Are you a cylon?

From Wetpaint's Battlestar Galactica Wiki:

Dr. Baltar's Cylon Detector

Turns out that I'm Billy. Great! I love Billy. Except, of course, that he's dead. If I retake the test and place conscience over loyalty (which is a tough call), I end up as Helo. Not bad. But yeah, probably I'm really Billy. Probably should stay out of bars for while.

At any rate, I'm human. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

Credit where credit is due

A friend forwarded me this post on The Screengrab — The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History. Not a bad selection, with some highly appropriate honorees:

• The great Saul Bass. Hard to choose between Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest, but if pressed I think I'd favor the latter.


• Robert Brownjohn and Maurice Binder, for their immortal work on the Bond series. Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me — all excellent. I have to also throw in GoldenEye and Casino Royale as two of the best Bonds for opening credits.


• Denis Rich (designer) and John Williams (music), for the main titles of Superman: The Movie. No kidding.

Conspicuously missing from the list, possibly because there aren't any opening credits per se, is the greatest opening title of all time: the Star Wars crawl. (Fun: Star Wars titles as done by Saul Bass, courtesy Popwatch.)

Setting aside Hitchcock, Bond, and Star Wars, I have to add my own Top 10, all missing from the Screengrab list:

1. Once Upon a Time in the West — Now this is an opening credits sequence. Best performance of Jack Elam's career, and he barely lives past the director's title. Nothing else in the movie lives up to the promise of its first 10 minutes. A masterpiece unto itself.
   
   
2. The Shining — Scariest credits ever. The steadicam skims that placid alpine lake, rises and descends menacingly upon a tiny car winding its way higher and higher into the mountains and towards the evil destiny that awaits its driver. And that music. And those crazy moaning/wailing voices, or whatever they're supposed to be. Freaks me out to this day.
   


3. Alien — Never was an orchestra put to such great and subtle effect as the windlike moaning punctuated by light, haunting chords in the opening to Alien. The camera pans very slowly across a grim starfield and eclipsed planet, and one by one those five hashmarks (representing victims?) appear along the top of the screen, and then turn into the letters A L I E N. What follows is equally effective: the camera wanders through the cold, still corridors of the hibernating ship, which suddenly yawns to life with some of the strangest, most unnatural-sounding computer sound effects ever devised. The ventilation comes on , then the lights, then the doors whoosh open. Never has an inanimate object come to life so eerily.
   


4. McCabe & Mrs. Miller — The wind. The movie opens with the whistle of a cold, merciless wind as the camera pans across a soggy, uninviting landscape. Then the quiet strums of Leonard Cohen's woeful The Stranger Song come up as we see a lone rider — McCabe — slogging his way toward one very bleak town. He crosses a rather unpleasant rope bridge over an icy river, muttering to himself. He finally finds and enters the town's only hotel-restaurant-saloon, a dark, crowded, dank, close structure. He shakes the water from his hat, checks the back door, then clears off a table and starts up a poker game with the locals. The beautifully filmed sequence is chilling, claustrophobic, oppressive, and gorgeously bleak.
   


5. Blood Simple — Probably the most clever opening credits I've seen. We see two occupants of a vehicle, driving at night and shot from behind, illuminated only as silhouettes by the light refracted on the wet windshield. The only punctuation is the swipe of the car's wipers, and the flashes of the headlights of passing cars. Each bright flash leaves behind a new title, which hangs on their windshield until the next pass of the wipers clears it away. Brilliant.
   


6. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Rough, grainy, weathered, and explosive, and most importantly, backed by Ennio Morricone's greatest score.
   


7. Contact — We zoom away from the Earth, deeper and deeper into space (and back through time as the radio signals on the soundtrack weaken and fade away). Finally, there's nothing but a heavy, desolate silence as we retreat even from our own galaxy and into the big black empty. And then, suddenly, we're pulling away from Jena Malone's iris — all the universe in the eye of a child.
   


8. The Usual Supects — These credits aren't really anything special, they're just good. A slow pan across lights reflected as wavy lines in the dark waters of the harbor, backed by John Ottman's beautiful, dreamlike score. Very sleepy, very haunting, and classically noir.
   


9. Memento — A closeup of a hand holding a Polaroid photo of a dead body. Every few seconds, the hand waves the photo back and forth, they way you do when “developing” a fresh Polaroid. Only, after few moments, you realize that you're seeing the photo develop in reverse — the image slowly fades away, just like the memories of the man who snapped the photo. Sets the tone of the movie perfectly. Also cool because due to the film's time structure, this is actually the final shot of the story.
   


10. Jaws — One chord. Just one chord, played over the Universal Studios logo. You know immediately what movie this is going to be. Sure, John Williams's rapid two-chord refrain and the swimming shark's-view footage of the ocean floor are all classic. But really, it's that one low, murky, simple chord at the very beginning that does it.

Heston

... is now soylent green.

Not a great actor, really, but still, a great actor (in the “big” sense). Larger than life, with a face that could part the waters and a voice that could blow up the planet. No matter how much as I disliked (despised, actually) his politics, I did come to admire the fierce sincerity of his convictions.

He was known for his loyalty and idealism (he foreited his salary on Major Dundee to keep Sam Peckinpah in the director's chair). And as an icon, he was the closest the Right ever came to having their own Gregory Peck. In fact, there's a great scene between Peck and Heston in the epic western The Big Country that sums up the two men perfectly:

Ranch foreman Heston, jealous of Peck's engagement to his boss's daughter, tries to goad Peck into a fight in front of all the other ranch hands (as well as the girl and her father). When Peck refuses to fight in front of an audience, and even lets Heston call him a coward, the girl is humiliated and furious with him for “dishonoring” her. Peck decides to leave the ranch, but first goes to Heston and tells him “there's a little business unfinished between us.”

The two men duke it out in the middle of the night, in the middle of the prairie, with no audience and no “prize” on the line. The scene is shown in wide shot without music — two little men scuffling the dust like ants, dwarfed by the expansive and impassive landscape. They beat on each other until they're both unable to stand, then collapse in the dirt, bruised and bloodied and winded. Heston, having obviously underestimated his opponent, is as gracious as his character allows: “You sure take a long time to say goodbye.”

Peck's answer is perfect: “Tell me — what did we prove?”

No actor's passing has affected me the way Peck's did, but losing Heston (and, only 2 weeks ago, Richard Widmark) just hammers home how very close we are to the true finale of a cinematic era. Only a few more obits, and the book will be closed. And of those remaining, I can think of only one of Heston's stature — Kirk Douglas.

(I do not count Paul Newman, even though he and Heston are only a year apart. In my own personal and highly biased view of American movies, Heston is the last book of the Old Testament, and Newman is the first book of the New.)

The Mother of all Reversals

BSG is back on, and so far in top form, picking up exactly where it left off over a year ago... (About frakkin' time! What is this, HBO?)

Good, good, good: A gorgeous opening battle scene with some very sneaky Cylon maneuvers and brilliant visual flourishes. A raider explodes in a splatter of blood; the ferris-wheel ship catches fire but doesn't explode...

The show has a lot to explain in its final season, but they have 19 episodes to go, and one thing I'll say about BSG: they can cover a lot of ground very fast. These guys do not hold back and milk every mystery to death (ahem, Lost, I'm looking at you...) — I expect great things, big surprises.

A couple of welcome touches: We knew when Starbuck returned that she'd be greeted with suspicion and skepticism, but I was glad to see that they didn't just summarily chuck her in the brig like every other Cylon suspect (or perennial screwups like Apollo, Helo, and the Chief). Their suspicions were tempered by their genuine affection for Kara — they want so badly to believe her story, even though it's thoroughly unbelievable. And Kara, who seemed uncharacteristically serene when she reappeared at the end of last season, is back to her usual Starbuckian roguishness, and that's what's going to land her in the brig more than anything else.

And then there's Baltar: His storyline has been marinating in desperation, hallucination, torture, misery, and paranoia for so damn long, it's nice to see a little humor and wry irony injected into the character. They've morphed him from George W. Baltar into Julius and Ethel Baltar into Jesus H. Baltar all in the span of a single season. And now that he has his own personal harem of disciples, he is turning into one sleazy Jesus. A big tip of the hat to James Callis, who might very well steal the season, the way things are going.

All of this brings to mind what is the great and central irony of BSG: in 1978, the original Battlestar series was widely panned and dismissed as a cheap knockoff of Star Wars — which in many ways it was, if not in story, then at least in the particulars of its production. Star Wars used SFX carefully and deliberately, and to great effect, while Battlestar was infamous for its endlessly recycled and respliced SFX. Star Wars gave us a plot that widened and deepened with each new film; Battlestar shamelessly swiped its stories from the likes of Shane, Guns of Navarone, and Towering Inferno.

Today, it's Battlestar that's fresh, innovative, and compelling — the best thing to hit science fiction since Firefly — and Star Wars is now the disappointingly uninspired knockoff, with its stilted dialog and overreliance on SFX. Battlestar gives us a great story, a rich array of characters, and compelling drama; Star Wars (and you know I'm talking about the prequels here) is basically an 8-hour cartoon with really good music.

Case in point: If Lucas were helming Battlestar, that ferris-wheel ship totally would have exploded...