Category Archive

If you are human, and especially if you are a Joss Whedon fan, go watch Dr. Horrible and if you haven’t heard anything about it yet I recommend watching the first episode before you find out anything about it at all.

I think Matt just restored my faith in humanity.  Hat tip to Steg.

In meatspace, that is.  The new digs are just one mile away; the far bigger transition is from Renting to Owing Incalculable Amounts of Money.  Boxes are still scattered everywhere, but I have the wireless set up!  Priorities.

What you have been hearing is true; it’s really really good and Robert Downing Jr. is the best part. Usually with these superhero movies there’s some cheesy character moments that you put up with in order to get to the good action-y stuff. With this movie there was some action and it was all right but I found myself impatient to get to the next character moment.

If you stay ’till the end, after the very last credits (and this is technically a spoiler but I can’t imagine anyone reading this who would care) you get to see Tony Stark come back home and a shadowy figure reveals himself as Nick Fury (played by Samuel Jackson), who’s here to tell him about something called the Avenger Initiative. When this happened in the theater I was in on Friday night, there was a wave of geek joy that spread from the front row (where one guy was literally jumping up and down with excitement) all the way to the back, presumably because it implies that there will be more Iron Man movies and more importantly a possible Avengers movie which, if it’s as good as this Iron Man movie, I think we can all agree would totally rock.

(spoilers are deeper in, with a warning. read on, Jonathan.)

The greatest show on television is over. Under normal circumstances I’d be reflecting on this a year or so from now, when the season 5 DVD finally gets released. But after finishing season 4 I knew I wasn’t going to be able to wait, and so burned through the final season via bittorrented video files, watching them on the laptop.

In the penultimate episode, a guy in recovery at Walter Reed is talking about a fellow marine who visits him from time to time. The quote is something close to “He takes the Peter Pan bus down from Baltimore and walks a couple miles south on Georgia Avenue from Silver Spring.” Anyone who lives around here probably knows that 1) Peter Pan is the bus you take in these parts if Greyhound is a bit too expensive, and 2) Walter Reed is, in fact, off George Avenue, and that 3) it’s almost exactly 2 miles south of Silver Spring.

That’s what made The Wire so good. It had the audacity to root itself in a specific place and shoot for showing things the way they really are. Sure, it had its operatic moments — like the end of season 3, or everything about Omar up until season 5 — but just enough to make the show an actual drama and not just a brutal critique of institutional incompetence (public and private) and the ruin it wreaks on our society. Ask a cop: “Is that what urban police departments are really like?” Ask a civil servant: “Is that what city politics are really like?” Ask a drug dealer: “Is that what it’s really like on the street?” Yes, yes, yes. Closer, at any rate, than anything before, close enough to make other dramas covering the same subject matter seem awfully shallow by comparison.

In my social and media circles it feels like the show has been thoroughly overhyped of late, but when I bring it up with people I’m always surprised how many still haven’t heard about it. So suffice it to say: make some time to watch the whole thing, at some point in your life.

On to some spoiler-y though about the final season.

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It was hard, starting out. I mean, you had to know coming off of season 4 that the “new day for Baltimore” wasn’t going to be all wine and daisies. But rather than observe that descent we jump right to the low point. Police funding in tatters, morale at an all-time low, Marlowe running rampant, the case against him on thin ice, Carcetti hanging low under the weight of bitter compromise. And it keeps getting worse.

No one has white gloves in The Wire, but there are characters it’s almost impossible not to like in spite of their flaws, chief among them McNulty and Omar. The writers seemed determined to burst viewers’ rosy conceptions of those two characters this season … almost maliciously so. McNulty sinks to his usual alcohol-drenched woes, but then, with his staged serial killer, enters the realm of the cringe-worthy. And Omar’s return to Baltimore for revenge is devoid of the brutal poetry with which he has been portrayed throughout the series. He is neither careful nor smart, and his death is ignominious; at the end of the day he has lost everything and caused the death of many of his loved ones. It’s not like I wanted Batman, but did have to be so bad?

After episode #8 I couldn’t imagine how things could come together satisfactorily — in total tragedy or otherwise. But by the end I think they had pulled it off. It was rushed, to be sure, and I wish they had a couple more episodes like the other seasons. But as soon as they brought down the arrests in Marlowe & Co. I realized that there was no way Carcetti could give any of that up, and that when the truth about the serial killer came out there would have to be a coverup. And, with the coverup, you get the cynicism of city politics, but you also get the blow against Marlowe to stick, at least in part. I think the ending I couldn’t bear would have been Marlowe remaining the king of the roost.

Structurally, I think adding the whole newspaper storyline was a mistake. There were already so many characters and plot arcs to keep track of. I would have loved to see more of some of the earlier characters who had only cameos this season or got dropped altogether. And the whole thrust of the newspaper story was, basically, about how the paper’s bureaucracy manages to reward mediocrity — indeed, outright falsity — and stifle and ultimately crush the real reporters. Same song, different instrument. Finally, I assumed ever since McNulty created his fake serial killer that the climax of the newspaper story arc would be somebody uncovering the facade and writing about it in the paper. It seems odd that that didn’t even come close to happening. All that said, the characters were all great and I’m sure the newsroom was portrayed with all the verisimilitude of the other aspects of the show. I’m not from that world but it was certainly exciting to see people giving a damn about language and about how to structure a piece of writing, and to see that sort of thing portrayed perfectly.

Bubbles: ah, Bubbles. At least somebody has everything come together for them. His final speech at the support group had my eyes welling up. Good for him.

Carcetti, right to the end, remained one of my favorite characters. One of the many triumphs of the show’s writers was the way that, in his whole journey from rising star to weighted-down mayor, even as he became compromised, disappointing and disappointed, even a little corrupt, he remained as committed and as intent on doing good as he ever was. It would have been too easy for him to simply devolve into your typical bad-boy politician, but instead he remains true to his core — gets even closer to his wife, for goodness’ sake — but time and again his hands are tied just enough that he cannot do the right thing, as much as he wants to.

So the show is done, though there’s plenty of room for continuation. Daniels, Freamon, and McNulty are all off the force, and it would seem weird to continue without all 3 of them, but cycling major characters in and out is hardly unusual for the show. In general I’m all for ending on a high note rather than letting a show run on and on until it jumps the shark and becomes an embarrassment. But I don’t think The Wire ended on its best season, and yet it did leave me hungering for more … if they announced it wasn’t ending after all, I wouldn’t fret too much.

Hillary’s campaign to make me actively dislike her has succeeded.  Playing on people’s fears?  Check.  Having surrogates noodle racial issues while retaining some semblance of deniability?  Check.  Brazenly asserting a reality (that she is still in the race by an reasonable measure) that is flagrantly at odds with real reality?  Check.

#1 and #3 cut deep because they are so, so Bush-Administration-esque.  I’m not holding out hope that an Obama presidency would usher in any more change than the usual, incremental kind, but at the very least I’d like a chance for my persistent state of outrage fatigue to have time to fade.  With Clinton, at this point, I’m not so sure it would.

Matthew Yglesias on The Wire:

It’s the best show on television. The best show in the history of television. And with season five ready to start airing in about a month, it’s by far the best show that’s currently still on. So you need to watch it. Okay? Okay.

Discussion question: Mr. Yglesias fails to take the next logical step and declare it the best show that will ever be on television. What aspect of The Wire is he missing?

As far as he goes, though, he’s right.

Finally, Peter Jackson is going to make The Hobbit. No word if he or someone else will direct yet.

I would like to take this time to remind everyone just what Gandalf is up to, history-wise, in the time between when he takes his leave of the Dwarves at the edges of Mirkwood and shows up again at the Battle of Five Armies:

He gets together with Galadrial and a bunch of elves (and I believe Saruman and Elrond but I’m too lazy to check) and they all go attack Sauron at the citadel of Dol Guldur in southern Mirkwood, which is where he’s skulking at that point.

Of course in The Hobbit this is only alluded to as “driving the sorcerer out of Mirkwood” or something like that. But this is Peter Jackson’s version we’re talking about, so you can be sure that scene is going to get some serious footage.

Kick ass.

Actually, here’s my early prediction: since they’re apparently going to make two movies, the second one being a Hobbit “sequel” with material bridging the time until The Lord of the Rings, I’ll bet they’ll fudge the chronology a bit and have the storming of Dol Guldur as the climatic moment for the second movie.

Socks and Barney.  Political satire in webcomic form, every day from now until the election, from the inimitable Steve Conley.  What will allow him to fulfill such a lofty ambition?  Readers.  Go now.  Bookmark.  Enjoy.

Christopher Tolkien says this book is for people who have read LOTR but aren’t quite up for The Silmarillion — a more accessible glimpse at the elder ages of Middle Earth. He may have misapprehended the average such person’s tolerance for genealogies and offhand references to obscure place names. The Children of Hurin is not the story of Turin Turambar told in a more LOTR-like fashion; it’s the same story as the one in The Silmarillion, but more so. It will remind you far more of Beowulf than anything to do with hobbits. This is a very good thing.

It’s rare enough for me to see a movie in the theater at all these days, so I know I almost certainly want to get a chance, but I want to see Ratatouille again in the theater so I can savor the visuals with a little more attention than was available in a theater full of the murmur of kids — including my own. It’d be so cool if this won Best Cinematography — is that even allowed?

This is a film about what it means to be an artist, and about art’s crucial ability to elevate us as beings, and, oh yeah, there’s a bunch of funny stuff about a rat in a French kitchen. I want to throw a movie party where we watch this and Big Night and one more — any ideas? — and cook up a really great meal. Who’s with me?

After about seven months of wanting one, I finally got a MacBook Pro. This is my first Mac, so I feel like a naive American tourist in Paris who thinks everything is just beeYOOtiful but doesn’t speak a word of the language. I enjoy using it more and more with each passing hour, although I must be vigilant — Dominic has made it his life’s mission to somehow, some way, get close enough to slobber all over the new hardware.

I find myself calling up Expose and the Dashboard frequently just because it it’s so cool the way the windows slide in and out. And the battery life is simply amazing.

This is a cool idea.

It doesn’t apply to me as much in terms of getting too many emails. But, like many people, I definitely procrastinate writing things that I know will end up being long, even when they might not even need to be that long.

Would the same principle would work for blog posts? Maybe I’ll try it.

Nothing but spoilers, be warned!

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Good stuff. While reading I was in the moment pretty much all the time, swept along … Rowling does a fine job of keeping the tension ratcheted way up, but also finding enough pauses in the action, and the right kinds, to keep it from getting downright absurd. When Neville whips out the sword and hacks off Nagini’s head, I do believe I punched my fist in the air and said “Go Neville!”, albeit quietly so as not to wake the sleeping baby.

Each of the latter books has been as much about the past of someone from the elder generation as it has been about Harry and his friends, and this time we get that look at Dumbledore. Maybe a few too many new pieces of information for this late in the series, but it was nice to see him humanized somewhat, and to see his management of secrets and his parceling out of information to Harry as a quirk of his own, sometimes not the best move, and not the blameless prerogative of the Guy with the Beard.

Glad he stayed dead. Glad Harry had to die, if not exactly truly so. In any case his confrontation with death has been inevitable since Book One, and I think Rowling found a way to do it justice.

Who knew that, at the end of the day, one of the most interesting characters in the series would turn out to be Voldemort himself? At the beginning he is just the Dark Lord, then we learn that he is Tom Riddle, who was once a student just like Harry, and upon his return we see him not as a disembodied Sauron figure but a man with a couple very specific agendas – wizard supremacy, staving off death – and some critical blind spots, including a cataclysmic lack of management skills that causes those closest to him, Snape and the Malfoys, to turn against him earlier or later. He’s a lot like James or Sirius or Dumbledore when they were younger, but unlike them he never really grew up, never learned love, and became little more than the inflated version of the playground bully with a pack of followers.

Of course, one running thread through the books is how if you have a staid bureaucracy and a slightly complacent populace, the playground bully type can aggregate a terrifying amount of power. The rise of the Death Eaters to assuming control over the Ministry and even Hogwarts is told step by incremental step over literally thousands of pages, starting with those early glimpses of “Mudblood” racism and Ministry incompetence, and then outright corruption, and then of course the delightfully infuriating Dolores Umbridge, and finally on to the situation in the final book, where Voldemort seizes all the power he needs not because he holds the majority opinion in the wizarding world, but because just enough people are just fearful enough of their own heads to not stick out their necks. The story of those baby steps that lead to authoritarian rule can’t really be told without taking thousands of pages, and I’m glad it’s done here. I just wish it wasn’t so damn relevant.

Snape! Ah, Snape. Always one of my favorites, so I was delighted to find his story arc taking front and center in Book VI, and pleased-if-not-surprised to learn that, yes, he was always on Dumbledore’s side, and yes, he killed Dumbledore so that Draco wouldn’t have to do it. But I was bitterly disappointed that other than those revelations, Snape’s role in Book VII is decidedly minor, and that we don’t get to find out all of those things until after his suddenly and altogether insufficiently dramatic death. And find out through that mother of all plot crutches, the Pensieve, no less. There’s talk about how Snape had the hardest job, keeping his cool as a double agent among the Death Eaters, but we don’t get to see near enough of that job, and we don’t get to see a final exchange between him and Harry at the end.

One thing that I’m glad clicked for me from the beginning of the series is that these books, for all their fantasy trappings, are structured like mysteries. Not “whodunits,” per se, but in each one there’s a riddle or riddles, a question of identity, something to be unraveled, and the attentive reader will find at the end that all those disparate parts will fit together nicely at the end, aided most of the time by a long dialogue between Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore tying up the remaining loose ends. It was clear that in Book VII this was happening on a grand scale, across the whole series, and I’m sure my appreciation for the last book was impaired by the fact that references and connections were coming fast and furious that I only had vague recollections of. (Not once did I ever follow through on my intention of rereading the previous book before starting the new one.) It did make me want to go back and read all the books again to get a deeper sense of how everything fits together. Rowling’s audience for all of this, of course, is the kids who have been reading these books since they were even younger kids, reading them again and again, and whose attention to every last minutiae is rewarded in the end by the fact that all those things they noticed, like how the bartender resembles Dumbledore or how Harry one time put that statue with that diadem on top of that chest, all actually matter in the end. Good for her.

Theodore Tonks Lupin: A new kid in the wizarding world, friend of the Potters. His parents are dead. He has werewolf blood in his veins. Groundwork being laid for future works, anyone?

The folks at wordpress.com, bless their hearts, introduced MX support for Google Apps locally.  Without getting too technical, it was previously impossible to have polytropos.org mail via Google and also redirect the url to the new blog home without paying someone for hosting.  Now it’s possible.

So the old url for the blog is working again.  And if you missed the fact that it changed and haven’t been here in a while, don’t worry, you haven’t missed much.

One of my failed blogging intentions was to do a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road. (A while back I did do a review of his previous novel, No Country For Old Men, as well as a short McCarthy primer.) But lately it’s been on my mind again, for bizarro reasons that I’ll get to in a second.

The Road is a great book. Father and son wander a postapocalyptic wasteland, the geography of which is the same as McCarthy’s earliest novels, at least on a map. The funny thing is that they’re kind of recognizable, even though everything now is covered in a layer of dust and almost nothing is left. The sere prose that describes the scenes is the connective tissue that links them. This wandering pair are two rare souls that have managed to hold onto their humanity; most of the people they run into have become, to some extent, monsters. McCarthy traced one man’s journey from man to monster in macabre detail in Child of God . . . kind of neat to see him coming back to this theme so very many years later. But for all the connectedness to his earlier works, the bulk of The Road’s actual text reads like some sort of survivalist primer. Just as NCfOM was taken up with the nitty-gritty of one man’s attempts to stay a step ahead of the law and the bounty hunter, this one makes you feel every pang of hunger as the protagonists try to scrounge for food for just one more day.

Anyhow, there’s plenty more to be said that will take a second reading to properly bring into focus in my mind. I’m not surprised that The Road has achieved quite a measure of popular success. “The apocalypse happened, and a father and son are trying to survive afterward” is, after all, quite a hook. Good Pulitzer prize material (which it won). But I was surprised to walk into the bookstore a few weeks ago and see copies of the book on the counter with big Oprah Book Club stickers on them. Surprised but not flabbergasted. It had already been Pulitzered, after all.

Then yesterday, my head exploded, when I learned (from loyal reader and friend Adam) that . . . but let me back up. Cormac McCarthy, while not a recluse of Pynchonesque proportions, is not a public writer. He steers clear of discussions of his work. His last interview regarding his fiction, to my knowledge, was the one for the New York Times Book Review in 1992 or 3 — and that was given in a car on the way to or from some airport. He’s the kind of guy that’s probably a familiar face at his local bookstore, and shows up for the neighborhood barbeque cheerfully, but just doesn’t go in for the whole national-exposure thing.

Except that on Tuesday, Book Club day, he’s going to be appearing on Oprah.

Cormac. McCarthy. On. Oprah. Oh what a strange, strange world we live in.

Needless to say, this I gotta see. Anyone know when Oprah is on?

(As a footnote, No Country for Old Men was made into a movie — no surprise there — by the Coen brothers — pleasant surprise there — and it was well-received at Cannes. I’m betting that even the quirky Coens gave the thing the filmic ending that the novel carefully skirts, and if so it should make a fine movie. Looking forward to seeing it.)

. . . the sign at the bookstore says “Just Like You Read When You Were a Kid!” but the books it’s referring to came along after you were a kid.

DNS migration taking place now. In the near future use nbruinooge at gmail dot com to get a hold of me.

UPDATE: Well, that was less painful than it could have been.  Normal email is working fine again.

Another year gone by now, now with two kids in the clan: even less theatergoing time than before. In previous years I’ve used that as an excuse not to talk about the Oscars, but where’s the fun in that? This year’s game: see if you can pick out which movies I’m talking about but haven’t actually seen!

The Nominees

Leading Actor

Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) is an easy win for this category, and reasonably well-deserved. Props to the Academy for giving Ryan Gosling the nod for a brilliant performance in a film that some might have seen as too hot to touch. And it’s delightful to see Leo nominated for his brilliant work in . . . Blood Diamond?! WTF! Give the man credit for his masterful performance in The Departed, where, as my buddy Nate pointed out, he had to show that he was tough enough to fool Jack Nicholson and his thugs while simultaneously channeling to us, the audience, that he is scared utterly shitless, all the time.

Supporting Actor

Eddie Murphy, nice to see you back in some sort of form, dude, but still: overrated. I am prepared to see The Departed a third time solely in order to watch Mark Wahlberg in it again. But Alan Arkin must ultimately get the nod here for playing the crass, heroin-snorting grandfather and somehow, through this, achieving the sublime.

Leading Actress

Can we just give it to Helen Mirren and get on with our lives? I swear, the British could make a movie about bread pudding and as long as their was some dignified elder actor headlining it, we’d still drool. Kate Winslet is the truly deserving one in this lineup, though overall I remain angry that Little Children got made into a film, thereby making it even more awkward for at-home dads at the playground than it already was.

Supporting Actress

Two fine performances from Babel get the nod here, which is nice, but we can still give this one to Jennifer Hudson for the Famous Film Moment of the Year. We know that moment will get overhyped on Oscar Night; let’s just hope it’s not over-over-hyped.

Animated Feature Film

Cars. C’mon.

Directing

The man is so long overdue it’s not even funny anymore, people. Quit screwing around and do your duty. If Eastwood gets it for Letters From Iwo Jima it won’t be the end of the world because, hey, he’s freakin’ Clint Eastwood. But if Frears sneaks this one away I am going to punch my TV screen, I swear.

Best Picture

If The Queen wins, see above. So nice, so very nice, to see Little Miss Sunshine make it to the short list, though decades of Oscar tradition dictate that the spunky little film gets nominated but doesn’t actually win. But now I’m torn, because as much as there is to like about The Departed, it is a flawed film. A ten word review might read: “Everybody dying doesn’t make it Shakespeare, dude. And the rat?!” The way out of this dilemma: give Scorcese Director and give Eastwood B.P.

Best Screenplay (Adapted)

Children of Men, no contest. So-so novel becomes an astonishingly good film.

Best Screenplay (Original)

Little Miss Sunshine has a superb ensemble cast and it would be a delight to see it win B.P., but I won’t be torn up if it’s doesn’t win Screenplay. Similarly, Pan’s Labyrinth has some fantastic visuals and had darn better win Best Foreign Film, but doesn’t absolutely need to win here. That leaves The Queen — kidding! I guess it leaves Babel, really, but it’s always side awarding an Oscar via process of elimination. So we’ll leave this one open.

Driving past Pittsburgh, I came across 91.3 WYEP, and heard, in the space of an hour or so, The Flaming Lips, Cassandra Wilson, Elvis Costello, The Housemartins (?!), and the Shins. Plus a bunch of artists I had never heard before but were really cool. Oh, and it’s a public radio station, so there were no commercials and they had NPR news on the hour and half-hour.

My question is, why the heck does Pittsburgh get a cool radio station like that, when D.C. is a radio wasteland? Unless I’ve missed something that’s come along in the last few years — if so, please tell me! As far as I know we got nothing much when it comes to eclectic/indie tastes like that, and one of our two public radio stations (WETA) just dropped their strong lineup of BBC/local news shows and went back to all-classical, all-the-time.  Sigh.

It was down to the wire, but I managed to see the two films I was determined not to miss while in Michigan: Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. There’s been some buzz about these two Mexican directors, each with what is undoubtedly their masterpiece thus far, and both films lived up to the hype.

When I saw Children of Men it was a snowy afternoon in Holland and I was the only person in the theater. (Spoilers of the won’t-spoil-the-movie-unless-you’re-really-picky-about-spoilers sort incoming.) The dystopian future presented will no doubt draw all sorts of comparisons to Blade Runner, but the world of Children of Men is much much closer to our own. As with Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I had a sense leaving the theater that there was a whole elaborate system of color symbolism and other subtle visual clues that I was picking up on only slightly. The whole movie is incredibly intense, but when (OK, maybe the spoilers are a little more spoiler-y, but still nothing that you wouldn’t have already heard if you’re seen/read any of the buzz) Theo (Clive Owen’s character) has to help deliver a baby and then shepherd said baby and her mother through the hell of a disintegrating detainment camp for illegal immigrants, I completely broke down. As in, I was in tears, or near tears, for the last forty minutes or so. No doubt a big part of that is just me having a six week old baby, and therefore responding to Baby Is In Danger storytelling at a visceral level. And Cuaron should be given all due credit for his amazing filmmaking — only when reading about it afterward did I realize that, yes, the whole apartment building scene toward the end was one long, long shot. But I also wonder if being along in the theater didn’t also free me up somehow to respond to what I was seeing emotionally, and physically. It was also shocking how, post-Abu Ghraib, the simple act of getting a hood put over your head can be. Seeing it happen to one of the characters just before the camera pans off was like a punch in the gut.

But hey, even if you don’t have enough of whatever parental horomone makes you weepy at the drop of the hat, you should still see this movie. I haven’t seen very many of them the past couple of years, but this one is easily the best I’ve seen in that time. Go see go see.

I was actually looking forward to seeing Pan’s Labyrinth even more, and maybe because my expectations were so high, I enjoyed it a little less. Del Toro’s horror film instincts are still very much in play here, and while it made for a gripping movie I occasionally found it a bit much. And let’s face it, I wanted to see it because it involved a girl encountering a faun, not because it was a tragic story about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, though it’s ultimately the former that provides the countermelody to the latter, and not the other way around. It is not a fantasy movie — its fantastic elements reside pretty conclusively in the imagination of the protagonist and the “could it be real?” moments don’t add up to much. These facts may make it a little different from the film I was expecting or would have liked to see, but that’s not to say they aren’t exactly what Del Toro had in mind. Like Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth is a tightly-constructed gem.

Both directors are going to be able to write their own tickets after this. If I could write them, though, I’d put them to work on a couple of the future Chronicles of Narnia pictures, doing work that’s true to the spirit of the books but darker and with a bit more of an edge — something that’d make ol’ Jack cringe, but maybe not if he had been born fifty years later. Del Toro should definitely do The Silver Chair, with all those giants and underground monsters — and Puddleglum, oh, Puddleglum! Cuaron could make fine work of Dawn Treader or maybe A Horse and His Boy.

Google is going to conquer the Internet.  It has already largely conquered me.  I use the Google personal page for my homepage, Google Reader for an rss reader, Google desktop for search, scratch pad, and to-do.  Google Calendar is the only calendar I use now, online or off.  I find myself using Google Docs a fair amount.  I belong to a couple Google Groups.  I will shortly be using Gmail with my regular email address, too, via Google Apps.

But the whole Internet — how is that going to work?  For an excellent writeup on that, see this “I, Cringely” essay.  Via Slashdot, though be warned that the summary there bears little resemblance to the actual article, which is more of a “here’s how Google is thinking very big and very long-term” and not “here’s how Google is bent on world domination.”

Check out this Spiegel Online article about the current state of Liberia and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s first year in office.  She’s the first elected female head of state in Africa, and you can see a cult of personality developing around her reminiscent of any number of male dictators who were extremely popular before their rotten cores showed, at which point they were thoroughly entrenched.  If she were a man I’d be highly cynical right now, giving her administration a few years before it falls into the same pattern as so many others.  But maybe she’ll be different.

Charles Taylor remains in the Hague.  His trial begins in April.  Meanwhile his son, former head of the atrocious Anti-Terrorism Unit during the war, is under arrest here in the U.S.  Chuckie is an American citizen and is the first person to be arrested under a 1994 law that makes it illegal to commit torture abroad.  A conviction there would not only be justice for Chuckie, but would provide some legal traction against the weak-minded scoundrels who refuse to close the door on torture as an instrument of U.S. policy.

Some bad news about the Bimbo Box — on the way to Michigan last week, the timing belt crapped out as we were pulling into our hotel.  So the next day found me spending seven hours getting to the garage and dealing with updates and waiting while they fixed it.  Things have been smooth since, thankfully.

The Pepboys where the BB was getting fixed was in the middle of a parking lot wasteland in Youngstown, Ohio.  There was a mall nearby, and behind and to the left and right of the mall were more strip malls and Home Depots and Kmarts and other stores, all with their own huge parking lots.   (Ooo, it just occured to me — here’s a Google Maps link with satellite view.)  It was as depressing an expanse of retail drear as I could imagine, and I walked around and through it in the drizzling rain because I had already read the book and the magazine I had brought and I had nothing better to do.

And then, rounding the corner by the Hobby Lobby, I saw them up ahead: on my right, a Borders.  On my left, a Chipotle.  I was saved.  It’s a shame that the retail sprawl exhibits such awful urban planning, but we live in a world where you can find awesome burritos and a store with lots of books and comfy chairs to read them in in freakin’ Youngstown, Ohio.  You have to admit, that’s pretty cool.

Via cdj in his new blog, I learn that George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series is making its way to HBO.

This is superb news because it means that I no longer feel obligated to actually read the books. I started the first book once and put it down for too long, so that when I picked it up again I had lost all the plot threads, yada yada. I’ve always meant to burn through them, not doubting their quality on the basis of so many positive reviews from friends. But now — now, as people will, when the series airs, begin the process of discussing book vs. TV versions, society at large will need That Guy Who Saw the Series But Never Read the Books. And I will be that guy.

I accept, nay, embrace this responsibility.

Welcome to Polytropos’ new digs, over at wordpress.com. Why? Short version: my hosting provider started crapping out big time, and in considering what to do I realized that I am not, at this point in my life, the guy who likes to have his own server space to play with and configure, but rather the guy who wants it to be easy. So rather than migrate to another full-service hosting provider, I’m using wordpress.com and Gmail, though I will be keeping the domain name, so in hopefully not too much time the old url will point faithfully to this blog, and the old email address will work just fine.

So don’t go changing your bookmarks just yet, but in the meantime, you can use this url for the blog and use nbruinooge at gmail dot com to get a hold of me if the usual email bounces. You will need to update the rss feed, though.

Comments should be working again.

Don’t worry, the header image is going to be replaced by something appropriately Polytropian — thanks in advance to Ed!

Older pages are going to be a sea of broken links and unformatted Textile formatting. I’ll try to fix the posts that still get some intermittent traffic.

Oh, and in the spirit of wanting things to be easy, I should confess that I have iPhone lust and also very badly want a Macbook Pro. I am prepared to publically apologize for my years of PC advocacy if the Mac fairy will bring me these things.

“The bimbo box” — Hiro Protagonist’s derisive term for the family minivan in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. I can remember reading that book for the first time, in 1993, and savoring that feeling of dissing those minivan drivers, “[poking] along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise’s driveway like they don’t know if it’s a promise or a threat.” If someone had asked I might have sworn never to own a minivan even before the term “bimbo box” came along; with the added weight of that appellation it would have been a no-brainer.

Stephenson didn’t predict the SUV, though. And by comparison, the minivan doesn’t look quite so bad. It may be staid and a little suburban, sure, but at least it’s not superfluously all-terrain and prone to flippage. SUV drivers may actually think that they look cool, whereas the minivan drivers labor under no such illusion. Their choice is utilitarian, and, as such, is considerably less egregious, as far as gas-guzzling behemoths go.

My point is that, in the greater scheme of things, minivans aren’t that bad any more, right? Right?

Do you see where this is going?

Yes, it’s true, the new Polytroposmobile is a 2000 Toyota Sienna. Seats seven. Teal, or Caribbean Green or something. It was three weeks of loading and unloading with two kids, and contemplating a drive to Michigan with the same (to say nothing of the dimensions of the Sit ‘n’ Stand stroller), that made the choice an obvious one. Sometimes there’s just that deal that comes on down Craigslist and you’d be stupid not to take it, y’know?

At some point in the past this decision might have still been a little traumatic for me, but three years of diapers ‘n’ Dora have long since stripped all the hipness from my system. I am close to achieving a Zen-like state of peace with respect to our purchase — a process that will be helped along by a custom bumper sticker of some sort, though I haven’t exactly decided what it’s going to say yet.

Suanna knew when she got up this morning, December 9, that it was going to happen today; at 1:30 she knew it was time to go the hospital, even though her contractions were still relatively far apart. At 2:00 we were in her delivery room; at 2:05 she was pushing, and at 2:53 Dominic Michael Bruinooge was born.

Seven pounds, ten ounces, nineteen inches. He has a fair amount of dirty blonde hair, and dark grey eyes with perhaps a hint of brown — we’re not sure yet. He has been a most relaxed baby so far, staring around at everything with wide eyes, like his big sister did, and hardly crying at all. I am composing this while Suanna is sleeping and the nurses are busy checking him out in the nursery, and I’m still not sure if I’m so relaxed about it all because this is the second time or because it happened so fast I haven’t had time to actually process it.

You wonder, as a parent, how on earth you could possibly find more love for someone new when your heart is full to bursting with love for the child you already have. But then when the moment comes it washes over you and you can’t imagine it any other way. Your capacity isn’t divided, it’s multiplied — the kid is hours old and he’s already given me a gift I can never repay.

Pictures and further news can be found over on Cerin Amroth.

It starts innocently enough. It’s a blustery autumn day and there’s a nice arts and crafts festival in your neighborhood, so you swing on by to see what there is to see. And right at the edge there’s an area for kids to make their very own scarecrows — your daughter is delighted! You help her put one together, though a lot of the good clothes have been taken, so the pickings are a little slim. You make a small scarecrow, one that you can stuff in the top part of your daughter’s stroller, and she just loves it.

But then you get home. The scarecrow just sits there. It starts to freak you out. And then, the very next day, this.  Dear reader, steer clear of the make-your-own-scarecrow area, and maybe, just maybe, you can escape our tragic fate.

Go go read read Bruce Schneier, What the Terrorists Want. Spot on.

Hat tip to Patrick over at Making Light.

Polytropos now runs on WordPress. Update your feedreader if you use one! Internal links are seriously broken, but many were already broken from the last big MT upgrade. I’m gonna fix the links in the Highlights entries over the next few days, though.

If you’re here wondering where on earth Cerin Amroth has gone, update your bookmark to the new url, here.

During my latest ill-advised bout of blog infrastructure tinkering, I managed to change to the newer, cleaner template, and in the process completely invalidate my old stylesheet. I also did a bit of tweaking to try to make comments 1) doable and 2) reasonably impervious to spam, and succeeded on point 1 but failed utterly on point 2.

Time for a clean start. Gonna move to WordPress. New directories and filenames will hopefully throw the comment spam off the trail. Lost links to old articles will be too bad, but hey, not like I’m writing anything worth linking to at the moment anyway. Nothing like an extended blogging hiatus to make switching platforms seem like not that big a deal.

I’ll keep the root url the same, though. Will probably change Cerin Amroth’s url to something different, seeing as it’s gonna be about two kids in a while. Anyway, if the main page appears as one form or another of gobbledeegook in the near future, this is why.

Testing out Writely, Google’s new web-based word processor. I’m aware that Google appears intent on conquering the world. But they do seem to come up with interesting toys. We’ll see if their brags are correct and I can post directly from here to the blog.

UPDATE: Seems to have worked, other than screwing up the title.

1. There’s a part of your soul that gets replenished when you go into the mountains. If you haven’t been to the mountains in a while, the effect is profound. If there’s some other activity that fills up that same part of the soul, I haven’t discovered it.

2. If I could go back in time, I would do my darnedest to be at Red Rocks on June 5, 1983 and August 15, 1995. Being there a decade or two later, during the day, watching just a few people rehearse on the stage, and explaining to your daughter that all of those strange and wonderful sounds she hears are coming from one instrument, the electric guitar . . . all that is pretty cool too, though.

3. Is it even possible to drink enough water to keep from feeling totally dry?

We have news! Suanna is pregnant. Here’s the FAQ:

Q: Seriously?

A: Yep.

Q: Wow . . . I mean, like, I didn’t know if you were gonna have another one or not.

A: Neither did we. But then we decided to give it a shot.

Q: Now you’re gonna end up with like four or five, right?

A: The plan is to stop at two.

Q: So, when’s Suanna due?

A: December 16, which means she’s early in the second trimester right now.

Q: Are you gonna find out the gender, and if so are you gonna tell us?

A: Yes and yes.

Q: So do you know right now?!

A: Nope. The technician wasn’t able to hazard a guess at the ultrasound. But you are more than welcome to engage in your own speculation; here’s a picture:

http://www.polytropos.org/sonogram.jpg

Q: Do you guys want a boy now, for balance or whatever?

A: Not necessarily. In fact, when we were at the ultrasound and the technician was trying to figure it out, I realized that, in my gut, I wanted it to be another girl.

Q: Maybe on the theory that another girl might be as wonderful, easygoing, and non-troublesome as Ella?

A: Hey, it was a gut feeling. But that may have had something to do with it.

Q: You realize, though, that after Ella you guys are totally fated to get a screaming terror of a child that will have you in a constant state of frazzlement for the next 18 years?

A: The cards are stacked against us, it’s true.

Q: So what does Ella think of the prospect of having a sibling?

A: We haven’t told her yet. That is to say, we haven’t sat down with her and explained everything in language we know she can understand. We have talked about it with each other in her presence pretty liberally, so she’s got to have an inkling that Something Is Going On.

Q: So how much of it do you think she gets already?

A: If history is any judge, way more than we’d guess.

Q: This is all very exciting. Who’s allowed to know? May I spread the word?

A: You certainly may.

Opened up comments and trackbacks again, after finally tweaking some spam settings. Hopefully won’t regret it. Chatter away.

Are you feeling a little down today, seeing as it’s 6/6/06 and the world is gonna end? I’ve got some good news for you. Fafblog has returned, after being gone for far too long. So enjoy, for the next six hours, give or take depending on time zone.

If Fafnir and Co are back to stay I may have to start writing more here, or I’m gonna lose my link from their site . . .

We ate tonight at the Brickskeller, in Dupont Circle, a fine basement dive that boasts the world’s largest beer list. Throughout the 90’s this was a favorite haunt and a default destination when Suanna and I had visitors in town, but somehow along the way we stopped going. When one of our visitors this weekend suggest we return there, we realized it had been at least five years since our last visit.

The place hasn’t changed much, which, in this case, was comforting. I can recommend without reservation the Schneider Hefe Weizen and the Zywiec Porter (Polish porter — who knew?). But the food disappointed. Neither the cheese plate, nor the pizza, nor the Brickburger measured up to our cherished memories of past visits.

And therein lies the puzzle. What has changed — them or us? Has the quality of the food served at the Brickskeller taken a dive in recent years? Or have our culinary standards changed in the transition from 20s to 30s, so that now stuff that seemed wonderful no longer measures up? Hard to say for sure, though if any readers have dined at the Brickskeller both recently and long ago and can shed light on at least one half of the puzzle, by all means let me know.

I knew when we moved that it would be kind of nice to have a YMCA just a couple blocks away. Little did I suspect how much use I’d get out of it, though. The key factor here is one of the perks of membership: free childcare for an hour and half during the morning. Because of this, heading over to the YMCA has become a morning ritual for Ella and me, usually five days a week. There are three nodes of happiness:

1. A break from childcare. Not that it’s wearing on me that early in the day, but the early break means my batteries last that much longer. And the exposure to a daycare-like situation is definitely good for Ella.

2. Exercise. Insert the standard comments about how exercising gives you more energy throughout the day here. After a few weeks of it, I can definitely tell the difference in terms of energy, strength, and overall sense of fitness. Not much change in weight yet — appaerently there’s some evidence out there that one also has to adjust diet when losing weight? Gah, I hope not.

3. Susanna Clarke. After a couple false starts at reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I’m finally halfway through and going strong, by listening to the audiobook version on my iPod while toiling away on the elliptical machine. The world is full of audiobooks that are worthless because they have a lousy reader. This, thankfully, is not one of them. 31 hours of audio means it’s gonna last for a good while yet. And the nature of the book, rife as it is with footnotes, asides, meandering descriptions, and Victorian flourishes, means that when my attention wanders for a minute or two, as always seems to happen when listening to a novel, chances are that I haven’t missed anything particularly essential to the plot.

I didn’t blog on Charles Taylor’s capture when it happened, but thankfully, the event was decently covered in the media — a healthy change from the treatment Liberia usually gets.

So anyway — Yay! He’s in the hands of the Sierra Leone Special Court. Might be tried there, or in the Hague — that’s the current source of debate. That Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf called for his extradition at all came as a welcome surprise. After all, she had visited the U.S. just prior, and had been decidedly noncommital on the issue. Other than a few members of Congress who have been on the Taylor issue (sometimes “a tad overzealously”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2003/11/boba_fett_repor.html), the U.S. government hasn’t been particularly enthusiastic about stirring up Taylor trouble by reeling him in. The State Department seems to have been happy with him boxed up in exile, not causing (as much) trouble. The White House, predisposed against the International Criminal Court, was disinclined to support any action that might lend it credence. And if the conventional wisdom, that Taylor has CIA connections from back when he was the alternative to President Doe, holds any weight, then there’s another bunch of folks with no desire to see him on the witness stand.

But Johnson-Sirleaf asked for him anyway. Good for her. When I first heard that he had flown the coop in Calabar, I would have bet real money that that was the end of it — that he’d turn up again in one shady country or another, someplace harder to extract him from, and that he’d live out his days there, Idi Amin-style. Turns out he even made it to the border, but no further.

Now the long, long wait for the trial process to turn up anything worth writing home about. In the meantime, here’s my main question: why isn’t “Douglas Farah”:http://www.douglasfarah.com/ being interviewed, quoted, or otherwise turned-to every single day on this issue? Am I just in on the wrong news outlets? You’d think someone with some things to say about “the possible connections between Taylor and Al Qaeda”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2004/06/the_charles_tay.html would attract a little more attention.

Oh well. They got the bastard. That’s something.

One big difference in the layout of the new Polytropos HQ is that the computer desk is in the bedroom. It used to be in the main room, which made playing music easy — the computer speakers were decent enough for the job, and the computer is where all the music was, anyway. Ever since moving I’ve known that some sort of solution would be needed to play the music from the computer on the stereo in the living room, since the alternative — taking physical CDs out of the big CD binder and putting them into the CD/DVD player — wasn’t going to happen all that often, in practice.

I realized yesterday, when we had some people over and I was wanting to put on some dinner music, that in the two months since we’d moved I had just sort of stopped listening to music very much. And that was appalling. So after a flurry of online research to confirm what I already suspected, I went out and got an Airport Express. It’s plugged into the outlet near the stereo; standard RCA cables connect it to the receiver. Took 5 minutes to get it talking to the wireless network. As I write this, I’m sitting at the laptop on the couch, accessing the shared music library on the desktop in the bedroom, and playing the music through the stereo speakers. The new[1] Franz Ferdinand album sounds very fine, as have the new[1] Belle & Sebastian and Neko Case. I declare myself quite chipper, indeed.

fn1. I realize it’s probably not new any more, but I’m always a few months behind on music these days, and it’s new to _me_ dang it!

You should be reading Slacktivist all the time, but even if you’re not, read

“Empathy — part 3″:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2006/03/empathy_part_3.html

and

“Empathy — part 4″:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2006/03/empathy_part_4.html

. . . on the community bulletin board at Mancini’s Cafe, Alexandria:

Lonely? Worried About The Threat Of International Terrorism? Need A Little Extra Spending Money?

“Here’s a scan”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/misc/homesec.jpg of the whole ad. What I love most about it is the guerilla satire angle — no attribution or link or anything, just the piece itself. Now that it’s scanned I’ll put it right back where I found it. Kudos to whoever’s behind it.

Well, a few miles, anyway. Polytropos HQ is changing its coordinates in meatspace. The new apartment is in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, which is one of those areas that has a pretty good mix of “hip” and “quaint” and that everybody recognizes when you say it and thinks it’ll be a great place to live. Consequently the houses around there are totally unaffordable, as are most of them ’round these parts, so we’ll give that step another year or two.

Playground in walking distance: check
YMCA in walking distance: check (added bonus)
Metro stop: check, definitely walkable, though far enough away that you’d feel obligated to drive out and pick up people you don’t know very well.
Decent coffee shop nearby: “check”:http://www.stelmoscoffeepub.com/

Hiring movers this year, instead of the usual bribing-friends-with-pizza-and-beer. Does that make us grown-ups, now?

I haven’t linked to him in a while, but Douglas Farah’s blog remains a rare and valuable resource for tracking Charles Taylor’s mischief-in-exile and its implications for Liberia’s future. Most recently, see “this piece”:http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/17/a-bad-start-in-liberia-of-johnson-serlif#comment on some bad seeds in the new Liberian government, and “this one”:http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/22/the-administrtation-is-still-oblivious-on-taylor#comment on the Administration’s obliviousness to Taylor’s continued importance to both Liberia and the struggle against terrorism.

I’ve been getting absolutely hammered by comment spam. Don’t know if there’s some MT setting I need to tweak or if the built-in filters just aren’t doing their job. But in any case I’m going to turn off comments until I get a chance to sort it all out. Feel free to send your comments via email in the meantime.

“Fabulous State of the Union parody”:http://www.youtube.com/w/State-of-the-Union-2006—-Bush-Impression?v=upTUbqc5Pso. Hat tip to Marty.

I love “CD Baby”:http://www.cdbaby.com/ for a couple of reasons.

Reason #1: This is an excerpt of the confirmation email I received upon shipment of my recent order:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, January 29th.

Reason #2: CD Baby sells “Craic Wisely”:http://www.craicwisely.com/ CDs, including their “new one”:http://cdbaby.com/cd/craicwisely2, which I await most eagerly. I wrote about them “before”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2004/01/craic.html; they’re super-cool. Make sure your next CD Baby order includes something of theirs.

Someone do “one of these”:http://www.originalalamo.com/downtown/frames.asp?b=/online_tix/show_details.asp?show_id=3243 in the DC area, pretty please. Like, yesterday.

Hat tip to cousin Tom.

It’s been a spare year for the ol’ blog. And looking back over things, it’s clear that nearly all the entries even vaguely worthy of the term “highlight” fall under the “Polytropos Review” category from previous years — reviews of books, movies, music, games, what have you. Not much at all in the way of politics or “slice of life” narratives. No promises, but we’ll see if we can do something about that in 2006.

*Books*

* “The System of the World”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=497
* “The Knight”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=501
* “The Wizard”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=504
* “On Rereading Books”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=505
* “The Wizard Knight Redux”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=526
* “Vacation Comics Roundup”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=532
* “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=541
* “Cormac McCarthy, In Brief”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=545
* “No Country For Old Men”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=546

*Movies*

* “Outfoxed”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=489
* “Sunset, Before and After”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=502
* “The Revenge of the Sith”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=527
* “Batman Begins”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=542
* “Serenity”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=556
* “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=561
* “King Kong”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=566
* “NarniaBlogging”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=571

*Games*

* “H2Online”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=486
* “Major League Halo”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=491
* “That Game”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=543

*Music*

* “That Voice”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=496
* “Quick Music Reviews”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=544

Better late than never, right?

Narnia runs deep in my blood. One of my most cherished childhood memories is having my father read the first few books of the Chronicles to my siblings and me, a chapter at a time before bed. By the time we were up to the last few I was old enough to read them by myself, which I did repeatedly through childhood. I revisited Narnia and became rather deeply steeped in the milieu in college, when I got involved with NarniaMUSH.[1] Rereading _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ recently reminded me of how ingrained these books are into my consciousness, and how hopeless any attempt would be to re-evaluate them objectively today.

Given all that, it’s understandable that I approached the new film version with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. But given the larger context, it was the latter that won out as I walked into the theater last night. Somewhere along the line, _LWW_ the movie had been eclipsed by _LWW_ the cultural event, certainly in terms of media coverage. Prior to its release, just about the only article you could find about the movie would be about how it was being heavily marketed to the evangelical community by Walden Media, the folks who gave us the “Passion of the Christ”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2004/03/the_passion_of.html marketing blitzkrieg. It took coming to the Midwest (I’m writing this in a coffee shop in Holland, Michigan[2]) to see it firsthand, though: the billboard advertisement for a church featuring the face of Aslan, or the fact that the Holland Christian school system sent _all_ its students to see the movie.

This is weird, wacky stuff. First of all, whatever happened to the fundamentalists I used to come across who were _down_ on the Chronicles, what with their magic, witchcraft, and unorthodox-theology-if-you-could-even-call-it-that, penned by a quirky universalist neo-Platonic Anglican? Are they quietly stewing right now, or have they morphed and embraced Lewis now that he’s a Pop Culture Event? And why is everyone behaving as if _LWW_ is some sort of straightforward Christian allegory? C.S. Lewis, Christian apologist: check. Hodgepodge of Biblical references: check. Sacrifical atonement by a godlike figure: check. But what book did you read in high school that _didn’t_ have Biblical references and a Christ figure?

Lewis gives away — strips away, actually — the metaphor at the end of _The Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ when somebody (Aslan himself, I think) hints that Aslan goes by another name in our world. As a kid it wasn’t until that moment that I “got” that aspect of the story. And I was quickly disabused of the notion that they were Just Christian Stories when I first logged on to the aforementioned NarniaMUSH and mets scads of fans of the books, ranging from atheists to pagans to Christians, who appreciated them for what they are, primarily: excellent children’s fantasy literature.

So yeah, back to the trepidation. My hope going into the theater was that, whatever the marketing campaign, the film itself would simply do the book justice. (It was in the can before the marketing began, after all.) My worry was that the same people selling the film in churches had gotten their fingers into it while it was being made and turned it into . . . something else, something that was a neater allegory to contemporary evangelical Christianity in particular.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ the movie hews remarkably close to the book. There are the expected changes for a Hollywood film: additional action sequences, punched up dramatic sequencing, modernized dialogue and sensibilities. (”Battles are ugly when women fight in them” is changed to just “battles are ugly” — a better line all ’round.) But none of it was in violation to the spirit of the book, and there are even a few dramatic choices that I’m sure Lewis would have wanted in his book if he had thought of them at the time.

A quarter of the way through I was worried that these young actors didn’t have the chops to pull off their roles. I don’t know if I was just sufficiently sucked in to ignore that stuff, or if they all get better, but that didn’t bother me again through the rest of it. Lucy in particular does a swell job. And all their characters age subtly but effectively, so that by the end you can actually buy Peter up there in front of the army, even though he was playing hide-and-seek just an hour and a half earlier.

J.R.R. Tolkien disapproved of Lewis’ Narnia to a certain exten;: it was sloppy world-building, after all. Lewis tosses in elements from English folklore, Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and throws in Santa Claus to boot. Ask too many questions about Narnia’s socioeconomics, or geography, and you’re bound to come up with some inconsistencies. But in the movie this messiness works, especially when surveying the delightful menagerie of the Narnian army, or the Irish stew of boggins and troglodytes that make up the jeering masses at the Stone Table. WETA Design, the folks who brought Middle Earth to life in all the wonderful ways documented in the extended LOTR DVDs, were also responsible for this Narnia, and you can tell they had a blast with it.

Big kudos to the filmmakers for starting the film with the London air raids. It’s a throwaway line in the book but it works wonderfully as a way to contextualize the story, introduce the Pevensies, and provide a counterpoint to the fantasy battles inside the wardrobe.

_LWW_ is a good movie, but not a great one, and one of the big reasons is that Andrew Adamson has taken way too many pages from the Peter Jackson Book of Fantasy Film Direction. This is true throughout, especially in the climatic battle scenes, which are done rather well except for a fact that they steal rapaciously from _The Lord of the Rings_, sometimes shot-for-shot. It all would have been a lot more thrilling if we hadn’t seen it before. This is going to be a problem for anyone who wants to do a fantasy movie or a big army battle scene for a long time — Jackson found a near-perfect visual language for it, so how are you going to live up to that but still be original? A tall order, and one that doesn’t get filled here.

A lot of it still works, though. Like the centaur dude dual-wielding broadswords — Lewis _never_ would have written that in, but he totally kicks ass.

I couldn’t help myself — as I watched the movie, I was keeping a mental inventory of any changes from the book that might be construed as an attempt to Christianize the story more than it is. I came up with three, all of them tenuous:

1. Aslan walking away at the end on the beach. Subtle reference to the maudlin “Footprints in the Sand”:http://www.llerrah.com/footprints.htm meme? It’s a stretch.

2. After the battle, Aslan says “it is finished,” which doesn’t happen in the books. But if this is a conscious allusion to the Biblical words it is just plain bizarre, seeing as they are Christ’s words moments before his death on the cross. It works as a nod but not as any sort of allegorical reinforcement. Maybe a coincidence.

3. The fact that the trees carry the news of Aslan’s death to everyone back at the army camp. In the book, only Susan and Lucy (and the reader, of course) are ever aware that Aslan dies and comes back. I always liked the fact that Aslan’s death and resurrection were so limited — for the sake of one person alone, and done essentially in secret. It meant there were associations with the Christ story but no point-for-point connectivity. Making everyone aware of Aslan’s death moves it a step closer to being a collective, religious experience, which it’s not in the book. But you could also make a good case that doing so simply increases the dramatic tension, so, as with the previous two points, this really isn’t enough to get worked up about.

So where are they going to go from here? The IMDB doesn’t have anything else on the horizon, Narnia-movie-wise. I’ve heard it said that if this one does well, they have six more that they can make, but that isn’t necessarily so — not all of these Chronicles are necessarily going to translate well to film. _Prince Caspian_, the next one in order[3], is a middling contender. _The Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ would be a much better bet for a next movie — it would work well on film, and is the best of the books to boot. I would love to see _The Horse and His Boy_ and _The Silver Chair_, my other two favorites, but neither _The Magician’s Nephew_ nor _The Last Battle_ seem like the big screen is going to embrace them without some heavy tweakage.

Whatever happens, though, I no longer have trepidation about the film future of these beloved books. If Adamson & Co. stay on this course, it’ll be good — good enough, at least, to withstand whatever manner of marketing silliness, for those who are willing and able to see past it.

UPDATE:

Some links:

* Not surprisingly, “Fred Clark’s words”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2005/12/wwad.html on Narnia and the culture wars are memorable and apt.
* Here’s “Joshua Bell’s review”:http://spaces.msn.com/members/inexorabletash/Blog/cns!1pDgw8wq3izH0e3yCzmSbAHw!410.entry.
* David Edelstein “gets it”:http://www.slate.com/id/2131913/?nav=fo.

fn1. Joshua Bell, a fellow Narnian from those days, has an “excellent page”:http://www.calormen.com/Calormen/narniamush.htm describing what the heck a MUSH is for those who don’t know, and describing NarniaMUSH in particular. Those readers who also took part in NarniaMUSH will also appreciate his archive of assorted files and maps from those days as well. Quite a trip down memory lane.

fn2. “Lemonjello’s Coffee”:http://www.lemonjellos.com/. Good place.

fn3. This seems as good a place as any to shoehorn in my Chronicles of Narnia Book Order Rant. The published order of the books — LWW-PC-VDT-SC-HHB-MN-LB — has stood for a while, but more recent editions have been coming out in chronological order — MN-LWW-HHB-PC-VDT-SC-LB — presumably with the consent of the Lewis estate. This is all poppycock and nonsense. Lewis wrote an oft-quoted letter to a kid one time where he suggested reading the books in chronological order, but if you read that whole letter it’s clear that what he was saying was “it’s not a big deal, and if you’ve already read them the published way why not read them this way this time,” _not_ “This Is The Way I Wish My Books To Be Read.” When it comes down to it there’s really only one point of contention. LWW-PC-VDT-SC-LB should obviously be read in that order. _The Horse and His Boy_ is unrelated to that chronology, and can be inserted pretty much anywhere. The issue is whether to read _The Magician’s Nephew_, the “prequel” book, right away or at some later point. And as far as that goes, _MN_ as it is written is clearly the sort of prequel that you read _after_ having read the other stuff. It gives plenty of “aha!” answers as to how various things came to be in Narnia. Answering the questions at the outset takes away a little of the mystique of _LWW_ especially, and besides, _MN_ is a quirky, somewhat uneven work — not the strong opener you’d want for a series of books. Chronological order is a fun way to read the Chronicles on a subsequent reading, but sucks as a way to tackle them at the outset, and super-sucks as a way to publish them.

. . . in which we answer reader mail! This one comes from a particularly esteemed reader:

Dear Nate,

I write because your 83 year old grandfather needs some help.

My high school teacher of English (and president of the Wisconsin English Teachers Assocation WETA) was a harsh taskmaster. She insisted that no one would get a passing grade in her class until they could distinguish the correct use of “I” and “me”, “we” and “us”, and similar pronouns. She claimed that any intelligent person, which she hoped we would become, would know the difference between a subject, an object, or what followed a preposition, and would thus use the proper pronoun.

So I have almost a visceral reaction when I hear what I believed correct for 81 years (I learned the above at home even before I went to high school) to be misspoken. I cringe when I hear a preacher proclaim that “you and me need God’s forgiveness.” Why should I believe the truth of someone who speaks in error? Hearing a successful CEO observe that “it’s been a good year for my partner and I” I say to myself “He’s rich, but he’s dumb” or “he must not have taken an evening English course when he immigrated to the States.” To be honest, this is one part of my life where I am extremely intolerant.

Imagine then my consternation when occasionally I read in your blog expressions like “it was preferable to Suanna and I”. This is my grandson Nate who writes this?! Nate: college English instructor, blogger who incisively critiques movies and novels, perceptively records the growth of his daughter, and politically echoes the New York Times slant on national affairs.

Help me. Is this the “new English” like the “new Morality”? Must I abandon my deeply held conviction about what is right and wrong? Shall I, at age 83, change my whole outlook on my mother tongue? Me needs some guidance. Me thinks you can help I. That doesn’t sound right. I need some guidance. I think you can help me.

Still searching for wisdom . . . grandpa Pekelder

Have no fear! While it is true that there _is_ a New English, different in many respects from the one taught in your grade school days, that is only because, like all living languages, English is in a constant state of evolution and change. Some of the changes are welcome, others (curse you, “Great Vowel Shift”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift!) less so, but nearly all of them inevitable. However, to the best of my knowledge, confusing pronouns in the way you describe is still an _error_, pure and simple.

The fault is mine, and mine alone. But I think it’s important that we identify the nature of the fault: sloppy editing, pure and simple. When it comes to writing, ’sloppy editing’ is a sin pretty far down on the heinousness spectrum — certainly not so heinous as ‘a clunky, artlessly constructed sentence’ and a very far cry from ‘a poor or even deliberately misleading idea’. Your critique is incisive except insofar as it associates a grammatical error with a character flaw.

One other quibble: the editors of the New York Times chose to cave to political pressure and sit for years on a tremendously important story highlighting the abuse of executive power. I have precious little interest in echoing their “slant,” whatever that might be.

It’s kind of late and I really ought to be getting to bed, but the thing is, I’ve been invited to Madonna’s wedding. It’s happening in town, after all, so why not go? But instead I end up just hanging around and watching the wedding on the E! entertainment network. As it’s wrapping up on TV I realize that I could still go to the reception — it is _Madonna’s_ wedding, after all, so it’s bound to be swank, with lots of famous people and great food. But isn’t it a little weasely to crash the reception when you’ve skipped the wedding? Nevertheless, I go. I’m delighted to run into a friend outside the building who’s doing the exact same thing, so we slip in together.

But the reception is a terrible disappointment. Madonna has married an Ubuntu tribesman[1] and they are sitting on thrones at the head of the hall. On a whim at the last second Madonna has decided that she wants every single guest to be presented to her and introduced. The line is _incredibly_ long, and the presentations are taking forever. My friend and I can see the open bar and the table stacked high with the most glorious hors d’ouevres imaginable, but with a sinking feeling I realize that it will be dawn before I get through the line and am finally able to partake. And anyway, I have breakfast plans. What a bummer.

fn1. In waking life I realize full well that Ubuntu is a word, not a tribe. But this was a dream. This is the only part of the dream that I know where it comes from — I read “this”:http://www.goesping.org/archives/2005/12/26/bring-it-goes-linux/ just before going to bed.

Big props to “Ed”:http://www.goesping.org/ for starting a webcomic, appearing informally (so far) as entries on his blog. He’s done seven so far and I’m already hooked. Right out of the gate he seems to have found his voice for it; the subject matter is autobiographical in that perfect way that lends authenticity but isn’t at all self-absorbed. The drawing is rough around the edges, but the more I look at it the more I find that expression or gesture or bit of composition that is just exactly what it should be. Encourage him in this endeavor, and you can say that you were there when it all started.

I’ve got the blog back to looking like it ought to, though many many tweaks remain. I’m aware of all the funny-looking stuff, and will get to it eventually.

It’s just not fair. You know the type of guy. He’s big and he’s strong, he’s blustery — he’s actually kind of a jerk. He’s the prototypical alpha male and is always engaging in chest-pounding types of behavior. Going through life, he leaves a destructive swath all around him. He takes a downright possessive attitude towards the woman he’s interested in, and treats her pretty badly for the most part. But what does he have to do to keep her hooked? Once in a while, just show a sense of humor, or a touch of sadness, some hint of Hidden Depths. Never mind that most of them time he’s totally shallow. He always seems to get the girl.

Damn ape.

_King Kong_ is a big, big movie. It’s long. It has really big monsters, and big action, big shots, big emotion. We’re accustomed these days to action/adventure movies with a certain measure of ironic detachment. Not here. Peter Jackson wants to have you at the edge of your seat, or sitting back with your mouth gaping. Sometimes he wants you to laugh, or to cry. But he never ever wants you to snigger.

I saw the original _King Kong_ for the first time only a couple of years ago, actually, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the lion’s share of the movie tells the story of the rescuers’ danger-defying venture into the heart of dinosaur-ridden Skull Island. So too with this version — dinosaurs, more dinosaurs, giant crocs, and an insect pit that had me writhing in my seat the whole time. Here we can see Jackson’s roots as a low-budget director of quirky horror films. It’s one long thrill ride, with sequences that just keep going and going and going — most of the time this is a very good thing. Kong versus not one, not two, but _three_ Tyrannosaurs is the highlight of the film, though the Brontosaur stampede did go on a little long.

Kong himself is Gollum II — a digital construction overlaying an actual actor’s face, with a result that is way more convincing than you’d think. Only after the movie was over did it occur to me that at no point _during_ the movie did the CGI-ed-ness of Kong bother me. Like Gollum, he blended into the scenes almost perfectly. Plus, here, he’s the best actor in the film, closely followed by Naomi Watts, neither of whom have a whole lot of actual dialogue with each other. It would have been such an easy, obvious mistake to have Ann Hathaway _speaking_ to Kong, if only to let the audience know what she was thinking. But, as with the big ape, Watts has to do everything, absolutely everything, with facial expressions. And she pulls it off.

One great failing: there’s a moment when Kong is up at the top of the Empire State, dying, and Ann is there staring into his eyes, and the soaring music of the score falls off and we’re left with a single female voice, high and keening. It’s a moment of high emotion, but it falls flat because we have heard that voice before. It was used to tremendous effect a number of times throughout the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy. Those moments had a lot going for them: the beautiful voice, occuring in the context of the choral work throughout the score, was meant as a reflection of the sad, ethereal voices of the Elves. There’s no such obvious connection here, and besides, it’s a rehash.

There’s lots else that’s reminiscent of LOTR, in terms of score and sound but especially the visual stuff — the swooping cameras and timely slo-mos and long close-ups. Is all of this Jackson’s unique voice, variations of which we’ll continue to see in future films? Or is he recycling all his idioms from his Tolkien work here when he should have been trying for something new — especially seeing as this is pulp and not high fantasy? Hard to say — the LOTR movies cast a long shadow and make it tricky to evaluate other stuff independently.

If the un-crowdedness of the theater I was in on a Friday night is any indication, _King Kong_ isn’t going to do particularly well at the box office, especially considering its budget. This is too bad insofar as it might reduce Jackson’s cachet in Hollywood and thus the likelihood that he’ll get to do _The Hobbit_ someday. On the other hand, it may be time for him to take a step back and do another indy feature, something more along the lines of the superb _Heavenly Creatures_. And — having just googled around a bit — he appears to be poised to do “just that”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lovely_Bones (scroll down to the ‘film version’ section).

We need a word for the feeling of frustration, impatience, and impotence that sets in when everyone else has seen the movie / read the book / experienced the experience, but you haven’t yet, and so you’re forced to put off reading and/or engagin