Notes on X-Men: Apocalypse

I went to see X-Men: Apocalypse tonight and it was okay.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't X-Men: Days of Future Past either.  I would have made a few corrections, and because of the nature of this post, be aware that the entire thing is either spoilers for the movies or the books.

So, first, Apocalypse had two important powers.  The first was that, through the use of a giant mechanism he could transfer his "soul" to a different body and thereby gain the powers of that body.  The second was that he could create "horsemen" by enhancing the powers of other mutants.  He also could rearrange matter and teleport, but those aren't relevant to the actual plot of the movie, so whatever.

Of the two important powers, only one of them was actually necessary.  And hint, it wasn't the first one.

There's already an X-Person with the ability to steal other mutants powers.  Her name is Rogue.  The entire first movie was about her, and she appeared in the next two movies in increasingly insignificant roles.  The reason that her roles were increasingly insignificant was due to the fact that, as a plot device, stealing other powers can become really boring unless it's really well written, and Apocalypse wasn't well written.

But the second power, now that was the interesting one.  Apocalypse had his horsemen from the comics, and from the Bible.  He finds the mutants that are already the most powerful and enhances their powers even further.  That presents sooooo much opportunity for interesting characterization.

In the movie he uses Storm (great), Angel (okay), Psylocke (ugh), and Magneto (oh yeah baby!).  The Psylocke character really could have been anyone, and although I like Olivia Munn, she was terribly, terribly used in this movie.

Imagine now that Apocalypse doesn't have his first ability, he just has the second one.  Suddenly, the four horsemen aren't just cannon fodder for the X-Men to fight, they're essential to the power that Apocalypse wields.  The more powerful the horsemen, the more powerful that Apocalypse is. 

That makes Apocalypse much, much more interested in the horsemen.  Perhaps he can only invest four people at a time, and he has to be really choosy about who he's going to pick.  That sets up a conflict among the horsemen, they want to keep Apocalypse happy to keep their increased powers, but they also have a reason to fear other mutants and want them dead: if Apocalypse discovers that some other mutant is more powerful, he'll withdraw his blessing and bestow it on someone else.  I'd add a little extra: his powers are addictive and the more you get the more you want.

By the way, I will say that Psylocke is a psychic, and if Apocalypse had found her first (or if she had found him first) that would have alleviated the need for the "TV will teach me English" trick.

Generally, the plot would go as it already does, until they reach Magneto.  He's ridiculously powerful already, and so his powers added to Apocalypse seem like a great deal for Apocalypse.  He's got some issues though, and at the point that they kidnap Xavier I would probably give him some issues.  He should give Apocalypse an ultimatum of some sort, Charles goes or I go.

Apocalypse really would want Magneto, but something tells me that he'd want Charles more.  So he releases Magneto and takes Charles instead.  This leave Magneto less powerful than he was, in withdrawal from Apocalypse's powers, and angry at Charles and Apocalypse.

Here's the thing, I would have had Apocalypse successfully turn Charles Xavier into a horseman.  He sends the message (and the secret message), the X-Men come for him, there's a fight in front of the pyramid.  Quicksilver, Mystique, Beast, Cyclops and Nightcrawler, are beaten into the ground, and dismissed as not worthy of becoming horsemen (although I'd seriously have to think about Quicksilver, if I were Apocalypse, since he's pretty up there in terms of powers).

But let's say that with the help of Jean, Nightcrawler manages to take Charles back and they hide in the building.  Charles starts fighting Apocalypse in his own mind, trying to wrest away from the addictive powers of Apocalypse and now Apocalypse is determined to get him back.  Only Magneto decides to get in his way.  He's way more than enough to take out Psylocke and Angel, but watching enhanced Storm go up against Magneto would have been a seriously cool fight.  She wouldn't have been throwing just lightning, she would have been throwing fog, snow, wind, and everything else at him.  That could have been a very fair fight.

So Apocalypse rips the side off the building, and he finds . . . Jean Grey, sitting with Charles.  He takes a couple of swipes at her, but she fends them off.  He tries to get Charles to attack her, and Charles does, but she's Jean Grey so of course she's still fine.

And Apocalypse realizes that Jean may be more powerful than Charles.  And more powerful than Magneto.  More powerful than all the rest of his horsemen, and Magneto and Charles combined.  Her powers are really broad, from telepathy to telekinesis to . . . crazy things that shouldn't be mentioned in polite company.

So he tries to convince her to become a horseman.  He talks about how powerful he could make her, how she could be a God-Queen at his side.  And she seems a little tempted by all that power and maybe says . . . after a pause . . . yes?

So Apocalypse makes her a horseman.  He reaches into her and unlocks what Charles tried to keep locked, and finds that at her center she's more powerful than the burning heart of a star.  She couldn't beat him before, there was just too much holding her back, so much that Charles did to try to give her control.

But now she's Phoenix, and Apocalypse can't even bear to look at her.  He tries to yank his powers back, control her, but of course there is nothing that he can do.  He's spent so long bending power to his will than he couldn't have imagined that there were powers that he just couldn't control, and now he's discovered one and that discovery has killed him.

There's a flare of incandescence.  The pyramid vanishes.  All of the X-Men plus the surviving horsemen, and Moira, and Magneto and what remains of Apocalypse wake up on the lawn of the Xavier Institute, which looks like it was never destroyed.  

And then the rest of the emotional stuff happens, Xavier kisses Moira, blah blah blah.

But that creates a much more emotional resolution.  Apocalypse was beaten by his own greed and his own attempts to take control rather than the "alone vs. team" theme that Charles quips in the real movie (because it's not f---ing true!  Did you not notice his four horsemen?  He wasn't alone!)

This whole revision does leave a couple of plot holes.  Instead of the original opening bits in ancient Egypt, the giant golden pyramid machine isn't a body transfer machine, it's something that Apocalypse builds to make him immortal.  And it works!  Huzzah!  But then rebellion and burial, etc. It can still wake him up with the sun touching the apex of the sunken pyramid, and then it becomes unnecessary.  Because honestly, Apocalypse shouldn't be so reliant on a big golden machine.  It's a big weakness, and the fewer massive weaknesses that your enemies have, the more dangerous they seem.

Oh, the other thing about this movie?  Psylocke can't make lightsaber whips.  Lightsabers aren't solid, they can't thrown things around.  Thats kinda the whole point.  If she caught Beast around his neck, she should decapitate him, and it really bothered me that didn't happen.  She should have other powers, that would have been cool, but no whips morons.  That's like the opposite of the Indiana Jones gun vs. sword fight: she could have ended the fight in two seconds but didn't because of no particularly good reason.  Beast is very smart, he could have fought her to a standstill without the stupid whip.

Groundhog Day

So, I got back to my old place a few days ago. It was the last trip before I was completely moved out, but really I was just there to clean up. All my stuff had been moved out.

But there was a package, an Amazon mailer, waiting for me on the stairs.

It was the Groundhog Day special edition. Which was on my Wish List, which was only linked from my Fark account. Someone apparently decided that they wanted to buy me a gift.

I've heard about that sort of thing before. People have been known to buy busty blond girls things online, and I'm sure some of the cute x-rate boys on various sites get presents. However, it's the first time that I've ever gotten something.

I don't know what prompted it, but it made me feel really good. Hopefully I said or did something special to the person that bought it because it made me very special.

So, thanks to Chris C. I very much appreciate your gift. I watched it today and enjoyed it. I'm feeling a bit under the weather it was lovely to have a movie that I love but haven't seen in a while.

Were the World Mine

So, I finally got the apartment internet hook up the other day. I'm pretty sure that I mentioned that. One of the things that I did in the glorious rush of high speed internet access was to watch all of the movie trailers on the Apple site, including the few that I'm especially looking forward too: Milk, Watchmen, Star Trek (Chris Pine is dreamy), and the next Harry Potter. I also discovered a few others that look good. Up (I mean, it's Pixar), My Name is Bruce and JCVD. There was also some crap like Yes Man (why is Jim Carrey doing that movie again?) and Valkyrie and Angels and Demons.

Among all of these big deal movies I found something that you could say that sort of uniquely appealed to me. It was Were the World Mine and although it looked a little bit campy, it also looked like it appealed to me on two levels. The first, obvious level was "cute guys" and the second level was "Why yes, the power to make people gay has been a personal fantasy of mine."

So I went to the offical website and found it to be a flash monstrosity. Not only that, it was a nonfunctional flash monstrosity. So I did the obvious thing and went to the wikipedia page about it where I found out that it was opening in NYC a week after I watched the trailer. Nifty.

Ben decided to visit that same weekend, so it seemed natural enough to drag him out to the movie.

I bought tickets online, we went out to dinner and then we went to the movie theater. It was packed. I mean, for this little indy film in it's second day of release in NYC there was a line stretching down the block. Which was very confusing. Yeah, it's NYC and all but I didn't think that the second day of release was still a big deal. It's like camping out to get an iPhone on the second day. People don't do that.

So I was standing in the line to pick up the tickets, and the guy behind me says: "After the 7:00 p.m. showing of 'Were the World Mine' the director and cast will have a Q&A."

And I turned to him, and sort of challengingly said, "What?" Because I didn't believe him because I had bought tickets to the 7:00 p.m. showing. Inexplicably cool things don't usually happen to me.

He pointed, and there it was, taped to the box office window. He hadn't even paraphrased it, he'd just read what the sign in front of me had said.

So I picked up the tickets, and hyperventilated a bit as I digested the fact that yes, something completely unplanned and cool had just happened to me, and then we went into the theater.

The line that stuck with me from the giant set of reviews (here's the NYT one) which were pasted onto the outside of the theater was from the SF Chronicle's review: "Tom Gustafson's queer-centric take on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream teeters between banal conceptualizing and inspired execution."

Ben agreed with that line. If you press me I'd have to admit that I do too but I really came down on the inspired execution side in the end. It was everything that I wanted it to be. It was a little campy and the ending had some writing issues, but overall it was well acted, well written, and well produced, especially considering the ~300k budget and 24 day shooting schedule (as revealed by the Q&A).

The male lead played by Tanner Cohen was just gorgeous and it doesn't hurt that he's a decent actor. I'd love to see him again in more movies but I'm pretty sure he's also gay, which means that he'll never get a major role ever again.

Crap.

The other guy, Nathaniel David Becker, is also cute but also less overtly gay which makes me hopeful that we'll see him again.

I think the girls actually stole the show though. Zelda Williams was phenomenal as the best friend, in a Chloe from Smallville way. Judy McLane and Jill Larson as the Mom and the Mom's Boss were both excellent, especially playing off against each other. Wendy Robie had some (very) flat lines at the end of the movie but near the middle her character's bliss at the chaos is quite beautiful.

So the movie ends (happily and without death, thankfully) and the audience clapped. Then Tom Gustafson, the director, Tanner Cohen, Zelda Williams and one of the other guys (Sorry, I don't remember your name!) came down and did a quick Q&A during which I learned the above mentioned facts and for a bunch of gay guys the audience showed an amazing lack of creativity coming up with questions.

Tanner looked thinner in person and was wearing a sort of lumpy orange sweatshirt, but he was still breathlessly cute. I found him and Zelda hanging out in front of the theater after the movie and shook his hand. And asked him how old he was. 21. Too young for me but I'll still dream when I buy the movie on DVD.

One thing on his age; I figured he was actually older than that. Usually the guys that play high school guys are in their thirties. I thought that since he was such a good actor with an amazing voice, he must be older that I am. Surprise. Of course, this only serves to make me feel old.

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie thouroughly. It was a great experience and I had lots of fun. If you like fun gay musical movie romps through Shakespeare, and you can locate a showing/DVD I highly recommend this.

Okay, so that was the movie review. Today I also got on the subway and rode it all the way to the end of the line out in Queens. Which my mother probably doesn't want to hear, but it's the truth.

Once there, I walked along the beach for a bit. I got a really bizarre "You're on candid camera!" stone from a nice lady, but I don't think I did anything that wasn't unfailingly polite so I'm hoping that's the last I hear of that. I took a few pictures with my phone of the shore, and then turned around and came back home.

Sometimes I seem to blend oddly well with everyone. I passed homeless people, Russians, Jews, and (when I got back to Soho) I passed rich Asians, pampered white girls, and guys in suits.

One of my friends would probably call this the comfortable annonymity of big cities, but I can't help but imagine how much he would have stuck out like a sore thumb walking through the neighborhood of Queens that I was in. Even I would have been starring at him.

If Ben and I had held hands in that neighborhood, we probably would have been in danger.

And yet people ignored me. With my lumpy black hat, my old gray A&F jacket and jeans, I just became another in the backdrop no matter the neighborhood that I was walking through.

Good Things

The NYC Marathon

The New York City Marathon was on the second, and Elliot ran it in 4:32. I was feeling a bit under the weather, but still came out to cheer him on. I missed him at the agreed upon Elliot rally point on 1st Ave, but caught up with him in the park during and then waited around with his beautiful, intelligent and unbelievably dedicated wife after the race for him.

I'll never be able to do that but I'm so proud of Elliot. He's an amazing guy, as long as he doesn't kill himself with all of the running.

Election Night

For the election I went up to Ben's place in Boston. I don't have a TV and I didn't have internet in my apartment yet, so it seemed like the best plan.

Ben went all out, with two televisions (split for most of the night between CNN and NBC, although we did watch a lot of the live Comedy Central coverage) and a laptop streaming MSNBC. Also, since he's a genius, he knew all of the races and had been tracking all of the polling (he was helping to compile the DKos synopses of the various Senate races).

There were, over the course of the evening, about ten people that stopped by and for the most part things went swimmingly. Really, it seems like the result was about dead between Fivethirtyeight.com's predictions and Ben's, and only the passage of prop 8 in California seemed to bring a downer to the night.

At this point, eleven days later, things still seem to be going our way, what with the run-off in Minesota and Sen. Ted Stevens looking like he's lost the seat in Alaska. I can only hope that our luck holds and they throw Lieberman out of his chairmanship on his ass.

The party eventually started to wind down and finally some people went to go downstairs to smoke (yes, winning an election is just like having sex to some people).

After a bit, a few of us in the apartment got a call from the people downstairs to come down and revel in the good mood with them.

Now, I said Ben lives in Boston but really it's Cambridge. People were driving down the streets near us and honking, and people were standing out on the streets in little groups. When someone honked, they would cheer. This was late, after midnight, but I've never seen people so happy and enthusiastic after an election.

We stood out there for a while, and the feeling never went away, so eventually we got the idea to walk to Harvard Square, and by mutual aclaimmation we found ourselves doing just that.

So it's 1 a.m. an we're in Harvard Square on Massachusetts Ave and we find that there are thousands of people there. Many are holding Obama signs and wearing Obama shirts (I certainly was under my sweater). The were climbing on roofs and spilling out into the street blocking traffic along Mass Ave.

Someone even brought a life size cardboard cutout of the president-elect, and while many people were waving American flags one guy was waving a Kenyan flag (I didn't find out about the celebrations in Kenya proper until the next day).

The level of energy was absolutely intense; people were doing Obama chants such as "Yes We Can!" and "Si Se Puede!" but they also did "Yes We Did!" (someone stopped that one with shouts of "There's works just beginning!" which got a cheer) and at one point people started singing the national anthem. Off key, but we sang it with pride and honor.

After we'd been there for about forty minutes, things started to wind down and somehow the idea was spread to walk to Central Square (also on Mass Ave). So a thousand people or so flowed out into the street like a swarm of locusts and down the street, completely blocking traffic in both directions.

Cars that we passed were still honking with support, and people were still cheering back. Someone had a pair of bongo drums and marked a cadence. Oh, right, taxis and buses were also honking their support even when we were blocking the street. At one point, we saw people in a building maybe ten stories up watching us fill the street.

About half way there, the police (who had been with us all the way from Harvard Square) decided that they need to reopen the street lanes. They honked at us, corraled us, and one of the cars stopped in the middle of the group. Then, suddenly, there's cheering. The cop is hugging us and cheering with us, which was probably a good thing since it prevented any hard feelings by the marchers.

We got to Central Square about two a.m., and we decided that it was time for us to head back, but it was still just an amazing night. I would never have imagined seeing people dancing in the streets after an election if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Also, being in a place like Cambridge probably didn't hurt.

Opera At Lincoln Center

A friend of mine from San Francisco was visiting on the 5th. At first I thought we were going to miss each other, but then he called to let me know that his pseudo date had canceled on him, and he had an extra ticket to the Metropolitan Opera and would I like to attend in his place?

Yes I would.

The Opera was "Doctor Atomic" and it was about the Manhattan Project, which is an interesting topic to me because I'm on the periphery of science geekdom and I'm from the area in which the Opera was set (large chunks are set in the town of Los Alamos, which is where the ice skating rink I went to as a child was).

At first I thought the writing was crap, until my friend pointed out to me that it was adapted mostly from unclassified Manhattan Project documents, personal notes, and poetry that Oppenheimer was interested in. The music itself was beautiful though and one song (Three Person'd God, I think it was called) was especially magical.

The set design, lighting, and the various performances were quite impressive as well. It was a great night.

Movies

Also been to a few movies with Elliot and friends of his this week. Zack and Miri was cute and although I love Katie Morgan she looked . . . not great. I was also attracted to the guy that plays Jay in "Jay and Silent Bob" and I'm still really confused about that.

I don't remember anyone saying that Quantum of Solace was part two to Casino Royale's part one, but Elliot was right, it is. Without seeing Casino Royale, I would have been completely lost through large sections of QoS.

Internet

Finally on Friday I got reliable internet service in my apartment. Yay! I also badly twisted my ankle but that doesn't conform to the title of this blog entry, so I'm not going to think about that until the next time I have to stand up.

Jumper

First, let me just say that Jumper the movie is not Jumper the book. They are separate and distinct mythologies and stories, and except for the concept of teleportation and a couple of the names they have almost nothing in common.

I first read Jumper years ago, when I checked it out from the La Farge branch of the Santa Fe public library system and liked it so much that I went out and bought it.

The premise of the book is sort of a subversion of The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. In Bester's novel nearly everyone can teleport and it has replaced cars as the most common form of personal transport. In the Jumper novel, only Davey can, and no one has ever heard of someone else that shares his ability.

The movie is sort of in the middle. Davey is not unique, but the power of teleportation isn't nearly universal either. He is one of a select few, one in a billion, that is not limited by the need to walk or drive or take a plane when he wants to travel. He can teleport from place to place whenever he wants to, limited only by the necessity of having previously visited a location before he can teleport there.

In the movie there's a new twist that wasn't in the book; men called Paladins that are religious fanatics that are determined to wipe out jumpers, the people that can teleport. Davey avoids their attention for a long time, but they eventually track him down and begin to hunt him, setting up the conflict at the heart of the movie.

I was ambivalent about this addition when I walked into the movie theater, but the screenplay really manages to integrate these murderous men in black well. They're a little vague about what exactly their religious beliefs are based in (Christianity? Islam? Judaism? Buddhism?) and how they came about, but they really manage to move the plot of the movie along. Interestingly, the Paladins replace terrorists as the antagonists which shocked me. After all, terrorism is a really hot topic at the moment, and in the novel Davey's concentration is on plane hijackings. Ah, well, perhaps in the sequel.

The cast is actually very, very high profile, and they all do their jobs excellently. Samuel L. Jackson, Hayden Christiansen, and Diane Lane all play central characters. The British jumper Griffin is played by Jamie Bell (of Billy Elliot fame), and he steals every scene that he appears in. Or perhaps that's because I have a crush on him. Either way, he's great.

Only two thing bothered me about the characters. Samuel L. Jackson's Roland had limited characterization, leaving him a bit two dimensional. The second was Millie, played by Rachel Bilson, who doesn't ask how he survived the apparently fatal accident that allowed him to leave home when she sees him again and then later agrees to leave the country with a man that she hasn't seen in years. Those two little bits of character stupidity strain credibility, and both could have been covered with a minute worth of scenes in which we see Davey charming her as they sit alone in her closing sports bar.

Also, just a note about Hayden Christiansen: He's still a little whiny, but if he hadn't been in Star Wars, you probably wouldn't even notice that. He manages to show depth of character, express realistic feeling, and his dialog isn't the stunted mess that Anakin Skywalker had. He wasn't brilliant, but for a science fiction action flick he was more than competent. If you read it differently in another review, I suspect that the critic is being biased by his previous role.

The effects and the setting are brilliant, just like you would expect from a big budget science fiction movie. If they'd taken the novel's cue, the effects would be much less impressive, as Davey doesn't even make a popping sound when he teleports. The movie's bursts of air and water are much more effective for a screen version.

Altogether, this movie really works and is very well produced. It doesn't try to hard to force the plot together: the action flows naturally from the situations. As I said, it isn't the book, but it doesn't try to be. It has it's own center of being, and it understands that and follows it. I really enjoyed it, and I will certainly buy it when it comes out on DVD.

Kudos to the movie makers, and to Steve as well.

If you haven't seen it, go!

A Happy Valentine's Day

So, yesterday was a very long, very complicated day which demands a very long , very complicated post followed by a movie review. I think I'm going to divide it into blocks of time, just so that it's easier for me to manage my thoughts about it.

First, I woke up in Albuquerque at my brother's house at 6:30 a.m. and went to a mediation with my lawyers over the whole broken neck thing.

7:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Mediation: So, I learned something today that I didn't know. The woman that ran the red light and hit me (and broke my neck) is a former Buddhist nun. She's been having horrible problems since the accident because she was absolutely devastated by what she's done. She told me that she had nightmares and wasn't able to drive for about a year after the accident.

She asked to be able to speak with me alone, to apologize, and I agreed. She was crying, and told me how upset that she'd been about disrupting my life, and basically broke down. I couldn't think of anything to say at first, but I finally told her that she had to promise me that that she would work at forgiving herself. I said "everything is going to work out," but I'd slipped into lawyer mode and I just couldn't come up with something comforting that didn't sound like admitting fault.

I can't hate her anymore though. I just can't. She suffered too.

And then there was that conversation that we had, alone in that room. Heaven help me if I ever forget that conversation. It made everything that happened at IIDB feel like a win.

I brought four books. Over the seven hours that I was there I probably could have finished two of them, but I only finished off Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. It's odd because that's a book that I really hadn't heard anyone talk about, but I think that it's definitely one of her best works. I did manage to start Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives though, so I got some good horrors of the deep laughs from that.

And then, around 2:15, we finally settled. Yes, I covered my medical bills, and I'm glad it's over. Finally, finally, finally. I'm still worried that I made the wrong decision, even though my lawyers and my mother agree that it was the right one.

I didn't think it would be over, but it is.

Let me just point out how wrenching negotiating for this money was. I'm not a good negotiator, but the guy on the other side was just jerking us around. He was good, but the mediator wasn't really conveying what my lawyers wanted to convey from him. My lawyer was giving her cues about how to say x-y-z, but she was just ignoring him. The opposing (i.e. insurance) lawyer was jerking us around, and it probably would have been better for us if we'd allowed our numbers to do the talking instead of the mediator.

I think that the reason that I'm mostly worried/convinced that I made the wrong decision is because I feel that my side didn't negotiate well. When you're on the side that has the edge, you need to push the other side out of their comfort zone. They had one up card and one reserve card, and they played really conservatively, inch by inch, in a style that allowed them to walk away without a clear victory, but without the huge losses that the opposing lawyer was there to prevent.

Perhaps if I'd sent the mediator along with one of my shoes and instructions to hit it on the desk we would have done better.

Hindsight, you know? It'll kill you every time, and it was potentially enough money to change my life. I still hope that it will, even though it's a lot less that I think we could have played for.

2:30-5:00 Hanging out with Jeff and his roommate recovering and trying not to cry: His roommate is really cute, and he's good at Halo & Call of Duty 4 as well. He was totally beating down on both of those games. Yeah, I'm not much of a first person shooter person, but those games on the XBox 360 look amazing. During this time I recovered from some of the shock that I felt about finally having settled my case.

5:30-7:30 Dinner with Pam and Jeff at Flying Star: Pam drove down all the way from Colorado to come to Jumper, which is based on a book that Steven Gould, one of our instructors at Viable Paradise, wrote. I've been promoting the movie to almost everyone I meet, and I've been looking forward to it for a weeks.

The even more cool thing is that Steven lives in Albuquerque, so he was going to the opening night showing of the movie as well with a huge group of friends and acquaintances. To be able to say that you went to the movie with the guy that wrote the book is a fairly respectable bragging point, and both Pam and I jumped at the chance to represent at the premiere.

I knew that he and a slew of others were going to go to Tuscanos, a Brazilian restaurant, after the movie, but because of the Mediation I hadn't eaten anything of substance all day so I already knew that I wanted to eat prior to the movie. Thus, I ended up with a very good Cobb salad. Hooray.

Pam has kept in much closer contact with the other VPXI alumni, so it was nice to hear what's been going on. I thought that I missed a bit because I was sick, but there seemed to be a lot more that I had either forgotten or missed out on, and I have to wonder about the way my head works some times. Pam is basically the preeminent Anne McCaffrey fan in existence, which is something that I did not have the faintest clue about from Viable Paradise. I mean, I suspect that it was mentioned, but I had no idea of the awesome depths to which her fandom goes. By comparison, my deep commitment to some of my favorite authors is purely dabbling.

If I ever have a fan like her, I will know that I've made it.

7:30-9:00 Jumper: I liked it. I really honestly did, and that's not because I'm going to send Steve a link to the review blog when I post it.

9:00-11ish Dinner at Tuscanos: So, just before the movie started, I saw a gentleman with salt and pepper hair sitting down with his wife. I'm not very good with names and faces, and I'd already been confused once, so I decided that I very much needed to make sure that it was in fact S.M. Stirling that was sitting there in the theater. I went down to talk with Laura, sidled up to her, and in a near whisper I asked her if that was S.M. Stirling, and laughingly said "I've confused him with George R. R. Martin before."

She looked at me and said, "You don't know George?" Then she looked up about four rows from where we were standing and says "Hey George! This is Ben, he'll meet you later!"

I'm not religious, but the best description that my generation uses to describe how I felt at that moment was: O.M.G. In all of the mindless valley girl splendor that phrase implies.

Absolutely extreme fandom alert. My copy of A Game of Thrones was left in Iraq with the marines by my little brother and I haven't yet replaced it, preventing me from rereading the series recently, but it's still the fantasy series at the moment.

After the show, I was trying to figure out the logistics of the situation. Jeff, Nick, and er . . . Nick's girlfriend (darn it, I'm doing really badly with names today) had driven up with me, but I had decided that I was now massively interested in staying for dinner. They volunteered to go back to school by bus, thus allowing me to indulge in a little bit of serial fan worship of a few of my favorite authors. Thank you all so much. I freaking owe you.

Pam and I wandered into Tuscanos. Since both of us had anticipated eating early, neither of us had really anticipated eating after the movie as well, and we weren't part of the 60 person reservation that Steven made at the restaurant. We mutually decided that we should hang around and see if there were any seats left before diving in.

At around this time I was standing near a table where it looked like Laura and Steve might sit, and a woman is looking up at us. She stands up from her seat and starts making conversation with us. I don't remember what the conversation started out as, but my first thought was that she was probably Laura's mother.

Then she introduced herself as Joan . . . Saberhagen.

No offense to Mr. Martin or Mr. Stirling, but of the local New Mexico authors, Fred Saberhagen is probably my favorite. I've got an entire little section of my shelf that contains all eightvolumes of The Lost Swords, The Complete Book of Swords, An Armory of Swords (merely edited by him), Merlin's Bones, and the "Saberhagen: My Best" collection of short stories. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of what he's written. He is awesome.

My eyes just absolutely lit up for a moment, and I pumped Joan Saberhagen's hand, and I gushed for just long enough that it suddenly hit me that he'd recently died.

Darn it.

Darn it, darn it, darn it.

I offered my condolences, but it must be hard to be put in a position where your connection to someone is your recently deceased husband. I can't even imagine. She looked sad for a moment, but she must have the will of a saint because it was only in her face for the briefest second.

I think it was Joan and Steve himself that suggested to us that it was eventually time to get seats, and that we should go for the seats that we wanted, and I did. The table next to George R. R. Martin was partially empty, and so I drew on my reserve of "You already regret one thing that you've done today, just suck it up and remember that if you don't do this you'll regret it tomorrow" motivation and asked George if we could pull the tables together.

Thus, it came to be that I sat across the table from George R. R. Martin for dinner at Tuscanos. I should have offered to pay, and if I wasn't worried that my debit card would be declined if I tried, I would have.

Next to George sat Pam, and between us was a hilarious friend of Steve's named Gary. On my other side was Parris, a gentleman whose name I immediately lost, and a gentleman whose name I think was Hank.

I, of course, made a complete fool of myself, which I do not for a moment regret. It was blissfully, painfully, embarrassingly funny, and I got to tell my "Are you George R. R. Martin?" "No, he's S. M. Stirling" story to George himself. Yes, I may not have made another meaningful comment for the rest of the night, but that little itsy-bitsy anecdote was worth it.

You have to take pleasure in the small things.

It's odd, I tried to listen to the conversation shooting around across the table for the rest of the evening, but the one thing that really caught my attention was when George said that he had always loved the insanely complicated rescue plans, and that one day he'd have to set up a huge one where one person dresses as the king, another as a knight, and then they swing into the feast on a rope.

This being George R. R. Martin though, he pointed out that everything would have to go wrong. I pseudo-countered, pointing out that if he was the writer, the author would expect everything to go pear shaped. It seems so obvious now, and I wish I'd come up with the obvious conclusion to that line of reasoning: If it was in one of his books, in order to subvert the reader expectations the intricate, complex, and convoluted rescue plan would have to succeed from top to bottom, and then go completely wrong once they thought they were safe.

The guy sitting between Pam and me, Gary, is unbelievably funny though. He was the most interesting dinner companion. He works with GPS systems, although I swear that we made it through dinner without touching on that subject once. It wasn't until later that I found that out.

A note about Tuscano's itself: They have cute waiters. Really cute waiters. With those pale blue eyes and short hair, and everything. Oh, and I find their premise interesting. They've got a salad bar (and it was a good one), but then the waiters traipse around the restaurant carrying kebabs of meat. Bacon wrapped veal, tri-tip steak with various glazes, roasted chicken, spicy sausages, and everything else. If you want some, you get a bit. It wasn't phenomenal, but it was still on the good side. Pam's chocolate hockey puck thing was excellent, for example, and I couldn't get enough of their spicy sausage.

At some point around 11 p.m. I realized that I'd missed a call from my mother. She told me that due to weather I was to "Stay with my brother" and two sentences later "drive right home so that you don't get caught in the storm." As of the time of this writing, a day later, there still ain't no storm, and I don't think she ever managed to fully clarify which of those two orders she actually wanted me to follow.

11ish to 12:30 Champagne at Steve and Laura's: Now, you have to understand that I'm not much of a champagne person. It think it tastes bad, but I think that about nearly everything with alcohol in it, and it apparently was a really expensive bottle of champagne, so I had half a glass, and it was the best that I've ever had, which means that I got it down and I managed to make it stay down.

Upon arrival at Steve and Laura's (and I used to live in the same part of town, actually), I realized that they have more books than I do. Way more books. Way, way more books. I mean, wowsers. I wish I had shelves like that.

We sat around, talked for a while. I told my story about the neck, and for the first time it was a story that is in the past tense. It is something that happened to me and is not still happening to me. It was a really happy evening for me.

I got to see the office, which I now know is famous. I don't get it, I thought I knew the author's online domains, but I was quite wrong about this one. Steve has a blog, and it will be going up on the side bar when I get a chance to move things around. (Note: Ta-dah!)

I did get some pictures though, by the machinations and manipulations of those around me. Two of me, one with George and one with Pam and Steve, are visible at Pam's blog here. There's also one involving the chocolate hockey puck taken of Pam by me.

12:30-2:00 a.m. Driving home: Yes, I finally did drive home, stopping to get gas and use the restroom. It wasn't the drowsiest that I've ever been on the way home, but it isn't an experiment that I'd likely repeat soon.

I just remembered something that I'd forgotten, so I'll mention it here: I was carrying around my (second) copy of Jumper, and got Steve to autograph it. He wrote something really awesome in it: "To [ST], who will write others as good." Awwwwww . . .

And that was my Valentine's day.

The End of the World Sucks

There is a giant asteroid headed toward earth. What do you do?

I'd probably complain about the impending destruction of the Earth for a while and then go check some S.M. Stirling books out of the library.

I mean, seriously, if it's about the size of Texas, we're basically all doomed. Some people may be able to survive if they're:

1. In the right place at the right time (i.e. where the asteroid doesn't impact the earth)
2. Capable of finding the mythical twinkie factory to feed them.
   
3. Unaffected by Seasonal Affective Disorder.
4. Important enough that people who can arrange for 1 and 2, and find a psychologist that specializes in 3 (i.e. the government) wants you to survive.

I'm not one of the above people, but if I check the S.M. Stirling books out of the library I can probably fake 2 for a while. I'm certainly not a member of 4.

Seriously though, both of the movies on the subject suggest that nuclear weapons are the solution to this scenario. They're not. By the time we detected the asteroid (granting that we detected it before it hit us) it would be much to late to blow it up or change its course substantially. Do you remember how the asteroid split and went just around the Earth in Armageddon? Unfortunately there's this thing called gravity, which means that an asteroid that big and a planet the size of Earth are unlikely to just drift away from each other, especially when they're so freaking close together.

And that's not even counting the momentum of a Texas sized object.

The funny thing is that I'm not a math guy. I can't prove any of this mathematically but it isn't even logical to the most unsophisticated rational mind.

I think the worst thing is when writers (or editors, or producers) say something that sounds good but doesn't make the least bit of sense. There was an episode of Star Trek: Voyager that included a throwaway line about how a certain species' technology allowed them to exist on the surface of a neutron star. Then they fought them with hand phasers. I don't care what the hell the premise behind a phaser is, if these guys can stand on the surface of a neutron star, then no Federation technology is going to be anything more than a pretty light. As I understand it, the energy present on the surface of a neutron star is like standing in the middle of a series of nuclear explosions at the rate of a million megatons per second. Or something like that. As I said, I can't do math, but no one is going to convince me that phasers output more energy than a million nuclear weapons a second.

A neutron star is so powerful that there is no such thing as atomic structure on it. No iron. No lead. No oxygen. A thimble full of neutron star material would be enough to poach the planet Earth. And probably all of the other planets in the solar system too.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Star Trek: Voyager, but when I watch episodes like that one, I just have to cringe. Mistakes like that force anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge out of a willing suspension of disbelief, and the whole episode or movie is completely ruined.

Don't even get me started on "The Core." Some movie executive must have turned to a producer and said "Hey, end of the world movies are popular! Come up with another situation in which the world ends that involves nuclear weapons!" and then they must have hired a hack writer to churn it out in two days.

Good Omens is the best Armageddon story that I've ever read. I desperately wish that I could write something that funny, but I'm more of a dark writer. I fear for the presumed upcoming movie, because it doesn't involve nuclear weapons or hellfire, just a lot of really funny, quirky characters, and I'm worried some idiotic producer is going to demand a Keanu Reeves playing the part of the mindless American savior of the world. You know, like the Matrix. Or Constantine. Or Little Buddha.

The point is, that things that are engaging and well written do better. It's not a sure fire way to make money, but the better that a movie or a television show or a book is, the better the chance it has of making a lot of money. Remember, having a Keanu Reeves style actor isn't a surefire way to make money any more, either.

That's why the Star Wars prequels sucked, incidentally. They were horribly, horribly written, but unfortunately none of the movie executives cared. They knew they were going to make fist fulls of money anyway, so they thought it didn't matter. And, in that specific situation, it didn't.

It saddens me that there isn't a lot more effort put into narrowly averted catastrophic destruction, but today America seems to be infused with the idea that if something is sufficient it is good enough. Really though, we should be reaching and doing our best on every single ounce of demolition, destruction, and apocalyptic horror that we produce.

And that's why I'm voting for Obama.

(Yeah, I'm in a really strange mood today.)

Arthur C. Clarke & Queens

Having read the Rama series straight through, I couldn't really understand why people considered Arthur C.Clarke one of the great masters of science fiction. The first one was good, after all, but the subsequent three books went way too far and subverting some of the most interesting premises of the first book. It turns out that the alien race doesn't believe in triple redundancy. Oh, and God is a museum collector. And God exists, obviously, in a mindbogglingly weird way.

I just finished Childhood's End, and now I can sort of see why he's so warmly regarded. That book was sort of like Rendezvous with Rama, but with a slightly longer perspective and some brilliant characterization of the "Overlord" creatures and some of the notable characters.

There's still a lot of myth thrown in, but then again, I tend to like to use myth as well, so I can't really complain about that.

This book was originally published in 1953, but the prescience about some modern technology is quite impressive. For example, I couldn't get over the fact that some of the things that they use computers for are things that we use computers for. It was hard to imagine that this was written before the advent of the modern microchip.

There was one other brilliant prophecy that's been fulfilled. Quoting from page 141 of my version (Ballantine 1969):

Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that's available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges [...]

Reading that, isn't it amazing to think that there was no cable and satellite television? There were really only the Big Three television networks in operation at that time. Fox wouldn't be around for more than 30 years after the writing of this book.

Yeah, I know that probably isn't that big of a deal, but it's still amazing to me, especially the part about people becoming passive sponges in front of television sets.

Also, I saw a Spanish movie called "Queens" which also predicted the future: the legalization of gay marriage in Spain. The movie was released in April 2005, and gay marriage was legalized in July 2005. It was cute and certainly very well presented, but I can't get over the cool name of one of the actors: Unax Ugalde. That's an awesome name, and it belongs to a really, really hot guy too. Great movie.

All Sorts of Media Disappointments

So, I went to see the Golden Compass last night, and was disappointed by the cliff hanger ending. The book ends in a much more natural place, and the final twist is important to the resolution of the plot. It wasn't complete without it. Imagine if The Two Towers had ended before the end of the battle of Helm's Deep. That's how I felt about the Golden Compass, and I was prepared to let a lot slide on the basis that I'll support atheist writers when they succeed.

Speaking of things that ended too early, Brian Sanderson has been chosen to finish the Wheel of Time series that was left incomplete by Robert Jordan/James Rigney when he died. The only exposure that I've had to Sanderson is his book called Elantris and it failed to wow me. Granted, it was certainly okay, but it wasn't anything like what Jordan made me feel.

Tin Man was also just okay, which was unfortunate, considering that the second part was pretty good and got me interested but then the third part just dragged it down into a death spiral of epic proportions. What a phenomenally boring ending . . .

Also, I want to rewrite the third Matrix movie. Too bad I can't hire the same actors and film my version, and then put it up to a vote to see which version is better. Sort of like The Phantom Edit. Here's a hint about my version: All of the humans turn against Neo near the end.

On the plus side, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is available for pre-order now, so I've gone back and updated that blog entry with a link (Teen novel, WTF?) and added a link to a blog post that appeared in the NYTimes that I think is relevant. I also just got one of his books via Amazon, so I'll read that this weekend.

10 Best Intellectual Science Fiction Movies

For a while there on Fark, they were doing a lot of 10 best lists (including this really moronic “Best Animated Movies” list that should have been Akira; Spirited Away; Beauty and the Beast; The Incredibles; The Nightmare Before Christmas; My Neighbor Tontoro; Monsters, Inc; Fantasia; Shrek; and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and I’ve been thinking of doing one for a while. I decided to pick a made-up category: the 10 best intellectual science fiction movies of all time, as chosen by me.

What is an “intellectual science fiction” movie? If a movie’s plot is based on exploring some aspect of technology or culture in a fictional or futuristic setting, in a way that provokes interesting questions, that is an intellectual science fiction movie. The best ones do this with intelligence and depth, and the worst ones take a great concept and turn it into crap. This usually doesn’t include movies that explore an entire new setting, like Star Wars and to a lesser extent Star Trek (although some of the Star Trek episodes would make the list if I included television shows).

Just so you know: I am both a huge Star Wars and Star Trek fan.

Obviously, this isn’t based on gross receipts or popularity. The opinions are my own, which obviously carries its own inherent bias. Just as a warning, I am biased toward more recent movies.

Here are the movies:

No. 1: Contact (1997)

Currently my favorite movie of all time, “Contact” is based on a brilliant book by Carl Sagan. This movie explores Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrials in the form of a radio signal from another star and also the trust that we humans place on technology, religion, and other humans.

Although the special effects for the movie are pretty, they don’t drive the plot, which revolves mostly around Eleanor Arroway’s experiences and search for extraterrestrial life. The acting is absolutely superb, and the technical work and music are amazing.

Sagan, who wrote Contact, was determined to make sure that “Contact” was scientifically accurate, and for the most part, he succeeded. The science represented in the movie is a combination of inspiration and hard work. The meaningless technobable is minimal. Further, Arroway has to wrestle with her dreams and the realities of her life along the way to her discovery.

The movie differs from the book in several ways, for example in the book five scientists travel using The Machine, not just Arroway. However, I believe that dropping the “hidden message from the creator in pi” plot makes the theme (searching for ultimate truths that are just out of our grasp) much stronger.

This movie is the pinnacle of the synthesis of intellectualism and story-telling.

No. 2: Children of Men (2006)

This movie, only recently released, forced its way onto this list with its dark look at a futuristic United Kingdom on a world in which humans have lost the ability to reproduce.

Alfonso Cuarón did an amazing job with this movie, with many subtle indications of a world that is very much like our world and yet completely different. From the ads for suicide pills to the cult of celebrity that surrounds the youngest human, Children of Men is both a brilliant social commentary and a wonderful work of art.

Again, although “Children of Men” features huge explosions and gunfights, they are not the focus of the plot. They are simply part of the experience that the movie portrays. I couldn’t help but hold my breath during the scene where they left the apartment building, but it felt real as well.

No. 3: Gattaca (1997)

When I was a kid, I wanted to have fraternal twins someday, and I’m sure other people similarly wish they could select their children, or at least their childrens' attributes. The theme behind “Gattaca” is so enticing, so innocent. What could be wrong about making sure that our children are the smartest and the fastest?

This is the ultimate movie about eugenics, and to a lesser extent about DNA profiling and statistics. The protagonist has to fight to show that what we desire can be just as strong as who we are. This is a theme that definitely resonates very strongly with me.

Overall, this is another very interesting movie; perhaps especially for the idea that someday we’ll wear a suit and tie to travel into space.

No. 4: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

This film, which introduced us to Hal 9000 and big black monoliths, was certainly a groundbreaking science fiction masterpiece. It would be ranked higher if it was more comprehensible. Can you say that you really would have understood the ending to this film without reading the book (or Wikipedia)?

The plot of this movie revolves around the discovery of a “designed” object on the moon, and a subsequent investigation to Jupiter in which the computer (programmed to act like a human) goes crazy and tries to kill all of the astronauts.

Despite some sections of the movie that could be clearer, this movie has provoked decades of discussion and speculation, and is probably one of the most influential science fiction movies ever made. It’s also one of the Stanley Kubrick’s amazing works of art.

No. 5: Brazil (1985)

I must admit, I haven’t seen “Brazil.” Every time I’m at the video store I forget to look it up. Still, when people list the best science fiction movies, “Brazil” typically finds a place.

If I understand the plot, then Brazil rightfully deserves its place on this list. It’s themes of imagination and reality and of the breakdown of bureaucracy provoke a deep reaction among viewers because they recognize the dysfunctional world that it presents.

The story of the making of “Brazil” seems to typify the plot as well. The studio didn’t like the bleak ending, so they chopped up the movie to make the saccharine “Love Conquers All” version. The director, Terry Gilliam, had secret showings of the original and that version of the film eventually won a Best Picture from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

No. 6: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

When I first watched “A Clockwork Orange,” I was greatly disturbed by the entire thing. However, partially through Elliot’s enthusiasm for Kubrick, I eventually came to understand why this movie is so good, and so important.

In the book, the protagonist and his hooligan friends are 15 year olds that practice “ultraviolence,” which involves rape and random attacks on people and property. Eventually he’s captured and “reprogrammed,” but it raises ethical questions about what makes someone good or bad. Can we simply cut evil out of society without cutting out some of the things that make us human?

Interestingly, I just learned from Wikipedia that the book ends on a positive note, but since the American version dropped that chapter, Kubrick didn’t know about that until after the screenplay was written. Up until this point, that makes half the movies on this list that end on a positive note, and half that tear the bottom of your soul on the way down.

No. 7: The Abyss (1989)

Like “Brazil,” the edited version of “The Abyss” makes little sense, but this isn’t a case of studio interference. The “Director’s Cut” is three hours long, and James Cameron worried that people couldn’t sit through it. Additionally, Industrial Light & Magic wasn’t sure they could create some of the visual effects with the technology that they had available at the time. If you’re going to watch this movie though, you should dedicate the time to see the long version.

“The Abyss” changes the alien encounter scenario by placing it underwater, but the primary conflict in the movie is between the civilians, who take the view that the visitors are benign, and military officers, who believe that the aliens attacked a nuclear submarine.

Some of the scenes that were in the Director’s Cut include some really interesting threats that the aliens deliver to the humans involving a giant tsunami wave that rise to destroy humanity around every coast in the world. Unlike Contact, in the end there is incontrovertible proof of the aliens at the end of the story.

This is the only movie on the list that involves a nuclear weapon, but that’s to be expected because it’s a James Cameron movie. Incidentally, the novelization was written by sci-fi master Orson Scott Card.

No. 8: Vanilla Sky (2001)

I can’t quite believe that a Tom Cruise movie made my list, but here it is. When I went to see this movie, I had absolutely no idea that it was a sci-fi. I thought it would be more along the lines of “Almost Famous,” probably a drama about a musician.

This movie came out two years after “The Matrix,” but the way that it questions reality is substantially more nuanced, although the themes are very similar.

Some of the things that make Vanilla Sky special are the way that it revolves around the choices of the main character. There is a vast conspiracy out there, but it’s his conspiracy and in the end it’s a solution that he built. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, the acting is also very good.

No. 9: Metropolis (1927)

This is another movie that I haven’t seen, but you probably haven’t seen the whole thing either. Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction epic has sadly been lost over time. Still, this is one of the most influential science fiction movies ever made.

This movie, about deep class divisions in the future, is so inspiring that just the poster led writer Osamu Tezuka to create his own version about the nature of authority and consciousness.

There are Manchurian Candidate themes in “Metropolis” too. A member of the ruling class uses a robot doppelganger to lead the lower classes into revolt, anticipating that he will then be able to eliminate them.

No. 10: Flight of the Navigator (1986)

There’s always a movie on the list that people hate, so mine is this eighties movie, which contains one of the best portrayals of time travel that I’ve seen. The whole premise (with faster than light travel, time travel, telepathy, and a morphing silver spaceship) is interesting, but when I first saw this movie, I thought that the treatment of the protagonists return eight years after he disappeared was very well done. I haven’t seen it in years, but I really liked it.

Besides, it has a happy ending, and lists should have happy endings.

***

There are so many other amazing movies that didn’t make it onto this list. Some of the others that come to mind are Phenomenon, Powder, Minority Report, Starship Troopers, Equilibrium, and The Cell.

There are some really bad movies in this category out there though. I picked out ten more movies that are bad, either because they try to be intellectual and fail, or because they take a wonderful premise (or short story) and manage to turn it into crap. Just for fun, they’re in the opposite order than the first list.

No. 10: Mission to Mars (2000)

This and Red Planet came out at the same time, and the later was obviously the better movie. You see, in this movie, the “face on mars” is really an alien spaceship that seeded life on Earth and then stayed behind. Perhaps you have to see it to understand how much it sucked.

No. 9: Total Recall (1990)

They wouldn’t have survived on the planet while the atmosphere was forming. And why would the aliens bother leaving the device in the pyramid if they weren’t going to use it? The only really interesting question it raised for me was “Would a triple-breasted whore make more money than a double-breasted one?” Incidentally, this is based on a Philip K. Dick short story, and I think he’s a great sci-fi writer. This will come up again later.

No. 8: Bicentennial Man (1999)

The idea for this movie isn’t quite as bad as the execution. Robin Williams? Two hundred years old? The fact that he could eventually replace machine parts with human replacement organs? That speech that the judge makes? I want my 132 minutes back. This was based on a work by Isaac Asimov.

No. 7: Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001)

This is basically the same movie as Bicentennial Man, except that it was well executed . . . until the end. When I watch this movie, at the point where David is trapped in the helicopter, I turn it off. The alien machines spoiled the whole thing for me. Why would they reactivate him instead of just tapping his memory? Why did they recreate his mother? Why did they have those horrible accents? This is otherwise a good movie, but that ending just ruined it.

No. 6: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

This is the Star Trek that tried desperately to become a Star Wars, but fell miserably on its face. True, I don’t dislike it as much as “Nemesis” but the premise of this movie was counter to what seemed to be the theme of the Star Trek franchise, which was that eventually things all things can be understood. Suddenly there’s mystical magic in Star Trek? I don’t buy it for a moment.

No. 5: The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Whatever intellectual content there was in this movie was already covered in detail by Dan Brown’s book. And all the books that he (probably) plagiarized from.

No. 4: The Saint (1997)

Okay, I know, let’s take the premise of cold fusion, involve a pretty scientist that needs notecards to understand the concept, throw in a love story, and then make the entire thing a spy movie. And throw in a bunch of Catholic dogma that didn’t make much sense either. Yeah, I can’t imagine why this didn’t work.

No. 3: I, Robot (2004)

The Foundation Series (of which I, Robot is a auxiliary short story) is an amazing series of books, and this title was bought and then slapped on a Will Smith vehicle. The reason the books give for robots that are able to harm humans involves the development of the “Zeroth Law,” which allowed robots to kill humans in order to benefit humanity as a whole. You could have made a mint off that premise, instead of making it just a pretty action flick where Will Smith beats down on robots.

No. 2: Next (2007)

This isn’t even out yet, but it is based on a Philip K. Dick story, and let’s face it: apparently scripts based on Asimov and Philip K. Dick stories don’t make very good movies (the only exception so far being “Minority Report”). It stars Nicholas Cage, and while I like his movies, it’s not because they make me think.

No. 1: Paycheck (2003)

See, this is why Next makes it on the list even though it isn’t out. Palmistry? Lasers that can see the future? A memory device that plays like a first person shooter? At least Dick’s original story had a cool ending (not involving a lottery ticket). How on Earth did they make this so bad? They got fairly good actors, and they had a cool concept and a big name. This movie should be embarrassing to everyone involved.

Update: Yeah, I farked up the "I, Robot" description as the good people at Fark were so kind to point out. Fixed now. I have no excuse but temporary insanity.

Update 2: I have now seen both Brazil and Metropolis, and I was right, they both deserve their places on this list, although if I was to rewrite it now, I would bump Brazil up by one place on the list.

Furiously Fast

The Fast and the Furious has a 51% at Rotten Tomatoes, but I happen to think that's underrating it. Granted, it's pretty and shiny and marketed to people that like fast cars and explosions, but there are definitely some themes are that very not the standard fare.

The little bit of plot that can be wedged in between the fast cars, trucks, and motorcycles revolves around an undercover cop looking for a group of mysterious drivers that are hijacking semis of electronics.

The cops suspect that a local drag racing gang is responsible for the hijacks, so the undercover cop ingratiates himself to the leader of the racing gang. At the same time he falls for the leader of the racing gang's beautiful and innocent sister, and finds that there is an evil Asian racing gang that is at war with the gang he's gone undercover with.

(At this point I want to mention that this movie features three actors that are at least pretty to look at: Vin Diesel [yay D&D players!], Paul Walker, and Paul Walker's abs. The last is seriously underused, which is a shame considering that they're the second best actor of the three. Michelle Rodriguez is also in it. Before her drunk driving conviction incidentally, but I don't like looking at her and I'm not exactly impressed with her acting skills.)

Everyone should know what the end of the movie should be. Or at least I thought I did. The undercover cop discovers that the evil Asians are really the ones responsible for the hijackings, and the cop calls on his racing gang buddies to somehow prove through racing that the Asians are responsible. He ends up dating the racing gang leader's sister, and they all drive off happily ever after.

That's not even remotely what happens. The undercover cop does suspect that the Asians are responsible (after all, they torched his car and killed another member of his racing gang) but when the police raid the Asian's garage they find nothing suspicious. They're just rich Asians.

Instead, he finds out that it is his drag racing gang is responsible for the hijackings. In fact, they're out doing a hijacking right now and thing are going completely wrong. The cop tries to help, and indeed saves one of their lives but Instead of solving the case, the undercover cop has blown it completely.

At the end, they drag race (to see if they can beat a train! Yay action flick confluence of events!). Once again, you think you know how the story is supposed to go: if the bad guy wins, he gets away, and if the cop wins, the bad guy gets arrested.

Nope. They both beat the train but the gang leader looses control and has an accident. Instead of arresting the gang leader, the undercover cop decides to give the leader his car. Now they're both on the run, and the undercover cop is now a rogue cop.

Then the movie ends. No redemption for him. He doesn't solve the case. He doesn't kill the bad guys (well, he does kill the Asians). Not only did he fail his mission, but he's a bad guy now (until the second movie, which deals with all these problems in about twenty seconds of dialog, proving once again how much sequels [and prequels] suck if they're not part of the original plan).

The movie plays with a lot of deeply ingrained stereotypes to confuse the issue of who is good and who is bad. Instead of the two dimensional bad guy that most movies of this nature have, the gang leader's character is explored more than any other. He's charismatic, he's strong, he treats his people well and he talks about how his father died in a car crash. And he says grace before meals. Faithful Christians are never supposed to be the bad guys in popular Hollywood movies.

There are also the Asians, who are the two dimensional bad guys that bad guys are supposed to be. They're . . . you know, Asian. And rich. And they're not in love with the leader's sister. Again, in big budget Hollywood movies, the bad guys are rarely the white guys when you have an easily blamed minority present. (Although, they're not totally innocent. They are killers, and in the end the uncover cop helps kill them instead of arresting them. So there is some obvious racism. The movie isn't perfect.)

I think the favorite part of the movie are the questions that it raises about how you know people. Paul Walker's undercover cop has one of those gut feelings. You know the ones. The gut feelings that the cops in cop shows and movies have that inexplicably lead them to the solve the case without any false leads or mis-steps.

He uses the same clues that the audience is given to make decisions about the people he interacts with, and he makes the same snap judgment that we make watching the movie. In the end, an hour or an hour and a half isn't enough time to get to know someone. It's the people that you've known for years that you really know.

For a movie about car chases, explosions and gun fights, that's an awfully deep subtext. Except for the racism and the dearth of Paul Walker's abs, this is actually a good movie. Whoever wrote the first draft of this story, and not the fairly horrific street dialog did a good job. There are three people listed on IMDB for the screenplay: Gary Scott Thompson, Erik Bergquist, David Ayer. Kudos to whoever wrote the good stuff.

Update: Ah . . . the wonders of the internet. The three stars of "The Fast and the Furious."

Vin Diesel


Paul Walker


and Paul Walker's Abs

Hygeine & Worry

If you're a family member you shouldn't read this if you want to hold onto your sanity.

Crap, I'm falling apart. Between the emergency dental appointment, the latest round of teeth problems, and my neck hurting I want to ask for more pain meds.

If I'd actually waited until March for my dentist's first open Thursday appointment, I think I would have died. I mean, my teeth hurt if I just blow air on them. That sucks.

I think I know why my neck hurts. I've put on some weight recently, so I feel pretty horrible about myself. It's not like I should be up and around, so most exercising is forbidden to me. With my neck hurting again, I shouldn't even be walking too much again.

I'm not supposed to look up and down, but when I woke up today I knew I had to feel better so I decided that I needed to feel good about myself. I took a long shower, shaved, and then gave myself a trim, down there.

I'm typically pretty hairy. I'm not a bear by any stretch of the imagination and the hair on my chest is sparse. But I've always been a bush down there. I've shaved a couple of times, enough to learn some of the tricks (siscors down to a certain level, trimmers for a couple of places but not the underside, and an actual razor for the underside).

I have to admit, I don't always take as good care of the hair as I should. I suppose if I actually dated I would think about it more often, but these days it's just usually just for me.

Here's a funny thing, I used to think that hair was pretty universal. You know the covers of Men's Health & Fitness? I always thought they were shaved. And Porn Stars too. And I'm sure a lot of them do. \_/ is not a natural formation, as far as I know. The idea that some guys were just mostly naturally hairless hadn't occured to me.

I remember when I saw J. with his shirt off for the first time, and with less than that later, and I realized that he was just naturally hairless. He certainly wasn't the kind of guy that would take the time to shave his chest (and everything else) and I even asked him about it. Genetics can be a miserable thing if you get the hairy end of the stick.

So I trimmed today. I didn't take too much time, and I didn't do a great job, but it makes me feel better. And I hurt my neck from all that craning and looking down. Between the shower, the shave, the trim, and the Murano underwear I feel pretty good.

I did get a cool new toy. An external hard drive that's about 6 times larger than my laptop. I got it because . . . uh . . . I've been doing a lot of writing recently. Yeah, that's the ticket. Anyway, it's a beautiful thing. I can't remember if I mentioned this, but about a week ago I tried to back up my writing to my flash drive and accidentally backed up from my flash drive to my hard drive, erasing all of the work that I've done for the last three months.

I haven't done a lot of work in the last three months, thankfully, but I did loose a couple of things. Twenty pages on one of my book specs. About five pages over various chapters. A huge trunk of the file where I keep some of the dreams that I can remember when I wake up. I had some great ones back when I was still on Oxycodone, but obviously those are all gone.

So, I'm keeping multiple copies of everything now.

What else is gong on . . . . Hmmm.

I'm worried about Mike and Alex. I haven't heard from Mike in a couple of months now. I know I missed him right as he was going to South America or Central America or somewhere but I since I don't know when he's coming back I get to be worried until I hear from him.

The last time I saw him, he still wasn't doing great. Crap, I hope he's okay.

You know, it's odd about Alex. I've met him a grand total of once, but he's a great guy. If you know Alex, and I know at least two of the people that read this blog do (one of them is Alex), you must know what an amazing individual he is. I mean, read his blogs some time. He's definitely a thinker, and we need more of him. Good thing he's a breeder, eh?

Still, he's been having some crises of late. I think it's okay if I mention them because he mentions them. He's going Jew (or back to Jew, I guess). That doesn't bother me, as long as he doesn't become Hassidic and start telling me that we can't talk. After all, between Elliot and Jeff and A. and J. and etc., etc., etc. I seem to spend an awful lot of time with them. The Jews tend to be a great people to hang out with, and nearly all the ones that I know can hold down their end of a deep conversation.

He's going to Israel though, and will probably join the army there. He was being recruited by the Navy Intelligence, so he'll probably do really well over there.

That scares me. There are a couple of reasons that I can think of (that I'm willing to admit to). The first is that I'd worry about him. I'm not neutral on Middle East Issues after living with Elliot, but I can't deny that it's dangerous.

The other big one is that sometimes I think that the military is what finally tore me and Matt apart. We never really got along when we were kids. He was outgoing, funny, and straight, and I was the opposite. I say that we made each other's lives hell, but mostly because I was so jealous of him.

And then he went to the military. There aren't many places that he can go where I can't follow, but that's one of them. Which sucks because I seriously considered the military. It was supposed to be my irrational outlet. My way to finally find some drive. It was a surprise to me when I found out that he joined the Marines, but there was also some jealousy because I thought it was my plan.

In the end, it finally was just impossible because I'm gay. I can't lie about it, and I would rather have not been thrown out.

Now I don't even know him. He came home from basic, and it hit me that even though we grew up in the same house, we don't even share the same history. I remember he finally told me that our phone number was (505) ***-DUDE. In all the years that our phone number has been the same, I'd never known that. All his friends knew, and somehow I didn't. It's just a phone number, but to me it illustrates how totally disconnected I am from him.

So I think that I worry that when Alex goes away, I won't be able to connect with him any more. That he'll be as distant as Matt is.

I know how crazy that sounds. I mean, I don't even know him, but since I've been confined to my little room here, he's one of the few people that I seem connected to. I suppose I'm latching on because I don't have anyone else, and that doesn't bother me as much as I hope it bothers him.

Finally, I guess I'm worried that I'll never play D&D again. Why I connect Alex with D&D and not Jeff and Mike is inexplicable. If I had to guess it's because Alex was there at the game right as everything started to fall apart. R. moved away (I didn't know you for very long either but I still love you, R.). The main group had already fractured apart. Then I lost my job, and had to move home.

So Alex is a symbol of my problems with D&D. How that relates to him moving away I'm not quite sure, but somewhere in my twisted psyche it does. Crap. I need to move to New York. Somewhere in a city of 8 million people there must be enough people that play D&D for me to find some players. I bet even Miami Beach has people that play D&D, somewhere among the models and plastic surgeons.

It's too much to think about at the moment. I don't want to be worried. Aparently my last post spilled over into a rant in front of my Mom, so she went out and rented me so "gay movies" like The Kathy & Mo Show and Another Gay Movie, and I'm going to go watch them now.

And, just in case someone from New York is reading, I haven't figured out what I'm doing with this wedding present yet. I'll figure it out soon.

HBO Party: All Aboard

For the life of me, I can't seem to spell "Premiere" . . .

Anyway, saw the last preview of "All Aboard: Rosie's Family Cruise" with the director at the Museum of Fine Arts. The party was not particularly exciting . . . there was no one there my age, but the movie was interesting.

It was nice to see gay people in situations that were positive. All the people with families and kids. I mean, they really managed to find just about everyone for the ship ride.

So I don't think I'll be spoiling anything by revealing the plot: Rosie O'Donnell and her partner Kelly rent out a Cruise ship and fill it with gay and lesbian and transgender families. But the movie isn't really all about them, it's more about the people that ride with them.

Of course, when you've got that much love in a place, you also have that much hate. They're protested in the Bahamas by churches. I mean these are families, not just gay people. They have the straight daughter of a Lesbian walking by the protesters, holding up a v sign and they're screaming at her, and she walks by what looks to be a gay family holding a baby . . .

Because apparently, Christian Love means hating gays and their families, and anyone who respects them.

Not that there weren't problems on the boat, like the mother against gay marriage, or the jeweler that makes a faux pax, but it's the reception at the Bahamas. Well, now I know that I'm hated there. Good thing I know, I can plan my vacation plans accordingly.

Incidentally, there's drama at home again. Maybe I go more into that later.

When Gay Streetwalkers Attack

I watched Cold Case last night. I'd never seen the show before, and I don't particularly like the format of constant flashbacks. The only reason that I watched it was that I thought the victim was kinda cute.

Well, I'm actually really glad that I saw this particular episode, entitled "One Night" because it featured something that's come up before, and that is a couple of street hustlers in love.

The first time I ran across this was in the movie "Twist" featuring Nick Stahl. For some reason, the movie tore me emotionally to shreds. It effected me so much that I wrote a poem for a class about it, which has since become one of my best received works, and can still make me upset just by reading it.

"Twist" is a tragedy. It's one of the films that led me to believe that most media representations of gay people are tragic, and I was an emotional wreck after seeing it. It's a particularly dark portrayal, as one boy pulls the other into the world of the drug addicted hustler in what might become and endless vicious circle. I personally happen to think that it's very well done.

"One Night" is different, happier. One of the boys is kidnapped by a murderer, and is buried alive, only to be rescued at the end to find his almost love waiting for him. The performances by Shiloh Fernandez and particularly by Cole Williams (who also was in North Country, which is how I found his name because Cold Case files does a miserable crediting job) were excellent and three dimensional for all of their 8 minutes total air time. It's also unusual to me, because the person that dies is the straight boy and the gay boys are together in the end.

Why do these stories resonate so strongly with me? I'm an emotional wreck afterward, although with the happy ending not as much as with the sad.

The only thing that I can think of is that I'm so alone. I can't help but to identify with the boys that have no emotional connection to anyone or anything . . . and then find love despite that.

Which is odd, because you think that someone that has never lived on the streets, who still has a family and friends, and works full time in a customer service industry where I don't service the customers would be hard pressed to identify with four boys that live on the streets.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but something about their situation just clicked with me. I can't understand it, but I can't get past it either. What does it say when four teenage prostitutes are less lonely and almost as well adjusted as I am?

Anyway, kudos to all of the actors involved.

Racism

First, it sucks that Brokeback Mountain didn't win the Oscar, but at least I know that I can buy Jake and Heath later this year and treasure them forever. But this entry is about race and racism. The Best Picture winner Crash and the new FX show Black. White. are creating another dialog in this country about racism.

But it's not going to work.

Because white people love subversive racism. You can intellectually think that racism is the worst thing in the world and and you can reap the benefits of it.

Have I ever walked into an interview and said to myself, "I hope that they'll see past my whiteness and look at my qualifications?"

No, of course I haven't. And when I got my new job I never considered that there might have been more qualified Hispanic or black candidates that didn't get the job, and even now I'm not really considering it because that could mean that I might have to accept that I might be the beneficiary of racism. Even though I'm intellectually and more importantly vocally not racist, I can't bring myself to look at my actions.

What can I do, really? Demand to know if there was a black person that was passed over for me to get my job? How would I know? Further, if there was a black person that was passed over, how would I be able to live without the job. I was lucky to find one as quickly as I did. I have marketable skills in some areas, and it's hard to find work that I like doing.

So it's not going to work. White people aren't going to be able to not take advantage of "white currency" that they get just for being white.