Double Spectre.

In the third installment of Watchmen viral fun, we get to venture into the Gunga Diner and try out an 8-bit, Veidt-manufactured Minutemen arcade game. (It’s basically Double Dragon or Kung-Fu Master, except with Hollis Mason, Sally Jupiter, and Moloch.) Some nice touches in here — note the poster for Rolf Mueller‘s circus show. And the date of the game — 1977, a bit early for this sort of sidescroller — might suggest the accelerating influence of Dr. Manhattan…

Basterds and Huns.

Look alive, privates: The teaser for Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming WWII epic, Inglourious Basterds, is now online, starring (among others) Brad Pitt with a ‘stache and nasty neck scar, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Daniel Bruhl, B. J. Novak, Michael Fassbender, Maggie Cheung, Julie Dreyfus, Mike Myers, and Rod Taylor

Hmm. So far, I’m not feeling it. Even notwithstanding the aggravatingly misspelled title, both this and the overly-jubilant AICN set review make Basterds sound like WWII torture porn, or at best another installment of Tarantino wallowing in his grindhouse and Z-movie fetishes for two hours. (See also KB1, KB2, Death Proof.) I hope I’m wrong, and that this is a return to the form of the Reservoir Dogs-to-Jackie Brown years. But, as a AICN talkbacker aptly noted, it’s looking more and more as if QT has gone the self-indulgent, self-derivative way of Brian DePalma.

A Bottle of Jack.

Is this a dagger which I see before me? No, actually that’s a dagger rogue. A christmas present from my brother and sister-in-law which arrived just the other day, this stealthy fellow in the glass case — a lvl 80 undead rogue, for the non-WoW inclined — is a 3-D sculpture (or “rapid prototype,” to be more exact) of my (main) World of Warcraft alter-ego, courtesy of the folks at FigurePrints. (I chose the name JackLowry from here (Jack) and here (Lowry) — everyone on-server usually assumes it’s a Bad Boys reference. Fine by me.)

Apparently, obtaining a FigurePrint is rather difficult at the moment — due to high demand, you have to win a lottery for the privilege of buying one. I can see why. It’s a pretty cool and detailed little sculpture, and it’s just the perfect size to make for some tastefully nerdy desk flair in your home or office (and/or to use as a dogwhistle to smoke out your WoW-playing colleagues and co-workers.)

You can get a sense of the size of the statue from the Jack-and-Coke pic below, and, as you can see, he’s already playing nice with President Obama (whom, unlike Jack here, I’ll liberate from the packaging someday.)




Growing Pains.

Apologies if you’ve had any trouble coming by the site over the past few days. Apparently, the server was being upgraded, which caused several slowdowns and loading errors of late. And I also upgraded to the latest version of MT, which has brought on its own set of minor glitches. At any rate, I think we should be good to go now.

The Whole Truth, and Nothing But.

“Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened.” Judiciary Committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy calls for a “truth commission” to investigate Dubya-era abuses. “‘We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page,’ Leahy said. ‘We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past.” Ok, sounds grand…but perhaps we should stop perpetuating those abuses while we’re at it.

Tortured Reasoning…Again.

“Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same.” Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? The Obama administration and Holder Justice Dept. uphold Dubya’s dubious use of a “state secrets” privilege to put the kibosh on a lawsuit put forward by five men “extraordinarily rendered” by the CIA.

See also a livid Glenn Greenwald for the details: “The entire claim of ‘state secrets’ in this case is based on two sworn Declarations from CIA Director Michael Hayden — one public and one filed secretly with the court. In them, Hayden argues that courts cannot adjudicate this case because to do so would be to disclose and thus degrade key CIA programs of rendition and interrogation — the very policies which Obama, in his first week in office, ordered shall no longer exist. How, then, could continuation of this case possibly jeopardize national security when the rendition and interrogation practices which gave rise to these lawsuits are the very ones that the U.S. Government, under the new administration, claims to have banned?

Update: Sensing the likely blowback, one presumes, the Justice Dept. announces it’ll be reviewing Dubya’s “state secrets” claims in due course. “It’s vital that we protect information that if released could jeopardize national security, but the Justice Department will ensure the privilege is not invoked to hide from the American people information about their government’s actions that they have a right to know.” So apparently, the ugly details of our now-defunct(?) extraordinary rendition policy aren’t among the actions we should have any clue about. Ugh…this one definitely goes in the Carcetti file.

Drinking: A Love Story.

A(n Irish) marriage grown stale and lovelorn. A woman (Eileen Walsh) chafing under the suffocating, sexless domestication of suburban motherhood. A man (Aidan Kelly) emotionally checking out and casting a guilt-ridden, wandering eye at the nubile flesh around town. And a doomed plan (in this case, a tenth anniversary date, not a move to Paris) that will theoretically resuscitate all the feelings this couple once shared… Yes, Declan Recks’ Eden, a 2008 adaptation of a Eugene O’Brien play and the second movie I caught as part of the local Film Forum sunday series, is for all intent and purposes, Revolutionary Road with brogues. And yet, in the end I enjoyed Eden a good deal more than the Kate-&-Leo-gone-sour show.

It helps that Eden is a low-key, naturalistic affair, and — a few gamy symbols and some late-film Catholic flourishes aside — it isn’t burdened with the stilted pretentiousness that marked Mendes’ movie. But I also found the depiction of marital purgatory here considerably more realistic than the histrionics of those Revolutionary Wheelers. Rather than rage against the dying of the light, Breda and Billy, the two (former) lovers here, have just grown physically and emotionally distant. Breda the bored housewife now spends her days indulging in bodice-ripper-type sexual reveries that even she knows to be a little sad, while Billy — like no small number of Irishmen before him — has basically just disappeared into the bottle. And rather than engage in knock-down, drag-out fights as per the Wheelers, it is awkward silences, pleasantries exchanged around the (more intrusive and realistic) children, and the solace of the local pub that are the symptoms of Billy and Breda’s decay.

Nothing surprising happens in Eden, and, trust me, it’s probably not the best movie to rush out and rent for Valentine’s Day regardless. But, as a portrait of two well-meaning people drowning in quiet desperation, I found it worthwhile nonetheless.

Awash in the Juice.

Breaking over the weekend, thanks to Selena Roberts and David Epstein of SI: Yankees star Alex Rodriguez — and 103 other MLB players! — tested positive for steroids in 2003. Given what we already knew about the sea of performance-enhancers in baseball, this isn’t really a huge surprise, and as I said of Barry Bonds, I’m not even sure juicing should be deemed a mortal sin anyway. Still, as pro-athletes go, A-Rod is almost as easy to dislike as Kobe, so I’ll fess up to a bit of schadenfreude in this case.

That feeling also extends to the rending of garments now happening among the “Baseball is America‘s game!” crowd in the wake of the A-Rod revelation. This notion that baseball has some special place in our hearts — a “unique paragon of American culture,” as Jayson Stark effusively puts it in this example — is a sentiment I’ve never shared and don’t particularly agree with. (Besides, the sport survived the 1919 Black Sox. It’ll survive the juice.) And, in my pantheon of annoying sports fans, the baseball purists are right up there next to the bandwagon jumpers. Take me out to the Ball Game…but please don’t sit me next to the stats obsessives or self-appointed diamond historians.

Brooks Was Here.

James Whitmore, 1921-2009. “Although not always politically active, in 2007, Whitmore generated some publicity with his endorsement of Barack Obama for U.S. President. In January 2008, Whitmore appeared in television commercials for the First Freedom First campaign, which advocates preserving ‘the separation of church and state’ and protecting religious liberty.

Public Service Announcement.

Here’s one to grow on: If you’re looking to represent the little people by taking on a cabinet position in our nation’s government, please deign to pay the taxes you owe on your chauffeurs, nannies, sinecures, and assorted other luxuries. Thanks much.

Also, for what it’s worth, I guess it’s possible that Tom Daschle was really God’s Gift to Health Care Reform, as he was recently made out to be when his nomination tanked. (His ideas seem solid, but, his book aside, we didn’t see that much of that side of him when he was Harry Reid 1.0 for years and years.) But I think it’s just as likely that his strong lobbyist ties would’ve made him ineffectual in the post, and the Daschle-friendly administration — a lot of candidate Obama’s core people were Daschle hand-me-downs — wouldn’t ever have been able to cut him loose. So, all the recent teeth-gnashing aside, this might very well have been a blessing in disguise.