I like Vampires. (as literary tropes, not as actual beings, of course.)  I like nudity.  Also–this is unrelated–I like Anna Paquin.  Or at least I think I do.  I also like the occassional mind-reading story.  I really, really like the name: Sookie Stackhouse.  It’s an awesome name.

Maybe someday I’ll grow to like True Blood.  But, two episodes in, I’m struggling.

The premise, which seems to have spread through script-writers like a plague, is the vampires have largely given up their bad, bad ways, and want to live among us.  Like regular people, except sexier and more dangerous.  More like pro athletes, I suppose.

Sookie Stackhouse, played by the somewhat adorable Anna Paquin, can read people’s minds.  Most of this mind-reading seems to be picking up the bad guy-thoughts that float around her trim body.  Guys, in her world, either think about sex in a really creepy way, or are somehow too pure.  Or gay.  Naturally, since guys are too disgusting to date if you know what they’re thinking, she has given up.  Until she meets a guy whose thoughts she cannot read.  Naturally, he’s a vampire.

Now, I know a lot of guys, and I don’t think we fall into the two or three categories allowed for by this movie: creepy predator, hopeless romantic, or gay.  In fact, most of us do think about sex, and we think about affection, and romance, and videogames.  Some of us even think about the world around us.  Also, I know a lot of women.  They KNOW we think about sex.  To a woman, they know a lot more about what men think than the writers of this show.  Or at least the writers of the mind-reading parts.  And they still seem to like us.

Anyway, why do I like Anna Paquin?  I’m not sure about that part, either.  She was chilling in The Piano, but after that, nothing stands out.  Sure, she was the tragic, untouchable mutant in the X-Men, a role that seems to have prepared her for this, but Rogue wasn’t that great a character even in the good X-Men movies.  Now she seems kind of generic as the good-hearted waitress in a sea of not-so-good people.  At one point the vampire asks what kind of thing she is, because she’s not as vain, stupid, greedy as the rest of the cast.  Maybe she’s just normal?

I suppose I’ll watch a couple more episodes.  There are two characters I like, her brother, and her friend, Tara.  But I can’t see how these secondary characters can hold up the show if the leads continue to be self-absorbed in their own “unique” goodness.

Just because I don’t attend church doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate religions.  I like religions.  I like spirituality, and for most people the best place to find that is in church.  (or equivalent).  What I don’t like is the “one true” mentality.  The Bible clearly says that God wants everyone to make it.  (see parable of the shepherd, among others).  If this is true, why would God act like a bad D & D dungeon master, creating one safe door and a bunch of doors that lead to certain doom?  With no way for an average person to decide which one is correct?

Face it, most people choose the religion they get from their parents.  And some people, naturally, try to find the exact opposite.  A few go adrift, then wander into some church led by friends or potential romance.  Nobody actually sits down and does comparison shopping, using analytic tools to ascertain the one true religion.  People who claim to have done so inevitably either decided on the church they were raised in, or the one with the prettiest girls.   Presumably God knows this is what would happen, so judging people on their failure to do this makes no sense.  Therefore, every religion that makes this claim is wrong, at least to that extent.

I also used to believe that religions had really fundamental differences.  Christianity was the “only” religion that allowed for salvation through mercy.  Islam had five pillars, including total service to God.  Buddhaism is the only religion that really understands the denial of the self.  Etc.  But now I think that any story about the relationship between God and man can be told within any religion.  The differences have more to do with temperment and culture.

Movie genres behave the same way.  You can tell a story about guilt and redemption as a romantic comedy (Wedding Crashers), an action movie (The Untouchables), a horror movie (The Exorcist), or as a Western (The Searchers).  Each genre has its own symbols, conventions, and appeals to a far different crowd, but central human themes are available in each.  And, naturally, there are some people who feel that one genre is the one, true means of expression.  Having said this, I reserve the right to bash the idea of Romantic Comedy at any point in the future.

What good is building a classy brand if you can’t whore it out for big bucks?  Clothing manufacturers do it,  chefs add their names to canned soups.  Why not Imax?  The latest controversy is that “Imax” movies are being shown on relatively small screens, for full price.  The Imax experience used to mean one thing.  Giant screens, up close, with amazing picture quality.  But now they’re selling some of us something much less.  Something like [insert designer label] Express.  But the trick is, they don’t tell you which screens are the real Imax, and which are fake.  The story was reported back in October, but didn’t get much traction, then.  But Star Trek happened.  When you have a super-geeky, detail-obsessed audience paying extra for something, their going to look at their reciepts.  They noticed, and they don’t stay quiet.  Word spread through the blogosphere, and on Twitter.

I went to see Star Trek, for the second time, at the AMC Hoffman in Alexandria.  We went there because we wanted to see the movie on an Imax screen.  Sadly, the AMC Hoffman offers Fake Imax.  Now, it wasn’t a complete rip-off.  Fake Imax still looks better than the digital projection screen we’d seen it on the first time.  But it was a long ways from being a real Imax experience.

The movie itself holds up magnificently.  There is one long section, beginning from Kirk’s exit from the Enterprise, and going at least until he meets Scotty, that is just painfully bad.  A mish-mash of un-motivated action, stunning coincidence, and exceptionally bad physics/astronomy, I just had to bite my tongue and wait it out.  When the movie gets it’s feet back underneath it, the awesomeness returns.

Once again, a beauty pageant model is brought to task for “bad behavior” and nude photos.  This time, the woman is Carrie Prejean, a Miss California, and target of Perez Hilton.  The photos exist, but we’ll probably never see them, because she was 17 when they were taken.  Big deal.  I’m going back and forth on who I don’t like and who I just don’t care about:

1) Perez Hilton is an annoying idiot who suddenly claims some kind of political relevancy?

2) Some 21 year old bimbo can’t walk a political tight-rope?

3) Beauty contest are basically displaying and rating female flesh, with a patina of respectability, and yet trashing the ones who’ve shown a millimeter more flesh?

I want to say, lay off the girl.  And I would, if she had gone back home, quietly stating that she didn’t think her beliefs should matter in a beauty contest.  But she didn’t, she signed on with “National Organization for Marraige”.  National Organization for Marraige is the worst kind of hate group, it goes all emo over people disagreeing with it.  Hating minorities and disempowered groups is a long-standing tradition in this country.  Probably in any country.  Our high schools are still permeated with it.  But the bullies used to at least have the guts to be consistent.  NOM is part of a new movement among conservatives.  They spew hate.  When they get a negative reaction, they act injured.  Victimized.  It’s pathetic.

So at least I have one bad guy in the mix.  I hate NOM.  Not for being bullies, not for perverting religion to their own hate, but for being all emo.  And I can give up my sympathy for Carrie Prejean because she signed on with them.  But still, digging up nude pictures from when she was seventeen?  Sure, it proves she isn’t absolutely morally pure, but that has never been the position the evangelicals take.  They all flirt with with sin, and if they get caught over the line, they repent.  It’s practically required.

I started out being mad at Perez Hilton.  That’s easy, because I’ve never liked him.  He can be funny, but mostly he’s cruel in a kind of “I can say whatever I want and then act harmless” way.  And, what kind of person tries to trip up beauty queens with complex moral questions?  That’s like Kramer beating up the third-grade Karate class.  But then I asked myself: Who picked him as a judge?  The same person who thought Roseanne Barr should sing the National Anthem?  What, exactly, did they expect?

I guess what I really hate is the politico-entertainment-industrial-complex.  It’s this machine that delivers something like Carrie Prejean through talk shows, commentators, entertainment shows, and the internet as if she can really be the focus of an important national debate.  These are the people who filled our living room with Joe the Plumber.  And the problem is, they guys on my side are as in on it, as guilty as the guys on the other side.  Bill O’Rielly, Keith Olberman, both eat this stuff up.  Each from his own moral high ground, but they both let a 21-year-old bimbo become the focus of their respective wrath/understanding.

If literature tells us anything, it’s that as soon as Google achieves sentience, it will destroy us.  The theme has been pretty well explored, from 2001, A Space Odyssy, to Battlestart Galactica.  We create something intelligent, and it rises up and destroys us.  This summer, Skynet will take another shot.  Maybe Mary Shelley thought of this first.  If you can adjust to the writing style, it’s still one of the best tellings of the story — second only to Battlestar Galactica.

One version of the story was the movie, Colossus, that came out in 1970.  Steeped in both cold war paranoia and 50s-style scientist-hero myth, this could have been done as a Twilight Zone episode.  A really good episode.  This is not an action movie, or an atmospheric horror piece.  It’s more of a deconstruction of the confident, proud scientist soldier, holding up under the pressure of a creation gone bad.

Colossus is a giant computer, designed to take over control of all the country’s strategic missiles.  Thus, there would be a precise, objective response to any attack.  Viewers may instantly think this is a bad idea, but the confidence of the scientists seems very reassuring.  Even though we know things will go wrong, we sort of believe they did the right thing.  They figured it out, and they have excellent vision.  But Colossus finds a buddy, the Soviets have built one also.

The progress of bad things is done without the usual pyrotechnics, but feels real and inexorable.  After nuking one town in Russia, the computers can order humans to do pretty much anything.  How the good looking, super-smart scientist tries to fight this takeover is a fairly well-grounded game between humans and computers.  No “24″ style plot-magic here, almost every move and counter-move sounds like what people would really do.

The direction this movie takes at the end raises it to a higher level.  This is a movie that pulls no punches, and may reflect our relationship with many of the great technologies we’ve created, then become dependent upon.  Twilight Zone had some pretty damn good stories, stories that didn’t just scare us, but looked a bit closer at our relationship to the world around us.  This movie, though not a big-budget masterpiece like 2001, really gets to the relationship between creator and created, much like Mary Shelley did.

It’s hard to argue with the weight of critical opinion, not to mention Oscar nominations. But I will argue.

Mongol loses points for being, essentially, a love story. We have lots of love stories. Anybody can be the subject of a love story. Complex love stories can also be woven into to tales of great human events. But love is not what’s interesting about Genghis Khan. Sure, he loved his wife. And liked his other wives. But he also united a bunch of nomadic tribes, conquered a whole bunch of Asia, and created an empire.

Genghis Khan was a great military tactician, master of alliances, a leader who could inspire loyalty in not only his own people, but in those who had recently defeated. He created an effective systems of administration, and helped create the Silk Road, which was important to several civilizations. The movie didn’t really get this. There were battle scenes, but they were personal. Genghis Khan was probably a good warrior, but that’s not what elevated him above all the other warriors of his time.

There was one large battle, but the movie attributed the victory more to mysticism and thunder than anything else.

The acting was quite good, and some of the sequences were compelling, but the geography quickly got lost. As action moved back and forth, over the years, there was no sense of how large an area was being covered, or of the relationship between the different locations.

I love this movie.  I’m unable to say why.  I can link superlatives together, describe awesome over-the-top scenes, but the magic is in the attitude.  From the opening credits which took the last scene from the first movie and did it 8-bit video-game format, we knew exactly what level to take the movie.  Everything after that was crazy-ludicrous.

At some point, when a shoot-out in strip club is the obvious next scene, there are, for no apparent reason, strippers shooting automatic weapons.  It’s not the last time strippers show up to a firefight, and no explanation is given.  You don’t need one in a movie like this.

This is the kind of movie where you can take a living head out of the tank of fluid in which it was living, and drop kick into the pool.  It makes perfect sense.  And, when Chilios calls the doctor and finds out that one way he can re-charge the internal battery that is powering his temporary artificial heart is by rubbing up against someone else, you think: of course.  Of course that would be it.

The movie may not be a great movie, not in terms of storytelling anyway.  But it is art.  There are so many moments here, like being trapped in a police car by protesting porn stars.  These are the moments I can talk about.  But the greatest scene, for me, was the completely incomprehensible shift to classic Japanese monster movie.  No reason, it’s just that they could, and it works.

Two final words: Chicken and Broccoli.

I just finished watching Polymorph, a straight-to-video cheapie made in 1996, for a budget that must have been under $100,000.  It was a pretty standard mish-mash of alien body-snatcher, psycho drug dealers, and the band of attractive interns that alway seem to attract killing.

I gave it five stars on Netflix.  The acting was actually pretty good, the action kept moving, and the denoument worked.

[Next day] I had to come back and add a note to this “review”.  This movie grew on me overnight.  Sure, it’s barely more than a student film in terms of production quality, but the plot, which seems pretty simple, has a bit of depth.  It takes the viewer on a journey, a fairly short journey maybe, but one that undercuts your assumptions.  And, though some of the conflict scenes were pretty over the top, and some of the emotive stuff a bit messy, it felt as if it was at least trying to imitate real life rather than other movies in the genre.  The balance of forces was perfect for the tension built.

I started watching the movie as if were a Sci-Fi original (don’t know what we’ll do when they change their name to Syphyllys Fy), using it as background while I worked on my laptop.  But, soon enough, I was engaged.  Put the laptop down and wait for what happens next.  A lot of movies with much higher production values fail this simple test.

Last night, someone mistakenly thought that Eliza Dushku would look convincing as a dominatrix.  She didn’t.  She looked like that mousy girl who shows up at parties and tries to get attention even though she’s actually not that smart.  So she tries dressing in ways completely out of character and is just more awkard.

But she did the right thing for most of the show, stood around a waved.  Dollhouse is going off the rails, after a very brief period of actually being good.  It’s a shame because there were actually a couple good scenes in the episode:

• Helo finding out that his lasagna-bearing neighborly girl-friend is actually a sleeped doll.  That scene was very compelling, even sad.  His character is great, because he sort of has that “beautiful mind” level of obsession, but when he turns around it turns out that even the person he trusts is part of “them.”
• Echo doing the interrogation of the staff.  Usually Eliza Dushku (spelling may vary) seems out of her depth, but she seemed to carry this segment off pretty well.  But, as some sort of compensatory effect, Sierra crossed over from cool to ludicrous.  Only Victor was still engaging.

But there were so many bad parts:

• Dominic was not that convincing as head of security, he was even less convincing as an NSA plant.  It’s not the actor’s fault, the scripts gave him wildly inconsistent motives from show to show, and the explanation for being an agent was too thin for even this kind of show.
• Echo was once again, at the end of the show, lauded as being ’special’.  Why?  Because she gave Tofu an idea?  She is seriously becoming the stupid one that everybody likes so they act like anything she does is just brilliant.  Even though everyone knows better.
• That chip.  In this universe, apparently, anybody who is technically smart can identify a piece of average-looking electronics as “super-secret NSA” stuff.  Not only that, but why do these fall off of agents and get found?  Do they flake off the skin?
• The gun shot.  Really?  He shot her, blood splatter across the window, and it turned out to be a small puncture wound?

Once again I’ve got “Give me back my little fish” stuck in my head.  I’m not sure that’s the actual lyric, but it doesn’t matter.  You know it, the McDonald’s fish song.  Long John Silver tried to bust out with a new series of commercials that pretty much attack the McDonald’s Fillet O’ Fish sandwich.  The commercials went product to product, using the best line-that-should-have-worked: “Is that even fish?”

We’ll set aside for a moment the one astonishingly bad idea, the theme of splashing the customer with water.  Everything else about the commercial should have completely sold us on how much better and tastier the LJS product is.  More fish-like.

But with fast food, the actual substance rarely matters.  McDonald’s isn’t selling us fish.  If you want fish, go to a sea-food restaurant.  McDonald’s is selling a combination of magic and crave-satisfaction.  Setting the actual food product aside, would rather get splashed with a bucket of water while holding a tray full of food?  Or would you rather eat something, with obvious satisfaction, while the magical fish sings to you?  And, to top it off, your friend comes in and watches you with envy?  Because he’s not in the secret magic-singing-fish club.

McDonald’s wins with the most important fast-food demographics:

• Kids love magic.  They don’t care if what they eat is closer to real food, as long as it’s breaded, salty, and reminds them of a magical singing fish who wants part of its body back.
• Stoners need satisfaction.  Late-night stoners and drunks want something that will give them that sense of satisfaction you see on the guy’s face, as he stares down the singing fish.
• Parents want their kids to shut up.  See point #1
• Cubicle rats want something they can take back to their desk.  Something that doesn’t seem too messy.  The fillet o’ fish may not be food, but it looks tidy.  LJS splashes you and your food with a bucket of water.