Right Wing Nation

Hmmmm. So is The Dark Knight still at the theater here today? Hey, how about that? It is! Maybe see it again . . .

That’s how much The Dark Knight made in one day (Surber).

Sells $66.4 million worth of tickets in one day — or 10 times what “Valley of Elah” sold in over a year.

Ah, yes, the VRWC’s favorite antiwar movie. Its total box office and rentals are $6.5 million.

And it’s going to keep making money:

All indications are that “The Dark Knight” will keep landing blows: Advance ticket sales were booming.

“There is an unbelievable demand for this movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of tracking firm Media By Numbers LLC. “The Heath Ledger factor is a major part of this. Beyond that, the movie is so good, it’s worthy of all these accolades.”

The movie directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale as Batman cost $185 million to make, excluding money spent marketing, said Dan Fellman, Warner’s head of distribution.

Critics have heaped praise on the movie — especially the late Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker, which has already generated whispers of a posthumous Oscar nomination.

“We’re very proud of the film,” Fellman said. “It’s the magic of the movie business, how one film just stands out above the others.”

What are you waiting for? Go! Today!

Seriously. The Dark Knight lives up to all the hype. A helluva movie. I can’t recommend seeing it in the theater strongly enough.

We went to the one down the road that nobody knows about. Er, knew about. We already had bought our tickets, and we got there 25 minutes early. The theater was nearly full when we got there, and by the time the movie started, there were people who stayed even though there were no seats left and stood through all 2 1/2 hours. Applause at the end.

One. Hell. Of. A. Movie.

Great story, great acting, great direction, great photography (well, I’m not sure where the ferries were going, since it was Chicago), great direction, great score. Even the finale will have your heart pounding.

And you won’t see me complaining if Heath Ledger gets a posthumous academy award. It’s an amazing performance, and he gets creepier and crazier as the movie goes on. He certainly put Jack Nicholson’s performance as the Joker in the Tim Burton film to shame.

Just outstanding.

Dark Knight made 18 million dollars on the midnight showing alone (Ace). The local theater (the one 2.5 miles down the road) is even showing it at 10 am on weekends, and the theater never opens before noon.

Planning for the 1 pm today, but only if the car is done by then (I’m about six months late for this year’s communist extortion racket emissions test, and I have an 11 am appointment).

I remember in 2000 when Memento came out (heh — remember, that’s funny, if you’ve seen the movie) and I wondered what Nolan would do to top that, since it’s one of those movies that can only be done once. Then, he did Batman Begins, which didn’t top it, but came close. Maybe this one will.

Half of a full bookshelf is taken up by DVDs, but a couple of times, I’ve looked for a DVD, not found it, and thought, “Oh, I thought we had that. I guess not.”

Well, Gladiator is on (just now ending), which reminded me of A Beautiful Mind, which I know we have. It is nowhere to be found on the shelf, however. So that means that somewhere, there are unpacked DVDs, and that I need to dig through boxes.

I’ll worry about where to put them after I’ve found them.

Gladiator is a good movie, by the way (although it’s pretty disrespectful of, you know, history), but Crowe got screwed when he didn’t win an academy award for A Beautiful Mind, which is by light years his best performance.

One of the stupidest shows on television (there’s lots of competition) is Cool Fuel, which features such feats of genius as making a moped that runs on mashed potatoes.

Well, the DVD is better than standard, but not quite as crisp and clean as the HD broadcast.

Recorded Live Free or Die Hard off Cinemax HD, and burning it to DVD now. The HD picture is amazing. We’ll see how the DVD looks when the movie’s over.

Premonition is on Showtime HD. It gets about the same rating on IMDB as Perfect Stranger, but it can’t be worse than Perfect Stranger. I saw the end coming a good hour before the movie was over.

We now have HD, with 95 additional HD channels. All I can say is, “Wow.”

Currently on the tube: Deadliest Catch, on Discovery HD.

* A&E HD
* Animal Planet HD
* Big Ten Network HD
* Biography Channel HD
* Bravo HD
* Cartoon Network
* Cinemax HD East
* Cinemax HD West
* CMT HD
* CNBC HD+
* CNN HD
* CSN Chicago HD
* CSN Mid-Atlantic HD
* CSTV HD
* Discovery Channel HD
* ESPN HD
* ESPN2 HD
* ESPNews HD
* Fox Business Network HD
* FSN Detroit HD
* FSN Prime Ticket HD
* FSN Southwest HD
* FSN West HD
* Fuel TV HD
* FX HD
* HBO HD East
* HBO HD West
* HD Theater
* HDNet
* History Channel HD
* MSG HD
* MSG PLUS HD
* MTV HD
* National Geographic Channel HD
* NBA.TV HD
* NESN HD
* NFL Network HD
* NHL Network HD
* Science Channel HD
* Sci-Fi Channel HD
* Showtime HD
* Showtime HD West
* Showtime 2 HD
* SNY HD
* Speed Channel HD
* Spike HD
* Starz Comedy HD
* Starz Edge HD
* Starz HD East
* Starz HD West
* Starz Kids & Family HD
* TBS in HD
* Tennis Channel HD
* The Movie Channel HD
* TLC HD
* TNT HD
* USA Network HD
* VERSUS HD/GOLF CHANNEL HD
* VH1 HD
* YES HD

Sometime between noon and four pm . . .

HBO is replaying the John Adams mini-series starting tonight, and since this was one of the things on the hard drive of the dead DirecTiVO, I just set the box to record them.

Then I realized that today is the day we get the HD dish installed. So once that happens, I’ll set the box to record off HBO HD.

Except.

If I record something from an HD channel, then burn it to DVD, can it be played on a regular TV? Enquiring minds need to know.

why I didn’t remember much of anything about the 2002 Time Machine remake. It’s forgettable. Or it’s better to forget it, if you’ve seen it.

Guy Pearce kind of stumbles through the film with a deer in the headlights expression on his face. Jeremy Irons should have been taken out back and shot for his performance. And a lot of it was annoying.

It seems to me that a “mad scientist” who devotes his life to developing a time machine doesn’t need an additional reason to, you know, use his time machine once he’s developed it, but the screenwriter obviously did, and added a really stupid reason: He tries to change the past and can’t, so he travels to the future to find out why he can’t.

There’s a Magic Negro, this time a Photonic Magic Negro, sort of a master word database of all human knowledge. That was annoying — and so was the actor.

The Eloi aren’t the childlike zombies of the George Pal movie, but sort of a big, lesbian collective kinda thing. They’re the cliff dwellers redux, living on the sides of cliffs in huts. They fish, and climb up the cliffs to their lesbian collective huts on rope ladders, which they pull up at night (boats too). Visually, those shots were pretty neat.

But it’s one of those movies you don’t want to think about, because as soon as you start, it falls apart. It reminded me of Menotti’s opera, The Telephone. The plot is so stupid and illogical that you have to literally turn off your brain. In Menotti’s opera, we have a couple in some Soviet bloc nation. The man gets papers from the underground and leaves. She knows all of the same people in the underground, but instead of also getting papers and getting out, she whimpers beside the telephone, waiting for him to call — and we’re supposed to feel sorry for this idiot.

Well, Time Machine is a lot like that. Let’s take the living on the sides of cliffs thing. The Morlock live in caverns, like the original. So do these caverns extend upward inside the cliffs, and if so, why didn’t the Morlock merely tunnel through and snatch their dinner out of the huts? If not, why live on the sides of the cliffs, why not on high ground above the cliffs, where the Morlock can’t easily get to you? And why would the Eloi ever go down at all and possibly get barbecued, instead of up, where they wouldn’t?

They weren’t childlike or zombies, like the original. They were just stupid.

Look, don’t bother, or you’ll spend several weeks trying to forget that you saw it, like I did.

I don’t recommend Robocop 3. At all.

It’s over, and I’m still not sure what was supposed to be going on. And it has Jill Hennessy in it.

I didn’t know there was a Robocop 3. Best scene so far: Guy walks into a restaurant full of cops and tries to hold it up, with the obvious result. Restaurant employee says, “What’s it like being a rocket scientist?”

Somehow, at some point while watching that re-make, my receiver lost all of the schedule info, so I rebooted it. It’s back, but it took me a few minutes to realize when it comes on, it looks like it comes on, then goes off again.

The schedule right now is a wasteland. I think I’ll put in a DVD.

Them’s some ugly critters.

The Time Machine remake. It’s on TNT now, just started at noon. I barely remember the Morlock guy, and that he talked, or something. Don’t really remember anything else, not even whether I liked it or not.

Anyway, he’s just now climbing into the machine …

They’re gone, and the whole system is set up: Satellite, new DVD burner/player, and Laserdisc player. Until next Saturday, the only thing we can get close to 1080 on is the DVD, so Band Wagon is on right now. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, and Oscar Levant.

I’m sorry to say that the Laserdisc isn’t nearly as sharp and clear on this TV as it was on the GE.

It’s a little more complicated than it was before, since we have two inputs on the TV, and before, only one (I switched everything from the receiver). But it’s set up so the DVD will burn whatever we’re watching.

That new desktop I have has a TV card, so I decided to hook the VCR/DVD-R unit up to the desktop, if I need it. It doesn’t upconvert, so the picture wouldn’t be great on this TV.

Ah, life is good. I did find out that the local channels don’t broadcast HD yet (supposed to start in September). Well, there’s nothing on network TV now except re-runs, anyway.

They’re on their way to set up the whole system.

Robocop is on! Yeah!

I don’t know if you saw Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, but if you didn’t, you want to rent it. Now. Before the sequel, Dark Knight opens on July 18.

Don’t like comic book movies? Read on.

Tim Burton’s movies were excellent, but they were comic book movies for comic book fans — after all, they were Tim Burton movies. He had no intention of escaping the genre; he embraced it, and successfully, unlike most comic book movies (the first X-Men was pretty good, and the second was fine, but the third was just stupid, and Ironman was unexpectedly good — but all the rest have been pathetic, especially the Spiderman and Fantastic Four movies — and I devoured comic books when I was a kid).

Nolan broke free of the genre, and perhaps chose the only comic book hero with which he could have: Batman. In the 2005 movie, he goes back to Batman’s origins. The movie, like the comic, is dark and gritty, and most importantly, real. It’s a movie that non-comic fans can love, beautifully made, with pitch perfect performances, particularly from Christian Bale (as Bruce Wayne/Batman) and Michael Caine as Alfred. Nolan’s flick is an adult’s movie, with complex characterizations, and the first film that truly lets Bale show what an incredibly talented actor he is.

There is nothing of the television show in Nolan’s movie. It is as serious as a film gets, with no camp or humor. Nolan even manages to make bats scary, and I like bats.

If you missed this movie, you missed what was hands down the best movie of 2005, without question. I wouldn’t call it kid friendly; fine for adolescents, a bit dark for younger kids. Because the successors to Burton’s Batman films were so bad, I didn’t bother to see Nolan’s movie in the theater, and I will always regret that. Had I seen it in the theater, at the end I would have stood and applauded.

Me, I couldn’t care less about The Hulk. I didn’t like the comic, and I didn’t like the TV show (anyway, Bill Bixby to me was always My Favorite Martian). But on the day Nolan’s sequel opens, you won’t be able to keep me away from the theater.

Seriously. Even if you never go to the theater, don’t miss this. And don’t miss the chance to see the first movie, if you haven’t.

There must have been a glitch in the satellite yesterday. We have two tuners, and local channels.

We won’t get HD signals until July 5, so this is purely regular signals on the 1920×1080 HDTV.

When I first started watching, the picture was pretty terrible. Then I found the format button on the TV remote, and found I could change the resolution, as you would change the resolution on your monitor, and that I had been watching on something by 480 resolution.

I found “stretch” mode at something by 768, and while still a bit fuzzy, it’s perfectly watchable. Still, once we get the HD dish, we’ll be watching HD as much as possible. Stretch fills the whole screen, and even without HD, these people have some big heads, and lots of skin detail we never saw on our 1986 GE. Even if there were lots of bigger TVs, this is a big picture.

I guess we do have two tuners. I set one program to record, then switched channels. This time, I did not get the prompt to stop recording. It’s possible that while we were going through the setup yesterday, there were problems with the second satellite signal that worked themselves out.

No DLB, though. That’s going to take getting used to.

If I record a program while it’s playing, then try to change channels, it makes me stop recording to change channels. That, and the error on the second dish during setup, is why I assumed we only have one tuner operating. But I set up a program to record at 8:00 am today (before it started), then changed the channel. I’m still on the other channel, but the red record light is on, so it looks like I have two tuners.

I’m not sure what’s going on.

It’s not just the TV that’s new. For the last six years, we had had DirecTiVO, a DirecTV and TiVO receiver in one box. DirecTV cut off their business partnership with TiVO, and now have their own DVR.

The DirecTV DVR interface isn’t nearly as simple to navigate as TiVO. TiVO makes everything accessible from the TiVO menu, accessed by pressing the (ta-da) TiVO button at the top of the peanut remote. The DirecTV DVR interface is nearly identical to the Dish TV DVR interface. Recordings and the TV guide are two separate menu systems, not accessible from a top menu (as far as I can tell, there is no top menu).

The TiVO menu is transparent. The first option is Now Showing (recorded shows), which might be ambiguous except that the next option is Watch Live TV. Everything is accessible from the top menu (each selection opens a sub menu). The DirecTV DVR is not transparent — and that’s okay, it’s just that I could immediately do everything on TiVO, but have to figure out what’s what with this DVR.

The TV guide (schedule) is just like Dish TV (I don’t much like it). With the TiVO guide, the screen is split in two. On the left are the channels, and on the right are the shows on the selected channel. You can scroll down to see what’s coming up on that channel, and you can see the current and next five (or so) shows on the right.

The Dish TV like guide is flat, and the times run from left to right, not up to down. So you have to scroll scroll scroll scroll to see what’s coming up on the channel, instead of being able to see the next five or so shows.

I’ve seen complaints that you can’t see as many options on screens, but that’s because the print is bigger. I like that.

I also like the remote. The buttons on the famous peanut remote were a pain in the *ss for somebody like me with big fingers. The buttons on this remote are bigger and easier to find. I’ve seen complaints about the mysterious colored buttons that do different things on different menus, but since on each menu, there’s a key at the bottom of the screen that tells you what they do, I don’t see anything to complain about.

However. And this is a great big however.

TiVO has DLB (dual live buffering), so even live TV is just like watching recorded TV. Let’s say there’s a show on A&E and one on Discovery. With TiVO, anything you watch on live TV is buffered, so when the show on A&E cuts to commercials, you can press the pause button to pause the playback, then press the down button to change to Discovery on the other tuner, press play to start the playback. Fast forward through the commercials, then watch the show on the Discovery channel until you get to the next commercial break and press the pause button. Press the down button to switch to the other tuner, and that A&E show is still paused. FF through the commercials, watch it, etc. So you can watch two shows simultaneously, without having to watch the commercials. The buffer is thirty minutes, or at least was for the box we had; live buffering uses hard disk space, but overwrites it, and the live TV shows do not show up in the Now Playing list unless you set them to record.

If you stumble on a show (within the first thirty minutes) you want to record, press the record button, and it records it from the beginning.

This is the way we watched live TV. It’s also the first thing I wanted to know how to do. I couldn’t find any way on the remote to change tuners, and didn’t see anything in the manual. So I looked online, and we’re going to have to change the way we watch TV.

The new DirecTV DVR has no DLB, so it only records what you tell it to record. So the only way you can simulate it is to record both programs. Problem is, each tuner is connected to a dish, and since one of our dishes won’t work, we only have one tuner. I may see if I can get a service guy out here before July 5 to fix that second tuner, or I may not. I set it up to record a whole bunch of things yesterday evening (I can watch recorded shows while the DVR is recording another).

I had always assumed all DVRs were more or less the same. I was wrong. TiVO is the king of DVRs. Had I known, we could have gotten a DirecTV HD receiver without a DVR and a TiVO box, but then, we would have had to pay a monthly TiVO fee. So we’re just going to have to adjust.

The only one tuner thing is driving me nuts, though.

It hung during reboot, so we cold booted it. Service is activated. Now, I’m going to figure out the remote and interface; this ain’t TiVO.

So I was on the phone with a DirecTV service rep, who patiently walked me through the setup, and changed my access card number and updated my account. The minute I got off the phone, I tried to pull up the guide and got:

DirecTV is not activated on your account. Please call 1-800-DIRECTV to activate your account.

So now, I’m on the phone with another rep, and he had me boot the system. We’re still on Almost there, just a few more seconds please . . . I’m used to a receiver that takes forever to boot, but this is ridiculous.

Oh. And we couldn’t get it to see the second dish, so no local channels.

Before (click to see full-size — and yes, that’s the top of my foot at the bottom right):

After:

You know, I have the new DirecTV receiver here. I could plug it up and activate the card. Maybe I’ll do that.

Day 2 of no TV.

Dealt with the cords (note: cord tangle is a breeze to deal with if the cords aren’t attached to anything). Swept up all the dust bunnies, now on the back porch where they can naturally recycle. Best Buy called. They’re bringing the stand and TV (we have everything else here) between 10 and 11 today. So I get to look at a TV with no picture until Saturday.

Day 2 of no TV.

Everything is unplugged and removed, in two piles: Things to keep, and things for Best Buy delivery to cart away (TV and DirecTiVO). The cabinet has been moved to a temporary location.

It’s a mess, but not quite so much as this. We have a big pile of serious cord tangle on the floor where the cabinet used to hold everything, and big wads of electrostatically-bound dust. Right behind the TV picture tube was a big black spot, but it came right off with a little windex.

So I still have to untangle all the cords, then sweep (thank God the floor is laminate, and not carpet, and I can just sweep the dust bunnies out the french door onto the porch).

Delivery is today, so I’ll get to look at the pretty boxes until Saturday, when they come to set it up.

The first is an accurate description of how I feel. The second is because I just realized that we’re going to have to tear down the TV and equipment, and move the cabinet someplace else, because Best Buy won’t.

I don’t really like the idea of watching movies on the computer, but I may end up breaking down tomorrow and sticking one in my drive.

We went mid-rage, and got a 40″ 1920×1080 resolution Sony. We also got a 1080p upconverter DVD burner (and player too, obviously), and a new DirecTV receiver and DVR (they only had one, so that was easy). The Sony we bought was displayed with a whole lot of other TVs, and the picture quality contrast was stunning. Clean crisp resolution, brilliant color, with burn-your-retinas reds, and it was on sale (the color saturation is really remarkable, the best of any TV of any size in the store). We had to get a TV stand and we got a power conditioner strip so we won’t have the same problem again with the brownout.

The bad news is that they can’t install it until Saturday. That’s no TV. At all. Until Saturday. Aieeeeee!

Because we now have HD, or will have, we have to have the current dishes replaced with an HD dish. The soonest they can do that (it doesn’t cost anything) is Saturday, July 5, and when he said that, I thought I was going to have to dial 911 until he said we could get DirecTV, just not the HD channels, until then, so on Saturday, we will again have TV.

as we’re dragged into the 21st century.

I’m geeky, but I’m not a first adopter, and one of my colleagues back in Indiana used to tease me because I wasn’t. A first adopter is a geekiness for its own sake geek, somebody who has to have the very newest technology the minute it comes out. Call me conservative (no!) or a tightwad or both, but I figure if I’m going to spend a lot of money (and the latest greatest tech toy is usuallly fairly expensive), I first want to know if it works, and second, why I should buy it.

My first computer was a Commodore 64, and I didn’t buy it until my brother showed me his, and what he’d done with it. My second computer was a TRS-80, and I bought it because it had a disk drive (on my Commodore, you could only store data on a cassette tape), and only (again) after my brother had one — although it didn’t take much to convince me of the advantages of disk drives over a cassette tape recorder.

I only bought new technology right out of the gate once: The Laserdisc player (and discs). And look where we are with that. Dead technology, and we have 70-some 12-inch, very heavy, laserdiscs that can only be played on the $750 Pioneer player, which we’ve had to have fixed twice. And those players have not come down in price.

Having said that, let’s jump to 1986. I was a grad student, and my crappy little TV died. Just a block from where we lived there was an electronics sales/repair shop (it’s still there). Being nearly destitute, we went there first, because they rebuilt TVs and sold them at good prices.

On their shelf was a rebuilt GE with a 26-inch screen. It was a top of the line TV for the era, and the price was extraordinarily cheap, so we bought it.

You’re thinking, “Rebuilt TV, it probably crapped out on you,” and you couldn’t be more wrong. That GE worked flawlessly. It had a couple of quirks (it couldn’t remember channels, so every time you turned it off then on, you had to run it through the cycle so it could find them), but the picture was great, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was one of the first line of cable-ready TVs, but as time went on and we went from cable to LR audio, we had to buy an RF modulator for it, but they’re only about twenty bucks, and the TV worked great, so who cared?

Yesterday evening, as I briefly stated at the time, we had another brownout (they’re almost daily here), and the system didn’t come back on, or it did, but there was no picture on the TV, and it couldn’t find a channel. I looked at the modulator and saw that no signal was going through it, so I thought it had died, and got another.

I hooked up the new modulator, and still, the TV could not find the channel. The TV was stuck in a potentially endless loop, running through the cycle over and over and over. So I cold booted the whole system.

When I turned the power back on, I heard the familiar hum of the TV, so it was getting power, but there was no picture at all, and there should have been snow (until it found a channel). Pressing the auto-find button (to start the cycle) did nothing. In fact, everything did nothing.

As if that weren’t enough, the DirecTiVO receiver was getting power, but the power light didn’t come on, and just like the TV, nothing did anything. And the RF modulator was receiving no signal.

I rebooted both numerous times, and the same thing: Power but nothing.

The brownout blew out both the TV and the DirecTiVO.

But it gets worse.

When we moved into a large house out in the country and bought furniture, we bought a mission book cabinet, and with a jigsaw, I turned it into an entertainment center. We did a lot of entertaining, and it was nice to be able to put the system on one of the DirecTV music channels and close the cabinet during parties. The GE just barely fit inside, which at the time was fine. But because of the wider aspect ratio, the only HD sets that would fit in the cabinet have pictures that are too small given what we’re used to, and the amount of money a new TV is going to cost.

So today, we’re buying a new TV, a DirecTV receiver/DVR, a backup power supply, and maybe, furniture to put it on (I have never seen an entertainment center that wasn’t an ugly, godawful thing I’d never let anywhere near my house, so I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that. We have to do something, though, because we have a TV, a receiver, a satellite receiver/DVR, a VHS/DVD player and recorder so I can put in an old VHS tape and a DVD-R and press a button and burn the tape to DVD, and that old Laserdisc player, and we can’t just put them all on the floor.) I suppose I should be excited (new toys and all that), but I’m not. I’m annoyed. So sue me for it.

We had a brownout, and it blew out the RF modulator. So no video on the TV. Getting another from Best Buy.

Yes, it’s an old, pre-cable-ready-era TV. Bought it in 86, rebuilt, from a TV repair place. GE with a 26″ screen (that was a big TV then). It still works fine, so there’s no need to replace it until next year.

A&E is on right now, and they just ran an ad for Dog the Bounty Hunter. I checked the schedule, thinking they may have accidentally run an old ad. He’s back, Wednesday nights at 9 pm.

Die Hard, the king of all action movies is on. Priorities!

One of Hollywood’s last greats, the beautiful Cyd Charisse has passed away. Fred Astaire called her “beautiful dynamite,” and while there were other great dancers, such as Ann Miller, none had the fluid grace — or the legs — of Cyd Charisse. Here is Joubert’s tribute.

With Ricardo Montalban dancing the Tango:

With Fred Astaire, whom she said, “moved like glass,” from Dancing in the Dark:

And of course, with Gene Kelley from Singin in the Rain, the Broadway Melody Ballet:

And this number, also from Singin in the Rain:

“What Should I Do? I Am A Grown Man With Red Hair.” Better yet, the article trashes David Caruso.

He can’t walk and talk at the same time (you should see him on stairs), requires dozens of takes for simplest line-readings (which as we all know, he can only do one way), and can’t even put his CSI gloves on on-camera (always a time cut, just watch). He will cuss uncontrollably (often in front of a child actor) and blame everyone but himself for his inability to act. He used to hack up big loogies on the floor of the set, too, until a producer gently reminded him of sanitation and courtesy. Oh, and he re-writes every scene he is in, so he is totally to blame for the hackneyed one-liners. He will take anything the writers give him, and destroy it. And the sunglass bit is all his, a truly innovative contribution to his character. But as he said to us many times, “What should I do? I am a grown man with red hair.”

We used to call the diet coke his “acting juice.”

Angie Harmon is going to be in a Helpless female victim Lifetime TV movie. Hell has officially frozen.

Silence of the Lambs. Great movie (and this should make you feel old: it was released 17 years ago).

Transformers is on. Uh, this made money? I mean, people liked this? I’m not sure I know exactly what’s supposed to be going on.

Apparently, M. Night Shyamalan, the one-hit wonder, has managed to make a movie that’s even worse than Lady in the Water (see here and here). I would not have thought it possible.

However, when I heard that Lady in the Water was worse than The Village, I didn’t think that possible, either — yet, it was. And The Village was much worse than Signs, which was even worse than Unbearable Unbreakable. M. Night is Hollywood’s worst director, a director only a critic could love.

Yet, they keep giving him millions of dollars to outdo himself. No wonder they don’t make any money.

Even Salon hates Planet Green:

Concern for the environment is, among other things, an upper-middle-class privilege and a status marker. Planet Green turns the entire Earth into a lifestyle accessory, often to uniquely awful effect.

The most inane program in Planet Green’s initial lineup is, by a nose, Alter Eco, which, depressingly, finds Adrien Grenier behaving very much as he does in the role of Vincent Chase on Entourage. Verily, the show is promoted as a virtual hangout with Grenier’s “entourage of green activists, experts, and friends,” and it feels designed to provide you with lines to pick up chicks at the farmers market.

In one episode, Grenier chills with a dude—obviously a douche bag, just a biodegradable one—who is constructing an eco-friendly pleasure dome in the hills of Los Angeles, a Playboy Mansion with organic bunny feed. We’re told that the water from the showers will be treated and reused to water the garden, and also that the shower in the master bath will be spacious enough to accommodate 19 honeys. Elsewhere, some of the crew goes to an organic wine tasting, where they swill in a most obnoxious fashion. There are “great little tips” for exercising greenly, such as doing pull-ups on the limb of a tree. People seeking material gain are exhorted to “make that cheddar.” It’s impossible to say whether the show’s smug superiority is more grating than its anorexic thinness of content, but seeing them in combination may fill you with a kind of retributive rage. I for one want to go out and kill a dolphin.

I can’t believe this guy actually watched it. Just the ads are enough to make me throw things at the television.

This has to be the strangest commercial on TV right at the moment.

Hat tip to Hube (or would that be Hube tip?) for this:

For the 77th consecutive month, FNC finished first in total day and prime time ratings during May. FNC was the sixth highest rated cable network on all of basic cable during prime time for the month (CNN and MSNBC finished 19th and 26th) and the seventh rated network in total day (CNN and MSNBC were 19th and 27th).

FNC also had 11 out of the top 13 programs in cable during the month in Total Viewers. The O’Reilly Factor was the #1 program in cable news for the 90th consecutive month, and saw gains in Total Viewers year-to-year (26%).

Amercia’s Newsroom (9-11amET) was up 30% year-to-year, with the program averaging more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined during the time period.

Meanwhile, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren has been #1 for 73 consecutive months in Total Viewers while Hannity & Colmes has been #1 in its timeslot for 54 consecutive months.

Remakes annoy me, and I wasn’t too inclined to watch A&E’s Andromeda Strain, but this comment made me set it to record tonight:

Short version - the remake is so bad that it’s good. If you like to say “I can’t believe they just did that” then you have to watch this.

And it’s got the gawdawful Benjamin “Babyface” Bratt, so we can watch him chew up the scenery.

Sturgeon’s Law, ironically (or appropriately, depending on how you look at it) was proposed by Theodore Sturgeon, a Sci-Fi writer, after years of defending the genre from critics. There are two corollaries (we’ll be primarily concerned with the better known second corollary):

1. Nothing is always absolutely so
2. Ninety percent of everything is crap

The problem Sci-Fi writers and fans have always had, the problem Sturgeon ignored, is this: If you’re going to play the game, you have to play by the rules. You can’t create your own rules, then complain when they don’t let you play.

If Sci-Fi is going to be literature, then like every other genre of literature, it must revolve around the characters and the plot.

I’m not knocking Sci-Fi. I’ve been a Sci-Fi geek for decades. But something has happened over the last twenty years that has made Sturgeon’s Law inapplicable, since far more than 90% of Sci-Fi these days is crap — and here, I’m referring primarily to filmed Sci-Fi, either television or movies.

Well, somethings have happened. The first was Gene Roddenberry (yes, I know, I’ve ranted about the Star Trek franchise before, but this is not a Roddenberry rant, and I’ll try to constrain myself, okay?)

It’s not about the tecnhology, stupid

This is one of the two ways in which Roddenberry degraded Sci-Fi. In the Roddenberry universe, there’s a gadget that does everything. In addition to phasers and breaking the speed of light, we have transporters, replicators, holodecks, time travel, you name it, there is no technological barrier some group on the franchise has not broken.

Phasers are fine, I suppose, although ray guns are just this side of silly, and in Sci-Fi, you pretty much have to have dispensed with Einstein. Holodecks, while extremely annoying because they encourage all kinds of idiotic plots, are, with a sufficient amount of computing power, feasible (well, provided that the dimensions of the created environment do not exceed those of the physical space, as they so often did in the franchise, you know, like when they went mountain climbing on the holodeck).

Transporters and replicators, however, well, don’t get me started. I said I wouldn’t rant, and I won’t. They violate the probability principle, discussed below. But back to the point.

The problem with having a neat techno-gizmo-gadget that does anything you want it to do is that the technology becomes a deus ex machina, as it did in the Roddenberry franchise shows. Scotty was always reconfiguring the dilithium crystals to solve whatever problem had arisen, and then there was the tricorder, which seemed to be sort of an all-purpose magical box.

A great Sci-Fi author, Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but he was referring to perception, not reality. Technology is always distinguishable from magic in one fundamental way: Technology is constrained by scientific laws, and magic is not. Roddenberry’s world did not have technology; it had magic devices presented as if they were technology. When they were constrained by laws, those laws were conveniently forgotten or changed at whim, as the writers needed, hence “reconfiguring the dilithium crystals,” or “sending a gravimetric burst” or pick your favorite example of magic-as-technology every other episode.

It is a necessary precondition of Sci-Fi that the author must create a world constrained by laws. The author (or writer) with artistic integrity creates his world and consistently subjects everyone and everything in it to those laws. The hack writer creates his world, then dispenses with or changes the laws whenever it suits him. Roddenberry and his writers were, by that criterion, hacks. That they used (mostly, but not entirely) actual scientific concepts which they then perverted at will in order to get characters out of situations makes the Star Trek franchise bad Sci-Fi.

It’s probability, not possibility

Sci-Fi authors are far too imaginative, or perhaps imaginative in inappropriate ways. Because we must suspend disbelief to read (or watch) and enjoy Sci-Fi, the world and the scientific laws which govern it may be improbable. The events and the plot, however, cannot cross the improbability line, lest they become absurd.

Yesterday, I saw a particularly ridiculous episode of Voyager in which they transported “photonic matter” onto the ship from a star. The “photonic matter” (except that it had suddenly become “photonic energy,” but why would anyone in Sci-Fi worry about the distinction between matter and energy?) had somehow leaked into the holodeck system, where one of the characters was running a Beowulf program. The “photonic whatever” (matter? energy? do the writers know there is a difference?) turned out to be a (wait for it) “photonic lifeform” and became Grendel in the holodeck program.

Where do I start with this drivel — and it is drivel, from beginning to end. And what was I talking about, since I am mentally ranting, even though I’m not ranting here . . . oh yes.

Yes, it’s possible that “photonic matter” could have 1) developed into some kind of living being, and 2) evolved intelligence, but then, it’s also possible that those grains of salt in your shaker are actually nanodevices the Illuminati use to track your every movement for some nefarious purpose. Nearly anything is possible.

The operating principle is not possibility, but probability. So while a “photonic lifeform” is technically possible, it’s immeasurably improbable. It is so improbable that it’s ridiculous. But let’s forget that, and say it’s likely that “photonic matter” would be alive and intelligent.

Is it possible that this “photonic lifeform” would morph into Grendel on the holodeck? Well sure, but it’s possible that we’re being controlled by reptilian aliens masquerading as human beings. It may be possible, but it’s not very probable, is it? No? So why did these writers produce this nonsense? (Answer: Because they’re hacks.)

Put a moratorium on clichés

I said above that Sci-Fi authors are imaginative in the wrong ways, and here’s why. Sci-Fi is plagued by tired themes that have been beaten to death over the last fifty years and need to be retired for at least the next hundred. “There are things man was not meant to know/do!” is one that’s been with us since the beginning of the genre, and is so old and dead that it needs to be discarded. Yet authors seem incapable of coming up with anything but these dead, tired, whipped to death themes. They just dress them up in new ways, and that’s not imaginative, at least not in the right way.

However, there are two of these themes that almost ensure bad Sci-Fi: Utopianism, and it’s antithesis, dystopianism.

Like any other theme, these were both interesting when they first appeared. But by the time Ryker was spouting such idiotic lines as, “We no longer enslave animals for food production” on television, utopianism had become a parody of itself (hence, the idiocy of the line). Mad Max was cool, but by the time we got Waterworld, dystopianism had become farcical.

Of all the dead clichés in Sci-Fi, these two annoy me more than any others, because they’re both so inherently ludicrous, because they almost always overwhelm the story, and because they nearly always lead the writer into abject stupidity. Neither is original, and neither is interesting. Both need to go. Permanently.

Fantasy is not Sci-Fi

Back in the 60s and 70s, there was a war going on between the hard-core Sci-Fi folks and the squishy, not-very-scientific speculative fiction folks. I fall firmly into the former camp, although I did think at the time that some of my fellows were anal to the point of being silly.

That war no longer rages as it did then, and the speculative fiction folks seem to have won. So at Barnes and Noble, Sci-Fi and Fantasy are shelved together, and the Sci-Fi Channel is more likely to be airing a werewolf movie than a space flick. And crucially, nobody seems to notice.

This is important because I believe that the victory of the squishy, not-very-interested-in-science speculative fiction folks is the reason that shows revolving around magic, such as the Roddenberry franchise, are presented as if they were Sci-Fi. I also believe this victory is the reason that possibility rules, and nobody much cares about probability.

Understand that I’m not knocking Fantasy. But it isn’t Sci-Fi. Magic isn’t science, even when it’s presented as if it were.

Plenty of highly educated science geeks love speculative fiction, and don’t much care that it is presented as if it were Sci-Fi, but they are not the general populace. Back in the 60s when the hardcore Sci-Fi v. squishy not-so-sci speculative fiction war was at its hottest, we lived in a heavily science-oriented society.

That’s no longer true. We now live in a society in which science is under siege from all sides, and people now believe in “alternative medicine,” crystals, auras, chakras, chi-energy, aromatherapy, feng shui, accupuncture, “organic food” and “body toxins,” oh, the list never ends. The fundamental irony is that all of these forms of magic, just like the Star Trek franchise, use para-scientific babble to legitimize their magic.

The language of science, then, is still highly valued, but science itself, not so much.

And these are not correspondent in some way to religion. Magic has supplanted science to a large degree precisely because in order for the magic to be legitimate, it must somehow be presented as if it were science.

I’m not implying causation here. Whether there is any, I cannot say. But “magic-as-science” predominates both in our society and Sci-Fi.

But waving crystals to heal somebody is magic, not science, just as the Roddenberry franchise is Fantasy, not Sci-Fi.

Good Sci-Fi

Both Battlestar Galactica and Blade Runner are not only good, but great Sci-Fi, for mostly the same reasons.

Neither falls prey to the traps that the Star Trek franchise exemplifies. In BSG, there are only two identifiable areas in which the world is more technologically advanced than we are: Space travel (like I said, you pretty much have to dispense with relativity to have Sci-Fi) and artificial intelligence (the people created the cylons, recall). There are no ray guns — the weapons shoot bullets. There are no transporters or replicators or holodecks. The technology in BSG is so minimal that it cannot detract from the characters and the story.

Few, if any, of the events in the plot cross the probability line. There is a spiritual streak in the show, undeniably (the show is supposed to be heavily Mormon influenced, much as The Magic Flute is Masonic, although I don’t know enough about the LDS to comment on that), so we have Six, Boomer, and Roslin sharing the same dream, for example, but — and here is the crucial point — it isn’t portrayed as if it were science. The dream is a dream, and nobody knows why or how they’re all sharing it. It isn’t “reconfiguring the dilithium crystals,” because it isn’t presented as if it were science.

The same is true of Blade Runner. We get hints of lots and lots of advanced technology, particularly in the scenery, but very little of it is part of the story. It never intrudes, much less takes over, as it does in every episode of the Roddenberry franchise. None of the events is so improbable that it cannot be believed.

Most importantly, both BSG and Blade Runner are about the characters and the story, and never contradict their own laws. Never is magic presented as if it were science, and in both, science really has very little to do with the story. And that’s because good Sci-Fi, like any other genre of literature, is about the characters and the story.

If we’re talking about literary Sci-Fi, books or short stories and not movies or television, then great Sci-Fi authors abound. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, the list goes on and on. And so do great novels, at least one of which was written by a one-hit wonder (Dune). In fact, my favorite Sci-Fi novel, er, novels, er, series isn’t, as you might imagine, prototypical hardcore Sci-Fi. The science is minimal, but it follows all of the rules (or I would find it incredibly annoying). I refer to the Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe. The Foundation Trilogy, I, Robot, Ender’s Game, Stranger in a Strange Land, Childhood’s End, Cities in Flight, again, the list goes on and on.

The problem with Sci-Fi on film is, I think, that writers are far too tempted to substitute gizmoness and special effects for substance, which is an even larger problem than in novels, because of the time limits involved — see I, Robot, the recent movie, as an example, and I Am Legend as an all too rare counterexample. Here, again, BSG excels, as the writers pack the maximum amount of substance into each episode, with only a few exceptions. Then, there are the Sci-Fi novels that are so complex that they cannot be successfully filmed — and speaking of, I read the other day that they’re going to film Dune again, a project that’s doomed before it begins — but that’s another topic for another day.

We need more shows and movies that revolve around the characters and plot, with less technowizardry and fewer special effects. I’m not holding my breath waiting for either.

As an addendum, unlike all of the Star Trek geeks, I rather liked Enterprise, precisely because they didn’t have a magic gadget for everything, and weren’t able to use gadgets as deus ex machina devices. I thought Enterprise jumped the shark when the writers introduced the time travel nonsense, pulling the show back down into the same, tired, not-very-sci Sci-Fi camp as the other shows.

to the nearest movie theater this weekend and see Prince Caspian! Yes, the kids too — especially the kids.

One of the great spoof comedies of the 90s is on Starz: Mystery Men.

“I’m Pencil Head!”

“And I’m Son of Pencil Head!”

“We erase crime!”

“I’m the PMS Avenger. I only work four days out of the month. You got a problem with that?”

Despite the cool, drizzly weather.

• Prince Caspian
• Scott’s on Saturday, and
• Scott’s on Sunday, since they’ll be at the Big Spring in Bellefonte (I guess that means we basically spend the weekend in Bellefonte)

Mmmmm, roasted pork sandwiches and C.S. Lewis!

Good flick, a few spots that drag, but well worth seeing. Some of the best scenes are when he’s perfecting the design in the lab. And yes, what you’ve heard is true: Robert Downey Jr is the best thing about the movie.

Jaw-droppingly lame?

Anyway, the asskickinest new show on TV is DEA on Spike. The cameramen put on bullet-proof jackets and follow a DEA team around Detroit, and documenting them busting scumbags. That all by itself would be asskickin, but one of the agents, Woody, is one of the smoothest guys you’ve ever seen as he talks the bipedal excrement into flipping on their suppliers.

So where does jaw-droppingly, speechlessness-inducingly, fry-your-brain lame come in? In this, ahem, “review” I found while looking for clips. Oh, wait. Before I quote this . . . well, st00pidity, let’s note who wrote it:

Spike’s ‘DEA’ fails to capture Detroit
Mekeisha Madden Toby / Detroit News Television Critic

Got that? This drooler actually gets paid to write this drivel. Think about that as you read:

Spike’s ‘DEA’ fails to capture Detroit
Mekeisha Madden Toby / Detroit News Television Critic

The one truly authentic Detroit moment in Spike TV’s new reality crime series “DEA” comes neither from the endless obligatory shots of the city’s skyline nor the occasional pan of dilapidated buildings along Hamilton Avenue.

The essence comes through when Detroit DEA agents are on a stakeout waiting for a confidential informant to arrive and a man from the neighborhood comes up and asks what the men are doing.

First, the cops lie and say they are just checking out the buildings. When this doesn’t work, DEA agent Rick “Woody” Gatewood tells the man that he and his partner are from Channel 7 and they’re following up on a story.

A true Detroiter, the man clearly doesn’t believe him and asks Gatewood (who seems to own and wear every Detroit T-shirt in existence) for proof.

“You got a business card?” the man asks. Of course he doesn’t. Eventually, the man goes away and so, too, does the little Detroit flavor the series possesses.

While the narrator spends a great deal of time at the beginning of this Al Roker-produced series telling viewers how dangerous Detroit is, how it has the highest murder rate in the country and how many hundreds of thousands of illegal guns there are on the street, Roker and his producers fail to establish a sense of place. Our Motown is so much more than a list of frightening statistics.

Yes, we get it. Detroit is the big bad city and these DEA agents — who are shadowed for six episodes — risk their lives every time they bust a drug house or make an arrest. This is indisputable. The producers and camera people go to great lengths, themselves wearing bullet-proof vests, to prove to us how much is on the line.

Unfortunately, the same care isn’t taken when accurately portraying the most crucial character in the whole production — Detroit itself.

You can reach Mekeisha Madden Toby at (313) 222-2501 or mmad den@detnews.com.

How, exactly, does this moron come to believe that it’s somehow the show’s obligation to “capture Detroit”? Look, idiot, see the name of the show? DEA? The show could be filmed in Milwaukee and it wouldn’t make any difference, because the DEA is the point of the frakking show. Is it called Detroit? No? And why do you suppose that might be, idiot?

But if you look a bit beyond that, this “review” is even st00pider than it appears. What does she think this is, a National Geographic show? What, exactly, would “capture Detroit”? Quaint local savages in quaint local garb doing quaint local dances? Aging, hippies with grey hair and sagging breasts selling “organic” food at a farmers’ market? Insufferable latte-sipping, sushi-sucking liberals noshing at the local Starbucks? Your criminal mayor banging his ho’s in his office?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s wrong not only with newspapers, but universities. Mindless mouthbreathers like this manage to get journalism degrees. And how much would you like to bet that this idiot “reviewer” faints and slobbers all over herself at the mere mention of Obama?

Anyway, catch DEA. It kicks serious ass — literally.

The Music Man just started on Cinemax West.

The Ruins. I’ve seen worse. It could have been a lot better. It was poorly edited. There was far too much set-up, especially since there was no way to make us like the characters, and that left too little time for the horror. What horror was there was pretty good. Let’s just say you may never eat salad again after seeing it. I didn’t read the book, so I don’t know if it was the book or the screenplay, but the movie is even more archaeologically uninformed than Apocalypto. I can’t really say more about that without giving it away.

I could say there was far too much screaming and crying and whining and sobbing, but that goes for any horror movie. But there was way too much screaming and crying and whining and sobbing.

Several gratuitously violent scenes, but it’s by no means torture porn.

Not entirely a waste of money if you’re bored and have nothing better to do, and certainly not a movie that would tempt you to demand your money back, but if I were you, I’d wait until it comes out on HBO.

Just cause one of these shows is on now . . .

First, we have Sell This House! (A&E?). It works like this: We have a house that’s been on the market for months and hasn’t sold. The shows videotapes potential buyers walking through the house, saying things like, “I hate the color of the paint! I hate the couch!” The show then brings in hack designer Roger Hazard, who paints the walls (he also paints over wallpaper, which should be an automatic death penalty), moves the furniture around, and then the homeowners swoon all over his artistic genius. Finally, the same potential buys are brought back into the house, and now say, “I love the paint color! I love the couch, it has such a pretty sheet over it! I want to buy this house!”

Then, we have Moving Up. If you ever watched Trading Spaces, you’ll remember Doug Wilson, that obnoxious SOB who did everything he could to make the show a train wreck — you know, like painting a house to look like a jail cell and replacing all the chairs with seatless toilets, very creative. He hosts this show, and he’s even more of a sneering sack of cow feces than he before. The show works like this: We have three couples. Couple A is buying Couple B’s home, and Couple B is buying Couple C’s home. Couples A, B, and C have radically different tastes. Couples A and B (we never see C’s new home) hate everything about the house they’re buying, so they move in, tear down walls, put up walls, remove ceilings, add staircases, you name it. At the end of the show, Doug has the couples come back and look at their old home and provokes them into making nasty remarks, videotapes it, and shows it to the new homeowners.

What I want to know is where do they find these idiots?

Don’t like the couch? Who would decide not to buy a house because they don’t like the couch? Don’t they realize the couch doesn’t come with the house? Ditto for the paint. Are they too stupid to know they can paint the walls, and that the color of the paint isn’t the house? Frankly, I think these potential buyers are plants, and that the whole show is phony, even the homeowners who fawn all over that idiot Roger Hazard because he had enough intelligence to paint and they didn’t.

On the other show, the participants are even stupider. For one thing, these are expensive houses in neighborhoods with ridiculously high real estate prices. So they buy houses they hate? And it wouldn’t be an issue if they just repainted, but they don’t. They hate the whole architecture of the house. So why did they buy it? And from what they do, they must spend nearly the amount of the house on remodeling.

I suspect something’s fishy going on in this show, too. For each episode, they have to find three couples who are playing ring around the rosie with each others’ houses, all of whom have radically different tastes, all of whom are stupid enough to buy a house they hate everything about and are willing to double their investment (instead of just finding a house they like), and all of whom have to agree to be insulted by Doug Wilson on national television.

And I’m betting a lot of these idiots on Moving Up have lost their houses because they threw their money away on houses they hated, then more or less rebuilt, and now want the government to bail them out.

One of the series recording is John Adams on HBO. But the Military Channel is running an excellent series of documentaries called Revolutionary War, which I’m also recordi