gonewest

For all you Firefly fans disappointed that there will almost certainly be no new series or movies to look forward to, it can only be good news that the rights to turn firefly into a MMORPG have been purchased and so there is a decent chance that you’ll be able buy a Firefly and do your own crime in the next year or two.

I caught a showing of Casino Royale yesterday at the Seattle Cinerama (an old school big theater with a great big screen). They say this movie is as good as the old Sean Connery Bond flicks. It has been so long since I’ve seen Connery as James Bond that all I can say is that this is the best Bond flick that I remember — it has all the action and high class intrigue that you would expect from Bond without going overboard on gadgets and too-big-for-life villains that plagued most of the previous films.

Casino Royale is the first installment of a re-imagining of the Bond franchise which looks to be off to a very promising start. In many ways it reminds me of last year’s Batman Begins which marked a similarly successful fresh start for the Batman series. Both films are darker, grittier, and more realistic than the original series and both bring plot lines and leading performances to the table that are strong enough to make one actually look forward to the next installment, which I think is something that neither Bond nor Batman fans have been able to do for quite a while.

I went to see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Kazakhstan a few days ago and I must say that it is the funniest movie that I’ve seen in a while. Anyone who is easily offended should think two or three times before seeing it though because it makes a movie like South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut seem rather tame by comparison.

This is the first time that I have seen anything that Sacha Cohen, the comedian behind Borat, has done but it appears that he has taken up the mantle laid down by Andy Kaufman so many years ago. Both practice a form of ambush comedy (which is apparently actually called anti-humor or Dada) which is hilarious when the setup works but almost always uncomfortable to watch; but it is also a unique brand of comedy that has the ability to reveal more about who we are than any other.

My only complaint about the Borat movie is that there was too much toilet humor, gay humor, nudity scenes that set new standards in bad taste, and not quite enough of the dupe making ambush comedy that I had come to see. There are several really good bits that make the whole movie worth seeing though.

Update: I changed the title to this post because the original was too long and didn’t say what I wanted to say

So, I’m watching Aliens on TNTHD (damn them for stretching pan-n-scanned movies instead of using the original cinematic format on their HD channel, damn them all to hell!) and it’s at the scene where Burke is revealed for the unprincipled profit hungry monster that he is and Ripley says:

You know, Burke, I don’t know which species is worse.

Then Hicks says:

Let’s waste him.

Except that is not the way it goes.

Here is the excerpt from the script:

BURKE
This is total paranoid delusion.
It’s pitiful.

RIPLEY
(wearily)
You know, Burke, I don’t know
which species is worse. You don’t
see them screwing each other over
for a fucking percentage.

HICKS
(serious)
Let’s waste him.
(to Burke)
No offense.

I have seen this movie many, many times over the years and not once have I noticed “You don’t see them screwing each other over for a fucking percentage” to be missing — and it is a very memorable line, I would have noticed. So, why did TNT remove it? Can they really have needed the extra 10 seconds for commercials? Were they technically incompetent unable to bleep out or re-dub that one cuss word as they do for countless other movies?

Or could it be that TNT censored this line in a conscious effort to squelch the message that it sends: that “ambitious corporate types” can be cable of acting in the most unprincipled, even monstrous, ways if they are a little too ambitious or profit hungry? I wonder how many ambitious corporate types they have over at TNT anyway?

Ran across a link to this clip at Kung Fu Monkey. It’s amazing what a good editor can do to a scene.

What would the Bellagio water show look like if it was done using Diet Coke and Mentos?

Glad you asked.

Being lucky enough to live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (Seattle is #15 of 361) I get access to quite a few movies that are not in general release across the country. Sunday afternoon I went to see one of those, An Inconvenient Truth.

This movie lives up to the hype and I recommend that you see it whether you think that you’ll like the politics (of which I can assure you there is relatively little) of it or not. Even if you think global climate change is BS (are there any of you that still exist?), seeing the movie will help illustrate what the concern is about and what the scientific consensus on the issue really is.

And if you are a conservative tempted to see the movie but holding back because you don’t want to help make some “liberal movie” successful, then you can be certain that you won’t make any difference there. Here are the box office rankings for the movie’s first weekend where it ranked 22nd, and this second weekend where it ranks 9th. When you view those links, take special note of the theater counts and the average sales per theater — that figure of $91,000 for the first week is apparently an all time record for any movie in any genre, and the second week ranking of #9 (which is based on gross sales for the weekend, not the per theater average) is a movie breaking into the top ten while still showing in only 77 theaters. The lowest theater count for any movie ranking better than #9 is 1270 which is 16 times greater. If the ranking was based of per theater sales instead, then An Inconvenient Truth would not only rank #1 but would be beating the pants off every other movie on the list except The Break-Up which is currently in its opening weekend high. There has been fair amount of rather dismissive commentary about the movie from the pundits of mainstream media, and I am sure that conservative blogs are trying to minimize it as much as they can, but box office numbers like these will prove to be very inconvenient for that effort.

Oh, and this was my first time visiting the AMC Pacific Place mall and cinema in downtown Seattle; I must say that I am impressed with both and will be back. Now if they would just finish fixing the monorail which has a stop two blocks away.

UPDATE: Further research reveals that the comment about the per theater sales for this movie setting an all time record is incorrect; it appears that it is only number 24 on that list so far. It does appear to be the record breaker for non-fiction, however.

Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes is, as the title suggests, about the new science of information theory and how it is providing a deeper understanding of quantum physics, relativity, thermodynamics, biology, and just about every other area of science imaginable. This book was a real page turner for me and I would also recommend another book by Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. Both books cover topics in mathematics and physics without requiring more than a passing familiarity with either by the reader.

Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention is a history of the invention of the steam boat. This book was slower going for me as I found that the narrative style chosen by the author interrupted the reading flow at regular intervals (the story would be tooling along in third person narrative and then suddenly, there would be a statement that such and such may have happened but no records exist to document the event), but it is a very good story about the three people primarily responsible for the steam boat, John Fitch, James Rumsey, and Robert Fulton, and the intrigue and conflicts that they endured while pursuing their dreams.

Today was a very un-socal like day in Pacific beach. A heavy fog set in early and cast an uncommonly warm and sticky pall over the area. The fog was rolling so densely through the buildings in my neighborhood that at first I thought there was a fire nearby.

On the brighter side, I took advantage of my east coast hours (in theory my workday ends at 2 pm but the practice usually isn’t that good), and headed out to a theater in Mission Valley to catch a matinee showing of Serenity. I tried hard not to expect too much going into the movie so that I would not leave it disappointed but need not have bothered — Serenity the movie was every bit as good as a two hour adaptation of a series (even one with only 14 episodes) could be. I certainly didn’t like a couple of the choices on where to take the story, but overall I think Joss Wheden created a wonderful movie.

Approaching Mission Bay on the drive back home, I could see the fog steaming off of the water and hanging above it in thick curtains as if to mark the boundary of some dreary nether-world. It was a good thing that I was returning from such an enjoyable movie to help buoy my mood as I reentered the pall.

When I get in a reading mood, a rarely have the patience anymore to stick with one book cover-to-cover (at least if it’s non-fiction) but instead have a handful that I rotate through depending on my interest at the moment. Here are the main books that are currently on my reading list:

And finally, my old copy of the the book that Amazon has no cover image for:
“Dine Bahane: The Navajo Creation Story” (Paul G. Zolbrod)