Fair warning to any that have not seen Revenge of the Sith, If you do not want any details revealed you should turn back now.
I suppose I am what you could call an epic Junky. I am a sucker for epic stories. And for me it all began with StarWars. And now it is over. With Revenge of the Sith, Lucas has finally completed telling the story of Darth Vader. Before I get into whether or not I liked his ending I will clear the air of a few things. First, fanboy I may be but I do not make any claim that StarWars is the greatest story ever told. I harbor no illusions that they are the greatest movies ever made. Much as I love them I grant them their flaws. Dialog is wooden, characters 2 dimensional and the story simplistic. But I must say, I feel nothing but pity for those who allow such unimportant details to cage their imaginations when we are given such memorable moments as that of Luke gazing across an alien landscape into the setting of two suns. This is because of what StarWars IS. It IS one of the most fantastic expressions of imagination ever. Its true genius lies in its unerring power to sweep people into its world. It is a world that we want to imagine and for good or ill the master of this world has failings as a story teller, yet we forgive him for it because thanks to him we have this wonderfull limitless playground for our imaginations to run wild in.
So thanks George Lucas. For the good and the bad. For Jar Jar - Yoda. Well I really really really could have done without Jar Jar.
That aside my thoughts regarding Sith is all about the two halves of the movie. The First half is more everything is grey, sappy please belive we are in love dialog delivered like they were practicing lines hung over at waffle house. But then a magical thing happens. Lucas finally reaches the point where he says 'OK, enough, now he is giving in to the Sith in order to save what he loves'. Out go all the tortured thoughts and in with the supreme bad@$$ we all came to love to hate in Starwars Darth Vader. The tragic moments left have little to do with shades of grey and everything to do with people doing what they believe in to the fullest and being torn to pieces by it. In short the Second half Rocks. It Rocks for a simple reason. It is Starwars. Not this behometh unweildy overpowering economic force we have been exposed to since Luke first blew up the Death star. But that simple expression of imagination of people engaged in great deeds for the best and worst of reasons. That first movie was anything but complex. It was dirt simple and there was never any hedging in it. We knew who the characters where. We knew what the stood for, what they would fight for. And it did not matter that we knew. It was a classic story of good overcomming evil. George had the absolute perfect setup for simply inverting that entire formula for the prequals and largely in my book failed to deliver. With a few exceptions here and there (most of the sabre duels were damn entertaining) it seems to me like he only delivered half a movie out of 3.
Some problems I had with it.
The Jedi. This magnificent powerfull force of justice that is supposed to have reigned supreme for 1000's of years is snuffed in about 4 minutes of screen time. Vader plays a big role but not the role you would expect... he takes out the school scrubs that are not yet ready to go out into the galaxy to deal with the on going war. We could have had a movie of Vader falling deeper and deeper to the Dark Side. Seeing the will and commitment he had to saving what he loved. Instead we get him slicing a couple kids and a bunch of Jedi Shot in the back by Storm Troopers. I thought that a bit dissapointing.
Grievous. Damnit... how many enemies did we go through ? Grivous wound up being pretty cool but even so that battle never had any intensity to it... it was just a special effects tour de force which was pretty cool to watch. I really thought Lucas screwed up with not just sticking with Darth Maul. He had some serious vibes going for him and he was used for all of one real fight and about 4 lines and a couple of good snarls. Tragic waste of a powerfull image.
What I liked.
The final battle with Obi Wan is about as epic as you could ask for. It is brother against brother and no quarter is taken. How much more powerfull an image can you have than Obi Wan leaving Anakin burning by a lake of lava with his legs freshly severed by his light sabre ?
Windu/Yoda's tangles with the Emperor where both good as well.
If I were George Lucas ?
Episode one never happens, pick Anakin up farther down the road and use clues later that he is an oddball case. Not sure about Qui Gon in general. He was used so much for exposition that he never really comes across as a character. More as a narrator. Could have just put Obi Wan in the same role and traded on the fact people already valued and knew him as a character. Hell even pick him up on Tatooine at Lukes age and avoid the whole problem of an 8 year old acting like an 8 year old which was Jake Loyd's only real fault. That way the whole argument about being to old would have made a lot more sense.... I mean hell if he was to old at 8 then when do they start the training... when they are born ?
NEVER NEVER NEVER try to explain the force. Leave it mystical. Faith is a hard thing in the modern world but Lucas created something people were willing to swallow because it was futuristic... and because it had tangible manifestations of the power of the faith. It did not need explaining.
Let the Love story be a lot more subtle. Its not hard to believe a boy and girl fall in love. Its not hard to put them in impossible positions. Its not hard to have people believe that people do crazy things for love. Nobody had a hard time believing Han loved Liea and they had all of a few seconds of looks and dialog in two movies leading up to his delcleration. Its a simple story... and since he is doing the most horrible things for love it actually would behoove it to remain a very simple almost stylistic love that is pure and perfect. The foundation of Starwars is the use of archtypes and classic epic storylines. The atempt at putting more modern shades of grey into the plot was largely a mistake and nowhere was it more in evidence than the 'love story' sequences.
Of Courese that is all easy for me to say in hindsight. Lucas didn't present himself with an easy task. And if he had done it that way perhaps he would have actually managed to slay the golden goose. As is, good bad or indifferent each movie shattered box office records and the trillogy as a whole created a new record book. Perhaps none of them were as ground breaking as the original. But then they were not original were they ? All in all they are still a testament to creativity and damned entertaining.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Braves Update
Well it has been four weeks since my last Braves look and low and behold they are out in front of the division. Thank god the Phillies are off to such a rough start. I would hate to be in a hoss race with those bats. As is if they don't get their act together soon they are going to have to come flying down the home stretch just to be in contention. Course the Marlins pitching is off the hook and that is shaping up to be one heck of a race. Lot of season left, but baring any major equation changes (injuries etc...) its going to come down to pitching. The Marlins have more sticks and they are going to have their say before this is over so I hold to saying we have to have the best pitching in the division... and right now we only have the best in the most important category(wins) and trail in most other marks.
I like the Nationals but where the Braves are clicking along in cruise control right now and the Marlins are struggling at the plate, the Nationals are playing lights out across the board. It isn't impossible they could sustain it the whole way through but the odds are very much against it. If they keep it this tight up to the all star break we could well have a good three way stretch race and if the Phillies wake up this will be the most exciting division in baseball.
Areas of concern.
It is taking Kolb longer than I would like to get back to what he is good at... pitching ahead in the count. Pretty much all of his problems have been due to working behind in the count. This is good and bad news. The bad news is he is having confidence issues and those have a habit of lingering with a closer. The good news is he is still getting saves, and he is not pitching his game. If he were in a groove and getting rocked I would be far more worried than I am.
Estrada is still not producing quite the same. However he still has a clutch habit and his K/walk ratio is just fine. All in all the signs are good and over the course of the season it is likely his average will rise from his current dissapointing .240 level
Thompson going down is a problem. We really can't afford mediocity from the starters... in the long run having thompson out for an extended period of time will catch up to us unless we get a surprise performance for whoever steps into his shoes. Say what you want about Thompson but his is 11-3 with a 2.53 era since July last year. That is outstanding.
I like the Nationals but where the Braves are clicking along in cruise control right now and the Marlins are struggling at the plate, the Nationals are playing lights out across the board. It isn't impossible they could sustain it the whole way through but the odds are very much against it. If they keep it this tight up to the all star break we could well have a good three way stretch race and if the Phillies wake up this will be the most exciting division in baseball.
Areas of concern.
It is taking Kolb longer than I would like to get back to what he is good at... pitching ahead in the count. Pretty much all of his problems have been due to working behind in the count. This is good and bad news. The bad news is he is having confidence issues and those have a habit of lingering with a closer. The good news is he is still getting saves, and he is not pitching his game. If he were in a groove and getting rocked I would be far more worried than I am.
Estrada is still not producing quite the same. However he still has a clutch habit and his K/walk ratio is just fine. All in all the signs are good and over the course of the season it is likely his average will rise from his current dissapointing .240 level
Thompson going down is a problem. We really can't afford mediocity from the starters... in the long run having thompson out for an extended period of time will catch up to us unless we get a surprise performance for whoever steps into his shoes. Say what you want about Thompson but his is 11-3 with a 2.53 era since July last year. That is outstanding.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
That was Neat
Ok... talk about your surprise events. Here I am minding my own business sitting on Console when I get a phone call. Low and behold its none other than John Phillips. One of the crew we are currently supporting on ISS. I wish there was a picture of my face when I realized who I was on the phone with... and where he was calling from.
So now I can add a conversation with an astronaught in LEO going about 17,500 mph while riding a bike (excecise time) to my experiences.
Needless to say it is at times like these that I am reminded I don't have what anyone would call a typcial job. Surprising as it may seem when your here doing it day in and day out it just ceases to be anything special. Nice to have reminders from time to time.
So now I can add a conversation with an astronaught in LEO going about 17,500 mph while riding a bike (excecise time) to my experiences.
Needless to say it is at times like these that I am reminded I don't have what anyone would call a typcial job. Surprising as it may seem when your here doing it day in and day out it just ceases to be anything special. Nice to have reminders from time to time.
More Baseball
Well its that time of year again. The First half is well underway so of course balloting has begun for this years all-star game. I ran across this discussion on ESPN page two about two guys having some fun with how they think ballots should be counted.
Me personally? I think the all star ballot should be canned. Yep, no more voting by the fans, reporters, or even coaches and players for that matter. All stars are not about elections. To me it is simply the numbers. The numbers should be for the second half of the previous season and first half numbers of the current season and post season numbers discounted. That way allstars are chosen on a seasons worth of performance.
Great players having bad years should not be in the allstar game because of career numbers. The AllStar game is about who is on top of the game NOW. While the AllStar game was an exibition with no impact on the season I was perfectly fine with the popularity contest, then mandated representative from each team and making sure everyone played. However, now that it is played for home field advantage in the series I think it is time to turn the game back into a competitive showcase for the best players in the game. Play it like a game, not an exibition, or go back to the meaningless exibition routine where everyone smiles and nobody goes in hard. I also think they should consider a 4 day break after the game in order to remove the issue of overusing starting pitchers creating a case where they may not be able to make their next scheduled start for their team. Otherwise the 2-3 innings per starter is probably better all things considered.
Me personally? I think the all star ballot should be canned. Yep, no more voting by the fans, reporters, or even coaches and players for that matter. All stars are not about elections. To me it is simply the numbers. The numbers should be for the second half of the previous season and first half numbers of the current season and post season numbers discounted. That way allstars are chosen on a seasons worth of performance.
Great players having bad years should not be in the allstar game because of career numbers. The AllStar game is about who is on top of the game NOW. While the AllStar game was an exibition with no impact on the season I was perfectly fine with the popularity contest, then mandated representative from each team and making sure everyone played. However, now that it is played for home field advantage in the series I think it is time to turn the game back into a competitive showcase for the best players in the game. Play it like a game, not an exibition, or go back to the meaningless exibition routine where everyone smiles and nobody goes in hard. I also think they should consider a 4 day break after the game in order to remove the issue of overusing starting pitchers creating a case where they may not be able to make their next scheduled start for their team. Otherwise the 2-3 innings per starter is probably better all things considered.
Broadcast Radio Loosing ground to Digital
From the "NO SHIT" Department comes this latest news about the decline in radio listeners occuring as more and more people move to subscription services like XM or Sirius.
The short version is that Radio is in decline due to increasing popularity of sattelite radio. The no shit part is because anyone that listens much to radio these days know it has some serious problems. One, music stations generally just re-play the same 20 songs or so over and over and over. Two, DJ's no longer have any distinct personality or freedom to play new or non-mainstream music. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, they break up the re-plays with seemingly unceasing advertisements with even less variety than the music.
By contrast Sattelite radio provides far more variety (more channles) with far better reception quality (close to CD quality) and no advertising since the service is subscription based. Off hand I imagine sattellite radio is going to follow a very similar path to that of cable. IE that is right now the subscription base keeps ads largely out but as more and more people move to it (50million and counting now) there will be a lot of incentive by providers to allow advertisers some premium slots to add to their income. It will slowly grow until there are ever larger amounts of advertisements same as their are on subscription cable TV now whereas when it first began there were almost no commercials.
In the future my guess is we will see a move to internet based radio distributed via wireless internet. Already in some cities it would be feasible to rig a wireless solution in your car that could listen to almost any regular broadast station and quite a few internet only stations including a great deal of the content you would pay for from sattellite radio with similar quality. The barrier to that revolution for the time being is the cost of a mobile internet connection service costs, and low amont of coverage (compared to traditional broadcast and sattellite). However the equipment is pretty cheap and easily on par with sattellite and the spread of services and coverage are already starting the inevitable downward spiral of cost. Before we realize it mobile connections will be on par with current home conenction cost levels for constant broadband coverage wherever we may roam. At that time Sattelite is going to become the next 8 track... or in otherwords the intermediate technology that gets quickly bowled over by something better. Net infrastructure is far far far more upgradable than orbital infrastructure at far chepaer prices. So it won't take to long before mobile net conenctions will be able to proivde more than sattelite and it will get cheaper faster. Really I just don't see a way for sattellite to win in the long run given cheap mobile internet connection ability. At least not as content broadcasters. There could deffinatly be a role for sattelites in providing mobile internet connections... always has had that potential but we have got to get launching, capable enough sats cheap enough to make it feasible.
In addition to live content this would also provide the capacity for on demand content by requesting media files. And access to home content via wan access to your home systems. Sattellite just dosn't have the capacity to deal with on demman for million of users.
The short version is that Radio is in decline due to increasing popularity of sattelite radio. The no shit part is because anyone that listens much to radio these days know it has some serious problems. One, music stations generally just re-play the same 20 songs or so over and over and over. Two, DJ's no longer have any distinct personality or freedom to play new or non-mainstream music. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, they break up the re-plays with seemingly unceasing advertisements with even less variety than the music.
By contrast Sattelite radio provides far more variety (more channles) with far better reception quality (close to CD quality) and no advertising since the service is subscription based. Off hand I imagine sattellite radio is going to follow a very similar path to that of cable. IE that is right now the subscription base keeps ads largely out but as more and more people move to it (50million and counting now) there will be a lot of incentive by providers to allow advertisers some premium slots to add to their income. It will slowly grow until there are ever larger amounts of advertisements same as their are on subscription cable TV now whereas when it first began there were almost no commercials.
In the future my guess is we will see a move to internet based radio distributed via wireless internet. Already in some cities it would be feasible to rig a wireless solution in your car that could listen to almost any regular broadast station and quite a few internet only stations including a great deal of the content you would pay for from sattellite radio with similar quality. The barrier to that revolution for the time being is the cost of a mobile internet connection service costs, and low amont of coverage (compared to traditional broadcast and sattellite). However the equipment is pretty cheap and easily on par with sattellite and the spread of services and coverage are already starting the inevitable downward spiral of cost. Before we realize it mobile connections will be on par with current home conenction cost levels for constant broadband coverage wherever we may roam. At that time Sattelite is going to become the next 8 track... or in otherwords the intermediate technology that gets quickly bowled over by something better. Net infrastructure is far far far more upgradable than orbital infrastructure at far chepaer prices. So it won't take to long before mobile net conenctions will be able to proivde more than sattelite and it will get cheaper faster. Really I just don't see a way for sattellite to win in the long run given cheap mobile internet connection ability. At least not as content broadcasters. There could deffinatly be a role for sattelites in providing mobile internet connections... always has had that potential but we have got to get launching, capable enough sats cheap enough to make it feasible.
In addition to live content this would also provide the capacity for on demand content by requesting media files. And access to home content via wan access to your home systems. Sattellite just dosn't have the capacity to deal with on demman for million of users.
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