highindustrial.

"Still giddy from her recent incarceration, Ms. Ryder looks on as Mr. Sandler points out her receding career prospects." + 2

Over the course of 11 years, four television series, and a pair of TV movies, Dustin Diamond played just one character: Samuel "Screech" Powers, the comic relief on Saved By The Bell, as well as its precursor Good Morning, Miss Bliss and its two spin-off series, Saved By The Bell: The College Years and Saved By The Bell: The New Class. Surrounded by sexy troublemaker Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), sexy cheerleader Kelly (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen), sexy brain Jesse (Elizabeth Berkley), sexy jock Slater (Mario López), and sexy princess Lisa (Lark Voorhies), Diamond displayed an awkwardness that provided a welcome counterpoint.

The Onion interviews Dustin Diamond. There's nothing I can think of to add to that. There's so much great stuff in there ("Did you ever bump into Urkel at a party?" "When Showgirls opened ... did you run right out and see it?") ... it's pleasurably painful. + 5

Watching the State of the Union address.... Know what I'd like to see, aside from the usual mix of politicos, token visiting dignitaries, war widows and dudes in various states of traction? Circus animals. I'd like to see a couple of ostriches, maybe a recumbent lion, a grazing zebra or giraffe. They wouldn't even have to take center stage -- they would just be there for texture, arrayed among the assembled luminaries like plush throw pillows. And maybe GWB could wear a toga. And a ten-gallon hat.

Why does Donald Rumsfeld always look like he just sat down on a cream pie? + 11

How cool would it be if it snowed here? I know the reality would probably fall somewhere between Home Alone and Speed along the traffic mayhem spectrum, but it would be such picturesque traffic mayhem!

I miss ya, snow. Whatcha been up to lately? + 14

Here we go: "lame meme" equals 645,540,000,000. (In all fairness, this happens to be the rare cunning meme. Most memes, however, are indeed lame; in fact, they should just be called lames.) + 3

Critics and audiences (at least at the AMC Kabuki last night) really seem to be hating The Mothman Prophecies, but I rather enjoyed it. It's a lugubrious exercise, all atmospheric disorientation, but it works: dread-filled rather than dreadful; nimble despite its emotionally leaden material; positively seething with fatal import. And the pay-off, the Tacoma Narrows-esque climax, is a righteous humdinger, executed about as perfectly as anyone could hope. Plus, with respect to spectral scariness, I'm a stated fan of not seeing the titular menace rendered in broad CG strokes -- and director Mark Pellington and screenwriter Richard Hatem deserve credit for their restraint in this regard. Mothman got under my skin. From now on, whenever things get weird, I'm blaming "Indrid Cold."

At least Owen gets it. + 11

Officers arrived and forced open the door and saw Crisp dead on her couch. Larkins said Crisp was probably preparing her baby for bed when she passed away.

''She was leaned over on her left side with her baby's pajamas in her lap,'' he said.

Her son, Allen Shackleford, was found standing by the door of their apartment, shaking and clutching a bottle of tile cleaner. His soiled diaper was on the floor.

That just breaks my heart. + 1

Damn, I'm so out of it. A couple of early morning phone calls shaved an hour or two off my sleep and I just finished making them up. Now everything feels like goose down feathers and tastes like cane sugar. +

A friend of mine wants to do something special for his parents' twenty-fifth anniversary and is at a loss for ideas. He was thinking of sending them to Australia, but he's done that sort of thing in the past, and it's not like they don't travel around a lot on their own anyway.

My suggestions (matching grave plots; a Vietnamese orphan dipped in silver) have thus far been met with indifference. Any ideas? He wants something "ephemeral" and "not about giving them stuff, because they already have lots of stuff" -- but he also wants it to be apropos of the milestone.

Saturday's conundrum. I frankly don't understand why he didn't pounce on my orphan suggestion, but to each his own, I suppose. + 4

I dunno ... an anime Metropolis? Looks like Maxfield Parrish swallowed H.R. Giger and barfed up Speed Racer. But I guess I'd have to see it in motion before condemning it. +

Once again, I'm glad I use a Mac. + 6

Tonight, the role of John Walker Lindh will be played by Orlando Bloom. + 5

By the way, I love this. + 6

CNN is crap.

Certainly not an original observation, and it's a theme I've visited before -- but since I don't watch the network very often I was assaulted anew by this realization today during a bout of afternoon passivity. And I'm not even talking about the insidious editorializing, the sensationalism, the frequent factual errata -- those are yesterday's umbrages. I'm referring to the knock-off sitcom-patois anchor banter, the strangely bored reportage, the lame ad-libbing. Especially the lame ad-libbing.

There was this segment: about how McDonald's French subsidiary has replaced homicidal harlequin Ronald with Asterix the Gaul in an attempt to pander to the culturally hypersensitive locals; about how the locals predictably have their cravates in a knot over this; and the anchor kept inserting "le burger" into her monologue, to dubious grammatical effect, and it just wasn't necessary or funny or even sane. Lame.

Later, a rather Steve Carell-looking Jason Schwartzman was on, live, to plug the foreseeably execrable Slackers; and toward the end of a very disjointed interview he leaned toward his interrogator and began massaging her left shoulder. "You have a lot of tension," he intoned duskily. (Earlier, she had blurted out that he had a lot of chest hair.) The CNN liaison just looked really, really uncomfortable. A witty retort was not hers.

There was also a piece about the recent addition of Connie Chung to the CNN family, following her protracted and inglorious stints at all three major television networks. During a press conference she professed that it had always been her dream to work for an all-news channel, as if she used to keep a calendar of CNN on her wall during her primetime news magazine days, like Pablo the Penguin sitting in his little igloo, pining for sunnier climes.

(Actually, the way Chung confessed her "dream," all craven gravitas, reminded me of that scene from Welcome To the Dollhouse where the little girl comes to Heather Matarazzo's school to give a cautionary speech about talking to to strangers, as if engaging in such illicit conduct is akin to a drug addiction that will land you on Skid Row leashed to a pimp. "I am here to talk to you today about the dangers of talking to strangers, for I, Mary Ellen Moriarty, once talked to strangers, and that is how I became the innocent victim of a brutal kidnapping." You get the idea.)

In an act of devious misdirection, CNN sidebarred a few other additions to its roster. My peripheral vision just barely caught the names of MTV's Serena Altschul and The Mole's Anderson Cooper scrolling by as Connie crossed and uncrossed her legs on the dais. And let's not forget the harvesting of NYPD Blue's Andrea Thompson last year. I think these facts speak for themselves.

Pretty soon even the supposedly venerable likes of 60 Minutes and 20/20 will have run out of respectable senior citizens to prop up in front of the cameras, at which point they'll begin plundering the ranks of beauty pageant contestants, music VJs and television gameshow hosts in earnest. Bank on it. And here's a tip: I hear the huskies from Snow Dogs are looking to branch out. And isn't Matt LeBlanc out of a job this fall? + 6

In a parallel universe, everyone's talking about Monica Lewinsky's sleek new look when she stepped out with Camryn Manheim and Roseanne at a Jaclyn Smith Collection show. + 8

Black Hawk Down is so viscerally potent that its narrative sophistication comes almost as a surprise. Co-screenwriter Steve Zaillian's facility for depicting complex events lucidly is amply in evidence here -- particularly during the film's intense second act, which plays out as an extended action sequence. And while early attempts to distinguish the various soldier-protagonists from one another are (perhaps unavoidably) unsuccessful, rendering the miscellaneous carnage and privations that follow somewhat anonymous, the overall pointillistic impact of the film is unimpaired -- and even enhanced in some respects.

Working from a thematic structure that establishes the story in terms of jarring contrasts -- an enemy both hostile and pitiful; heroes cunning yet naive -- director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Slavomir Idziak present Mogadishu and its environs (actually Morocco, substituted for obvious reasons) as an alien landscape at once exotic and familiar -- unfurled in a series of images along the beautiful/terrible axis, all dust and deliquescence. And they don't miss a trick: the aerial photography is some of the best I've ever seen, full of parallax and depth of field, augmented by seamless digital effects and camera angles that call attention to the plane of the earth and the line of the horizon -- visuals as handsome as they are brutal.

Under Scott's eye, the eponymous helicopter is itself a character, an active participant in the proceedings -- animated, alive, furious, flailing. As mentioned earlier, the soldiers don't fare quite so well, however -- although I suppose the depersonalized nature of the armed forces doesn't leave much room for maneuverability in a story that's constrained by historical accuracy and frenetic pacing. Accordingly, most of the leads settle into traditional combat-movie archetypes: the Ruthlessly Efficient Mercenary; the Doomed Naif; the Young Father; the Goofball; the Stoic Cipher; and variations thereof, and in between. Also par for the course: Scott's occasional reliance on his brother's familiar "subtitle syntax" to move certain scenes along; and a depiction of "the skinnies" sometimes bordering on exploitation; but given my unfamiliarity with the facts behind the movie, and its overall and unqualified effectiveness, these are minor quibbles.

Black Hawk Down isn't for the faint of heart: it doesn't shy away from gore, although the violence feels essential rather than gratuitous (thanks in no small part to Scott's ability to temper the immediacy of the action with his remote aesthetic sensibility); and the fatalistic progression of the plot may seem relentless at times, but it makes for a worthwhile moviegoing experience, by turns energizing and exhausting -- and ultimately satisfying.

(Incidentally, I couldn't help but notice that Simon West got a producing credit on this movie. What this probably means is that Jerry Bruckheimer originally pimped the project out to him before bumping it up to "prestige" status and slipping it under Scott's door. Disaster averted. The mind reels.)

(Completely unrelated: waiting in line before the movie, I accidentally elbowed a Little Old Lady™ in the face. I just turned around suddenly and SMACK! I felt really bad about it because no one, especially Little Old Ladies™, should ever get elbowed in the face. For her part, the Little Old Lady™ was rather sweet about it -- and uninjured, to my relief -- insisting that it was her fault for not watching where she was going ... although I noticed she steered clear of me as we were herded into the theater. Raza: 1, Little Old Lady™: 0.) + 6

I've been stuck in the past today, reading old emails, remembering old thought-places. Words and people, Christmas lights and picture windows, everything reticulates through a fisheye lens, the margins of memory annotated with new smells and strange songs. It all begins to feel like someone else's story, a misplaced dream.

On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, Raza Syed wrote:

Night falls early these days -- what, with the tricks white men, long dead, have played with clocks and diurnal variation.

I was walking back to my apartment and I looked up at the sky. The moon, half formed, was shrouded in a cold veil, and I wondered if that's what lured ancient explorers across uncharted waters -- that vision of some celestial enchantment, silver and remote, soft and inviolable. I know now why Diana was the lunar deity. No one writes about the moon like that anymore. What we see in it is a flash of white teeth, like a Cheshire cat's grin, thin and sharp.

R.
--
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come and kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

-Shakespeare

And much later:

10/13/2000 1:27:46 AM There are nights when the moon is just out of view, and I can wander the darkened house gleaning its pale glint off terrestrial objects: here, scattered by tree branches; there, refracted through window glass; and I can never quite find its center.

And so on. +

Reading this item via Slashdot about possible black-hole alternatives (cool term of the day: "unreal spacetime") got me thinking about supernovae. I have a question: now while our own sun is too small ever to become anything but a red giant, would it be possible by some artificial means to make it go supernova anyway? This is obviously sci-fi speculation, but I'm curious. Any ideas? + 7

"'Spider silk is a material science wonder,' Turner said. 'A self-assembling, biodegradable, high-performance, nanofiber structure one-tenth the width of a human hair that can stop a bee traveling at 20 mph without breaking.'"

Well, when you put it that way, it doesn't seem so gross anymore. + 3

I love this article because it takes a triviality compounded by an inanity and treats it as a newsworthy item ... which it sort of is. Or as the author puts it: "It demands an explanation because this is America." + 1

I should keep better track of my favorite musicians. I was a fan of Davíd Garza's This Euphoria my sophomore year of college (courtesy the inclusion of "Slave" on the Great Expectations soundtrack), and just now I was wondering what had become of him. Turns out he released two albums in the interim. My bad. +

Are Dell laptops that ugly on purpose? I mean, what was their industrial design mandate? "Make this look like Darth Vader's Trapper Keeper"? + 13

So when is this bad boy hitting the market? + 6

The new Panic Room trailer is up. I still prefer the pre-MPAA cut -- more menacing, more atmospheric -- but I can understand the marketing utility of a less arty, more plotty preview.

I've sung David Fincher's praises here before, and will doubtless sing them again in the future, but I just love his style. He's one of the few directors I can think of who knows how to use so-called "eye-of-god" camerawork in a way that's organic and actually enhances, rather than detracts from, the experience of watching his movies. That, plus he just seems to "get" the man-machine interface -- often to thrilling effect (which makes me anxious to see his Rendezvous With Rama adaptation get off the ground).

(Tangentially, one of my beefs with The Fellowship of the Ring was that Peter Jackson went overboard with such god's-eye-view shots -- way too much dive-bomb action where I just thought to myself, "Oh look, CG and miniatures." Feh.) +

I had an airplane dream -- pretty tame, mostly pertaining to the abysmal quality of cabin cuisine: passengers defecting en mass from the practice of eating, a stewardess becoming steadily, sexily, more flustered and put-upon; and I shouldn't tell you this, but ... the Olsen Twins were there. I only saw the backs of their heads, alas, as they sipped sparkling white grape juice out of plastic cups -- giggling, commiserating with each other, haranguing the aforementioned sexily flustered stewardess ... who finally approached me, thoroughly exasperated, and exclaimed: "Fine, you deal with them!" -- whereupon I popped awake, leaving behind some unfinished business in the skies above Nod. + 12

MadTV parodied a Shakira video the other day (unfortunately it's not in their archives yet), and the goddamn song has been stuck in my head ever since. It's not very good, but it's lodged in there like shrapnel ... shrapnel made out of mid-Nineties export-quality Europop and ... um, yodeling. The lyrics (e.g., "Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/So you don't confuse them with mountains" -- say what?) are worse than bad. + 18

Speaking of creepy ... Ian draws my attention to this, which of course reminds me of a certain meta favorite from days gone by. +

You know what's scary about Ben Curtis, the "dude" from those grating Dell commercials? He's in college and I bet he gets a lot of play. I can't even pinpoint why that's scary -- it just is. Runner up: Mike Maronna, who slacker'd down his Pete and Pete profile in those rah-rah ~~E*TRADE~~ Ameritrade spots of yore. And don't even get me started on those IBM ads starring Tony from Blossom.

But Brian Baker, of Sprint PCS fame -- he's nonthreatening. I'd let him babysit the kids I don't have. + 14

I sometimes have trouble telling Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez apart. If I followed baseball more closely, or at all, this probably wouldn't be the case, but I only know them from SNL appearances and Radio Shack commercials ... and apparently not from each other. + 3

Wonderful, useless, use of Flash. What's with the Kubrick-creepy motif anyway? + 2

"By flubbing an embargo and giving Web-happy night owls a premature glimpse of the new computer, timecanada.com broke Time's deal with Steven P. Jobs, Apple Computer's chief executive and ringmaster. By pulling down the article a few hours later, the site made it excruciatingly clear that there was indeed a deal." + 3

"Because Ive's designs aren't intended simply to attract, pictures consistently don't do them justice. It's only first-hand that you notice the tiny things: the magnetically-operated latch on the notebook computers; the light which, when the machine is 'asleep' rather than off, 'breathes' brighter and dimmer; the drop-hinge on the iBook, which puts the screen further away than usual on a notebook." + 7

I think we'd all like to do this to Robin Williams for some of his recent films. + 4

A word I'd love to see stricken from the vernacular: dang. It's disingenuously casual in the mode of cowboy hats and fake British accents* -- furtively studious, fussy. And we already have preferable alternatives -- damn and well, slap my mama! for example. I'm willing to grant special exemption status to Dave Chappelle and an animated Eddie Murphy, but a line must be drawn. Also, if you used dang recently but are now willing to recant, amnesty applications are forthcoming. + 8

If you glance over to the right, you'll see that I've reinstated the archives from the previous incarnation of this site ... which means I now have content going back almost two years. Insane, huh? I pretty much uploaded the relevant files and directories from my hard drive as-is, so the odd link may be broken -- although a quick inspection has left me with the impression that the gist, and the bulk besides, is intact and ready to be Googled, perverted, and in other ways surveyed, sampled and molested. There's even the occasional insightful tidbit mixed in among the dross. And just for kicks, you can observe the sundry tec-tone-ic shifts the writing has undergone for no particular reason. It's like watching various characters' hairstyles change on your favorite television show. Only boring. Here's an old-but-okay entry to getcha started. Banzai! +

Star Talk with Humbert Humbert: because it's been awhile since I posted anything about the Olsen Twins. + 6

I probably shouldn't have any New Year's resolutions, given my general aversion to conventions which smack of superstition or totemism ... but the brain is, after all, a mnemonic engine, driven by assignation and prefiguration, so here are mine in some particular order and somewhat after the fact: start things; finish what I start; multitask; develop more consistent sleeping habits (failing miserably on this last one so far).

That's the lot of them. I tend to keep mine simple and broad so that I don't psych myself out too much. In any given year, assuming I remember to make them, I usually end up following through on most of them. Wait and see. Knock on wood. Club a baby seal.

Did I say that last one out loud? Okay, one more resolution: don't club baby seals. Happy now? I'll just club homeless people instead.

Who said that? + 12

Up till now, The Mothman Prophecies' main selling point seems to have been the reteaming of Richard Gere and Laura Linney ... and I can't say that counts for much with me. I mean, its undeserved reputation and Ed Norton's showboating to the contrary, their previous outing was a pretty generic thriller.

But Jeffrey Wells' recent write-up has piqued my interest. I'm a sucker for psychological terror, presuming it's done well -- movies where implication is more potent than visualization. Horror movies that show you everything are just porn, literally working against your imagination. + 2

A friend writes: "I think there's a bug in IE with the yellow highlight hover on your webpage. Our IE browsers at work were recently upgraded to 5.5. Every time my mouse rolls over a link, your webpage flashes/blinks."

Anyone else getting this? I haven't been able to reproduce it in either Mac or Win -- but then again, I'm using IE 5.1 and 6.0 respectively, and this may just be localized to 5.5 ... a version which many of you happen to use. Guh. I hate the smell of napalm in the morning. + 11

I've been hearing good things about Lilo & Stitch, and the irreverent teaser bodes well ... but we'll see. I haven't really enjoyed any traditional (i.e., cell-based) Disney feature animation since Hunchback and Hercules in 1996-97. Mulan had its moments. Tarzan and Atlantis were atrocious. I never even got around to watching The Emperor's New Groove. + 3

For those of you who posted comments today and got some goofy error ... it's been fixed. Your comments got through regardless -- the server was just spitting up some post-processing jibber-jabber due to a slight misconfiguration. + 2

Say: what does explicit liber regis quondam regisque futuri mean? + 8

"Embarrassed CNN executives on Monday yanked an on-air promotion that referred to anchorwoman Paula Zahn as 'sexy,' accompanied by the sound effect of a zipper." I'd be willing to work at CNN just to be fired for allowing an ad like that to make it on the air. The gratuitous zipper effect was the coup de grace/stroke de genius, methinks. + 2

I won't even begin to enumerate my artistic objections to this offal, but I will say this: Shane West and Mandy "That's Not Short for Mandace" Moore look way too much like fraternal twins to be paramours in yet another bopper debacle. Visual incest is becoming a disturbing trend. + 2

I forgot to tell you about this dream I had -- must have been late November. Your site was a giant table, and all the readers were visitors, seated, hovering, variously situated around it. And it was arrayed with cookies, cookies of every stripe and texture, great big fun cookies. And I was a cookie thief, illicitly snacking under cover of casual conversation. Clearly, I had cookies on the brain.

Later, I dreamt that you and Ryan (Six, not Dzig) were studying for some sort of standardized test -- an entrance exam, perhaps. I quizzed you from a large book, Barron's-style.

In my dreams, the rooms we occupied were lambent with memory -- permeated with a tactile dreamlight that coated every surface like a draped satin sheet. Difficult to describe. + 7

"Alcohol may increase drowsiness and dizziness while you are taking this medication." I can vouch for that. I slept like a lamb last night. Not at all unpleasant. + 2

I think the club sandwich I just ate had Beggin' Strips instead of actual bacon. + 5

Rest assured, my puerilism knows no bounds today. To wit: what exactly is going on over at Zoog Disney? First, they have an original movie called, yes, Double Teamed; and then -- then -- they have a recurring character named ... named ... Zoogina. Um ... as in ... Alotta Zoogina? (I'm sure it's pronounced in some pedestrian Germanic way with respect to the "G," but I can dream, can't I?) I guess their army of kindershrinken ran out of words and phrases that weren't sexually suggestive ... or maybe we're just witnessing a demographic shift. Either way, I'm getting tingly. + 2

For no particular reason:

My friend B____ and I have this game we play sometimes where we take a crappy television series and re-cast it as a movie. There are no real rules, except the substitute actors need to resemble their forebears in some way, however absurd. For example, take Boy Meets World (please):

Cory ... Albert Brooks
Dad ... Jeff Bridges
Mom ... Frances McDormand
Eric ... Kato Kaelin
Shawn ... Ethan Hawke
Mr. Feeny ... a 1983 Trans Am
Topanga ... Jennifer Coolidge

Incidentally, what was the deal with Topanga anyway? She trotted out of the gate with loads of hubba-hubba potential, but it's like her ass and rack got caught up in some centrifugal death struggle over her center of gravity and she started looking like a cross between a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float, a Leisure-Suit Larry vixen, and one of those mermaid busts (no pun...) you see lashed to the prows of old sailing vessels.

While we're on the subject of casting, why-god-why wasn't former MTV VJ Dave Holmes in The Fellowship of the Ring? He's a total Hobbit. I mean, if NSYNC can be in the next Star Wars McMediocrity ... ya know?

(This post was one-hundred percent refined sugar, injection-molded into a sponge-cake matrix.) + 10

"Literary creativity isn't truly an act of creation. A writer doesn't manufacture words. Rather, he chooses them: He chooses to include some and to exclude others, by those means to kidnap their implications with greater or lesser precision of phrasing. A writer gives structure to preexisting cultural associations, finding new meanings by arranging them in previously unimagined juxtapositions. So it goes with scenes and chapters, an entire book." + 2

Heard any good songs lately? + 13

For a change, I haven't really written about movies in quite a while. So, forthwith, a rundown of the final hype-tastic trifecta of 2001:

Ali. Michael Mann proves yet again that when it comes to soulless, consummate craftsmanship ... he's really soulless and consummate. Which isn't a knock, exactly -- Ali delivers its share of "you are there" moments, abetted by Emmanuel Lubezki's amazing cinematography, which recalls the pages of a vintage Life pictorial sprung to life -- all grain and light and structure. (Incidentally, this is a real departure for Lubezki, whose excellence has historically struck a more ethereal note.) But ultimately the movie's breadth and verité vurtuoisty ring hollow, like a manicured greatest-hits reel of Muhammad Ali's life -- civil unrest, religious awakening and marital infidelity relegated to the margins of media celebrity, tiny asterisks astride bold sound bites. Will Smith holds his own, for what it's worth, although he seems to convey the physiciality rather than the soul of the pugilist, belting out everyone's favorite lines in the rote fashion of a really, really gungo-ho high-school drama lead. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and blame the screenplay. (See also: Man on the Moon, Evita.)

Vanilla Sky. Cameron Crowe loves his record collection. He also loves Alejandro Amenábar's Abre Los Ojos. The twain don't meet well, and the result is a curiously watchable but ultimately untenable "erotic thriller" that's neither particularly erotic nor thrilling -- disengenuous rather than ingenious. Some critics have complained that the plot makes no sense, but I thought it made all too much sense, especially the Cliffs Notes ending, where Crowe Spells It Out For You, and even manages to shovel in some additional subtext that he apparently couldn't finesse into the actual movie, instead presenting a laundry list of filmic, musical and literary references. To their respective credits, Tom Cruise is more than game, Cameron Diaz is a great psychopath, and Penélope Cruz manages to be appealing for the first time in her Stateside career. This is really the sort of movie a David should have directed -- as in Cronenberg or Fincher. In fact, rent eXistenZ or The Game instead. Better dividends.

The Fellowship of the Ring. What can I say about this movie that hasn't already been said? I know: I didn't much care for it. I didn't exactly dislike it either. In fact, for the first several minutes, I loved it.

Ring begins well -- with a darkened screen, Cate Blanchett's pitch-perfect narration, and Howard Shore's seething, portentious score. And the opening battle -- soldiers swarming like beetles, hematite armor glinting under a swooping crane shot -- is brutal, ancient and timeless: Aleksandr Nevsky on acid.

But then -- slam. Smurf Village -- I mean, Shire Somethingorother, replete with wildly unappealing hobbit hijinx (such imps!), and what amounts to a sadistic habitrail of a plot, in which our intrepid heroes are gerbils scurrying through a repetitive maze of stock adventure/quest components. Scenes of walking are usually followed by scenes of monster-thumping or "meanwhile, back at the ranch"-type displays of villainous scheming ... followed by scenes of communal weeping, usually on, or in the vicinity of, some sort of stone dais.

The visual effects vary considerably, sometimes transporting, other times merely obvious. (The forced-perspective trickery used to make Ian Holm appear smaller than Ian McKellen in the Gandalf-Bilbo scenes smacks of Honey, I Blew Up the Baby.) And it's sometimes unclear whether the elves are supposed to be camp, kitsch or just dour. David Ansen makes a good point in his review:

"The depiction of the landscapes, architecture and creatures of evil is stunning. But when it comes to the depiction of the good, the movie lapses into art nouveau kitsch. Cate Blanchett's appearance as a golden-locked elven queen is like pre-Raphaelite calendar art. The elven city of Rivendell runs to Ye Olde Antique Shoppe. Jackson isn't the first artist to be more inspired by darkness than light."

Speaking of Blanchett, both she and Hugo Weaving are uncharacteristically ill-used as alpha elves Gynelotrimin and Enron (...I think), respectively. The former has a CG money shot that falls somewhere between Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Disney's The Little Mermaid in terms of estrogenic pyrotechnics, and the latter can't seem to shake his monkey-marble-mouth accent from The Matrix, even though I've seen him do good and varied work in the past. Go figure.

The various British thesps are predictably sharp, and even Liv Tyler rises beyond eye candy, engagingly Zen-ferocious in a fairly small role as yet another elf, Aardwolf (...I think). The real standout performance is not Elijah Wood's, however, although he's certainly solid, called upon to maintain a tremulous agony-ecstasy composure through sundry travails; it's Viggo Mortensen's. I would go so far as to call his work here a revelation -- capturing the atavistic sensibility of the prologue and spiking the whole film with his intensity. The movie quickens in his presence.

Unfortunately, no amount of Method heroics can completely overcome a three-hour running time -- which I would have to say is Ring's greatest extravagance. I almost get the feeling the studio brass wanted a trilogy not out of any regard for Tolkien's books (although director Peter Jackson is certainly somewhat slavish in his interpretation), but because trilogies seem to be all the franchise rage these days, and breaking a costly fantasy epic into three parts means three big opening weekends over the next three years. (Opening weekends are when studios make the most money, with the revenue share tilting in the exhibitiors' favor as the weeks drag on ... which is why so many movies are primed to make a lot of money quickly and then fall off the face of the earth, much to the Chapter 11 chagrin of numerous theather chains.) Not to mention an engorged DVD boxed set just in time for Christmas 2004.

Anyway, this first installment of Time Warner's latest cash cow didn't really do much for me, and since I've never been able to stomach the books (why more people aren't into nimbler, wittier fare like T.H. White's The Once and Future King, I'll never know), I don't have much more to say about it. It's a decent movie in many respects ... it just didn't tickle my tuning fork. Hopefully the second picture will be less expository and more, um ... fun.

Incidentally, I've consumed so many cherry ICEEs lately that I think red dye has replaced the hemoglobin in my blood. Furthermore, Fush has a great piece about "The Nerfing of American Movies." Check it out. + 10

Starting the year on a vital note of triviality ... I read this piece on CNN a few weeks ago, about the formerly abandoned U.S. embassy in Kabul, somehow preserved in its 1989 state despite the ravages of the Afghan civil war. That's all Dickensian and good, but what really grabbed my attention was this little blurb: "Documents litter a diplomat's desk. Bottles of Fanta stand half full. Filing cabinets protrude displaying their contents." Open bottles of soda, still half full a decade later? (The corresponding video stream bears this out.) What exactly is in Fanta anyway? Shouldn't it be mostly water? Admittedly, I don't know much about the physics (or is it chemistry?) of a standing liquid in an open bottle, with respect to said bottle's aperture and various environmental factors ... but still. I remember breaking a Glo-Stick on a windowsill in C's dorm hallway sophomore year, and the fluorescent grog that emerged was fresh as Mountain Dew for weeks afterward. (I guess nobody wanted to touch it to clean it.) But that's not something I'd expect from a soft drink.

(While we're on the subject of fizzy drinks: what is it about seltzer -- soda, sparkling, tonic -- water that I hate so much? I used to think the stuff was bitter, but I've recently realized it isn't bitter at all; rather, I'm so conditioned to anticipate sweetness from my carbonated beverages, so expectant of a rolling sucrose kick, that the absence of, say, chemical cherry or caramel and Ingredient X manifests as a negative perceptual space around the flavorless water -- analogous to an optical illusion.) + 10

PSA: This is my inaugural Movable Type post. The switch from Blogger had been in the works for a while, even prior to that service's mini-meltdown last week. MT is simply more robust by my reckoning -- a slick interface over a unified architecture, regularly updated with new features. Good stuff. I wanted to wait till the beginning of the month so as not to break December's archive page. Likewise, this front page will remain hybridized for the next couple of weeks until newer entries have pushed the older stuff out of the way. I've also taken this opportunity to make a few CSS and interface refinements. Everything is rendering fine in the latest Win/Mac MS/Netscape browsers; but per usual, lemme know if anything sucks or is broken. + 5