I didn’t watch “Miami Vice” when it was on TV, but I doubt it had the dark, brooding atmosphere of the Michael Mann movie of the same name. Colin Farrell takes the role that made Don Johnson famous (Sonny Crocket), and Jamie Foxx plays his partner, Ricardo Tubbs. The movie follows the pair into deep cover as drug runners for a powerful Colombian drug cartel with the goal of flushing out the identity of FBI informants for the cartel. Things get more complicated in a hurry when Sonny falls for one of the bad guys (not literally), played by Gong Li, and the rest of the bad guys don’t trust their new American partners who are too good to be true. The bad guys are portrayed as realistically pragmatic, smart, and ruthless as are, in their own way, the good guys. But the bad guys are really, really bad, and over the course of the movie Mann manages to foster a serious dislike of these people in the audience without being overly manipulative. While there are some flashy raceboat scenes, the movie generally has an air of gritty realism. The gun battles in particular are well done, capturing the chaos and avoiding overdone explosions or ridiculously mis-matched shooters (both sides have deadly aim). This culminates in a particularly satisfying showdown. My main criticism is that at nearly two and a half hours, the movie drags at times.
Archive for July, 2006
Miami Vice
Saturday, July 29th, 2006Hoping Landis is Cleared
Friday, July 28th, 2006This year’s Tour de France was one of the most exciting ever, with Floyd Landis mounting an incredible comeback in the mountains the day after an equally incredible collapse. A drug test has now showed elevated levels of testosterone (actually, a high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone). Either these tests are incredibly inaccurate or Landis is an idiot. The only way to explain someone taking a banned substance in his position, when he knows he will be tested, is if the tests are so poor that they almost always miss a violation. I find it hard to believe that it is that hard to test for testosterone. I also find it hard to believe that Landis is an idiot. So I’m hoping against hope that Landis is cleared, and the test result is explained by his thyroid medication, his natural hormone levels, and/or his cortisone shot for his hip. See this article for more information.
There’s Nothing Banal about Mischief
Friday, July 28th, 2006Let’s get this straight once and for all:
It’s “mischievous” (MISS-chi-vuss), not “miss-CHEE-veeus”. Take a close look between the v and the s and you shall find e’s, i’s, and y’s are missing.
And please: the French gave us a perfectly reasonable pronunciation for “banal.” Let’s not ruin it by making it rhyme with anything other than “canal.” Or, if you like, “ball” with an “n” in the middle. I was once in a play with an actor who insisted on making it rhyme with another word with a similar spelling. She bet me a six-pack of soda that she was saying it right, and to this day I’m sorry to say that I found a dictionary that did list that scatalogical pronunciation as an acceptable alternative. Well, it’s not acceptable to me.
But I did give her the sodas.
Saturn’s Rings: Prediction vs Observation
Thursday, July 27th, 2006Last night I got my first new measurement of Saturn’s rings from Cassini in almost a year. A couple of weeks ago I posted a prediction about what that measurement would look like. Here are the results. The black curve (new observation) shows excellent agreement with the prediction, particularly in the outer half of the A ring (right half of the plot). There is some disagreement in the inner half of the ring. This may be due to inaccuracies in the model. Another possibility has to do with instrument calibration. That gets down to the nitty-gritty work. Overall, this observation confirms our model by the good match with the prediction.
Lakes on Titan
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006The strongest evidence yet for large lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan are in these RADAR images of the north polar regions of the large moon. At the very cold temperatures of Titan, these lakes are liquid methane or ethane. Water is hard as a rock at Saturn. These lake-like features may be lake beds, or marshy areas. They are certainly smooth, but may not currently be liquid. If they are, it would make Titan the only object other than Earth to have liquids on the surface at the present time.
It’s Spoke Season in Saturn’s Rings
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006One of the most intriguing features of Saturn’s rings is the occasional appearance of ghostly “spokes”. Gone for several years, we got a glimpse of them from Cassini only just before the spacecraft went into orbits in Saturn’s equatorial plane from which the rings are all but invisible. Now that Cassini is able to see the rings again, the Cassini cameras have seen spokes again.
These features are so named because they cut radially across the rings, like the spokes of a wheel. Unlike bicycle spokes, however, they are ephemeral, appearing in a matter of only a few minutes (or less), and rarely (if ever) lasting more than one orbit around the planet (around 10 hours). (That orbital time period is pretty amazing by itself: it takes the Earth’s Moon about 27 days to orbit the Earth along a path that is only about four times longer than the orbits of Saturn’s ring particles. These particles are really zipping around Saturn, though their speeds relative to each other are literally at a snail’s pace.)
The spokes, first observed by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s, are made up of particles roughly the same size of smoke particles. Particles this small are easily pushed around by electric fields. This is why your computer screen, even though it is vertical, is probably coated with a significant amount of dust right now. Saturn’s spinning magnetic field produces an electric field that can explain the radial nature of the spokes. But what makes them come and go? And why did they disappear for years? The spokes may be caused by meteoroid impacts onto the rings. Some theories connect the spokes to thunderstorms on Saturn. Their disappearance may be due to the changing seasons of Saturn. Direct sunlight on the rings in summer and winter may make the environment near the rings inhospitable to spokes. Now that spring is approaching on Saturn (Saturn’s year is 29 years long, so seasons run over 7 years on Saturn), the environment appears to be favorable for spokes again. Keep your eyes on the Cassini imaging team’s site and the Saturn web site for spectacular images and movies in the months ahead.
My Super Ex-Girlfriend
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006This movie is diverting enough, but somehow never manages to get above the level of merely diverting, in spite of a cute premise and a delightful performance by Uma Thurman. Ivan Reitman directed, and while his Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies, this one putters along in second gear. The funny moments are spread too thin, and the romantic aspects of the plot are too predictable to elevate this movie above the genre. What I did like was the juxtaposition of superhero abilities onto a person who has a believably unstable personality. Thurman works it for all it’s worth. Yet many of the jokes are geared more toward an adult audience (superheroes have superhuman sexual appetites, apparently), while the premise and goofiness of the rest of the movie feels appropriate for a teen movie.
Clerks II
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006While I remember enjoying the original Clerks in 1994, I don’t remember much about the movie. I certainly hope that 12 years from now I will remember more about Clerks II, because it has enough shocking moments that failure to remember them would certainly be a sign of mental decline. Some may wish to put some of the images from this movie out of their minds as quickly as possible: Kevin Smith’s latest film is a naughty delight. And I do mean naughty. One scene in particular that involved a donkey had me wondering just how far Smith could go with an R rating. Fans of Smith’s other movies, particularly Chasing Amy and Clerks should thoroughly enjoy this day in the life of two thirty-something schmoes going through a premature mid-life crisis. Rosario Dawson and Trevor Fehrman add welcome notes of sweetness to the occasionally gratingly (but hilarious) foul-mouthed Randal (Jeff Anderson) who is facing life without his fellow clerk and lifetime kindred do-nothing spirit, Dante (Brian O’Halloran). The crisis is such that it even provokes dialogue from Silent Bob. If you don’t know who Silent Bob is, trust me, that’s a big deal. A simple plot that takes place almost entirely during Dante’s last day in New Jersey before moving to Florida to start a new, conventional, married life, and the at-times infuriating behavior of Randal do not stop a vulgar movie from also being funny and even heart-warming.
Let There be Sound in Space
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006A mainstay of scientific critiques of movies that include space travel is the lament that we hear explosions and the roar of the spaceship’s engines. After all, in space no one can hear you scream, right? Right. But so what? Do we really want the movie to be dead silent when the Death Star annihilates a planet, or when the starship Enterprise goes to warp speed? Or even in a less fantastical science fiction movie like Deep Impact: would the movie really be better if all external shots of the spaceship and the comet were accompanied by silence interrupted only by the radio communications of the astronauts? I say that not only would it be less enjoyable, it would not truly be any more realistic. There may not be sound in space, but there’s also no movie camera. And there’s no orchestra to play the soundtrack. And there’s certainly no male voice choir to sing eerie music en route to Jupiter (which we couldn’t hear anyway because there’s no sound in space) in the timeless 2001: A Space Odyssey.
As members of the movie-watching audience we are participating in the charade that is the movie. How do we hear or see anything in a movie? We have made a contract with the filmmakers to ignore the camera, lights, and microphones that allow us to be shown the action. So, every time you hear the rumble of a spaceship’s engines while you’re seeing the spaceship from the depths of space, you can pretend that you’re hearing those sounds because they are transmitted by radio from microphones planted throughout the ship. It’s no more silly than the ability to see the ship, because while there is light in space, there aren’t many Hollywood movie cameras to let us see it.
There are plenty of potentially damaging (to public perceptions of science and reality) and definitely misleading elements of movies with scientific elements. Sound effects are not among them. Which are worse? You can check these sites for some ideas, or suggest your own.
Sci-Fi Science Blunders
The Intuitor
I think the regular violation of the conservation of momentum in movies and TV shows has contributed to societal misconception about how things move.
Galaxy Quest is not a Spoof
Thursday, July 20th, 2006Yes, Galaxy Quest is old news. But this has been bugging me ever since it came out. As much as I enjoyed the movie I was that irritated by it constantly being described as a spoof of Star Trek.
Galaxy Quest is not a spoof of Star Trek, or of anything for that matter. A spoof is a work that imitates another work in an exaggerated fashion for humorous effect. Spaceballs spoofed Star Wars, among other movies, by replacing Darth Vader with Dark Helmet whose dark helmet was comically large, and Jabba the Hutt with Pizza the Hut. Get it? Galaxy Quest is funny not because of the similarities to Star Trek, which are present, but because it puts a bunch of actors on a spaceship and forces them to be the dashing heroes they played in their television show. The ace pilot doesn’t know how to fly the spaceship and can barely get it out of spacedock. Because he’s an actor. Guy panics at the sight of the “red thingy” and the “green thingy” on the screen because he’s some shmuck from Los Angeles who has been transported to an alien spaceship that’s about to get blasted by a giant lobster. It’s funny because of the juxtaposition of our everyday life with a fantasy life transformed into reality, not because there is another corny (though filled with insights on the human condition) science fiction TV show with a rabid fan base.
The only part of Galaxy Quest that comes remotely close to spoofing Star Trek is the science fiction convention scene. Frankly, real Star Trek conventions are more amusing than the Galaxy Quest convention. I speak from experience. The sparkle of Galaxy Quest comes from seeing a bunch of regular 20-th century actors confronted with an absurd situation.
Alan Rickman’s alien bears virtually no resemblance to Spock, and whatever resemblances there are, aren’t funny. (Spock has prosthetic pointy ears, and Rickman’s character has a prosthetic headpiece. It bears no resemblance to Spock’s ears, and actually it’s a pretty good alien make-up job.) If Rickman’s character had 10-inch pointy ears and a permanently raised eyebrow, that would be a spoof of Spock. What makes his character funny is that he’s an actor with some pride in his craft forced to walk around with a piece of rubber glued to his head saying things like “By Grapthar’s hammer, by the sons of Worvan, you shall be avenged,” on a campy TV show and then has to confront the very real existence of a world he has scorned for so long.
Sigourney Weaver’s cheesecake character on the Galaxy Quest TV show repeats whatever the computer says. If a character did that on Star Trek, then that would be spoofing Star Trek. But no one does that on Star Trek. If Sigourney Weaver wore a giant telecommunications insert in her ear, that would be a spoof of Uhura. If there were a medical doctor on Galaxy Quest who regularly announced that someone was dead and repeated that he was a doctor all the time, that would be a spoof of McCoy. If there was an engineer on Galaxy Quest with a thick ethnic accent bemoaning the inevitable destruction of the ship because there’s not enough time, that would be a spoof of Scotty. If there was a race of aliens ridiculously more interested in death with honor than actually living, that would be a spoof of Klingons. But there isn’t.
Weaver’s character’s role on Galaxy Quest is funny because they put a hot woman on the show with no role other than to attract young male viewers, and that’s a spoof of TV in general but not Star Trek (which usually had hot villainous female guest stars). Tony Shaloub’s engineer is funny in Galaxy Quest because he is cool and unphased by his alien surroundings that would totally freak out any normal person (like Guy). It is funny because, as Gwen DeMarco (Weaver) says, “we are actors, not astronauts.” A Star Trek spoof would take place entirely within a fictional universe like the Star Trek universe, but everything would be exaggerated. Someone could probably make a pretty funny spoof of Star Trek. Galaxy Quest is pretty funny, but it’s not a spoof. Geez!