A Blog Named Sue

A scrub is a guy that can't get no love from me

One more thing about the new Sherlock Holmes movie: his love interest, predictably, is Irene Adler, the only woman who ever outwitted Sherlock Holmes. Conseqently, it's implied that Holmes is infatuated with her from then on. All well and good, but what I've never understood is why so many fans and pastiche writers think Adler was infatuated with Holmes. Fan fictions of romantic adventures between the two abound, and one Holmes scholar put forth the idea that Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe was Holmes' and Adler's bastard son!

I don't get it. She beat him! Why would she be infatuated with him? I ask any woman reading this: have you ever been into a man you thought was dumber than you? This is a woman who, before her marriage, was wooed by kings and princes. By comparison, Sherlock Holmes is not a fun date, unless eccentric emotional cripples fascinated by crime and murder turn you on. (You know when I put it that way I make him sound like potential school shooter.)

At least they've got Rachel McAdams in the part, though one wonders how she will ever surpass Morgan Fairchild's defining take on the role. (Um, yeah, that's snark.)

You can't afford the ticket back from Suffragette City

Much has been made of Guy Ritchie's decision to emphasize Sherlock Holmes martial arts prowess in his upcoming film based on the character. Purists seem to be outraged. They usually are. I don't have a dog in that fight, except to say that I've long thought previous film adaptations didn't emphasize Holmes' martial aspect enough - so much so that in one particularly dreadful adaptation featuring Charlton Heston as Holmes, the detective laments the need to have a body at all and expresses his longing to be a mind freed of all physical limitations. As awesome as it would be to have a movie about a floating brain in a deerstalker cap (perhaps with a dangling spinal cord, just for laughs) drifting about Victorian London solving crimes, I just can't see Sherlock Holmes expressing that sentiment.

Ostensibly, Sherlock Holmes practiced (among other manly arts) baritsu, which many scholars have long dismissed as a nonsense term coined by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was, most likely, a typo: at the time in England there was a popular martial art called bartitsu, developed by an Englishman named Edward Barton-Wright. Barton-Wright travelled to Japan to work on a railroad project; while there, he studied jiu-jitsu to stay in shape. He was extremely impressed with the art - so much so that he brought some top jiu-jitsu students back to England and promoted them as prize-fighters to great success. He also took what he learned in the jiu-jistu dojo and synthesized it with European boxing, kick-boxing, and stick-fighting to create a unique art he named after himself: bartitsu. Barton-Wright's approach, it goes without saying, predated Bruce Lee's "take what is useful" approach and today's "mixed martial art" movements by nearly a century.

Barton-Wright is a fascinating character, worthy of a movie of his own. In addition to martial arts his school seems to have been an epicenter of all kinds of Victorian madness, such as "electro-therapy," and physical therapies involving heat, light, and radiation. I have no idea if it worked, but it sure looks cool:

But Barton-Wright's contributions to western culture did not end with martial arts and awesome-looking gizmos I need to have in my living room. He was also an early supporter of women's rights, and made it a point to teach his art and jiu-jitsu to suffragettes, so they could defend themselves against thugs, state-sanctioned and otherwise, who tried to bully them out of their right to vote:

Like I said, a fascinating character. I'm told Robert Downey Jr. is practicing "proper" bartitsu in the movie - whatever that means. If nothing else, I'll be glad to see Sherlock Holmes portrayed as more than walking brain - I think we could use a hero these days who demonstrates that stupidity is not a necessary component of strength.

But in this ever changing world in which we live in

I finally saw Quantum of Solace, the most recent James Bond movie. It's not bad at all - definitely worth the $4.99 pay-per-view fee. SPOILERS AHEAD if you're one of the eight or nine people who hasn't seen it yet ... and if you have no intention of seeing it, please continue reading anyway.

OK, in Goldfinger, the evil genius is plotting to control the world's gold supply. In Thunderball, and its bizarre offspring Never Say Never Again, the evil genius is plotting to control the world's oil supply. In Quantum of Solace, the evil genius is plotting to control the world's supply of ... potable water.

Wow. If that's not a sign of the times I don't know what is.

Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain

I came across something interesting in David Denby's review of Iron Man - it seems that at one point in the movie, Iron Man gets waterboarded:

In any case, the freelance fanatics, or whatever they are, waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others. The complaint sounds a little wan, but it’s worth noting that, possibly, more Americans will see this dunderheaded fantasia on its opening weekend than have seen all the features and documentaries that have labored to show what’s happening in Iraq and on the home front.

I'm not sure Denby hasn't missed the point here; Jon Favreau, the film's director, is a pretty smart guy and I'm certain that if he decided to show Islamic extremists (or caricatures thereof) waterboarding an American billionaire arms dealer there's a reason for it - and I don't think it's because Favreau was rooting for Captain America during the Civil War story arc.

On the other hand, while I think it's a bit unfair to assume that the creative team behind Iron Man threw waterboarding in there simply to make the bad guys seem worse, Denby's point about Iron Man reaching a larger audience than, say, Standard Operating Procedure or Taxi to the Dark Side is a potentially valid one, given that they've decided to update Iron Man's origin story so that it now features scary brown people rather than scary yellow people. Is there a chance that certain less-informed moviegoers might have some of their negative racial stereotypes reinforced by the waterboarding sequence? Maybe. Does that mean Favreau shouldn't have included it? Well, maybe.

Pardon my equivocation, but I'm genetically unable to tell other artists what they should do with their work - which probably explains why David Denby is reviewing movies for The New Yorker and I'm reviewing his review. But if it were up to me, I'd go for it and waterboard as many superheroes as I could. You can't craft your work hoping the dumbest segment of your audience doesn't miss whatever point your trying to make; eventually you end up resenting your audience and once that happens your work starts to suck.  Someone who doesn't know that the United States is waterboarding prisoners is probably clueless enough to think that Barack Obama really is a terrorist sleeper agent - that viewer's opinion of Muslims isn't likely to get much lower. Also, as I've written before, most people don't really know what waterboarding entails. If this scene gets just a few people thinking a little bit more deeply about what's happening in America today, then I'm for it.

Besides, Iron Man is a tool. Never liked him anyway.

Make Art! Make Art!

I don't have a lot to say about last night's Oscars, mainly because I've been too busy to see half the nominated movies and, frankly, Juno and Atonement look like they might very well be annoying. (My Lovely and Talented Wife Who Is Smarter Than Me™ saw both and told me, simply, "You won't like them.")

I was thrilled to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win for "Falling Slowly" from the film "Once," though - and their performance of the song during last night's telecast must have sealed the deal for doubters there may have been in the audience:

I got a real kick out of that movie. Check it out if you haven't already.

At one point in the telecast My Lovely and Talented Wife Who Is Smarter Than Me™ teased me mercilessly by shouting, "Come quick! Come quick! They've got dancing dwarfs!" I rushed in from the kitchen only to see that one of the dancers in one of the damn production numbers from "Enchanted" was kind of on the short side, but that was it. Bereft of quality dwarf entertainment, I will now console myself with Spike Jones and the late great Billy Barty performing Yankee Doodle Dandy:

Spike Jones - I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy
Uploaded by perruche

When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What's Still Around

NBC Universal has announced that they will soon begin pulling all of their programming from iTunes. New NBC content is still being added to iTunes for the time being, but the network has announced it will soon launch it's own service, called NBC Direct, at which point NBC Universal material will no longer be available via iTunes.

This is obviously a huge risk for NBC Universal; NBC Direct material will not play on an iPod. I give it six weeks before some code monkey figures out how to make that happen, but as of now, no iPod. In other words, they have just blocked their content from appearing on the most popular by far portable media player. (Don't worry, guys - tech geeks don't make up that large a segment of Heroes audience. Or Battlestar Galactica's.) It's also a significant investment for NBC - rather than simply deliver a high quality downloadable video file to Apple for them to put up on iTunes, they now have to actually host all that video somewhere. That's a lot of video. I'm thinking many, many servers in a series of great big rooms.

But here's the kicker: NBC Direct content will contain commercials that you can't fast forward through. You download the show, you watch the commercials - at least for the seven days you're allowed to watch it before the file self-destructs.

Maybe this model will work for them; I don't know. It sure sounds fishy. It also seems emblematic of a larger problem: no one has yet figured out how to make money in the post-commerical era. And make no mistake about it: we are in the post-commercial era. Unless you're watching a live sporting event, between iTunes and the DVR there's really no reason to ever watch a commerical again.

I don't want to sound triumphal here - I have no vested interest in the commercial era ending. In fact, a good deal of my income and therefore the health and well-being of my family hinges on the commercial era continuing. But, by and large, I think it's done. It's time to realize that and move on. Just because you studied something in school doesn't automatically make it an eternal truth; it just happened to be the truth at the moment you were in school. I realize I'm painting with a pretty broad brush here but I stand by that overall sentiment. It's a lession the RIAA should have learned.

What I think we're really seeing here is typical human resistance to the fact that sometimes shit stops working. It just stops. There can be a one reason, a hundred reasons, or no good reason but every now and again shit stops working. Business models stop working. Governments stop working. Religions stop working.

Sometimes, the shit just stops working.

That doesn't have to be problematic in and of itself. It's just the way of things. But the real damage happens, the real chaos is unleashed when people try to force the issue, to willy-nilly prop up the failing business model, economic theory, government, or religion. Sometimes the damage this causes is inconsequential. If NBC fails in their little experiment no great harm will be done. Sometimes, though, the damage is catastrophic: we start wars to prop up the oil economy and to support the idea that a massive, high-tech military capable of obliterating entire sovereign nations with the touch of a button can be a force for good in this world. A multi-million dollar denial industry has been created to convince us we don't need to do anything about global warming. Brain-damaged children are slandered to maintain the  status-quo of our ramshackle healthcare system.

It never works. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. So be it. New centers form soon enough. You wouldn't (or shouldn't) govern your life like that, constantly clinging to outmoded behaviors that have long since ceased to do you any good if they ever did in the first place. There's a word for people who do that and it isn't complimentary. I can't say I've learned many things in my nearly forty years on this planet but I have learned this: anyone - anyone - who tries to sell you on some Rube Goldberg plan designed to simply maintain the status quo is doomed to fail. Doomed. This is an absolutely scalable truism: it works on a personal level up to a corporate level all the way up to a governmental level.  The harder you have to work to resist change, the more complicated the scheme you need to prevent it, the more inevitable that change is.

Remember this the next time you're in a meeting with your boss and he outlines some absurd reason why the company can't take a necessary step to adapt to a changing marketplace. Remember this as we head full bore into the silly season, when presidential aspirants will bombard you with Very Importan Reasons why we can't overhaul our health care system or critically examine why the United States is an imperial power and should it continue to be one. Remember this.

Sometimes, the shit just stops working.

You Want to See Whatever Common People See

I recently saw an episode of Charlie Rose that featured Robert Shaye, Co-CEO of New Line and bete noir of Lord of the Rings fans everywhere. It being Charlie Rose, the guest was required to say something completely asinine - and Shaye did not disappoint. He lamented the rise of the Internet in general and movie blogs in particular because, now, all of a sudden, "everyone is an expert." Apparently we all now feel we have the right to pick movies apart and discuss them and in some cases actually give our opinion of the work in a public forum! The nerve of some people!

I genuinely surprised to hear him go on like this  - Shaye always struck me as a pretty smart guy. What did he honestly think we did with movies before the Internet? The first thing everybody does after they see a movie - if they give a damn about movies, and in some cases even if they don't - is go to a pub or cafe and start picking the thing apart to see what worked and what didn't.  Even if they're not aware they're doing it, they do it; "Dood, that was fucking awesome!" is a perfectly valid critique of a cinematic work.

Big deal, so what - some people now decide to do the same thing on the Internet. It's nothing they weren't doing already - except that now Robert Shaye (and his marketing people) can hear them.

$icko

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I'm married to a foreigner. Worse yet, I'm married to one of those foreigners who hails from a nation that any conservative windbag would assure you is a liberal hellhole on the brink of taxing itself into oblivion. It's been on that brink for several decades now, enjoying a higher standard of living, better schools, lower infant mortality rates and greater life expectancy; that's one hell of a brink. Damn, I should live on that brink.

Anyway, my brilliant and lovely wife from the brink and I sat down the other day and compared paychecks. She works for an organization based on the brink and as she is still a citizen of said brink she is taxed at their rates. It turns out that far from being taxed to death, she's paying marginally less than I am. Now, I live in New York City, so your mileage may vary when it comes to this little thought experiment, but even though New York is one of the most highly taxed cities in the country, its taxes are not so far out of line with the rest of the country that one thinks of it as a proto-European nanny-state.

All of this brings me, in an admittedly roundabout way, to Michael Moore's Sicko. I haven't seen it yet, so please don't consider this a review of any sort. Another relation from the brink saw it over the weekend, though, and that relation was curious as to why the US doesn't seem to have enough money to cover universal healthcare for all of its citizens while the rest of the civilized world does. It's a point my relation felt Moore could have explored in more detail; after all, due to the USA's size and relatively prosperous economy, the money should be there even though we're not taxed at a rate equal to what you see in those states that provide universal coverage.

I'm no accountant, but I'm pretty sure this has something to do with it.

And maybe this. It's tough to tell.

Wild Loose Commas

Sorry about the unintentional radio silence over the past few days; a pre-holiday crunch at the office kept me offline and I've been treating myself to an extended sojourn in the real world for the past few days - a sojourn highlighted by The Worst Haircut Ever; I swear, I look like Steve Ditko's rendition of J. Jonah Jameson. Anyway, a few random bits of trivia that have been rattling around in my head (non-sci-fi geeks can tune out now, if they desire):

-I thought this Entertainment Weekly article about Transformers was pretty funny; I was around 14 when the cartoon debuted so I was never really a fan of it, but you've got to get a chuckle out of the cartoon's fans griping that the film adaptation of a toy franchise is overly commercial.

The story reminded me of when I did some promotional work for the Mattel/Cartoon Network re-launch of the He-Man & The Masters of the Universe line a few years ago. I was shocked to discover that Mattel keeps a full time PR person on staff whose sole job is to maintain good relations between Mattel and the He-Man fan base. Mind you, this was a franchise that had been dormant for nearly twenty years at that point in time. He-Man liason is a tough, unenviable job, by the way - there are literally thousands of He-Man fan sites and it seems that grown men who write He-Man fanfic are a surprisingly prickly and fickle bunch.

I have used this space to wax rhapsodic about the Christopher Eccleston Dr. Who episodes; I've finally had a chance to catch up with the first season of David Tennant's run as the Doctor.

Well.

Um, yeah, let's just say my reaction is a bit less rhapsodic...

Regular transmissions about stuff that actually matters to resume tomorrow.

I'm Gazing Now, Into History Back

So Imus is gearing up to sue WCBS for the balance of his $40 million contract, his primary defense being, "Hey, you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up." As coverage of the trial ramps up, we can expect a whole new round of hand wringing over who can say what about whom and just what is this thing you Earth people call comedy, anyway?

You know what? I don't fucking care.

You want to know why? Check out this Digby piece* about the fate of Ashleigh Banfield. Since the liberal blogosphere didn't really blossom until the Iraq War was foisted upon us, some of you may only remember Banfield as the good looking MSNBC reporter with the glasses. One of the worst things you can be in American corporate culture today is an attractive woman who's actually good at her job, at least if that job is anything other some type of modeling; you actually have get over the "burden" of your own physical attractiveness in order to be taken seriously. Banfield was at Ground Zero when the towers came down, and nearly suffocated in the debris cloud while on air. She rescued a police officer who had nearly succumbed, hauling him to relative safety. While in Afghanistan and Pakistan she used her Canadian citizenship to gain access to areas and individuals hostile to Americans. All of this earned her the dubious honor of being called a "mind slut" who looks like she used to "do porno" by the illustrious Michael Savage and his ilk.

The trouble started with a speech she gave shortly after she returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan in which she criticized American war coverage for being too sanitized and jingoistic, urging her colleagues to show more than the "puff of smoke" made when a mortar landed. The speech ended her career. She was demoted and fired shortly thereafter. Now she works for Court TV, and if she plays her cards right whe might get a gig on a Hollywood gossip show next year.

Seeing as we live in a society where a well-respected, gutsy journalist can lose her job for taking the radical position that war kills people, I'm going to have a tough time working up any interest in some dessicated millionaire zombie who lost his job for calling some teenaged girls whores.

Who are we allowed to make fun of? Really, I don't fucking care.

*I found the Digby piece via Dr Bopper THP, guest posting for the ailing Steve Gilliard over at The News Blog. Since Gilliard went into the hospital, he's had a virtual legion of incredibly talented people filling in for him - I can't think of any greater testimony to Gilliard's abilities than the number of gifted people taking turns keeping his seat warm until he gets back. Go check them out, right now. And Steve, get well soon. I can't face the prospect of a Giuliani presdential candidacy without knowing you'll be there to play whack-a-mole with any bullshit talking point that pops out of his mouth.