Remember What I Said Yesterday About Penelope Cruz?

Specifically how she looks in pirate duds? Um, yeah…

The funny thing is, I never used to think she was all that attractive. Ten or so years ago, when she was breaking through into Hollywood and everyone was saying she was going to be the next big “it” girl, I just didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But at some point over the ensuing decade, something has happened. She’s grown into her own, or some random switch inside me clicked over or something… but whatever it was… please, sir, may I have some more?

Jun062011

Pirates 4: The First Real Movie I’ve Seen in Awhile

The title of this entry doesn’t mean what you probably think I mean. Read on to see what I’m really getting at.

The Girlfriend and I finally made it to see Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides yesterday. I say “finally” because we’ve tried several times over the past couple of weeks to catch the latest installment of the franchise, but for various reasons we did not succeed on our earlier attempts. So, you may be wondering, was the wait worth it? Well, yes, I would say so. Despite the generally mediocre reviews, Anne and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. There’s a new director this time out — Rob Marshall took the helm from Gore Verbinski, who helmed the first three Pirates movies — and the change seems to have made a tremendous difference, especially in the action scenes, which are actually comprehensible in Stranger Tides. (That’s a big, BIG deal for me. I do not like the jittery, super-fast editing style where you lose track of who is doing what, and although the earlier Pirates movies never rose to the ridiculous level of the Bourne movies — i.e., total incomprehensibility — they flirted with it enough that I was frequently frustrated with them.)

This Pirates is smaller in scope than the wanna-be-epic second and third installments, a lot of extraneous characters from the “original trilogy” have been pared away, and the whole thing just feels much lighter overall. Like the other films in the series, it’s too bloody long. (How is it that Errol Flynn managed to get all his swashbuckling done in roughly 90 minutes, but modern-day pirates need two-and-a-half hours?) However, I can’t recall squirming in my seat or checking my watch once. I pumped my fist and/or laughed out loud a number of times. The sequence in which Captain Jack escapes from King George’s palace and tears off through the streets of 18th-century London with the redcoats in pursuit is as much fun as I’ve had at a movie in years. (That sequence also includes an unexpected and delightful cameo from the ever-lovely Dame Judi Dench, who always makes me happy.) Surprisingly, after four movies, On Stranger Tides still manages to produce a couple grin-inducing references to the Disneyland ride that inspired this whole thing. And Penelope Cruz dressed in pirate clothes is nothing less than a force of nature. So, yeah, I recommend it. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it is what a pirate movie ought to be, namely a nice bit of summertime escapism from the dreary, slow-motion horror that is 21st century.

You wanna know what really made me happy about Pirates 4, though? This is probably going to sound very strange, but it is what it is… I found I was irrationally pleased to see a pattern of flickering horizontal scratches along the right side of the screen throughout the entire length of the movie. As a former projectionist, I spotted them instantly, and knew exactly what caused them. Once upon a time, scratches like that on such a relatively new film would’ve driven me crazy. Anathema! My job back then, and my quest as a viewer, was to achieve a perfect presentation, or as close to perfect as you could get with a strip of easily damaged celluloid sliding through a whirring, spinning, film-shredding mechanical gauntlet. In recent years, we’ve finally achieved perfection in the form of digital projection technology: a digitally projected movie is always crystal clear, always clean, the same after 1,000 or even 10,000 screenings as it was on the very first one. But that has created a different kind of problem, at least for me. Yes, I’m going to say exactly what my Loyal Readers are anticipating. Something has been lost in the change to digital projection. Movies don’t look like films anymore, if that makes sense. They no longer have the imperfections that used to be part of the experience: the film grain and dust specks and scratches and all the other stuff we tried so hard to eliminate. It’s arguably not the same art form any longer, because the medium is so utterly different now.

Seeing those scratches on Pirates 4 was a dead giveaway that I was watching actual film, that there was a human being up there in the booth threading a strip of celluloid through the rollers and sprockets and gates before every show, and not just a computer that turned everything on at the appointed time. The projectionist had made a mistake at some point and damaged the print, true, but those platter scratches (not to mention the eruption of scratches and garbage around one of the reel changes!) were organic to the medium, and weirdly enough, I did enjoy seeing them. It made me realize how much I miss scratches and hairs stuck in the gate and juddery splice marks and the “cigarette burns” that used to signal the end of a reel, and all the other artifacts of the Way Things Used to Be that have been lost since everything became just another variety of computer.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was a good movie, yes, but it was also a good film, in the literal sense. And it was really wonderful to see one again. At least it was for me… your mileage may vary.

Jun042011

I Wish I Could Afford to Live in San Francisco

You just don’t see well-known pirate lords riding public transit in Salt Lake City:

There’s an explanation of this unusual sight over at Telstar Logistics, which is where I spotted it myself. That’s a great blog, incidentally. If you’ve never been there, check it out; you’ll find lots of groovy goodness about cars, planes, ships, big industrial stuff, and general San Francisco flavor.

Jun022011

Because It’s Been a While Since I Chucked a Grenade…

Kevin Drum says what I’ve been thinking lately:

Republicans didn’t care about the deficit when Reagan was president, they didn’t care when Bush Sr. was president, and they didn’t care when Bush Jr. was president. They only get religion when a Democrat is president and they need an all-purpose reason to oppose everything Democrats want to do. Is this really too complicated to understand? It’s a political tactic — and a good one! — not a genuine reaction to anything in the real world. In the real world, stimulus spending is winding down, Medicare was reformed a mere 14 months ago and is solvent for at least another decade, Social Security is solvent for two or three decades, and the deficit is very plainly not a domestic spending problem. It wasn’t a problem at all until 2001, and after that it was caused by two gigantic tax cuts, two
unfunded wars, and a finance-industry driven recession. If we just let the tax cuts expire, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the economy moving, the medium-term deficit will disappear.

No comments please. I’m not in the mood to argue about things that ought to be self-evident.

Jun012011

The End Is Near

In a scene reminiscent of those fondly remembered early mornings before school some 30 years ago, I stayed up much too late last night watching space shuttle Endeavour‘s return to Earth live on the NASA TV website. There’s not much to see during a night landing, sadly. The shuttle doesn’t have navigation lights like an airplane — I don’t know why, exactly, but I’d guess it’s because the lights would have to go right where the shuttle needs maximum heat-shield protection, i.e., the leading edges of the wings and the belly — so she’s all but invisible until she’s right over the runway. But NASA TV did its best. For nearly an hour, it was showing us the same digital map the guys in Mission Control see, tracking the orbiter’s wild streak across the globe as she decelerated from 18,000 miles per hour to about 200, her speed when the wheels hit the tarmac. (Ironically, considering how testy I get when people question the safety of these craft, I felt rather irrationally anxious during the so-called “period of maximum heating,” thinking how awful it would be to have another Columbia-style re-entry accident now, so close to the program’s conclusion.)

As Endeavour approached Kennedy Space Center, the view switched to Commander Mark Kelly’s cockpit heads-up display, so we could see the runway lights coming up out of the black landscape. Then it was on to a ground-based night-vision camera, which revealed a ghostly green silhouette of the orbiter, her nose and wing edges glowing a brilliant white, presumably because of residual heat from re-entry. Then finally the show ended with only a few seconds of the view you see above, a real-color camera feed of Endeavour’s final landing. Smooth and beautiful as always. It’s something of a wonder we’ve never seen a bad landing from one of these birds, really.

I did experience a moment of alarm after Endeavour came to a stop. While Commander Kelly talked over the radio with the ground crews, running down his checklists, I noticed an unfamiliar flickering on top of the shuttle. It seemed to be coming from near the base of the vertical stabilizer, right between the two bulging OMS engine pods. I’d never noticed anything like that before, and I briefly wondered if perhaps engineers had figured out a way to put a light on the ship after all, or if perhaps it was a reflection from some light source on the runway. But no, it was too sporadic to be a strobe light or an old-style rotating beacon. Then suddenly I realized it was a flame. My god, a jet of flame! As I said, I’d never seen that before, and a cold trickle of fear slithered through my guts… Endeavour had made a textbook landing, but she now was on fire! I waited and hoped someone on the audio channel would address this mysterious flame, but no one said a word. Feeling a bit frantic, I tabbed over to Twitter and started combing NASA’s official tweets, looking for some comment… surely someone else had noticed this… and then I breathed a sigh of relief. There it was: “The flames you saw at the top of Endeavour were normal – the vents from the auxiliary power units.” No big deal, then. Still… how odd that after 30 years and who knows how many landings I’ve watched on TV, that I’d never before seen that “normal” venting. For a moment, the spaceship of my dreams seemed more like a woman than ever, with endless layers and secrets yet to be revealed. God, I’m going to miss these things.

As I think I mentioned in an earlier entry, STS-134 was Endeavour‘s 25th mission. She is the youngest of the shuttle fleet, built quite literally out of spare parts as a replacement for the lost Challenger, after the bean counters decided that would be more economical and efficient than refitting the old Enterprise prototype for spaceflight. Her final mission lasted just under 16 days, which brings the ship’s final total to 299 days in space, and 4,671 orbits. Her final odometer reading is 122,883,151 miles. And now she’s finished. She’s already been towed into Kennedy’s Orbiter Processing Facility, where her fuel tanks will be drained and her engines and thrusters removed, to be replaced with inert mock-ups. Once the taxidermists are finished with her, she’ll be off to the California Science Center and displayed like any other mounted rhino head. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Meanwhile, the rising Florida sun this morning was glinting off Endeavour‘s sister ship Atlantis, finally in place on Launch Pad 39A after its tedious seven-hour roll-out during the night. STS-135, the last mission of the shuttle program, is scheduled to go on July 8.

If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like when an era comes to a close, this is it, kids…

May312011

Yet Another Stunning Photo of Endeavour

The title of this entry says it all:

This nifty timelapse photo of space shuttle Endeavour was taken on Saturday, May 28, while the orbiter was still moored to the International Space Station. The streaks of light in the bottom-right quarter of the frame are cities passing by below, and if you look closely, you can make out stars through the thin shell of Earth’s atmosphere in the background. If you want to see this pic really large, check out NASA’s gallery. (Gleefully borrowed from the Bad Astronomy Blog.)

To bring all you Loyal Readers up to date, Endeavour undocked from the station late Sunday night and is expected to return to Kennedy Space Center in Florida tonight — or early tomorrow morning, depending on how you define things — at 2:35 AM EDT.

Meanwhile, shuttle Atlantis will begin its achingly slow, one-mile-per-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A — the final time a shuttle stack will ever make this six-and-a-half-hour trip — at 8 p.m. EDT tonight, which I believe is only about a half hour from the time I’m writing this. There’s a background article about the crawler vehicle that’s carrying the Atlantis stack, a pretty amazing machine in its own right, here, if you’re interested. NASA has two of these crawlers, both dating back to the Apollo program. I find myself wondering what the next vehicle they carry will be… assuming there will be one at all. The reality of the shuttle’s end is really starting to sink in for me now…

May272011

Downright Eerie

They say everyone has a doppelganger out there in the world somewhere, and I now have it on pretty good authority that mine is a music teacher from New Jersey. Seriously. According to my friends Keith and Danielle, the guy who’s giving lessons to their daughters looks just like me. So much so that their youngest girl was a little bit weirded out upon meeting me last night. But wait! It gets even creepier:

This dude’s name is Rick. My favorite musician’s name, as my Loyal Readers well know, is also Rick.

Rick the Music Teacher Who Looks Like Me plays the guitar. I own a guitar.

Rick the Music Teacher Who Looks Like Me eschews the Disney tunes and lame-o kiddie songs that are usually taught to children in favor of ’80s hits. I, of course, am all about the ’80s.

And lastly, Rick the Music Teacher Who Looks Like Me has an extensive collection of band t-shirts. And I… well, the resemblance is just frightening, I tell you!

I’m deeply curious about my apparent twin, but also cautious… what might happen if we were to meet? Would it disrupt the space-time continuum and destroy everything? It’s not worth that kind of risk, obviously. But still… I am intrigued…

May252011

From the Department of Bone-Headed Marketing Decisions

I’m seeing reports that Disney execs have changed the title of John Carter of Mars, the film adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels I grew up on, to — are you ready for this? — John Carter. Rumor has it they’re gunshy of the word “Mars” because their animated flick Mars Needs Moms crashed and burned so spectacularly this spring. What’s that, you don’t remember Mars Needs Moms? Yeah, well, neither does anyone else, and Disney knows it, and they apparently figure it’s because the word “Mars” was in the title. Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the trailers made it pretty apparent Mars Needs Moms was a shitty movie, could it? No, it has to be because audiences avoid movies that mention the planet Mars in the title. So they’ve dropped the word from the title of a movie that is about a guy roaming around a fantasy version of… the planet Mars.

Yeah, trying to downplay the movie’s premise and setting is really going to help attract audiences, isn’t it?

And it pisses me off because, as I mentioned, I loved the books on which the film is based and would like to see a good adaptation version of them, and also the movie was filmed here in Utah, so my home-team spirit has got me hoping it does well. But I have a hunch people who don’t already know what this film is about — which is probably most people, if we fanboys are being honest — are going to hear the new, shorter, and completely uninformative title and say, “What’s that about? Who the hell is John Carter?” After all, he’s not exactly a household name like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. And if they can’t figure out what the movie is about, they’re not real likely to want to see it, now, are they?

Good job, Disney… and for my fellow Burroughs fans out there who were excited at the prospect of a trilogy, as the movie’s producers at Pixar have proposed? I think we’d probably better stick with our tattered old paperbacks…

May252011

From the Department of Needless Complication

Walking to the office from the train today, I noticed a workman refreshing the paint on some traffic-barrier poles near my building. The poles were glistening in the strengthening morning sunlight, and there were signs taped to the pavement around them warning off the unwary who might brush against them. Something about this scene was so reminiscent of the television fantasies of urban life I’d been exposed to as a very small boy — think Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and about a billion cop shows set in the gritty decay of ’70s-vintage New York — that I couldn’t help but smile. But then I noticed something weird about those warning signs. One of them read “Almost Dry Paint,” which seemed like an unnecessarily specific descriptor. And then the sign next to the pole the man was still slathering with Battleship Gray read “Undry Paint.”

“Undry?” It’s bad enough that we now apparently feel it necessary to define different categories of wetness, but “Undry?” Really? Is that even a word? Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned clarity — not to mention concision — of “Wet?” Seriously, what could be more straightforward and absolutely not in need of elaboration than the traditional phrasing related to the transferability of newly applied paint? What the hell is wrong with the 21st century anyhow? It almost like society is adopting the foolishly complex language of the Coneheads and saying things like “electric incandescent illumination unit” instead of “lamp,” because, oh I don’t know, we’re living in the future or something, and everyone knows that people in the future speak in pointlessly convoluted ways. Because it’s the future, man. Arg.

May242011

Um, I Think You Forgot to Do Something…

Last night, after the household chores were done — well, as done as they were going to get for a Monday — I threw on one of my favorite movies, Jason and the Argonauts. If you don’t know it, this is one of those great old fantasy-adventure flicks based on mythology and featuring visual effects by the master of stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen. I first saw it when I was very small, four or five maybe, and it made a tremendous impression on me. I’ll grant that it’s not a perfect film. The plot is pretty thin, existing mostly as a framework to get us from one to the next of Harryhausen’s set pieces. But what set pieces! Two of Harryhausen’s best-remembered and most celebrated are in this one film: the attack of the giant bronze man Talos — the grinding sound as he moves his metal body still gives me the creeps! — and a platoon of reanimated skeletons known as the Children of the Hydra. Both sequences look a little clunky these days (Talos less so than the skeletons, in my opinion, but that could be just because Talos freaked me out more as a youngling), but they are simply brilliant examples of a handcrafted and now virtually extinct artform. And they’re a helluva lot more charming than any of the photorealistic but dull CG critters we take for granted now.

Anyhow, as I was saying, Jason is a flawed movie, as much as I love it. I’ve thought for years that it had a very abrupt ending: Jason sees a couple of his companions killed by the Children of the Hydra and dives off a cliff to escape them himself, then we cut to Zeus and Hera watching all the action from Mt. Olympus, and they essentially say “Well, that was fun,” and the end credits roll. On last night’s viewing, however, I realized that not only is this ending unsatisfying, it’s also incomplete… it doesn’t conclude the story that was set up at the film’s beginning.

Jason and the Argonauts begins, as do so many fantasy films, with an evil warlord seizing a kingdom and executing the children of the king he’s overthrown, only to have one of them — Jason — escape his grasp. Jason returns 20 years later as a grown man, sworn to fulfill an ancient prophecy by killing the usurper, Pelias, and reclaiming his father’s throne. But first, in order to rally the people and restore his kingdom to its former glory, Jason embarks on a quest to find the fabled Golden Fleece, a magical gift from the gods that lies on the other side of the world. And of course he will find and win the Golden Fleece, because these sorts of heroes in these sorts of movies always do… but he never returns to deal with Pelias and take back the kingdom! Instead, as I mentioned, the movie just stops, with Jason and his newfound love Medea embracing on the boat while the gods watch with amusement. So what the hell happened to the whole motivation for the quest in first place?! Jason doesn’t abandon his pledge to retake the kingdom or anything like that. He hasn’t outgrown his thirst for vengeance. The movie just drops the matter entirely. Oh, Zeus says something to the effect of “Jason and Medea will have many adventures in the future,” which I suppose implies that he’s going to go back to Thessaly, but there is no actual resolution. In all the times I’ve watched Jason, I’ve never noticed that such a huge thread was left dangling. This film may be unique in that, too, since I can’t think of any other movie that leaves such a big plot point unresolved. Were Harryhausen and Charles Schneer, the producer of the movie, planning to do a sequel? Did they run out of time and/or money? Was the movie running long and the last 15 minutes got cut? I’m going to have to look into that question, because now that I’ve become aware of it, it’s going to bug me forever…

(By the way, if you’ve never seen this film, don’t allow my criticism to scare you away from it. It really is marvelously entertaining. It just happens to have one big flaw…)

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