Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, revisited

Lynnea and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind last night. The only other time I've seen it was in its theater release in 2004. It's weird to think how different everything was back then. Ben was two years old, I hadn't started grad school yet, and my first marriage still seemed more or less stable. Hard to believe, but it was nine years ago. I remembered very well that the movie was a good mind screw, but I hadn't remembered all the details, so really I went through the surprises all over again. Lynnea had not seen it before at all.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

Current TV watching status

Just for the hell of it, and to keep this from being a dead blog, here's my report on what TV shows I've been watching on Netflix.  Obviously this doesn't exactly count as earth-shattering news, but what the hey.

I usually don't sit and watch TV while doing nothing else, but I'll frequently have it on in the background while doing other activities.

• Finished season 5 of Doctor Who on Netflix instant watch this morning (which is why I decided to create this list).  Now I have to wait for season 6 to end so I can start queuing it.  I enjoyed it immensely.  Lynnea will not watch it because as far as she's concerned, David Tennant is the last Doctor Who.  Won't even give Matt Smith the time of day.  Poor Matt.
• I've been streaming audio of the BritCom The IT Crowd on my Android in the car.  Nearly done with the series.  The only time this does not work is when they do musical interludes with lots of laugh track, as there is clearly some visual comedy going on that I'm missing.  Almost done with the entire series.  It's enjoyable, but kind of a stupider version of Big Bang Theory, which is unfortunately not available on instant watch.  Stupider because in BBT, you can tell that the nerd jokes are authentic and loving.  In ITC, half the time they are clearly speaking complete gibberish for laughs.
• I finished rewatching (or relistening to) Buffy a while back, but I never did get through Angel.  Nearly done with Season 2 now, but it's been lower priority for me than "Who".
• Lynnea and I are now about two seasons behind Dexter.  Added Season 5 to the DVD queue as it's not available on instant.
• Got Ben hooked on Third Rock From the Sun.  One of the all-time great comedies, IMHO.  I'm saving episodes for when he's around and we have nothing else to do.
• Watched a single episode of Breaking Bad.  Promising start, I think, so I'm saving more episodes for later.  It was recommended by a coworker who, in turn loves Game of Thrones and has to put up with my constant danger of spoiling the series.
• Speaking of which, season 2 of Thrones starts up again in April, so I'll be going to my sister's again for screenings.  Woohoo!
• We still have about one and a half seasons of Quantum Leap that Lynnea's never seen, and we watch it at the rate of about one episode every two months.  That oughta take a while.

Well, that about covers it.  I know it sounds like I watch a lot of TV, but as I said, I often play it as background noise in the car and while working on other stuff, and it took me over three years to get through Doctor Who, so, you know...

Avatar 3d

Lynnea and I saw Avatar last night. So many people had raved about it as the greatest film of our time that I decided to prepare myself for either a terrific movie or a tremendous disappointment.

I think it was around the time that the grizzled marine in a huge mecha suit was knife fighting with the sexy blue alien babe riding on some kind of tiger-monster, that I said to myself "Boy, James Cameron really knows how to pander to nerds, doesn't he? I'm surprised there weren't ninjas in this scene too."

Also, at some point in the middle I whispered, "This is what I want World of Warcraft to be like in the future." In other words, you step into a cryo chamber of some sort, and then you mind control some fantasy character while feeling what is happening to your other body. Obviously these would be simulated sensations, not controlling a real physical entity. But Lynnea pointed out that this is a nerdy gamer's biggest fantasy, right down to what it turns out the main character can do at the very end. (I will not reveal what it is so as not to spoil the movie, but if you apply two seconds of thought to what a "nerdy gamer's biggest fantasy" would be, other than the naughty stuff, I'm sure you can guess it.)

Anyway, I did come away with a very strong certainty that James Cameron does, in fact, play World of Warcraft. And I'm not the only one to notice that the similarities are uncanny. The Na'vi are basically night elves, and if they work hard and become extra powerful then they get to purchase their epic flying mount when they reach level 70.

Let me not say that I didn't enjoy the movie. It was fantastic eye candy, especially if you pay extra to see it in Digital 3D, which we did. The effects were great, and seeing the paralyzed marine enjoying his new powerful body was fun to watch. And stuff blew up, which is always a plus in a huge blockbuster. Maybe it's in my nature to be a bit cynical and find it corny, but that's how James Cameron rolls, right? I mean, I actually liked Titanic, historical inaccuracies and weepy moments and all.

So I'm giving this a thumbs up, this was a good and crazy picture. I'm not willing to say, as Ebert did, that this is a Star Wars for our time. But then, I didn't even think Star Wars was a Star Wars for our time. I don't dress up for conventions, I don't think it is a movie that defined my childhood, it was simply a good flick where fun stuff happened. In the same spirit, I'll give Avatar four out of five stars, maybe four and a half if I'm in a good mood. It was super corny and the whole angle with the Na'vi as Native Americans was a bit heavy handed. But still a cool experience.

There will be fetish conventions based around this, you mark my words. I'll be skipping them. :)

Replay [Book, ***]

I haven't read a lot of fiction in the last few years. During the two years I've been in grad school I had to put most recreational reading on hold, and since then I've mostly read either more technical books, or nonfiction about politics or philosophy. I decided that this is something I miss in my life, so I recently raided the Round Rock Library and checked out two books. Replay by Ken Grimwood is something I browsed in a bookstore a few months ago and found interesting enough to put on my mental wish list. Dune by Frank Herbert is a book that everyone praises but I have somehow not gotten around to yet. I finished the first, so here's my review.

Replay predates the movie Groundhog Day by a few years, and uses a similar high concept. I love that movie, as I love most sci-fi that involves time travel or other creative reorganizations of time. As in Groundhog Day, Replay involves a main character trapped in an unexplained time loop. Unlike Groundhog Day, where the scope of the loop is one day, the book has its character reliving 25 years of his life.

It opens with the death of the main character, Jeff. Trapped in a loveless and childless marriage and an unfulfilling job, Jeff experiences a heart attack at the age of 43 in 1988, keels over, and awakes to find himself trapped in the past, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that the next leap will be the leap home. Oh, wrong story. But you get the idea.

Jeff lives his life about five times that are noteworthy. As Bill Murray did, Jeff goes through various stages in his attempt to come to grips with what's happening. He uses his knowledge of the future to become insanely rich. Then he tries to fulfill himself with a better committed relationship, which works out pretty well but is entirely erased on the next round. Then he spirals into hedonism and drug abuse, then finally meets a kindred spirit who understands what he's going through. Then they try to save the world.

Unlike Groundhog Day, a fair amount of time is devoted to speculating about the real cause of the time loop, but the effort is largely wasted because they never come to anything resembling a conclusion. In fact, the whole book didn't feel like it had much of a conclusion. Jeff wanders from one life to the next and does a whole lot of stuff, and makes some effort to throw out philosophical thoughts about the implications. But the book just ends, and nothing that happened seems all that significant. Jeff's learned something, I suppose. And there's a one-off epilogue that seems to try to make it feel more significant, but didn't much work for me.

Replay was still an enjoyable read. Ultimately it's simply about a whole bunch of stuff happening, and the stuff is interesting to read about. I don't feel like I got a greater message out of it in the end, so I'll categorize this as a good diversion. It does make you think about what you would do with multiple lives, though.

*** (out of 5)

Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog afterthoughts (spoilers!)

So yeah... typical Joss Whedon conclusion. I can't really decide whether Joss is a bigger bastard than George R. R. Martin in the area of gratuitously killing off his main characters, but I was definitely annoyed by the ending on first viewing. I had high hopes for the character of Penny. I was BSing with coworkers on Friday about our expectations for Act 3, and we came up with some of the following ideas:

• Penny is instrumental in defeating Captain Hammer.
• Penny turns into a supervillainess in the end. Complete with white leather.
• It turns out Penny was really "Bad Horse" all along.
• Dr. Horrible inadvertently rescues Captain Hammer from something.
• Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer fall in love and wind up together. (Okay, this is over the top. But Neil Patrick Harris IS gay.)

As it is, I mostly agree with this post, which states that Joss failed to live up to his usual standards of offering strong feminist role models. Penny was in the end a pretty low-dimension character, existing only to serve as a foil for Captain Hammer and Dr. Horrible to fight over in the typical triangle arrangement. It's extremely disappointing to me that, after strongly telegraphing her disillusionment with Captain Hammer throughout act 3, Penny's last words were "Captain Hammer will save us."

My comment on the actual ending: the death of Penny was the catalyst that Billy needed to stop being a villain wannabe and become an actual villain. Meanwhile, the "real" Billy -- my friend Shelley refers to him as the superego component -- gets pushed down and lost forever. Is it poignant and heart-wrenching? Sure. But I don't think I was in the mood for poignant. I was watching a comedy. I wanted a comedy ending.

Having said that... the music and comedy components were both excellent, right up through the end. Joss continued his fine tradition from the Buffy Musical, of delivering up hilarious and catchy tunes over and over again. I'm still planning to buy the DVD, and possibly the soundtrack too. If for no other reason, I think the project was a good idea, and I'd like to encourage the strategy that Joss is trying.

Quick recap of my favorite moments:

• The cowboy chorus. I can't repeat enough how awesome the cowboy chorus was.
• Nathan Fillion's first entrance. Hell, every scene with Nathan mugging, smirking, and chewing up the scenery. Again, Nathan is the real villain and a damn good one.
• "And sometimes there's a third, even deeper level, which is exactly the same as the top level."
• "Wow, what a crazy random happenstance!"
• "...The hammer is my penis."
  
• The last song of Act 2, starting with Neil's demented smile. Also: "I'll hand her the keys to a shiny new Australia." Also also: Giant Neil.
• Groupies! "This is his hair!"
• "I hate the homeless. ...ness problem that plagues our city."
  
• "Everyone's a hero in their own way. You, and you, and... mostly me! and you."
• I must report that Ben just loved seeing Captain Hammer crying and sniveling.

Finally, a few words about the many geeks who populate this project. Felicia Day, who played Penny, graduated with honors from UT (Hook 'em!) with a degree in mathematics, loves World of Warcraft, and stars in a videocast about video games. What's not to like? The actress sounds a hundred times more interesting than the character.

Maurissa Tancharoen plays one of the groupies, is married to Joss Whedon's half brother, and the two of them were apparently deeply involved with the writing and production.

Thoughts on the business model: This is going to be a raging success, probably, but I'm not sure it will prove that the business model is as game-changing as everyone hopes it would be. I mean, yeah, you can make money from releasing a movie and merchandise on the internet... IF your name is Joss Whedon, you have your own money and a huge cult following, and well-known actors who love you enough to temporarily work for free. For everyone else, maybe not so much.

My spoilery review of "Wanted"

As usual, I'm finding myself posting more and more on that other blog rather than on this one. Here's what I had to say about the movie "Wanted." I hope Ginny will read it, since it puts together some of the stuff we talked about after seeing it.

Memento

Somehow, this week, I managed to convince two people in separate incidents to watch the movie Memento for the first time. Looking back, I'm surprised to see that I've never written a blog post about Memento, which is easily in my top five favorite movies of the last decade. Because it can be confusing for first time viewers, I'm going for field a few questions about it and write some more thoughts as a review.

For people who have not seen the movie yet, I strongly advise you to stop reading this post and go watch it. This will contain spoilers. You should avoid reading too much about the movie, although it will help to know that it is played backwards. Scene for scene, each clip takes place immediately before the last one that was played. Some scenes are in black and white. Those are separate, but I'll have to talk about them after the spoilers.

SPOILERS AHEAD AFTER THIS LINE.

First, some general comments about the message of the movie and why I think it is so great. I already posted some of my remarks in an earlier comment thread to Dan, but I think they're worth repeating here.

If you insist on reading the spoilers, here's a quick synopsis. Lenny is a former insurance investigator who has a rare memory conditions that has left him unable to form new memories. Every so often -- somewhere between ten minutes and a few hours -- he forgets what happened recently. Thus, he is unable to remember names or faces, and the only way he can keep track of what's happened lately is to write things down and take pictures.

Lenny's last clear memory is that of his wife being killed, and his life's mission is to investigate and avenge her death. He writes important clues permanently as tattoos on his body. One other vivid memory that he keeps is the story of Sammy Jankis, a man who had the same condition as his own. Lenny investigated Sammy's case and thus knows all about his own situation based on prior knowledge.


In a nutshell, "Knowledge" is really the central theme of the movie. We think we know things because we remember them, but memory is unreliable. We think we can piece together an overall story from past events and familiar objects, but many of them are still subjective and can lie to us. Lenny gives an important monologue early makes an important speech early in the movie:

Early in Memento, Lenny's character gives an important speech about memory:

"Memory's not perfect. It's not even that good. Ask the police, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The cops don't catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts, make notes, draw conclusions. Facts, not memories: that's how you investigate. I know, it's what I used to do. Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It's an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted and they're irrelevant if you have the facts."

Despite his own condition, and despite his cynicism about memory as a guide to the past, Lenny unshakably believes that there are three things he can trust:

1. His memories of the night his wife died
2. His memories of Sammy Jankis
3. His own notes and tattoos
   

The end of the movie simply yanks the rug out from under these beliefs, not once, but for all three beliefs. They lead you down this trail, thinking that when you dig far enough back into the past, you'll find the answers to everything else. Instead, you get to the "end" of the movie (really the beginning, in a way) and they hit you with new revelations, wham wham wham, so fast you're left without anything to hold onto in your previous understanding of what really happened.

First you find out that his wife's attacker was already caught, so his entire quest to avenge her since then has been pointless.

Then you find out that he got the story of Sammy all wrong, that many of the events were about him, and that he may have actually killed his own wife.

THEN you find out that he lied to himself in his own notes. On purpose.

One message you could take from the movie is, "No amount of evidence is sufficient to accept a claim." That's not what I got from it, though. Rather, that people's interpretations of events are rarely reliable, and therefore relying on direct experience is a trap. The character of Lenny is not stupid and he's not entirely malicious; he's just going with events as they happen to him and trying to make sense of an array of personal experiences which are even more jumbled than most people's.

Now some specific questions from Tracie. She asked:

Sometimes it seemed like he was claiming that whenever he awoke he had no recollection of his wife's murder--that he thought she was still alive and well; but most of the time he expressed that he retained the memory of her murder. Did they ever explain his alteranating recollection of that memory? It seemed like _sometimes_ he forgot she died--but it seemed to be a pretty consistent "sometimes." Like I said I have to watch it again, but I thought he said he always woke up without the recollection of the murder--but he also said her death was the "last thing" he remembered (which I interpreted to mean it was part of his permanent recollection and not something he needed to remind himself about...?

The only guess I had, but I felt it was pretty flimsy, was that maybe since he had a warped concept of time, it was as if the event had only just occurred, and therefore, when he awoke, it was so "new" that it hadn't sunk in yet that she was gone? While I have had similar experiences, I have to say that in my experiences they're _much_ more fleeting than the film implied (and I can't stress that enough)--if this is what they were driving at. I might wake up _not_ recollecting bad news for like a few moments--but then it hits before I can even sit up in bed. I certainly can't imagine I'd get up and expend too much energy walking around looking for my husband, and expecting him to be in the bathroom, if I'd just seen him murdered "the night before." I think I would wake up initially oblivious and possibly happy thinking he was still alive, but it would hit me (and I don't think I'm unique in this regard) pretty quickly after I became conscious that he had been murdered.

Actually, according to one interpretation, his wife wasn't really dead when he found her. Teddy says as much at the end. As you point out in the next comment, Teddy isn't a reliable source himself, but in this case I think his claims might be plausible. Lenny's memory of Sammy is a false projection of events that really happened to Lenny. Teddy's version is that Lenny's wife survived the attack, but the trauma of seeing the rape still caused the memory condition. It was Lenny's wife who had diabetes, and it was Lenny who killed his own wife through an insulin overdose.

Although Lenny can't form new memories, there are hints that he can drill "facts" into his head through repetition. This might explain how he somehow managed to remember the real death of his wife and project it onto Sammy Jankis.

Then again, temporarily forgetting that his wife is dead may just be a product of the shock and not related to his condition at all.

2. So, who was Teddy? Was he a cop, a snitch? Was his motive actually to go around looking for people with JG initials to let Lenny randomly kill so Lenny could feel better again and again? That's a bit odd. I wasn't sure what to believe about Teddy or whether he was reliable--or was that the point?

Was Teddy supposed to confuse the issue? He lied enough and expressed such odd, unbelievable motives, that he was not a trustworthy character (I thought?). However, Lenny's reasons for not trusting him were, of course, contrived. But still, as the audience, I saw Teddy contradict himself (although we were shown that he did sometimes tell the truth), and I don't know who he really is, except that he seems to have more mental issues than Lenny.

I agree with you that Teddy is just about the least reliable character in the movie (although he has some tough competition!) but in the end I'm inclined to believe his version of events. It may be just because Teddy got the last word and tied up a lot of the other threads. He lies all the time, but it seems like in this case he may have been telling the painful truth just to get back at Lenny.

No, I don't think he was letting Lenny kill random people just to feel good. I think he really was a crooked cop, and he enjoyed the power of being able to go after small time crooks without hassling with court proceedings. The fact that killing crooks made Lenny happy was merely an added bonus, on top of the fact that Teddy got to keep his hands clean.

Also, in this case it's obvious that Lenny wanted to steal Jimmy's drug money. Throughout the movie, Lenny is really driving Jimmy's car and wearing his clothes, and Teddy keeps trying to get the car because there's money in the trunk.

3. Was Lenny's wife diabetic or were we supposed to be left wondering? If we can't be sure, this calls into question Lenny's entire story except what the police report validated. His notes were certainly unreliable. In addition to his conscious motviation to make Gambel the killer--even though he wasn't--he trusted Natalie, who was totally unreliable. So, the assessment he recorded, that she would help him, was very wrong and based on bad data--since he was unaware he'd killed her boyfriend.

I do think we are supposed to be left wondering, but I also seem to recall an interview with Chris Nolan (the director) saying "there is definitely a correct answer."

Again, my best guess is that Teddy was telling the truth about Lenny's wife, and about Sammy being a con man.

I want to wrap up with a few words about the black and white scenes, since those are a little hard to decipher. Unlike the color scenes, the black and white scenes play in forward order. Chronologically, they come before the rest of the movie. So if you want to piece the whole movie together in the correct order, start with the first black and white scene, and when you come to a color scene, skip it. Keep going forward until you get to the last BW scene in the movie.

When Lenny kills Jimmy Grantz, he takes a polaroid and then shakes it until it develops. As it does, the whole movie slowly fades into color. Watch the rest of the scene in color, then go backward to the next color scene before that, and so on.

Finally, the best explanation I ever saw for how everything worked was in this article at Salon. Hope it is helpful.

Sweeney Todd

It's kind of hard to categorize this movie. There aren't very many musical horror/comedies; the only other one I can think of is Little Shop of Horrors. LSOH is more comedy than horror, while Sweeney Todd definitely leans much more in the horror direction. Plus, most things that Tim Burton does cannot be categorized with anything else.

I didn't know the source material going in; never saw or read the play, and never heard any of the music except when a friend sang a few lines from "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd." That was years ago and it wasn't even in the movie.

Anyway, I think I liked it. It was at least effective horror, in the sense that it creeped out and disgusted me, so I can't say I really ENJOYED watching it, but I appreciated the art direction. It also had very effective comedy moments, especially every scene that featured Sacha Baron Cohen. People who like seeing Alan Rickman as a villain will probably like his role here, although since he plays a contemptible pedophile, people who think Alan Rickman is sexy will probably not like the role.

Johnny Depp did an excellent job, and completely personified the "Magnificent Bastard" entry in TV tropes. One thing I've always liked about Johnny Depp is the way he plunges into a role. Whatever weird stuff you throw at him, he always plays it to the hilt. This movie is no different. Probably my favorite number was when Helena Bonham Carter sings her glurgy fantasy about how she hopes that they will live by the sea someday, and even in her fantasies Johnny Depp sports this completely deadpan expression, with a slight sneer that indicates that this is a guy who does not intend to enjoy himself ever again in his life.

I like Tim Burton's style, and the grim and hideous vision of London that he cooks up is very impressive. I can definitely tell that a lot of it is CGI, but the non-computerized sets fit in very well with the sweeping pans that are made over a city that doesn't really exist except in Burton's twisted animation.

And the blood... all I can say is that it reminded me strongly of the black knight in Monty Python. After a certain amount, it goes beyond yucky and just becomes silly. I think that's not a criticism, because Burton probably meant it that way.

I am now a fan of the Sarah Connor Chronicles

And it's only taken one episode.

I mean, they already had me with "It's a TV series based on Terminator"... so already I know this is going to involve time travel, gunplay, explosions, and evil robots. Now to that, add Summer Glau, who played River Tam on Firefly. Hey, we all know that they could just make a movie called "River Tam Beats Up Everyone" and it would be great. But beating up everyone while nude? I'm so sticking with the entire season. :)

Also, this show seems to have taken the very wise approach of wiping out the completely lousy Terminator 3 from the chronology, so, bonus.

The Reaping: another awful anti-skeptic movie

I just watched The Reaping, another tedious horror movie that goes something like this:

Act 1, scene 1

Skeptic: "Hi, I'm an atheist and I think supernatural stuff is all bunk!"
Believer: "An atheist, eh? Why, you must have had some tragic experience in your life that made you mad at God."
Skeptic: "Why yes, as a matter of fact I did!"

Act 1, scene 2

Messenger: "Hey skeptic, some weird supernatural events are happening in this out-of-the-way location, and I think you should check it out."
Skeptic: "Supernatural events? Nonsense! There is a perfectly logical scientific explanation! Therefore, I will drop everything else in my life and go check it out."
Messenger: "I thought you'd say that. Car's ready, let's go."

Act 2

(Obviously supernatural events happen.)
Skeptic: "Nonsense, there is a perfectly rational scientific explanation for all of this. Give me a minute and I'll make some up."

Act 3

Skeptic: "Holy cow, it turns out that these events were supernatural all along! I have certainly learned many things and grown as a person. So much for my vaunted 'scientific method.'"


In this case, the skeptic is Hillary Swank, eventually revealed by the exposition to be a former preacher who lost her faith in God when religious whackjobs in some third world country killed her family. Now she apparently gives lectures on why there are no miracles and no God.

As I mentioned when I talked about Evan Almighty, these kinds of movies really work hard to undermine skepticism by establishing a fictional world where the magic stuff is real. The skeptic winds up looking like a fool by clinging on to "rational explanations" long after a real person, employing the observation and deduction skills possessed by a warthog, would have recognized the existence of magic. None of this applies in the real world, though; the takeaway message of the movie is "Don't be so skeptical of magic!" when it should qualify that with "...if you're a person who lives in a fictional magical universe."

You understand, of course, that I'm not complaining because a fictional story has fictional elements in it. I'm complaining about the really bad way that the skeptical main character is portrayed, in that she is confronted with an unprecedented level of real, concrete evidence... which she blithely ignores right up until the very end.

And "ignore the evidence" seems to be the only thing that Hillary Swank ever does in her capacity as a skeptic. For somebody with such a supposedly scientific mind, she certainly doesn't bother doing any of the obvious tests that I, who am not a scientist, think of immediately. For instance, the first thing she goes to investigate is a river that has turned red like blood. (The plot of this movie involves a recreation of the ten Biblical Plagues, in order.) Naturally, she starts pontificating on the possible reasons why the river could have turned blood-red. At this point I said to Ginny: "Surely the very FIRST thing that she should do when she gets there is run some kind of test to verify whether that stuff is actually blood or not. I sure do hope that occurs to her."

Guess what she doesn't do.

Oh, she has it tested for SOMETHING, but it's not whether it matches the chemical composition of blood. After she's been in the little town fooling around for several days, some other character refers to all the dead fish in the blood river, and she snaps at the guy "Look, those fish all died because the pH balance of that water is off the charts!" So apparently, she took the time to analyze the pH balance of the stuff, but never bothered to take a little extra effort to find out if it is actually, you know, blood. (Spoiler: It's blood.)

It gets worse. When the requisite priest starts yammering about the original Biblical plagues, Hillary Swank again begins ranting about how there's a simple scientific explanation for all ten plagues. You see, first this uncommon species of algae grew in the rivers, turning them red, and then all the fish died because of the algae, which caused some disease that killed the livestock and attracted frogs and locusts, and so on, in this hilariously elaborate Rube Goldberg sequence that handily explains all ten plagues.

This explanation struck me as so patently ridiculous that it could only be dreamed up by some nitwit in Hollywood, but it turns out I'm wrong. Since I googled some stuff to see if I got her "theory" correct, I found this page at Answers In Genesis arguing against a very similar explanation written by one Greta Hort in 1957. So I guess SOMEBODY really took this stuff seriously.

It's not that this stuff with the algae and the diseases and the frogs couldn't have happened in Egypt, or even been a very common occurrence. It's just that I'm floored by the absolute cocksure way that Hillary Swank declares that This Is How It Really Happened. Much simpler explanation: it's just a story. It's loosely based on things the authors had real experience with, or on local legends. There is no need for a scientific explanation, until such time as any evidence is presented to show that it happened at all.

This whole idea that you can just make up a "logical, scientific explanation" by ad libbing stuff off the top of your head, without taking any data or evidence into account, is what bugs me about this and many other movies in the way they portray skeptics. It's quite similar to cargo cult science, because it's clearly somebody who has no idea what science is, writing a script showing what sciency people sound like.

Similarly, the whole "I'm an atheist because something terrible happened to me and now I'm mad at God" angle is a theistic fantasy of how an atheist talks. Theists ALWAYS seem to jump to the assumption that this is how people become atheists. It's the default explanation. Yet among all the atheists I know, not one has ever told me that their story was anything remotely like that.

Gaming goodness

I had class this weekend, which means that only one weekend and two classes are left in total. My adviser finally got back to me to let me know that my thesis is interesting and well done, and only a few minor changes are necessary before submission. So on the whole it looks like somewhat smooth sailing from here on out, and therefore I treated myself on Friday evening to The Half-Life Orange Box.

I have not bought a game in several months, and part of the reason behind this purchase is that I had heard so many outstanding reviews that I couldn't stand to do without it any longer. This package contains Half-Life 2 (which I've played) and two mini-expansions (which I haven't) as well as some multi-player stuff that I don't much care about. And finally, there's Portal:



Many reviews have been written about Portal, but it's not the professional reviews that did it for me; it was Lore Sjoberg, a very funny guy who writes "The thing about Portal is this: it’s very funny. ...As a puzzle game, Portal runs way too short. As a comedy, it’s perfect." And it was "Yahtzee" Croshaw, whose great review of the Orange Box deserves to be watched and heard in full.



Yahtzee's a hilarious reviewer, and anyone who likes games will have a great time watching all of his regular weekly videos. He's also a very sardonic and pitiless reviewer, which is why it was especially meaningful when he said: "Lastly, there's Portal, and if you're a regular reviewer you'll understand how insane these words feel coming out of my mouth, but I can't think of any criticism for it. I'm serious. This is the most fun you'll have with your PC until they invent a force-feedback codpiece. ...Absolutely sublime from start to finish, and I will jam forks into my eyes if I ever use those words to describe anything else ever again."

Well, "sublime" is a very good description of the game. It is not only fun gaming, it also has brilliant writing, and it is alternately extremely funny and very, very, creepy and unnerving. Fun, amusing, and scary. Those are pretty much my three gold standard criteria for good games, and this hit them all exactly right.

Ben loved it too (and the scary parts were partly derived from uncertainty and the ability to read, so they weren't too scary for him). When you play the game, some puzzles require you to jump from a great height into a portal on the floor, so that you'll build up a lot of momentum before you shoot out of a wall going in a different direction. As we played together, we both started saying "Wheeeeee!" every time we jumped. Well, a minute later, the computerized trainer voice also said "Wheeeeee!" along with us.

Ben cracked up and kept laughing for several minutes. The afterwards, he wanted to know how the computer knew what we were saying. I had a hard time convincing him that it was a coincidence.

Evan Almighty: Blessed are the fictional

I watched Evan Almighty on video last night, even though I didn't particularly love Bruce Almighty. It was what I expected, a cute but corny lightweight comedy with a little touch of preachiness and some enjoyable special effects. The Bible story of Noah is watered down a lot, so six billion people don't actually die in a global flood. Steve Carell is acceptably funny, but it's not like his hilarious performance in 40 Year Old Virgin.

Anyway, the movie does deliver kind of a bland religious message, which got me thinking a bit last night. I think I'd be right to say that in just about every movie where God appears in person (as it were) in modern times, there is this obligatory scene where the main character has to be skeptical for a few minutes. You know the scene I mean:
God: "Hi, I'm God."
Mortal: "No you're not! You're a crazy old man who bears a striking resemblance to Morgan Freeman/George Burns/Alanis Morissette/etc."
God: "No seriously, I'm God."
Mortal: "I'm not talking to you anymore."
God: "Here, watch this trick."
(God does various impressive feats in which demonstrates uncanny knowledge and/or screws with the laws of physics.)
Mortal: "Stop! Uncle! I guess you are God."

Of course other characters remain skeptical, because God decides to be a complete dick by not revealing himself to anyone except for the guy he's inciting to crazy behavior. By the end of the movie, though, something remarkably improbable has occurred that makes it clear to everyone that the guy who talks to God was right.

This formula is loosely based on the Bible story of Doubting Thomas. Similar form:
Jesus: "Hey Thomas, it's me, Jesus."
Thomas: "Nuh uh! You're dead!"
Jesus: "No, seriously, it's me. Touch me. Poke your fingers through the stake holes in my hand."
Thomas: "Whoa."

And then there's the punchline.
Jesus: "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."

In the story of Doubting Thomas, and Evan Almighty, it turns out to be a good idea to believe in God. But only because they inhabit a fictional world in which God is real and reveals himself through evidence.

And there's the problem. At least part of the point of these stories is to serve as an inspirational example for those of us who live here in the non-fictional world. But in the real world, God never does these tricks for real people. So instead, we're encouraged to base our faith on "evidence" which occurs in fiction.

I'm reminded of an M.C. Escher print of a dragon who is "trying" to get out of his two dimensional world, but fails.


Of this picture, Escher wrote:

"However much this dragon tries to be spatial, he remains completely flat. Two incisions are made in the paper on which he is printed. then it is folded in such a way as to leave two square openings. But this dragon is an obstinate beast, and in spite of his two dimensions he persists in assuming that he has three; so he sticks his head through one of the holes and his tail through the other."

Like the dragon, people seem to try really hard to make God real by having him demonstrate his powers over and over again. Yet however much this god tries to be real, he remains a character in a story.

I'll give Evan Almighty two and a half stars out of five. It was cute, it wasn't a complete waste of time to watch, but it wasn't a must-see comedy.

Stranger Than Fiction (movie, ****)

I think it's time for me to just grit my teeth and declare that I am a Will Ferrell fan. I hated him with a passion when he was a hyper cheerleader on SNL. But I just have to say that everything he's done recently has been getting consistently better and better.

Stranger Than Fiction is very funny. Also extremely different from his last movie, Talladega Nights, which was also very funny. Whereas Ricky Bobby went for broad, obvious, Mel Brooks-style satire, STF is a very witty romantic comedy you just watch with kind of a goofy grin on your face most of the way through.

I love movies and books that screw with the narrative structure. It's one of the main reasons why Memento is among my favorites. I also very much enjoy stories which have characters who become aware of the story they are in. I admit to loving Last Action Hero as a guilty pleasure, and I've re-read The Neverending Story (enormously superior to the movie version) many times.

Most everything in the movie just worked for me. The reactions of all the characters to Will's narrator. The chemistry between Will and Maggie Gyllenhaal. (She is a major hottie, but who the hell knew that Ferrell could play a successful romantic lead?) The cleverly placed computer graphics that highlight the tedium of Will's life. The fake-out scenes that take place in the author's imagination. The fake literary analysis.

I can't remember where, but I recently heard a critic say that comic actors make successful transitions to drama far more often than serious actors make successful transitions to comedy, because doing comedy is harder. I would not call Stranger Than Fiction a drama by any means, but it is a thoughtful comedy different in nature from anything I've seen Ferrell do before, and it bodes well for his future career.

Idiocracy [Movie, ****]

If you haven't heard of this movie, I can't blame you, because it's received essentially no marketing at all. There isn't so much as an online trailer in existence.

I'm talking about Idiocracy, the new Mike Judge movie that has been in some markets for a month. Mike Judge is, of course, the director of Office Space, which I don't need to point out has a huge cult following, and also the creator (and voice) of "Beavis and Butthead" and "King of the Hill". I'm aware that some people really like him and some don't.

Here's the high concept in a nutshell. At the beginning of the movie, a narrator explains that evolution doesn't necessarily favor intelligence; it simply favors those who produce the most children. In fact, in recent times, there's an evolutionary drawback to intelligence, which is that smart people carefully plan their families and have few children, while the dumb ones breed like bunnies.

Then Joe (Luke Wilson) shows up, representing "everyman" so precisely that he is shown to be the most perfectly average person ever known. He's not exceptionally bright or stupid; he's not a particularly hard worker; he's just trying to hang on to his menial army job until he can collect a pension. The army decides to use him in a year-long cryogenesis experiment, which Luke would never have agreed to if he'd ever watched "Futurama." Naturally, he wakes up 500 years later to discover a world where evolutionary pressures have gradually dumbed down the population to the point where Joe is now hands-down the smartest person on earth.

Now, nobody knows how to write stupid like Mike Judge. I remember an old interview Judge once gave, where he said that he envisioned Beavis and Butthead as two characters who were so dumb that nobody in the audience could possibly identify with them. He pointed out with amusement that this turned out not to be true in reality; one day he realized that people were laughing with B&B when he intended people to laugh at them.

If Judge's ambition was to make characters that dumb, I really hope he has succeeded this time. When Joe speaks with a typical 21st century accent and vocabulary, the citizens keep making fun of him for "talking like a fag." In Judge's future -- which is equal parts "hilarious" and "depressingly bleak" -- enormous consolidated mega-corporations run America. Carl's Jr. sponsors nearly everything, under the catchy slogan "Fuck you, I'm eating." One guy even says "Brought to you by Carl's Jr." after every sentence in casual conversation, because he gets advertising dollars for it. A future version of the Gatorade corporation employs half of America and water is something that is only recognized as "that stuff that comes out of the toilet." The most popular show on TV is called "Ow, My Balls!" and seems to be an entire half hour of one poor guy... well, you can guess what happens to him. However, Fox News still exists and seems to be more or less unchanged.

Judge's future is bleak in the same way that the corporation in Office Space is bleak, only ten times more so. There are some really terrific special effect shots, which I hear were donated by (Spy Kids director) Robert Rodriguez. In panoramic shots of the city, you see vast mountains of garbage towering over inhabited areas; crumbling buildings tied together with giant rope; and a CostCo that spans several counties at least. ("Where's the electronics section?" "Uh, it's about an hour from here.")

This is both a very clever satire, and a completely unsubtle farce. What you have is Mike Judge clubbing you over the head with the message "No! Beavis and Butthead are not the guys you're supposed to imitate! THIS is what happens!" It's hard to say whether Judge himself has been partly to blame for the ongoing idiocratization of kids, or whether B&B were merely comically accurate exaggerations of what he already saw out there.

But I do think that Idiocracy is worth seeing, especially if you already like Mike Judge's past work. If you're not into Mike Judge (and I know some aren't, and that's okay) then you should bear in mind the fact that this is more of Judge's humor ratcheted up to an even more absurd degree. Bonus: the movie also features a cameo by Stephen Root with a Wolverine haircut. Root is a guy who now just has to appear on screen and my Pavlovian reaction will immediately force me to start laughing before a word is said.

My rating: **** out of 5

Jesus Camp review

I've written a blog entry, but it's not here... it's at the Atheist Experience blog.

Intro:

I went on Friday with about ten fellow Atheist Community members to see Jesus Camp, but I hadn't gotten around to posting my review until now. This has already been discussed on both The Non-Prophets and The Atheist Experience, but I'm offering up a written version for your perusal.

First of all, this is not a pleasant movie in most respects. What it is boils down to watching an hour and a half of child abuse, at least from my perspective. If you experience the sort of morbid fascination that comes from watching a bleak horror movie, you may get the same sort of feeling from this movie: you're not having fun while you watch it, but you may feel like you got something out of the experience of having watched it.

The Kingdom of Loathing

The Kingdom of Loathing is the stupidest game that I've ever been unable to stop playing. It's now been over a year since I joined the kingdom, and I decided that it is time for me to confess my shameful enjoyment of this diversion.

So you're this... stick figure, right? The good king Ralph has been kidnapped from the kingdom by the Naughty Sorceress, and it's up to you to save him. It's kind of a role-playing game, but your character classes have names like "Seal Clubber" and "Pastamancer". On the way to save the king, you'll fight a bunch of badly drawn monsters. Like you'll visit "The Misspelled Cemetary" where you take on "ghuols" and "skeltons." Or you'll go to the Hippy Camp on the Mysterious Island of Mystery, so you can fight filthy hippies and steal their filthy overalls. And at one point, the game temporarily turns into a parody of an old-school text adventure.

The game is riddled with pop culture references -- nearly everything you do will result in 2-4 inside jokes and you'll get maybe half of them. And also, you'll get drunk. You'll get drunk a LOT. In fact, if you are not making your character absolutely as drunk as you possibly can every day, then you're not playing the game to its full potential. Trust me on this one, you'll figure it out eventually.

In the year that I've been playing, I've gone through 19 incarnations of my character, accumulated approximately 1.7 million meat (the Kingdom's unit of currency), and acquired four out of six pieces of rare stainless steel armor as well as one out of six ultra-rare plexiglass items.

What's fun about it is that even though it's the stupidest game you've ever seen in the beginning, it's surprisingly deep because it has multiple levels of gameplay. As you play through the first time, you'll be focused on levelling up your character and experiencing all the wacky things that happen to you for the first time. At the end, you'll fight the epic battle against the sorceress, where you will die a lot but eventually "win". And then you get to ascend to a higher plane of existence, for a short time, before you voluntarily decided to return to the Kingdom and do it all over again.

Once you start getting into ascensions, you get to hold on to all of your items from previous lives as well as permanently save your favorite aspects of each character. You start to appreciate the power to combine skills like Transcendental Noodlecrafting with Saucemastery, while playing Ur-kel's Aria of Annoyance on your stolen accordion and infusing your pets with Empathy of the Newt.

The best part is, it's free! Sign up for a while to try it out. Just one piece of advice though, and I speak from experience. When a shady stranger offers you something in a dark alley, don't take it. You'll be really sorry.

30 Days

Morgan Spurlock's TV show, 30 Days, has just started its second season. On an upcoming episode, airing August 9 at 10 PM on the FX channel, an atheist will move in with a Christian family for 30 days.

I actually heard about this episode last year through the ACA and sent an audition tape, but didn't get the part. They wanted an atheist to go live with a Christian family for 30 days. The money sounded pretty good. However -- and here's my sour grapes rationale -- it would also have been my first semester of college, so I don't know how difficult it would have been for me to keep up with my first couple of months of classes.

I know atheists are probably feeling burned by reality TV after the Infidel Guy episode of WifeSwap, but I got a pretty good vibe from the producers of this show. I did, however, question their motive in having an atheist live with a Christian family rather than the other way around. It seemed to me from the episode I watched on the DVD they sent (a straight, uptight Christian lived with a gay San Franciscan for 30 days) that the show usually puts "normal" people in unusual living arrangements.

They assured me that they weren't looking for an atheist revelation and conversion, and they were hoping to get a very insulated fundamentalist family and give a wider perspective. I think part of the reason they didn't reverse the situation was because they didn't think they would be able to showcase a "typical" atheist lifestyle.

In the meantime, I watched the season premiere on Thursday. It was only the second episode I've ever seen, but I'm now officially hooked.

In this episode, a Cuban-American, anti-immigration Minuteman volunteer went to live with an undocumented Mexican family in Los Angeles for 30 days. When he arrived, there was a definite undercurrent of hostility, and they got into some real table-pounding arguments. By the end of the month, he had truly come to think of them as some of his best friends. He actually visited their former home in Mexico and brought back videos of their family, whom they could not visit themselves, because they would not be able to return. Some of their kids were young enough that they had never met their own grandparents.

As a general rule, I don't like reality TV. Wait, let me qualify that. I like the first month or so of American Idol, when Simon Cowell is eloquently crushing the dreams of talentless hacks. But it's a guilty pleasure. Those shows don't uplift. Shows like Wife Swap are usually a freak show: we took one insane family and switched them around with another insane family, now let's watch the sparks fly! It reminds me of how Jerry Springer the radio host often says of Jerry Springer the TV show: "Don't watch my show. It's garbage."

But 30 Days seems different to me. They didn't dehumanize either the family or the minuteman. In fact, the minuteman got plenty of chances to air his opinions, and they weren't completely crazy. Immigration is one issue where I'm very ambiguous; I understand both sides. I do think, however, that tramping around the border toting guns is more about feeling manly than about accomplishing anything constructive.

But with this guy -- they put him in a new situation, and he learned something. They couldn't have given him a better character arc if it was scripted. The family came off as very sympathetic. They understand his arguments against immigration, although he angers them. But they don't feel like they have a choice, and this feeling is strongly backed up when you see what are the living conditions that they left in Mexico. There is also a side story about the teenage daughter trying to be the first in the family to go to college. The end of the show implies that she got accepted, but she'll have a hard time figuring out where the money will come from.

When I sent in an audition tape, I seem to remember that they were going to pay $15,000 to whomever they selected. That should help.

The show was very uplifting in the end, which is something I can't say about very many reality shows.

I'm still very anxious to see how the atheist episode plays. So far, in both shows that I've seen, the person who moves out of his own environment is the one who is the most sheltered and closed minded. I REALLY hope this isn't what they're trying to get from an atheist living with Christians.

Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within [GC, **]

I've owned Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within for over a year now, I think. Usually I either win a game within a few weeks or get sick of it and don't finish at all. With Warrior, I played it for a while and then set it aside, having the best intention to return to it eventually. Recently, I've given it another go.

I love the Prince of Persia series. I played the original game as a freshman in college. The second game was one of the first I ever played after I bought my first sound card, so I fondly remember the experience of hearing ACTUAL VOICES in the game for the very first time.

In the Prince games, you play a character with extraordinary athletic abilities. The first two games were side-scrollers. In a typical gaming session, you might be running from a bunch of angry guards, then you duck through a gate just as it closes, jump over some spikes, and finally leap across a wide chasm, just barely grabbing the ledge.

Also characteristic of the series is that it is both brutally hard on mistakes, and generous in allowing you to recover from them. Miss the ledge, and you'll plummet to your death many screens below as the prince lets out a terrified scream. (Hooray again for the invention of sound cards.) Then you'll be transported back a couple of minutes to the beginning of the scene, where you need to start running from those guards again. Luckily, you get infinite lives. The first two games had a time limit; later games have given that up, which I considered a wise move.

In the latest incarnation of the series, the prince has gone 3D on GameCube, PlayStation 2, and XBox. (Actually the Prince went 3D in an earlier PC version called Prince of Persia 3D, but that one was so bad it's best not to speak of it.) In Sands of Time, they introduced a terrific game mechanic, which was the power to control time. You get a limited number of "sand tanks", which you can fill by fighting enemies. If you get killed by one of the many cliffs or deathtraps, you can rewind time to a point just before you died as long as you still have time sand. It was a clever way to stick with the spirit of the series, because it allows you to feel that the world is deadly while still giving you an opportunity to recover from your mistakes without starting over very often. It reduced a lot of the frustration but still kept the tension high, because if you run out of sand then your next screwup kills you. The character was well designed and the new moves (such as running along walls and flipping around poles) were very cool.

In Warrior Within, it's like some committee of corporate non-gamers tried to redesign Sands of Time to make it "hipper," realizing that Sands is a great game but not having any understanding of why. In Warrior, the prince is darker and edgier. The fighting is more violent, and requires you to memorize "combos" -- buttons you have to press in a certain sequence in order to win the battles. Also, the introductory movie has a hot goth chick in chainmail, and there's actually a closeup shot of her chainmailed butt. I like skin shots as much as the next guy, but it was just so utterly gratuitous that it was stupid. It's not all that relevant to the plot and it feels wedged in to the Prince of Persia universe.

All that aside, though, I finally managed to enjoy the game for a while, until I gradually realized that there is one aspect of Warrior Within that I truly, truly hate.

Some games are linear, dragging you from event A to event B to event C on rails. That's okay. Some games are nonlinear, giving you free reign to explore what you want. That's okay too.

But in Warrior Within, the designers have chosen the worst aspects of both. The game is linear in the sense that you must unlock events in a particular order. But the geography of the game is nonlinear, because at any given time, you can travel to just about anywhere else you've already been. And the enemies are all still there.

In other words, it's really hard to tell which way you're supposed to be going. I just recently backtracked very close to the beginning of the game, fighting newly resurrected enemies all the way, before realizing that there's nothing happening there. Apparently there was some other branch that I was supposed to take. So I went back to hunt for the other branch, and got sidetracked going to another useless location.

Adding to this horror, some areas can only be accessed by a very roundabout route, but once you're there, you can instantly take a one-way path that drops you right back where you were. So if you make a wrong jump, you'll slide down a banner and land on the floor, only to realize that you're now in the same place you were 15 minutes ago when you started climbing, leaping, swinging, and shimmying your way to the top. Now you get to do it all over again.

Finally, the game gives you nothing in the way of hints about where you want to be. One button reveals a "map", but the map is just a big artist's sketch of the exterior of the palace. There's not even a large, friendly "you are here" arrow. At the top, it just says "Gardens." At the bottom, it helpfully says "Goal: Open the second tower." Say, it would be nice if you could let me know where the second tower is, you unhip suit-wearing fogey bastards.

It's a shame that there is such a high quantity of anti-fun in this game, because there really are strong hints of the elements that have made the entire Prince of Persia series so much fun. When you're climbing around an enormous yawning chasm, and you make a dangerous running leap, and JUST BARELY manage to grab on to the ledge as you fall past it, it gets the heart pumping while simultaneously conjuring up a delightful nostalgia for the original side scrolling games.

But the first game had different levels, and once you enter a new level, the door closes behind you. When you're on level 20 and about to rescue the princess, you can't accidentally drop down a few ledges and suddenly be back fighting the guys from level 1.

I rarely give games one star, preferring to reserve that rank for the absolute worst stuff I've ever played. This isn't that bad. But it's not good.

Score: ** (out of five stars)

The Island: A "pro-life" action flick [movie, *** out of 5]

Ginny and I saw "The Island" last night. It was part futuristic dystopian sci-fi, part mindless computer generated action flick, and part ham handed political diatribe against abortion and/or stem cell research. If this seems like a weird combination to you, it did to us too. I'll get to the pro-life part later, but it will involve spoilers so I'll give a clear warning when they come.

The story centers around two characters played by Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

Garth: "She's a babe."
Wayne: "She's a robo-babe. In Latin she would be called 'babia majora'."
Garth: "If she were a president she would be Baberaham Lincoln."

Anyway, Scarlett and Ewan play two cute little model citizens in a closed and tightly monitored society reminiscent of the one in Brave New World. Each day they are told by a smiling pretty face and by instant messages how lucky they are to be protected in their little bubble, away from the deadly poison that the earth's atmosphere has become. And if they win the lottery, which EVERYONE does eventually ("Your day will come!" chirp the cheerful ads) they'll be transported to The Island, the one outdoor area on earth that is somehow free of contamination, and they can frolic and cavort outside forever.

So I'm sure it will be no big shock to anybody who's picked up this sort of story in their lives, that the whole thing is based on a lie. I won't give away what the lie is just yet. I will say that I saw exactly what was happening a very long time before the reveal happened, partly based on a review I accidentally read which revealed the theme in the first couple of paragraphs, though not the particulars.

The special effects are kind of cool, the vision of a near-future LA (2019) was nicely rendered. The action sequences were fairly exciting until they got very, very, very stupid. I'll just give three examples from one chase scene that should tell you all you need to know.

Our Heroes are speeding away on some sort of motorcycle/hovercraft device. They fly through a skyscraper. The glass of the windows on the side of the building shatters completely as they pass through it. They emerge with maybe a minor scratch or two, even though they are not even in an enclosed vehicle.

On reaching the other side, they shoot out of the building and lose control of the vehicle. They both fall off, but luckily they happen to land on the corporate logo in the shape of a giant letter "R". A wide shot reveals that this logo takes up a teeny, tiny amount of the overall area on the side of the building.

In order to pull off this landing, I guess they should feel lucky that (1) they happened to be on THAT side of the building instead of one of the other three, and (2) they came out precisely in the center, rather than off to one side or the other, and (3) they were RIGHT ABOVE IT, so the short drop didn't kill them anyway, and (4) they didn't overshoot the very narrow logo and fly right over it, and (5) it wasn't the letter "A".

So after they land on this letter, the bad guys manage to detach it from the building and man, woman and letter plummet from a height of 40 stories or so. Do they snag a rope on the way down? Does a plane catch them? No. They fall all the way... and then they land in some netting. Not a fine mesh net, mind you, but a sort of tangle of rope. Even with the net there, I would think the impact would have killed them anyway if not actually sliced them to ribbons.

I'll get to the spoilers in a minute, but first I want to mention that Steve Buscemi is one of those people who can unfailingly appear in a bad movie and make it temporarily good by virtue of his presence. I love Steve Buscemi.

Warning: spoilers coming soon, but not quite yet.

The movie did contain an extremely blunt and badly mishandled pro-life argument. I wasn't the only one who thought this. Ginny and I came out of the movie and both started asking each other "Was it just me, or...?"

It doesn't deal specifically with abortion or stem cell research, but it hits you over the head with the message hard enough that you'd have to be pretty clueless not to catch it. Apparently a lot of reviewers are pretty clueless, because in skimming reviews, almost nobody mentions it, even at liberal sites like Salon and Slate. Exceptions: the New York Times reviewer saw an anti-abortion message, and the Onion AV Club saw anti-stem cell. They're both right.

Warning: Spoilers! Stop reading now unless you have already seen The Island or never plan to.














There is no island, and the earth is not ruined. These people are all clones, living in a bunker and surrounded by a holographic projection. Those who win the lottery are taken away to an operating room where they are killed and then harvested for organs, which are then given to the rich and powerful people from whom they were cloned. (The clones are around 2-5 years old but they are born as adults. Stupid adults.)

The bad guy is the company CEO, who says "Originally we planned to keep them in a persistent vegetative state" (SCHIAVO ALERT! WHOOP! WHOOP! Did you miss the subtle reference?) "but the organs don't survive that way, so we have to let them grow up and walk around."

They lie to the clients and investors, letting them believe that the clones aren't conscious.

In case you're still not getting the message, the villain makes some villainous speeches just to make sure you understand that he's with the pro-choice and pro-research establishment. "Come on!" he says. "We created them, we can destroy them! These clones don't have SOULS!" And, "In a few years we'll be able to cure leukemia with this project." Yeah, what are you, some kind of anti-medical nut?

So the doctor is this ghoulish SOB who only cares about the fame and money, and he feels free to research on clones and kill them, while telling himself that they're not really human. Doesn't this sound just like a pro-choice person?

Well uh, no. It sounds like a pro-life caricature of a pro-choice person.

I don't care if they have "souls" or not. The clones have active brains. They have personalities. They can communicate. Their nervous systems can feel pain. All of which, duh, is EXACTLY what most pro-choice people would agree is what separates a person from a fetus. Or a blastocyst. Or someone in PVS.

So, the doctor, who I guess is meant to be a stand-in for a guy who makes pro-choice arguments, is quite frankly a lunatic. I'm one of the most pro-choice people around, and I think he's a lunatic. And it's okay if you want me to believe that a lunatic is the head of his own company. Happens all the time. However, it is completely impossible for me to swallow the idea that with all the people who also know the secret -- doctors, scientists, technicians, and so on -- not one of them is really bothered by what they do all that much, and none of them feel like they should blab this to the press.

So obviously nobody feels like this what they're doing is really all that bad, and yet everybody agrees that it would be a complete PR disaster if the rest of the world found out, and they would be shut down. So if people are smart enough to see that this is a bad idea, why don't any of the grunts agree?

And then there's a scene where Ewan McGregor meets his sponsor, his other self, who is a filthy rich inventor. I will call the original EM and the clone EM2. At first EM and EM2 get along famously -- turns out that EM2 not only has EM's DNA, but also acquired some of his memory. (Horrible, horrible science. But we'll let it slide.) Then EM remembers he has only a year or two to live. So he decides he will turn EM2 over to the guys who are pursuing him, or even kill EM2 himself so he can get at all those yummy organs.

All this makes perfect sense in the fundamentalist worldview, where people are basically rotten and will do anything to survive. [fundie]Heck, women will even murder their own poor little babies so they don't have a little bit of inconvenience![/fundie]

Except that people don't act like that. Really. They don't. I don't know a single person who would act like that. Oh sure, we're willing to drop bombs on people half a country away, but we don't have to look them in the face and have a conversation first. Even our soldiers don't do THAT.

Excuse me, but did they bother to ask me? I'm pro-choice. Even if I have only two years to live, I don't kill the guy who's sipping chardonnay in my living room so I can get his organs. Clones or no clones. If the people in this world are willing to do that kind of thing without being troubled by the ethical issues, then why bother cloning anyone at all? Why not just grab people off the street and say "Congratulations, you won the lottery! Step into this helicopter, please..."

In the end, the anti-choice message is so blatant that it's hard to miss, but so badly handled that it's hard for me to imagine anyone seeing themselves in it.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory [movie, ****]

Warning: this review contains spoilers about the new movie, which you will not know from reading the book.

I'm not one of those people who worships the original movie. I liked it a lot; for years I would watch everything with Gene Wilder because I loved seeing Willy Wonka. That movie was the first opportunity I had to learn about special effects. I knew all the kids were actors, but I was convinced that Augustus really did go up from the pipe into the fudge room, and Violet really turned blew and blew up, etc. I asked my mom how they could do all those terrible things to the children, and she tried to come up with a plausible technical explanation for each one. That was cool, but I have no idea how I would begin explaining the new computer generated effects to my kid.

The Gene Wilder movie was good but not great. I found the music catchy but annoying. After I read the book, I was disappointed at many of the deviations, particularly the mundane nature of the Great Glass Elevator. But also, although Gene Wilder was adorable, he didn't quite capture the spirit of the character for me. He was just too darn tranquil most of the time. Violet is chewing gum, and book Wonka will scream "Stop! Spit it out!" while wringing his hands, but movie Wonka is practically yawning while muttering the same lines in a bored manner. Dahl's Wonka was easily excitable; Gene Wilder was relaxed and seemed really in control.

To Johnny Depp's credit, he captured the manic personality of Wonka much better, but he also added something totally different that I never would have expected. Clearly what Depp and Burton were thinking was, "Here's a guy who has spent 20 years secluded in a factory, with nobody to talk to except these freaky little guys. Genius or not, he's bound to be a little bit socially awkward. Actually Johnny Depp plays him as a tremendous nerd, who reads lines off of cue cards when he's lost for words, and can't even remember the names of the children. Throughout the movie he's always gesturing ineffectually at the kids saying "Uh, little girl, little girl..."

Now that doesn't fit with the image of Wonka that I had either. But it is a very interesting take that actually makes sense... AND he manages to combine it with that frantic energy that Gene Wilder didn't have.

As I've read, both movies sharply deviate from the book for the same key reason: The book has no moral center for Charlie. Basically he's not as atrocious as the other four, so he wins by default. Also he is assumed loveable because he's poor. In the Gene Wilder movie, they threw in a subplot with Slugworth tempting all the kids to spy for him, and Charlie refuses, proving his goodness. In the Johnny Depp version, Wonka tells Charlie he can only inherit the factory if he leaves his family. Charlie refuses, proving his goodness.

In order to get to that point, the movie throws in an extra-Dahlian subplot about Wonka's childhood with his father. It's okay. It is logically consistent with the Burton/Depp version of Wonka. I'm not sure it's necessary, and the flashbacks feel kind of crammed in there.

The real problem I had was that when Wonka demands that Charlie leaves his family... well... I just didn't buy it. In the book, the three of them crash through the ceiling of Charlie's house Wonka says "Come on, let's go! Wheel the bed in the elevator and let's head for the factory!" This new version makes Wonka more of a jerk, and I just didn't want him to be. It also forces a resolution with the "Wonka's dad" subplot, which I didn't think was all that important.

The real problem with the ending is that it doesn't jibe with the sequel. I've done some thinking about "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator," and I concluded that it just wouldn't make a very good movie. But let me fantasize, okay? Let's pretend that we can look forward to a Tim Burton version of Elevator, how does the ending of his movie jibe with the beginning of the next book? It really doesn't quite. In the beginning of the first book, Wonka has an element of surprise on his side. The other three grandparents are like "Who IS this nut job?" That doesn't really work if Wonka has already spent several days eating dinner and making nice with the family and learning what families are all about.

FYI, here's the second book in a nutshell: Wonka takes the family up in space with his elevator, where they are chased by shape-changing aliens and shot at by the president. The grandparents (except grandpa Joe) bicker constantly. Once they are back down to earth, Wonka tells them about his invention which makes people younger. They overdose on the substance, two of them turn into babies and the third takes so much that she disappears completely. Charlie and Wonka then take a terrifying trip down to "Minus-land", deep below the factory, to save her from negative age and horrible negative monsters.

Again, I can't see that plot making a good movie, but damn, wouldn't Tim Burton make it look cool?

Which reminds me to comment on the visual aspects. Very nice. Charlie's house was a brilliant design, loved it. Chocolate river and waterfall, miles beyond the original movie. Elevator, better than I imagined it. Special effects on the kids? Well, weird, and even more disturbing than the Wilder version. Actually less convincing in some ways, because they just LOOK so computerized. I'm mainly thinking of Violet here, although they show a parting shot of Mike Teavee after he was stretched, and that also looks silly.

Overall, I have to say that this was well worth seeing. It's just a bit better than the first movie, unless you consider the first movie perfect, in which case -- well, you're wrong -- but okay, you won't like the new movie more.