"The extrapolator's working, we've got a fully functioning force-field. Try saying that when you’re drunk."This evening the Sci-Fi Channel wraps up its presentation of the first (or twenty-seventh, depending on how you look at it) season of Doctor Who here in the States with "The Parting of the Ways". At the same time Season 2/28 of Doctor Who is rolling on in Great Britain this weekend with "The Satan Pit", the conclusion of a two-part story that began with last week's "The Impossible Planet". That episode (the eighth with David Tennant as the Doctor) was classic Who-vian horror with a strong dash of everything from H.P. Lovecraft, the movie Event Horizon and a LOT of what can only be references to the videogame Doom. "The Impossible Planet" had me hooked so much that I had to re-watch it twice, and I'll be downloading "The Satan Pit" as soon as our British friends put it online tomorrow."Worship him! Worship him! Worship him!"
"I'm dead or about to die any second with no chance of escape. And that's okay, hope it's a good death... Have a good life."
"He's fighting for us, this whole planet, and I'm just sitting here eating chips!"
"You are the weakest link... goodbye!"
"**-***-***-***!!"
"Hail the Doctor: the Great Exterminator!"
"I am the Bad Wolf."
"I think you need a Doctor."
"Rose, before I go I just want to tell you, you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And do you know what? So was I!"
"Hello, I tremufu... hmmm, new teeth. That's weird. So where was I?"
But as for Doctor Who in America, tonight belongs to Christopher Eccleston.
This is Eccleston's final performance as the Doctor: a portrayal that he brought just about everything to but especially a personality that was as manic as it was magnetic. After just one season, I think he easily became my personal favorite Doctor. It would have been terrific (or maybe I should say "Fantastic!") to have seen him go an extra season or two, but I'll be thankful for what we did get to see of Eccleston in the role. He'll forever be known as the man who brought the Doctor back into the public conscience. And tonight, he gets to leave in a fashion truly fitting the Doctor, as our hero prepares to face down thousands of his old enemy, the Daleks. Expect some mysteries to be revealed tonight, especially the whole "Bad Wolf" thing that has followed the Doctor and Rose throughout this season. The final scene is something of a tear-jerker, as Christopher Eccleston undergoes the time-honored Doctor Who tradition and regenerates into the new Doctor (David Tennant). All told, some darned fine television tonight at 9 P.M. on Sci-Fi.
"Weird Al" Yankovic is supposed to have a new album coming out sometime soon (what he calls "record label politics" kept it from having a June release). But in the meantime, Al is whetting everyone's appetite for what's to come with "You're Pitiful", a parody of the James Blunt song "You're Beautiful". And... Weird Al has made "You're Pitiful" an absolutely FREE MP3 that you can download from his website!! I finished downloading it a little while ago, after it took an hour to retrieve on a broadband connection (Al's servers must be getting slammed right now... maybe this file could be torrented?). But if you have to wait a while, "You're Pitiful" is well worth it 'cuz this is one very funny song! Not to mention the first new Al song in three years. It helps if you've heard Blunt's original, 'cuz Al pokes a lot of fun at "You're Beautiful"'s style (like how Al starts off the song).If "You're Pitiful" is an indication of what's to come, I think it's safe to say that the art of Al has only gotten better with time. Can't wait for the new album (which reportedly also features a parody of "We Are The World" called "Don't Download This Song"). In the meantime, head over to Al's official site and check out "You're Pitiful" and prepare to laugh a lot :-)
(Oh yeah, I found the "You're Pitiful" faux cover art at Yankovic!)
UPDATE 9:56 PM EST: The official Weird Al site is hosed but BAD!! So many people are trying to get the song that the site is erratic in coming up at all. Fortunately some Al fan sites - notably Al-oholics Anonymous and We've Got It All On UHF have been given permission to mirror "You're Pitiful". So try downloading the song here or here or here or here or here or here, or here if all else fails!
Great, we nailed a bad guy. One of the biggest terrorist ringleaders even.
So... when does the "War on Terror" stop?
When do we go back to the America we had before 9-11, when our government didn't run roughshod over the Constitution in the name of "safety and security"? I mean, with Al-Zarqawi out of the picture, there's no more need for anything like our government spying on its own citizens, right? right?
**crickets chirping**
Let's just state the truth of the matter: the "war on terror" is never going to end. It's not supposed to end. It is the perfect example of Orwell's "continuous war", where the state will always have to produce a hobgoblin for its people to fear. Al-Zarqawi has been the big hobgoblin of the past few years. I'm glad that he's gone, if he indeed was doing all of these terrible things... but realistically that only means our government is going to produce another one just like him, and none too soon.
The "war on terror" was the greatest gift that believers in big government ever received. And in spite of today's events, there's no indication that they are going to relinquish that gift in the slightest anytime soon.
I voted for Alan Keyes in two primary elections when I was registered Republican. Keyes was the only person in a presidential race that I felt completely comfortable with giving my support to. Somewhere on my hard disks I've still got a picture I made in early 2000 of Keyes as a Jedi Master: it wound up getting shown to him and it got reported back to me that he got a big laugh out of it.He wasn't going to be allowed to be the Republican front-runner though... not by the party bosses who really pick and choose who the candidates are going to be, who decide which ones get the media exposure and the big big money. Keyes would have been too great a threat to their power structure.
But in spite of that, Alan Keyes is still showing America that he's a man of principle. Someone with that doesn't need high office or material wealth or elitist approval to make a difference for the better. And once again Keyes is proving that by coming out against the atrocious border policies of President Bush and too many others in this government. Here's the speech Keyes made a few days ago at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Minutemen movement in Arizona. I like this part especially:
"Well, we're taking care of having to deal with the problem of millions of people who have come into this country as a result of the dereliction of duty of these political elites. And they wish us to accept what they told us in '86 and '94 and every time they turned around: 'Trust us! Trust us! Trust us!' I think we need to send them a good, clear, strong message: 'We don't trust you anymore!'It's hard to argue with Keyes on this at all. The Republicans have been on a roll since the 1994 elections, and they were supposed to have more political capital "to get things done" in the last two presidential elections. Well, what good has it done them? What benefit to the American people has really come out of their being in power? No, I'm not shilling for the Democrats at all: they're just as bad if not worse. But really: why should we trust the Republicans and George W. Bush in particular? What reason have they given us to trust them?And I want to say it outright. I'm a Republican... but it's about time that we look G.W. Bush in the eye and tell him, 'We don't trust you, either!'
On another note, there are several pictures from the Minutemen event that Keyes was at on the above-linked website, including several taken by Connie Hair, Minutemen publicist and longtime associate of Dr. Keyes. Miss Hair is without a doubt one of the classiest and most thought-provoking ladies that I've ever been given the opportunity to have met, having done so on several occasions. Am really delighted to see her in the middle of the action, as she so very often is :-)
In my junior year of high school I was assigned locker #666. I opened it several times a day and there were no scenes of Dante's Inferno lurking in there that I ever saw (there was a lot of other junk though but that's neither here nor there). There've been a few times that when I buy something in a story it rings up $6.66. At least twice the cashiers have tried to give me a penny back so it won't be exactly that amount. I always tell them to keep it: to me, it's just a number that falls between 665 and 667. It's got no more special significance or power over me than any other number does.
And today is just another day. It's not even a really sequential numerical, because before it there would have had to be 665 days from the start of the year and followed by 667. Thank goodness the year only has 365 days, I guess. But some of the hysteria about today (one woman in England wanted her doctor to induce labor because the due date on her baby is today and she didn't want it associated with the devil's number) is positively mind-boggling. You'd have thought we as a civilization would be past such nonsense as numerology.
Well, whatever 666 really is in biblical prophecy, however it fits into what's supposed to happen, I doubt this day out of all days has anything to do with it. The only thing really abominable that I've heard is happening on this day at all is the remake of The Omen: a movie that I've heard nothing but bad about. Give me the original version anyday (which for the longest time has been something of a comedy for me, but that's another story...).
Some people may not know what I'm talking about. It's this: the belief among a lot of Christians that we are only supposed to use the Authorized Version of 1611 – more commonly known as the King James Version – of the Bible as our text. They further believe that it's a dire sin to use any version of the Bible other than King James.
(For the record, I use the New International Version in my personal study, but 99% of the time when I'm writing something and need to quote scripture, I will use the King James Version… if for no other reason than because it's classier to use a time-tested masterpiece of the English language, despite some problems in it that have been addressed by modern scholarship.)
Here's what I think: some Christians put too much faith in an earthly incarnation of the Word of God, and contend too much for the sanctity of that incarnation, instead of meditating upon the meaning of the Word itself. Instead of letting themselves be changed by the Word of God, they desire to have the Word as something that they can wield as a tool, or a weapon, to be used against the things and even people of this temporal realm.
In other words, some Christians are imbuing the King James Version of the Bible with a power that it does not have and never was supposed to have, on the sheer basis of its linguistics and structure. To them, it's not the truth that is conveyed by the words, but which exact words are used and how they are ordered that is what is more important.
This belief in the complete inerrancy and superiority of the King James Bible above all others is something very much based in one of the most enduring tenets of Gnostic thought: that things of matter can be given power. Indeed, power is the only driving motive behind King James Onlyism and the lust to destroy the credibility of other versions of the Bible. In doing so these Christians have taken the living Word and made it as something sterile, diminishing utterly its power of spiritual nourishment.
I may write more about this later, but I felt led to share that thought here for some reason or another. If anyone disagrees with my sentiment on this, they're more than welcome to make a comment to this post. I won't delete anyone who disagrees with me (unless the comment crosses the line away from common decency).
These are the same ones that President Bush is telling us to have compassion toward, the ones he's pushing to grant amnesty for.
This country is being invaded from the south. Hell, 10% of the entire Mexican population is in the United States right now. How the hell does this President get away with calling himself a "homeland security" Commander in Chief when he does NOTHING about our southern border and lets this kind of thing happen to REAL Americans?
President Bush doesn't care one damn whit about you or me, my fellow Americans. And as for the illegals coming over and doing this sort of thing, I'd recommend the following: fire one shot over their heads as a warning, and another between their eyes to take them down if they take one step more over the line. Let the Mexicans take charge over their own country: it's more than enough for us to manage our own.
"You have GOT to be kidding."-- The Doctor, "Bad Wolf"
The less said about this episode to the uninitiated, the better. Definitely one of the best of the Eccleston episodes. From the opening moments when the camera is spinning madly while focused on the Doctor unconscious on the floor, this one is outrageous as all get out. Doctor Who during its long run has done just about every genre imaginable - from sci-fi to horror to western to everything in between - except the musical. Well, tonight they add one more notch to the belt: the reality game show! Want a taste of what's to come? That's Anne Robinson herself doing the voice of "the Anne Droid" on The Weakest Link of 200,000 A.D.! Definitely to be recommended if you're an American fan who's just now able to see the revived Doctor Who and it's an absolutely must-see before Eccleston takes his bow in next week's "The Parting of the Ways".
No doubt he sees a lucrative market here: putting VeriChips into all those people will make the company billions of dollars.
Here's the real danger from where I sit: how long after imposing this on immigrants is this going to be expected that all normal American citizens be "chipped"? "For our own good" of course.
Are we willing to alleviate one serious problem by taking the first step down a very slippery slope toward something that would be altogether worse?
Dear friends, it's not your average American people that are messing up this country. It's a very disproportionately tiny group of individuals in government and political parties and the media and corporations like VeriChip, that are destroying everything that was once good and true in this land. They do nothing to sincerely help their fellow man out of compassion, but they will not fail to act when they discover some new means of shackling and controlling their brother.
Remember: you are not a number. You are not a piece of meat that lives only to spend and consume and screw and die. You have a soul... something that too many in this world would deny you sentience of that fact.
I for one will never relent to being "chipped". As for Scott Silverman, the president of VeriChip: might I suggest that he have his company's largest model firmly embedded far up his own ass.
Anyway, Blade Runner is one of my all-time favorite movies, from the time I first saw it in 1992. I've got the original DVD release but I've never been all that happy with how skimpy it is on extra features... like, there are none. The production of Blade Runner and all the elements at work in this story are just too rich to leave unexplored in a medium that welcomes that like DVD. Plus, I've seen both versions of Blade Runner: the original 1982 one that has Harrison Ford's narration and the 1992 "director's cut" (which may have been the very first-ever "special edition" of any movie) and the DVD we have now is only the 1992 version. I happen to like both cuts for various reasons.
Well, today has been a good day for Blade Runner fans: it's been announced that the 1992 director's cut is being re-issued on DVD this fall, followed by director Ridley Scott releasing "the final cut" of Blade Runner in 2007 for the movie's 25th anniversary. The 1992 edition will hit shelves this September, then be on sale for four months before being pulled, after which this "final cut" will be released in theaters. I'm guessing this edition will include some deleted material (like the scene where Deckard visits Holden in the hospital, among others). Following the cinematical run, Blade Runner will be released on DVD again, this time in a pack that will include all three versions of Blade Runner: the 1982 narrated original, the 1992 director's cut and the 2007 version, along with tons of supplemental material.
What else can be said, but that it's a great time to be a Blade Runner fan! Maybe someday someone will figure out that the world of Blade Runner would make an awesome massive-multiplayer online role-playing game where we pay to be either blade runners or replicants or civilians... heck I'd pay 15 bucks for that! Or at least give us an updated version of the original computer game.
Next year's event is going to be in Los Angeles, which may be a little too far for me to go (depends on some factors. We'll see... I've never been that far west before so this would make a first time experience for me if I did :-).
Now, last year Lisa and I attended Celebration III in Indianapolis and we saw a lot of kooky stuff, including what was almost a near-bloody riot breaking out after they closed the souvenir store that Friday after only being open for an hour and a half!! 'Twas one of the STUPIDEST decisions I've ever seen enacted by anyone in the history of anything. Well, listen to this from the official announcement:
One of the highlights for fans at a Star Wars convention is the chance to buy unique merchandise, including an exclusive, limited-edition action figure. Because this has led to bottlenecks and long lines in the past, the Celebration IV store will be bigger than ever, self-service, well-stocked with merchandise, have plenty of check-out lanes...and be open 24 hours a day from the opening of the show on Thursday until the close on Monday!I'll believe it when I see it, if I wind up going.
THIS part puts a damper on my hopes though...
To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Gen Con LLC will throw the largest party ever for fans of the saga...I heard from too many people at last year's Celebration that Gen Con was the reason so many things went SNAFU. Compared to Celebration II - when the Lucasfilm crew was managing everything - Celebration III left a lot to be desired. One thing in particular from last year's show still leaves me cringing in disgust... count me as one of those pinning it on Gen Con. I said it before: they can run role-playing game conventions, but not serious sci-fi/fantasy shows (and that ain't a knock on the good people in the Dungeons & Dragons crowd at all, mind ya). It's just that some things require whole different logistics than others, and in last year's case Gen Con wasn't on the ball. But, everyone deserves a second chance to make things right, so maybe they'll learn from last year's mistakes and hit this one out of the park next year. I wish 'em all the best.
So get ready for five days of incessant Starwargasms next year, fellow fans of the saga. Which may be another reason for me to avoid it next year: four days of it nonstop last year left me dead tired by the time I got home :-)
"Doh you know oo I am?! Ah'm da Jugga-nawt, bitch!"-- Juggernaut, X-Men: The Last Stand
This is the line that forevermore wiped out any personal sense of being wildly satisfied with X-Men: The Last Stand.
Don't get me wrong though: I had a lot of fun watching this final chapter in the X-Men film series. I was also frustrated beyond belief at the all too numerous problems in this movie.
It's NOT the train wreck that a lot of us had been expecting after hearing reports for the past year or so on how bad things were going during production. Based on some of those, it had sounded like a stinker on par with Batman and Robin. Thankfully, it's not that bad (and I doubt anything again ever will be as loathsome as that piece of dreck from Joel Schumacher).
No, X-Men: The Last Stand is more like being told you've got a beautiful baby on the way... and then being forced to stand and watch as that baby gets aborted against all moral soundness and sanity. That's what X-Men: The Last Stand is most to me, after seeing it at 12:01 AM this morning: an act of cinematic vacuum aspiration sucking out any and all hope of a future for this series.
The biggest thing I have against this movie is that Fox has stated that this will be the last X-Men movie. And they go all-out here to make darned sure you understand without any doubt that they mean it. From killing off several major characters (and not even giving a few the benefit of a meaningful onscreen death) to setting things up at the end so that the whole mutant crisis that's driven these movies since 2000's X-Men is made thoroughly kaput... I've never before seen a major studio fall over backwards to give euthanasia to a successful string of movies, until X-Men: The Last Stand.
There is absolutely no reason at all why the X-Men series could not go on for another two or three installments, or even six or seven more movies… if that few. This could have been Fox's own franchise like the Harry Potter movies, or more accurately the James Bond series. There's more than enough material from the comics and raw potential per its own merit to drive the X-Men movies to last for decades. Oh sure, there'd have to be recasting every once in awhile, like when Ian McKellan decides he no longer wants to do the Magneto thing, but think of the rat race there would be in the entertainment industry to be that next actor who plays Magneto. Or more wildly yet: Wolverine. Who says that has to be Hugh Jackman (who has done an amazing job bringing Logan to life) who plays everyone's favorite Canadian wildman? James Bond has gone on now with five or six actors playing the role... so why can't the same be done with several characters in one franchise? It would keep the whole shebang a lot more fresh and fun, without necessarily going stagnant in the way Paramount’s Star Trek series did. It's... insanely stupid to be stopping a series with such brilliant potential.
But anyway, about the movie...
The story starts with a flashback to 20 years earlier, a time when Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellan) are friends and co-workers. We see them approaching the home of the adolescent Jean Grey, to offer her a place in Xavier's school. Look for the amazing effort that was made to make Stewart and McKellan look 20 years younger, if not more. Also look for the obligatory cameo appearance by Stan Lee (that guy shows up at every Marvel party). Pretty solid opening, the movie's going good so far...
Flash forward to ten years afterward, to the office of industrialist Warren Worthington, who walks into the restroom at his office to find his son clipping the feathered wings that have grown from his own back.
Flash forward again to "a few years from now", a point some time not long after X2: X-Men United (one of the few sequels that managed to be better than the original). Xavier's Institute is still in pain after losing Jean Grey. Logan is filling in as a "substitute teacher" and when we first see him, he's leading some students through an exercise in something that longtime fans of the comics have been wanting to see ever since this movie series started: the Danger Room. Meanwhile in Washington D.C. word has reached the office of the President that a "cure" for mutations has been found.
It's a very promising first twenty minutes or so. And then things just... start feeling rushed. Tacked-on. Devil-may-care. Instead of one cohesive X-Men movie it feels like bits and pieces of several stories are slapped into place one after another with no sense of plot or pacing or emotional attachment or build-up to something that pays off in the end.
James Marsden's Cyclops is the worst offense. This morning it's barely registering with me that he was even in this movie at all. I think Cyclops probably has less than five minutes of total screen-time in X-Men: The Last Stand, most of that is feeling guilty and angst-ridden about what happened to Jean. The rest is the most clumsy way of getting rid of a character in a movie that I can think of from recent memory.
Though for some reason, as a counter, I feel compelled to praise Kelsey Grammer's portrayal of Henry "Hank" McCoy, better known as that lovable blue furball Beast. Grammer's McCoy was my favorite new addition to the X-Men series: he’s exactly like the comic book original, right down to saying "by my stars and garters" at one point. Grammer had fun with this role, you can tell. You've no problem believing in Beast whether he's in a three-piece suit advising the President of the United States, or swinging in action during the scene's final battle at Alcatraz Island. Of all the good that was in this movie (and there was some), Kelsey Grammer as Beast is the big standout.
Then the pendulum swings wildly toward the other way again when I think of Juggernaut and that horrible "Don't you know who I am...?!" line. For some reason (I think it has to do with a video that's floating around on the Internet) this line garnered the biggest applause from the crowd at where we saw X-Men: The Last Stand. I didn't find it particularly funny or fitting with Juggernaut's character though (and I've already ranted in this space about some of my other issues with the movie's take on Juggernaut). To his credit, Vinnie Jones brings all the right attitude to the onscreen incarnation of Cain Marko. The problem is that one line... and the fact that he's about four times smaller in the movie than Juggernaut really should be. If they'd poured a few million more into CGI enhancing his build, I bet Jones would have made a much more impressive – and scary – Juggs. And he wouldn't need that stupid one-liner that's now probably going to join other legendary American pop-culture quotes like "Eat my shorts!" and "I've fallen and I can't get up!"
Charles Xavier's death... was ridiculous. I didn't feel this at all, at least not how it was probably intended that I be touched by his loss. I don't know what else to say about this before descending into a diatribe against everything that was so wrong about killing him and how the deed was done.
Logan fighting a Sentinel? Cool! Now, why can't they show us more of the Sentinel other than just the head? Come to think of it, why couldn't this entire movie have been about Sentinels hunting down mutants, instead of it being relegated to a mere exercise in the Danger Room? Again, another element wasted that otherwise could have been terrific.
I didn't care at all about Callisto (Dania Ramirez) and the other "punk/gotchic" mutants that follow Magneto. The only one that really seemed cool to me was the one throwing those "bone knives" at Logan during one scene later on in the movie. On a similar note, I didn't feel anything resonate with the Angel (Ben Foster)
X-Men: The Last Stand's director Brett Ratner has taken a lot of flack for this movie, and during the year-long or so run up to its release. I didn't really see anything wrong here to pin on Ratner as a director, just going by what I understand of the situation. Based on everything I've heard, he was just asked to drive the thing toward whatever destination the Fox execs told him to. Indeed, you can see the heavy-handed mangling done by the suits all over this movie. It's like "blockbuster by committee". In some ways it makes X-Men: The Last Stand a harder thing to watch than Alien 3: a movie that had something like forty writers before it ended up on the screen.
This is like what happened to Star Trek V, but far more unforgivably so. Paramount slashed the funding on that movie but they weren't crazy enough to kill off a proven cash cow. X-Men: The Last Stand could have benefited from longer production time, a better script, a longer running time and maybe a bigger budget... everything needed to give this series a half-decent sendoff if this really is what it retires on. It got none of that. It's like Fox couldn’t decide if they wanted a tent-pole summer blockbuster or a tent stake through the heart.
And now on the morning after... I feel like I watched a movie with a lot of interesting visuals and a few interesting performances, and enjoyed watching what good there was... but ultimately it went nowhere.
I'm sorry, but Fox really, shoulda, oughtta have done better with X-Men: The Last Stand. I can't say enough that there are some fun moments and bits of eye candy in this movie... but in the end, they really can't redeem this film as being a worthy addition to the series, much less a fitting capstone to it all.
One word of warning: stay for the credits. There's one final scene that's well worth waiting a few extra minutes to see.
Now, as for Lost...
On a scale of 1 to 10, that was like a 19.
THAT, my friends, is an excellent season finale. It answered a whole lot of questions, left a tantalizing few unexplained and popped open a fresh can of new ones.
So, what is "it"? And what I wanna know is, what the heck is the deal with the giant stone leg with the four toes?
Well, anyway, good show tonight, Lost producers. And to Taylor Hicks, congratulations!! If you ever read this I want you to know that you're the first Idol guy that I'm gonna buy the CD of the day it comes out :-)
