I feel like I should issue addendums and corrections. Certainly better than inserting more parenthesis, I think. I don't, for instance, think Nemesis was better than Spider-Man, a film against which none of my listed objections for the former apply.

And an anecdote: I had some time to kill before The Two Towers started, so I went to Wal-Mart, because I am lame, and because there is nowhere else to go in Sunnyside, and because I don't know why. I wandered around for a bit, and looked at DVDs, essentially the only thing in the store that attracts my interest outside of necessities like food and, I don't know, paint and lawn chairs. Here's the thing, though, that caught my eye. Or one of the things. Wal-Mart, like a lot of places, has stands full of really cheap DVDs, of films like The Apple Dumpling Gang Save Parliament and Benji Meets The Harlem Globetrotters and Contractual Van Damme Feature.

The thing is, at this Wal-Mart, at least post-Christmas, the cheap DVDs aren't on a stand anymore. They're in a cage, like the kind you see basketballs sold in, and a large crowd was hunched over it, pawing through this huge pile of bargain films. I mean, literally a pile.

All sorts of interpretations present themselves, I suppose, depending upon your point of view. The success of DVD as a format. Pop culture as cheap feed which consumers eagerly wallow in. I don't know.

DVDs are way successful, though, which is kind of curious. VHS copies of movies were never, in my experience, treated as such a ubiquitous item. DVDs seem to almost be impulse purchases these days. That's quite the canny marketing move. Did Hollywood create such a market for all sorts of films out of whole cloth, or are we to believe that it was always there, unhappy with real film reels and VHS, just waiting for something small and digital? I am suspicious. And yet I'm buying up DVDs like everyone else, because all of a sudden it seems absolutely imperative that I have access to every episode of The Simpsons on a moment's notice. This is really weird.

Oh yeah, and one other thing that gave me pause. In the book section, stacked next to "How to Talk to Angels" and "Chicken Soup for the Angel-gabbing Soul" sat the new Umberto Eco novel. Huh.

I never get a chance to see all the movies I want to see while they're still in the theaters, either because of a number of factors standing in the way of my physically getting there (no cash or no one to go with, mostly), or because they never show up here.

Over the summer, though, I finally got over my overly neurotic compulsion against going to the theater alone, a new theater opened close enough so that I could get to it in about ten minutes, and suddenly a whole new world of film was opened to me. Plus, they were cheap, since I didn't have to wait around for friends to get off work. (I, of course, spent the summer blissfully free of employment, as well as money, but all goods have their price.) So, anyway, I saw Minority Report and Attack of the Clones this way; early in the afternoon, several weeks or months after they had opened, so on top of being cheap the theater was mostly empty both times.

Over winter break, I set a goal to see more films than usual, especially since it looked like December was going to be a pretty good month for movies, at least of a certain sort, and for a certain audience. These are the movies I've seen:

Solaris: I saw this in the last week of its run, locally, with just myself and an older couple in the room. It was good. I had stayed up till three in the morning, once, watching the original on TCM or AMC or something (This despite the fact that the Russian film is, rather by definition, not an American Movie Classic, nor is it, I think, owned by Ted Turner. But, I could be wrong.) and liked it, but was also rather, shall we say, incredibly bored. (This isn't quite so unusual a phenomenon as you might think. To a lesser degree, I was enthralled and yet bored during Fellowship of the Ring, which was good but long. Solaris (or Solyaris, to seperate it from Soderbergh's remake) didn't quite enthrall me in the same way or to the same degree as the nerdy magic movie, but I felt it was worth my time. And, yet, I thought, wouldn't it be neat to see a version with newer effects, that could give us more of a glimpse of Solaris itself? And, I supposed, such a modern film might prove to be a bit more...closely aligned to my 21st century American tastes. (That it would leave out the 15 minute taxi ride through Moscow, for instance, was almost a certainty.)

Solaris, as it turned out, looked newer, but it didn't really show us much of Solaris (the planet). Or, indeed, address it at all.

This is a bit of a hollow criticism, since part of the point of the story is that the planet and the apparent intelligence inhabiting it are not really comprehendible, or at least not easily and fully so. Solyaris wasn't really concerned with the planet, but the things it had created, and so was this film. I'm tempted to whine, in a charmingly pedantic way, that this isn't what Stanislaw Lem intended, but then I'd have to reveal that I've never read the book, so who am I to complain? Uh, at any rate, Solaris = I liked it.

Star Trek: Nemesis: Well. It would not perhaps be surprising if I admitted to liking Star Trek somewhat more than is usually considered socially acceptable, but I try not to, because, I mean, come on. Star Trek? For nerds and old ladies. But nevertheless, I was there opening night. I was disappointed, even though I liked it as an entertaining action movie. My reasoning is thus:

1.) Thrown together plot. Events happened solely in order to set up the next scene, with only a handful of scenes being allowed to exist for themselves. Why did plot point A happen, or plot point B? Just because.

2.) The film was apolitical. We're told that everything that happens is an outgrowth of the activities of vast societies and much time, but none of this is ever really dealt with or used in the film. The film seems to be without any background.

The Two Towers: Aside from Solaris, most of the films I've seen this year are loud action pieces, and of all the loud action pieces I have ever seen, this is one of the best. It manages to be a good movie, inbetween the battles between orcs and giant trees, and orcs and people. (Or, to betray myself yet again, orcs and ents and Uruk-hai and the forces [and allies] of Rohan.) Which is saying something, because are most loud action pieces good apart from the loud action? No. So, winner. Plus, at three hours long, it is like there's a whole other movie stuffed in, quieter and more scenic. You would not think this would work. "Hey, what if we re-edit Attack of the Clones so that The Deerhunter is a subplot?" No. And yet, here it does. This year has been pretty kind to people who like good stories that, through no fault of their own, happen to feature laser guns or wizards with silly hats. I mean, in that there has been more than one film that by all stereotypical rights should be awful but isn't. Spider enhanced by Science makes nerd cool. Knights fight ugly monsters, while that kid from Deep Impact talks to a computer image. Tom Cruise plucks out his eyes and fights crime.

See? Take that, Western Canon! Pop culture wins!

Wait. That can't be good. Aside from being great fun, I think the two Lord of the Rings films, as well as Minority Report, and perhaps even Nemesis (at least, more so than some in the genre) and Spider-Man, were somehow objectively good films, with "something to say," whatever that might mean, and had a certain amount of quality in them, in the scripts, the cinematography, and the other elements of film. But why the need to add that disclaimer? The Lord of the Rings is not any more of a fantasy than Beowulf or Paradise Lost (which regardless of your leanings does not strictly align itself with orthodox Christian theology), both in the Canon. Is it that fantastic stories can only be considered good if they were written at a time when their fantastic elements were considered possible? But surely that isn't the case, no one likes Beowulf because it is an accurate depiction of possible Grendal attack, but rather because of the quality of the story and how it is told. So, is The Two Towers a good film, in this sense, or do I like it because, along with the majority of other films I've seen this year, it features lots of guys fighting and things blowing up? This is troublesome, and I suppose cuts to the heart of certain questions in modern literature, like whether genre works can be good in the same way that mainstream ones are. In the world of film, at least, The Two Towers has garnered the appropriate praise from all the established cultural arbiters, and so might seem to count. But what about the larger world of fantasy and science fiction and what China Mieville would call "weird fiction"? Is there something intrinsic that seperates, say, For Whom The Bell Tolls from The Man in the High Castle, above and beyond what we generally accept as good writing? I don't think so. I hope not, anyway.

Test questions were: Barbour's four-fold typology, the definitions of biblical literalism, natural theology, theology of nature, the Anthropic Principle, and Wu Li; a discussion of the "Eastern" mind and the ways in which it might be said to be more compatible with quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, a brief explanation of either special or general relativity (which I couldn't quite resolve, at first, but finally remembered enough about what made special relativity special to tackle it), and finally, a synopsis of the two guest speakers we had come in during the quarter.

All in all, it was ok. I was not nearly as confident about the Taoism stuff, but I think I managed. A's would be nice.

I need to read this brief overview of process philosophy at some point in the future when I have some initiative. I think I've grabbed what I need for my upcoming final, though. It's just one question out of many, after all, and probably won't even be asked.

Possible test questions include (defining the natures of): scientific materialism, biblical literalism, the four-fold typology Ian Barbour uses to classify science/religion interactions, so-called "limit-questions" (In this context, those kinds of investigations that define the borders of a field of knowledge, I think.), natural theology, theology of nature, sociobiology, the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, process philosophy, God's self-limitation, "the Eastern mind," wave-particle duality, Schroedinger's cat, the special and general theories of relativity, Wu Li, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, enlightenment (in the "Eastern sense"), Bell's theorem, and coherent superposition.

Goody.

In lighter news, all of my housemates are awake and doing odd things, like watching Dark City or playing Counter-Strike and conversing with odd disembodied female voices. I suppose not all of these are odd.

So what happened to the interesting links about current events?

Dig that crazy science!