Scott Sigler's Ancestor was originally released as a podcast and PDF several years ago, but finally in print (just as print is dying, go figure).

It's a fast-paced science fiction horror story in the vein of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, etc., with a medical company genetically engineering a common ancestor of all mammals to use as a universal organ transplant source. Of course, everything goes wrong, horrible monsters are produced, many cows die, and then many people die on a tiny island in Canada.

So. It's a fun read, and I really like some of the characters, old man Clayton and crazy geneticist Jian in particular.

However, there's a bunch of problems that kept knocking out my suspension of disbelief.

The über-badass Canadian Special Forces psycho killer, Magnus. Canada's Airborne Regiment had the "Somalia Affair", but that's far short of what Magnus seems to have done in his career. Disbelief isn't a strong enough term for this.

The plan. Making a universal organ donor is a great idea. But a common mammalian ancestor won't do that, because it'll still be recognized as foreign material and be rejected. I can halfway give them a pass, since they're actively optimizing for non-reactive, but I don't see how it's possible. And there's something Jian does, which… isn't clear how much that affects the outcome. Still, I'm dubious.

The "ancestors". These things are basically Thrinaxodon, the earliest, most primitive mammals, and were small burrowing carnivores, somewhat equivalent to a badger. Even if you massively increase their size, they're just not getting that much tougher. There's no way they were great hunters, certainly not the ravening pack shown. There is no creature that can gestate and be born that ready to fight, and in any case, Thrinaxodon was egg-laying (yes, they can still be mammals; the Platypus still lays eggs). It has spines from Dimetrodon, a distant more-reptilian cousin of Thrinaxodon; where would Jian get the genes for that? Augh. And it's smart, maybe as smart as an angry Chimpanzee, which is about 240 million years anachronistic for tiny-brained Thrinaxodon. Almost nothing about this thing makes sense.

The heroes are obviously immortal. There's no way that certain people are ever going to die, and you can see it right off. I don't mind a happy ending where it makes sense, but the last few chapters go from "scrappy hero escapes tough situation" to "plot immunity". By the time the last character is saved, I was almost resigned, like I was on a crashing train, nothing to do but watch it crash. Yeah, of course [SPOILER] will win that fight and be okay in the icy water and everyone is safe. Ha ha ha.

I loved Sigler's Infected and Contagious, and I'm looking forward to Pandemic. But I may be passing on Descendent, the sequel to Ancestor, or at least waiting for cheap paperback or ebook.

Greg Egan is one of my favorite authors. You can learn a lot about how I view existence by reading "Axiomatic", "Reasons To Be Cheerful", "Learning To Be Me", and Permutation City.

Oceanic is a collection of Egan's short stories published in the UK. All of the stories are also in the US collections Dark Integers and Other Stories and Crystal Nights and Other Stories; Oceanic does not include "Luminous" (also found in the UK collection with the same name) or "TAP" (online at Infinity Plus).

You should read "Luminous" before "Dark Integers"; few of Egan's short stories depend on continuity, but these do. So in that sense, Oceanic is incomplete. On the other hand, Oceanic is a single volume with a great set of stories, and even paying import prices, less than the price of the two US volumes. I had already read quite a few of the stories, but as a set, as a concentrated dose of Egan, it's still a great ride.

Several of the stories are in the same Amalgam setting as Incandescence, where multiple planets have produced biological life, which coexist peacefully, and travel and sometimes live as digital encodings, though they mostly prefer biology.

"Lost Continent" ★/5

A brief and apparently incomplete story about refugees from a war-torn middle eastern country being taken to "safety" across parallel universes… Where they are treated like refugees often are. Part of this reminds me of H. Beam Piper's paratime story "Time Crime", but mostly, it seems to be Egan's commentary on Australian and US policies on asylum seekers. If it was finished, maybe it'd be interesting, but there's no punch. It's an appallingly weak first story, and should have been cut from the book.

"Dark Integers" ★★/5

A gripping, world-spanning adventure of mathematicians waging war with an alternative reality by proving axioms with computers, if by "gripping" you mean nerds sitting at computers abusing Internet Protocol packets. I liked it well enough as a weird tale, though "Luminous" was better, but the premise is silly. Mathematicians are axiomatically insane, and this reads like the crackpottiest of crackpot math stories.

"Crystal Nights" ★★★½/5

A computer company with no product uses enormous computing resources for a couple of years trying to produce AI, through extremely ethically dubious means. I would mock the business plan, but I've been employed by less potentially profitable companies. The irresponsibly lax safety measures are hard to believe, except I've seen dumber moves in startups. There are two quantum leaps in ability that I found hard to swallow. Still, as a classical tragedy, with hubris leading inevitably to catastrophe, quite good.

"Steve Fever" ★★★★/5

A goofy little story about hubris, lab rats, and man's unending quest for Steve. I buy NONE of the premise, yet enjoyed it completely.

"Induction" ★★★/5

A much too brief story about more-or-less-immortals almost doing something meaningful, but mostly letting the robots do the work. In itself, the story isn't much. As kind of a summary of many of Egan's latest stories, it could be the back-cover blurb.

"Singleton" 0/5

Hated it. Nearly hurled the book across the room a couple times. A guy with a delusional understanding of how quantum mechanics affect him personally, decides to do something about it. The problem is, he's completely wrong about the importance of Always Doing One Thing. If his invention worked as described, he'd be completely crippled and unable to act, would act according to unseen forces like a crazy person, or possibly die instantly.

The one sympathetic character, the AI robot daughter, is used for a Law & Order: SVU episode, but doesn't mind, and her rescue is as horrific and traumatic as her ordeal. I feel like cutting these pages out, using them for toilet paper, and mailing them to Egan as "editorial comment".

"Oracle" 0/5

A sequel of sorts to "Singleton", about a Qusp-enabled time/timeline-traveling sexy robot girl rescuing war hero mathematician Alan Turing from torture by the British government for the crime of being gay. I love Alan Turing as much as any computer nerd does, but holy shit this is a terrible story. It's amateur Alan Turing fanfic complete with an all-powerful Mary Sue. C.S. Lewis's religious mania is briefly amusing, but the debate is the worst didactic crap I've ever seen Egan produce.

"Border Guards" ★★★★★/5

A great story about life, love, and gameplay in computational environments, and people feeling guilt for entirely too long. One of Egan's best, both for the world, the mathematics of the Border Guards game, and the characters (WOW, Egan wrote actual characters and not just mouthpieces for cool ideas!)

See Greg Egan's site for the full text of the story, a Java applet to play Quantum Soccer, and math notes.

"Riding the Crocodile" ★★★★/5

A long story about a couple in the Amalgam culture taking one last adventure before voluntary death, trying to make contact with a culture(?) that doesn't want to make contact. Interesting characters (though I find their death motive implausible), good problem-solving, somewhat weak on the reveal.

"Glory" ★★★★/5

Glory deals with a question I've long had about Egan's settings. His settings (especially the Amalgam, which this is in) are almost monolithically peaceful, cooperative, nurturing. There's no fighting over scarce resources, territory, or creative work, there's no possible way to do more than trivially annoy someone. So where did the violent, aggressive, resource-hungry, expansionist, hegemonizing swarm cultures go? What happens to a culture that's too passive and inward-looking? It doesn't answer that entirely, but at least it recognizes the existence of that conflict.

"Hot Rock" ★★★★★/5

There's a dark, lonely, starless world hurtling through the galaxy. But it's not cold and icy, there's warmth and life. A pair of explorers from the Amalgam then go on a nice picaresque adventure and provoke a war of sorts. I love the planet Tallulah, and the multiple levels of biology and technology in it. I'm not so convinced by the mechanics of the unobtanium, but it's a fine macguffin. I want a whole novel of this world.

"Oceanic" ★★★★½/5

A novella about a retrograde, primitive colony on a water planet, and the origins of religion. The natives are almost human, but there's one part of their biology that makes me sing a King Missile song. Good story, great scientific premise (I much prefer Egan's biology/nature-of-mind stories), and a couple of good characters, but also many shadow-thin puppet characters who appear, spout a few lines to teach the protagonist a lesson, and exeunt stage left. Still, Egan won a Hugo for "Oceanic" for good reason: It's close enough to "literature" to satisfy the feel-good people, hard science enough to satisfy the nerds, bluntly atheist enough to satisfy blunt atheists, but remote enough from Earth to let fence-sitting agnostics and apologists feel it doesn't apply to THEM.

I've been catching up on my book stacks:

Orbus, by Neal Asher

Excellent finale (?) to the Spatterjay series, last seen in Voyage of the Sable Keech. Mad Captain Orbus is slowly getting his marbles together (though his still-crazy first mate Drooble isn't helping), the drone Sniper is back being sarcastic and sociopathic as usual, mutant Prador Vrell is confident he can conquer the Prador Kingdom, starting with this one ship he's stowed away on… And then they find multiple threats that scare even Prador.

As usual for Asher, lots of messy future bio-/nano-tech, great action scenes, weird world-building, parasitic life forms, and violence knocking some sense into people. Especially impressive in giving the Prador individual personalities, without them becoming whiny humans.

It's increasingly clear in Asher's books that baseline humans are the weakest, squishiest, dumbest, most useless "intelligent" life ever, complete evolutionary dead-ends. If there's going to be "humans" in any further books, they should either get infected with the Spatterjay virus (though there are downsides to that), or uploaded into a combat-ready Golem robot body.

Emissaries From the Dead, by Adam-Troy Castro

A new writer of the kind of space opera I like: Gritty, weird setting, tough investigator. The heroine, Andrea Cort, is seriously damaged goods, hated by half the species in the galaxy, and used as police/judge/jury/executioner by what passes for human civilization. A murder has been committed on a very weird orbital habitat run by AIs, inhabited by genetically-engineered "natives" who are like sloths… I won't spoil how, but their behavior makes perfect sense if you think from their perspective.

It's not deep, but the world creation is good stuff, and I'm enthused enough to read the sequel…

The Third Claw of God, by Adam-Troy Castro

Second of the Andrea Cort books. Events in the first book have left Andrea a little less broken and hateful, better informed, and with allies. That's good, because now there are people trying to assassinate her with the really horrific titular weapon as she's travelling to a meeting with the worst criminal scum in the galaxy: Arms dealers.

As a portrayal of what unspeakably wealthy moral voids can do in that setting, and indeed why Castro's galaxy is such a shithole, it's fine. I found myself bored with a lot of it, though. There's a closed-room murder that takes half the book to resolve, and the action scenes are more tedious than exciting or clever.

Enthusiasm for a third book is low…

Trouble in Paradise, by Robert B. Parker

I somehow missed this early Jesse Stone book the first time around; the events in it are referred to by Stranger in Paradise, so I had to find this one and read it first.

A truly great crime plot, and plenty of action. The criminal mastermind, his girlfriend, and the Indian assassin Crow are interesting characters, and given a lot of personality. This is early in Jesse Stone's recovery from alcohol and his clingy ex-wife, so there's heavy character story there, too. Sadly, almost everyone else in it is a wisp of vapor and a few lines. They mostly exist to be fucked or killed by Jesse.

There are a handful of films I've seen over and over, say a hundred times, that are burned into my brain so deeply they make up the basic wiring for my mind. Often I just put these on as background activity; I don't really need to pay attention, but it's comforting to see them yet again.

Star Wars (1977)

I think I liked farmboy the first time (dude, I was 7!), but every time after, I identified with Darth Vader (snappy dresser, bad temper, best at what he does) and Han Solo (loner, wiseass, and free man).

Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Star Wars is the juvenile heroic story, a rag-tag band of kids beat the giant Empire's war machine, yay. Empire is the adult story, what really happens, the consequences of your bad decisions all piling up on you. The "heroes" deserve everything that happens to them, and they get it good and hard. It doesn't hurt that it was written by pulp author Leigh Brackett.

Blade Runner (1982)

If you haven't read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie's pretty nonsensical, and yet it contradicts the book in important ways. But I still love the sets, I love the vision of the decayed but lived-in future. Ridley Scott's a tedious director, but he's a great set decorator.

MASH (1970)

Death, sex, and gallows humor; way darker than the TV show, but funnier, too.

Real Genius (1985)

"If you're smart, people need you, you can use your mind creatively." Lasers, nerd sex, and great music, too.

Appleseed (1988)

Anime based on Masamune Shirow's cyberpunk manga. Humans try to live in utopia, and fail. So do you break the utopia, or change humanity?
(This is the first anime version, which was focused on the story, not the prettier but dumber combat-oriented remake).

Dominion Tank Police (1992)

Another of Masamune Shirow's manga adaptations, Dominion is a black comedy about overreaction to crime and terrorism, how we just dig our environmental & political messes deeper. In the end, we deserve the shit-up planet we've made for ourselves.

Pi (1998)

Mathematics, computing, madness, and industrial music.

Fifth Element (1997)

Milla Jovovich nearly naked, Bruce Willis being a badass, ancient astronaut secret history, and a setting blatantly copied from Alejandro Jodorowsky's comics.

Versus (2000)

Low-budget, but awesome constant gun and sword fights between yakuza and zombies.

Runners-up with dozens but not 100+ viewings: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, Alien, Aliens, Terminator, Batman (1989), The Killer.

Five YouTube videos, in which a common theme is revealed:

• Microsoft Store
• Steve
• Haruhi
• Kim
• Adolf

Go see District 9. There's a short film intro, Alive in Joberg, which will set some expectations, but the movie is far more impressive.

District 9 is the only really great science fiction I've seen in a decade. Science fiction, real science fiction and not moronic "sci-fi", not fantasy, has been almost completely absent from the theatres, because Hollywood is composed entirely of subhuman morons who know nothing of science. They think shit like Armageddon and Transformers is acceptable, and it is not.

District 9 only got made because Peter Jackson gave Neill Blomkamp $30 million on the strength of "Alive in Joburg", and it was made in South Africa and New Zealand, where Hollywood's poisonous contagion couldn't reach it. If there were any justice, this would sweep the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Special Effects, and Best Actor for Sharlto Copley. But there is no justice or competence in Hollywood, and it will instead get nominated for "Best Foreign Film", and probably lose.

So, only great SF in a decade. That got me thinking, and so I collected some data. I went through Wikipedia's List of science fiction films for completeness, and added several not listed there. These is my own personal list of "Real Science Fiction" movies of the last 60 years or so. My list, my tastes, my idea of what's "real SF" and what isn't, my ratings (given as X/10, and ignoring anything less than 8). If you disagree, that's fine, but do so on your own blog.

It's nearly impossible to judge older movies by any modern standard; when I rewatched The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), I spent most of the film fascinated by the stiff, sterile, alien culture of the 1950s, not the movie itself. Still, there are some older films that are just as "real" SF as modern, so I list them. I don't include many bad (or actively malicious in some cases) adaptations of the works of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Richard Matheson, etc. I would include Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker if only someone would edit them into 90-120-minute films with some pacing. I would love to list The Fountain, but it was maliciously maledited by meth-crazed monkeys, so it's unwatchable. Sequels are almost never any good, SF sequels especially not; the sequels to Mad Max, Alien, & Terminator are trash.

1920s

1. Metropolis (1927) 9/10

1950s

1. Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) 8/10
2. Gojira (1954) 9/10 — The Japanese original, NOT the Americanized version.
3. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) 9/10
4. This Island Earth (1955) 8/10
5. Forbidden Planet (1956) 10/10

1960s

1. The Time Machine (1960) 8/10
2. Planet of the Vampires (1965) 8/10 — Mario Bava's haunted planet epic
3. Planet of the Apes (1968) 8/10
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 9/10
5. Gamera vs. Guiron (1969) 8/10 — The one with the brain-eating alien women

1970s

1. Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) 8/10
2. A Clockwork Orange (1971) 8/10
3. THX 1138 (1971) 9/10
4. The Final Programme (1973) 8/10 — Adaptation of Michael Moorcock's "Jerry Cornelius" stories
5. Soylent Green (1973) 8/10
6. Westworld (1973) 8/10
7. Dark Star (1974) 8/10
8. A Boy and His Dog (1975) 8/10
9. Rollerball (1975) 8/10
10. Logan's Run (1976) 8/10
11. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) 9/10
12. Star Wars (1977) 10/10
13. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) 8/10
14. Alien (1979) 10/10
15. Mad Max (1979) 8/10
16. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 8/10

1980s

1. Altered States (1980) 8/10
2. Empire Strikes Back (1980) 10/10
3. Flash Gordon (1980) 8/10
4. Escape from New York (1981) 8/10
5. Scanners (1981) 8/10
6. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (1981) 9/10 — The BBC TV miniseries production
7. Blade Runner (1982) 10/10
8. E.T. (1982) 8/10
9. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) 10/10
10. The Thing (1982) 10/10
11. TRON (1982) 10/10
12. Brainstorm (1983) 8/10
13. V (1983) 8/10
14. Videodrome (1983) 9/10
15. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) 9/10
16. The Last Starfighter (1984) 8/10
17. Repo Man (1984) 8/10
18. Runaway (1984) 8/10
19. The Terminator (1984) 8/10
20. Back to the Future (1985) 8/10
21. Brazil (1985) 9/10
22. Enemy Mine (1985) 8/10
23. Lifeforce (1985) 8/10
24. Bubblegum Crisis (1987) 8/10
25. The Hidden (1987) 8/10
26. RoboCop (1987) 8/10
27. Akira (1988) 9/10
28. Appleseed (1988) 9/10
29. They Live (1988) 8/10
30. The Abyss (1989) 8/10
31. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) 8/10
32. The Blood of Heroes (1989) 8/10 — aka Salute to the Jugger
33. Moontrap (1989) 8/10 — Cheesy, but interesting as SF *and* for Bruce Campbell & Walter Koenig

1990s

1. Hardware (1990) 8/10
2. The Rocketeer (1991) 9/10
3. Until the End of the World (1991) 9/10 — I wish I could get this on DVD
4. Split Second (1992) 9/10 — We're gonna need bigger guns.
5. The Wicked City (1992) 8/10 — Disturbing live-action Hong Kong adaptation of the 1987 anime
6. Demolition Man (1993) 8/10
7. Nemesis (1993) 8/10
8. Wild Palms (1993) 8/10
9. Stargate (1994) 8/10
10. Ghost in the Shell (1995) 10/10
11. Screamers (1995) 8/10 — One of the few half-decent P.K.Dick adaptations
12. Species (1995) 8/10
13. Strange Days (1995) 8/10
14. Twelve Monkeys (1995) 8/10
15. The Arrival (1996) 8/10
16. Cube (1997) 9/10
17. The Fifth Element (1997) 10/10
18. Gattaca (1997) 8/10
19. Dark City (1998) 9/10
20. Pi (1998) 10/10
21. Soldier (1998) 8/10
22. eXistenZ (1999) 9/10
23. Galaxy Quest (1999) 8/10
24. The Thirteenth Floor (1999) 10/10

2000s

1. Impostor (2000) 8/10 — Short film only, the "extended" film is awful
2. Pitch Black (2000) 8/10
3. Titan A.E. (2000) 8/10
4. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) 8/10
5. The One (2001) 9/10
6. Equilibrium (2002) 9/10
7. Returner (2002) 8/10
8. Natural City (2003) 9/10
9. The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) 8/10
10. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) 8/10
11. Serenity (2005) 8/10 — I would rate Firefly higher than the movie
12. Sunshine (2007) 8/10
13. WALL-E (2008) 9/10
14. District 9 (2009) 10/10
15. Moon (2009) ??? — I haven't seen it yet, hear good things

Look at the per-year distribution of this list:

1950s:  05: *****
1960s:  05: *****
1970s:  16: ****************
1980s:  33: *********************************
1990s:  24: ************************
2000s:  15: ***************

It'd be considerably worse if I removed all the non-Hollywood movies; there'd be a giant spike in the '70s and '80s, not much else. I believe what that curve is mapping is the rise and fall of the U.S. educational system, 10-20 years offset. If Hollywood writers, directors, and producers were educated with more than an inner tube and a banana, they might make real science fiction movies again. Barring that, I say we just wall off Hollywood and let cannibalism run its course.

I recently got an offer for cheap subscription and a request to do advertising with an iPhone-oriented magazine, so I take a look, I'm willing to spend money to make money…

…but it's only distributed quarterly in print (for a yearly subscription) and on Zinio.

Really? In 2009?

Print is, essentially, dead. Old people still read print newspapers and magazines, but anyone young enough (and some old people who still keep up) uses the Web to read news. A printed magazine is going to be at best weeks, and at worst MONTHS out of date by the time it comes out. Back in the '90s, reading on a flickery CRT was unpleasant, but most of us have nice LCDs, or even e-paper.

If there aren't enough eyeballs, you can't make a profit by advertising, and the kind of people who buy print magazines are the least likely to be my customers.

Zinio is even worse. It's a DRM-locked PDF reader. I used to get a few magazines on it… until it decided my computer was no longer valid, and nothing I could do, no email or phone call to their customer abuse line, could ever re-authorize me. They have a web site with a terrible, slow, unbelievably awful Flash reader. It's like someone set out to make reading online so miserable you'd have no choice but to buy print. Normally I attribute these things to incompetence, not malice, but what Zinio does goes far beyond mere incompetence.

I won't read a Zinio mag, and as a potential advertiser, I wouldn't expect any tech-savvy customers to come from it.

Let's take a look at four other publishers:

iProng

iProng has a really sweet free PDF, unlocked, you can read it with Preview.app, and subscribe in iTunes. It's hyperlinked throughout so it can interact with the Web. It's my second-favorite music magazine (after Metal Hammer).

Clearly they make good money from advertising. The ads are a positive, they're one of the reasons I read it, so I can see the cool products being pushed there.

ATPM: About This Particular Macintosh

ATPM is a semi-pro volunteer "e-zine", distributed as HTML on the site, or PDF for download. It's not glossy and rich, but it's a good informative newsletter, and the content is as good as any product magazine on a newsstand has ever been.

Python Magazine

Python Magazine is a paid (and somewhat expensive) technical journal in PDF or print + PDF; Python developer content only, but it's a lot like the old Dr. Dobb's Journal before DDJ went down the drain. It's well-designed, and well-written. The ads are sadly pretty thin, mostly conferences, which goes along with the price and the small but professional audience.

Macworld

Macworld is an old magazine, and not always in a positive way. They persist in publishing print; it has a long history on the newsstand, is general-interest enough to sell large numbers, and at monthly publication isn't TOO out of date by the time someone sees it, though still weeks old. It also has a digital distribution, but it's through fucking Zinio.

Fortunately, they manage to keep the web site up to date, and that's the only contact I have with their magazine. They have a Browse Macworld view on the site, which provides summaries and icons for each link, far more useful than their default web site.

Macworld is probably unique in the Mac market in being able to still get away with that kind of retro behavior, and even there, even with a growing Mac user base… it can't be easy. The market is just too small for anyone else.

For a new publication to be copying the business model of Macworld, except slower and less relevant and more focused, on a fast-moving platform where news can come and go in a day or a week? That's… unrealistic, to be charitable.

The publisher of the magazine gave me some quarterly distribution numbers… they're less than this infrequently-updated, non-professional, ranty, non-advertised little blog gets per month. I expected low numbers, but to see exactly how low was horrific. I almost want to subscribe out of pity.

The notion of a "music subscription service" is going around again, like Swine Flu for music players.

There's 6 ways to get music on a computer or digital music player like an iPod:

As is obvious from the table, there are tradeoffs for every option.

My CDs cost a lot over the years, and it took a LONG time to rip them all (and I should re-rip them in higher quality).

Finding free music is the "best", if you can spare time and the artists you like do it. I love Nine Inch Nails, and Trent Reznor releases most albums for free now (and makes money from concerts and tshirts and CD sales).

Buying music on iTunes is pretty cheap, and you get high-quality music (256K AAC, which is CD quality as far I can hear on good Sennheiser headphones) that you own and can keep. eMusic has a weird payment model, monthly payment for a number of downloads; if you keep up, it seems like it'd be very cheap.

Stealing music is stupid. It's free, but it's immoral and doesn't put money in the pockets of the artists. Regardless of how shitty the RIAA is, it's not acceptable to steal from the artists.

Internet radio is free, has far fewer ads and shitty retarded DJs and top 8 Britney Spears crap than the wasteland of Clear Channel FM radio, and it's great for listening and discovering artists, but it's no good on the go, no good for keeping music.

So… subscriptions. Microsoft wants you to buy an ugly horrible Zune, run Windows, pay $15 every month for a ZunePass. Then in 2 years, they'll shut the service off, and you'll lose access to everything. They've done that before, with PlaysForSure, and will do it again. They're claiming you get to "keep" 10 low-quality tracks per month, but those are also controlled by the ZunePass DRM authentication, and given how DRM works, they will die when it does.

There are other subscriptions that aren't as obviously malicious as ZunePass, but they're not much better. Rhapsody works on Mac and Windows, but only on your computer, and you still lose everything when you stop paying.

The subscription model just doesn't make sense for consumers. You want to keep your music. You want it in a high-quality format. You want it at a reasonable price. You want to play it on your Apple iPod, not some shitty knockoff, and surely not a horrible shit-brown or puke-green Zune.

Music discovery is an interesting problem. I find new music by:

1. Recommendations from friends with similar musical tastes.
2. Listening to Internet radio, last.fm, Pandora, etc.
3. Hearing free promo tracks on the band's site or MySpace page.

A subscription service could be used for discovery, but Internet radio is free, and does the same job just as well.

Happy holiday! 15 years ago, on April 5 1994, the average quality of all new music DOUBLED with a single shotgun blast!

Nirvana was the worst band I have ever heard. They couldn't sing or play their instruments. LISTEN to their shit: it's incoherent, inarticulate (and unlike Dylan, meaningless garbage). Their instruments are out of tune, or just being played by ham-fisted monkeys (and why not? They'd just break them when they were done). And for a decade, no-talent morons imitated them. You couldn't go anywhere in Seattle, or the entire Northwest, without hearing that whiny little bitch mushmouf and stammer while breaking guitars. For a decade, assholes dressed like homeless people, and usually smelled that way, too. Grunge is not fashion, grunge is a disease.

And after his death, oh, all the whiny eulogizing and "he was the best rocker ever!" from people who've never listened to real music. The real best rocker ever? Probably Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, or Jimi Hendrix. Kurt Nobrain wouldn't be qualified to mop up their jizz.

So, here's me raising my cup, saluting you, Kurt Nobrain Cocaine Cobain, for removing yourself from the world. Thanks, you rotten shithead!

In repudiation of the shitty remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, with Keanu Fucking Reeves, I rewatched the original 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still. This post is full of spoilers, so if you haven't watched the movie, you probably should before continuing.

The movie is, to modern eyes, two movies. One is the "ordinary" 1950s world, which is extremely surreal, and the other is the science fiction premise.

A spaceship lands in Washington, DC, containing two passengers: a robot Gort, and a "human", Klaatu (Michael Rennie). After failing to get all of Earth's political leaders together, he manages to get a group of scientists, and explains the facts of life:

Interstellar civilization prevents war by an extremely efficient system of killer robots (apparently unconcerned that they'll turn into Berserkers). The aliens send a representative to Earth, with the ultimatum: Don't threaten us, or you'll be exterminated. That's a system that can work. It has worked: it's Mutual Assured Destruction, but with an entirely neutral third party enforcing it.

That pretty well ends the scientific content, though.

Klaatu says he's travelled "250 million miles". This only makes sense for Mars, maybe Venus or a Jovian moon. '50s understanding of what other planets were like was primitive, but even then they knew Mars and Venus were uninhabitable. Some of Jupiter's moons could support life, under water where the deadly radiation of Jupiter's van Allen belt wouldn't kill them, but nothing on a surface like a human.

The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 100,000× further away, 4.2 light years, and more reasonable stars for habitation are in the 10-50 light year range.

The biology is quaint at best, and the presentation of Klaatu as human is beyond ludicrous. An alien will only be even remotely human if it evolved here, from primates, and I'm pretty sure that Homo erectus didn't make spaceships.

Why did Klaatu come to Washington DC if he wasn't interested in talking to just one political leader? Wouldn't New York make better sense, since at least the United Nations is there? This is back when the U.N. was a much smaller and newer organization, but it was stil the closest thing to what he actually wanted. Unyielding idealism of "everyone coming together to hear me talk" is nice, but even aliens should recognize political reality.

And then, there's the 1950s. I'm sure a lot of this is idealized for movie reality, but it's still a strange and alien time.

The '50s are incredibly neat and orderly. And white. VERY white. Everyone's a white anglo-saxon of basically English or German ancestry with a suit and hat. Everyone is very calm and obedient, they line up and wait to see what happens. The only emotions anyone shows are nervousness and seething hate. It's like a Nazi or Soviet propaganda film; HORRIFIC zombie-like pseudo-people. I kept waiting for them to suspect a neighbor (probably a black neighbor) of being the alien and kill him. There are a few shots of black extras around the ship in fancy (Sunday?) clothes, but they have no lines, and are not visible after that.

Everyone smokes, even the doctors. Smoking. Doctors. Crazy.

Washington DC is VERY white and tidy. You wanna see societal collapse? Compare this with the present-day DC.

Weird passing strangers in a boarding house are perfectly safe to leave your young boy with. No, really. They'll take your kid to the cemetary, and to get ice cream, and to go break into Albert Einstein's house and do math. (Okay, it's not Einstein; Einstein had better hair and lived in Princeton, New Jersey).

There's a LOT of car driving scenes. They apparently needed to pad the movie out, and rather than get a science fiction writer to make something interesting, they brought in Hollywood hacks to add more car scenes.

People in the '50s were shockingly bad at security and cordons. Repeatedly, a normal person can just walk up to a "secure" site, and there's only a couple of bored guards just aching to be killed over at the gate. Geez. "Nobody gets in or out of that cell", a commander says... And Gort just walks up to the back wall, blows it away, and walks in. No outside security at all. Total incompetence. Were people of the '50s really this stupid?

Klaatu's "Carpenter" pseudonym is WAY too obvious. Ha ha, he's Jesus come to give us salvation, and he'll rise from the dead and still give us salvation after we kill him. Seriously, that and his mention of an "Almighty Creator"? Lame. People who believe in invisible sky pixies are too stupid to make spaceships.

Keanuaatu cartoon at Hijinks Ensue suggests the new one is a preachy environmental movie? What? The aliens don't care how we run the planet, as long as we keep it to ourselves.

In any case, a Keanu version would never work. Michael Rennie's ending exposition is excellent. Klaatu is a much wiser, smarter, slightly contemptuous being with infinite gravitas, telling us straight up that we're doomed unless we change. Michael Rennie was stoic and awesome. Next to him, Keanu would look like a gibbering monkey.

The original moral would never fly in our recent political atmosphere. "Don't carry your wars to space or our robot police will kill you all" is a more direct threat to the US when we're the only aggressor nation on Earth.

Rating: ** (the 1950s scare me)/**** (science fiction premise)

By now everyone's seen the first two Microsoft ads of their $300 MILLION DOLLAR campaign with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates (except, didn't he retire?) If you haven't, count yourself lucky and move on.

The first ad, the shoe store, was bad. Pointless. And ends with the existential horror of Bill Gates wiggling his ass at the camera. Really, DO NOT WANT.

The second MS commercial is… it's even more Seinfeld "nothing"-like. Even more condescending and awful. Bill keeps secret games from the world, Jerry clips his toenails on your bed, and both are too snobby for your good home cooking. These are not positive qualities. I would not want a computer represented by these people in my home.

Apple's "Get A Mac" ads are vastly more charitable to the PC played by John Hodgman. PC is portrayed as bumbling, incompetent, confused, and very bad at creative work. But while I wouldn't want PC in my home making my home movies, he might be fine at work (in reality, PCs are just as awful at work as at home). The Mac is useful, gets stuff done, and puts a nice creative touch on his work. That's a computer you wouldn't mind having around. How is it that Apple is nicer to the PCs than Microsoft's own ads?

Oh, and there's a blatant, unbelievably stupid lie in the 2nd MS ad. PCs take 2-5 minutes to power up and power down. Bill's "robot" is WAY too fast. It should be more like "power down. POWER DOWN, BILL! Shit, ctrl-alt-del. Cancel program. CANCEL! Oh, fuck this, I'll just pull the plug out." Reboot. Wait 5 minutes before you can do anything again.

I saw Cloverfield last night, and I regret it. I must warn you all to avoid this film, don't waste your time and money, and do not encourage this bullshit.

If this had been filmed with a traditional camera on steadicam, it might be a reasonably good monster movie with a better-than-average character story. Sadly, however, hack pseudo-reality TV writer J.J. Abrams watched The Blair Witch Project FAR too many times, and tried too hard to imitate it.

The entire film is shot from the POV of a hand-held camera owned by one of the characters. When the characters are running, which they are for most of the film, the camera shakes constantly, veering off to the sides or down at the ground instead of UP at the action, so nothing can be seen. Even when at rest, the character doesn't hold the camera straight. It's nauseating to watch.

Blair Witch kept the running to a minimum, had a high-res camera on a tripod as well as the videocamera, and despite the "found footage" premise, was competently shot. Cloverfield is the worst-shot, most aggressively audience-hostile, incompetently-filmed piece of footage (I cannot even bring myself to call it a "movie" as it is) that I have ever witnessed. There are home movies of 5-year-olds having a birthday party which are better filmed.

The story itself is fine; I liked the characters and they mostly acted with some sense, though why Marlena follows a group of near-strangers into certain doom instead of escaping is unclear, but she is mentally damaged by that point. The monster looks good. The baby monsters/parasites/low-level enemies are an unnecessary distraction to the story, but are well-executed. The special effects and the military presence are great. The product placements for Nokia were very aggressive, and clearly the film should have just stopped for a Nokia commercial rather than shove excess placements in.

I was immensely happy to see that the ending didn't flinch away from what really happens to anyone stupid enough to stay in a city where a giant monster is attacking.

But for the filming, this film deserves to die, and J.J. Abrams needs to be busted down to making commercials for Nokia.

An open letter to Rob Enderle and IT Business Edge:

I would like to draw your attention to Rob Enderle's latest article:
Falling for the Dan Lyons Apple Hoax: Implications and Portents

In it, he discovers that he was reacting to a fake article on the Fake Steve Jobs blog, which had been revealed to be a fake days before his original post; even if he couldn't recognize parody when he read it, if he'd bothered to check back at FSJ before publication, he'd have discovered that he'd been fooled.

But his incompetent pretense of journalism is not the problem here; everyone laughs at Rob Enderle, and treats him like the perpetually-wrong joke that he is, and no harm done. However, his explanation points to a bigger problem, one of true malfeasance:

I clearly was drinking way too much eggnog to see the joke for what it was.

Now, we could take that as self-deprecating humor, as parody... Except that we know that Enderle is not capable of parody, not capable of self-awareness, and not capable of writing, especially when drunk. So clearly this must be taken seriously.

You have an alleged analyst filing reports while drunk, while clearly too incapacitated to understand simple parody. This is the behavior of an alcoholic; today he's filing bad tech analysis, tonight he's driving drunk and killing people.

For the good of everyone, I urge you to stop publishing Rob Enderle, and perhaps you can persuade him to enter an alcohol treatment program.

Thank you, and let's all hope for the best outcome for Rob and his long-suffering family.

Live Earth has started, and I'm trying to watch some of it online...

But they hosted it on MSN, www.liveearth.msn.com. If you use a real web browser, they bitch at you, and give you crappy video streams. You can't even use their message board to complain, because it's MSIE-only. It's filled with crappy brown ads for the crappy brown Zune.

What the hell kind of sense does this make? Al Gore's a Mac guy, and this is supposed to be a big international event to boost awareness of global warming. Instead, these filthy Micrococksuckers are turning it into a chance to hawk their piece-of-shit products.

You can't even complain on their message boards... They're MSIE only.

Dario Argento's Opera is a gorgeous film, which has been impossible to get in a decent version until recently. (Score: **** 1/2)

I'd only ever seen the low-quality, cut-to-shreds American domestic videotape of it before. You could barely hear the music, you could barely see the murders, all of the dark scenery and clothing was washed out, and they cut half the sex and violence anyway. The Opera Limited Edition DVD is a fantastic release. The colors look great, the opera music sounds lovely in proper stereo, and the entire film is uncut, and unrated. The only complaint I have is that it is dubbed. The dubbing is excellent, but still, it makes me sad. The LE DVD box has a soundtrack CD, so you can hear the music without all the stabbing and screaming. How thoughtful!

Opera is a simple, perhaps too simple, story: a serial killer stalks the opera house, murdering anyone who gets close to his inamorata, forcing her to watch by tying her up and sticking pins in front of her eyes, a la Clockwork Orange. While there are similarities to Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom is only physically a monster, he is not an evil man. The killer in Opera is a sadistic, psychopathic bastard who enjoys nothing but cruelty and suffering. It should be obvious by mid-movie who the killer is, but that does nothing to lessen the horror. The plot unfortunately does get slightly repetitive; Betty is alone with someone else, the killer appears and ties up Betty without the other person noticing, then slash, stab, stab while Betty watches. Betty's perpetual victim state makes her somewhat unsympathetic; all she does is whimper and run, usually with someone else's help. She never really becomes an independent person. The final act is very jarring and different, it feels tacked on at the last minute, and I really don't like it, but what came before is so excellent it's hard to complain much. The plot does move much faster and more conclusively than in most of his previous films (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, for instance), so if you've been turned off by the pacing of giallo films before, this may be more to your taste.

The plot, however, is incidental to the film. The style and setting and gore are fantastic. It's one of the most darkly beautiful films I've ever seen. The opera stage with the crows cawing and flying around Betty as Lady MacBeth dressed in black and gold and feathers is ridiculous, but so impressive that you can't laugh at it. The singing and music (Verdi's MacBeth) are lovely. The eye-torture scenes make make wince, but they're certainly effective. Argento's love for blood and torture and suffering is completely unrestrained in this film.

Certainly it's only for the strong of heart and stomach, but this edition has now at least tied Suspiria as my favorite Argento film.

Seen the latest episode on the Studio 60 death march yet?

Tonight's Very Special Episode of Studio 60 was about Matt's prescription drug abuse. As if every writer and producer in Hollywood and New York isn't doing drugs or booze all the time. As if a vicious old bastard of a writer is going to care what a fat intern's whore of a mother did. As if anyone, let alone said dissolute writer, can just quit instantly, when he's had no bad consequences. After-School Specials had better plots, more moral ambiguity, and more realism.

The ratings subplot had potential. That's where, if Aaron Sorkin had the slightest trace of balls, this show would be all the time. I miss Max Headroom, and the real-time ratings wars, when they'd do ANYTHING to increase the ratings on their network. ANYTHING. Lies. Betrayal. Sabotage. Murder. There's a pregnant woman on the crew? How can we turn that to increase ratings?

But no, this is Pussy Television. They're already dead, they could say whatever the hell they wanted, if their writers had any balls and talent. Max Headroom said everything it could about how useless and parasitic television executives are, in its final episode. But Studio 60 is a kinder, gentler, Christian show; the prayer at the beginning already makes me vomit, but this pernicious wussiness, refusing to even try to say anything honest even when they don't have to suck Hollywood's cock to stay on the air anymore, this is why it's a dead show.

Vanishing Point (1971) and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974) are the first two of my big stack of Grindhouse-related movies; they're explicitly referenced in Death Proof, and are some of the classic '70s chase movies.

I know I saw VP in my youth, but remembered only the endless chase, not the ending. I don't think I've ever seen DMCL before.

There will be SPOILERS ahead.

Vanishing Point (Score: *****)

Kowalski (Barry Newman), our first hero, starts out kinda scruffy, but you soon get a sense of character from him, even though he's clearly scraping bottom. As the movie moves on, you see more of his past, and find out that he was a hero in the most unheroic war we'd ever had before this one, then he was a hero cop until the realities of police corruption caught up with him, then he was a hero car racer, and now he's down to just delivering cars; won't be long before he's stealing cars. Even now, though, he has honor. He's perfectly willing to race and drive you off the road, but then he'll check to make sure you lived.

The desert's full of horrible, inbred mutant redneck white trash. It's horrific. It's a realistic depiction of Nevada, mind you, but still shocking to see it on film. One says, "Wonder what's goin' on? Here comes CBS News, must be important." ... 1971 was a strange time, back when the TV news was important in some way.

The second hero of the piece, blind DJ Super Soul (Cleavon Little), is awesome. Clearly this is the last place on Earth he should be, stuck broadcasting funky music from station KOW (soon renamed KOWalski) in the middle of nowhere. And sticking up for a hero when the Man wants to bring him down... isn't a good survival strategy for a black man in Nevada in 1971, you know? But he's a hero, he has no choice in the matter.

The weird characters Kowalski meets along the way are just bizarre and hilarious. A long stretch of it feels like "Kowalksi's Adventures in Wonderland"; maybe that's all the speed he's been taking, maybe the desert in the '70s was just that weird, maybe it's just this film. Whatever, I like it. There's prospectors and snake-handling preachers, hippies and hot chicks. Eventually reality re-intrudes on Kowalski's adventure, though, and you start to question how long Kowalksi can escape the organized forces of the Man...

And then there's the harshest ending I have ever seen in a film. It's the only possible way for a hero to be free when surrounded by the Man, unable to even do a simple car delivery without running into their control.

It's a classical tragedy, Kowalski and Super Soul are modern epic heroes, the equals of Odysseus and Cassandra[0], it's a fantastic movie, and it's very very depressing. When was the last time a movie actually made you feel anything? Trust me, go buy the DVD.

Naturally, there's some shitty fucking Hollywood remake, because modern Hollywood is incapable of doing anything good and new, they just shit on the corpses of the past. Anyone who produces, directs, or acts in a remake of a classic movie, should be used as disposable extras in my Bill Hicks-inspired sequel[1] to Death Race 2000. "BAM! THUMP! THUMP!" "What was that?" "Viggo Mortensen. He remade Vanishing Point WITH A HAPPY FUCKING ENDING." "Oh. He had it comin'." Seriously, everyone in Hollywood, kill yourselves today. Thanks.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (Score: * 1/2)

This is almost the diametric opposite of Vanishing Point, while sharing a similar structure and ending. Instead of a laconic but admirable hero, we get an amoral, unpleasant piece of shit Crazy Larry (Peter Fonda, looking uglier than ever, and at his most evil until The Limey); Dirty Mary (Susan George), the chick he banged last night; and Deke (Adam Roarke), Crazy Larry's supposedly-alcoholic mechanic, though he doesn't look like a man ruined by drink, he looks and acts like a serial killer, albeit a beta male to Larry.

After robbing a grocery story by holding the manager's wife and daughter hostage, not even having the balls to do their robbery at gunpoint like real men would, they take off, and can't get rid of Mary, who's latched onto Larry for some excitement. Oh, but don't go thinking it's all action and adventure. It's about 40 minutes in before you'll get a really good car chase. The chases start and end every few minutes, and there's a bit of low-brow banter in between, showing what useless scum all of them are, and how they're all out for their own interests only.

The ending is telegraphed a mile away by dialogue and characters reaching escape velocity from the group... And it's pointless. They made it out free and clear, and random chance got in the way. There's nothing noble in it, there's no reason any of them would want to die. Bam. Over. Idiotic.

I'm appalled. It was dull, the characters were spiteful and unlikeable, and the chase scenes were too short. I can't quite give it 1 star, because the few chase scenes were pretty decent, but a mediocre 2 stars is too high for the characters shown.

[0] Except in this case Odysseus is alone, already knows his wife girlfriend is dead, doesn't have a dog, and has nothing to live for except heroism, speed, and the thrill of the road. And Cassandra gets her ass kicked for telling the truth nobody believes. We worship hard and cruel gods these days.

[1] Yes, sequels are okay, if they're good and don't shit on the original. Consider Halloween. Halloween 2 is awesome and necessary as a companion piece to Halloween. Halloween 3 is a great movie, totally unrelated to the first. All of the others are unnecessary and bad. I nearly gouged out someone else's eyes after seeing H20.

My grindhouse movies just arrived, so tonight I'll start in on them. Probably gonna start with Vanishing Point, though that Bullitt 2-disc special edition looks awesome.

Also, over at Ain't-It-Cool, Quint has a rant about theatre etiquette, with perhaps the best set of responses in the talkback I've ever seen.

I almost never go to the theatre anymore; I can't stand all the jackasses screaming and shouting and the crying children in R-rated movies (get a babysitter, stay home, or drown your damned infant chimpanzee, you filthy humans, just don't let it screech in public). It's got so I'll only go to independent theatres where the ushers remove obnoxious people. The problem is that chain theatre managers have no financial incentive to make the movie-going experience good, and their bonus depends on nobody calling to complain.

One of the talkback posters made a petition, Enforce Etiquette in the Theatres!, but that doesn't really address the financial incentive problem. The next time you have a bad theatre experience, go talk to the manager immediately afterwards, and if he can't put it right with free passes (hurting him where it matters), call the corporate headquarters and complain. That is the only way to get them to understand that enforcing etiquette matters.

Now, consider this. I just spent $267 on movies. On DVD. Which I'll watch in peace and quiet at home. On a relatively tiny screen, because I don't have a home theatre to speak of.

Why did Grindhouse do so poorly in theatres? Because the people who love movies, the people who understand what kind of movie this is and would go see it again and again if they could, won't go to the theatres full of screaming children. I'll watch Grindhouse on DVD, and until it's out, I'll watch the kind of movies that inspired it, also on DVD.

Apparently watching this film infects your brain, or at least my brain. I can't stop thinking about the great goddamn action movies we used to be able to get, and how unspeakably shitty Hollywood's garbage has been for the last 20 years.

I have now spent $319 on Grindhouse and related stuff. Grindhouse movie: $9; Popcorn + soda (shoulda drunk less soda in a 3 hour movie): $9; Planet Terror sndtrk, Death Proof sndtrk, and White Zombie's La Sexorcista on iTMS: $34; a dozen car chase and kung fu movies from Amazon: $267; being a psychotic movie fanboy freak: No, I'm not gonna do that goddamn cliché commercial tagline.

Okay, the kung fu movies aren't exactly related to Grindhouse, but I can't think about the old B-movies I love without a giant martial arts and swordfighting throwdown in there somewhere. And one of those is just something silly a friend recommended; "one of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same..."

I'm planning to put up at least a small review of each movie as I watch it. We'll see how that goes, my copious spare time being what it is.

• Vanishing Point
• Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (Supercharger Edition)
• The Essential Steve McQueen Collection (Bullitt Two-Disc Special Edition / The Getaway Deluxe Edition / The Cincinnati Kid / Papillon / Tom Horn / Never So Few)
• The Driver
• 42nd Street Forever, Vol. 1

Kung Fu:

• Hanzo the Razor
• The Bride With White Hair
• The Bride With White Hair 2
• Five Deadly Venoms
• Cutie Honey - The Movie (Live Action)
• Butterfly Sword (Special Edition)
• Shinobi - Heart Under Blade

Saw Grindhouse this weekend. The only word for this is AWESOMETASTIC. If you're going to see one movie in your life... it should probably be Casablanca or The Third Man or Blade Runner. But for the second, go see Grindhouse.

Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is just another "Go-go dancer amputee with a machine gun for a leg, and a motley crew of Texas heroes, vs. bioengineered plague zombies" movie, you know, like all the others. The action and gore are totally ridiculous, but the important thing isn't that; it's the film techniques. The film is grainy, and clearly worn from being replayed too many times in the smutty scenes. At one point, something happens to the film which allows the plot to advance and the characters to share secrets without letting the audience in on it; it's brilliant, breathtaking in its genius. This isn't just a movie, it's a movie about movies, about the experience of watching a movie. There's homages to everything in here. I'm particularly fond of the Terminator ending, but everyone will have something different to love here. I found myself honestly thinking many times in the movie that Rodriguez may be the greatest filmmaker in history.

The crazy prevues of coming attractions are fantastic. Several of these I want for real. Machete is every insanely-violent '70s "exploitation" action movie crammed into one (I put "exploitation" in quotes, because they weren't demeaning, they were the first and best opportunities ever for blacks or women or asians or hispanics to get into Hollywood movies, and those movies did more for racial tolerance than anyone or anything else; John Shaft and Bruce Lee were much more my heroes than John Wayne). Werewolf Women of the SS looked awesome, and even stars Sybil Danning (from Howling II), though I've already seen Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (no werewolves, but Dyanne Thorne didn't need special effects to be a gorgeous and evil Nazi monster). DON'T miss DON'T! Ah, I love house of terror movies. There is nothing funnier than a bunch of stupid kids running in fear, begging for mercy, and getting eviscerated by a psycho killer.

Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof is a really good '70s car movie. I wish I could say it was great. The first segment lasts far too long, and Harry Knowles says it's some giant fantasy suck-and-fuck-fest for Austin, Texas, but it's a snoozerama compared to everything else in Grindhouse. Then Kurt Russell starts chewing scenery, and Stuntman Mike becomes a person; a really fucked up bitter old man who kills women, but a person. Then STUFF HAPPENS, and you're not snoozing anymore. And because you've spent ALL GODDAMN NIGHT following these girls around, you feel tense and give a shit about what's coming, and there's nothing you can do to stop it... So it's a hell of a payoff. Still, editing would not have hurt this segment a bit. So then the second segment comes... With Zoe Bell. "Who the fuck is Zoe Bell?", you ask? She's the real Xena, the real Bride from Kill Bill. She may be the most badass, unkillable, unstoppable fucking woman on the planet, for real. It's no spoiler to tell you Stuntman Mike doesn't stand a goddamn chance against her, any more than Random Japanese Soldier #37 stands a chance against Gojira. The final car duel is one of the most awesome chases ever, and unlike any but the very best from the '70s, concentrates on the people in the cars. It's not two cars doing this to each other, it's people doing it to each other with cars.

Despite the fact that Planet Terror is an A+ movie and Death Proof merely a solid B, I'm more inclined right now to follow up with more car movies, perhaps to scratch the itch that Death Proof didn't. I've added a ton of stuff to my Amazon wishlists, which I'll be picking up in the weeks to come as I wear down my current unwatched movie stack. And in a happy coincidence, Nathan Fillion (Mal Reynolds of Firefly) (and Richard Brooks, aka Jubal Early of Firefly!) is in a new series on Fox (ew) by Tim Minear (yay!): Drive; Cannonball Run meets 100 Bullets seems to be the concept so far. Good car-bashing chases, interesting dramatic conflicts. Not sure where it's going, but I'll be watching for a while, at least.

Oh, and there were non-Grindhouse, non-parody trailers, two of which were notable: Hot Fuzz, by the director of Shaun of the Dead, looks awesome and ridiculous; a badass maverick cop from the big city gets assigned to a teeny little village where nobody ever gets murdered. Hilarity and violence ensues. Will absolutely be going to see this as soon as it's out.

On the other hand, I don't feel any need to see Spider-Man III now, because I've seen it all. They could've stopped the preview at the first plot twist, and left something to surprise the audience, but no, they show that plot twist. Then the next. Then the third. Then the big finale... I'm no fan of the Whiney Spidey movies anyway, but completely destroying any suspense? If you ever wanted justification for my belief that Hollywood should be cordoned off, burned to the ground with fuel-air explosives, and everyone trying to escape shot in the head like the fucking zombies they are, here it is. Those useless cocksucking studios are shitting on the entire premise of putting suspense in a movie, by showing THE ENTIRE FUCKING FILM in the preview. There will be no mercy for the film butchers. This is why independent film is so important: so we can still watch movies after we terminate everyone in the current shitting-on-movies industry that is Hollywood.