This movie is sort of all over the place, sometimes painfully sincere, sometimes veering just for a moment into moderately successful Biting Satire™ and then veering even more widely into slapstick (the joke that Rainn Wilson’s character is accident prone/clumsy is milked dry and then some). Wilson is pretty much still playing Dwight here, but that’s fine; we like Dwight, don’t we?

Still and all, not bad for what is essentially a one-joke wish-fulfillment movie/product placement showcase. The music they cooked up for the band is nice and tuneful pop (wonder who really played it, but wasn’t curious enough to wait out the entire roll of credits and see all the corporate names who paid for promotional consideration) and the kids playing the lead singer and rebel guitarist are plausibly star-crossed.

But, yeah, could have waited for the dollar theater on this one.

My copy has gone missing! I’m tearing my apartment to bits trying to find it and actually considering just buying another one because I really really want to get back to it!!!

This is a great example of non-fiction that reads like a really good novel. The story of the quirky Scotland Yard Art Squad detective Charley Hill and his recovery of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” from the thieves who stole it from Norway’s national museum in 1994, it’s also a good study of the character of the detective and of the romantic myths and seedy realities of the world of international art thieves. As the main story unfolds, Dolnick freely diverts the narrative to accounts, not only of other capers Hill solved, but of famous art thefts of the past. This is partly a technique to prolong the suspense of the main narrative, partly to flesh out the character of this very interesting man, and partly to fill in the background of a subject about which public misconceptions abound. A lot of attention, for instance, is paid to the persistent myth of the shadowy billionaire hiring thieves to steal for his private collection, a myth Hill and others in his field can’t scoff at enough but have to take seriously because it is a big part of why so many crooks think they can steal famous and valuable paintings on spec and find a buyer for them later.

Good stuff!

That’s right, dance number. As performed by one of the “actors” I hate more than any other—Tom Cruise. He’s 2% forgiven for all the other crap he’s perpetrated on us over the years.

But there’s more! Robert Downey Jr. blew me away AGAIN on many many levels. There’s his dead-on take-down of Russel Crowe. There’s his delivery of completely off-the-wall lines “you’re shredded like a julienne salad!”. There’s his ridiculous send-up of token African American character sterotypes.

Normally I’m entirely allergic to Ben Stiller but the movie did a fine job of insulating me from him, with lots of great distractions like the aforementioned dance number, Jack Black’s ridiculous capering as a junkie in withdrawal, and Nick Nolte doing a wicked self-parody.

Lots of sly little nods to Apocaplypse now, as you might expect, but also digs at lots of other movies via the mock
previews at the beginning of the movie, which were almost too ridiculous to be borne. Again, worth at least your matinee dollar for those alone.

My one real quibble? Not enough Steve Coogan. Ever since the brilliant “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” I’ve been a huge fan, and was hoping to see a lot more of him here.

But it all comes back around to the dance number, which made me twitter on coming out of the theater: Tropic Thunder = As wrong as Borat. And I laughed just as hard.

I’m two discs into the first season and I’m hooked. This show is so good I almost wish I still had cable. The cast is great, the writing is great, the storylines are great and the overall style of the show is unbeatable. It was of course the style that hooked me - I’m a big fan of analog technology and 60s design and architecture - and then John Hamm and John Slattery reeled me the rest of the way in. By the time I got into all of the character drama - and there is a lot - I was on the beach and gasping for more.

Soon I’ll hit the wall (well, as soon as Netflix sends me the rest of the season) and then I’ll be sad… I’m glad a second season is already on the air… hurry up and get it on DVD already!

I now find myself returning to this excellent little book every PKD novel, new or re-read, for an additional meditation on what I have absorbed. This is way more than a traditional biography; this is a real attempt to portray the way the man’s mind worked, much the same way Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft book did.

I took this up after hearing of it so often as a sort of source code or touchstone for Gene Wolfe’s massive Book of the New Sun. While I do see certain similarities in setting - the end of the sun’s life cycle leaving it red and weak and swollen in earth’s sky, the end of the world drawing nigh, and magic and science being pretty much indistinguishable - I find Jack Vance’s dying earth to be much closer to, say, that of Conan or John Carter than to Severian’s. This is not a bad thing by any means, just not what I had expected.

It’s also reminding me rather a lot of Lord Dunsanay’s stuff, which is NEVER a bad thing in my book.

I’d recommended it more to my fantasy-reading friends than to my hard sf friends/relatives, though.

And it does not get an “ow my third eye!” though it might have if I’d found it when I was, say, 14 and finally sick of, e.g., Xanth and Elric.

Hmmm… after this I’m seeing Mercer’s pilgrimage (in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) as an iteration of Manfred’s and of Timothy Archer’s. I love seeing connections like that.

Had I not just overdosed on Gene Wolfe’s New Sun I might might not have peered at this book through that kind of lense, but I have and I did, and I’m glad.

Wow!

I was so happy to hear this won the Hugo Award!!! It certainly got my vote!

I’m a fan of the series, which I’ve consumed only on DVD since I don’t have cable, and was a little apprehensive when it came time to take in this last season, which got canceled during its hiatus without any warning. Ratings, I guess, had been on the decline since the spotty but still wonderful third season and the writers were obviously scrambling to get everyone’s attention back… my edginess was justified.

There is still, especially in “The Marked” a good bit of the quirky brilliance that hooked me on this show. “The Marked” is a great episode both as a stand-alone (the freak-of-the-week writes bizarre conspiracy-shattering screenplays as his 4400 ability) and as a continuation of the overall story arc (learning more about Matthew Ross and the baddies who sent him - and Isabelle - into their past) and it made me cheer.

That said, well, it was only one thread in a great big tangle of stuff. An unnecessary office romance. Interesting but ultimately dropped tales of new abilities on the part of early adopters of the shot. The establishment of a 4400 colony deep in the blight zone of Seattle. A political campaign to combat the “p-positive” movement with Sean Farrell as its figurehead. The effort to develop a test to see who would survive the shot…

Sure, every season of every half-decent show juggles a lot of chainsaws in the air, but this felt like too many of them. Maybe it’s just a side-effect of knowing the show was canceled, of bracing myself to hit the wall of irresolution, but I just found this season a mess.

Nice try on wrapping it up and pointing where they’d wanted to be going with the final episode “The Great Leap Forward,” though. I gather from talks with fellow fans that this never got aired. A pity. It shows they did have some plans to go nuts with this.

Mostly I’m just sad it’s gone. Even at its worst/silliest, it was a hell of a lot more fun than most TV out there. And at least we got three and some seasons before the ax fell, instead of, say one (Surface, Odyssey 5, etc).