Hey wha happun?

Did September just fffffft by or what? (Yes, fffffft is the correct spelling of the sound of an arrow flying by. Unless of course the arrow hits you, in which case thwack is preferred. An arrow hitting the wall just behind you is shwumph, and a kryptonite arrow caught midflight by Superman is fapp. Trust me — Ollie* and I have been spending a lot of time together lately.)

But September, huh? 'Twas just Labor Day, no? I'm looking around for hard evidence that we've actually experienced a month's passage, but all I find are leftovers of August.

Maybe it's because Maus and I lost a couple weeks to the watching of seasons 1 and 2 of House. And a full Ken Burns 9-parter. Oh yeah, and that 41-hour Danielle Steele dramathon where Martha Kent sleeps with a kindly Nazi and then grapples with a spoiled brood whose proclivities toward evil materialize through their hair...

[Channeling House: “So what accounts for temporal dissocia accompanied by heightened cravings for both reflective historo-documentia and 80s pulp-novel hair-dramatis? The Burns could indicate an attempt at compensatory self-medication following prolonged exposure to the Steele... except that the PBS symptoms presented before the WeTV. Hmm. OK, put him on ibubourbopraxis to suppress the medi-drama addiction long enough to get a lumbar puncture. Chase, you do it. And do an MRI while you're at it to check for growths in the hair-and-bile system. Cameron, check for lupus. It's not lupus, but check anyway. Foreman, break into this weirdo's house and get me samples of whatever he's been drinking.”]

Actually, I'd like to think the fffffft sensation has more to do with a new writing project that's been eating up my non-TV hours, such as they are. No details just yet. Suffice to say that it will require the watching and rewatching of a lot of old movies.

Hope my weakened system can handle it.

*Ollie's going to appear as a recurring character on Smallville this season — in at least 5 episodes. My natural enthusiasm for this news is tempered somewhat by the memory of the beefy horror of last season's Aquaman cameo.

That can't be good...

Scientists discover ‘walking’ shark

OK, so it's not quite so frightening as flying piranha, but still.

A long, long, LONG time ago...

Lucas has finally made the original versions of Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi available on DVD — no Special Edition embellishments, no modified dialogue, no scenes “resurrected” from the cutting-room floor, no ghosts of Hayden Christensen, and Greedo never fires a shot.
No. Fracking. CGI.

I have purchased the original Trilogy four times already (the original full-screen VHS box, the early-90s THX widescreen box, the late-90s Special Edition box, and the 2004 Special Edition DVD box) — so I'm reluctant to shell out one more dime for these movies.

Except.

These are, finally, the originals, in full widescreen, untouched and unmolested by the fidgety, obsessive Spurious George's legions of digi-monkeys. The opening crawl for Star Wars doesn't even inlcude the title Episode IV: A New Hope. Fine, then. Looks like I'll be reaching into my pockets for the fifth time — but only because this will be the last time. After this, I will have the version I wanted all along, and George and I will have no more business between us.

That is, until the next video format emerges... the one where you shove a tiny capsule up your nose and the movie is projected onto the back of your eyelids. Oh yeah, I'll be exchanging federal americredits for that one, too.

Just to be sure, though (no, George, I don't trust you), I went out and rented one of these DVDs for a test-drive. And oh baby, how I've missed you. The ships are plastic models, the aliens are foam rubber puppets, the backgrounds are airbrushed matte paintings. Stop-motion effects punctuated by firecracker explosions. All the good stuff. My god, these movies look like they come from the Seventies!

One thing that really struck me as I watched the non-CGI version for the first time in more than 10 years is how tactile the Star Wars universe was before digital effects came into play. Because no matter how fake the robots, creatures, sets, and locales looked, they were in fact real objects being photographed. Real dust, real dents, real shadows, real motion.

When a team of digital animators need to make a computer-generated R2-D2 fall over, they have to factor in his apparent size and weight, the type of surface he'll be falling onto, the appropriate arc of motion, the effects of his fall upon his digital environment, and the many laws of physics that come into play whenever gravity brings two objects together in this manner. In 1977, this was accomplished by having a stage hand push R2-D2 over. And which method do you suppose creates a more authentic and convincing thud?

Case in point: Compare these two scenes — one from 1977's Star Wars, the other from last year's Revenge of the Sith:

Which one do you believe? The second image is a well-done and much-appreciated homage to the first, and clearly, the second one is much more... picturesque. Owen and Beru stare hopefully towards the horizon, holding the future of the galaxy in their arms. You can hear the music swelling, can't you?

When I look at the first picture, though, with its muted, natural colors and empty sky, I can hear the wind. I can feel that sudden, sharp chill of desert air at sunset, when the sand is still warm. It looks like a real place to me, someplace I might have actually been.

The first image is so empty, the second is so full. And I believe the first one.

Heisenberging the dew

Every year, it blows my mind just how precisely the atmosphere of the real world aligns with key moments on the calendar — the Tuesday after Labor Day, for instance.

Last Friday morning, despite being the first dawn of September, felt clearly like summer — warm, dry, a light breeze. Even yesterday evening had that distinct late-summer stillness and warmth going on.

Today, however, as I headed out the door to drive Maus to work, it hit me squarely in nose: fall. There was a heavy dew on the plants, the lawn, the car. The sun was coming in at a low angle, well below the brim of my cap and right in my eyes. The air was cool and moist and smelled like, exactly like, waiting for the bus on the first day of school. One whiff, and it all came back in a rush: the blue windbreaker, the red backback loaded with pristine Pee-Chees and unopened Crayolas, the Steve Austin lunchbox.

This can't be just a subconscious perception-switch between a pre- and post-Labor Day mindset. I'm not just looking at the world with equinoctical eyes. This atmospheric change is real, and sudden, and unnervingly punctual. I half-expect to see all the leaves plummet from the trees today in a single instantaneous avalanche, Monty Python-style.

At least we still have eight (eight!) weeks of Daylight Savings Time left — if you want to talk about abrupt atmospheric changes, the end of DST is like that moment in Silent Hill when the world suddenly turns from eerie-spooky-foggy to pure ugly hell.