Origin of Species: The Chick Flick

Just joking! Creation is much better than that. "Skeptical" Jon Abrams thinks so too.


Minor historical gripes: Annie was not the Darwin's first child, but the second. And she died in 1851, while the bulk of the movie's plot clearly takes place in 1858 and 1859, with the arrival of Wallace's letter precipitating the completion of Origin of Species. Was Darwin really a cranky hysterical for seven long years? I know, time gets compressed in Movieland....

Postscript on Felines and Fiction

People (particularly data-entry staff at veterinary clinics) would sometimes ask where we got the name of our late pet from (usually after they've asked how to spell it, or if they encountered the written form first, how to pronounce it. It's: KEE-zhay). Classical music lovers generally recognize the reference to Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kizhe orchestral suite, and are further aware that the music was originally written for the 1934 film, which in turn is based on the novella by Yuri Tynyanov.

The action of the story revolves around the efforts of the Russian Imperial court to hide from the vain, mercurial Tsar Paul I the fact that he has made a mistake: that the name and persona of "Lieutenant Kizhe" is the result of a scribal error. The afore-linked Wikipedia article adequately describes the plot of the novella (the movie changes a few non-essential things), so I won't belabor the details. Though intended as a satire on the Tsarist bureacracy, one can't help wondering if there is not also a subtle jibe being levelled against the Stalinist regime under which both the book and film were made.

We discovered only yesterday that the film (with English subtitles) is now available at the Internet Archive and Google Video. (I think it's been a while since we last searched for it). So last night, in memory of our furry friend, we hooked up the laptop to the TV and sat down to watch....
I'm a lousy movie critic: about the best I can manage is "Liked it" or "That sucked". But this flick is definitely the former. It is made early enough in the "talkies" era to have preserved some of the silent-film propensity for sight-gags. For example, the prison commandant, presented with the non-existent Kizhe for incarceration, with perfect gravity searches the ground around the guards for this "confidential prisoner, who has no shape". No dialog is spoken, or needed. Later, the entire sequence of Kizhe's wedding comprises about 10 minutes of high absurdity. While there is understated slapstick, it never reaches the over-the-top level of the Keystone Cops. And behind it all is Prokofiev's music; the elements of what later became an orchestral classic.

So: it's a quirky kind of closure. We've loved the music for years (enough to name our seventh cat after it), and been fascinated by the back-story, so it was great to at last see that story played out. And we learned one detail about the doubly-fictional Lieutenant, which is perhaps a fitting memorial for the cat who lived in a non-believing household; who always knew what he wanted, and always let you know about it. From the film's closing soliloquy -- a kind of reverse eulogy on his now-deceased officer -- delivered by the Tsar:
Good-bye, little friend.

(Movie poster from WikiMedia Commons)

Reboot the Franchise, Scotty!

Phil Plait has written a much, much better review of the new Star Trek movie (complete with astronomical notes), so go read his instead.

You're still here? *sigh* Let's see what I can come up with. First, the obligatory warning:

KLINGONS SPOILERS OFF THE STARBOARD BOW!

What, still here? OK, you asked for it:

The Kirk character has a heavy whiff of Mary Sue about him -- what, from obnoxious, know-it-all cadet to captain of the Enterprise, just for saving Earth from destruction once? Methinks he skipped about four ranks (and at least one more saving-everyone's-ass) there. Pity, too: it might have made the (inevitable) sequels more interesting to see him work his way up from Ensign through Lieutenant and Commander, before he gets to kick people out of the Big Chair whenever he wants to.

Several of the supporting characters seem to be played for comedy -- caricatures, really, of their older counterparts on classic Trek (not that that cast didn't descend, at times, into self-parody, especially by the fourth or fifth movie).

I'm also not entirely sure I approve of destroying Vulcan. I kept expecting them to fix the time-line and put everything back the way it was, allowing history to proceed along Canonical lines -- it was fairly late in the movie when I realized that, no, this is the new normal. Of course, Spock Prime knows about the supernova, giving them over a century to prepare to save Romulus (and thereby the villain's wife, Kirk's dad, Vulcan, and Spock's mom). Or as a commenter at Bad Astronomy pointed out: Nero the Romulan could have done the same thing, instead of going off on his mission of vengeance.

I think time travel and its associated paradoxes will always be a dramatic weakness. Back to the Future managed it, but only as comedy (and of course, Doctor Who -- another show that has never taken itself seriously, in either of its incarnations).

But enough kvetching: as a dying Kirk says, "It was fun". Enjoyably demented villain, plot that keeps moving along, plenty of fights and swashbuckling, some kick-ass space hardware and lots of explosions. The retro-industrial look of the Enterprise engine room looks more back to the Enterprise TV series than forward to either classic or Next Generation Trek. The Onion review (no, really!) gets it about right: "A fun and watchable action-packed thrill-ride".

CBC Fail

Not as bad as their last fail, but it's always a bit pathetic when an error correction itself contains an error.

It seems that a few nights ago, the CBC Radio program As It Happens referred to lobsters as "molluscs". OK, that's a bit of a fail right there, and they seem to have received some feedback on it, as last night they issued an on-air correction: lobsters are Crustaceans, part of the phylum Anthropoda. That's right: not Arthropoda (joint-footed), but Anthropoda (man-footed).

Maybe they mean something like this:

AMC Ad, Updated

For those who can't see the animation (and for after it has disappeared), here's a composite of three screen-caps that give the gist. The caption in the last one reads: "The intelligent way to go the movies". I really can't help wondering if they did that deliberately.

BTW, we just got back from Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- a fun romp and worthy successor to the earlier ones. And it's every bit as good a documentary as Expelled!

AMC Advertising Appropriately

While looking up showtimes for Indiana Jones, I discovered that Expelled has arrived at our local movie-plex. Knowing what I know about the latter movie's contents (including stuff coming from the flick's producers), I am unlikely to see it. Not only do I refuse to enrich this bunch with the royalty from my ticket purchase, I've got more enjoyable and productive ways to spend 90 minutes of my life (like bathing the cats, or going to the dentist).

However, the AMC website blurb is worth seeing, just for the ironic humour value. Click here, choose the "Synopsis" tab, scroll down so you can see the Movietickets.com ad below the text -- and watch (but do it before the ad goes away -- who knows how long this turkey will last?)

Expelled: The Canadian Connection

Over at Monkey Trials, Scott Hatfield reports on the background of the people behind the ExcretedExpelled movie. That they all turn out to be evangelicals is no big surprise -- scratch an IDist, and you'll find a Christian creationist nine times out of 10. What's a little more interesting to me is the Canadian angle. I already knew that geek gazillionaire Walt Ruloff, who bankrolled the film, lives in BC, but this is news:

Co-founder A. Logan Craft is identified as a minister and TV producer on the American board of the Canadian Center for Cultural Renewal.

I'm a little puzzled why a Canadian center would have an American board, but the Centre's website shows it as having two boards -- a Canadian one and an American one. The whole thing looks a bit like a branch-plant operation of the Seattle-based Center for Science and Culture.

Perusing the Endorsements page I had a little shock: I found the name of someone I was in a fellowship group with, about 15 years ago (no, I won't tell you who, except to say that she was one of the more conservative members of that group).

Did they find his armour, too?

I seem to be the only one (or else the only one whose mind is trivial enough to care) to notice this coincidence: In the same week as the opening of The Golden Compass, comes the announcement of the finding of the fossil jawbone of a polar bear -- on Svalbard, the arctic island home of Lyra's ursine friend and protector, Iorek.

The significance of this find (I mean, other than amusing me with the "life-imitates-art" schtick) is that it pushes the fossil record of polar bears back about 20000 or 30000 years earlier than was previously known -- back out of the Wisconsin glaciation and into the previous interglacial. This raises hopes that polar bears, having survived warm periods before, may not be as vulnerable to gloabl warming as feared.

Pullman on the CBC

Proving that the CBC is a cabal of godless commies, the radio programme Writers & Company has devoted two episodes running to a long interview with that fount of atheist evangelism, the man who strikes terror into the hearts of Bill Donohue and Catholic school boards everywhere (OK, a few boards in the 905 belt), Phillip Pullman. Disappointingly, this Corrupter Of Youth turned out to be quite a mild, affable chap and hardly said anything at all bad about religion. A random scattering of some relevant points:

• The host, Eleanor Wachtel, referred to Pullman as "a Church of England atheist", to which Pullman agreed. He seems to have an affectionate nostalgia for the Anglican Church (so does Dawkins, BTW) -- he loves the language of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (but only the old, pre-revision, version). He fondly recalls his grandfather, a vicar, as wonderful story-teller.
• Contrary to garbled reports that he loathes C.S.Lewis, he thinks Lewis' lit-crit work is excellent, and that he was a good story-teller with an engaging prose style. He likes the Narnia stories until the very end: having taken his Narnia children through many trials and tribulations, growing their strength and character, instead of having them live on in our world to make it a better place, Lewis kills them off. And this, as expressed in the last book, is an outcome devoutly to be wished -- dead and in Heaven is better than living and doing good. Pullman also can't forgive Lewis for condemning Susan for simply growing up and discovering things like a social life and sexual attraction (I don't think I agree with Pullman's interpretation, though I'm not prepared to argue a point which seems to have generated a fair amount of commentary over the years).
• The authors Pullman really doesn't like are A.A.Milne and J.R.R.Tolkien. I'm not sure what he has against Winnie the Pooh, but he dismisses LOTR as "trivial". It has, in Pullman's view, no real moral ambiguity or struggle. The good and evil are always obvious. Again, I'm not sure I agree, but then I don't have a BA from Oxford, so what do I know?

My take on the His Dark Materials trilogy: the first book was bit "thin" dramatically -- definitely kid-lit -- but they picked up after that. I'm looking forward to the movie.

Oh, and my daemon is an osprey named "Brienne".