Geek Parody Theatre

The following is an actual call from the Onslaught archives.

WOMAN: Hello, Onslaught? I just got into an accident, on--

ONSLAUGHT: I know where you are. I know everything. The powers I stole from Magneto, the puny whelp, have already repaired your pathetic vehicle. But you, I have judged guilty of crimes against mutant-kind. The penalty is death.

WOMAN: I--ARRRRGH!

The Onslaught system costs you only your free will and eternal allegiance to the unholy combination of Charles Xavier and Magneto. And isn't that a small price to pay for peace of mind? Total peace of mind? Enforced, soul-crushing, will-deadening peace of mind?

ONSLAUGHT: Emergency services are on the line. Hello?

AMBULANCE: Yes, Onslaught?

ONSLAUGHT: We've had an automobile crash on the Santa Monica Freeway. I crashed it, the woman has died.

AMBULANCE: Excellent, my lord.

ONSLAUGHT: There'll be another crash about five miles away in three minutes--I don't like the color of that Lexus. Finish off any survivors, would you?

AMBULANCE: Of course, mighty Onslaught!

The Onslaught system comes installed on all GM vehicles, whether you want it or not, and can't be removed. Press the red button to unleash the might of Onslaught!

Hulk 2

A recent discussion prompted this out of my memory, one of those ideas I know I'll never get to use, so...my idea for 'Hulk 2'. It draws freely on comic elements, in particular those of Peter David's run on the Hulk (in fact stealing one scene outright, but since it is an adaptation, I think that'd probably be alright assuming he was credited. Which he is, here.)

Basically, it picks up where the first Hulk movie left off--Banner's on the run, hiding out in some Third World country and trying not to get "angry". The US government suspects they might know where he is, but they don't have extradition treaties with that country, so they hire, through back-channels, an ex-KGB mercenary named Emil Blonsky to go retrieve Bruce Banner, dead or alive. He's briefed on the Hulk situation, but is very confident (over-confident, even) that he can take care of the situation without problems.

Meanwhile, Bruce is approached by a man calling himself "The Leader". He's an insurance salesman who was contaminated by waste products from Bruce's gamma experiments, and his intelligence has been increased a hundred-fold; however, without the stabilizing nanites and Bruce's genetic alterations, the gamma radiation is killing him. He's super-intelligent, but doesn't have Bruce's background in the field. He offers Bruce a deal; if Bruce stabilizes his condition, he can a) take care of Blonsky, whose pursuit is news to Banner, and b) stabilize Bruce's condition. (The Leader also implies that if Bruce doesn't stabilize his condition, he has it in him to sic Blonsky on him as a last act.) Reluctantly, Bruce agrees.

The two begin working together--Banner is the expert in the field, but the Leader's natural intelligence allows him to quickly outstrip Bruce's knowledge. While they're working, the Leader displays other, disturbing aspects of his power--he can use the power of his mind to control others with a form of hypnosis. Banner wonders why the Leader didn't just control him, but the answer is simple--he can't implant suggestions into another gamma-irradiated person. Finally, the process succeeds and the Leader is stable. Now, the same process can be used on Bruce...

...but Bruce doesn't get time to test it right away, as Blonsky makes his move, kidnapping Betty and forcing Bruce to come after her. Blonsky thinks he's outplayed Banner with this trick, forcing Bruce to drug himself rather than risk Blonsky hurting his girlfriend, but Blonsky hasn't reckoned with Bruce's new ally. The Leader helps Bruce defeat Blonsky and rescue Betty, taking her back to his base for "safe-keeping." Blonsky's fate remains a mystery...for now.

With that out of the way, Bruce is free to try his cure......but Bruce discovers too late that the Leader double-crossed him. The process doesn't stabilize Bruce Banner, it stabilizes the Hulk, creating a new creature not as smart as Banner, not as strong as the Hulk, but with many of the properties of both. This new, grey Hulk is also totally amoral, and quickly agrees to help the Leader boost his mind-control powers a thousand-fold and take over the world's governments.

An appalled Betty tries to get through to the Hulk as they work on the device, but the Hulk is unswayed and steals the necessary parts from the US military in a major action sequence. The Leader assembles the device and activates it, enthralling not just the world's leaders but every human being on the face of the planet, save the Hulk and himself. The Hulk is actually fine with this--until he finds out that Betty, too, is now a mindless slave of the Leader, and that the Leader plans to use her as nothing more than a "brood mare" of his new humanity. With that, the alliance is off and the fight is on--despite his avowed lack of morality and conscience, he still deep down loves Betty Ross.

The Leader is more than a little irked, since he can't control the Hulk. He can't implant suggestions into the mind of any gamma-powered being. Luckily, he explains as Blonsky bursts into the room, he can implant suggestions into someone and then transform them. Blonsky turns into a larger, uglier, scalier, mutated Hulkish thing that the Leader dubs, "My own personal Abomination", which then proceeds to stomp nine kinds of hell out of the weaker, grey Hulk.

The Hulk fights valiantly, but the Abomination gets him into a choke-hold. As his brain begins to die from lack of oxygen, we zoom through his eye to his mental state, and see him start to lose his hold on the mental "cages" he's trapped Banner and the green Hulk in. The green Hulk breaks free and the two of them fight, the grey Hulk refusing to relinquish the body he's fought so hard to attain, even if he dies in it. Their battle is inconclusive, finally ending in the two of them strangling each other to death even as the Abomination strangles his physical body...

...and then Banner steps up to the pair. He says, "That's enough. This stops now. I'm stopping it. Because you might be stronger out there, but in here?" BAM! One punch and the grey Hulk drops. "Banner is strongest one there is!" He turns to the green Hulk. "Go. Save Betty."

...and we zoom back out through the eyes as they change from grey to green, as the Hulk grows more massive, stronger, greener, breaks the Abomination's hold, and Round Two begins. The Abomination just isn't a match for the stronger green Hulk, and their conflict destroys the lab and the Leader's equipment. The Hulk breaks out with Betty as the lab is engulfed with fiery explosions, seemingly killing both the Leader and the Abomination.

After a time, the Hulk reverts to Banner. He explains to Betty that the changes the Leader made further fragmented his mind and body. What was a struggle between himself and the Hulk is now an uneasy three-way war between himself and two Hulks that hate each other, him, and probably everyone else...and it's not safe to be around her, or anyone. With that, he turns and heads off into the night, leaving Betty to wonder when she and Bruce will ever be free of the curse of the Hulk.

Top 5 Lines You'll Never Hear In A 'Frosted Flakes' Commercial

5. "Gee, Tony, I've never knocked over anything bigger than a liquor store!"

4. "Gee, Tony, I've never gotten past second base with a girl before!" (This one presumably would bring new meaning to 'brings out the tiger in you'.)

3. "Gee, Tony, the picketers outside this abortion clinic look pretty scary!"

2. "Gee, Tony, she looks cute, but she's only thirteen!"

1. "Gee, Tony, I just don't think I have the guts to kill myself."

*boggle*

So, on a whim, I decided today to try to find a webpage that would give me some information on DC's latest cross-over, 'Infinite Crisis'. (Not to be confused with 'Identity Crisis', or 'Crisis on Infinite Earths'. DC seems to be in full-on panic mode way too often for a universe that has Batman and Superman. Marvel seems much calmer.) And so I made the horrible mistake of trying to read a FAQ on IC.

DEAR GOD. Seriously, this is the most convoluted, over-complicated, bloated mess that any human being could conceive of--in fact, almost certainly moreso. It sincerely looks like if you want to make any goddamn sense out of the current DC storyline, you have to have read every single DC comic since 1985...minimum. They're bringing back every single bad idea that they got rid of in 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' (well, every one they hadn't already brought back--they brought back Krypto the fucking Super-Dog a few years back, which was probably a sign of the end times then and there), they've turned every single super-hero in the DC Universe into a paranoid psychotic, and by the time I've finished writing this, they plan to jump the entire universe a year ahead and release a 52-issue miniseries explaining what happened in the missing year. (OK, it happens next month, but almost certainly by the time anybody reads this, that'll happen.)

I'm of two minds about this. One, the sensible part, which has listened to comics gurus like Warren Ellis and Alan Moore, and who isn't part of the completist grind anymore (and don't fool yourself, it is a grind. If you want to be a comics collector, you have to read a lot of shit to "keep up" with developments in the fictional universe you enjoy some stories in. Otherwise you'll be reading a fun Garth Ennis book like 'Hitman' and wondering, "Who's this Keanu-looking doof who's claiming to be Green Lantern?") This part of me is shrieking, "Have you gone out of your ever-loving minds, DC? This--this abomination of a bloated mess--is why comics readership is declining! With comics being as expensive as they are nowadays, if you make your readers choose between following everything in order to understand the events of the one or two books they like, and dropping comics altogether, they're just going to drop everything! You must, must, must release books that appeal to the casual reader, and stop huge bloated 'event' cross-overs that just perpetuate the insane soap-opera that only masturbatingly-obsessive DC continuity freaks care about! Listen to Warren Ellis! Short, sweet, self-contained, well-written! Not never-ending, bloated, and forcing you to read each panel from each book released over the course of two years in order to understand what all the different Luthors are doing fighting each other!"

Then there's the other, either more realistic or more cynical part, which says, "Screw it. Maybe they're right. Maybe it's just not possible for DC to get the casual readers anymore, maybe their continuity is just too entrenched and convoluted to get rid of, and maybe their only hope is to pander to the small obsessive, rich, DC fanboy market for all it's worth, using the trade paperbacks as a lure to that extremely rare marketing segment that picks up an issue of something like 'Infinite Crisis' and, instead of saying, "This is incomprehensible shit!", says, "I have got to know what this is all about." And hoping that niche market is enough to sustain them.

We'll see which part of me is right in ten years' time. If it's the first part, I'm buying the rights to Hawk and Dove. That series rocked.

Hot Stoves and Brick Walls

At some point during our Thing With Iraq (it can't be a war, since we declared victory; people get very shirty if you call it an occupation; and I'm not sure if we really want to try to explain why we're "liberating" them with torture centers, guns, tanks, and in a few rare cases, body armor)...well, at some point, the administration pretty much waved the white flag in the "moral authority" department. Basically, the argument has gone, "Alright, yes, there were no weapons of mass destruction. Yes, the intelligence was, at best, shoddy, and at worst so overtly shoddy that it's blatantly obvious that we were willfully misreading it to construct a causus belli, and everyone knew it even at the time. Yes, the entire war has been nothing but a blatant power grab. BUT..."

The new conservative rationale for the war. "Now that we're there, we have to win, because the alternatives are too horrible to contemplate."

Discussing a pull-out of the troops is considered to be "defeatist" talk, the same sort of thing that people did in World War II because they secretly supported Hitler or something. We're told that this "hurts troop morale", because after a long hard day of getting shot at, watching your friend get scissored in half by a chunk of shrapnel the size of a cat, and missing your wife and kids desperately, nothing will really lower your morale like hearing that people back home want to get you the hell out of Iraq.

The fact of the matter is, any realistic discussion of the war in Iraq must consider the question, "What are the conditions for victory, and are those conditions still attainable?" If the answer to the latter half of the question is "No," then it is not defeatist to say that we should cut our losses and go, any more than it would be defeatist to suggest that we shouldn't try to break a brick wall with our skulls. We can't do it, and we'll probably do ourselves serious harm in the process.

The current administration is refusing to consider this question. They have sub-ordinated the best interests of the American military, the realities of public policy, and quite possibly the well-being of the nation for the forseeable future, to the egotistical belief that they will be vindicated by history if they can simply pour a sufficient amount of resources into the war. By attempting to salvage their reputation, they are in fact making it worse. It's like touching a hot stove, and instead of pulling your hand back, holding it there to prove how tough it is.

So, let's take a moment and actually consider the question. "What are the conditions of victory in Iraq?" The answer would seem to be, "The creation of a stable, humane, US-friendly government in the country." If this is, in fact, the answer, we should pull out now, because that was never an achievable goal and never will be. Any government that is stable is stable because it is responsive to the needs of its citizens; any government that is humane is humane because it values its citizens; any government that is US-friendly (in the terms we are attempting to impose upon Iraq) values our goodwill higher than it does its own citizens. Meaning that any government that is US-friendly will either have to resort to violence to keep power, or else ask us to do it for them. "Stable, friendly, humane" is the "cheap, close, nice" of nation-building: Pick two.

So what's a realistic "condition of victory" in Iraq, one we can actually achieve that won't make us feel that this is a total failure (or worse--a chaotic, unstable Iraq would be a total failure, a stable-but-actively-hostile-to-the-US Iraq would be worse). This is something that is changing day to day, which is another thing that the Bush administration is failing to understand, or possibly deliberately refusing to understand. "Events are in the saddle, and ride mankind." It was spoken of Vietnam, but it's equally true here. The statement, "We have to stay until we win," presumes that there will always be an existing condition of victory, that we have an unlimited supply of time, money, manpower, material, and goodwill (both of the US and Iraqi public) to accomplish our aims. We do not. The clock is ticking.

It may already have run out.

The End of the Conversation

(Go watch 'Anne', the first episode of Buffy Season Three. Pause it right at the end of Scene 15, the conversation between Giles and Joyce. This is what I always figured Giles must have said.)

"She's a young woman who's been placed under any number of burdens, Ms. Summers. Some of them are the same as any other girl her age, but others are absolutely unique, and she has borne them when any number of others would have broken. She's saved my life on more than one occasion, and more than that, she's saved the lives of her friends, of her family, of total strangers and of every man, woman and child in the entire world. I realize that it's a bit hard to take in a phrase like that, so I will repeat it so that you don't miss it.

"Every living being on this planet today owes their life to your daughter. In fact, we all owe her our lives several times over; her courage and skill has saved the entire planet more than once. She saved all these people without thought of the considerable danger to herself, without any wish for reward or recompense, and indeed at great personal cost. If you have to put that into a single word, Ms. Summers, I believe the one I'd select would be 'hero'...and frankly, if you wish to place the 'blame' for that onto my shoulders, I take it as the greatest of compliments. Good day to you."

At which point Giles walks out, leaving Joyce to maybe feel a bit bad about the way she's been handling things.

One Tiny Thing

Changed my mind about 'Purge', by Bif Naked. It's dreamy. (I must have been in a bad mood the first time I listened to it.)

Alternative Ending to V for Vendetta

(Or, I Can't Be The First Person To Think Of This)

We enter the scene with Finch, the detective assigned to track down V, staggering into Victoria Station. He's heavily under the influence of LSD, a drug he took to try to understand the enigmatic killer, and although it's exacted a heavy mental toll, it's done its work well. He's finally close to V's lair...and its secrets.

He heads down into the abandoned Underground. At last, he spots V himself. He pulls out his gun...prepares to fire...

And suddenly a vast dog leaps past him, spoiling his aim! The dog, some sort of breed of Great Dane, lets out a strange and poignant howl. In Finch's drugged state, it almost seems as if it's calling out, "Roverrr here!"

V turns. He spots Finch, but seemingly just as importantly, he spots the massive dog. He moves towards the pair with a swift, gliding motion, and Finch knows they're both doomed...

When suddenly, a giant net drops from the ceiling onto V, entangling him! Finch stares in utter confusion as four people step from the shadows, four civilians who've managed to do what the entire British government could not--capture the terrorist known as V.

"Good work, Scooby!" they chorus, as one of them, a young man dressed in green, scratches the dog's head. Another, dressed in white, steps forward to V, who's only managed to free his head from the weighted net. "And now, let's see who V really is!" With a flourish, they remove the mask.

Everyone, even Finch, gasps. "Old Man McAllister!" they shout. The girl with spectacles nods knowingly. "Of course. He was using the V costume to frighten people away from organized governmental authority...and the old mill!"

"That's right," snarles V. "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for you meddling kids...and that dog!"

Getting an Idea Out of My Head

As is usual when I have what I think is a really great idea that I have no way to convey to the people who could do something about it, I'm just going to blog the idea and hope that someone who has some power to do something about it sees it. It's sort of like setting a bottle adrift at sea, except that that a bottle adrift at sea has less chance of being found by a person who was really just looking for porn sites.

So, with that in mind, and hoping that Joss Whedon Googles his own name just to see what people are saying about him (I can't be the only person who does this), I suggest:

A Firefly line of novels.

Seriously, the movie apparently didn't do enough business to bring out another $25 million film, and that seems to be the end of it...but unless I've been lied to repeatedly by a variety of different publishers, authors of TV tie-in books don't get paid 25 million dollars. I think that there's definitely a devoted following of the series that's willing to shell out regular dough for a series of decently written books, and that it could be sustained as a profitable line. And one of the advantages of writing a book based on a TV series is that TV series are designed as "story machines"--ie, the setting and characters are meant to generate a large number of story ideas, just because they need to have a large number of stories over the lifespan of the series.

So. Let the word-of-mouth campaign spread from this tiny little blog, read by a bare minimum of people (and probably fewer since I post so infrequently now.) Let it become a vast tide of public opinion which will reach the ears of publishing houses everywhere. Firefly: The Novels! Or Serenity Joss Whedon Nathan Fillion Universal ...let's see, what other keywords would get me hits?

Right. Hot Asian shaved.

Jazz Textures

Something I was wondering tonight at work, when someone tuned to the "smooth jazz" station...

Are there other textures of jazz? Like rough, abrasive jazz, which you can put on in the background, but it'll eventually wear away at your nerves and make you tense, irritable, and in the mood to fight.

Or sharp jazz. You'll be listening to it, it doesn't really register much, then BAM! You suddenly get a big jagged chunk of jazz straight in your ear. (Presumably necessitating a tetanus shot.)

Or perhaps, moving in the opposite direction, soft downy jazz. Jazz so inconsequential it puts you to sleep.

Liquid jazz, which presumably conforms itself to any listener's contours...

Gaseous jazz, jazz so inconsequential you don't actually notice you're listening to it. (This last jazz is, of course, a purely theoretical jazz texture, as by definition, it's impossible to notice the existence of true gaseous jazz. In fact, I could be listening to it right now.)

All of the above is, of course, "free jazz" when heard over the radio, and only becomes "expensive jazz" when heard in concert.

Oh, What the Heck...

(The "sporadic posting" continues, and will continue for some while--my hours have ramped up at work, and that's just how it is. I'm used to it now, I'm even more used to the nice extra money, but it does bite into Mr. Free Time a bit. Anyhow, away from my boring life...)

On the radio a few weeks back, they had an ad for a jewelry store that said that they had wedding rings that "scream how you feel about her." It's an ill-chosen metaphor, but when thought about literally, it paints an even more disturbing picture...

CUSTOMER walks into jewelry store. There is an unearthly din all around, as though he has walked into a pet store that sells only trained parrots. A SALESMAN walks up to him.

SALESMAN: Good day, sir. Are you interested in a wedding ring?

CUSTOMER: Well, yes, I am. (Looks around.) What's with all the--

SALESMAN: Perhaps this one might interest you? (Holds up a small velvet box, and opens it.)

RING #1: I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I--

CUSTOMER (hurriedly pushing box closed): No. No, I don't think that's the sort of thing I'm looking for at all. In fact, I--

SALESMAN: Say no more, sir. Perhaps this one is more to your taste. (Opens a second box.)

RING #2: I JUST DON'T WANT TO DIE OLD AND ALONE! I JUST DON'T WANT TO DIE OLD AND ALONE! I--

CUSTOMER (closes that box as well, by now looking utterly horrified): No! I just want--

SALESMAN (with a knowing nod): I understand perfectly, sir. (Holds up another box.)

RING #3: I KNOCKED YOU UP! I KNOCKED YOU UP! I KNOCKED YOU UP! I KNOCKED YOU UP!

(Ring continues to repeat as panicked customer flees shop.)

Review: Superbeautifulmonster (Bif Naked)

Latest by Bif Naked, and it's nice. I'll admit to being a bit flat on 'Purge', her sophomore effort, but this one hits a lot of the same notes that 'I, Bificus' did. Very much in the mode of Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, and other female vocalists who weren't afraid to display emotions beyond "love" and "worrying about the man you love". She's capable of showing anger ("Let-Down", which is a snarky anthem for every garage-band kid in America), sorrow (an excellent cover of "Nothing Else Matters"--I hated covers when I was a teenager, but I've come completely to the opposite view and think that a good cover song is a thing of beauty), and she's not afraid to admit that she's got a sex drive as healthy as most guys. ("Funeral for a Good Grrl" contains a few lines that made me blush--"I don't want your diamonds/just a necklace of pearls" and "You be the kid and I'll be the candy store" being two of them.)

And "The World Is Over" is a song so damn good that it should be playing hourly on every radio station in America.

So, yeah, this is another very good album from a very good artist. Go. Buy.

L'Esprit D'Escalier

I didn't get a chance to say this at the time, but to the woman who wrote the column in my college newspaper, back when I was a student, talking about how everyone was too quick to label independent woman as "angry", and who wrote the line: "Everyone's talking about Alanis Morrisette as an 'angry young woman' just because she wrote about having flies in your champagne"...

No, dear, I think it was the one about "Every time I scratch my nails down someone else's back I hope you feel it" that got her labeled as an 'angry young woman'.

Nice to finally get that off my chest.

Great Bad Movie Lines, #3

Not so much a bad line as a bad delivery, really. In 'Day of the Dead', the helicopter pilot is rebelling against the evil (well, not so much evil as cracking under the pressure) soldiers. One of them pulls a gun on him, but the leader realizes that the helicopter pilot is the only one who can fly them out of there, and stills his men with the command, "Wait. We need his ass."

Unfortunately, he doesn't say, "We need his ass," suggesting that they can't do without him and have to keep him alive. No, he says, "We need his ass," suggesting that perhaps the remaining body parts are expendable, but that fine ass of his is just too important to lose.

It's not much surprise that the pilot makes a run for it, really.

I...Still...Function...

Yes, two Transformers references in three posts. I'm on fire!

Watched 'Land of the Dead' for the second time last night, and I'm still struck at how the whole thing is a huge allegory for the need for the working classes to revolt and set up a communist society inside the United States. You have the two sets of underclasses, the living (led by a white guy) and the dead (led by a black guy) set against each other in an irreconcilable conflict so that neither side will notice how they're both exploited by the rich. Cholo (John Leguizamo) is someone trying to get ahead by doing the rich's dirty work, but he'll never get anywhere because he's Hispanic and the rich are all racist under the skin.

Eventually the whole system breaks down. Cholo tries blackmail and terrorism, but these tactics are morally reprehensible because they threaten the underclass he should be supporting, and fail. Only when he dies (and joins the underclass in spirit as well as body--"I always wanted to see how the other half lives") can he truly make progress in the People's Struggle. Meanwhile, the living and the dead set aside their differences and slaughter the true source of all evil--the rich. Once that's completed, the dead leave the living in peace and the underclasses prepare to live a new live in their socialist Utopia.

It's a blatantly obvious reading--I'm just amazed he was able to get away with it.

Light Posting...

...because of floods, home repairs, 52-hour workweeks, and if there's a plague of locusts headed towards the Midwest, you now know why. Will get back up to speed later, assuming no meteor strikes.

Junkions

Anyone remember these guys? From 'Transformers: the Movie', made out of discarded bits of other robots, leader voiced by Eric Idle (as part of a surprisingly star-studded cast that included Leonard Nimoy, Orson Welles, and Robert Stack...OK, it's surprising for a movie about "robots in disguise")...but the main thing was the way they talked. Just as they were made up of discarded junk, so too was their entire culture, the way they spoke and acted, made up of nothing more than discarded one-liners, old pop culture references, and quotes from TV shows and movies.

Sometimes I think we're turning into them.

Only without the ability to turn into a motorcycle and also with way too few laser guns.

Partial Review: Hitch-Hiker's Guide

Watched as much of the 2005 film as I could stand (up through the scene where all the main characters meet on the Heart of Gold), and so, here's a review.

The facetious version: Watching this movie unfold is like being a pregnant woman, going into labor and being wheeled into the delivery room, fully aware of the magnificent potential of the nascent and beautiful life to come...only to have the nurse say, "Your regular doctor is unavailable, so we've brought in Leatherface to deliver your baby. He knows a lot about anatomy, right?"

The lengthier, more accurate version: It's like watching the real Hitch-hiker's Guide movie, as re-enacted the next morning by the guys around the office who were pretty drunk when they saw it, aren't necessarily sober now, and don't remember it really well. The film tries to "improve" on the original (in all its various forms) by botching punchlines, snipping those long talky bits in favor of a romance between Arthur and Trillian, taking great descriptions and turning them into unfunny sight gags, and then having the whole thing be performed by a cast of actors who wouldn't be able to make the cut in a high school production of 'Our Town'.

Martin Freeman completely misdelivers one of the best lines in the story ("We've met") so thoroughly that you have to believe it was on purpose as a means of showing his contempt for the other actors, Mos Def delivers each line as though he expects the director, at any moment, to shout "ACTION!", and I'm firmly convinced that Sam Rockwell is trying to kill me, using his acting as the murder weapon so that the police won't suspect him. His delivery of the line, "Hey baby, is this guy boring you? Why don't you come and talk to me, I'm from another planet," is eye-bleedingly, tooth-grindingly, hideously, Shatnerianly bad, and he just gets worse from there. Zooey Deschanel is decent enough as Trillian, but her character has suffered the most from being rewritten, to the point where we're actually supposed to believe that a smart, clever, witty woman usually asks guys she's just met 15 minutes ago at a party to quit their job, sell their home, and travel to Madagascar with them...and thinks the guy's boring when he doesn't do it. Yeah, something tells me that's a recipe for perpetual disappointment.

Oh, and Marvin looks like a stormtrooper who's just swallowed a weather balloon.

I'm still of the opinion that a good Hitch-hiker's movie can be made. But this is as far from it as you can possibly get short of having it be a one-man show starring Carrot Top.

Actual Review: Hitch-Hiker's Guide

Thoughts, in no particular order:

1) This is talking about the six-episode BBC series from 1981, not the recently-released movie. Don't have much interest in the recently-released movie, probably will never bother to see it. It's not exactly to the book what 'I, Robot' was to Asimov, but I was a bit underwhelmed by the bits I saw nonetheless.

2) Sandra Dickinson is probably the single biggest factor in dragging this series down...but it's not really her fault. She's been saddled with an outfit that makes her look like one of Ming the Merciless' concubines, her hair is just relentlessly 80s in a painful way, and the director has told her to deliver all her lines in an American accent that a) she can't do, b) doesn't make sense for a character from Islington and c) makes her sound like Vanilla Whore in 'Scott of the Sahara'. All that together, and her ability to be convincing as an intelligent, centered astrophysicist dies upon hearing her first line (and it doesn't help that her first line is one that you'd expect to be delivered by an air hostess.)

3) The other big factor is, of course, The Other Head. Yeesh. The actor playing Zaphod does the same awful cod-American accent as Trillian, but it works better on him than it does on her, because he's meant to be larger than life, silly, and not too very bright.

4) The actor who plays Ford Prefect would make a good Doctor, if you went into a parallel universe and took the part away from Colin Baker. (Not that I dislike Colin Baker in the part.) He does have a tendency to underplay every line, delivering them all with this sort of weirdly soothing drone, but he gets the sensibility of Ford right, and that's what counts.

5) The actor who plays Arthur seems a bit too arch for my tastes (it's as though I want to take him and Ford and hook them up to a giant "Charisma Transference Device" and just take a little off the top for him and give it to Ford) but does do what he needs to do for story purposes.

6) Marvin is, of course, magnificent.

7) Production values are low, but then again, it is early 80s BBC. And they get lots of positive style points for keeping to the story's digressive, excursive, ramblingly brilliant style. The general myth about 'Hitch-Hiker's' is that it's horribly plotted, but very funny; the actual truth is that it's cleverly plotted, but that the plot is mostly going on while the characters aren't looking and they don't necessarily notice the plot even after it's happened.

8) It really bothered me at the time that they went straight from the Magrethea stuff to the Milliways stuff, instead of sticking to the source material. You may all now laugh at my youthful ignorance.

9) The actor playing Number One (of the Golgafrinchians) didn't understand he was in a part that was, by its very nature, impossible to overact in. He's way too subdued. (Although, again, this could be the director.)

10) I really, really miss Douglas Adams.

Spoiler-Free Review: Serenity

So they do the thing, with the--the zoom, and the whoosh, and the big--omigod, and they--oh, wow, and the bit with the fight, and when the guy does the--and that scene where Mal--it was SO COOL!

It's not the kind of movie you can give a spoiler-free review of. Go. See it for yourself. I'll just give you one line as a bonus.

"Doctor, I'm taking your sister under my protection here. If anything happens to her, anything at all, I swear to you I will get very choked up. Honestly. There could be tears."