Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I saw Watchmen Thursday night, and I have to say I am joining the chorus of people saying that it was a great film and an amazingly accurate adaptation of the graphic novel.

When I first saw it, I only had one objection, not related to the graphic novel or even the film per se, and that was, when the credits rolled, I went “Oh my god. Is this REALLY supposed to be ‘Desolation Row’?”

My Chemical Romance, you fail at Dylan.

I know, the film has three Dylan songs, which is AWESOME, and expecting fanboys to sit through”The Times They are a Changin’” is more than most directors would give us, but the three-minute rocked-up version of “Desolation Row” commits one of the great musical sins of the Firefly-Verse, which is that the music is over-produced given the theme.

(spoiler cut)

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Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been listening to the Between the Covers podcasts at National Review Online, and there’s a lot of cool stuff there, like interviews with Christopher Buckley and George R.R. Martin (and, yes, Chuck Norris.)

… but! Imagine my surprise and delight when I find a podcast about T.S. Eliot, where the interview-ee is none other than… Benjamin Lockerd! Apparently, he has written a new introduction to a new edition of Russel Kirk’s Eliot and His Age.

Lockerd is a prof at GVSU, possibly the most awesome Brit-Lit-prof in the world, originator of the phrase “Were you beaten with roses as a child?” which I have shared with my father on numerous occasions as he and Dan continue the disagreement that existed between my ex-boyfriend Stefan and Dr. Lockerd about whether something can be described as intrinsically beautiful, or are only considered beautiful because our culture conditions us to believe they are. My father and Lockerd take the former position, leading Lockerd to say “If you see a rose, and you don’t think it’s beautiful, I think: what’s wrong with you? Were you beaten with roses as a child?”

Other great Lockerd moments:

Last time I talked with him, it was January, and I was wearing my coat with a World of Warcraft “druid” pin on it, and he jokingly replies. “Ah, good to see a follower of the old religions! Human sacrifice and all of that!” I laugh, explain its real meaning, and take the opportunity to find one person in the world who understands the origins of my warlock, Duessa’s, name.

Now I guess I really have to read Four Quartets…

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’m so out of it with regard to music now, I only just found out that Ben Folds Five had a reunion concert in September. But! I found the whole video online when I logged into myspace for the first time in forever. The guys play the entirety of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner live before an incredibly lucky audience — yes, even “Your Most Valuable Possessions,” which Ben’s dad comes out to nervously read from a cue card.

Reinhold Messner has gotta be one of my top five albums of all time, easily, and I know Ben Folds is awesome to watch live. I bought Sessions at West 54th DVD beforeI even owned a DVD player and bought it to my boyfriend’s house to watch, and we were all astounded by it. I bought the official score, borrowed my boyfriend’s keyboard, and almost learned to play “Narcolepsy” except for these chords that are made to played by someone with giant Ben Folds hands amd not freaky midget hands like mine.

So, being unable to really play Ben Folds Five songs, I did the next best thing and named my computer after one of them. Looking back, it wasn’t that great of a computer, so maybe that was unfair of me. At any rate, this got me reminiscing while I watched Ben Folds Five perform, about all my computers:

• Firefly, my graduation present, the K6-2, which eventually got cannibalized into other machines by Troy.
• Leo, my mom’s old computer, the other K6-2, that we loaded with an absurd amount of RAM and used to run Mandrake Linux after Jeff’s old iMac exploded.
• Jane, which I got from Wal-Mart and ran Linux.
• Una, which Josh Rowe built, and ran Windows XP so I could play FFXI. But it was NOT named for Yuna or anything like that, but after Una from Faerie Queene.
• Daenerys, the first computer I built. It was a learning experience, so I thought her epithet “Stormborn” was quite fitting. I sold it to my father, and he used it until it was stolen just recently.
• And finally… Mal. There have been a number of things that I can credit for keeping me almost-sane while working at the casino, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the joy that came from building this computer are two of them. When I switched it on and it worked, I went “Aha! I can really do this! I rule!”

Not even counting my family’s nameless computers, all the way back to the Kaypro and Commodore-64. Well, there’s two ways of navel-gazing into my past, right there.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” should really end with the Devil laughing: “I have your soul anyway, for the mortal sin of Pride! Now take your shiny thing, stupid American!”

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

A sentence I never expected to use: James Lileks is blogging about Boswell’s London Journal:

Oh, I love that. Not just because Boswell was 22, full of vim and pretense and hungry for fame, but because it’s obvious he poured himself a tall glass of port and set to writing and was highly pleased with his own genius – unaware, of course, that 200 years later his work would be held up, examined, and dismissed in a footnote. A footnote in his own book.

It’s all a caution for young writers. Your chances of being another Dr. Johnson are microscopic. Your chances of even being Boswell to a Johnson are remote. But keep at it.

I might expect such a topic from Lisa - she wrote a paper on Boswell, for reasons I still fail to understand. I suspect the inherent lasciviousness of Presbyterians may have something to do with it. At any rate, it gave me an opportunity to tell everyone “I gave my roommate gonorrhea” — in plush form. Named Boswell.

I mailed it to her parents’ house, too. The real wonder is that she still speaks to me.

Anyway, read Lileks’ current bleat for Boswell, and to never hear the word “quaint” the same way again. Also, more Dark Knight, if you somehow are not yet tired of hearing about that.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

When we meet Berenger, first scene of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, there’s very little to admire about him. He’s likable enough, compared with the anal-retentive Jean, but he is at best an amiable drunk (the American film version cast Gene Wilder as Berenger opposite Zero Mostel’s Jean, hoping to recreate the chemistry of The Producers). At any rate, Berenger is a lazy, slovenly, uninspired drunkard who shows up to lunch late, hungover and generally disheveled.

By the end of the play, he is the last human being on Earth. It is an unlikely and largely unexplained metamorphosis.

It makes sense only when you stop thinking in terms of heroes and villains and remember that Berenger is the point-of-view character — a strange notion in theatre, but particularly true here: by the conclusion, he is the only character capable of maintaining his own point of view, unlike the “rhinoceroses,” Ionesco’s friends and associates who, one after the other, all fell prey to the unthinking, group-oriented, animalistic appeal of fascism.

We all have doubts, like Berenger: who am I alone to say this is wrong? My friends are better than me in every respect: better at their jobs, more respectable in their social lives, more intelligent, better at attracting the opposite sex. If I say “I will not do this; this is wrong” who am I to get on my high horse and pass judgment over these people?

And yet that is what must be done.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I thought that Batman Begins was by far the best of the movies, not only compared to the terrible later movies but even against the early Tim Burton films. Maybe the sequel will carry that on. But this trailer, with Heath Ledger running around in Shriner makeup and sounding a bit too much like a cut-rate Jack Nicholson, is a bit of a disappointment.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I finally got around to reading Dune and I kind of wish I had someone to tell me what exactly I’m supposed to love about this book, because I was just kind of “meh” about it. I mean, there were occasional bits where I’m like “hmm, that’s clever” but nothing like “Wow! This is an amazing and unique work of speculative fiction!”

On the other hand, I set my standards pretty low for the next book I read, Christie Golden’s Lord of the Clans. This is a novel about Thrall from World of Warcraft, and it covers his early life as a slave gladiator, his escape from Durnholde, initial meetings with Grom Hellscream, Drek’thar, and Orgrim Doomhammer, and the forging of the new Horde. I don’t usually read tie-ins like this, but I have a massive crush on Thrall. I want to have his little green babies.

At any rate, I enjoyed Lord of the Clans. I would say it exceeded my expetcations. People who don’t have crushes on Thrall and haven’t run Old Hillsbrad just to see him in his youth could still enjoy it if they like fantasy. I’d classify it as young adult fantasy, and for that genre it’s pretty good.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Staatsicherheit.

Staatsicherheit who?

DO NOT JOKE ABOUT STAATSICHERHEIT, IT IS TREASONOUS TO THE SOCIALIST ORDER.

*ahem* My own bad jokes notwithstanding, The Lives of Others is, in fact, a really good movie about the dreaded Staatsicherheit or Stasi forces that turned neighbors into informers against anyone with pro-West views.

Since it won the 2006 Academy Award for Foreign Language film in an upset over Pan’s Labyrinth (another very good film), this is hardly news, but it’s worth mentioning that Lives of Others is in DVD now, and they had two copies at the Movie Gallery by my apartment, so there’s no more excuses for not seeing it.

Set in East Germany in 1985, The Lives of Others is the story of a playwright, his actress girlfriend, Christa, the government official who falls for Christa, and the Stasi officer assigned to up dirt on the playwright in hopes of getting him out of the way.

The Lives of Others excels at moments of unbelievable tension, incredible tragedy, and, in the end, some degree of redemption — perhaps the most surprising feature for a German film.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I saw Stardust on Thursday. For the most part, I really liked it. I thought all the actors did a really good job and the script stuck to the story pretty damn well and even when it didn’t, it fit. Some additions, such as making the pirate captain (Robert DeNiro) a more important and complete character, were actually quite clever.

One thing I didn’t like: whatever composer wrote the score must have not trusted the rest of the crew to adequately convey excitement and interest. Basically, the score was the musical equivalent of a guy standing around going “THIS IS EXCITING! LOOK HOW EXCITING THIS IS! HEY LOOK! SOMETHING HAPPENED! MORE STUFF!” for about 75% of the film. I’m halfway tempted to write into Neil Gaiman (since I know he’s answered sillier emails) and be like, hey, can we get a “not so much melodramatic music” option on the DVD?