Stop Frame

You scored as Serenity (from Firefly) . You like to live your own way and do not enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you that you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (from Firefly) 94% Millennium Falcon (from Star Wars) 81% Moya (from Farscape) 75% SG-1 (from Stargate) 75% Bebop (from Cowboy Bebop) 63% Galactica (from Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Enterprise D (from Star Trek) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (from The Matrix) 56% Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? v1.0 created with QuizFarm.com

This looks so cool. And since it's old news to much of the world, yet still Coming Soon to the United States, here's a review . Those who underestimate the power of comedy to topple empires do so at their own peril. Betcha not one mullah in Iran is laughing.

Rumor has it that Saddam Hussein has been hanged from the neck until dead, dead, dead. I have something to say about that: Hurrah! I am a reluctant supporter of the death penalty. By "reluctant" I mean that I'd rather there was a better way of dealing with sociopaths and psychopaths. Some day we may be able to do something a la Babylon 5 , and just wipe their evil personality away and replace it with something useful to the community. But alas, that day is far, far in the future. I laughed outloud earlier this year reading an article in the New York Times . To paraphrase the headline: "For more and more, life imprisonment means dying in prison." The gist of the article was to express shock and dismay that someone sentenced to life imprisonment would actually (gasp) remain in prison for the rest of their life. It's that shock that reminds me to support the death penalty, because the plain fact is that your typical left-leaning moonbat would, at some point, ...

Yeah, it's a minor gripe when compared to all the other crap in the world, but I've long thought I'm currently living in exile in the Sacramento region. I was born and raised in San Francisco, you see, and even after 20+ years I've not adapted to this alien valley existence. Prime examples are that I have to wait another week to see Children of Men , which doesn't open until January 5, 2007, in Sacramento. And though today is the official opening day for Pan's Labyrinth , good luck in figuring out when it might pop up in my neck of the woods. Near as I can find out, "sometime in January 2007." There aren't a lot of films that I care to go see at the theatre, but these were the top two for 2006. Now I have to wait until 2007. Days away, sure, but I told you up front, this is a minor (if annoying) gripe.

A marvelous start : History, a wise man said, is a pack of tricks we play on the dead. Very well: Let's get out the deck and deal. As we stand on the cusp of 2008, let's look back on the follies of 2007. North Korea returned to the negotiating table and announced it wants a Playstation 3 and a ham sandwich. Also a pony. Talks broke up when the Americans refused to supply a Playstation because they bought North Korea an Xbox last time, and it just sat in the closet. Laugh outloud funny. My favorite bit: North Korea tested a nuclear bomb attached to a medium-range missile; it was headed towards a U.S. carrier group before it was destroyed. The United States subsequently tested several nuclear missiles on North Korean soil. The tests were successful. Hee!

When I first wrote about Superman Returns , I said I had the flu, skipped through it, and would really need to sit down and watch it start-to-finish. I thought I might need to have Kleenex handy. Well I watched and no, I didn't need Kleenex. I did need caffeine, though, so luckily I had my Starbucks Barista Expresso Machine . I stand behind most everything I wrote initially. The strongest part of film is that it offers no easy out of the threesome, Superman, Lois, and New Guy. The inner conflicts involved are nicely rendered, if never solved. I hope that Spider Man 3 does as well in this regard. But now having seen the entire thing -- twice, mind you -- the overall feeling is...ugh. The entire Lex Luthor plot is as bad as I first thought. He's not a menacing villain, or even particularly funny. He's just...ridiculous. And he's surrounded by morons. No, seriously, genuine morons. Only Parker Posey does well, but then again, she always does. (Yeah, I've got a cru...

Absolute brilliance : Basically, what we have is a series of anti-consumer DRM infections masquerading as nothing in particular. They bring only net negatives to anyone dumb enough to pay money for them, and everything is better than these offerings. They sell in spite of the features they tout, not because of them. The manufacturers still have the balls to look you in the eye and say that they are selling because of the programs/features/DRM. Marketers, what a laugh riot. In the end, every step in this chain of consumer woe that is Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Live, VIIV, HDCP, MCE and Vista is flopping. And that is where the better choice comes in. The consumers have voted with their dollars, and are staying away in droves. All the walls of the walled gardens are being built higher and higher, with the occasional brick landing on the head of someone who pulls out a credit card. Buy now, there is a brick with your name on it whistling down, operators are standing by. In the mean time, Piracy,...

I have recently become a House addict. Like the Vicodin-gobbling doctor, I can't get enough. This addiction is difficult for me, since I don't subscribe to either cable or satellite, and I can't find an antenna good enough to allow me a decent television signal. So on a friend's recommendation I Netflix 'd the first DVD of the first season. Once hooked, I moved on to purchase, and bought seasons one and two . Discs in hand, I had a mini-marathon. I've watched 'em all several times. Now I'm an addict. To feed my habit, because I didn't want to wait for the next set of DVD's, I deployed a bit torrent client and snaked down the first ten episodes of season three. Doing this will tide me over until the DVD release of the entire season. I feel like I'm on maintenance at some rehab clinic, since it appears the series is on Christmas hiatus. Damnit. Hugh Laurie does a brilliant job being a complete asshole of a doctor, who happens to have the i...

As I sit here listening to the Hans Zimmer 's score for The Da Vinci Code , I'm wondering how to recover the hours of my life that were lost watching the film on DVD. All right, that's pretty harsh, but it's praising with faint damnation to say that Tom Hanks was duller than dirt. Where the hell did that hair "style" come from? I know he can act, I've seen it, so what happened here? As for Ron Howard 's "directing"...ugh. I'm not a big Howard fan anyway, but he's usually tolerable. I think his two most successful efforts were Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind . This mess is far off his usual game. For all involved, this film garners the question: What the hell happened? And I haven't even gotten to the plot, yet. Wait, was there a plot? Full disclosure: I was born and raised Catholic. My father was the product of a Jesuit education. I spent nine years with nuns as teachers, then one year with the Jesuits in high school, until I f...

Quite often we ask ourselves hard to answer questions, like, “What is a bastard?” And we wax philosophic with metaphysical postulations, incomplete aphorisms, and inconsistent sophisms that make one more and more sure that the only true thing is that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this photo, the guy on the right is a member of a bomb squad in the middle of a deactivation. The guy behind him, well, he's a bastard. [Received by email, original author unknown.]

[Danger, Will Robinson, there be SPOILERS ahead!] I've figured out the secret of Chinese films. They're all about love unfulfilled, love denied. They're all about unrequited love. Look at one of the best, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon . Chow Yun Fat is literally gasping his last before he finally admits his love for Michelle Yeoh . Look at poor Chen Chang , so desperately in love with Ziyi Zhang , and she's so desperately in denial that she literally takes a leap of faith at the end in order to -- we hope -- fulfill that love. You see similar patterns in Hero , House of Flying Daggers , and even Infernal Affairs . And 2046 just drips with lost love, love unfulfilled, unrequited love, etc. I mention all that because in that regard, Superman Returns feels very Chinese. It is all about love denied; it is all about unrequited love. Throughout his history, Superman has been plagued by his relationships with humans, especially -- but not exclusively -- with Lois Lane . ...