Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

My wife and I saw this film last weekend and one of us really loved it. That would be my wife. I think it is a bad sign when the best part of the movie is the poster by Drew Struzan (though there have been many films where Drew's artwork was the highlight of the production).

My problem with the film mainly is that unlike the other Indiana Jones films, this one just went too far beyond reality with the stunts. I don't mind outrageous stunts and saves, so long as there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that it would actually work in real life. But this thing had a couple of 1 in a billion chance saves (refrigerator) that happened too often (waterfall, waterfall, waterfall), which resulted in me being pulled right out of the film. I thought it started well, but was a real mess by the time they reached the same lost temple they had in National Treasure II. Big stunts are one thing, but they must be grounded in some sort of consistent reality. The big stunts in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull drift into the realm of magic, and if the heroes are going to be magically saved then why should we care about any supposed danger in which they are placed?

David Koepp has written so many great screenplays for Spielberg in the past, that you have to think the problems came from the Lucas story rather than the Koepp screenplay. I have a feeling Koepp was not given the freedom to change things as much as he has on other films because Lucas holds such a tight reign on the story. Lucas has a proven track record of missing the mark by wide margins when it comes to story.

There were also some gaffes in the special effects during the long (too long?) jungle chase, where the digital construct was glaringly obvious for a second or two. Not a lot of time for a miffed effect, but long enough to once again destroy the illusion of reality and sabotage the great work that was on display there most of the time.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did $311 million the first weekend world-wide, but I see a very steep drop coming as not many people will want to sit through this again. Actually the news is already bearing this out as Sex and the City is demolishing it so far this weekend. That's too bad because this could have been a great little action/adventure film if only some restraint could have been exercised.

Bill'O Blowing a Fuse

Joseph Pevney, R.I.P.

Director Joseph Pevney died May 18 of age-related causes at his home in Palm Desert. Though he directed more than 35 theatrical films, including Man of a Thousand Faces and Tammy and the Bachelor, Pevney is best known for directing classic TV shows in the 1960s and 70s. Wagon Train, The Munsters, The Fugitive, Bonanza, 12 O'Clock High, The Virginian, Adam-12, Marcus Welby, M.D., Emergency, The Incredible Hulk, Fantasy Island, Medical Center and Trapper John, M.D. were all shows Pevney worked on, but he is best rememebered for the 14 episodes of Star Trek he helmed.

Among Pevney's episodes are the classics The City on the Edge of Forever, Amok Time, The Trouble With Tribbles and Journey to Babel.

The Trouble With Tribbles, written by David Gerrold, is one of the most popular and most fondly remembered episodes of the original Star Trek series. Jeff Bond, author of The Music of Star Trek and editor of the magazine Geek Monthly said Pevney directed "the first real comedy episode of the series, 'The Trouble With Tribbles,' which was a complete, all-out comedy about the ship sort of getting infested with a bunch of furry creatures. And he certainly worked on some of the strongest dramatic episodes."

Time Amok features Mr. Spock returning to his homeworld for a brutal Vulcan marriage ritual. It is the only episode of the original series to have scenes on the planet Vulcan.

Journey to Babel features the first appearance of Sarek and Amanda, the parents of Mr. Spock. In this episode, the Enterprise must transport dignitaries to a peace conference, with an assassin on the loose.

The City on the Edge of Forever was written by Harlan Ellison and guest-starred Joan Collins. It was one of the most critically acclaimed episodes of the series and was awarded the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The filmed version of The City on the Edge of Forever is considered the best episode of the original series by many critics such as Entertainment Weekly. TV Guide ranked it #68 in their 100 Most Memorable Moments in TV History feature in its July 1, 1995 edition, and also featured it in another issue on the 100 greatest TV episodes of all time.

What I loved about this episode is that unlike most shows on TV, The City on the Edge of Forever features real drama, as opposed to the meladrama we normally see. At the end of the episode, Kirk must make a choice for which there is no good solution; no matter what he picks, he loses and that is the heart of true drama.

40 Years Ago Today From DC Comics -- Green Lantern #62

Green Lantern #62 (On Sale: May 28, 1968) has a very nicely drawn, if not so interestingly colored cover by Jack Sparling.

"Steal Small -- Rob Big" is by Gardner Fox, Jack Sparling and Sid Greene. Hal Jordan is assigned to investigate a series of bizarre robberies in which trivial objects of no value were stolen. While on a date with Eve Doremus, a bandit attacks him and steals a ballpoint pen from Eve as well as a heart pendant that Hal had given her. Hal is knocked out, so he is unable to use his power ring to stop the thief.

The next day Hal learns that the victims of the earlier robberies were robbed again. This time however valuables were taken. Hal deduces that Eve's house will be the next target and is waiting for the crooks when they arrive. He is able to capture several members of the gang.

However all the crooks were not present at the robbery scene. The one that took Eve's pendant uses a device that utilizes light rays absorbed by ordinary objects to see what happened around them. The crooks used the device on the stolen trinkets to learn about bigger targets. When the crook uses the device on Eve's pendant it shows him that Hal Jordan is Green Lantern.

The crooks lure Hal into a trap, but he refuses to admit that he is Green Lantern. While Hal is tied up, the crooks commit another robbery.

Edited by Julius Schwartz.

The Truth Hurts

I've been told that on this blog I have, from time to time, been pretty hard to Hillary Clinton. Some have mentioned a limbo picture as being in poor taste, for example. But I have been a supporter of Clinton for years and that has made it all the harder as this primary "battle royal" has gone on and on, for no apparent reason.

Bill Clinton is all over the place complaining about people telling Hillary to leave the race and people are falling all over themselves to say they never meant that, but why they lie in this way I don't know. Most pundits have been saying she should leave the race and for quite a while now. Bill talks about how others have stayed in races longer and not been asked to leave, but he misses a simple truth about that. People who have something to add to the conversation are always welcome to stay as long as they feel the need. However, Hillary Clinton has nothing to add to the conversation; her policies are almost identical to Obama's. She is not a Dennis Kucinch, who articulates a point of view not shared by other candidates.

You are also free to stay if you spend that time talking policy differences. But Clinton does not do that, she has spent her "extra" time in personal attacks on the candidate that is going to win the nomination, to the benefit of no one in her own party. Yes Bill, others have been allowed to stay, but they understood the rules involved in doing so and played within those guidelines. Hillary has not done this and that is why she should have left the campaign long ago. All she has done in recent months is make it that much harder for her to become the nominated candidate for any position. All she has done is hurt herself and her party and her country.

What her staying in for so long past the point of good taste has demonstrated is that 1) she has a hard time accepting reality when that reality sucks, 2) so far in debt she shows she is incompetent in fiscal management, 3) like George Bush she will rely on others to attempt to body-slam her opponents when she is not getting things her way, 4) since her excuse for some of her recent gaffes is that she was "tired,' it makes you wonder how she would answer the phone at 3:00 AM, and 5) she is just not ready to be President of the United States.

Lastly, and this has been my contention for quite a while, what she does bring to the mix, that Obama does not, is the loathing of a great number of Republicans. Republicans have little to no incentive to go to the polls in November. The Christian right hates McCain, conservatives hate McCain, active military people hate McCain. Except for Joe Lieberman the whole country pretty much dislikes the guy and Republicans are not going to turn out to elect him. This means they will also not turn out to keep Republican seats in the House and the Senate in Republican hands; the top of the ticket is always the draw, or lack there-of. However, Republicans will turn out in mass to vote against Hillary Clinton; they dislike her much more than they don't-give-a-shit about McCain. For the sake of the party and the country she professes to care so deeply about, she must not be anywhere near the Democratic ticket. Her name is toxic to her professed cause.

She continues, even today, to foolishly argue that she is "more electable" and that is just plain nonsense. She make McCain more electable. In the words of Bob Dole: "You know it. I know it. The American people know it." Will someone please let Hillary in on the truth.

The Real McCain

While campaigning this weekend Barack Obama confused Auschwitz for Buchenwald. The Obama camp issued a correction the following day, but Republicans are jumping all over the gaffe, attempting to pounce on the non-story and try to manufacture a scandal. Yeah, we wouldn't want anyone who might make an occasional mistake to run the country, would we?

"Smokin' Jokin', Doing Coke With Leon

I saw Joe Cocker this weekend, along with the Steve Miller Band. Both were great and my wife mentioned how much better Cocker seems to be physically, with, you know, his muscular dystrophy and all. She asked me to look it up when we got home and when I did I have to admit, fuck, I always thought Joe had muscular dystrophy myself. Of course, Joe has no physical problem at all, that's just the way he moves on stage.

I think I got the idea Cocker had MD from the National Lampoon Lemmings album, which was the first place I ever heard John Belushi do his Joe Cocker impression. John made it famous on Saturday Night Live, where he flopped around on the stage like a fish out of water pouring beer all over his body and generally looking like a fool, but also singing a fairly good Joe Cocker. As Ccocker himself remembers...

During the time of "You Are So Beautiful," I was working at Village Recorders, in Los Angeles, and someone comes into the studio and says, "Joe, we've got this video to show you that you're not going to like." I don't know how long Saturday Night Live had been on the air, because I never watched much TV, but when I saw this video of John Belushi doing me being spastic and pouring beer, I became hysterical.

Everyone else said, "Joe, you're not supposed to find this amusing. You're supposed to find this gross and inoffensive."

I said, "Oh, come on. You can't not laugh at this." I didn't even know who Belushi was.

Moving my hand around is subconscious with me. A lot of the time I'm more or less conducting the band, just keeping a feel. I don't know why I do it. It's just one of those things.

I clearly remember the night this aired. I was living in my first rented house and my friend Baron Mrkva was over and we were pretty high. We were sitting on this couch in the TV room and when Belushi started flopping on the floor we both lost it, laughing so hard we fell literally off the couch onto the floor and rolled around holding our stomachs, which were aching from how hard we were laughing.

I can't embed a video of that performance, but the one below is the earlier one from Lemmings. Lemmings was a National Lampoon stage show, a take on Woodstock, the Woodchuck Festival of Peace, Love and Death, where hippies got together for a weekend of music, drugs, sex and suicide. The main actors/writers/performers were a bunch of unknows: John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest.

Listen to Lonely at the Bottom where Belushi sings, "We were makin' musical history. Now I'm workin' for muscular dystrophy."

A Bobble Head?

The St. Paul Saints, a minor league baseball team, are giving away a truly one-of-a-kind promotion at today's game. While many sports franchises hand out bobble-head dolls, usually depicting their players, the Saints are handing out 2,500 "bobble-foot" knickknacks.

According to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, "The keepsakes consist of a miniature bathroom stall with a couple of lower legs and feet. One of the feet is springloaded and 'taps,' which, the Saints' press release says, is in honor of National Tap Dance Day... The team also takes pains to note: 'It doesn't matter if your tapping style is done with a wide stance or is used as some sort of code.'"

Thanks to my good friend Dave Potts for the "heads up" (pun totally intended) on this one!

40 Years Ago Today From DC Comics -- Strange Adventures #213

Strange Adventures #213 (On Sale: May 23, 1968) has an amazing Deadman cover by Neal Adams. DC ran full-page ads of this cover in black and white this month with the blurb "One Picture is Worth a 1000 Words!" (see below).

Deadman stars in "The Call from Beyond" written and drawn by Neal Adams. Continuing from last issue, Tiny is rushed to the hospital after being shot by the Hook. A brilliant surgeon named Dr. Shasti is able to operate and save Tiny's life, but the strong man appears to have lost the will to live. Deadman enters Tiny's body and gives him the strength to survive the ordeal. When Tiny's survival seems assured, Dr. Shasti credits the supernatural with his recovery.

Dr. Shasti tries to convince the hospital board to give a grant for psychic research. He takes them to Madam Pegeen, a psychic, to demonstrate the power of the supernatural. The board is convinced by what they see from the psychic, but Shasti withdraws his support. Reprinted in Deadman #5.

Here is a page of original art from this story that comes to us from Tony Marine's I me mine blog, this being the first piece of Neal Adams artwork Tony purchased. I love the simplicity of the inking on the Deadman figure in the first panel; just amazing stuff and Tony is fortunate to own this piece.

The back-up story is "Half-Man -- Half-Alien" drawn by John Rosenberger.

Edited by Dick Giordano.

It's Only A Flesh Wound!

Guts, Leadership and Brass Knuckles

From the good people at The Daily Kos:

The contents of the Downing Street Minutes confirm that the Bush Administration was determined to go to war in Iraq, regardless of whether there was any credible justification for doing so. The Administration distorted and misrepresented the intelligence in its attempt to link Saddam Hussein with the terrorists of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, and with weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not have.

In addition, the Downing Street Minutes also confirm what has long been obvious – that the timing of the war was linked to the 2002 Congressional elections, and that the Administration’s planning for post-war Iraq was incompetent in all its aspects. The current continuing crisis is a direct result of that incompetence. ...

President Bush constantly talks about the 'progress' that is being made in Iraq against the insurgency, but he’s looking for good news with a microscope. All anyone can see is 'Mission Mis-accomplished' and the continuing losses of American lives, the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the torture scandal, and the ominous decline in our nation's moral authority in the world community.

We know the Administration had been planning to invade Iraq for many months before the invasion actually began. We know the Administration twisted the intelligence to make the facts fit their plan. We know that the Administration never really intended to give the U.N. weapons inspectors a reasonable chance to succeed. The Downing Street Minutes demonstrate that the Administration knew their case for war was paper thin, and that in order to go into war with the support of our allies, we had to demonstrate some willingness to go along with the UN inspection process. But the Administration continued to misuse its intelligence, distort the facts and pay only lip-service to the UN’s role in disarming Iraq.

We never should have gone to war for ideological reasons driven by politics and based on manipulated intelligence. The Downing Street Minutes provide even more proof that this is exactly what happened on Iraq. The Administration's dishonesty, lack of candor, and lack of planning have brought us to where we are today, with American soldiers dying, Iraqi civilians living in constant fear, and with no clearer picture of our strategy for victory in Iraq than when we started.

---Sen. Ted Kennedy, June, 2005

40 Years Ago Today From DC Comics -- Beware the Creeper #2

Beware the Creeper #2 (On Sale: May 21, 1968) has a cool cover by Steve Ditko.

(The Many Faces of Proteus) is by Denny O'Neil and Steve Ditko. An impostor posing as the Creeper interrupts a live television broadcast and commits a murder. Jack Ryder witnesses the scene and is assigned the task of apprehending the killer. His boss suspects a connection between the Creeper and racket boss Legs Larsen, so Ryder begins by crashing the gangster's gambling party. When Ryder confronts Larsen as the Creeper, a masked man shoots the gangster. Larsen then passes along information to his foe before dying.

The Creeper learns that Proteus, a master of disguise, has taken over the local gangs and framed him for murder. Proteus tries to get the information back from Jack Ryder and sets fire to his apartment. The Creeper and Proteus fight it out in the burning building.

Edited by Dick Giordano.

Stout on Elder

I spent part of this Sunday, for the first time in about six months, at William Stout's studio for the Sunday "Worshiping at the Throne of Feminine Beauty," or as I like to call it, drawing naked girls. My job makes this much harder to do than it used to be, seeing as I am in Florida most of the time, and the time away sure showed up in my artwork.

I thought most of the drawings I did sucked, but making up for my lack of artistic skill was talking to Stout about Bill Elder. Little did I know at the time that Bill had just put his thoughts on Willy down on paper, well, CRT anyway.

Woodstock for America

A SLIC Time

Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of EDS this week got me thinking about my time with Electronic Data Systems, or Ed’s Bar and Grill as some of the people there called it. I was just in the process of being made a manager at Amtec Information Services when we were purchased by EDS. The manager I was replacing, Giovanni Reynaudo, was the man responsible for me getting seriously into programming.

I had been employed as an editor at Amtec (and two other names the company had gone by) for a couple of years. During that time I had become quite proficient at writing EXEC, EXEC2 and XEdit macros, not realizing that these were programs. Giovanni spotted my work and one day asked if I would be interested in working on the coding of the proprietary typographic software that our company created. I told Giovanni that I didn’t know how to program and he told me that I did, that he had seen it. Long story short here, I became a programmer by name and occupation that week and within a year Giovanni and I were neck-deep in rewriting the SLIC and SuperSLIC languages in our own images. SLIC stood for the Symbolic Language for Illustrated Composition and it was an IBM 370 Assembler Macro language that ran on a number of IBM mainframe operating systems. SuperSLIC was what we considered the ultimate format-driven generic composition system.

When I took over the lead role in developing these two products, SLIC was about 7,000 lines of Assembler code and SuperSLIC was about 12,000 lines of code on top of that. When I left the company six years later, the software had more than tripled in size, doubled in functionality and ran 20% faster than when I had started working on it. SuperSLIC had three separate macro languages imbedded inside it and when I got hold of the software these languages were a shambles of inconsistency. I removed the inconsistencies and then worked on improving all of them.

You may wonder why one program needed three macro languages and it is a good question. In reality the program could have gotten away with only two. SuperSLIC was a two-pass composition system. The first pass created composed typographic galley: lines of type, paragraphs, illustrations, footnotes, etc. The second pass placed that galley into pages. While galley creation was a pretty straightforward process, pagination was a series of trial-and-error passes, filling a column, then another, then squaring them, then backing off space for footnotes, floating blocks of text/graphics or structure changes (from say two columns to three columns, etc.), then starting the page over with the building of the first column again and over and over.

Each process had its own macro language, which were different because they did much different things and saw much different types of data. There was a second galley macro language that could do just about anything, but it was harder to use that the main macro language which we called “structured editing.” The “unstructured editing” was very powerful, but very hard to implement correctly. There was only one form of “pagination editing.”

Besides bringing consistency to the macro languages, I brought new concepts as well. I added new commands to the languages, the concept of functions, then nesting of functions and a short-hand way of declaring multiple and or sequential search values. I made sure that everything I added was done modularly, so that a new functionality could be called and used by many different areas of the program or attached to many of the new and existing commands.

At every opportunity I looked for limitations and tried to remove them. For example, the language had seven or eight different types of floating blocks. One type would appear where it was encountered or float to the top of the next page. One type would only appear at the top of the next page. One type would appear where it was encountered or float to the top of the next column (if it fit). One type would appear where it was encountered or float to the bottom of the current page. One type would only float to the bottom of the page. One type of block was hard-coded so that it would only appear at the top of a specified page. One type of block would jump in front of existing blocks waiting to be output. I took all of the logic and mapped it to a new type of super block that could perform any and all functionality. Then I exposed this new block as a new command that allowed the user to mix-and-match the floating logic. This allowed for hundreds of different types of blocks to be created by the user, yet allowed all the existing blocks to continue working as normal even though internally they were being converted to the new super block format.

I’m actually very proud of the work I did on this software and I really loved working with the 370 Assembler language which was unforgiving but elegant and straightforward in nature.

Next time I get back to this subject, I will tell you about the biggest failure of my career and the day I showed up at work and waited to be fired.

Holy Unannounced Cameo Batman!

As I watched CSI two weeks ago I couldn't help but notice this unannounced cameo appearance by the Mythbusters:

40 Years Ago Today From DC Comics -- Bomba the Jungle Boy #6

Bomba the Jungle Boy #6 (On Sale: May 16, 1968) has a kinda cool cover by Jack Sparling. This issue gets a new logo as editor Dick Giordano tries to save this struggling book.

Inside we have (Krag) by Denny O'Neil and Jack Sparling. This is O'Neil's first full script for DC coming over from Charlton with Giordano. Denny O'Neil would become one of DC's premiere writers.

Edited by Dick Giordano.

Having Your Ass Handed To You, Part II

Keith Olbermann nails Bush's ass to the barn door! Watch it all and tell me if Olbermann edited himself in the last sentence; he wanted to say "fuck" and said "hell" instead.

This Week in Political Humor

Compiled by The Daily Kos:

"Anybody go down to the Crawford ranch for the big Jenna Bush wedding over the weekend? ... That was so sweet, because at the reception, President Bush danced with his lovely daughter. It's the first time he has led in eight years."
--David Letterman

"It’s going to be a relatively small wedding with only her family’s loved ones---the CEOs of the five major oil companies."
--Jay Leno

"This week, New York City Congressman Vito Fossella was arrested for drunk driving, then caught having an extramarital affair, then exposed for having a secret child with his mistress. Or, as it's known in Washington, the trifecta."
--Seth Meyers

"The price of stamps is going up next week from 41 cents to 42 cents. 'Aw, that's cute,' said oil."
--Amy Poehler

"In a recent speech, Barack Obama said he has visited all 57 states. After hearing this, President Bush said, "Ha Ha! He forgot Alaska and Hawaii."
--Conan O'Brien

Having Your Ass Handed To You

God are these Republicans stupid. You got to wait for it about four minutes and then watch this little weasel squirm!



Another item from the Daily Kos.