Possibly a new low

I guess part of me knew right from the beginning that this was inevitable, but even four years later (especially four years later) I find it really repulsive: a TV drama about Flight 93.

It was bad enough when “Let's roll” was perverted into a kind of action-film one-liner during the country's whole chest-puffing These colors don't run phase (and even worse when several enterprising interests — including the Todd M. Beamer Foundation — sought to trademark the phrase in order to have exclusive rights to print it on T-shirts and caps).

But to turn the terrifying and ghastly last minutes of those passengers' lives into a dramatic thriller, to assume that America wants or needs to relive that day by watching as their families witness their deaths, all in the name of entertainment (or even worse, as a means of giving fading jingoistic sentiments a kick in the pants). . .

It takes bad taste to a whole new level.

Bastards

They killed off Jonathan on “Smallville” — not entirely unexpected, given the fact that Lana, Lois, and Lex are unkillable in the Superman universe, and Chloe is too cute to die. But still, the episode was a lame fraud, a total cheat with pathetic attempts at misdirection to keep alive the false hope that maybe they wouldn't kill off our favorite character after all.

But no. Now, Maus (whose love for Jonathan is matched only by her love for Colin) is devastated and emotionally emptied, and our almost-inexplicable five-year devotion to this practically unwatchable show has reached a moment of crisis. If they want to keep us, we better be seeing some red cape right quick.

All this right on the heels of the news that The WB will also be killed off this year. Well, they sure as hell have it coming. I hope it's slow and painful.

Name the movie

Note: Not a still from the actual film — merely a pathetic, half-assed re-creation (click image if you want another hint):
This pretty much sums up the fourth week of January for me.

Bourbon on the rocks?

To arms! To arms!

Crisis! Catastrophe! Cataclysm!

This global red alert comes courtesy of fellow whiskianado Chris over at Grist:

CLIMATE CHANGE CLAIMS YET ANOTHER VICTIM:
KENTUCKY BOURBON

I better start stockpiling pronto. Time to convert the garage into a cask house.

Well played, Hawks

Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. George W. Bush is a compassionate conservative and a uniter. The Seattle Seahawks are in the Super Bowl. Intelligent Design is a scientifically sound alternative to the theory of evolution.

Only one of these dubious statements is demonstrably true. Tell me, can you guess which one?

Sad to say, I tuned out pro football a long time ago, so the Hawks' triumphant season* is not much of an emotional milestone for me. Mostly I'm happy for the city and all the long-suffering fans — I get a big kick out of watching the celebrations and hearing the chorus of car horns bugling the news of victory (it reminds me very much of 1995). Glad that new stadium is working out for them.

One thing that would make this experience more meaningful for me: the Hawks should break out their old uniforms for the big game — the white ones with the silver helmets and the blue-green logo:

Because I tell ya, this navy-clad bunch just doesn't feel like the same team I loved as a kid.**

* Not to be a total grinch about it, but I also have a hard time feeling truly impressed by ANY outcome of a season that is only 16 games long. The NBA and NHL have 82-game seasons; MLB teams play 162 contests every year. Somehow 16 games doesn't strike me as a statistically valid sample.

** No, the Mariners need not revert to their powder-blue uniforms of the same era. I've made THAT adjustment, no problem.

Indeed

Oh yes! Once again, The Beast presents its annual and scathingly accurate 50 Most Loathsome People in America. I'm glad they do this each year — it's valuable to see whose star is in ascendency. I was #3 on last year's list (as were you), and we slipped to #4 this year, bested by truly the three worst people around.

A few favorite highlights:

Michael Brown (#35): “Second fiddle to Bush’s Nero...”

Ann Coulter (#27): “...a revolting skeleton with a boob job and a grotesquely oversized head, who feeds only on the hatred of her target audience, liberals.”

Bill Frist (#21): “A physician whose senatorial career has been a protracted renunciation of the Hippocractic oath. First and foremost, Frist does harm.”

Karl Rove (#15): “A greasy pig whose only distinction in life is his total lack of decency. Rove is decidedly not a genius; he is simply missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face... Quite possibly the worst person in the worst White House in American history.”

Barbara Bush (#12): “Her polluted womb nurtured the seed of American decadence. The root of America’s decay; the poison tree from whence the fruit loop George W. Bush sprang.”

Tom Delay (#5): “A politician so horrible, his prior career as an exterminator constitutes fratricide. Smiled for his mug shot like it was a campaign poster.”

Dick Cheney (#2): “A true psychopath with only one motivating force; insatiable greed... So cartoonishly evil he defies parody.”

And there goes another one

As remembered to us by Tom Waits:

“Well I'm goin' out west where the wind blows tall
'Cause Tony Franciosa used to date my ma*
They got some money out there, they're giving it away
I'm gonna do what I want and I'm gonna get paid.”

The Franciosa film I'll remember most is Dario Argento's wonderfully gruesome bright-red bloodbath Tenebre, which I stumbled across during a late-night horror-film binge a couple of Halloweens ago. It contains possibly the only filmed instance of death-by-pointy-modernist-sculpture.

* He was also once married to the great Shelly Winters, who just died last Saturday (I happened to hear that news while I was watching her great Western, Winchester 73).

Midnight hour in the land of 1000 dances

He knew how to pony like Bony Maronie. He mashed potatoes. He did the alligator. Put his hands on his hips, to let his backbone slip. He did the Watusi like his little Lucy.

Somebody help me say it one more time:
NA na-na-na NA
Na-na-na NA na-na NA na-na NA
Na-na-na NA

Wow.

大怪獣!!!

Cool:

INVASION OF THE GIANT JELLYFISH
TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- A slimy jellyfish weighing as much as a sumo wrestler has Japan's fishing industry in the grip of its poisonous tentacles.

Yikes. He's gonna need a bigger boat.

No offense to Mr. Kong, but Japan gets all the best monsters. We really have a lot of work to do on our kaiju.

Ode to the month that crawls like a snail on the edge of straight razor

“January... shit. We're still only in January.

“Every time I think I'm gonna wake up in the sunlight. When I have to make a 9 AM meeting, it's even worse. I wake up and there's nothing. I hardly say a word to my wife, until I say ‘yes’ to a cup of coffee. When it was hot out, I wanted it to be cooler; when it turned cold, all I could think of was getting back into the sunshine.

“It's four weeks of this now — waiting for the sun, getting paler. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Shmool squats in the bush, he gets soggier. Each time I look around, the walls move in a little tighter.”

The kinetic arts

My vote for the most beautiful scene put on film in 2005 would have to be the finale of Peter Jackson's King Kong — the sunrise battle atop the Empire State Building. What struck me most about this scene was the beautiful and very realistic motion of those lightweight, canvas-winged biplanes, the way they floated so convincingly on the air. CGI has never captured airplanes in flight so faithfully.

This got me thinking about CGI and science fiction, and how/why spacecraft are always depicted as moving as though they were aircraft.

[ the geeking starts here, in earnest ]

It's a balance of terrestrial forces (thrust vs. air resistance, lift vs. gravity) that shape the familiar, predictable motions of aircraft — they turn by banking, accelerate in a dive, etc. Special effects artists have long emulated these motions when depicting ships in space (the ships in the Star Wars movies “dogfight” just like planes in WWII; they even do strafing runs, and plummet into spinning dives when hit). As a result, these effects look convincing — even if they're inaccurate for ships in a weightless vacuum — because the apparent motion is familiar and thus believable.

Pre-CGI “realism” was also greatly helped by the necessity of using models. To create apparent motion, you had to physically move the model (or the camera). There is a gut-level believability to even the crudest of these effects, because even if the thing looks fake, it's still clearly a physical thing, bound by physical laws of motion. With models, considerations like perspective, line-of-sight, depth of focus, the effects of light, and the relative motion of two objects are all pretty much WYSIWYG.

This is why much of the CGI we've seen over the last 15 years is so unconvincing — it may look real, but it often doesn't move real. The clearest examples of this are the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy released in 1997. The new, “improved” effects allowed the starships more freedom of movement — too much freedom. They danced around in absurd and unnatural paths that seemed two-dimensional and cartoony, and the perspective was all out of whack. Despite the image quality and clarity, there's an instinctive reaction to bad kinetics that robs special effects of their realism.

Just as Peter Jackson perfected the look and feel of CGI aircraft for King Kong, the effects artists for the new Battlestar Galactica are finally using CGI to liberate their spaceships from the “traditional” effects of gravity and atmosphere, allowing them to move freely in space as they should. The ships are propelled not by continuous forward thrust, but by a single burst of power to build velocity, after which they are carried forward simply by momentum. To maneuver, they use small thrusters to adjust pitch, yaw, and roll, allowing the ships to fly backwards or sideways, or to turn completely around in place to face a pursuer.

(If you played a lot of “Asteroids” in the 80s, you get the idea.)

The effect is quiet and graceful, and — once you adjust to the physics of it — perfectly natural. Traditional chases and dogfights are thrown out in favor of nonlinear battles that have the kinetic dynamics of, say, a massive, three-dimensional snowball fight.

If there's television in the afterlife, I hope Isaac Newton is watching Battlestar Galactica. Never have his three laws of motion been so faithfully depicted, and by a genre that tends to prefer the three laws of a wholly different Isaac.

The Decablogue

For no reason other than the fact that nearly a month of continuous rain has washed away any inclinations toward creativity, I give you an old reliable standby. It's good to revisit this every so often, just to take stock and evaluate where life is taking me. So here they are (because I know you've been dying to know) — My Ten Favorite Movies:

Number Ten


Lawrence of Arabia
Who said the Top Ten was an inpenetrably exclusive club? Probably me. Well, here's the exception that proves the rule. A year ago (and for that matter, ten years ago) you would've found Aliens in this slot. But this year Ripley is out and El Aurens is in. This may very well be the only movie that you absolutely must see on the big screen. For precisely that reason, it's also the only movie on this list that I don't own (although our Tivo picked it up for us on its very first day on the job — good Tivo, smart Tivo).

Number Nine


Tombstone
Changed my life. That sounds pathetic and geeky when I say it, but the truth is this movie put a bug in my ear that started a small, slow chain reaction, which eventually led to big things. A lot of who I am today has been shaped by that series of falling dominoes for which Tombstone was the first nudge. But that's a whole other post. Tombstone also happens to be a colorfully written and vividly realized retelling of a familiar story — endlessly quotable and rewatchable, and overflowing with memorable performances.

Number Eight


Dr. Strangelove
Brilliant, beautiful satire that masterfully walks a dangerous tightrope. Any edgier, and it would fall into depressingly dark nihilism. Any goofier, and it would tip over into inappropriately morbid slapstick. But Kubrick manages to keep a smile on your face in spite of what you feel in the pit of your stomach. This ‘lighter side of doom’ is probably more entertaining now than it was in 1964 — I can't imagine seeing this right on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I'm sure it didn't improve anyone's sleep.

Number Seven


Dazed and Confused
The lives and relationships of these teenagers in 1976 are so convincingly realized that they seem like people I actually know, and rewatching this movie is like getting together with old friends. I myself have no recollection whatsoever of what I actually did on the last day of school my junior year, but it feels perfectly natural to say “Oh yeah, wasn't that was the year Pickford's party got busted? We ended up hauling the kegs out to the moon tower. And wasn't that the time some punk kicked the shit out of Mike?”

Number Six


The General
This film sits in the Top Ten as proxy for all of Keaton's masterpieces. I place The General on top because even if you remove Keaton's brilliant gags, you're still left with a thrilling, sweeping adventure story that can hold its own against anything they put out today. It also drives home just how much special effects dilute visual impact — you can sense the power and weight and realness of these locomotives, which is something CGI will never be able to deliver, because looking real is not being real.

Number Five


The Empire Strikes Back
Just a damn good movie, and easily the strongest in the series, possibly because it reverses the usual plot structure of tragedy/adversity -> long journey -> climactic battle. This one begins with the big battle scene, which sends the heroes on their long journey, only to arrive at a dark, tragic end. This is also the only episode to focus on the individual stories of the characters rather than the “big picture” of a galaxy at war — it brings these larger-than-life heroes and villains down to earth (so to speak).

Number Four


Raiders of the Lost Ark
The greatest adventure story ever to grace the screen — pure entertainment. It's a symphony of action, thrills, scares, comedy, romance, mystery, chases, escapes, spiders and snakes, bruised heroes, and melting Nazis. And the technique behind the film is equally flawless: the sweeping music, the kinetic pacing, the tight editing of action sequences. As many times as I've seen it, I can't think of a single sour note. The film just carries you along, almost effortlessly, right to its hauntingly perfect final scene.

Number Three


The Philadelphia Story
If there was a specific moment when I stopped merely appreciating old movies and started to truly love them, it was probably the first time I saw The Philadelphia Story. This is my warm-blanket movie, one I can watch any time, any place, so long as there's a bottle of champagne handy. The actors tackle this spiraling, outrageous barbfest with total abandon — especially Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, who are so over-the-top that you can see Cary Grant struggling to keep a straight face.

Number Two


Rio Bravo
Not very much happens in this movie — John Wayne leaves Walter at the jail, walks down the street with Dino, visits Ricky at the saloon, stops at the hotel to flirt with Angie, goes back to check on Walter at the jail, and so on, for pretty much the whole movie. Every now and then there's some gunplay, but mostly the Duke and his cohorts are killing time, nursing hangovers, wondering what will happen next. Sometimes they sing. There's something in the simplicity of it all that makes this one of the best movies of all time.

Number One


Star Wars
Duh.

Dank city

So we're creeping up on the record for consecutive days of soggy misery. I'm not surprised — I think I'm also closing in on a personal best for unbroken string of feeling like utter crap.

Interesting how much more acutely aware of the rain I am now that I live in a house with a leaky basement. It takes at least 5 or 6 days of continuous rain before water even begins to seep in (after the ground becomes completely waterlogged) — so we essentially only deal with this problem in January. In previous years, we'd have a week or two of dampness downstairs, which would dry up quickly once the rain let up (the previous owners wisely put thin, resilient industrial-grade carpet down there). A little sprinkle of Lysol powder and a pass with the vaccuum, and it's more or less back to normal.

This year, however, the familiar squishy blotch has grown into a widening, deepening splashy puddle that's making its way toward the guest room and the garage. I tried a series of absorbant barricades to halt its progress, but that worked out to be merely a delaying action (during which we should have been staging an evacuation, I fear). Mold and sediment are now in play.

All we'd need is 48 hours sans pleuie to put us back above sea level. Alas, that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

Argh.

On the bright side: Scientists de-stink dung. So it all evens out.

I don't get it

A million people listen to this idiot every day.

A million people.

That's enough to fill all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums to capacity.

It defies comprehension. Where's Darwin when we really need him? Or for that matter, a bolt of divinely guided lightning?

What women want...

My wife informed me the other day that she has fallen in love with Colin Mochrie.

Can't blame her — the man is clever, Canadian, and a hell of a dancer. And an aneurysm-inducingly brilliant improvisational comedian.

How do I compete with a man who can improvise lines like:

“Hi. I'm Thor, but not complaining.”

“You seem real easy and willing to put out, so roll in the cream cheese, roll in the cream cheese...”

“Good evening, I'm Lars Lars Pantsonfars.”

“An infinite number of monkeys have just come up with the Fox fall lineup.”

“Today, well-known mob hitman Johnny Two-Shoes admitted that he was once hired to kill a cow in a rice field using only two small porcelain figurines. Police reports indicate that this is the only known incident of a Knick-Knack Paddy Whack.”

“Rosebud — the last word in sleds!”

So I've got my work cut out for me if I'm going to hang on to this woman of such discerning taste. And I still have work to do on my stutter so I can be as dopey as Jimmy Stewart for her.

It's a rough life.

Tart me up

Hey, whaddaya know: Sambar’s Barbapapa is the featured cocktail in today's Seattle Times Food & Wine section. This, for my money, is the best drink in the city*. Their description is not very accurate, though (“girly sensibility”? I think not!). The drink is nowhere near as sweet (nor as pink) as they make it sound. It's actually very tart and bracing, although the dissolving sorbet does slowly sweeten the drink as you go. It does not, however, go down fast like a Cosmo.

The only Seattle cocktail I can think of that bests the Barbapapa for tartness is the Paradigm Shift at Oliver’s — another zinger I highly recommend.

*Maus contends that my New Year's hangover might have been averted had I not prefaced my champagne binge with one of these cocktails. Me, I'm pretty sure it was the bubbly's work alone, and no fault of the faithful and forgiving Barbapapa.

2006 bites

All year long I've had nothing but hangovers and colds.

OK, one hangover (but one for the books, let me tell you) and not even a real cold (not yet, anyway).

Sorry, I take it back — 2006 is still okay with me. I should know better than to hold any year accountable for what happens in January. January is just the pace lap before the year gets started. Sort of a psychological batting cage (a dark, cold, wet batting cage).

And what is it? Only January 3? Christ. I call a do-over.