Coyote Blog

Kevin Drum and I disagree about many things.  I read his blog specifically to find things to refute.  But it turns out we had the exact same two reactions to Quantum of Solace:

Now, I also happen to think Quantum of Solace wasn't a very good movie. The pace was so frenetic "” chase, fight, chase, fight, chase, fight "” that there was hardly any story that seemed worth following, and what story there was just wasn't very interesting. (Cornering the water supply of Bolivia? Seriously? And you thought the later Roger Moore movies were ridiculous?)

My reactions were here and here.

• I added some updates to my negative review of the new Bond film.  I said:

I feel I need to clarify one thing.  I am a huge fan of the old Bond movies.  Goldfinger, Thunderball, Diamonds are Forever, Goldeneye -- all great.  Despite my comments above, I even like most of the Roger Moore films, though you have to take a different approach to them.  But the formula was tired.  The Survivor formula was hugely popular at first, but in season 9 or 10 or whatever, it's just done.  You either are repeating the same tired cliches, because you feel locked into a formula by your fans who will get pissed (as they did with Casino Royale) when you violate any minute detail the Formula, or you fall into the trap of trying to top yourself with goofier and goofier plots.  I actually thought the series was dead around about View to a Kill, but Pierce Brosnan really brought new life to the series for a while.

Oh, and I wanted to really make fun of the plot in the new movie, because it really is a great WTF moment, but I didn't want to include a spoiler, since there is some mis-direction in the movie.  However, the spoilers have already come out in the comments, so if you are interested, I reveal the incredible world-shaking evil plot around comment #6 here.

• I saw a trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie, which could essentially be called "young Spock and Kirk."  It could be good.  Talk about a franchise, though, that has been milked to death.  A new take would be refreshing.  We'll see.  Never forget Battlestar Galactica - from the ultimate in goofiness came one of the better science fiction series to hit television.

• The note above reminds me of an idea I have for a movie that I think would be a no-brainer.  The Star Wars clone wars stuff has pretty much lost me  (actually the dialog in episodes 1-3 pretty much lost me).  But I always thought a young Han and Chewie movie - how they met, various pirate adventures, young Lando, etc.  would be almost a layup to make succesful.  I am increasingly convinced that that the Star Wars movies were good almost in direct proportion to how much Han Solo was on the screen  (well, maybe pre-dryfreeze Han Solo -- after he was unfrozen, he was a little goody-two-shoes for my taste.)

First, I want to preface that I absolutely loved Casino Royale.  I had expected not to like it, being skeptical of Daniel Craig and the apparently trendy substitution of Texas Hold'em for Baccarat.  But the movie was fabulous, easily the best Bond ever, and a long-overdue retooling of the franchise.  In comparison, the campy Roger Moore 70's Bond movies are almost embarassing.

All that said, I was disapointed in Quantum of Solace.  The movie was entertaining and worth the price of admission, but two aspects really hurt the movie for me:

1. The directors have adopted the currently popular edgy filming style of action sequences which involve lightning quick cuts and jerky camera pans (used in the Bourne movies, for example).  The style really increases the confusion of the moment, and has its place in creating tension and giving a first person feel to the action, but it gets tiring and confusing after a time.  Compare the opening chase sequences in this movie to the absolutely fabulous chase scene through the construction site near the beginning of Casino Royale.  I thought the Casino Royale sequence was much a better, but I must admit I am a big fan of long tracking shots over quick cuts, so I guess your mileage may very.  There was one shot I thought really cool in the new movie.  Bond and mystery villain #3 or 4 fall through a glass ceiling, and you fall with them POV-style. 
2. The movie seems to be a return to the WTF-style plot of a lot of modern action movies, especially sequels, that put one-upping the action sequences of the previous movie over having a coherant plot.  I don't mind twists and turns, but in the end, all the motivations have to make sense.  I mean, how many mystery guys can Bond chase, kill, and then say, well, I guess we'll never figure out who that guy was.  The early parts were like the Seinfeld version of action movies -- they are not about anything, they are just chase scenes.  And, I still don't understand why the bad guys in QoS are doing what they are doing.  Its another one of those "spend a billion dollars in a vast conspiracy to make $100 million" Bond villain plans.  In contrast, Casino Royale was anchored to what I think was the best Ian Fleming book, and it stuck close to the book.  Even when it deviated, for example with the shift from bacarrat to Texas Hold'em, it actually improved the plot, as it shifted to a game that at least involves some skill.

Update:  I feel I need to clarify one thing.  I am a huge fan of the old Bond movies.  Goldfinger, Thunderball, Diamonds are Forever, Goldeneye -- all great.  Despite my comments above, I even like most of the Roger Moore films, though you have to take a different approach to them.  But the formula was tired.  The Survivor formula was hugely popular at first, but in season 9 or 10 or whatever, it's just done.  You either are repeating the same tired cliches, because you feel locked into a formula by your fans who will get pissed (as they did with Casino Royale) when you violate the formula, or you fall into the trap of trying to top yourself with goofier and goofier plots.  I actually thought the series was dead around about View to a Kill, but Pierce Brosnan really brought new life to the series for a while. 

Update #2:  Tigerhawk has similar thoughts

Channel surfing last night, I ran into the Running Man, an unfortunate movie "adaption" of  a pretty good Steven King (as Richard Bachman) book.  For those who have seen one and not the other, they have little in common with each other. 

What I hadn't realized before was just how bizarre the casting for this movie was -- Richard Dawson, the cheesy game show host as a ... cheesy game show host.  Jim Brown, Dweezil Zappa and Mick Fleetwood?  The latter, by the way, as himself but in the future.  Whatever.

But the best part is that the movie has two United States governors in substantial roles -- Arnold Schwarzenegger (California) in the title role and Jesse Ventura (Minnesota) as one of the "stalkers" trying to kill Arnold.  Is this a great country or what?

Do ya'll know any others?  I know Sonny Bono did a Love Boat guest appearance, so there must have been two Congressmen  in one TV episode (with Fred Grandy of Iowa).  There may be a Fred Thompson +1 out there I can't think of.  And of course there were probably some Ronald Reagan matchups, but that is before my time.

Update:  Rob reminds me that the Ventura-Schwarzenegger team can also be found in Predator. 

I went to see Santana with my son last Saturday night, and I can tell you that 67-year-old Carlos Santana is still the man on the guitar.  2-3/4 hours of straight guitar and percussion goodness.

But my new guitar fav's are probably Rodrigo y Gabriela, Mexican guitarists who went from street musicians to stars in Ireland.  Here is Diablo Rojo

And while we are on guitarists, I can't help but give a shout out to fellow Princetonian Stanley Jordan, still the most amazing thing, technically, I have ever seen on guitar.  If it looks like he is playing piano rather than the guitar, that's because his original training was on the piano.  When playing piano, all one is doing is causing strings to get hit.  He wondered why he couldn't just do it directly.  Skip to about a minute in if you are impatient:

Or watch him playing two guitars at the same time in Stairway to Heaven around the 4:00 mark (Jimmy Page had his two-neck guitar but never played them at the same time!)

What is easily, to my mind, the best and most innovative music service on the Internet may be closing soon, as Pandora can no longer pay the royalty rates demanded by record labels.  This is really too bad.  I am a paying customer of Pandora (it is a free service on the Internet, but I pay $30 or $40 a year to listen to it on my Squeezebox streaming system at home). 

I can say with total confidence that Pandora has caused me to buy more music than any other outside force has caused me to buy since my ill-fated flirtation with Columbia House when I was a teenager.  I have gotten streams going that were so great that I had Amazon open in a second window, and was banging out CD orders almost as fast as Pandora could serve up tunes.  I have thought for years that this would be a natural fit for Amazon or iTunes.  Too bad the record labels can't understand this.

I went to see the movie Wanted today, mainly because I am home alone and tried to pick the movie I was least likely to take my wife or kids to.

If you like non-stop action movies with computer game physics and lots of CGI close-ups of bullets drilling through people's skulls that were fired by a smoking-hot assassin babe played by Angelina Jolie who actually had to add tats rather than hide them for this role (and, really, who doesn't?), then you will probably enjoy the movie.  The lost opportunity in the film was the very beginning, which sortof tried to be Office Space without being nearly as good.  But there is certainly a big hint that Office Space was on the director's mind -  don't miss the red stapler, though it didn't look like a classic Swingline.

As an additional note, I see from the previews that someone has done a remake of Death Race 2000, though it seems to bear about the same resemblance to the original as the Running Man did to the original Steven King / Richard Bachman book.  The whole fight-against-the-dystopic-state thing seems to have been lost.  By the way, can't they find any actor other than Jason Statham to portray someone who drives cars fast?

As a final shout-out to SF geeks out there, trolling around on IMDB led me, via Morgan Freeman of all people, to this page which seems to imply a Rendezvous with Rama movie is in the works.

Postscript:  I will never be mistaken for a social conservative, but I did find it odd today that in a preview that was supposedly "approved for all audiences" there were numerous F-bombs dropped.  Update:  OK, I can't be sure that this particular preview was "all audiences."  All the ones that followed were, but it may be they have grittier versions of previews they show before R-rated features. 

Clarification:  Sorry if it was not clear, but I actually did enjoy the movie.  Sort of a guilty pleasure.  Fixed Jason Statham's name, thanks to commenter.

I saw the new Indiana Jones movie with my kids this morning.  It was OK.  The chase / fight scenes were great, and the effects were terrific.  But the plot was so-so  (George Lucas has a writing credit, so I could just refer you back to the Padme** dialog in the last 2 Star Wars movie).  There is sometimes a fine line between good fantasy and silliness, and the movie crosses back and forth several times.  Also, you just can't beat Nazis for over-the-top bad guys.  The Boris-and-Natasha style Soviets just don't serve as well.  Overall, worth seeing if you liked the others, and certainly better than Temple of Doom.  But I wouldn't stand in line to see it.

** Interesting fact that maybe I am the last person in the world to know:  Do you know who the actress was that played the fake Queen / Padme double in Star Wars Episode 1?  I always thought it was Natalie Portman, but that is actually not correct.  It was an uncredited role, and the actress was always in elaborate makeup.  Who was it?  It was Keira Knightly, of Pirates and Beckham fame.

Wow- a video of Jimmy Page in 1957.  For you younger folks, Page was lead guitarist for the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, among others.

I am a big proponent of front projection for serious home theater.  I currently have a 108" wide (not diagonal) projection set up and I paid less for it than many people do for their 50" flat screens.  Unfortunately, it is 720p rather than 1080p, but there is a great new crop of affordable 1080p front projectors that I am lusting after.  This site has very good, complete reviews of front projectors and has just posted its roundup of the best 1080p machines.

Apparently, the 7th Harry Potter book will be split into two movies.  Great.  The second part will be killer, but the first will doom us to watching Harry run all over England camping. 

It looks like Blu-Ray will soon defeat HD-DVD. 

Fans of Toshiba's HD DVD format have been kicked while they're down, this time by Wal-Mart's decision to ditch the format,
and sell Blu-ray players and media exclusively. Effective June, the
move is the result of customer feedback, and an attempt to "simplify"
patron's decisions. This news closely follows Best Buy's decision to
also give the format the boot. Speculation has already surfaced that
suggests Toshiba will abandon their own format "in the coming weeks"...

So file all that HD-DVD software next to your Betamax tapes.  I actually preferred the HD-DVD format, but thought from the beginning that Blu-Ray's position in home gaming machines, which immediately gave them a huge installed based before any of us started buying High Def. movie players for our home theaters, might give it a lead that could not be overcome. 

Most consumers have just wanted the format wars to be over so they could pick the right player and software (I partially avoided this problem by buying a combo player).  This is an interesting consumer-friendly role for Wal-Mart that I have never seen discussed, that of standards-setter.

So here is a message to Blu-Ray:  Now that you are on the verge of victory, you need to clean up your own house.  The creeping standards problem you have had, which has caused early players to be unable to play newer disks, has got to end.  In particular, it is irritating not to be able to play a newer disk because the fancy multimedia menu won't work.  When when you learn that we aren't interested in all that crap and just want the movie to start?  Just because the technology says you can do that stuff does not mean that you should.

Update: Reuters with the same news, and a rumor that Toshiba has already shut down production line.

I really like the HBO series "the Wire" about the Baltimore police force and the pursuit of various drug gangs, which I have been catching up on via DVD.  While season 2 and 3 were not quite as good as 1, they still are quite good.

In many respects, this is a very libertarian series in outlook.  A central part of the show is that government officials nearly universally do wrong and wasteful things.  However, only a few of them are overtly corrupt.  The vast majority are regular folks responding rationally to the types of incentives government employees are given and which result in really bad outcomes.

In fact, I may just be screwed up from too many years in a past life working on corporate performance metrics, but at some level the show is all about incentives.  Even within the drug gangs, there is an interesting interplay between Avon and Stringer due mainly to the fact that though they face roughly the same circumstances and inputs, one has a goal of making money while the other has a goal of reputation and street cred.  I can see now why the Freakonomics blog discusses the show so often.

Oh, and the season 3 experiment with effective drug legalization is also interesting.

Highly recommended.

I was surprised to see on someone's blog that the writers' strike was still going on.  I would think that the biggest danger of going on strike (beyond the lost income) would be that no one notices you are not working.  This seems to be a real danger faced by the writers, and an important reason why you will never see Congress go on strike.

This is really cool.  They recreate the Omaha beach landings with three actors, a camera, a green screen and lots of computer work.  Really amazing results.  Beware anyone whose business model relies on movies being produced in the traditional manner, with lots of actors and props.

In a couple of posts, I warned readers that I thought there might be problems with the new 80meg and 160meg iPod classics  (generation 6).  On two occasions, I tested units at Best Buy stores (two different cities) and found the menu and scrolling performance to be terrible.  The controls were laggy and slow.

An Apple person wrote me to say that my experience was not universal.  I also noted that people were split on the message boards -- some loved their new iPod and couldn't understand the problem, and others couldn't understand how anyone could miss the scrolling problems.

From this and other evidence, I am now convinced that there were either two different batches with different performance, or there was some early software patch that fixed the problem but stores like Best Buy were not applying the patch to their demo models.  The other day I tried the new iPod Classics at the Apple store and was thrilled with the performance.  The menu scrolled beautifully, perhaps better than generation 5. 

So, I still advise folks to try before they buy, but I now am convinced that the new Classic is a great product.  I bought an 80gig over the weekend.

By the way, I have never been anything but enthusiastic (except perhaps to wish for more memory) about the iPod Touch.

A while back, I solicited input on what bands a lover of classic rock should be listening to from the last 10 years.  I got about 40 responses.  Here are some of the more popular recommendations:

First, several people suggested Pandora.com, an internet radio station that will play music based on songs or bands you like.  I have used Pandora for a while and really like it.  I have found a number of albums I really love from this source.  For example:  Frank Zappa's "Shut up and play yer guitar" series of live guitar solos.   RadioParadise.com also had a number of supporters, and I am running it right now as I type.  It streams a fairly eclectic mix of old and new music.

Several bands / albums got multiple votes.  Those included:

White Stripes
Clutch
Corrosion of Conformity
Dream Theater
Queens of the Stone Age
Tool

I will try a selection and let folks know. 

Lot's of support for the most recent Rush efforts, which I already own and enjoy.  Ditto Stone Temple Pilots and the Black Crowes, though I am not sure their best work quite clears the 10-year-old hurdle.  Someone suggested Days of the New -- I own their first album and really enjoy it (acoustic grunge?).  I also own and enjoy both "Burning for Buddy" CDs that several folks recommended, if you are looking for something jazzier.

Lots more recommendations I will check out over time in the comments here.

Update: I asked my college roommate and CATO-ite Brink Lindsey the same question, because I know from several years of living in a confined space that he shared many of my musical tastes.  He writes:

From the mid 90s to the present, my favorite albums are:

Soundgarden, Superunknown
Garbage, Garbage
Kula Shaker, K
The Offspring, Smash
Beck, Odelay
Audioslave, Audioslave (this one's actually from after 2000!)
Kid Rock, Devil Without a Cause (yeh, it's rap but it rocks)
Green Day, Dookie
Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory (from 2000!)

Going back to the early 90s, Metallica's black album, Blind Melon's
self-titled album, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, U2's
Achtung Baby, Nirvana's Nevermind and Unplugged, and Pearljam's 10 and
Vs. are all favorites.

None of this will allow you to claim you have current musical tastes.

Among current rock bands that I know of, I like the White Stripes.  But
that's about all I know.

Soundgarden / Metallica / Nirvana / Pearl Jam sort of represent the new end of my music collection, beyond which I am attempting to fill in the white space.

I saw Peter Frampton in concert tonight from the eighth row of a small venue.  He still puts on a really good concert.  It is really rare to see someone who has been touring as long as he has having so much fun on stage.  The 40 minute rendition of "Do You Feel Like We Do" was worth the price of admission alone.  The show had a little of everything, from some acoustic guitar to a Soundgarden cover.  He ended the final set with his friend George Harrison's "While my Guitar Gently Weeps," which was quite good.

OK, I am tired of getting grief from family and friends for only listening to classic rock.  My collection includes some Metallica and SoundGarden and Pearl Jam, but thats about as new as it gets.  So, here is my request.  Knowing I like classic rock, what albums or artists from the last 10 years should I be exploring?  And please, don't tell me Avril Lavigne because you like her -- Tell me what I will like.

Update:  Holy Sh*t!  If you want lots of comments fast, put up a music bleg!  I'll put up a summary post for all of the results this weekend.

I had eagerly awaited the first installment of Ken Burns documentary on WWII.  While it was fine, it undershot my expectations.  My expectations may be affected by the fact that, unlike the Civil War or other topics he has addressed, WWII has been done to death by documentaries.  It may also be that WWII is so sprawling, its hard to get a handle on in his timeframe.  After all, his series will be much shorter than the classic World at War and even than his own series on Baseball.

As with the Civil War, I thought the focus on a few American cities and the impact of the war worked pretty well.  However, I found the narrator (Keith David) for this particular series sleep inducing, particularly after David McCullough in the Civil War did such an outstanding job (and he was not even a professional "voice") and after the incredible cast of voice-overs in that same series.  Also, the organization seemed bizarre.  Around the 2 hour mark, they seemed to be clearly wrapping up the first episode, with summaries of dead and injured in the first part of the war.  But then all of a sudden they grafted on a short segment about Latinos and the marine raider battalion on Guadalcanal, and even a little snippet about Bougainville.  And then it just ended suddenly.  Made zero sense to me.

TJIC points to more poor decision-making by LOTR characters.  I can't take these criticisms seriously after seeing the Lord of all ring-plan critiques here:

It has been a while since I have posted this, but I am still convinced this is the worst music video ever made.  The only competitor I can think of is if you classified the movie "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as a music video.  Enjoy (or not):

Seriously, this is wrong is so many ways.

I guess I must be the last to find out, but I saw this weekend the Wachowski Brothers (Matrix) were doing a live action movie remake of Speed Racer.  Woah.

Brink Lindsey reminds me it is the anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars.  I happened to be staying in Century Plaza in LA with my family on the day the movie was release, though I had never heard of it.  It was actually a pretty low-budget movie, and was only released on a few screens.  I got dumped off by my family, who was going shopping, in some theater near UCLA and Century City I can't even remember the name of.  Anyway, I and about 20 other people were in the theater that first day, partly I guess because it was daytime and mid-week.   It is the first and only movie I stayed and watched a second time.  I know this makes me a geek, but it really was a transcendent experience for me, though sadly an experienced unmatched in any of the follow-on movies.

Being one of an extremely small cadre to have seen the first one on opening day (really by accident) I felt compelled to see all the others on opening day, a cycle I completed successfully.

I would argue that for its time, against expectations of its day, the opening 30 seconds after the words stop scrolling may be the most amazing and powerful opening of a film ever (starts at about 2:00 into the clip below).  And don't miss that fine exhibition of Stormtrooper shooting at about 4:31.  Enjoy it again:

And don't miss how Star Wars should have ended.  Priceless:

And if you are not Star Wars'd out, try the Stormtrooper Training Video:

Possibly this is one of those things that everyone but me knows about, but Google apparently has a search function for music.  I found it only because I was searching for the Rolling Stones and found this search page.  Its got track listings and ratings.  Kind of cool.