Falling star

The life and death of Battlestar Galactica.

Tonight sees the end to Battlestar Galactica, a show that has received a gratuituous amount of critical praise--at least, for a show set in the realm of science fiction. Usually, sci-fi shows are dismissed by critics, no doubt due to a reaction against shows considered "nerdy" but as nerdy might not still be the sort of epithet that it once was, BSG (as everyone calls it) has managed to gain some breakout success, and has helped put the Sci-Fi (or, as it will soon annoyingly be called, Syfy) Channel on the map. If ever a show has trumpeted being referred to as the best show on television more than Galactica has, I don't know what it could be.

In fact, the fulsome praise directed at Battlestar Galactica requires something of a pushback. BSG is not the current generation's equivalent of Star Trek. In fact, it is doubtful that the show will stand the test of time in any sense. Galactica has its merits, which have propelled it farther than anyone could expect a basic cable remake of an awful 1970s Star Wars knockoff to go. But, especially in its later seasons, it has proven to be much less than the sum of its parts, getting in over its head exploring weighty themes and abandoning the engagingly pulpy-but-brainy style that made it as popular as it is. In fact, during its run, the show has become more listless, cyclical and self-indulgent than The Sopranos was at its worst, though Sopranos was never nearly as dull.

Battlestar Galactica sprung to life from a miniseries that debuted in 2002. Its premise was simple and compelling--humans have been essentially eradicated from existence. Only a 50,000-odd set of survivors, in a ragtag space fleet commanded by Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos), has survived and is trying to find the mythical human colony of Earth. The miniseries had its weaknesses, as virtually every character scene fell flat--the conversation between Adama and his estranged son, Apollo (Jamie Bamber) felt very TV, too earnest and stagy to pass for real life conversation. The interaction between Apollo and his dead brother's ex-fiancee and ace pilot Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) felt roughly the same--lacking in verisimilitude. But there was good stuff, too: Galactica combined some jaw-dropping special effects with some interesting ideas, and the themes introduced in the miniseries were initially explored in the series: how do people continue on after such profound loss? Does Earth really exist? If cylons look like humans, can they be stopped? What level of free will do they have? The series examined other themes as well, in particular the extent to which religious beliefs affect one's actions, tensions between the military and civilian government, and, that old sci-fi mainstay, what does it mean to be human?

Those early seasons were quite strong. Most of the time, the show managed to keep a few plot threads going at once: there was Helo trying to survive on the bombed-out planet of Caprica, Sharon trying to figure out whether she was a cylon or not (which she is, and which we all know), as well as the story of the week on Galactica. The show was characterized from the start by a rather grim tone, with a rather palpable feeling of doom, but there were little touches of humor and humanity here and there: fans generally rooted for communications officer Dualla and presidential aide Billy to hook up, self-absorbed Dr. Baltar (James Callis) quickly became a scene-stealer and often got the funniest lines, and during one episode we found out that Adama is actually one sentimental motherfrakker (frak being the series' greatest contribution to the English language) who can't leave Starbuck to die after a crash because he can't bear to lose the last connection he has to his dead son, and neither can his living son (who also has a thing for her). The show quickly took on something of a feminist hue--which was quite welcome, considering how testerone-ridden the material could have been--with the women being the tough and uncompromising leaders and the guys generally being the weepy, conscientious ones. And the show managed to build to a genuinely shocking season finale where a clue to Earth leads all hell to break loose, Adama gets shot (by Sharon), people are stranded on a planet abandoned (save for cylons) and the alcoholic Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan), one of the show's greatest creations, is left in command. This led to the show's second season, its best and most assured--the first half was arc-heavy and propulsive, leading to a three-episode run where the crew encounters another human ship, only to find out that it is commanded by a cold and arrogant officer who bucks no criticism and causes a dangerous standoff. The Pegasus episodes were among the show's best, and did a surprisingly thorough job of showing the unintended consequences of the end point of the worldview of George W. Bush, one overly focused on payback and "doing whatever needs to be done", including torture, to get back at the cylons. Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes) is an embodiment of this sort of mindset, and the show treats her rather harshly. Under her, Pegasus turns into an amoral hellhole full of testosterone-charged officers bragging about raping and torturing their female cylon prisoner, the ends always justify the means and decent people are too afraid to fight back. But the show puts its message pretty starkly: it is not enough to survive, one must be worthy of survival. If ever there was a message that needed to be sent, and a time it needed to be sent, it was these episodes at that point in time.

Unfortunately, the show's other takes on contemporary issues have tended to be lacking. One episode focused on the abortion issue without saying anything of real-world importance. Ditto political corruption and the Iraq War. The vaunted "New Caprica" story arc from the show's third season, in which our heroes are taken prisoner after settling on a new planet, tiptoes around provocation on subjects like suicide bombing and violent insurrection without actually being provocative. Unlike the original, old Star Trek which often tended to be nakedly allegorical about the social issues of the 1960's, Battlestar Galactica often cops out of commenting on contemporary issues by taking what I'll call the Crash two-step, which is to introduce weighty issues but not to develop them with any sophistication, such that viewers feel that they've engaged with an issue without actually being challenged by it. The aforementioned issues have been "Crashed" by the show, but it is difficult to think of particularly potent political observations outside of the Pegasus episodes. To be honest, these attempts never really felt like a con game so much as a sense that the writers were in over their heads, and one could indulge them for a time, as the show was really, really entertaining. But the notion of exploring real-life issues at all went out the window with season three, when the show fixated on different (and less vital) themes like identity and prophecy. These were the bad times.

After a while, the show became bloated and self-indulgent. New Caprica exeunt, the crew plodded through space without much in terms of things to do or narrative momentum. Instead of being under constant threat from cylon attack the Galactica went about its business generally free of danger--and the cylon absence was noticed. The third season was when things started to go off the rails: the show decided to examine the innards of cylon society, to delve deeper into the religious mumbo jumbo, to obsess about the Apollo-Starbuck relationship, and to focus on a number of one-off storylines that were almost immediately dropped. One could be charitable and say that the show was trying to fill out some of the empty spaces in its universe, though it was more likely a bid to get more viewers on board by shying away from the series' arcs in order to make the show more accessible to non-fans. The attempt was unsuccessful in both interpretations. Ultimately, though, the show lost its electricity, so to speak, and certain other flaws came to light at this time. Why was every episode, regardless of what happens, shot at a breakneck, breathless pace? Why do we have to hear about the five final cylons every episode as though it's the most important secret in the world, despite nobody caring about it before? And, finally, can't someone on this damn ship crack a smile? The self-conscious darkness of the show became overpowering, as mirthless characters went about their duties while the show plodded along, hints about Earth casually strewn about the storyline with nothing approaching a crescendo in the show's main story arc. The crowning glory was spending three episodes on Baltar's trial, which could easily have been handled in one. Yes, come for the cylon dogfights, stay for objections from the defense counsel. And these were some of the better season three episodes. Any other show would have been cancelled.

And the show's forth season--less dull than the third, at least--has gone to great lengths to try to convince the relatively few people still watching that they should never have bothered in the first place. Wacky twists are now routinely introduced to the show in order to set up an ending that seems to be something less than the sort of grand finale that the miniseries suggested. We find out, randomly, that the child of one of the cylon characters isn't his child, but is actually fully human, because his late human wife cheated on him. This was done to make the only other half-human child the only one in existence in order to set up the kidnapping plot around which, incredibly, the show seems set to use as its swan song. Cheap, insulting, and silly, but the bad writing doesn't stop there. Boozy Tigh is reunited with boozy wife Ellen, both of whom are actually cylons, and she gets miffed to find that her husband--who thought she was dead for years--has impregnated another cylon. This coming from a character primarily defined by her infidelity. Pot, meet kettle. After spending the better part of two seasons being bombarded about who the final cylons were, we're effectively told that there is no difference between cylons and humans. Nicely done, we say, as we rub our rugburned knees. Baltar, the man who nearly managed to get the human race wiped out, is able to extract guns from Adama to enhance his own power, and the old man decides that giving more power to the least trustworthy character in the show is a good idea. Evidently the Galactica is commanded by an idiot, though Adama performed nearly as dumb a move earlier in the season by giving a command to an unstable and perhaps reborn (and suspected cylon) Starbuck to find Earth. That subplot ends with a mutiny and a character losing his leg, and yet there are no consequences for either action. And Adama decides it's a good idea to keep known cylons like Tigh on the crew before and after the mutiny. This is to say nothing of the fact that humans can jump through space faster than light but use corded phones, and the amount of references to Shakespeare and Dylan, among others. Oh, I could go on and on (they just abandoned the cylon detector? No questions asked?), but I suspect the point is made. The show has been retconning like mad in hopes of trying to make it seem like the show went right from day one, when it clearly isn't so. Inconvenient little factoids like the ones found here are enought to prove the point, though because Ron Moore enjoys talking about the show, there are little nuggets like this one, from the early days of the show:

Human-like Cylons are better from a creative standpoint because the backstory
now is that the Colonials created the Cylons. The Cylons went off and developed
on their own... and then they came back in this new form.

As one can see, this was the original concept of the human cylons--that the mechanical cylons had created human models. This was also hinted at during the miniseries, when Leoben the cylon ponders whether God took souls out of humans and put them into cylons. Here's what I think happened:

1. The plan was that mechanical cylons--or some sort of cylon authority figure, like a queen--created the humanoid cylons.
2. The episode "Downloaded" showed humanoid cylons in the cylon society, but since only seven of them had been revealed--and Moore didn't want to reveal any more at that time.
3. Because with all those cylons around there would have had to be a few of the unseen models, there had to be an explanation of why the others weren't present.
4. Hence, the mysterious "final five", but what's so special about them? Why are they excluded? And why don't the other cylons know about them? I don't know what Moore's original plan for Earth was (I suspect there was none), but I suspect Moore decided at some point that the final five were from Earth. Why not tie the revelations together?
5. And this led to the idea that the final five were not only not created by the cylons, but that they created the other humanoid cylons.

It's ridiculous. The final five rescued five cylons from Earth but created seven new ones? Why not save seven more? And why only five? What's so special about these five? Perhaps the finale will answer these questions. Perhaps not. But it suggests a stunning lack of vision for a show that only lasted four years, and it is not atypical for the details of the show. Obviously, Moore should have explored the most interesting avenues of the story (though in later seasons he clearly didn't) but it's become clear that the show is a cruel joke on the few people who still bother to tune in, as for all the mythology Moore developed and for all the stringing along he did, there was precious little there.

Now, this might be excessive criticism for a television show. I mean, you wouldn't rip CSI: New York or American Idol a new one in this sort of manner. But I think BSG deserves it for a few reasons. Number one, because the show claimed to be something more than usual television from the start. Number two, because the show has received much critical acclaim. Number three, because it is still a fanboy staple and, as much of this culture is predicated around mainstream acceptance of things like comic books and sci-fi movies it has become a cause celebre among these types, and I do not begrudge them that. I like a lot of the stuff they do. Ultimately, though, BSG has become something far less than the sum of its parts--it is a rather dour and pretentious show whose writers don't have the chops to do justice to their themes of religion, war and suffering, and its stylistic and tonal sensibilities (more is more!) that became progressively more mockable as the series went on (Adama's painting scene in the series' penultimate episode was literally funny, in much the same way as Nic Cage's overly intense "HOW'D IT GET BURNED?!" moment from The Wicker Man was). What we have here, simply, is a show that provided some decent genre entertainment (and occasionally a bit more) for a while before taking itself way too seriously and becoming more of a catalogue of the pet interests of Ron Moore than a coherent series.

So it is with some ambivalence that I say goodbye to Battlestar Galactica, with an appreciation for the show's superior early years but tempered by the idea that it's long since been time. One hopes that, in time, the show's early years--which for my money are still solid entertainment--get the recognition they deserve, while the later years are justly condemned as tainted by overreach and self-indulgence. That is how I will remember them, to be sure.

Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers, and comedy

I recently rewatched Burn After Reading, a film that I saw when it was in theaters and only moderately liked. I have watched every Coen Brothers film at least twice (with the exceptions of Raising Arizona and Intolerable Cruelty, which I was so unimpressed with that I didn't even bother). The Coens' intricate craftsmanship requires multiple viewings, and at several points I have found myself turning around on the Coens' films after a second viewing--it wasn't until the second viewing until The Big Lebowski clicked. Burn improved a bit on the second viewing--I laughed more, and I appreciated the jabs at D.C. society, which were certainly sharp and well-aimed. However, my overall feeling was the same: the movie was a little lazy and should have been much funnier.

This got me to thinking about the Coens in general. They are two of the best filmmakers around, without a doubt, and they have a formidable catalog that contains the likes of Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Fargo, not to mention No Country for Old Men and The Man Who Wasn't There. I realize that Barton Fink is more polarizing, but I tend to think it's a genius movie that is mostly a character study, done in a particularly meta way that doesn't really lend itself to easy explanation. But all those films are "serious" films, in the sense that they are primarily dramatic, though all are laced with dark humor and funny dialogue. Indeed, it occurred to me that the Coens generally succeed when attempting drama though they fail when they try to do comedy. Their comedy catalog contains little to love: Intolerable Cruelty, The Hudsucker Proxy, Raising Arizona (which some people adore but I never really cared for), The Ladykillers (which most people didn't care for and I actually liked) and now Burn After Reading. In fact, the only triumphs that I can see are The Big Lebowski and, to a lesser degree, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and there are some trends to be noted here. Cruelty, Ladykillers and Burn all felt like lazy pieces of filmmaking--at best, uninspired films that have their moments. Ladykillers has more than a few good moments but I am not sure it works as a film. Hudsucker, on the other hand, tried much too hard and wasn't too funny either. So it was a sort of counterreaction to the prevailing trend among Coen comedies. Brother succeeds, though its success owes much to its ramshackle energy and driving soundtrack and not to its overstuffed plot and overdone Homer references. Subplots involving Robert Johnson and a bipolar bankrobber barely register as the movie is too busy and has too much going on. It works, but the pacing could have been better, which is rare indeed to say about a Coens film.

Lebowski, on the other hand, is a triumph, and one of their very best. The Coens managed to include one of their typically overstuffed plots, but the plot is countered by the lethargic energy of The Dude, as played by Jeff Bridges. Bridges is the major reason why the story works: the plot unfolds around him, but he only barely understands it (like us) and he is reluctantly pulled along with it. It doesn't hurt that Bridges puts in one of the all-time great film performances, and it is seriously a thing of beauty. But Bridges is balanced by the Coens going all out in their usual plotting and dialogue tricks. The film never feels like it is just going through the motions, and the comedy is never left on the table. Ultimately, though, it isn't the plot that is funny so much as the characters, the dialogue (which is infinitely quotable) and the individual scenes.

So, on a fundamental level, I think it makes some sense to say that the Coen Brothers are simply better at doing drama than they are doing comedy. This isn't to say they aren't funny, but that they don't excel at telling funny stories, as Intolerable Cruelty will inform you, again and again, if you were to watch it, which I don't recommend. In Lebowski they manage to make the most of it by downplaying the impossibly complex story and focus on making the scenes, characters, and dialogue as funny as possible, but the humor is in the approach and not in the story. One could simply have cast different actors, trimmed out some of the dialogue, and tweaked the scenes and the film could worked just as easily as a drama. Now, I wouldn't like that one bit because I happen to think that Lebowski is near perfect, but I don't think it's an unfair thing to say.

I suppose this is another way of saying that Lebowski is basically just a drama with comedy sprinkled on top, which is fine by me since the comedy is so good. But it illustrates the lack of versatility of the Coens' approach. In retrospect, it makes sense that Burn wouldn't really work as a comedy, as the Coens have yet to demonstrate that they can master the rhythms of the comedic feature film. They've pretty much mastered drama at this point, and the critique that they're nothing but recyclers of old movies seems to have passed into obvlivion following the nonstop parade of awesomeness of No Country for Old Men, clearly a career watermark that showed that they could tackle someone else's source material and adapt it compellingly to the screen. Not that I'm going to stop watching their comedies, and I'm hoping for a No Country-level comedy from them at some point. At this point, though, they have yet to deliver one.

The Five Best (And Worst) Modern Political Movies

As a political nerd in my other life, as well as a big movie fan, it is only natural that I should want to hit both of my sweet spots at once. In other endeavors this might not be advisable, but it is complicated in this instance by a simple truth: most political movies suck. They really do. They are often made by people who don't really know anything about politics and wind up saying either ridiculous, banal or just wrong things with their writing; or by informed political observers who have something to say and do a decent job of saying it. The latter is a really small group.

Therefore, I have decided to write a list of my top and bottom five political movies. My considerations are subjective, but I have judged them by the following metrics: knowledge of how politics works, knowledge of the political structure, having insights into either of the above, and generally the quality of the filmmaking. And it's biased--very, very biased. But hopefully interesting. Here goes nothing.

The Bottom Five

5. 24

Forgive me while I completely destroy the primary justification for this article right off the bat. Hey, man, what's happening here? This article is about political movies, not action-adventure TV shows, right?

This is true, but I think it works. For one thing, this show nakedly aspires to be the equivalent of a Hollywood action movie. The rhythms are the same, the paucity of the writing, the ridiculousness of the show are straight from cerebellum-shrinking Hollywood thrillers. And 24, despite what you might believe, is actually the most political show on television. Obviously there are actors who play political characters, and the political process is (incorrectly) displayed. For one thing, the president isn't going to know who Jack Bauer is. He (or she) isn't going to have a clue who Jack Bauer is because that destroys plausible deniability if you have Jack running around engaging in covert actions and doing illegal things. This isn't too hard to ascertain, unless you're a Hollywood producer like Joel Surnow who hasn't likely read a single book about the subject.

Then there's the little matter of this show being an unabashed brief for right-wing security policies. The show, despite its ridiculousness, is taken seriously by a lot of people who then believe that we have to let Jack Bauer torture and eavesdrop to his heart's content. Never mind that torture doesn't work, and that in The Dark Side numerous federal agents seem to have more success with noncoersive methods. The show presents a brief for the Bush security state that doesn't acknowledge its excesses and treats every character who objects as either an ignoramus or a traitor. This show is a revolting piece of bile that has wended its way into government policy (see the aforementioned The Dark Side) and even into Supreme Court briefs. Luckily, its ratings have declined. Hopefully the age of Obama will see the end of this particular brand of "patriotism".

4. The Contender

The Contender is a weightless and implausible film that seems to grasp nothing about politics, but it thinks it grasps the mechanics of political power exactly. To be fair, the film is not entirely lacking in grace notes: the performance of Jeff Bridges as a practical and realistic president is a triumph, and the character is well-written. Additionally, the movie actually bothers to give its characters party designations, which is a pet peeve of mine. If you're making a movie about politics, just give the party affiliations, okay? Not doing so seems to smack of not wanting to alienate potential audience members, but I tend to think that most Republicans are going to be able to handle a movie with some Democratic characters.

But the movie has so many problems. First, Joan Allen's vice presidential nominee is so ridiculous and implausible a character that the movie simply doesn't work. The reality of this country is such that Atheists simply cannot win public office, and this is regrettable, but Allen portrays one in the film. Additionally, she used to be a Republican Atheist, which is even less realistic--why not go whole hog and have Bridges's president be pro-life, the Republicans can be environmentally friendly, and Mormons can be 45% of the country and solid Democrats to boot? In a political movie, overlooking these details is inexcusable. And, in addition, she has evidently run in tons of elections with a major scandal story hanging over her head but it has never come out. And she's politically tone deaf enough to refuse to dispense with a silly fraud story when she's about to become vice president and possibly even president? I've heard people complain that the character of President Bartlet on The West Wing is too idealistic to exist in real life--I disagree, because I think we just elected him. But the idea that someone combining insufferable self-righteousness with such poor political instincts and such an odd life story would be elected out of the middle of the Heartland stretches belief. Allen's character is absurd. Others fare better--Gary Oldman's Republican antagonist seems about right, if a little colorless and too self-consciously evil. Christian Slater, surprisingly, does a good job as a Democrat who goes along with Oldman's schemes to derail a prospective vice president of his own party. And that's Sam Elliott as Bridges's chief of staff, so you have no complaints there.

Still, the movie's poor writing doesn't end with the Allen character. There's the character played by William L. Petersen, for example. He's the Jerry Brown-ish Governor of Virginia and a Democratic heavyweight who hopes to get the V.P. appointment. To this end (spoilers!), he stages a Chappaquiddick-like disaster in which he gets to play hero and to try to save a life. It is later discovered that the (deceased) victim was a soldier of fortune who had an run an advertisement in a soldier of fortune magazine. (Okay, they're mercenaries. Screw the PC term.) Petersen is presented as a sharp and ruthless politician, so why would he do something stupid like this, when even a cursory investigation would easily have discovered the arrangement? There's a technical term for when smart characters do dumb things: it's called "bad writing" and you have perhaps heard of it.

But the most offensive thing about the movie is its recycling of insipid Clinton-era Democratic Party talking points. Allen is supposed to be commended for refusing to dignify questions about her private life with a response, but consider if the movie had turned out differently: let's say that Petersen got away with his stunt temporarily and Allen's nomination went down due to unanswered allegations of personal impropriety. Then let's say that Bridges nominates Petersen for VP. And then the news about Peterson's impropriety breaks, and Oldman successfully runs for president against a party minus a standard-bearer that has seen two VP picks go down for personal improprieties. At the end of the day, Allen will have her principles despite being seen as a slut, while the Republicans would be ascendant and Oldman's corruption would lead to a worse United States. And virtually all of this would be the fault of the idealist. The Contender earns its raspberries for framing politics as a battle between idealists and cynics, between holy martyrs and contemptible villains; for too many poorly written characters; for not realizing that politics is the art of the possible; and generally for not engaging in any sort of sustained argument of any sort that doesn't make the movie sag under the weight of trying to valorize Bill Clinton's behavior with respect to Monicagate. Case closed.

3. The Sum Of All Fears

Both of my lists feature a Tom Clancy novel turned into a book. The Sum Of All Fears might or might not count as a "political" movie, but it features an actor playing a president, as well as other actors playing various cabinet secretaries and political officials, so I'll count it. It's not as much of a stretch as X-Men 3: X-Men United, which has to be on some sort of worst of list somewhere, though just not here.

It's pretty difficult to mount a defense of TSOAF. The book, as I recall, was decent though very long. The movie changes one critical element of the book: the book featured a terror plot by Arab terrorists after a successful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The movie, made after 9/11 and hoping to avoid getting smacked around by groups like CAIR decided that it would be better to make the villains neo-Nazis. So we go from the gritty minutiae of intelligence politics in Clear and Present Danger to Batman villains in TSOAF? Hell, yes! The point of the book was that even acts of peace can have deadly blowback if some extremists don't accept them. But the movie doesn't get there--neutered, it flounders in trying to maintain even basic credibility, and largely fails at that. It actually manages to become more farfetched than Patriot Games, with its royals in the government and silly revenge-driven IRA plot.

This is all to say nothing of casting vacuous nothing Ben Affleck as a super-smart CIA analyst. Was Tara Reid unavailable? Affleck simply doesn't have the chops to play an agency braniac, and while Morgan Freeman is as compelling as always the film doesn't hold with bad writing on one side and a weak protagonist on the other. As this is a pretty reviled movie I'll refrain from piling on further, but the scene where the Russian and American presidents clash over text messaging is insane. I suppose that the Facebook servers must have been vaporized in the blast.

All in all, this might have been an interesting film with a different leading man and an unneutered script. The makings are there. However, this movie comes to exemplify suck, and is the only Clancy novel so far to be better than the movie version.

2. Lions for Lambs

What is art? The presence of this phrase at the beginning of a review usually indicates a dire review to come, and this is no exception. Still, mocking this piece of rancid social commentary seems a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel. It got terrible reviews and bombed at the box office, further cementing Robert Redford's irrelevance while continuing in the tradition of studio political films that are "thoughtful" rather than thoughtful. The difference is important. Thoughtful films present you with facts and argumentation and ask for you to consider things differently. "Thoughtful" films (i.e. propaganda) tell you how it is. One type of movie asks you to use your brain and the other asks the opposite. Simple.

LfL (rather an ungainly acronym) is a failure partly because it is propaganda, but partly also because it doesn't really raise any interesting new points about the issues it purports to cover (making it as timely as yesterday's newspaper), and partly because the whole thing is rather poorly dramatized. Rather than feeling like a superior episode of The West Wing--which is probably the best the film could have hoped for--it winds up feeling more like watching a bad Law & Order rerun where you vaguely remember the headline from which the episode was ripped. LfL winds up being a series of not particularly exciting conversations that will bore those who don't follow the issues and will bore those that do, though for different reasons, and fans of strong story and characters are bound to be disappointed as well. The film is almost downright Randian in its characterization: noble martyrs, disgusting sellout villains, and a few in the middle who make their choices. The Wire it ain't.

So this brings us back to the question: what is art? On some level, a little bit of indirectness is essential to art. After all, if you could just say what you mean, why write a novel about it, or make a movie about it? Lions for Lambs commits the unforgivable sin of telling us everything, rather than presenting us with, well, art. This is regrettable but not unforseeable.

1. Absolute Power

This Clint Eastwood film has one of the all-time killer openings in movies: Gene Hackman's president engages in some rough sex that turns deadly while being watched by Eastwood himself, playing the film's protagonist, a jewel thief who accidentally witnesses a murder at the behest of the president. The sequence is compelling, and it is reminiscent of another sequence in Robert Altman's The Player in which the protagonist watches another character talking to him on a cell phone. It's a comment about the voyeurism of movies, just as the scene from Power.

Would that the rest of the movie were as subtle or clever. After this scene, the movie gives into rightist paranoia about the Clinton Administration. It's easy to forget, but that fat Arkansan nearly drove the righties nuts without doing anything at all, up until the point where Republican members of congress speculated about strike forces coming to steal their guns (and yes, that is a reference to Helen Chenoweth's black helicopters) and it was common for conservatives to speculate on whether the Clintons regularly had people whacked (Jim LeBoutlier, among others). These stories were generally picked up by the mainstream media and voters, depressingly, voted in Republicans year after year. I don't understand why such fanciful narratives took hold, as it wasn't too hard to find things to not make a person like Bill Clinton.

So, while the movie looks like it's going to deliver some sort of pronouncement on the Clinton years it turns out to be a pretty standard-issue "thriller" that doesn't really prove too exciting or unusual. It's all standard cop-vs-crook stuff you've seen a million times, and the finale (does E.G. Marshall get away with killing the president?) compounds the idiocy. It's the worst kind of political movie: a superficial stock genre film with a political backdrop that doesn't really have anything that isn't banal to say. It's a formula that has proven sadly durable: see, for example, Syriana.

The Top Five

As much as I wanted to include 25th Hour in this list, I simply could not justify it as it is not really a political film. It is a movie that virtually embodies September 11th, but it doesn't really talk about the political implications of that day and tries more to get at what people were feeling and thinking at the time. I do think it's one of a very short list of things that tell anything about 9/11 (Springsteen's The Rising being another), but it steers clear of politics, which is atypical for a Spike Lee film (or joint, as it were). I couldn't put it on the list, but it is nonetheless valuable for understanding this age. And since we're talking about modern movies, I suppose that Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Advise and Consent are out of the running, though Smith is definitely worth your time, and Consent is pretty good as well, though a little stagy. Anyway, that's all I've got to babble out. With no further ado...

5. Primary Colors

A wonderful movie that ought to be absorbed by historians trying to understand Bill Clinton. Here he is, presented in all his glory--at once a huckster and a man who cares about people, a man who loves his wife but loves screwing anything within his sights, a man who can make you optimistic and cynical nearly at the same time. He is certainly a character, and the film is illuminating, well-written and well-acted. And I say this all as someone who is not much of a Clinton fan. As a liberal Democrat I can appreciate what he did for the country and for liberalism--i.e. make it less toxic--while still believing that he compromised too much and didn't really secure a good deal for his supporters. And his inability to take responsibility for his actions, coupled with his symbiotic relationship with his malefactors, would eventually lead to a presidency that disappointed in many ways in reforming much of anything, though after George W. Bush his responsible stewardship of the nation is looking awfully good.

This is the rare movie that offers a penetrating analysis of its subject, all the while making good observations about the nature of politics these days. It understands how the game works and

4. Wag The Dog

There are movies with strong premises that sound promising and don't deliver. Wag The Dog actually does deliver on its simple premise of depicting a totally media-made war whose sole purpose is to hide a president's indiscretion, but the timing of its release--right after the Lewinsky scandal and President Clinton's subsequent bombing of Iraq--meant that it wouldn't be recognized for its more penetrating insights. In fact, it shouldn't be too surprising that the media would be impressed with perhaps the most banal observation in the entire movie considering their incisive handling of the abuses of the Bush Administration--of course political leaders launch military action after domestic setbacks. Margaret Thatcher had her little war in the Falkland Islands, Reagan had his Grenada invasion, and Ehud Olmert had his little Gaza war right before removing his rancid presence from the political scene. Military action allows a leader to be seen by a weary public as strong and resolute, distracting the people from whatever corruption/failed policies/secret arms deals they are focusing on and putting that attention back on the great and glorious game of warmaking. And it always works, except for when it doesn't.

It works in Wag The Dog thanks largely to Dustin Hoffman's performance as a Hollywood studio head who agrees to help Robert De Niro's political fixer create a war. Dog has quite a few weak elements--as a film, it's rather flawed. By the time Woody Harrelson's mentally retarded war hero enters the stage the film has long since abandoned an attempt to be anything other than low comedy. But during its first two acts the David Mamet-penned script manages to get in quite a few interesting and highly debatable ideas: first, that being able to control the media--and more importantly the news cycle--is key to convincing the public to adopt a course of action. Secondly, the movie argues that the media will never be skeptical about war stories, as they are simply too good for business and too easy to report. Third, the movie argues that the media is no longer in the business of actually breaking news but rather of rebreaking it, and that circulating a clip of a young girl running across a bridge dodging gunfire can quickly become a viral news staple (and keep in mind that this movie predated YouTube by a number of years). Fourth, the media is more concerned with the presentation of news rather than the content of said news--a snappy song about defending American borders matters more than a reasoned argument from an opposing presidential candidate. All of this adds up to an argument that the media's influence over politics is in presenting a series of images and sounds--which is what they have effectively reduced politics to--and selling that content in a way that helps them out the most.

Now, I don't agree with all of the ideas in the film--I tend to think that the newscycle-centric approach to politics doesn't always work, and one need only look at the success of Barack Obama to conclude that. But Wag The Dog is a sharp piece of media and political criticism, and its cynicism and lack of answers make it all the more compelling a piece of polemic.

3. Clear and Present Danger

Tom Clancy's books almost invariably make better movies. That's not necessarily a slight on Mr. Clancy, who is a talented storyteller who knows the military and, to a lesser extent, politics (though he definitely knows national security politics). Clancy, though, isn't a disciplined writer (this is a way of saying that his books are too fucking long and that he needs to trim them down to under 1000 pages) and he's not a great prose stylist. But the films based on The Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger are all worthwhile entertainments, and the latter is quite a bit more, while the middle entry is a weak film whose plausibility is weak. (The Ben Affleck vehicle The Sum Of All Fears is described above.)

Clear and Present Danger is the strongest of all of them, and it is precisely because it is simply so plausible. Most movies have plots that require suspension of disbelief, but Danger does not. The story is actually pretty simple: the president's friend is murdered in conjunction with a drug deal. The president--in a way so as to ensure plausible deniability--signals that he wants to escalate the war on drugs. This is done by putting a CIA-fronted group of commandos on the ground in Colombia, with orders to basically gum up the works in drug country.

The movie is so brilliant because it captures what America has done wrong in foreign policy for the past few decades. The American onslaught is calculated in order to have the least political cost, and the halfheartedness of the effort means that it is rolled back as soon as it is convenient. The mechanics of governmental decisionmaking are well rendered here, the lack of concern for illegality and the comfort with realpolitik are reminiscent of the Cold War but still present today, the insulation between decisionmakers and the results of those decisions is a timeless theme that is, if anything, even more relevant after G. W. Bush, and the historic use of the CIA to conduct foreign policy on the cheap--and the disastrous results--are exactly in keeping with the history of United States policy over the past fifty years. Clear and Present Danger is ostensibly about the drug war, but it's really about what happens when politicians aren't willing to commit to victory when lives are on the line and the disastrous consequences that occurs. Something to think about when pondering how our last president ignored advice to send several hundred thousand soldiers to Iraq because doing so would be politically inconvenient.

2. Munich

Munich was nominated for Best Picture at the 2005 Oscars, and yet it feels strangely underrated. It features several note-perfect performances, including from Eric Bana as the leader of a strike team meant to exact vengeance for the Munich massacre, Daniel Craig as a fanatical driver whose devotion to the cause never waivers, and Mathieu Amalric as a French intelligence broker who might be working both sides, and Geoffrey Rush as Bana's hot-tempered case officer. It also features Steven Spielberg working with one of the best scripts he's ever directed, at the height of his visual and storytelling powers. So many masterful touches, like the contrast between the stark, black-and-white photography of the Munich incident itself to the final scene, in which a bewildered Bana stands on a playground in the middle of a New York City dominated by gray, are so subtle that you only notice them the second or third time through.

Honestly? It's a masterpiece for a director whose career is replete with them. I'm not a huge Spielberg fan but I can appreciate the artistry. Munich is a crowning moment. It's hard to imagine anyone else making the movie so alive and gripping, and yet Spielberg suppresses his usual triumphalism (of the sort that ruined Minority Report) in exchange for something that feels far more authentic and complicated. Munich isn't completely impartial, but it isn't agitprop in any sense. The movie's argumentation can be compared most easily to GoodFellas: the first half of the movie is tense, colorful, and a little exciting. The team seems to be driven by a firm moral calculus--they're just out for justice, plain and simple--even to the point of risking a mission in order to save a little girl. For the first half of the movie, we identify with our heroes and it all seems right and fun. But the second half turns everything around--dead targets are replaced with ever more bloodthirsty extremists. The lines don't seem clear cut anymore. The team gets hunted and members start dying, one by one. Bana's character winds up unable to live with the things he's done, and flees his country to move to New York. Bana, unlike his Palestinian counterpart that he briefly encounters in the film, comes to believe that it isn't worth it to sacrifice everything for one's home.

This dynamic--home vs. sacrifice and sin--is an interesting one, equally as applicable to Israel as it is to America. There are a significant number of people in this country who believe that survival is paramount and anything that stops attacks on sovereign American soil is justified. There are people--a lot, frankly--that simply saw the Iraq War as vengeance on the Middle East after September 11. These people are mad, and we shouldn't hesitate to say so. But the movie ties into Iraq far more clearly than that: sometimes vengeance is disguised as necessary sacrifice, and sometimes the whole endeavour is predicated upon lies told to us by high-ranking officials. The mission turns out to be counterproductive and hollow, and Bana winds up feeling lost and used at the end of it. But, still, Geoffrey Rush's character's point about trimming one's fingernails has some logic to it as well--you can't just not respond to attacks. Munich doesn't try to keep things simple. This is part of why it is so underrated--it is probably the most substantial movie of ideas this decade.

1. Spartan

Of course Number 1 has to be a film you've never heard of, correct? Well, I can't help it. Spartan is probably the most knowing film about American politics made during the past decade, and the fact that nobody saw this 2004 gem doesn't change the fact that it fundamentally understands the tradeoffs of the post-9/11 national security state, and communicates them in a particularly compelling way. Spartan also succeeds as a masterpiece of misdirection, which unveils a pretty significant twist more than halfway through but stays tonally consistent, and it has the usual Mamet mysteries but doesn't try too hard to be a mindfuck (a la Spanish Prisoner). Instead, it merely unfolds its story gracefully. Basically (and here's a spoiler alert), the president's daughter is kidnapped, and special agent Val Kilmer is put in charge of getting her back. The chase is abandoned when the daughter evidently turns up dead and drowned, only to be confronted with a key piece of evidence that suggests that the story isn't that tidy, that the girl might still be alive, and that there might be quite a bit more rot in the machinery than he could ever have figured possible.

This is another David Mamet film, and it's quite a good one: it's anchored by an impressive leading performance by Kilmer, who is as charismatic and energetic as he's ever been, and he manages the famously difficult Mametian dialogue without a hitch. The film is mesmerizing and even dreamlike at times--throughout the first hour, the story unfolds naturally and deliberately. We learn what we need to without being spoon-fed, while preserving quite a bit of mystery for later on. There has been some complaints about the climax, which it has been alleged was a little too expected. I tend to agree, though the movie advances some key insights that any thinking person ought to agree with at this point. The film alleges, fundamentally, that the war on terror and the expansion of presidential powers will lead to abuses of those powers, and that preserving that power might even go so far as to break society's deepest bonds, in this case, the bond of family. It's a pretty simple message: power corrupts. It's actually a pretty conservative message in the philosophical sense, which should not be surprising as David Mamet is conservative. But it's one that today's so-called conservatives simply do not understand, blinded as they were (and are) by partisanship and hero worship of mediocrities. Nevertheless, the notion of a corrupt federal government--which rationalizes itself with talk of protecting the country but in reality is merely interested in cementing and expanding its own power--is exactly what wound up happening in the Bush Administration. What is really noteworthy is that Mamet made this movie in 2004, when Bush was still popular and winning his reelection battle, and many of his worst screwups had never come to light. It's no wonder the movie bombed--it told a truth that people didn't want to hear. But now that time has passed it ought to be reconsidered for the prowess of the filmmaking, as well as the potency and timeliness of its message, whose simplicity and power ought to be absorbed before the next time the government tries to lurch toward power.

Query

Obviously, this show hasn't come out yet, and it might be too early to judge, but is HBO really producing a show called Hung about a guy with a huge penis? Seriously? I guess the glory days of HBO's praised literary era are gone indeed.

Meditations on Galactica

So, Battlestar Galactica's final half season has begun.

I have to say that I'm glad the show is ending, because I think its moment has passed. Actually, had there not been a writers' strike it might have ended at the right moment. But it's possibly the dawning of the Era of Obama. Hopelessness went out with Dubya. Back in 2005 everything seemed hopeless, but there is now the promise of renewal. BSG is pretty much stuck in 2005, in terms of its emotional appeal.


Then again, one might forgive the show if it hadn't begun to feel tired already. Galactica had lost its driving force and vision long before this season. If I had to pinpoint where it went away, it would be right after the secret tribunal episode in Season 3. Before that, the show was definitely relevant: its explorations of faith and politics were interesting, and it had finely drawn characters. The political aspect was most interesting: the most forceful rebuke of the Bush worldview in pop culture might well have come from Battlestar Galactica. But since the tribunal episode the show has made almost no political observations of any worth. Instead, the third season junked most of the show's ongoing themes and emphases but kept the storylines and characters. Season 3 became fixated on lesser stories: Kara and Lee! The final five! Starbuck's destiny! Baltar's trial! All of a sudden, a show which had been about a desperate attempt to escape from the Cylons became entirely Cylon-less, and despite a gem here and there it was a wasteland of boring and pointless episodes. Honestly, they could have done the Baltar trial in a single episode and gotten back to Cylon action. BSG's third season felt more like the first season for a show that I would never have gotten into in the first place.


And its more recent season feels like that show's second season. It really is like the alternate 1985 from Back to the Future Part II where things are just askew. There were actually quite a few things to like in this episode, but upon further reflection, I really miss the old BSG. Y'know, with Admiral Cain and the Pegasus? That was some entertaining, allegorical, dense stuff. You had the sense then of a point to all this dreariness. That's what has gone away. The urgency. Or maybe I'm just ODing on dreariness. Honestly, I don't know. I can tell you that I never had that problem with Deep Space Nine.


I will be the first to admit that Deep Space Nine had its flaws, because it did. There were lots of silly episodes sprinkled in with the serious ones. But it never got depressing. There were a few stretches where things were rough during the Dominion War, but DS9 found a balance between that business and lightness in a way that BSG never did, and this makes me think that DS9 will stand the test of time better than Galactica will. BSG can be compelling but it isn't really balanced, and after a while, one gets tired of ODing on sorrow.


I really do think that that has changed as well: earlier episodes were dark but they didn't lay on the sorrow too thick. Not only that, but there seemed to be actual forward momentum to the show, a feel that everything mattered and that important things were happening. The dark tone of the show was established from episode one, but there always was that little bit of hope. After a while, though, the unrelenting and progressively increasing grimness begins to feel meanspirited. The show might yet tie it all together satisfyingly, but it's begun to feel like the darkness has become an end in and of itself, especially since we've seen the ruined Earth.

At this point, my investment in the series is largely intellectual: I want to see how Ron Moore wraps it up. Emotionally, I've been through with Galactica for a while.

A Shield and a Battlestar: Two shows that shine a light on Bush's America

The Bush Era is now (gratefully) ending, and along with it the vibrant art that commented on its intellectual and cultural underpinnings and implications. Unfortunately, due to a media structure that is still incredibly hierarchical (though it seems to be decentralizing fairly rapidly these days), much of the most significant aesthetic accomplishments of the past decade or so have been unjustly kept secret. Such is life.

One of these accomplishments--perhaps the most popular--was the television show The Shield. As a television show it was exceptional: fast-paced, darkly humorous, packed with compelling and diverse characters, and consistently outstanding during its entire run. One could watch the whole thing just for the stories and not have to think about the moral and political implications of the show.

Those layers, however, are at the very heart of the show. The Shield centers on Vic Mackey, a bald-headed imposing cop played indelibly by Michael Chiklis. Mackey heads up the Strike Team, a semi-autonomous elite anti-gang task force charged with taking on gang violence in Los Angeles. At the heart of the show is an acknowledged moral paradox: Vic's team is effective at locking up the bad guys, no doubt about it. Even Vic's detractors on the show cannot help but admit it. There's just a little wrinkle, though: Mackey is totally, completely, epically corrupt. During the course of the show he commits murders, shakes down drug dealers for money, steals drugs, robs from gangs and cheats on his wife, for starters. Such behavior is typical for members of the Strike Team. Why is this? From what flashbacks we've seen, Vic and his crew were decent guys and good cops before they joined the team. What gives?

The show's answer to this is simple: power corrupts. It's a simple message that a lot of people tend to forget, and that other shows like 24 tend to obfuscate. I'm not going to go on a rant about 24--it is not one of my favorites, and I am prepared to leave it alone for the time being. But in addition to being a tool to desensitize the country into giving up our liberties and values in exchange for "freedom" (sorry, I couldn't resist), 24's largest failing--and why it should never be taken seriously--is that it doesn't believe that power corrupts. Jack Bauer & Co. do what they have to do every week, day in, day out. The show's argument is that we should let intelligence professionals do what they need to do in order to protect America and not ask questions, to just trust their love for America as a guiding light instead of hindrances like the Bill of Rights. And that's certainly a viewpoint, and a debatable one. But the show never really considers that giving a guy like Jack that kind of power is a bad thing. Jack isn't corrupt. He's not haunted by what he's done. Killing and torturing don't bother him, and his brain's rationalization center seems to be quite well developed that he can explain it all away as being in defense of America. Actual intelligence officers who did what Bauer did were not so lucky: as the book The Very Best Men by Evan Thomas tells us, many of them went literally mad after realizing what they had done. And people who inflict violence upon others--especially in the form of torture--find that it takes a toll on their egos. Many of them commit suicide. To me, the idea of power and corruption go so neatly together that it almost makes sense to speak of them as two sides of the same coin. Just take a guy like Ted Stevens, the outgoing Alaska Senator who was convicted of taking bribes a few months back. These days Stevens is known as a particularly clumsy crook or, failing that, a notorious porkmeister, but Stevens actually made his career as a tough prosecutor of political corruption. Or take the Bush Administration. Give someone vast quantities of power, and even upstanding people will turn into crooks. 24's primary philosophical assertion is that you can have both justice and absolute power concentrated in a small group of people. This is a pretty foolish and, dare I say, not a particularly American worldview, at least according to what our Founding Fathers might have said.

Consider the counterexample posed by The Shield. Vic and his team pretty much do whatever they want for the first few seasons, and spend the rest of the series paying for their sins. Their corruption is evident from the very first episode, in which they kill a Strike Team member who is snitching to the feds. What's more, the corruption feeds forward, requiring ever increasing acts of immorality--notably the murder of one team member by another--in order to survive. Importantly, though, the show posits that all that extra garbage really isn't necessary to doing the job: we see throughout the show that the Strike Team's more straight-laced counterparts are able to do their jobs perfectly well within the bounds of the law, and get criminals off the street just as effectively. All the moral compromises and corruption that are inevitable in the acquisition of power turn out not to be necessary to do the job, and they wind up to be disastrous to those who practice them. Vic's ultimate fate is actually rather poetic: he is consigned to live out his days in a bureaucratic McJob in order to remain out of jail, effectively shut out of power and consigned to work at a place where everyone knows he's a cop killer and then to be out of a job and unemployable in three years. My guess is that Vic eats his gun at some point shortly after the end of the show rather than go through life without having the sort of power he once wielded. It's fitting, though: Vic allowed himself to get turned into a monster, everything and everyone that mattered to him, and it all turned out to be for nought. One could not have asked for a better ending to the saga.

The other major political show of the Bush years, Battlestar Galactica, was acclaimed by both the left and right because of its material. On the surface, there is certainly enough there to allow differing ideological readings of the show, but it is pretty unambiguously a critique of the Bushian worldview. The central question of the Bush years has actually been pretty simple: what can a civilized people reasonably do to survive when surrounded by vicious and uncivilized killers? In other words, should we do anything in order to survive? The film answers the question in words that any viewer ought to remember: "It is not enough to survive," Commander Adama [Edward James Olmos] says, "one must be worthy of survival." The show has sought to portray the challenges of being civilized in an uncivilized world, of preserving liberal democracy in a universe that has suddenly become less hospitable to those ideals. And, despite some hiccups here and there, the humans in Battlestar generally stayed true to their ideals. It's an inspiration to us all.

The show has also shown us the alternative to staying true to liberal democratic values. This was done during the show's second season in a several-episode arc that centered around Admiral Cain, played with scary self-assurance by Michelle Forbes. Cain cuts a very Bushian figure in the show: she is definitely "the decider" and if you disagree with her, you are not likely to like the consequences. Cain's reaction to the Cylon war, as it turns out, was eerily similar to George W. Bush's response to 9/11: rather than thinking of the future like Adama, Cain responds with visceral anger. She promises payback for what the Cylons did, her own personal War On Cylons every bit as ill-conceived, dangerous, endless and ultimately nihilistic as the War On Terror has become. She doesn't plan for the future because she doesn't see one--her limitations as a leader prevent her from seeing the forest, and instead of having experience and wisdom like Adama, Cain has only ambition and self-assuredness to fall back upon. These qualities served her well in advancing up the ranks and getting her flag at such a young age, but they prove positively toxic in the post-human genocide world. Cain's payback mission, naturally enough, comes to include torture of a Cylon prisoner, which has the entirely predictable effect of turning the surviving Pegasus crew into a deeply nasty group. One can only debase other peoples' humanity for so long without realizing that you've lost your own. It doesn't seem to bother Cain too much that her crew seems to consist entirely of rotten apples and decent people who have been so thoroughly cowed to stand up to her (like her XO). Like Bush, Cain polarizes her people. And like Bush, rather than seeming tough, Cain comes off as a rather weak leader who can only act tough despite not having a clue about what the situation is and what to do next. The analogy isn't perfect, as BSG is wont to do: Cain is actually a technically proficient commander who knows her stuff and isn't a total incompetent like Bush. Still, watching the BSG episodes with Cain is a lot like watching the past eight years all over again: you can't help but ask yourself what was she thinking? before it becomes clear that she never thought about anything, aside from the mission at hand. It represents the frustrations of the Bush era in a particularly vivid format. One wishes that the show had kept up this level of political relevance in its past two seasons.

Between these two shows, a viewer decades from now ought to be able to piece together what was going on with the Bush Administration: it was an administration that opportunistically used circumstances to enhance its own power, and when it came time to flex that power, it has done so in ways that betray a lack of vision, a disconnect from civilized Western values and an inability to lead. To know the Bush Era is to know the most base of humanity: brutality disguised as concern, contempt for civilization disguised as caution, mere words disguised as a strategy. Never in my lifetime has the exit of a group of people from power been so eagerly awaited, and they will not be missed.

Bond and Star Trek

I enjoyed the most recent Bond film. Quantum of Solace was a thoroughly solid action flick, which is generally a genre I tend not to like because it comes second only to the romantic comedy in terms of its obsequiousness to the old formula. Still, QoS continued in the tradition of its immediate predecessor: it has retained its darker and grittier vision of James Bond, to its great credit, and it has constructed a second villain who is less a crazy strongman or world domineer, but rather a pathetically effete European jetsetter. During the Pierce Brosnan years, that description would have sufficed to describe Bond himself. How the times have turned...

I was a great admirer of Casino Royale, and I'll admit that that film was better than Solace in several ways. Royale was, in my humble opinion, pretty much damn near a perfect film. Solace is more flawed, but not as flawed as one would imagine from reading the reviews. I think that much of the vituperation from reviewers is more of a reaction to the realization that the old Bond is dead for good, and that the Bond people are going with the "newer" Daniel Craig model of James Bond. I put newer in quotes because it's actually the older version of James Bond from Ian Fleming's books, though with more of a leftward twist, of which I definitely approve. Brosnan as Bond was an upper-class, uber-suave spy who seemed to generally enjoy life and had no palpable toughness. Daniel Craig is the complete opposite: he looks good in a tux but there wasn't the practiced poise, no whiff of eveningwear and elegant soirees. Craig's Bond is working class, all the way, and as a man he's damaged goods--lethal, dangerous, dark, able to seduce women easily, but at heart he's a disappointed romantic who shrugs off all the emotional entanglements. Sean Connery is, of course, the gold standard for movie portrayals of James Bond, but Craig is the only other actor--with the possible exception of Timothy Dalton--who makes any effort to portray Bond as an actual dude instead of an icon (or a caricature). People who were fond of the Brosnan Bond and the intermittently fun escapism of his time on the clock who liked the old formula--and who probably figured that Casino Royale would lead to a revival of the old Bond, with a return of John Cleese and all the gadgets--are realizing that that is not going to happen, and they're upset. On its merits, though, Quantum of Solace announces, for all those who chose not to see, a new era of Bond. And I'm pretty enthusiastic about it.

I'm rather less enthusiastic about the upcoming Star Trek movie, partly for the reason Peter Suderman identifies here--that J. J. Abrams tends to concoct shallow melodramas that go through the motions aptly enough but are pretty soulless (like, say, Mission: Impossible III). I don't expect action movies to be especially soulful--soft bigotry of low expectations and all that--but I would like Trek movies to tell a Trek story every once in a while. The last one that tried was Star Trek: Insurrection, which was middling but not bad, although the ideas were hoary. I expect Star Trek to be a big slab of red-blooded action-adventure that doesn't really bother to try to communicate optimism for the future or any vision of society, and certainly not any sort of political message. (BTW, it really dismays me to see Spock engaging in hand-to-hand combat in the trailer--has he ever thrown a punch? What about the Vulcan nerve pinch?). We wouldn't want to get Trek in the middle of a red-vs.-blue conundrum, despite the fact that it was sort of an arch-left show back in the 60s.

Trek became irrelevant as a result of many factors. Surely, the subpar storytelling that plagued later seasons of Voyager and the two most recent movies is important to this discussion. The sheer amount of product that those folks put out might have led to some fatigue, and the now plentiful sci-fi offerings on TV and elsewhere have made Trek a victim of its own success. Then again, the fact that the Star Trek curators decided to turn Voyager's worn-out ass into the flagship Trek while ignoring the superior Deep Space Nine gives you some hint as to why the franchise has gotten so dire.