The Way-Back Machine

Full Disclosure: I have not seen the 2010 New Year's Day Dr Who special, "The End of Time, Pt. Two." It's on its wholly legitimate way to me right now. So I'm sitting here, studiously avoiding spoilers for the next few hours or so, and I'm thinking, what with this being a milestone and all, the passing of David Tennant's--an actor who has become as synonymous with the role as anybody--era, that I'd take a little trip in time of my own and go back and revisit that first glimpse I had of that blue box on the TV screen.

Oh, and happy 2010.

If you grew up in the United States in the 1970's, you got first exposed to Dr Who through that great medium of PBS, which brought us other such gems as Red Dwarf, Are You Being Served? and Blackadder from the British Isles. I didn't. I grew up in the Eighties, and despite the fact that two of the aforementioned shows also came from the Eighties, the PBS affiliate in my home state didn't carry Who by the time I was of the impressionable age for it to be most appropriate. I can't imagine how I would have grown up if it did, how terribly it would have exacerbated my wanderlust.

What I did have were the Target novelizations, all in a rack, in the Westmoor Elementary school library. They existed in this no-man's land between describing the show to someone who'd never seen it and seeming to rely on an insider's knowledge of the show's internal logic.

Still. What fun.



I didn't actually see an episode of Doctor Who until I was fifteen, when it made its ill-fated landing on these shores. Short version: The BBC serial was canceled in 1989, after 26 years and a progressively dwindling rate of return. Almost immediately there was interest in reviving it in some form, frequently distilling to the form of a big-budget Hollywood picture. Steven Spielberg's name was dropped. Animations were tested for a new, less clunky version of the Daleks, called Spider Daleks. We didn't see them, but you can find about 6 seconds of the footage on YouTube.

These big-screen dreams never materialized, and Doctor Who floundered in Hollywood until a script got optioned for a pilot. It aired on Fox in March of 1996. And then it died. I want to say that it died because it was a bit crap (which it was) but this is TV and the two are hardly ever connected, unless conversely. No, it died because of poor marketing and, if memory serves, because it was put up against Roseanne, a heavy-hitter of the time.



So no Who for me. Despite this, and despite the fact that the pilot was a huge clunker in terms of plotting, pacing, and (as I would understand later) betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding about how this hero should be presented, the thing stayed in the back of my head for a few years, until I got to college.

College was where I met Tom Baker.

Well. I say "met" but that's rubbish. What I mean to say is that it was in college where I rediscovered Doctor Who, specifically Tom Baker's mid-1970's run, specifically in these VHS collected editions of his stories. Starting with "The Robots of Death."



That's The Doctor explaining--as well as he can to his assistant Leela and to the audience--how his time machine works. The whole "Robots of Death" serial is fantastic. Here's a show ostensibly aimed at children and, apart from all the deaths in it, Baker's Doctor goes on to casually explain the whole theory of the uncanny valley and why all robots are slightly creepy, when he's not dealing with some demento who takes to robots like Buffalo Bill took to attractive young ladies.

I was hooked. Here was a guy who could go anywhere. Past, present, future, anywhere in the universe. And that to me was his gift. Not his sonic screwdriver or his two hearts, or any of the other alien gifts that came with the package. Here's a guy who just went, who carried on his boots the dust of a thousand worlds and times. Plus: Leela. Total babe. And Romana. Both of her.

I didn't get back in to it 'till 2006 and the BBC revival on the SciFi channel. I remembered why I got hooked in the first place. I tracked down all the Baker serials, then Pertwee, Troughton, Hartnell, the other Baker, Davison & McCoy. I devoured them voraciously. And even the rubbish episodes--of which there are quite many--couldn't diminish that first promise, that if you turned the right street corner, stepped in to the right box, that you could go anywhere.



See you in the future.

Even Cat People Get the Blues

So I saw Avatar. And after seeing the trailer for Clash of the Titans, I find it pretty hilarious that here's a Sam Worthington movie where his entire job description involves blending in to an environment. Specifically (that is, if you've been living under a rock the last six months) the environment of the planet Pandora and its blue catlike inhabitants, the Na'vi.

First things first. Visuals, since that's what this is, primarily, and the majority of the critical acclaim which Avatar has received has focused on those amazing visuals as well as its innovative use of 3D. I was worried initially I'd get an an absolutely titanic headache watching this, based on my limited experience with 3D movies before, but this article set me straight. I had no problems, except on occsion with closeup shots. Anything shot at middle distance, provided you just trust Cameron and let your eye go where he wants, works fine. The landscapes are gorgeous. The action is fantastic and there's a minimum of BOO! GOTCHA! 3D work.

The whole 3D thing raises questions of its own about the future of movies. Movies went color long before TV, and fifty years ago, threatened by infiltration of TV into every American household, movies went bigger. Specifically, wider. And at $10 a ticket, $5 for popcorn and a zip-dandy recession, 3D is here to stay. And if the above article is any indication, it may change entirely how shots are framed and composed.

So this movie looks amazing. Amazing. Not only is it simply pretty, but Cameron and his art department have taken great pains to depict a completely alien ecosystem. Most of the terrestrial creatures have two sets of forelegs, joined at the knee, suggesting a common evolutionary path. It's not like they stuck a couple of fake horns on a dog. There's bioluminescence everywhere. Big freakin' pterodactyls roam the sky. And there's the Na'vi. In keeping with the planet's low gravity, they're tall & gangly, but in service to the plot, these natives are hard to kill. Also: restless.

Which is where our guy comes in. Perhaps it's simple human arrogance on the researchers' parts, but I can hardly see how they expected to be taken seriously, let alone generously, as what the Na'vi call "dreamwalkers." Worthington gets downloaded in to an avatar, a cloned Na'vi that looks like the blue-cat-Hakeem-Olajuwon version of himself in order to shill for the evil company that's here searching for their Nth metal.

Same old story. It's Dances with Wolves or The Last Samurai in space. And really, this is the focus of all the negative criticism of the movie. Rightly so. It's a shopworn cliche. The Na'vi are just another band of Noble Savage, painted blue this time. Of course Our Hero was going to bed their princess and become King. That was just inevitable. So Chameleon Sam falls for M'Ress (because she's a cat and played by Uhura, get it? Anyone? Anyone?) and turns against Space Blackwater's Evil Colonel of Evil, whose Evilness Can Be Seen from Space. He rebels, using Advanced White Guy Tactics, and they save the day. Hooray.

But it's so PURTY!

Other reviewers, specifically AV Club's cool, refreshing Sam Adams, argue a different tack with regards to the movie's politics, drawing an allegory not just to the obvious Native American similarities but also to the privatization of warfare brought on by strange bedfellows like Blackwater and Triple Canopy in this country.

I'm not sure that I buy all that, but it's an interesting read. More than anything, again, this seems like Dances with Wolves or Last of the Mohicans or any white-guy-cum-Indian movie you've seen, even going so far as to use its science fiction pedigree to grant the World Spirit Circle-of-Life animism present in most Native American mythologies a literal foundation. Space Blackwater's guys mock the Na'vi's religion, but we're shown it actually at work here, which seems an unintentional slight against people who have actual religions based around this kind of thing. There's no weird tentacle connection to a worldwide superconsciousness on Earth to tell us not to buttfuck the environment in to a bloody husk, so that must be why we did it, right? Right?

I do recommend the thing. If you have to see some version of the White-Guy-as-Reluctant-Savior cultural trope at some time in your live, it might as well be the floating mountain, helicopter dragonfly, bioluminescent moss, blue-cat-people, pterodactyl riding, Now-in-3D-with-100%-more-Michelle-Rodriguez version.

Clash of the Titans

Sometimes, things slip by me. Like the entire career of Sam Worthington. Where'd this guy come from? It's like Hollywood, bemoaning the lack of charisma in its current generation of actors, decided to cast the SAME uncharismatic actor in every damn movie.

You might have noticed him in Avatar. Or last summer's Terminator 4, where he was the one who looked distractingly like Christian Bale in a lot of the teaser pictures. Or you might not really have noticed him at all, since he tends to blend in to the surroundings, and not in a method-actor way but more of a most-beefcake-chameleon-ever way.

So then I find, this morning, a trailer for the new film 'Clash of the Titans.' Below.



I like that bit. "Titans will Clash." It's Clash of the Titans, so I should bloody well hope so.

If you've been living even deeper under a rock than I have (seriously, Sam Worthington and Lady Gaga are the two things from 2009 that ambushed me like the Cheney-era CIA) let me start off with a bit of history. This film is based, not just on the success of 300--though this time it looks like they decided to make something other than a Fascist Instructional Cartoon--but also the 1981 film Clash of the Titans. It had Burgess "The Penguin" Meredith, Lawrence Olivier as Zeus, and a young Harry Hamlin as Perseus, before he would go on to star in a bunch of things you or I have never heard of.



That's a fan-made trailer, updated for today's attention spans. The original Clash was the last really big showcase for the model work of Ray Harryhausen, who designed, among other things, the menacing skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts and that big, Godzilla-like Venus creature in 20 Million Miles to Earth. He's a legend. A legend of stop-motion monsters. I'll bet he makes some token cameo in this flick, which has replaced all his charming, I-know-they're-dated, stop-telling-me-they're-dated, stop-motion effects with a bunch of CGI monsters and creatures who look like they missed the audition to a Guillermo del Toro film. Of the former I'm ambivalent. It's amusing to me that we've advanced this far in creating creature effects that are for the most part no more realistic than they were in 1981, just cheaper and made on a Mac instead of with silly putty. Of the latter I'm pleased. Guillermo del Toro doesn't make a whole lot of movies and it's nice to see the monster freakshow jet-set getting in on other Disposable Friends of the Hero-Killing action.

The original Clash was very much in the mold of Star Wars, going back directly to the source material for its hero's Joseph Campbell-ing about the place. It's been years since I've seen the thing, but I don't think Perseus was aware that Zeus was his Dad. It was much more an adventure movie, the young lad sailing off to fight monsters and win the heart of the girl.

In this one, at least in trailer 2, ol Worthius seems conflicted about his demigod nature and Zeus is much more of a prick. Oh, Liam Neeson. You'll do anything, won't you? You're like Morgan Freeman, an actor of immense gravitas who will do films like The Bucket List. I haven't included Trailer 2 here because Trailer 1 was so dorky. "Titans will Clash" indeed.

"I'm dark and conflicted!" Worthius shouts at the screen, and I suppose I believe him. But I'm not going to mistake growling or shouting at the screen for drama, rather I'm going to miss the feeling, encapsulated by this movie of my childhood, of going off to adventure just for the sheer hell of it.

Home

There are stars out here. Actual, proper stars. Get about five miles from town and on a clear night like tonight, the whole sky is laid bare. I can see the Milky Way, faintly, from the ground. I'd forgotten. I always forget, it seems, things like the stars, or the lonely, sparse beauty of the place, coming up north from Wyoming across the sandy bluffs, ragged with scrubby trees.

I'll be home a little over a week. Chatting with family, meeting up with old friends, falling in to those patterns effortlessly, under the starlight. I wouldn't ever want to live anywhere this small, not really, but it's hard not to become a little intoxicated drinking in those stars.

BBC Promo

Lie Detector

In Praise of Lando Calrissian

I tried watching The Empire Strikes Back for what was probably the eleventy-first time last weekend. Alas, Lucasfilm pulled some predictably asinine tomfoolery and the non-digitized version does not conform to the dimensions of my laptop. I have had no trouble with other DVDs, they all fit my computer automatically, as does the "Special Edition" version of Empire and the other Star Wars films.

Screw it. I've seen these movies seriously probably a hundred times since the pan-n'-scan, VHS, taped-off-HBO version, well-worn and kept in my parents library alongside favorites like Cosmos and Ken Burns Civil War.

When I was a kid I wanted to be Lando. I'd like to think nowadays that it was because my nascently literary mind recognized him as the closest thing to a morally ambiguous character (it's that same moral ambiguity that makes the previously mentioned Nancy Botwin such a win in my book) in the whole of Star Wars. Lando's a good guy. He's responsible for a whole city, and when you're responsible for those people, sometimes you have to make a deal with the devil, and sometimes that blows up in your face.

Really, though, I think it was the cape. There's that scene in Empire where Lando gets in to a scuffle with Han Solo and his cape comes off, revealing that at no time (unlike in Jedi) was it ever attached. That's right, America. Lando Calrissian saunters through Cloud City wearing a cape attached to his shoulders through the sheer virtue of his own awesomeness. THAT'S why I wanted to grow up to be Lando.

All the other kids, they wanted to be Han Solo or Boba Fett, and while I can't fault Solo (guy has his own ride and it is sweet) Fett dies like a chump in Jedi, and his biggest proponents can't explain to me the decision-making process that leads your salty badass to dress in pastels. Pastels. Who is it that orders his supercommando uniform from Mandalore Ltd., complete with rocket backpack, and gets ocean green highlights? Who? I ask you.

Give me Lando. Give me a guy who can fly the hero's ship if he has to, who owns the best real-estate in the galaxy (seriously, how unlikely is it to find an earth-liveable sweet spot on a gas giant, complete with shining white city?) who has to weigh his responsibility to hundreds of thousands of people against his responsibility to his friend, who makes a deal with the devil only to be redeemed, who Rocks. The. Cape.