Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Saturday, November 30, 2002
22:57 - Movie Day	(top)
I saw the Bond movie today; it was big, loud, dumb, and fun-- just the way a Bond movie should be. Lots of horrifically huge situations with potentially world-shattering consequences, with eerie allusions to current events lurking around every corner, but eventually just leading back in on itself to a self-referential resolution illustrating every regular human's essential decency and the monstrous megalomania of one central fictitious villain. Countries may have their disagreements, but everything would hum along nicely if it weren't for these evil geniuses popping up here and there, setting up secret labs and hideouts and weapons foundries and DNA clinics in impoverished third-world countries, using immaculate technology that the "civilized" world won't see for another twenty years. (The US always seems to turn out to be dumber and more primitive, if stronger of will, than all the rest of the countries in a given Bond film-- Cuba and North Korea, in this case.) But keep the madmen from going to the Evil Pet Store to trade suitcases of diamonds for long-haired white cats to stroke, and it'll be a happy planet. Ah, if only the real world were so neat and tidy. John Cleese is turning out to be awfully fun in his Q role; he certainly seems to be able to wring a lot more fun out of the ubiquitous "gadget" scenes than his predecessor did. But then, facial crags aside, he is still John Cleese. Brosnan, I think, just looks more like James Bond should look than any of the previous Bonds; but maybe that's just me. And the Moneypenny scene at the end was a gem. (I'm told I was supposed to be watching Halle Berry's curvatures more closely than those of the Aston Martin, but I seem to have failed that particular test of Bond-watching Basics.) Having just seen a week-long marathon of the classic Bond films on TNN, including Dr. No (the first one), I can at the very least say that these things have gotten a good deal more fun to watch over the years. Anyway, then I retired to a friend's place to see Reign of Fire. This one, I have to say, was pretty aggressively stupid, but it wasn't as bad as I'd been led to believe. Sure, the worldbuilding was nonexistent, the practicalities of dragon biology and military weaponry and all that were inconsistent and flawed to put it as charitably as possible, and the whole plot felt chopped-up from a much longer screenplay, and left full of throwaway elements that in any other movie would have swung back around later in the story to close a circle-- in The Iron Giant, to take a random example, everything from the dent in the giant's head to the playing Superman to the reassembling-himself-from-component-parts comes back around to tie up dozens of loose story arcs; but in Reign of Fire you never see another mention of the capture method with the skydivers and the nets, the crop harvest, the horse, or anything. The "prayer" with the children reappears in a throw-and-catch that's pretty effective, but that's about it. But it wasn't bad, or not as much so as I was expecting. Although I am curious as to why so many of these post-apocalyptic movies take place in non-US English-speaking countries. What is it in the British or Australian psyche that revels in fantasies of futuristic self-immolation? (Kevin Costner aside.) I don't know whether to make anything significant out of the role of Van Zan and his American soldiers in the movie; the first line we hear from the defenders when the Kentucky Regiment comes over the hill in their marauder tanks (hey, at least they weren't jetskis) is "There's only one thing worse than dragons... Americans." Van Zan arrives as a messianic figure, arms spread, rallying the dying Northumbrian fortress to action, bringing hi-tech new battle techniques and an uncompromising and joyless single-mindedness to his dedication to the cause. But he eventually gets his ass kicked by his own overconfidence, and when the final attack on the London nest takes place, it's just the three of them on foot-- Van Zan telling Quinn, pointedly, "You lead. We follow." I dunno... maybe I'm reading far too much into this. It's just another big, dumb movie with lots of explosions. But hey-- what's the use of living in a decadent, doomed nation if you can't while away holiday weekend afternoons musing over the deep sociological significance of dubious pieces of popular fiction? Oh-- and there's a new Chow Yun Fat movie coming out called Bulletproof Monk. My reaction was: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Matrix."