Andrew Sullivan, Updated--Again--And Again

Re-posted 8/31/2008, 11:30 p.m.

Original post: 8/29/2008, 1:29 p.m.: I don't mean to harp, but it took him only moments to make fun of Sarah Palin's kids' names.

What's the over-under on how long it takes him to use her Down's baby against her? Perhaps something along the lines of, What kind of family values lead a new mother to abandon her disabled baby in order to pursue her political future?

Maybe three weeks? Maybe less?

Updated from the comments: Whoever had 8 hours as the over wins.

Time for the next bet: How long until Sullivan suggests that Palin only had her Down's baby for political advantage? I'll give 3 weeks again. Seems like a sucker's line, though.

Second Update: Well, we have another winner! Sullivan passes on a rumor that Palin didn't actually even have the baby. And that the baby is fair game because, "This baby was a centerpiece of the public case for Palin made by the Republicans. They made it an issue - and therefore it is legitimate to ask questions about it."

At what point does David Bradley have a responsibility to protect his other writers and editors from association with Sullivan? If I were Jeff Goldberg or Ross Douthat or Jim Fallows or Mark Bowden--or any of the other very serious, very smart people at that great magazine--I'd be awfully uncomfortable having Sullivan as a colleague.

Sullivan is undermining the magazine's entire intellectual enterprise and laying waste to a brand that took a century to build. I hope someone over there is paying attention.

Third Update: Sullivan now says that there's a photo that "looks like it confirms" Palin's pregnancy. But of course, that's not enough either. He now demands "Just a simple confirmation from the doctor who was present at the birth."

The BSG Ticket--Updated

Watching Palin's introduction it became immediately clear that she looks uncannily like a young Laura Roslin.* This can only bode well for Palin. But the parallels don't stop at her looks. Like Roslin, Palin was basically a private citizen (Roslin was a teacher, Palin was a reporter) before being pulled into politics. Neither seems to have had any larger ambition, until events pulled them into prominence. And both were immediately discounted by outside observers as being unequal to the demands of their new positions.

But wait! There's more!

If Palin is Roslin, isn't McCain very much a Bill Adama? Both are Navy men. Both seemed destined to be passed over by a younger generation of hotshots, until a perfect storm elevated them to command. Both are tough old dogs with little patience for politics. Heck, Adama's staff even call him the Old Man.

Like Adama and Roslin, McCain and Palin should complement each other well. I eagerly await the moment in the VP debate when Palin is asked what she would do with Osama bin Laden if he were captured. One assumes her answer will be some variation of, "Put that thing out the airlock."

* Galley Wife S.L. observed this within seconds of Palin stepping on stage.

Update: Several astute commenters make the point that it's really more of a Tigh-Roslin ticket. I can buy that for a couple reasons: (1) The uncanny physical resemblance of McCain and Tigh; (2) Both McCain and Tigh were POWs; (3) McCain is reputed to have a temper somewhat approaching the Irish of Saul Tigh.

All of that said, in defense of seeing McCain as Adama, I'd argue that (1) Tigh is fundamentally, Adama's guy; McCain is his own man, for better or for worse; (2) Both McCain and Adama were hot-shot fighter jocks; (3) Most strikingly, Adama's Maverick-StreakTM long ago forced him to give up higher command ambitions. It's only by accident that he becomes head of the fleet. I think you could see very much the same thing in McCain's career. It's only a bizarre, perfect-storm of events--9/11, Huckabee, Rudy's crazy Florida strategy, Fred! siphoning votes in SC, Petraeus's brilliance in Iraq--which lead him to this moment. In a more ordinary time, McCain's constant tweaking of the base would have doomed him to the sidelines.

Also, McCain wouldn't resent Kara Thrace; he'd totally dig her.

Obama "Analysis"

You'll recall that I tried to preemptively top the praise of Obama's speech by doing a mock analysis of it earlier in the week. Other readers sent in their own attempts at parody. Below I'm going to reproduce a bunch of the parodies interspersed with the "real analysis" by various bloggers, commentators, etc from the last 12 hours. I defy you to tell which is which.

(A) Stunning. Simply stunning. This is the speech that changed America, that restored her to her erstwhile glory. Tears flood the eyes--and I am not someone who cries easily.

One forgets the native beauty of our founding commitment, and then one is reminded in words so powerful, so simple, so true. Mark my words: decades hence, we shall all look back on this speech and remember the brief shining moment when we were, truly, one nation, under God.

(B) This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

(C) Indisputably the greatest political moment we have witnessed in many generations. Behold, America. You have been offered redemption. Seize the opportunity. Remind the world of the better angels of your nature. Now is the time. This is the place. Yes we can.

(D) But the dark moments pass, and this is why. There is still goodness in the land. It lives and walks among us, calling us back to our better selves. With this speech, Barack has brought light to the hinterland. No honest person, no decent person, could vote against him.

Know hope.

(E) It was as if the first three days were the Democratic Party's convention, when the usual lineup of pols and dignitaries got rewarded for their service, and the final night was Obama's convention, where Obama, all on his lonesome, defined the contours of the campaign and laid out what he meant liberalism to look like on his watch.

(F) In many ways it was less a speech than a symphony. It was a masterpiece.

Go ahead. Three of these are parodies and three are from various commenters. I'll even give you a hint by telling you who they are: Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, and David Gergen. Tou tell me which is which.

Tomorrow's News Analysis Today!

I'm in Denver so that you don't have to be. In times of immense boredom, I've taken to writing news accounts of upcoming speeches, with the idea of putting them up against actual analysis after the fact. So far, I've done pretty well, I think. Here, for example, was my pre-fab analysis of Michelle Obama's Monday night speech, which I wrote earlier in the afternoon:

Can you imagine a better speech? A better First Lady? A better woman? If Barack is the savior of our world, Michelle is the savior of our soul. The way she bared her family for all of America to see, inviting us in, to join them. The strength and courage in her every word. Like Barack, America is lucky to have her.

And here's the account Andrew Sullivan gave afterward:

One of the best, most moving, intimate, rousing, humble, and beautiful speeches I've heard from a convention platform. Maybe she should be running for president. You don't need any commentary from me. This was a home-run. And sincere. Thank God that in the end, the truth struggles out there. Just look at her mother's face.

Pretty close, no? So now it's time to turn toward the main event. How will the press react to tomorrow night's Obama revelation? Here's one idea. Feel free to come up with your own.

The bar was impossibly high. This man has already given the three most seminal speeches in modern American politics. He has already changed our perceptions of the possible. And yet there he stood on this sacred day, the columns behind him reminding us of Martin. Of Lincoln. Of our best selves. And he told us the truth: That we are one nation. That we do not need to fear each other. That strength and bluster are not one in the same. America will be a different place when this man is president.

Because of him, it is a different place already.

Too over the top, maybe? We'll see if Sullivan or others can't top it . . .

Great Moments in Law Enforcement

Without comment:

DENVER--Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic Senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

Police on the scene refused to tell ABC lawyers the charges against the producer, Asa Eslocker, who works with the ABC News investigative unit.

A cigar-smoking Denver police sergeant, accompanied by a team of five other officers, first put his hands on Eslocker's neck, then twisted the producers arm behind him to put on handcuffs.

A police official later told lawyers for ABC News that Eslocker is being charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order. He also said the arrest followed a signed complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel. . . .

Video taken at the scene shows a man, wearing the uniform of a Boulder County sheriff, ordering Eslocker off the sidewalk in front of the hotel, to the side of the entrance.

The sheriff's officer is seen telling Eslocker the sidewalk is owned by the hotel. Later he is seen pushing Eslocker off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic, forcing him to the other side of the street.

It was two hours later when Denver police arrived to place Eslocker under arrest, apparently based on a complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel, a central location for Democratic officials.

During the arrest, one of the officers can be heard saying to Eslocker, "You're lucky I didn't knock the f..k out of you."

I'm sure there's a perfectly legitimate explanation.

"The Eucharist and the presence of the body and blood of Christ is, in my mind, an overwhelming experience for me. I find that Communion for me is empowering. It's almost a feeling of a kind of high."

--Joe Eszterhas, who recently wrote Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith as well as Basic Instinct, Sliver, and Showgirls.

According to the Toledo Blade, Joe isn't faking. But if he converts, who's next? Tom Sizemore?

U.S. Open Notes

Cutie Pie Tennis.

Your one-stop shop for all the really important U.S. Open news.

BSG News

On ratings and sequels.

AWOL

Probably almost no posting here for the next two weeks, not that you'll miss it. I wouldn't dream of sullying these pristine pages with stuff like this.

If you're needing political stuff though, I highly recommend this.

When the Music's Over

If you're a Doors fan, you might have been surprised to learn that the surviving members of the band have been in a legal dispute against each other--specifically Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger versus John Densmore. As it turns out, the former two had been on tour as The Doors. Technically they couldn't use the name unless all three were in it, so the official title of the group was The Doors of the 21st Century. Hmmm.

In any event, a California court has ruled that Manzarek and Krieger owe money from their tour, approximately $5 million, to Densmore as well as Jim Morrison's father and the parents of Morrison's wife Pamela Courson. Manzarek and Krieger's appeal was just turned down by the California Supreme Court.

Does anyone else find it strange that Jim Morrison's father is still alive?

Got Hope?

I remember talking with Galley Friend and Women's Soccer Phenom H.W. about the Hope Solo mess while the U.S. women's team was getting crushed by Brazil a couple years ago. H.W. patiently explained to me that Coach Ryan's decision to pull Solo in favor of Briana Scurry was a judgment call, but that Solo's complaining about it in the press was a worse sin.

Well, the U.S. team just spanked the Brazilians in a re-match. The key difference was having Hope Solo in goal. You would think that women's sports would learn something about professionalism from this: The most offensive aspect of the Solo controversy was that the players on the U.S. voted not to let her play in the next game. Because you, now, sports teams are democracies. There's a deep lesson about professionalism in all of this. (At the time, Czabe had a great email about the entire affair.)

My fear, however, is that some other lesson will be learned. The team will take away how important conflict resolution skills are, or forgiveness is, or some other crap.

As Czabe puts it, "Hey Greg Ryan? How does my ass taste now?"

In Defense of Czaban

I wrote a tiny bit about Daniel Snyder taking over Washington's only semi-respectable sports talk station before, but I've now blown that out a bit.

The takeaway: Snyder runs his radio empire the way he runs the Redskins, and with similar results.

Day by Day

Variety reports that the current financial climate has had an impact on Broadway. Writes Gordon Cox, “Producers report some investors would now rather hold onto their money rather than pony up for a risky Rialto show, and many worry that the usual September downturn in ticket sales will be particularly brutal this year.”

Sadly, one of the shows to be cancelled is Godspell. Damn this economy!

Olympic Notes, 2008

I don't want to look like I'm down on Michael Phelps because I'm not--he's great and his endorsement deal with Frosted Flakes makes me like him even more. But in a certain way, Usain Bolt's performance is even more impressive.

Bolt shattered the world record in the 100M, running it in 9.69. The last 10M he was so far ahead that he dropped his arms and started looking off to his right. I've never seen anything like it. He might have 9.50 in him.

Then tonight Bolt won the 200M by breaking Michael Johnson's record, which was once thought to be unbeatable. Bolt finished in 19.30 and I haven't seen the 100M split, but I'd be surprised if he didn't run one of those pieces under 9.20.

And what's really crazy is that we have no idea how Bolt might run the 400M. He's only 22. And because of his build he could be a singularity in the sport--a dominant big man. Bolt isn't going to get 8 medals, but I think he's the more dominant athlete and my intuition is that he's the only person who's going to challenge his records in the medium-term future. He's going to places that no one thought possible, changing the perceptions of how those two distances can be run.

And one other thing: Bolt's the first athlete I've seen at these Games who looks like he's actually having fun. Lots of it. Every minute. He's such a joy to watch after sitting through all of the tough-guy swimmers and grimly determined gymnasts. He actually looks like he's thrilled to have all of us along for the amazing ride he's on.

That's pretty great.

Olympic Notes, 2008

That's Leryn Franco, who competed in her second Olympics today, throwing the javelin for Paraguay. She finished 51st, just a spot or two from last. Somehow, I don't think that matters.

No Comment

I just want my kids back.

Star Destroyers Over San Francisco

I mean it literally. Kind of amazing.

Your Amazon Gold Box Pick of the Day!

Big Balls: All-Male Nude Workout.

Olympic Notes, 2008

Trampoline?

Do the other gymnasts look down on the trampoline types? Is it like the cheerleaders sneering at the color guard?

On Men's Synchro

Steve Sailor finds a great quote by Simon Barnes about men's synchronized diving:

It all looks like a wonderfully elegant gay suicide pact.

Trautwig Watch

Not only does Al Trautwig look like Dr. Emil Skoda, he sounds like him, too!

Olympic Notes, 2008

* First off, who knew the Jackson Five was still big in Japan?

* Second, did you see that great final in the 100M Fly? Boy, it would have been really embarrassing if the clock had showed Phelps winning by 0.01 seconds and he had finished in third!

I kid. Upon further review, Phelps did win, fair and square, despite how it looked at first to the naked eye. But two thoughts occurred to me watching that race:

(1) How in the world would they have called that finish before touchpads?

(2) Imagine the outrage there would have been if these Olympics had been held in the U.S. All of Europe would have cried about how we had somehow fixed the results. Thank God for the ChiComs!

* So how great is Phelps? He's plenty great. The greatest swimmer of my time, to be sure. (And by the way, did you see who was seated in front of Ma Phelps for the final race? The Thorpedo! He did not look particularly pleased at Phelps's achievement. Maybe Xenu can comfort him.)

But I think the fixation on his 8 gold medals in one Olympics is a little much for two reasons. First, only swimmers have any shot at winning that many medals in a given Olympics because of the number of different events open to them. They have a bunch of distances very close together (50M, 100M, 200M) in different styles. Plus the medleys. Plus the relays. It takes major greatness to be able to compete in different distances in different styles--don't get me wrong. But if you play tennis, you've only got two medals open to you. Most of the sports at the Olympics only have a couple medals at stake. Even track and skiing don't have that many opportunities for one athlete. It's no accident that the two most decorated Olympians are both swimmers. And if someone breaks Phelps's record, it will almost certainly be another swimmer.

Second, because of the reliance on medals from relays, only swimmers from a handful of countries have a realistic shot of winning 8 golds (Russia, Italy, France, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, USA, and a couple others). If you were the greatest swimmer of all time--even faster than Phelps in all of his events--but were from Rhodesia, probably couldn't win more than 5 golds because you wouldn't have the athletic infrastructure around you to create other top-level teammates to win in the relays.

So when people talk about how long Phelps's record will stand, it's as much a function of the very, very small pool of athletes who can challenge it (only swimmers from big, organized, developed countries) as it is the untouchable nature of the sheer number of gold medals.

* Finally, I did a small item about the theological sophistication of boxer Demetrius Andrade over at First Things. Omitted in it is my non-understanding of Olympic boxing. It seems like the safest sport at the games--badminton players probably get hurt more often. I understand why you'd want to design a set of rules to protect the boxers from injury since they're fighting so many times during a fortnight. I get that and understand that this necessarily leads to an arrangement guaranteed to produce almost no knock-downs, let alone knock-outs.

But what's with the scoring system? So far as I can tell--and if anyone actually understands the Olympic rules, please correct me--the system they use only counts clean blows to the head. Which means there's almost no reason to go for, or to guard, the body. If both fighters are just guarding their head, and punching for the head, doesn't that make what they're doing sufficiently different from real boxing that it's almost not the same sport? It's like have basketball without allowing layups.

(And when does MMA come to the Olympics? Oh sure, you can scoff, but if I had asked you 25 years ago when snowboarding would be an Olympic sport, you would have laughed at that, too.)

Is It okay to laugh at this?

Let's stipulate to the fact that the following WWTDD post about Lindsay Lohan leaving her girlfriend for a dude is definitely mean and probably very offensive. But dear God, the funny:

I’m still amazed Lindsay held out this long. Lindsay is a whore. Whores need dick. God only knows how Sam kept her happy. The vibrators in that bedroom must be all next generation stuff.

Got ahead, try not to laugh.

Brief Political Aside

I have not followed the Wehner-Sullivan cage match with any diligence, but one point in this Wehner broadside strikes me as obviously incorrect. Wehner writes:

For Andrew, almost everything comes back to the Bush Administration’s policies on interrogation and water-boarding, Guantanamo Bay, rendition, and whether the Geneva Conventions ought to apply to non-state actors and terrorists.

For Sullivan, everything comes back to Bush's fleeting, half-hearted endorsement of the Defense of Marriage amendment.

Olympic Notes, 2008

A few thoughts:

* Yes, the Phelps kid is a physical specimen and in very good shape and whatnot. But the French 100M free stud, Alain Bernard, is the scariest dude on the planet. He's not a Frenchman so much as a Gaul--he reminds you why they were a feared people several centuries back. Here, have a look:



Vince McMahon (or Freddy Prinze Jr.) should sign him up for the WWE tomorrow. He'd be the greatest heel since the Nature Boy.

* Roger Federer lost--in straight sets--to James Blake.

Let that sink in for a minute.

I love Blake. A lot. But he's a head-case with a terrible record against top players. He survives by beating the people he should beat but never, ever overachieving. He was 0-8 against Federer before today.

Blake played a pretty good match, but Federer looked terrible. As he has all year long, there were frame balls and mis-hits. At times he looked alternately frustrated, scared, and sad. His run as the greatest player of all-time is over, more suddenly and decisively than anyone ever could have imagined. The other players know it. None of them fear him anymore. Where they used to fear a match with Federer, they now look at it as a golden opportunity to get a big win over player who's vastly over-ranked. Drawing Federer is now like winning the lottery.

And the worst, most tragic aspect of all of this, is that Federer seems to understand all of this.

I'm more and more convinced that he'll never win another Slam. I now believe that it's possible (albeit unlikely) that he'll retire at the end of this season.

Galley Friend R.M. posits that what Federer should really do is retire from singles and commit himself totally to doubles, as an act of generosity to the sport. It would instantly create an audience for doubles, which is criminally underappreciated.

* Is it possible not to root for Misty May-Trainor and Kerri Walsh? I dare you to try.

I'm as averse to pre-packaged hype machines as anyone on the planet. But I've also been following beach volleyball since Karch Kiraly was still on the hardwood. I remember the halcyon Randy Stoklos-Sinjin Smith days. (Belmar AVP represent!) And May and Walsh are the real deal. Unlike Gaby Reese, they're really fun to watch, not just to look at. Here's hoping they get gold.

Marvel vs. DC

Turns out Robert Downey Jr. hates DC Comics:

“My whole thing is that that I saw The Dark Knight. I feel like I’m dumb because I feel like I don’t get how many things that are so smart. It’s like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I’m like, ‘That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.’ I loved The Prestige but didn’t understand The Dark Knight. Didn’t get it, still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so high brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ You know what? Fuck DC comics. That’s all I have to say and that’s where I’m really coming from.”

If you couldn't get enough of the New York Observer's profile of Steve Guttenberg, here is the sequel by Spencer Morgan:

“You know,” he said, “what actors are, are living pieces of art, and that’s what the museum gives me, too. You being on that screen, you’re a piece of art hanging on a wall!

“That’s why I like being really nice to people—they’re not seeing me,” he said, referring to fans who approach him. “They’re seeing a piece of art that they can’t believe came to life.”

Truly compelling stuff.

Meeza tinks sheeza in trouble!

The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday dares to take on George Lucas:

Friday marks the release of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," an animated spinoff that Lucas executive produced and that looks like precisely what it is: a television show that has been puffed up into a feature-length advertisement for itself.... But it's time to admit it: He's not a storyteller. For all of Lucas's command of myth, symbol and sweep, the nuances of narrative still elude him.... Once "Star Wars" became a multi-billion-dollar economy unto itself, when the movies increasingly served not "the story" but the games and the sound systems and the effects business and the lunch boxes, Lucas's weakness became his greatest strength. Who needed story when the audience would be satisfied with spectacle? He got rich, and we got Jar Jar Binks.

Hornaday compares Lucas to Thomas Edison (and not in a good way). She goes after THX 1138 and American Graffiti. And now she and anyone related to her will never, ever, ever, ever be invited to Skywalker Ranch. Ever.

David Effin' Grann

David Grann is one of the three or four best writers working today--his stuff is an unmitigated joy to read. Seriously, think of how rarely you actually get excited by a byline. His new piece is routinely brilliant.

(Don't forget, The Lost City of Z comes out in February!)

But Galley Friend D.S. sends in a keen observation:

I was just reading David Grann's latest essay in the New Yorker. It's about a sort of con man named Frederic Bourdin, who, oddly enough, adopts the identities of young wayward boys. And the article quotes a notebook Bourdin keeps, in which he muses on his fate and his own chameleon-like nature. Anyway, a line from the notebook is used as a caption beneath a photo of Bourdin. "Bourdin once wrote, 'When you fight monsters, be careful . . . you do not become one.'" He should also be careful not to become a plagiarist as that very famous line was written Friedrich Nietzsche. It's funny that the New Yorker missed this; and it's funny that the con man should even in his own diaries pretend he is someone he is not.

Anyway, Grann's article is, as usual, not to be missed.

Dark Knight Box Office Watch

At some point in the next couple days Dark Knight is going to pass Star Wars to become the #2 grossing movie (domestic, unadjusted) of all time. There's a font of interesting trivia about the DK's numbers here.

The two most interesting are the most weekends at #1 charts (consecutive and non-consecutive. Now these numbers only go back to 1982, so they don't include monsters like Snow White, Gone with the Wind, Jaws, etc. But still, if you had to guess the picture since 1982 with the most weekends at #1, what would you say? I wager that you'd get it right on the first or second or third try.

But if I asked you what two movies tied for third on the list of most #1 weekends, I bet you'd never guess, not in a million years. Don't cheat before you click through.

Get Me Re-Write!

This Variety story is great:

"Edwin A. Salt" is about to undergo a gender change.

Once expected to star Tom Cruise, the Columbia Pictures espionage thriller will be redrafted by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer as a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie. Philip Noyce remains attached as director and Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Sunil Perkash are producing.

Jolie is close to a deal to play the title character, a CIA officer who's accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper spy and must elude capture long enough to establish her innocence.

At least it's not based on a true story.

"They say Ricky Watters blacks out anytime he sees a green shirt."

So far as I can tell, the only thing I missed from the blogosphere last week was the return of the Emo Eagles fan.

But it's fucking awesome.

Down some dark defile of the mind, terra incognito to the blithe and bourgeois notions of normalcy, lies a swath of consciousness shrouded in a substance as dark as Kevin Curtis is light. Shawn Andrews has seen this place. So, too, have I. Indeed, I’ve felt its wintry contours and been contained within its clammy manacles.

There is no 4th and 26 in this place.

Harry Potter Puppet Pals

My gift to you:



Courtesy of Galley Sis K.P.

Oh, by the way, there's more. This bit on wizard swears is fabulous:

Olympic Notes, 2008

It occurs to me that this very silly blog basically began as a vehicle of writing about The Khorkina. (Peace be upon Her.) The Olympics are back and Galley Slaves has only devolved in terms of its ambitions. So some thoughts on these Olympics:

* NBC deserves enormous credit for a number of aspects of their broadcast--starting with the Glorious High Definition. It's the best my plasma screen has ever looked--even Discovery HD Theater's Sunrise Earth looks like foggy gunk by comparison.

* Also, NBC is putting Mary Carrillo to use doing feature packages. Awesome. She's a huge talent. Could be the next Costas.

* All of that said, could Jack Donaghy please send out a memo forbidding the color commentators from using the phrase "It's all about [insert name, skill, result, etc]!"

* Also, you know what's a lot of fun to watch during the Olympics? Actual events. Packages telling us Olympic Stories to Make Us Care are boring. So are long studio interviews with people like the president of the United States.

* The ads are pretty impressive, too. My favorites are the incredibly detailed and beautiful spots for United Airlines. They must have cost a fortune. Southwest never has gorgeous, awe-inspiring ads. Hmmm. Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere . . .

* Visa's ad featuring the Morgan Freedman voiceover, on the other hand, is ridiculous. Their catchphrase: "Go World." Sure thing. Let's give everyone gold medals!

* Watching Women's Synchro 3-meter Diving (I told you, I'm a sucker for this stuff), I couldn't help but notice that the judge from the Netherlands was the Paula Abdul of the event, spitting out 10s and 9.5s by the bucket. She was the high score for almost every dive NBC showed.

* During some prelim heat, the broadcasters were breathlessly recounting the twisted tale of French swimmer Laure Manaudou: She moved to Italy to be with her Italian boyfriend; she broke up with him; he posted naked pictures (and a sex video!) of her on the interweb, and--this is the best part--started dating her chief rival.

Hearing all of this it struck me that with the exception of the really big sports, the interior workings of most sports--not just figure skating and gymnastics--must approximate the world of ballroom dance.

* Did you know that Bart Connor and Nadia Comaneci are married? Oh sure you did. But did you know they also have their own website, BartAndNadia.com? I think not. They do speeches and personal appearances. I'm just saying.

* Is it just me, or is it hard to root against the Chi-Coms? During the Cold War, I not only wanted our jocks to crush the godless Reds, I wanted the Ruskies to suffer, too. I never forgave that mean Russian boxer for killing Apollo Creed. It just wasn't right.

But I kind of like the Chinese athletes. They aren't in the least bit threatening. Instead, the all seem vaguely put-upon. It's more apparent that they're victims of their government. So I guess I'm sort of pulling for them.

Comic Genius

It's a strip called, obviously enough, Garfield Minus Garfield. It's an eerie and brilliant depiction of a man gone mad.

Alexandra Frackin' DuPont

She has returned from Points Unknown to issue a wonderful, scathing review of The Mummy 3: Jet Li in 2-D Double Dragon Emperor Action. Sample hotness:

Q. What's horrible?

1. There's a screechy, overcranked, insecure, geographically confused, let's-put-an-exclamation-point-on-everything quality to the film that really burns you out after a while -- and it only lets up once, when the whole thing grinds to a dull, talky halt in a cave for about five or ten minutes.

Cohen (who did confident work in "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" and "xXx") seems to have lost all sense of proportion. Watching any scene in this movie, you can almost hear him screaming in the editing room:

"Okay! Use the shakiest handheld shot here! Now cut to an overhead "Lord of the Rings" helicopter shot -- but only for a second or two! Now turn up the music! And make sure it crescendos on something really minor, like Fraser turning to reload! Now add a sound bite of John Hannah screaming! Now get the effects team to throw a couple of extra Yetis in the background!"

2. Oh, right: There are Abominable Snowmen in this movie -- three of them. At one point, one of them kicks an evil Chinese soldier over a goalpost-shaped piece of architecture. The Yeti behind the placekicker Yeti raises his arms straight in the air like a referee signaling "touchdown."

3. Expanding on points (1) and (2): The movie has this ridiculous habit of doubling and tripling every character and story element -- when one character or story element would have had a much bigger impact.

For example: Rick and Alex perform identical heroic acts, often in the same scene.

There are three identical Abominable Snowmen, two warrior women blessed with eternal life, and two wisecracking drunks.

There are two separate mummy armies that go to war (in a scene that plays like the who-gives-a-shit version of the Battle of Pellinor Fields). There are also, for reasons not fully explained, two airplanes attacking the mummy armies -- I guess so Cohen could stage a plane crash without taking out anyone important.

Hayden Pantierre and Natural Law

So you probably thought to yourself, Hey, comic books are totally mainstream now. Heroes and Battlestar Galactica are big hits. Dark Knight is going to be #2 on the all-time list. The stigma is gone!

You would, of course, be wrong. Here is Hayden Pantierre at the San Diego Comic Con, being forced to meet her adoring nerd public:



There is a natural order to the world, imposed by the Almighty above. Never forget this.

Dept. of Huh?

Remember Freddie Prinze Jr.? Sure you do. He married Sarah Michelle Gellar Prinze Jr., and you've secretly hated him ever since. But by all accounts he's a swell guy.

So what's he doing with himself now? He just got hired by the WWE. But not to wrestle--he's now part of their creative team doing the writing for storylines.

Free advice: Bring back the Four Horsemen!

(The spawn of Dusty Rhodes and Ted Dibiase seem like the natural base of this. Put Triple H in as the Ric Flair figure. And then turn some very popular face into a heel to take the final slot.)

That said--and I'm being quite serious here--I've never figured out how the WWE can square the circle of having admitted that it's all play-acting. Once you do that, doesn't every storyline ultimately fail to get over? If Prinze can figure out the macro fix for this metaphysical problem, he'll do the world a real service.

Bennigan's R.I.P.

First they close the Cherry Hill Starbucks. Now Bennigan's is out of business. What's next? The demolition of the Moorestown Mall?

I'm from New Jersey and suburban chain eateries are my damn birthright! These are hard times.

(Funnily enough, the Bennigan's website is still up and running, even the section about employment opportunities.)

Dark Knight Box Office

Variety has a discussion of how high it might go. The takeaway: They think the #2 spot and maybe even a $500M domestic cume are in reach.

One small quibble: The article seems to suggest that you can't compare Dark Knight to Titanic because it was a different economic era and no one could do that again and blah, blah, blah. Don't believe it. Titanic's success was firmly grounded in the same economic realities of today, where movies had to open or perish. The opening weekends of the time weren't as big, because of inflation and smaller screen counts, but it's a difference of scale, not of kind. What happened with Titanic was totally unexpected and totally unpredictable. It was the type of singularity that only happens once or twice in a generation, when a movie becomes part of the culture. The fact that Dark Knight won't do that kind of business has nothing to do with changes in the marketplace and everything to do with audience reaction to the films.

Just for fun, take a look at this chart of Titanic's weekend grosses. It was in release for 19 weeks before it experienced a decline of more than 26 percent. Heck, during that period, 4 of its declines were in the single-digit percentages. And on six separate weekends, its box office take actually increased.

The Mortgage Mess Hits a New Low

How low? One of the free houses ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition gave away is being foreclosed on.

But maybe the government can bail them out, too!

On Writing

There are few things in the world as silly as a pretentious writer. Man is a vain animal, but writers have their own special sort of vanity. For exhibit 1,116, I submit this newspaper writer's tirade against a copy editor for removing an indefinite article--an "a"--from his copy. Here's a taste:

I don't really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn't going to happen anymore, so I'm really hoping it wasn't you that fucked up my review on saturday.

It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

You probably think it couldn't get any worse, but it does. (And not just because the tirade is being performed in public.)

What few readers--and sadly, few writers--seem to understand is that while writing is a solitary act, publishing is not. Publishing is a group effort. Someone writes the piece. Someone else lays it out. Some other worker finds art to accompany it. Another person works the code to post it online. A whole army of people lug the papers to the news stands so that the public can purchase them. The writer does the most work in the production, and gets nearly all of the credit, but there's a huge apparatus helping to make the publication of his work possible.

Look, every working writer gets a bad edit from time to time. Editors can sometimes make your copy less elegant and even insert mistakes. But they can also vastly improve your work. And I don't know any writer who hasn't found himself on both sides of the equation.

But when an editor subtracts value, to go after them in public, acting as though they were making happy-to-glad changes to Shakespeare is ridiculous and betrays a lack of understanding as to what a writer's job entails: a large part of which is enduring edits, even those which you may not like.

Dept. of Shoot Yourself Now

Via Galley Friend B.W. comes this amazing stat on home prices in Detroit. Don't click just yet.

First, if I told you that mean home price in 2003 was $97,850, what would you guess mean home price in Detroit was today?

If you guessed $19,448, you'd be the big winner.

As one of the commenters asks, "How low do house prices have to drop in Detroit before it pays to gut them for their parts?"

News Alert for Galley Friend T.R.!

It's great to have a blog readership measured by the half-dozens because (a) it frees you up to do nothing but Dark Knight for a week month year while; and (b) it allows you to do items for individual readers.

So this is for T.R.: Pushing Daisies is doing a Wonderfalls crossover episode. Rock on.

The Internet

Now with 1 trillion URLs!

So I guess we don't need newspapers anymore.

The Other Galley Slaves

Who knew?

Cue Lefty Dark Knight Backlash

In 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

The Downside of Dark Knight

Studios are going to continue throwing money at comic-book projects, and probably more indiscriminately than before, even. Witness this depressing story about a Rob Liefeld book which has been optioned before it's even been published.

Couldn't get worse, right? Wrong. The screenwriters attached are writers for Ryan Seacrest's LA radio show.

News From the World of Porn

I don't know why, but I get a lot of unsolicited promotional material sent to the GS address, everything from Richard Viguerie's latest "Why X isn't a real conservative" to news about upcoming videogames. But today is, I think, the first time I've gotten a press release about porn. It's Digital Playground's upcoming Pirates 2. I know what you're thinking: A sequel in porn? Didn't it used to be about the art?

Below is the image for the one-sheet:



Pretty wild, huh? Like they actually paid a graphic designer. But the real gold is in the email release. Some highlights for your reading pleasure:

July 23, 2008 --- VAN NUYS, Calif. --- The cover art for Digital Playground’s epic sequel “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” is now available, as well as juicy facts concerning the budget, the special effects, and the raw, passionate sex. The original “Pirates” made history as the most expensive adult film ever produced, but it is left in the shadow of “Pirates II” and its 10 times larger budget. The extra cost can be partly attributed to the over 600 astounding special effects. . . .

Sasha Grey describes the special atmosphere that surrounded the production. She says, “There was always sexual energy on set. My sex scene with Evan Stone and BellaDonna was amazing! We all wanted to [have sex]; we were all horny. It was what pornography should be—flawless and unforgiving in every sense!" . . .

Digital Playground’s newest signed contract girl is Riley Steele and “Pirates II” contains her first filmed sex scene ever. Riley says, “What a fabulous film to start my career with. The original ‘Pirates’ was partly responsible for my decision to enter the industry. As if just being in the film wasn’t enough, what was supposed to be my first boy/girl scene turned out to be so much more."

There's so much great stuff here, but my favorite part is the way the press release demurely edits out the "We all wanted to [have sex]."

Dark Knight Box Office Watch

For those of you playing along at home, Dark Knight made $24.5M on Monday. That means it probably crossed the $200M threshold yesterday, on its fifth day of release. It could hit the $300M mark as early as Saturday.

Hercules! Hercules!

Variety reports that Peter Berg, who recently helmed Hancock and directed the impressive The Kingdom, has agreed to take on Hercules: The Thracian Wars. No doubt, as Variety might put it, that the production values and perfs will be stellar across the board. Nevertheless, there will be enormous pressure for Berg to match the greatness of the original Hercules, which I was privileged to see in a movie theater in 1983. Somehow I doubt Berg will find anyone to match the depth of Lou Ferrigno.

Dark Knight Thoughts with BIG SPOILERS

First, a non-spoiler, semi-demurral from Santino, who says that I think Dark Knight is headed to Titanic territory in terms of box office. I don't think Dark Knight has $600M in it; though I do think it has an excellent chance of $400M, a very good chance of $425M, and a fair chance at $450M and above.

I think I've made this observation before here, but to repeat: You cannot predict the biggest box office successes. A movie that does historic-level totals does so by having great legs and you only get that sort of repeat-viewership when the movie taps into, and becomes part of, the culture. And that's something you just can't predict.

If you're a studio chief, you can basically manufacture a film with the goal of making, say, $80M, or $200M. But there is no way of manufacturing a cultural phenomenon on purpose. Look at the all-time list adjusted for inflation. The one thing most of the movies have in common is that you'd never guess they'd be on this list on the first day of their releases: Gone with the Wind, Sound of Music, The Exorcist, 101 Dalmatians. You get my point. I think Dark Knight is going to end up on the un-adjusted top five grossing list. And I think it could become a phenomenon. But I wouldn't predict that.

Now on to the more interesting point. Galley Friend T.J. sends in a particularly keen observation. Spoilers Ahead!):

Here is something I immediately noticed last night upon viewing the film. Nolan has brilliantly inverted the world of Batman's past. Take, for example, the climatic scene where Batman and Gotham police try to save both Rachel and Harvey Dent. The situation neatly parallels the predicament that Batman faces in Batman Forever (a terrible film). In that film, the Riddler has captured both Robin and Batman's lady love. Batman/Bruce Wayne must choose which one he will save: his love, who represents Bruce, or Robin, who represents Batman. In the end he saves them both in a classic bit of heroism by diving down a seemingly never-ending shaft, scooping up both just in time, and explicitly proclaiming that he is both Batman and Bruce Wayne.

The Dark Knight turns that situation on its head. There is no option for Batman to save both Rachel (Bruce's love) and Harvey (Batman's sense of duty). From the first, he must choose ("Rachel" he tells Gordon, as he jumps on the Bat pod to save the day) and then when he does he is deceived by the Joker. He thinks he is going to save Rachel, but it turns out the Joker has reversed addresses on him.

But Rachel and Harvey die as a result. Rachel is, of course, killed in the explosion. Harvey is brutally scarred (emotionally and physically) even though Batman helps him escape. Harvey Dent as anyone knew him is now dead, with Two-Face taking his place.

This is probably over-thinking it. But I found this to be a neat parallel to Batman Forever. It shows Nolan's Batman does not reside in the same world as previous incarnations. He can't "save" the day in a classical sense. He is forced to make one impossible decision after another and even then he can still lose everything.

Dark Knight Box Office

You'll have to take my word for this, but on the way to see Dark Knight last week I told Santino that I had a sneaking suspicion this would be the biggest three-day weekend in the history of movies. The initial reports had it at $155M--the biggest ever--but the final numbers have it even bigger: $158M.

I think the declines are going to be, relatively speaking, pretty slim. Dark Knight is actually a great movie, unlike the other monster three-day openers. I think it could be headed for top five all-time, maybe even top three. I think it will become, over the next couple of weeks, a big-time cultural event that people talk about. Or maybe not. We'll see.

But two statistical exit questions:

(1) What sequel showed the biggest opening-weekend dollar increase from the original movie?

(2) What sequel showed the biggest total gross dollar increase from the original?

Remember, the vast majority of sequels underperform from the original. Dark Knight is going to be one of the exceptions. I'll try to find the answers to these questions later this week, but I'd be interested to see what your initial guesses are.

At first blush, I'd guess that it would be Mad Max, Rambo, Lethal Weapon 2, or Terminator 2 . . .

(If you want to cheat, the answers should be somewhere in here.)

Redskins, The Danny, and Steve Czaban

There are a lot of reasons to hate the Redskins. (I don't need one, of course, because I'm from Philly and hate is our default setting.) Today I bring you reason #4,419:

Steve Czaban is, for my money, the best sport-talk radio host in America. He's wicked smart, deeply funny, and almost pathologically candid. He's not a confrontational jackass like Jim Rome. He's not a jock-slobberer like Mike Greenberg. He's not a celebrity peacock like Dan Patrick. Czaban is, instead, everything you could want in a radio host: a quick wit with deep pockets of knowledge and an engaging worldview. He's the best.

Czaban is based in D.C. and hosts two shows a day, a nationally-syndicated morning show called the First Team, on Fox Sports Radio, and a local afternoon show on Washington's WTEM.

Washington has a weird sports culture in that fans and journalists mostly seem to have a Pollyanna view of the world: No matter how bad things are going, there's sunshine around the corner.

Czaban has been one of the few voices of reason (during my purgatory in D.C.) to understand the real problems the Redskins face. He has been critical--though not crazily so--of Redskins management, particularly the coaches and management. Including owner Dan Snyder.

So a few weeks ago, Snyder, who already owns competing sports-talk radio stations in the market, bought WTEM.. WTEM was, up until the time of purchase, a Fox Sports affiliate. Snyder's stations were ESPN affiliates.

And what was Snyder's first move? To make WTEM an ESPN affiliate and drop Czaban's morning show. Even though Czaban's Fox show was crushing the ESPN show in the local ratings.

Now Snyder is airing the same ESPN product on all of his stations in the market. This doesn't make much sense to me: Since he's the only game in town, wouldn't he attract more listeners by airing as much competing product as possible, thereby casting a wider net? Unless of course, this wasn't a business decision in the first place.

The Dark Knight Triumphant

My nerd-opus is up over at the other site. It's less movie review than deeply revealing confession. I'm just warning you.

In other news, the great Alexandra DuPont has a characteristically brilliant review. (She closes the review quoting a line from moi, which, I believe, completes my nerd trifecta, having now been linked at AICN, the force.net, and Whedonesque. This is not, perhaps, something I should brag about.) Anyway, sample brilliance:

When "Batman Begins" came out, many of us praised it as a crime drama that happened to feature a guy in a bat costume. But that praise was partially in comparison to the Schumacher nipple-disco that had come before.

Yes, in "Begins" Bruce Wayne fights gangsters and police corruption (and choppy action editing). But he was also dealing with ninjas and an ancient secret society and Liam Neeson with two names and a Van Dyke beard and the thespian skills of glassy-eyed Katie Holmes as a little girl trick-or-treating in an assistant-DA costume. Also, there was that CGI elevated train and the CGI hallucinations and the sonar-guided bats and that dopey conspiracy involving corporate malfeasance, poisoned water, and a gun that microwaved that water into steam (unless that water happened to reside in a human body). You could almost feel Nolan fighting for his gritty urban Batman against a riptide of studio notes.

"The Dark Knight" has none of that.

More Dark Knight

I haven't been holding out on you--I've got some thoughts about Dark Knight, but have been busy doing a larger piece on it which will run tomorrow. And apart from that, I've been grappling with how to talk about the movie without dipping too heavily into the realm of spoilers.

So I think I'll have some spoiler-filled thoughts tomorrow (appropriately noted, of course), but in the meantime, some general observations:

* I understand how annoying the hype surrounding this movie is. I realize how over-sold almost every movie event in recent years has been. (Godzilla, Cloverfield, Spider-Man, etc.)

All of that said, even if your expectations are very high, I think this is more movie than you're prepared for.

* Ditto the accolades for Heath Ledger's Joker. Look, Ledger's performance isn't legendary, but it is inventive, off-kilter, and very, very fine work. His voicework in particular, impresses because he hits odd cadences and registers. And his physicality, for me, is really great. The Joker is never supposed to be physically menacing--he's skinny and weak. But (and this is mentioned again and again in the comics) he's deceptively quick, particularly with his hands. Which makes him kind of unexpectedly scary at close range. Ledger and Nolan get this just right.

But most of all, the character is perfectly conceived. This isn't to take anything away from Ledger's work, mind you, but just to point out that it's build on really solid, thoughtful writing.

* I have no idea how much money this movie is going to make, but my unscientific guess is: a ton. I have no idea what the opening will be ($80M? $100M? $115M?), but I'll be really surprised if it doesn't have fantastic legs through July and August.

* It also would not surprise me if, at some point in the next couple weeks, the left decides that they have a political objection to Dark Knight. It isn't an overtly (or even covertly) political movie, but it does have something to say about the capacity of Western liberalism for dealing with a certain type of nihilist challenge, and the limits of liberalism's social compact.

I suspect that this is the real root of David Denby's infantile criticism of Dark Knight and other liberal critics may join in, particularly if they think that conservatives are embracing the movie as some sort of apologia for Bush/Cheney/neoconservatism/Iraq/Guantanamo/warmongering/suspension of habeas/etc.

David Edelstein's negative review complains that Christian Bale's smirk reminds him of "Dubya entitlement" and that Batman employs "FISA-like surveillance."

But I could well be wrong; maybe no one will attempt to invest any political meaning in it.

More tomorrow.

Update: One final point--even the title is perfect. I was wary of it, because I assumed Nolan was just using it as a sop to fanboys since there was no way he was going to use the Miller Dark Knight stuff. But I was wrong.

This isn't Miller's Dark Knight, but the title is absolutely integral to the film and not even in the obvious "dark night" of the soul sense.

My Gift to You

Slate has an uncharacteristically boring piece about iPhone 2.0's web applications. And it misses the best web app there is: PhoneSaber.

Just trust me on this. Go get it. Now.

Pauline Kael, Will Smith, and Trash Cinema

Galley Friend B.W. sends us this link to an essay about how the vastly overrated film critic Pauline Kael helped usher in the era of trash cinema:

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"

Been wondering what's been going on in Steve Guttenberg's life? The New York Observer's Spencer Morgan profiles the star of Police Academy and finds out just why he moved back to New York:

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

"I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me," said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot--as he’s known to his friends--appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

"All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!'" said Mr. Guttenberg. "And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in. And he sat Tom Cruise and said, 'I’m so sorry, but you know, Tom Cruise.' And I’m like, 'Holy fuck.'"

It's All Bosh

The First Things blog points us to Joe Queenan, explaining why people hate contemporary music:

During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain. It was a daft analogy. Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public’s lack of imagination. If they don’t know in advance whether Nadal or Federer is going to win, but still love Wimbledon, why don’t they enjoy it when an enraged percussionist plays a series of brutal, fragmented chords on his electric marimba? What’s wrong with them?

The reason the sports analogy fails is because when Spain plays Germany, everyone knows that the game will be played with one ball, not eight; and that the final score will be 1-0 or 3-2 or even 8-1 - but definitely not 1,600,758 to Arf-Arf the Chalet Ate My Banana. The public may not know in advance what the score will be, but it at least understands the rules of the game.

Someone will have to remind me who wrote this, but some time ago a smart observer noted that contemporary music was the only one of the contemporary art forms not to be granted exalted status. But that's for a very simple reason: No one actually likes any contemporary art. However you can stroll past a Rothko and, after 30 seconds, proclaim its romantic brilliance. You can pretend to have read an unreadable modern novel. But contemporary music demands that you actually sit and suffer through two hours of aural hell. And that's a price too high for fashion, even for polite society.

Update: It was the invaluable Spengler.

Ultimate Fighting Brain Damage?

Let's fire up the Congressional hearings. Ultimate fighting must be bad for your noggin. How else to explain Rampage Jackson's arrest today for hit-and-run?

Because, you see, Jackson drives an enormous monster truck with his picture and his name plastered all over it.

Where is the Budget MMA Fan when we need him!

Tom Disch

Jody Bottum has a beautiful, heart-breaking obit for his friend:

I can picture it, unfortunately. Those ratty, rundown rooms in which he lived. The pistol he kept in gleeful defiance of the city's gun laws. The prickly brilliance with which he thought himself down into a narrower and narrower trap. The cosseted ill-health and the limp. The endless self-conceit that confirmed even his despair as a great and cosmic thing: an arrogance against the universe, a point of deadly pride. "Here in old age," he grandly announced when I saw him at lunch this spring, "I've finally decided that being a genius is enough for any man, and I'm just going to have to live with it."

He couldn't, of course, because it's not enough: The mad brightness of his arrogance burned against a background blacker than the grave. But the truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius. There was nothing he couldn't do with words.

Blu-Ray Days

Megan McArdle worries about whether or not she should get a Blu-Ray player--and calls herself an early adopter. I'm sorry, but if you didn't buy a player while the hi-def war was still being fought, then you're firmly in the mainstream. Us real early adopters have to have some bragging rights to make up for being on the bleeding edge.

For whatever it's worth, The Dark Knight tipped me--I'll be buying my Blu-Ray player the week before it comes out on disc.

Dark Knight Watch

Saw it this afternoon. I don't have anything coherent to say yet, except that it has not been over-promised. I was luke-warm on Batman Begins, even though I softened somewhat upon second viewing. But Dark Knight is in a totally different class. You can't consider it by the normal metrics of superhero movies. It aspire to, and achieves, the actual level of film. This is Chinatown and Heat rolled into one.

Much more later.

Update: I posted more thoughts here and a long essay, "The Dark Knight Triumphant," here.

Get Your Fresh CulturePulp!

Galley Friend Mike Russell puts together a strip where the comics version of Hellboy works with the movie version of Hellboy to explain the concept of Hellboy.

Genius.

The Recession Hits Home

Starbucks has released its first list of store closures. On the chopping block is the Starbucks on Rt. 38 in Cherry Hill, NJ. If they can close a Starbucks in Cherry Hill, then truly none of us is safe.

Dust bowl days indeed.

"The Little Midget"

Oh, the joys of working for Jeff Katzenberg:

Which, Katzenberg assured me, is a story that's been told from the beginning of time. And he told me I should get this book by Ted Kopell and Joseph Campbell called Hero of a Thousand Journeys or Something. Actually, he offered, because he liked me so much in our first meeting, to have his people send me a copy. To help me write his movie.

And I said "oh, that sounds great," because I had been coached for that meeting by the directors and producers, and one of the rules was that if Jeffrey said anything about story structure or Joseph Campbell, I was supposed to pretend I'd never heard of him.

Not kidding. Not exaggerating. Except for the Ted Kopell part.

The Little Tugboat That Could

Galley Brother J.P. sends along a link to an amazing pictorial series. I won't reproduce it here, because taken on their own, no one picture is particularly impressive. But it's the story of a tugboat, pulling a barge down a flooding river toward a draw bridge. The bridge doesn't open, the tug hits the span, flips on its side, and goes almost totally underwater.

And then the captain guns the engines and rights the fracking thing. You won't believe it. Total hotness.

Taking Sides with Sharia?

I know, it sounds crazy. Especially when the story headline is "Brit facing jail for public sex in Dubai." Sounds like another one of those outrageous sharia stories.

Yet when you read further down in the piece, I'm not unsympathetic to the Dubai authorities. It seems that Brit ex-pat Michelle Palmer got drunk at a brunch, met some dude, went for a walk on the beach with him, and then went for it. So far so good.

But when a Dubai cop caught the beast with two backs, he gave them a warning and told them to cut it out. Pretty reasonable, actually. The cop kept walking his beat, and came back to find the pair having another go, right where he'd left them. Here's the Sun's description of what happened next:

Sources said Michelle, who works in Dubai for magazines firm ITP Publishing, launched an angry four-letter tirade after her second romp was halted.

She is alleged to have called the cop a f****** Muslim **** and tried to hit him with her high-heeled shoe before being restrained.

Two thoughts:

(1) Michelle kind of deserves whatever she gets out this, no? The Dubai police are talking about 3 to 6 months in jail and deportation. Does that really sound all that unfair for such behavior?

(2) Can you imagine the headlines if this had been an American girl? "One More Ugly American!" "More Wages of Bushism!" "Islamophobic Yanks Terrorize Another Middle Eastern Nation!"

MMA on $5 a Month

Well, not that cheap. But the Budget MMA Fan has a new blog devoted to helping you get the best MMA bang for your buck.

"I'm not here to make friends."

Reality TV's greatest cliche brought to life.

"We hack the internet."

Two bits of Dark Knight news:

(1) The final trailer is out. Mostly wordless, it makes a lot of promises about the tone of the movie.

(2) And this is the important bit: Spill.com has found Michael Bay's lost Dark Knight treatment. Sample awesomeness:

Tom Disch, 1940 - 2008

A writer I much admired died on July 4, apparently taking his own life. Jody Bottum has a nice note about Disch. And, proving once again that it's a middle-brow magazine at heart, so does Entertainment Weekly.

Very sad news.

Wimbledon Redux

Santino has put together some coherent thoughts on Federer's future that I find highly persuasive. Yet this morning Galley Friend and Tennis Afficionado R.M. argued to me his belief that Federer still has a future as a champion. R.M.'s case went something like this:

* Federer was sick for a good chunk of this year (mono) and will be fully recovered by next season.

* Federer could benefit from the right coach, under whose care his game could improve.

* Unlike Borg and McEnroe, Federer doesn't seem to have any hobbies or other pursuits. All he wants to do is win matches. This monomania should keep him engaged and in the game in ways other greats weren't. (And unlike Sampras, Federer seems to have a monstrous work ethic.)

The exception to this last is Agassi, but he seems a special case since he basically had three very distinct careers, each separated by long pauses where his engagement with the game was minimal. I'd argue that Agassi was so different as a player and had such a singular career that it isn't really worth using him as a point of comparison for anyone else.

I'm not sure I buy R.M.'s argument. But on further consideration I do agree with him that the 2008 final was the greatest match I've ever seen. Consistently high-level play from both guys; giant momentum shifts; several incredible rallies; the highest possible stakes; and a fifth set where it was unclear who was going to win until the very end.

This last point is the most crucial, obviously. Normally, going into a fifth set you have some sense of who is collapsing and who is surging. Yesterday there were a bunch of occasions where either player could have folded and allowed himself to lose honorably. But the outcome was always in doubt, until the very finish.

One of the greatest moments I've ever seen in sports; I put it up there with Keri Strugg sticking the landing for the gold at the 1996 Olympics.

Dark Knight Watch

I'm not ready to call it Citizen Kane yet, but Drew McWeeny has a review which describes a single line of the Joker's dialogue: While Batman is interrogating the Joker, the Joker says to him, "When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other. You’ll see. I’ll show you."

For me, this is a pure and perfect distillation of the Joker's worldview and it suggests that The Dark Knight may have gotten the characters right in what I'll un-ironically call the most important franchise in Western literature.

Only 8 days until the press screening . . .

Wimbledon Notes: The Passing of an Age

The 2008 Championships were a solid affair made transcendent by Sunday's men's final. A few thoughts:

* I keep waiting for Richard Gasquet to become the great player he's meant to be, but his quarterfinal meltdown against Andy Murray suggests it may never happen. Gasquet has as much natural talent as anyone in the game other than Federer. He's as pretty to watch as Federer; everything about him is smooth as glass. But as soon as Murray broke him to stay in the third set (remember, Gasquet was up two sets to none, and a break, and was serving for the match), he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world but on court. All of a sudden he looked like Eli Manning. Galley Friend S.H. calls that "loser face."

* Andy Murray is an animal. But he may not have the tools to win a major.

* It's frightening how fast things fall apart. Last September, Federer had just finished his third consecutive year with three major wins. With 12 slams in the bank we were wondering how much he'd pass Sampras by.

Ten months later, Federer hasn't won another slam. If he doesn't win the U.S. Open, I suspect he can't finish the year #1 in the rankings. Since January, Santino has been telling me that he thought Federer was done, that 26 is the wall in tennis, and that Federer would be lucky to tie Sampras's 14 slam wins. I scoffed, but now that seems about right.

The age of Federer is over. He'll hang around near the top for the next 18 months. He'll be a regular in the semis and finals of the slams, but absent him getting some help (injuries to other players, a draw with lots of upsets) I don't think it's certain he will win another big one. It's hard to imagine how he could win three more. Nadal and others are still on the upswing and Federer has nowhere to grow but old.

This is not a shot at Nadal--I like him a lot. He's a special player, a sweet guy, and a deserving champion. Yesterday's epic final was super-high-level tennis. Some of the best I've ever seen. But Federer lost the match by clutching up on most of his break chances. I forget how he finished the match--was he 1 for 15 on break points?--but it wasn't like Rafa was fighting them off brilliantly. Federer dumped backhand after backhand (some of them off of second serves, even) into the net on break points. The old Federer doesn't miss those.

I suppose I should just be glad to have had the chance to see him play at his peak. But I can't help being a little sad at the prospect of his diminishing.

* One of the aggravating aspects of tennis coverage is that the tennis community has all of the cliquishness of the ballroom dance world. Commentators and former players will go to any pains to excuse boorish behavior or even just foolish decision-making on the parts of players and their entourages. It's a criticism-free zone. (Unless, of course, you're some poor schlub ranked 235th in the world, in which case Pam Shriver will feel free to criticize your outfit, your body, your fitness level, and your lack of a second serve. Qualifiers don't get the same courtesies.)

But for the first time last night, I was grateful for the closed-shop tennis mentality. McEnroe was interviewing Federer just outside the locker room a few moments after the presentation ceremony. Federer, having held it together on court, was a mess. He looked like a man who understood that all of a sudden, his powers had been stripped from him, that his career was now a dead-end. After a minute or so of interview, it looked as though Federer might break down. And McEnroe, bless his heart, simply cut the interview short and gave Federer an awkward hug--the purpose of which seemed less to comfort him, than to get between Federer and the camera.

If a regular NBC reporter had been conducting that interview, they would have strung Federer along as far as possible, eager to get emotion out of him. For the first time, I was happy to see tennis protecting its own.

Who knew that owning the rights to Strawberry Shortcake would be such a big deal? As the Los Angeles Times reports, Miss Shortcake belongs to DIC Entertainment Holdings, Inc., which intended to be sold to the Cookie Jar Group of Toronto for approximately $31 million. But DIC's licensing partner American Greetings actually owns the rights to Shortcake and everyone else living in Strawberry Land and found a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and prevent DIC from being bought by Cookie Jar.

I thought Strawberry Shortcake went the way of My Little Pony, He-Man, and Inspector Gadget. Not so, reports the Times:

"In the last four years, according to DIC, Strawberry Shortcake has generated nearly $3 billion in retail sales."

Well, at least we know what Strawberry Shortcake does for DIC.

The Failures of Markets

Free markets are the best available system of allocating resources and we're all blessed to live in one and blah blah blah. I like the free market. I certainly like it a lot better than all of the alternatives. But I am driven to distraction by free market androids who insist that markets are perfect and that any result a free market produces is, by definition, a correct result.

You know the type. This is the guy who insists that the Worldcom CEO was absolutely worth $120 million a year--because if he wasn't then nobody would have been willing to pay him at that salary!

Instead, I would content that while free markets are great and all that (see above), they produce failures at a much higher rate than most Americans would probably suspect. These matters normally hinge on something subjective, but today we have an example that seems pretty cut and dry, courtesy of Santino.

Betting markets are a pretty pure distillation of a free market. But Sonny notices that at least one casino in Vegas was (earlier this year) giving Tiger Woods 4-1 odds on winning exactly three majors--but 3-1 odds on winning the Grand Slam. That's right: The betting public thought that there was a better chance of Tiger winning all four majors (something which has never been done) than there was of him winning three of the four.

I'm not sure there's a way to dress up this result as anything other than a market reaching an objectively irrational result.

Drug Busts Gone Wrong

My friend Adam White has the goods:

Juan Johnson is a police officer whose off-duty act of kindness to a stranger in distress landed him in the middle of a drug bust in which he was repeatedly kicked in the groin by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal.

On The Incredible Hulk

Anthony Sacramone has the best review you'll read anywhere.

Brideshead Revisited, Revisited

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

That's one of my favorite sentences in the English language. The 1981 BBC production of Brideshead Revisited includes it in its entirety, which is just one example of why that screenplay is the greatest work of adaptation in the history of filmed entertainment.

All of this is by way of saying that I've written something elsewhere about the new Brideshead that you might find interesting.

Wimbledon Notes

Is there anything ESPN can't fuck up?

As the Championships got underway this morning, ESPN unveiled their new scoring graphics. It's the worst graphic design I've seen for sports-broadcasting, maybe ever.

In tennis, the traditional scoring graphic--a box of information tucked into either the upper or lower left-hand corner--conveys 6 pieces of information simultaneously: the names of the players; their seeds; who is serving; the score of previous sets; the score of the current set; the score of the current game.

The Four Letter Network's new graphic--a thin horizontal line stretching all the way across the top of the screen--takes up (I suspect) nearly as many square inches of screen as the old graphic. But it conveys only three pieces of information at a time: the names of the players; who is serving; and the score of the current game. The graphic than changes periodically between points, spitting out other bits of information. It's distracting, inefficient, and kind of maddening.

Super Geekery: Fire Dan DiDio?

Non-comics readers should stop reading this right now. It'll bore you to tears.

If you pay attention to the small universe of professional comic book watching, you probably know that there has been a lot of talk about firing Dan DiDio, the head of DC Comics. I don't pay all that much attention to the inner-workings of the comic book publishing houses, myself. But one of the criticisms of DiDio is that under his leadership, DC has fallen much further behind Marvel than they were just a few short years ago.

Sales are not, necessarily, the perfect measure of success. But I realized this past weekend, while putting away the stack of comics I've bought over the last two months, that after being a life-long DC partisan, I have gradually stopped buying DC books and started buying more Marvel books. I didn't do this consciously. But over time, I've dropped nearly every DC title that I once loved because the editorial direction had become sloppy and/or uninteresting. The new DC books were almost bizarrely un-engrossing. And at the same time, Marvel keeps putting out really smart, fun, and interesting books, such as Runaways, Astonishing X-Men, The Twelve, Ultimate Iron Man, Logan--you get the picture.

I'm only one data point, obviously. But when a publisher gets trounced in sales and the overall quality of his product seems markedly diminished, then something isn't going right.

Iron Man

As usual, I'm late to the discussion, but having finally caught Iron Man yesterday, I'd posit that it's one of the three best superhero movies ever made. (The other two, for my money, being Spider-Man 2 and Batman. I won't count The Incredibles, but if I did, that would make the list, too.)

In fact, I'd call Iron Man a nearly perfect movie in every way. Like with the X-Men franchise, the production benefits from having a seriously great actor in the lead. The effects are so top notch that they didn't even particularly register as CGI (for men, at least). But most importantly, the script accomplishes a number of very difficult tasks with much grace:

* Like Superman, the character of Iron Man suffers from near invulverability--particularly in his current incarnation. The story very deftly and believably creates a conflict in which Iron Man is quite vulnerable.

* The script keeps the stakes at a reasonable level--the fate of the world does not hang in the balance--but still keeps the conflict very interesting.

* One of the problems with origin movies is balancing back story with forward progress. This is doubly true with Iron Man since his back story is just well known enough to be cumbersome, but not well known enough that it can be glossed over. By started in the desert with Tony Stark's capture, getting that out of the way in about 2 minutes, and then jumping backwards in time, the script gives Tony's back story more time to play before the audience needs it to move along.

* And the big payoff for this is that we get to see Robert Downey Jr. at his most charming. Tony in Vegas is pretty irresistible and we get to see just enough of him as a cad. When he has his epiphany--which the script seems to earn pretty nicely--he's able to keep the charm of his caddish behavior even as he's losing the narcissism. That's an awfully fine line to walk, but the writers did balanced it perfectly.

* Finally, the script handles Obadiah Stane perfectly. It's not clear if this is the Obadiah from the normal Marvel universe or the Ultimate universe. (One of the really interesting thing about Marvel Studios is that it seems to be creating a third stand-alone universe, melding bits and pieces of the other two.) The problem with Obadiah is that he's obviously the villain from the moment we first see him. But the script gives him so much generous material, and Jeff Bridges is so unbelievably good, that instead of wanting to look past Obadiah's turn to get to the denouement, we want as much of him as possible. He's just deliciously fun on-screen and the fact that we all know the reveal before it happens hardly matters.

* Also finally, a word for Gwyneth Paltrow: She's pretty great here. It's weird to see her playing insecure, but she does it just about right and the fact that she isn't a damsel in need of saving is just one of the many, many clichés that Iron Man avoids.

The great achievement of Iron Man, to my mind, anyway, is that probably a dozen times there's a cliché looming, but the script turns away from it and makes a more interesting choice instead: Tony doesn't kiss Pepper; the government agents and soldiers are neither evil nor incompetent; the terrorist villains are not misunderstood or omnipotent; Yinsen is not killed because of Tony's actions, etc. etc.

And even better, unlike Batman Begins there are no "movie moments" where the film stops abruptly to nod to the audience by having a character say something like, "Does it come in black" or "I gotta get me one of those."

In other words, Iron Man succeeds because it takes itself seriously as a bit of film-making. Very few superhero movies--and almost no summer movies--dare to accept that challenge. Good for John Favreau, et al.

(The Real) Michael Bay Strikes Again

I don't totally get the Megan Fox stuff myself, but here she is explaining Michael Bay's directorial vision for her role in Transformers 2:

"As for Michael Bay’s main directorial input to his lead actress, Megan had this to say: 'His main note to me is just to look hot; so I try my best.'"

Awesome.

Even the Onion Rings Matter

My colleague JVL passes on this link to a dissertation-sized explanation of the last episode of The Sopranos. It is heavy. It is dense. It is repetitive. It is thousands upon thousands of words long and it may take me a year to finish. (Incidentally, the longest magazine article I ever read was Paul Berman's "The Passion of Joshka Fischer" in the New Republic, which numbered more than 25,000 words. It took me six months riding Metro to finish.)

Nevertheless, the argument is laid out in excruciating detail that Tony Soprano does indeed die at the hands of the man in the Members Only jacket. And everything has significance: the ringing bell every time a patron walks into the diner, the location of the patrons around the diner, Tony's POV, the onion rings (?!), things that were said in previous episodes (not knowing when the end comes, the lyrics to the song about Jimmy Brown). It's like an analysis of the Zapruder film--which is also mentioned! Totally out of control. But you'll read on. And on. And on. And on...

Clearly a ton of one's time was devoted to this. And some of it is very interesting. But here's one amazing detail that was entirely missed in all the analysis:

When Johnny Sac's daughter Allegra is married, she and her father share the classic father-daughter dance. The song is "Daddy's Little Girl." But Allegra is not little. She is enormous!

Take that, Sopranos experts!

"It is what it is."

This phrase (which, for me, ranks up with the British expression "Well there we are" in terms of sheer utility) is everywhere today. But the first time I heard it was when it was muttered by the great Ricky Jay in Boogie Nights. Stay with me, I'm going somewhere with this.

So it was Boogie Nights which jumped to mind when I saw this story about the porn outfit Digital Playground moving to a new hi-def camcorder, the 4K Red One. But buried in the story was this fantastic nugget: "Reportedly, the high-resolution camcorder has already been used to capture ten films in the past two months."

That's the type of high-volume operation that pushed Jack Horner and the Colonel out of the business. And surely cranking out a film every four days means that something in the art must suffer?