Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

fter spending several hours writing over the weekend, I have most of the content for this week finished already. It's going to be review week! A review a day, or nearly every day, though I'm throw in various news items and other miscellaneous bullshit as well, as I always do.

Here's the line up.

• Today starts off with a review and discussion of Spartan, the new movie that I talked about several times last week.

• Tuesday you'll see a review of Patricia Cornwell's Jack the Ripper book, Portrait of a Killer, which I read a few weeks ago.

• Thursday I'll have a review of Red Dragon, comparing the book to the movie and discussing the Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal series in more detail.

• That will be followed up on Friday by the book/movie Hannibal getting similar treatment.

• I'm not sure about Saturday yet.  I might finally post a longer write up about the Tahoe trip, or I might finally write a discussion and review of Storm of Swords and the whole, brilliant, Song of Fire and Ice trilogy by George R. R. Martin.  The fourth book was due in April, but it's been delayed to August since he's not done writing it yet, and it's eagerly-awaited here at Casa Malaylux.

I started Martin's series a year ago, after a reader recommended it as a truly "great" fantasy series. I was skeptical until mid-way through book 2, when the plot twists and action really heat up, and by early in book 3 I was ready to give him "very very good" if not quite all the way to "great."  The ending to book 3 pushed me over the line to "great" at least in terms of plot, characters, plot twists, and everything along those lines.  It's the best plotted and most interesting fantasy series I've ever read, I can at least say that much.  I wouldn't say that Martin is a brilliant writer, purely in terms of prose and word choice, but then again hardly anyone is. After Clive Barker, my list gets pretty short.

And speaking of the Tahoe trip, as I was a bullet point ago, if you didn't notice it Saturday in the Latest Stuff box, the photos page for Tahoe is online, as is one for the John Muir redwoods National Monument visit with dad and Malaya.  As with all of my photos pages, these two combine a dozen or more digicam shots from the sight with long captions and additional discussion about the trips and locations.  Enjoy.

There are two news items today, both of them basically ridiculous.

¤ George Carlin, of all people, has weighed in with some intelligent comments on the current fever of "indecency" that various moralistic politicians are riding like a broken down whore.  So to speak.

So what does the 66-year-old Carlin think of the current handwringing over what is indecent, profane, obscene, immoral, lewd or insulting?

"More of the same, more of the same. What are we, surprised?" Carlin told The Associated Press on Friday.

He blamed it on religious moralism, media commercialism and election-year politics.

"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition. ... There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

Seems to pretty well sum up the issue to me.

¤ Here's one that Malaya found somewhere, forwarded to me, and that I should just post directly to the ever-expanding Religion vs. Reality Article and be done with it. It's an editorial on a Science and Religion news site, and it argues that, the "Bible leaves no room for extraterrestrial life."

As it happens, I agree with him.  The Bible was written over 2000 years ago, by people who knew nothing of science or astronomy, other than enough to put names to some of the shiny points of light in the sky.  Expecting them to discuss life on other planets, when they didn't have even the faintest inkling that the earth was a planet itself, would be like cursing microprocessors since there aren't any schematics for cell phones in the Old Testament.

However, I don't believe this is quite how the author intends his argument to be taken.

In conclusion, despite spending millions of dollars, NASA and others have not found the slightest proof for life anywhere but Earth. Behind the search is the metaphysical assumption that life evolved from nonliving chemicals on Earth, so there is no reason it couldn’t evolve elsewhere. Chemical evolution has such major hurdles that if life were found on Mars, the most reasonable assumption is that it came from Earth somehow. Scripture mentions nothing about biology outside Earth, but looking at the big picture of the Bible, it seems hard to reconcile it with extraterrestrial intelligence.

You should read the whole thing; it's only five paragraphs and it's pretty interesting just to see the guy's point of view. The thing I found funniest about the page was the vote. No, not just for the utterly incoherent opening sentence.

Spirit and Opportunity rendering images of Mars, many are waiting to see if life does exist beyond Earth - and what sort of life that is. If further research proves we are not the only life in the universe, what does this mean in terms of our understanding of creation?

• No impact on our understanding of creation. -- 45 %
• The discovery makes it less plausible that God created everything. -- 23 %
• The idea that God created everything is strengthened. -- 32%

The vote results aside, what do you think true believers will do, once there's proof of life off of the earth?  The author of the editorial is clever, since even though he says there's probably not life off of earth, he hedges his bets by arguing that if meteorites on earth could have come from Mars, why couldn't ones from Earth have gone there and seeded the planet with life?

Well, I can think of a few reasons.

For life to travel from the Earth to Mars, said "life" would have to be on a rock that was blasted out of earth's orbit by an tremendous meteor impact.  The life would have to survive that blast, then stay alive for centuries or millennium while the rock floated through the millions of miles of the airless vacuum of near-absolute zero space. Then once it hit Mars, presumably billions of years ago, when Mars still had an atmosphere capable of keeping the surface warm enough for liquid water to exist, the rock would fall to the surface, traveling thousands of miles an hour in a ball of flame.  This Earth "life" would then have to find conditions on Mars that it could survive in, and live long enough to spread across enough of the planet so that our probes, searching the .00000001% of the planet they have access to, could find clear signs of it, 2 or 3 billion years later

It's pretty absurd, and that's the point. This creationist "scientist" seems to not understand that no one says Earth was seeded with life from Mars.  The meteorites from Mars that were found here with possible signs of life in them didn't mean they lived on Earth.  It meant that there was life on Mars, that it lived and died and was fossilized or left chemical traces, and then millions of years later a meteor impact blew that rock into space, and it eventually fell to Earth.

As for the likely result of clear proof of life on other planets, as there's likely to be life we can understand anywhere there was or is liquid water, it'll be further confirmation of religion.  Everyone's religion.  God is great, God created life elsewhere, God left that info about of the Bible/Quran/Greek Mythology because He was testing us, or He didn't think humans could handle that knowledge. Or it's covered under the whole "gave man dominion over all forms of life on earth or elsewhere in the solar system or universe" clause in Genesis.

When people want to believe in something, they're going to believe in it.  And facts and evidence and logic can only go so far against faith.  They don't call it blind for nothing. Though that's not really an accurate adjective for faith, since it's not just blind, it's willfully ignorant.  Faith is able to adapt to any changing circumstance, and able to be reinforced by any new information; you just have to know the trick of viewing the new facts in the right light.

They could find 4 foot tall fossilized humanoid skeletons on Mars and it wouldn't be six months before Christians were saying they were the descendants of Cain whence he was sent in exile after the whole jaw of an ass incident, Jews were saying they were the true lost tribes, Muslims were saying they were mentioned in some obscure quatrain that gave all praise to Allah, and Mormons were retroactively baptizing them so they could get into Mormon heaven.

(The following contains no spoilers.  Which is not something I can say about any of the other Spartan reviews that I've read.)

Yes, Spartan!  The movie! After I blogged about it at excessive length, two days in a row last week, I was pretty much obligated to go and sit through it. And so I did.

Over the weekend, Malaya and I caught a matinee, or at least we tried to catch a matinee. They have matinee pricing until 6 on weekdays, but we had to pay $9 a head for the 5:25 showing on Saturday at the Walnut Creek Century Cinema. Bleh.

On top of that Malaya was hungry and wanted to get food, and I wasn't and didn't. Well, I wanted to, but the prices ruled that out, movie theater food being priced on a par with room service in a hospital.  On an airplane.

The prices in theaters really are absurd, and I'm convinced, counter-productive. I'd love popcorn and a soda at the movies, and would pay perhaps 5x what the raw ingredients would cost me in the real world.  But when it's $3.15 for a small soda and $3.95 for a small popcorn, and about $1.50 each more for a large of each... that's just insane. I simply refuse to pay that.

I understand that they want to take advantage of the monopoly they create by banning food and drinks, but why do they overdo it so much? If they changed high prices, but not ridiculously high, I would probably give in to my cravings and get something at least every other movie, just to reward their common sense pricing.  Everyone knows that soda is essentially free, when bought in bulk, and popcorn is even cheaper; the packaging might well cost more to produce than the kernels. Hell, you can get a 36 pack of microwave popcorn in every flavor imaginable for about $8 at CostCo, and a 30 cube of soda for something like $8. And that's small servings with more packaging.  You know that movie theaters pay a fraction of that, buying their popcorn in 50lbs bags and making soda from syrup, tap water, and compressed air.

But anyway, figure that a movie theater large is about triple a home serving, and for that you're paying something like $10, vs. $2, tops, at home.  Not that you'd drink 3 sodas and eat three bags of microwave popcorn at home. At least I hope not. What do you, work at Blizzard North? (Oh that's right, no one works at Blizzard North anymore. This is actually a good thing, since when I look at the delay/damage to my writing career Diablo II did, the release of Diablo III could have taken another 3 or 4 years.)

If movies sold popcorn for say, $2, $2.50, $3.50, and sodas for $1.50, $2, $3, and gave you refills on larges, they'd probably sell 4 or 5x as much as they do now, and the few people who do pay their ridiculous food prices now would not only buy more, say candy bar along with the popcorn, but would probably go to the movies more, rather than budgeting it like an expensive dinner for two; something they can only afford to do once a month, or less. I'd pay $3.50 for a drink and some popcorn, and they'd still make about $3 profit on the sale. Now it's $6 for the same thing, and most people just don't pay it. Or if they do they hate the movie for the prices and themselves for giving in and paying them for such shitty food.  And that's no mood to begin watching a film in.

I assume they've done extensive market research on this, and raised prices and raised prices until they saw their profits begin to diminish.  Plus this way they need to buy far less stuff, pay less to have it delivered and stocked, pay fewer teenagers to work in the concessions stand, etc. So they're probably making money as best they could on it; I just dislike it since I'm poor and would like a snack at the movies, but refuse to pay their outrageous prices for it.  If you'd like to make a difference in my movie theater starvation, feel free.

Once in the theater, saving a seat while Malaya ventured forth in search of something vaguely-affordable on the menu, I looked around at our fellow movie-goers, and noticed something immediately. They were hella old!  I'd never seen a movie with an audience skewing so old; afterwards Malaya remarked that we were probably the youngest people in there, and she might have been right. In front of and to the sides of us were nothing but 40 y/o+ couples, with gray-hairs scattered around as well.  I never saw a TV ad for Spartan, and they obviously didn't have much of a promotional budget or effort behind this film, but perhaps what few ads they did have were on old people TV shows?  Or is Val Kilmer just skewing 40+ now?

We got the usual five trailers, but nothing new.  I did see the Denzel Washington trailer for Man on Fire at last.  I've clicked the link for it on trailer sites at least half a dozen times, forgetting what it's about, but every time I see the picture with Denzel playing a tough guy, I laugh and click back. He's not a bad actor, but he's just too friendly and smiley a guy to be believable with a gun.  At least that's what I thought, but when I was finally forced to watch the trailer... it wasn't bad.  I still think it would be a far better movie with another actor, basically anyone but Will Smith or Jim Carrey or some other comedian, but Denzel wasn't glaringly out of place in it. I'm not going to pay to see it, but hey, it wasn't a disaster. It's a very informative trailer, but one that anyone who wanted to see the movie already would hate, since it gives away virtually the entire plot.

They also showed the inexplicable trailer for the overly-wordy Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Whole Ten Yards, another one I can't remember, and The Ladykillers.  Ladykillers got the only audible audience response, as people murmured and I heard a couple of, "I like him." or "I want to see that." type remarks as the trailer began with Tom Hanks. It's grown on Malaya and me also, and we'll probably go see it.

As for the others, The Whole Ten Yards is an odd case.  I clicked on it recently on the Apple site, with the name ringing no bells at all.  And winced through it, thinking it was another Hudson Hawk disaster for Bruce Willis, as he tried to combine action with comedy.  Until Malaya, who was watching it on my computer with me, pointed out that it was a sequel, and that yes, that dorky guy was one of the idiots on Friends.  At that point The Whole Nine Yards belatedly came into my memory as a movie title I'd once heard and had negative interest in. I'd totally forgotten it, and the overly-cute title of the sequel hadn't reminded me at all. It's a bad title, since every American man and most American women who hear it will think it's a football movie (Ten yards being the amount required for a first down in football, the overly rule-stuffed most popular sport in America.) Apart from the title, it's a train wreck of a trailer, needing only a cheesy line-spitting "Mr. Voice" narrator to drop it down to the train wreck level of Garfield the Movie. I didn't hear one chuckle during the whole awkward slapstick-filled trailer, as one bad line after another assaulted my ears. It's hard to believe that such an awful trailer could be created from a movie that wasn't equally as bad, but I suppose it's possible.  Not that I'll ever find out personally, I assure you.

I refer to Sky Captain and the really long title is as "inexplicable" since I have no idea how they got the money to make it, who thought it was a viable movie idea, and what their target audience is. You really have to watch the trailer to know what I'm talking about, and it's worth watching even if you don't think the movie will be any good.  It's some sort of past history scifi, with 50's looking robots/aliens invading the earth and stomping cities flat while search lights crawl across their impressively-riveted bodies and hundreds of others fly overhead like planes on their way to a bombing run in World War II. All done in this weird, soft focus, glowing silver light that's obviously created with computer graphics.  Mixed into this is some guy, the Sky Captain, who flies around in a circa WW2 fighter, complete with propeller and wing-mounted machine guns and has dog fights with the robot alien things, in between wooing a hot, eye-patched Angelina Jolie, and Gwyneth Paltrow in the Lois Lane reporter role. Sky Captain is played by Jude Law, who I would have sworn was Brendan Fraiser after seeing the trailer.  He's got that same, overly-earnest but stupid face.

Putting aside the absurdity of a WW2 plane with a top speed of about 300 miles an hour engaging in dog fights with robots so advanced they couldn't even be built today, and the total lack of any discernable plot other than some War of the World-esque invasion flick... who the hell is going to see this?  The robots are appealing to 60 y/o men who played with similar things when they were kids, and antique toy collectors. The computer graphics aren't the cool type kids will like, and they're too obviously CGI for toy robot loving adults to be interested in. All of the stars are quality actors but none can "open" a movie, and they're all adults near 30, so the movie isn't going to pull kids or the 18-24 bracket. The trailer doesn't tell you anything about the movie other than that there are some aerial dogfight scenes and lots of giant robots; no love story or human element to make women or couples want to see it... who does that leave?  It doesn't look bad, it's just one that I see everyone thinking, "Pretty, but not for me. Maybe a rental..."

It could be the best movie of the year, but who would know? I'd hate to be the marketing department working on this one.

All of the trailers were all adult-skewing films, as you'd expect given the audience for Spartan. When they started playing, I whispered to Malaya, "What if they show Shrek 2?" She shrugged, probably too horrified at the thought of being hit with spoilers for her most-anticipated film of the summer to think rationally. Luckily for her, they didn't show it.  Not that we thought there was much chance they would, given how they bundle trailers with movies by demographic interest.

So all of that Harry Knowles style endless intro to his movie review aside, how was Spartan? Remember, there aren't any spoilers in this, which means there's virtually nothing about the plot or events, but hey, that's the price you pay for going without spoilers. There are currently 77 of them on Rotten Tomatoes, if you want variety.

It wasn't great, or at least not greatly-enjoyable, but it was a pretty good movie. We enjoyed it. Well made, interesting characters, complex and intricate plot, etc.  I wished I'd gone in without having seen the trailer or read any reviews for it, since then I would have been playing along with the characters in it when they think someone is dead, or are trying to figure out a loose end or follow a trail, etc. Instead I knew how pretty much everything was going to go, or at least knew something that was going to happen later on.  There was still some suspense, since I didn't know every plot twist, but it would have been more fun if I'd been totally in the dark.

Of course the only reason I went to see it is that I had read a bunch of reviews and they all said it was pretty good, and I liked the trailer once I watched it again. So I wouldn't have seen it at all if I hadn't been pre sold on it, and the pre-selling required plot details and other information.  Catch-22.

So the movie. It's smart, dark, harsh, and intelligent. Lots of people die, good guys and bad guys, and it's very real life with the violence coming suddenly and shockingly. Two guys walking along... one drops dead with no warning whatsoever. If you like your movies very Hollywood style, with everything explained and 

It starts off immediately, with things happening right away and no fucking around. There is very little exposition; you learn things as the characters learn them, or learn them from viewing what's happening.  A woman has been kidnapped, or has vanished, the bodyguard left his post and allowed it to happen, and the vanished person is obviously very important since dozens of government agents are in a lather trying to figure out where she went, who took her, if she's run off, etc. As the viewer, you are plunged right into the heart of this, and the camera is an observer in a command center that's being put together on the fly and is understaffed and chaotic and under a severe time crunch. You get a sense of urgency, you see how good Val Kilmer's character is at what he does, and from there the action takes off and never lets up.

Well, I use "action" in a non-Hollywood way.  It's not the action of cheesy car chases and mindless shootouts and people running around doing stupid stuff with lots of quick camera cuts. Spartan's action is more like a rapid series of key events, many of which go very wrong or at least differently than the viewer and the characters expect them to go. I didn't count, but there must be 20 different sets in the film, where key events take place. Things are constantly happening and moving along rapid fire, characters come and go, the body count increases in all the wrong ways, and as a viewer you're just trying to keep up with things, rather than being 5 steps ahead, as is the case in your average brain-dead thriller.

It's not a movie to see if you like traditional explanation-heavy, stupid-hero type Hollywood movies. You need to enjoy chaos, confusion, clusterfucks, and characters who do things for their own reasons and agendas, rather than just to advance the plot and to be the hero types you always see in movies but never in real life. It's also got a happy ending, sort of, that may actually be a depressing, unhappy ending, depending on how you look at it. It's logical and consistent with the characters and the rest of the film, at least, which is more than most movies can say.

It reminded me of Ronin, which was also written by David Manet (he wrote and directed Spartan). That film was faster and had far less plot, but was similar in the brutal, shocking action and dialogue, and both films were populated by tough, internalized characters who give away nothing of themselves.  Malaya could see the comparison, but oddly enough she hated Ronin, while I liked it mildly, and she liked Spartan a lot, while I liked it, but less than she did.

There's a scene in Ronin where DeNiro and the IRA woman are in the car and have to pretend to kiss to disguise themselves from the cops.  They do so, out of duty and professionalism, and after the kiss and the cops pass by both of them look at each other, look around, adjust their clothing, etc. And then a moment later the woman leaps back onto DeNiro and they kiss, and they really kiss the second time, with passion and desire.

Nothing like that happens in Spartan; in fact there's no kissing at all.  But it's the suddenness of things, and how real they feel when they happen that makes it work, for me.  People try hard, act nobly, and then they get cut down out of the blue, and that's it. No miracle recoveries or slow fades to black with a fade back in in a hospital with a loved one nearby.  The other characters in Spartan suffer losses, but they have to just keep on going, leaving the dead where they fall and saving their grief for a later day.

Not that it's all about dying, but the dying was handled so much differently in this movie than in most Hollywood fare that it's the thing that most stood out in my mind. I feel influenced by it, somewhat.  I've handled death in my stories in various ways, sometimes quick and harsh and unforgiving, like in Ronin and Spartan, but not always. And I'm not always going to do it this way, or any other way, but after all, variety is the spice of life. And death.

See Spartan if you like to be challenged, both in plot and events, and you don't mind cynical and unhappy things happening in movies. But you'd better hurry, or wait for the DVD since it's only on 800 screens, and it's had zero press, and it's not going to make much money or stick around for long.

I'd give it about a 6/10 in terms of being enjoyable, and a 8/10 in terms of quality of movie and plot and characters and such.  I can easily imagine some viewers who would agree with me on the quality rating, even while they hated the movie and wanted those two hours of their life back.  But that's how it goes with hard-edged films like this one; opinions will differ, sometimes strongly.

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