Steaming Turd

From this article via Slashdot:

Russian jamming systems are publicly known — the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs.

So, 20th Century Fox and/or Lucasfilm showed a glimmer of intelligence recently by telling George “I Can’t Make Up My Mind” Lucas to take his vision and shove it. They released the laserdisc cut of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. It’s actually a set of bonus discs released alongside the 2004 re-re-re-releases of the trilogy, but most people who bought it wanted to have the original untarnished versions rather than the blasphemies against geekdom that Lucas has since come up with.

Unfortunately, this release is non-anamorphic, non-remastered, with 2-channel Dolby audio. You can read more about this on teh Intarweb, if you feel like doing a Google search - I don’t have the links handy anymore, and I’m lazy.

Having the 2004 version right alongside the 1993 laserdisc version opens the possibility of someone doing a fan edit where they take the good parts of the 2004 version (legitimate improvements and corrections) and replace the stupid parts (Greedo shooting first or at all; using the new dumb music in Jabba’s palace and at the Ewok party; putting that flat-as-a-pancake-acting Hayden Christensen in for the adult Anakin Skywalker, whom we just saw before he died, at the end of RotJ; etc., etc.) with the parts from the original version.

Think it’s not possible to recut a movie like that and make it better? Well, it can work. Someone did it with Episode I - well, actually, several people have done it, but I’ve only seen one cut. The normal Phantom Menace was a horrible, horrible disappointment of a movie. You know, where the first half hour was exciting, with two Old Republic Jedi laying down the law and generally showing us how cool the Jedi really were back then, only to have the entire movie ripped out from under us and replaced with a racist children’s show.

The guy who fan-edited the movie cut out the most annoying parts of Phantom Menace (mostly featuring Jar-Jar and midichlorians), and redubbed the Gungans and the Trade Federation guys with alien language dialogue. It’s amazing how those two changes turned one of the worst disappointments I’ve ever experienced into a pretty good movie. Still not as good as ESB, but pretty good nonetheless. It’s called “Balance of the Force”, if you’re interested in learning more about it.

There are a couple bad things about their efforts. One, the alien language was largely just dialogue recorded backwards, and it was obvious that the forward dialogue was at least partially Spanish. For people who don’t know any Spanish, it’s not a big deal, but I still remember enough from high school to where it becomes distracting. The other bad thing (well, not so much bad as just not really necessary in my opinion) was that they replaced the “boring” trade dispute with a dispute about banning slavery. Six of one, half dozen of the other, in my opinion - the dispute was simply a MacGuffin, and if you were trying to read more into it than that, you were missing the point of the movie. Since the alien dialogue was subtitled, the fan-editor was able to restructure the dialogue to go along with the slavery dispute, though the parts recorded by the original actors didn’t always seem to match.

Anyway, if you can get ahold of one of these fan edits, it’s highly recommended. (Take note that the fan edit is technically not legal, by the way, but Lucasfilm has been kind enough not to sue the guy.)

Will such an edit be possible for Episodes II or III? I have my doubts. Lucas took the hint after the outcry regarding Jar-Jar and toned him down for the next two movies. The big problem with those movies is that the acting from Hayden Christensen (and, to a lesser degree, Natalie Portman) was horrible. Remember the line in the original Star Wars, where Luke whines, “But I was gonna go to Toschi Station to pick up some power converrrterrrrrs!!!” Christensen’s performance in Episodes II and III was kind of like that, but for two whole movies. He was three times as annoying as two ordinary first-season Wesley Crushers. The so-called romance scenes between him and Natalie Portman were abysmal, soul-sucking, emotionless travesties*. I would have rather watched Tuvok put the moves on B’Elanna Torres. And what made it that much worse is that George Lucas completely sucks at writing emotional dialogue - at least he and Christensen are made for each other in that respect.

On a side note, there is a fan edit of the LotR trilogy as well. I’m interested to see that one now, too, since Jackson and his co-writers butchered the storyline so badly.

* Edit: I was skimming this post again, and it looked for a moment like I had written “abysmal, soul-sucking, emotionless transvestites”.

We had another brownout on my block early this morning. Went through the motions of unplugging everything, checked that the stoplight was out again (which it was), and called the CHiPs non-emergency number. The conversation went something like this:

Officer: Cleveland Heights Police, Officer {Lastname}.
Me: We’re having a brownout near {Street} and {Other Street}, and it took out the stoplight there.
Officer: Okay.
Me: (Did I just wake this guy up?) I guess the most important thing is for you to contact CEI and let them know about the brownout.
Officer: Yeah.
Me: (Come on, at least feign some minimal interest so I know you’re going to do something about it.) Just wanted to let you guys know.
Officer: Okay.
Me: (I know I’m usually a pretty apathetic guy, but this is ridiculous.) Thanks a lot. *click*

Me: …

Anyway, I also turned down the volume all the way on the haunted clock radio so I could get some sleep without it creeping me out. Didn’t work. About ten minutes later it started making some staticky noises, and I had to unplug it altogether, lest it kill me in my sleep.

From here:

“This worm is the stuff that legends and fairy tales are made of,” worm supporter Steve Paulson declared. “What kid wouldn’t want to play with a 3 foot-long, lily-smelling, soft pink worm that spits?”

There are so many ways you can go with that, most of them being wrong.

Fry: My god! What if the secret ingredient… is people?
Leela: No, there’s already a soda like that: Soylent Cola.
Fry: Oh. How is it?
Leela: It varies from person to person.

Recently, I read the book “Make Room, Make Room” by Harry Harrison. It’s the loose inspiration for the movie “Soylent Green”, a classic sci-fi/film noir flick where Charlton Heston proclaims in anguish that a new food source ostensibly made from plankton is actually made out of people.

Well, it turns out that Soylent Green isn’t really made out of people. Like all good movie adaptations, the film doesn’t really have anything to do with the book. Besides the overpopulation of Earth in the early 21st century and the reuse of several character names, the two have practically nothing in common. The book mentions Soylent Green once in passing, and it’s just plankton, not people.

In fact, it appears that the formula for making this movie was as follows:

1. Dispose of old plot; replace with new plot.
2. Cast white people in the roles of all characters of non-European ethnic background.
3. Realize that you don’t have any non-white people in your movie.
4. Randomly re-cast several characters with token ethnicities.
5. ???
6. Profit!

Better yet, republish the book, and change the cover such that it seems like the movie and the book are identical:

After having read the book and seen the movie, I have to say that the book was (as usual) better, if only marginally so. The movie had numerous Manos-esque moments where you realized that a character’s purpose in the plot had inexplicably changed; for example, Tab, the hired bodyguard, suddenly became a thug for Soylent Corporation. Sol, the police researcher roommate of Heston’s character, played by Edward G. Robinson (it’s curtains for you, see?), went from being a happy old man to being a patron at the local suicide facility. While his change of heart concerning living was explained by his discovery of the horrible secret of Soylent Green, his decision to turn himself into food for his fellow man made perhaps a bit less sense, given how horrible he found the secret of Soylent Green to be. It ended up being a flimsy pretext to show a series of beautiful vistas of pure waterfalls, lush green valleys, and lots of flowers, with the implication that in the future, we won’t have any of those things because of our carelessness with the Earth.

As I said, though, the book, while better, wasn’t that much better. While the character of Sol appears in the book, he’s not a police researcher - he’s just an old coot who needed a roommate, and the book’s protagonist (essentially Charlton Heston’s character, though he was named Andrew Rusch rather than Robert Thorn) had taken him up on the offer. Sol’s main purpose is to be curmudgeonly for 90% of the book, until finally he becomes Harry Harrison’s mouthpiece on the topic of birth control. He essentially pins the entire situation of overpopulation on the Catholic church’s ban on birth control, going off on a six-page tirade on the topic. Harrison takes his interesting fictional story and turns it into socio-political commentary. Unfortunately for him, even the entire NYC metro area has roughly half the population that he projected 40 years ago that the city would have, despite his citations of numerous doom-and-gloom sources at the end of his book.

Anyway, even if Soylent Green really is made out of people in the movie, the people were already dead, and the government wasn’t intentionally killing people to make food out of them. If famine and overpopulation are such tremendous problems, is it really such a bad thing to turn corpses into tasty little square green people bricks?

I just finished (as in, just now) watching Firefly, finally. What pretty much everyone who’s recommended it to me has said is true: it was a really good show, and it deserved to have more made of it.

The show reminded me very strongly of Cowboy Bebop. Both shows had some Old West influences, both involved a ragtag and unlikely crew on board a rickety-yet-relentless spaceship, and both spent most of their time developing the characters rather than the plot. Both were set in a dog-eat-dog universe, though Bebop’s rule of law was as much controlled by crime syndicates as by anything else, in contrast to the massive governmental power of the Alliance (and its comparatively posh environment) in the Firefly setting. In both settings, Earth was inhospitable, if not uninhabitable, and the series focused on life on the frontier; in Bebop, though, everywhere was essentially the frontier, and the reach of humans had not yet extended beyond the various terraformed planets and moons in our solar system. In what I’ve read so far, though, Cowboy Bebop hasn’t been cited by Joss Whedon as an influence for Firefly, and neither series was original in its juxtaposition of the Old West with outer space, so it’s likely that each was separately influenced by many of the same earlier works.

As I mentioned, Firefly was heavily devoted to the development of its characters rather than setting up a continuous story arc. You can watch many of the episodes out of order, though, because a lot of this character development was through flashbacks to the characters’ histories. The characters do change throughout the series, however, with their initial distrusts giving way to devotion and friendship. I think this was a good way to go with this series, especially in retrospect. Even in fourteen episodes, though, there were still a lot of potential storylines and backstories left sadly unexplored. This all stands in contrast to another favorite of mine, Stargate SG-1, where character development easily gives way to continuing the plot, and is usually approached only in a few episodes out of each season with gusto.

Special effects were top-notch. In particular, the in-atmosphere effects were stunning, probably in part because of the interesting “camera” work they chose to implement. I also liked that there’s finally another work of visual sci-fi that remembers that in space, no one can hear you scream or pretty much anything else for that matter. I was also impressed that they chose to build the entire interior of the ship as a set. The attention to detail was incredible.

There are a couple of minor details about Firefly that I dislike, though. The use of replacement words so you can swear during prime time is a bit cliche. Fruit you, and all that. There were also several scenes where an across-the-room perspective was done handheld, which in any other show is a sign that you’re watching events from another character’s perspective. Using such a shot and not holding the camera steady is confusing at first, and the confusion ends up only being alleviated when the scene ends without revealing that any other characters were present. Sometimes the “rules of filmmaking” can be bent or broken for good artistic effect, but sometimes it just doesn’t look right, and the constant, rather than judicious, use of handheld camera shots was an example of that here.

Anyway, I really did like Firefly. I have to admit, though, that I don’t get the maniacal fan obsession with the series. What I see in Firefly is potential left unrealized, and I’m forced to compare it to sci-fi series that I like more probably because their potential was realized, such as seasons 2 through 4 of Babylon 5, or seasons 3 through 6 of SG-1, or Cowboy Bebop. It’s because of that tremendous unrealized potential, though, that I hope Joss Whedon gets to fulfill his hopes of producing the rest of his vision of Firefly in some format. Half a season certainly wasn’t enough.