Books Lying Open
¤ The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
¤ The Bachman Books, Stephen King
¤ Bushwhacked, Molly Ivins
¤ Skinwalkers, Tony Hillerman

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ The silent treatment.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because I like that picture best, and I can always check the date elsewhere.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your social lubricants remain forever unconsumed.

Having read a few things about Reagan since he died, it seems I was wrong, and that he really did a lot more than I gave him credit for doing. Apparently he broke with most of his military advisors when it came to believing Gorbachev and agreeing to make some cuts in our nuclear arsenal, and he wasn't purely the clueless old goof I'd always thought.

As for his death, who knew he was still alive? Alzheimer's has kept him away from public life since the late 90s, and as recently as a week ago, I couldn't have said whether he was alive or already dead with any real certainty.

I don't watch any TV news, and I haven't been reading any of the Reagan obits, so my only impression of what's being said publicly about him comes from the various political blogs I read. Most of them are centrist or left wing, and most of them have been basically full of quotes from every ridiculous, fact-deprived hagiography about Reagan they can find. The biggest lies are familiar ones; Reagan was the most popular president ever, Reagan won the Cold War single-handedly, Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall, and so on.

Just to throw in a quick quote from a recent, all-purpose post on Atrios:

As is often the case for me, I'm much more interested in the news about the event than the event itself. And the most interesting and amusing things to come about due to Reagan's death are the shitstorms of rightwing hatred directed towards anyone who dares say he wasn't just the bestest fellow ever. Ted Rall is one of the few liberals willing to make strong statements, and then back them up with TV appearances. He seems to have an at least passing acquaintance with the facts, so I wouldn't call him a left wing version of Ann Coulter, but he's not afraid to stir things up. And he did so about Reagan's death with a blog entry on his site, though it's far less of a hatchet job than your typical anti-Clinton article. Here's the post, since it's short:

Now honestly, what's so offensive about that? Rall obviously hated Reagan's policies and thought he did a horrible thing with the Grenada invasion and the Iran-Contra arms sales.  It's his opinion; no one else has to agree with it.  It's not like he came out with conspiracy theory craziness and claimed Reagan murdered people to get his job, murdered advisors who failed him, sold drugs while he was governor, etc. (All things you an easily find right wing types claiming about Clinton, I might add.)

I can see a person who admired Reagan disagreeing with Rall on the issues, but what's so personal about it? Rall didn't suggest digging Reagan up and burning his corpse, or nailing Nancy into the coffin with him, or anything really offensive.  I can see someone disagreeing on the Grenada issue, and Rall's blaming Reagan for 9/11, and the issue of alienating our allies... but how about the rest?

There's no doubt that the CIA under Reagan supplied weapons and aid to the Afghan resistance so they could fight the Soviets, and that those people evolved over time into the Taliban. There's also no disputing that Reagan racked up record (for the time, Bush II has shattered all of them) budget deficits, that people serving under him sent weapons to terrorists in the Iran-Contra affair, and that Reagan pushed huge cuts in education and was responsible for the cost of college education increasing dramatically.  Those are historical facts; they can't be disputed.  A Reagan fan could certainly say they are far less important than all of the other things Reagan did, and that it's stupid to obsess over those few points when they're not important, etc. I'm not making the argument, but it could be made. But since at least half of the stuff Rall said was 100% true, and the rest was at least borderline true, what's to get so upset about?

Of course expecting logic to factor in when emotion is involved is usually a foolish tactic. As Rall found out, when he got links from numerous right wing blogs and media programs, and started receiving a seemingly endless avalanche of hate mail.  Check out this entry, or this one, where Rall's quoted numerous of his admirers. Be warned though, you'll encounter an astonishing amount of dirty language, hatred, dreadful writing, and misspelled words. A sample:

And remember, as stupid as those emailers all seem to be... they still get to vote. Even the ones who think homosexual slurs are the height of argumentative brilliance, and the most certain way to insult someone. 

Looking at Rall's blog now, basically the whole thing is about Reagan and right wing hate mail and hagiographic glorification of the dead president. Just go to the top and scroll down if you want to, but feel free to skip along; I got bored with the subject halfway down the page.  I can only wonder what sort of feedback he's gotten about his most recent article. It's been among the top 20 most emailed stories on Yahoo for a week, and it's basically the blog entry expanded, minus the burn in hell part.

Here's another example of this sort of thing, where a liberal wrote a column that's actually a lot more critical of Reagan than Rall's blog entry was. And got a ton of incoherent, curse-filled hate mail, but quite a bit of approving agreement as well. I guess I'm mostly bemused by the fact that no one seems to spend a second arguing the points made in the anti-Reagan articles, and just spends their time flaming the writer. Where does the personal antipathy come from? Why do people feel so threatened by the fact that some few writers dare to express their dislike for Reagan and his policies?

Lastly, this isn't specifically about Reagan, but about anyone who dies. What's with that "How dare you say bad things about him/her while the family is in mourning?"

When the hell are you supposed to comment on the life's work of the deceased? Everyone else is writing love poem style obits about them, and if you disagree what are you supposed to do? Talk about your cats for two weeks, and then start writing your rebuttals once the public debate has moved on to other subjects?   You strike while the iron is hot, and the subject is in the news. In a week no one will care, and if you write about the person then, you'll be ignored as behind the times.

he Chronicles of Riddick.

Malaya and I saw the film Friday afternoon, ignoring the precipitously-declining review average on Rotten Tomatoes. And we're sorry we did. Critics don't know everything, and you can pretty much count on any action movie getting poor reviews, but in this case Riddick is at 24% positive, with just 23 good reviews out of 97 now listed, and it's there on merit. The movie is a train wreck.

It's got good parts, and if like action and you fast forwarded and only watched the best 45 or 60 minutes, you'd be okay.  Unfortunately, the movie is nearly 2 hours long, it feels longer, and very few movie theaters come equipped with remote controls.  My categorized rating:

The Chronicles of Riddick
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 3
Must See on the Big Screen: 4
Overall: 3.5

Basically it's a gorgeous movie with some good set pieces and a cool character as the hero, dreadful dialogue, lots of boring and unimportant minor characters, an unraveling shoestring of a plot, and utterly-impossible, repeatedly-unsatisfying action sequences. It could have been good; they had the budget and special effects and ideas and decent actors. The script let them down though. It needed massive work, I'm talking multiple rewrites, and I just don't think the director was up to it. The movie doesn't tell any sort of coherent story, it doesn't build in action or intensity, and after a pretty good first half hour, it steadily falls apart.

(I'll be calling the film CoR for short in this review, to avoid confusion with references to its eponymous main character, and will avoid any spoilers until the concluding comments, where I list a few minor ones, and give a warning in bold.)

Script/Story: 3
There's not much to say here. They had a few novel concepts, Riddick is cool, the bad guys have some dimension to them (not just mindlessly bad, as the trailer makes them seem) but the way it all comes together is just not acceptable. I was bored during most of the last hour, until the very ending, which has an acceptable twist, setting us up for CoR 2. Which may or may not happen, but I hope if it does the director/creator brings in some more writing talent. The whole thing sort of reminded me of Star Wars Episode 1 and 2. Great look, good ideas here and there, but just not competently put together, and the demise of SW is due entirely to Lucas refusing to let anyone else touch his baby.

Acting/Casting: 5
I'd never seen Vin Diesel in anything. Not even Pitch Black, the prequel to CoR. After seeing CoR, I wouldn't buy a ticket just to see him, but I wouldn't stay away from a movie with him in it either. I thought he was fine doing what the roll demanded of him (being a bad ass and nothing more), and the character of Riddick was tough and pretty cool. No one else in the movie was anything other than acceptable though, and I didn't like the main bad guy much. He never brought anything more than a strong jawline, and his supposedly more than human powers were virtually nothing more than super foot speed.  The girl Riddick is trying to save (for no clear reason) was mediocre, the scheming 2nd in command of the Necromongers was useless, his Cleopatra-style wife was annoying, Judy Dench did nothing of any interest, and the assorted other soldiers, prisoners, mercs, etc, were all instantly forgettable.

I was also disappointed in an outer space scifi movie that had zero non-human characters. Judy Dench's character is an "elemental" which seems to mean that she's partially transparent at times.  Other than that, everyone was just a human, mostly Caucasians with olive skin.  There are two spiky-panther type creatures, but other than that there are no aliens of any kind. SW and other movies often overdo it with an excess of bug-eyed freaks who it's difficult to feel any empathy or connection to, but Riddick got boring with nothing but humans.

Action: 6
Here's where you'd like to think the movie would excel, and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. The direction of most of the fight scenes was shit; all style and close ups and rapid cuts. Very souped-up Bruckheimer style, and while that can work to make a fight seem faster and more intense, here it mostly just seemed like none of the actors actually knew how to fight, and the close shots and cuts and shaking camera tricks were employed to conceal that fact.

Eye Candy: 8
This is by far the best thing about the film. The sets are gorgeous, the worlds are well-conceived and have a great look, the costumes are good, the space ships and weapons are nice, etc. There are original sets and looks everywhere, the whole movie has a gorgeous (to me, at least) bronze and cobalt color scheme, and the special effects are top notch.  Riddick's glowing white pupils are cool, and really make the character. Without those he's just another shaved, oiled, muscle boy in a black wifebeater. The coolest thing about the space ships, especially the Necromancer vessels, is that they seem to breath this black vaporous gas. It swirls around their propulsion mechanisms, being sucked and and floating out as they fly and rippling and dissipating in the air. I loved the look of it.  The other ships have a nice look too, their jets leaving glowing ion trails as they fly and contrails streams at the tips of their wings, like smoke packs on jets at an air show.  Unrealistic, but damn pretty.

The architecture wasn't necessarily good, I mean I wouldn't want huge sculptures of angry male faces all over my walls, but it looked awesome in the movie and helped set the tone and mood nicely. Any portion of Riddick I sit through in the future will be largely due to how good most of the movie looked.

Fun Factor: 4
Sadly disappointing here, with way too much pointless scheming and ponderous dialogue and delays before the ass-kicking began. The gaggle of giggling 13 y/o boys sitting behind us actually got so bored that they left about 2/3 of the way through the film, if that gives you any idea.  I was quite glad they did though, since as the movie dragged on and they got bored they started giggling and talking and dropping things at a greater frequency.

Replayability: 3
For the whole movie: 1. I can't see anyone liking this enough to watch the whole thing again, unless they were very, very bored. For selected scenes, mostly the large exteriors with the special effect ships and troops and such: 9. But 10 or 15 quality minutes out of a 2 hour film is not a real strong average.

Must See on the Big Screen: 4
The eye candy would be improved, and the music was great with lots of drums and bass and should be heard in surround, but other than that, there's no reason to see it in the theater. There are many reasons to see it at home, the largest of which is that you could fast forward liberally. I might pick this one up from the library in a year just to skim over it and enjoy the eye candy, but other than that I can't imagine ever watching it again.

Overall: 3.5
I wanted to like it, and found myself enjoying it on and off through the first 30 to 45 minutes. After that it was sporadically enjoyable, at best. I'm also marking this one down since it just wasn't well made. The plot and story were as bad as the special effects were good, and I think that a capable director and editor could rework this film, cut 20-30 minutes of dead time, and greatly improve it.

I don't have an entry for "logic" but if I did, this movie would get about a 1.5, at best. There are many, many scenes where you can't help but think, "Oh that could so never happen." A few examples, most of which are somewhat spoilery:

• Mercs try to capture Riddick by firing impractical spiky nets at him, rather than just some sort of tranquilizer dart.
• People outrun the rotational speed of a planet to keep ahead of the rising sun, repeatedly.
• People running across the impossibly inhospitable and rough terrain of a planet are able to go faster than other people moving through a flat, straight tunnel below the surface, over a distance of 29.6 kilometers. Not to mention the way the ones on the surface just happen to run right up to and past various small manhole type observational tunnels just when the people in the tunnels are near them.
• People survive on the surface of a planet where the nighttime temperature is 300 below zero, and the daytime is 700 above. Besides the fact that no breathable air could last a second on this atmosphere-less rock, the sunrise comes with a huge incinerating cloud of death (what's there to burn when this happens every day?), and people can survive just fine as long as they're in the shade. Even though the temperature five feet away is supposed to be 700 degrees.
• Guards go down into the lower levels of a prison when there's no reason on earth for them to do so, other than let the condemned to death inmates attack them.
• Most of the space ships don't any living spaces, means of recreation, or even have any chairs, and appear to be about the size of a minivan. They all have artificial gravity though, and can easily house four or five people for weeks at a time though, when none of them have room to do more than turn around.
• And while this is true of most movies, no one in all of CoR is ever seen eating, drinking, bathing, changing clothing, sleeping, or needing to pee. They might as well be androids for all we see of their physical needs, and they aren't much more human emotionally either, never showing grief or fear or sorrow or even anger. They just sort of fight and die because the plot demands it of them; no one seems to do anything for any real human motivation.

I could go on and on, since basically every segment in the movie is full of utterly illogical and ridiculous stuff. That's true of most action movies and all scifi movies, but CoR spends a lot more time trying to be cool and pretty than intelligent. That technique works for actors, but not so well for the movie they're acting in.

Overall, it's just not a well-made film. Unprofessional and uneven. It reminded me of Episode 1 and 2 in a way, since it had great eye candy (I liked that aspect of CoRfar more than the Skittles-colored world of SW.) but the dialogue was death, the characters had no real motivation to do anything, and the films were all dragged down by boring subplots about galactic supremacy, war strategy, treaties, and more. CoR could have been good, and I suppose a sequel could be better-written and improve upon things, but since the ending of CoR set us up for much more of the boring political stuff, and removed Riddick's status as a hunted outsider, I doubt CoR2, if there is such a thing, will be any better.