fine whine

War is hell. That's really all I can say, having finally seen all of HBO's Band of brothers. It's quite a powerful series, following the U.S. Army's Easy company from their training before Normandy up to V-E day, done in a very visceral style. You know, like the beginning quarter of Saving Private Ryan, but much, much longer.

As a series, though, Band falters more than once. Having been spread over parts, each with a different director and other inconsistencies (a couple had a DVD chapter stop right after the opening credits; most didn't) with the styles of visuals and narration, it was more distracting than it should have been. Switching the focus from soldier to soldier is one thing, and not so bad at that, but constantly changing the look and feel of the show meant I needed to get used to each episode's style all over again, every time. In this regard it very much reminded me of From the Earth to the Moon, another HBO (mini-) series*. That show, of course, was much less violent.

Band may be violent, but it never seems inauthentic. The battlefield scenes are almost too vivid (complete with the currently-in-vogue shaky camera motion) and realistic. I've never been in a war and now, more than ever, do I know that I'd never want to be in one either. War is hell. I don't know what more to say about it. I'm not so dedicated to my country, nor so dead-set against some evil to take up arms and fight and potentially lose my life. I suppose I owe my respect to those who do (and for that matter, my freedom and livelihood). So thank you all, but can't we all just get along?

* Also produced by Tom Hanks, oddly enough. His son Colin didn't ever appear in that, to my recollection, and fortunately so. That kid just doesn't have his dad's acting ability, yet.

Instead of my usual exciting start of the workday, this morning I was up bright and earlier, and just sitting around. In fact, I sat around from about eight thirty until just before noon. I was waiting around because Jessica was having foot surgery.

I miss out on all the excitement.

She got through it fine, by the way. With the anesthesia she didn't even know it was happening until it was over.

I, on the other hand, was forced to endure those three hours more or less awake, in the waiting room with nice-looking (i.e. expensive) chairs that weren't all that comfortable for long term occupancy and a television blaring the Fox News channel.

The channel gets a bad rap, I guess, but by not having cable and not watching television in general, I don't run into it very much and haven't formed much of an opinion. From what I've heard their programs are rather abrasive and biased or worse.

Today was a special day, though, and instead of their regularly scheduled programming the channel seemed to be in live crisis mode.

To be honest, the last time I even saw more than a channel flip's worth of Fox News they were in crisis mode, back in September of 2001. They haven't gotten any better at it.

This morning's crisis was across the pond, seemingly a re-hash of the mass transit bombings a fortnight ago. From what I heard, that was quite the tragedy and many lives were lost. All in all, a bad thing. And that's about the extent of my feelings about it. Call me callous or self-centered or whatever but what I feel won't change one bit of those people's lives for the better (or the worse).

But that's last week. Today's crisis was seemingly a series of diversions, detonators detonated without explosives exploded. Of course, at the beginning, we didn't even know that much.

When we first arrived in the waiting room the screen was showing street-level footage of cars, buses and people, interspersed with a map of downtown London with one or two tube stations marked.

Two hours later, that map hadn't changed except that the arrows now pointed to little blue red and white Underground icons, not just points on the map. Woo hoo.

Of course they weren't just showing the map; they also had rivetingly boring footage of the same streets over and over. Occasionally they framed a British station, complete with its own ticker, clock and other eye candy, inside their own ticker and so on. The footage was the same, just an extra border or two.

The real action was in the voiceover. The 'host' was talking to anybody he could find, apparently, some on the scene and others just watching the show. He was asking the people such hard hitting questions as "What do you hear?" and "Do you smell anything?"

This focus on the senses struck me. Obviously there was nothing they could show us, so was this an effort by the news folks to get us to somehow experience some of the chaos and confusion? Difficult to say.

An oft-repeated litany was "We don't know". Nobody seemed to know anything for the hours of the broadcast while I was there. Some people had smelled and heard odd things, and some reported seeing a suspicious tall African American or Asian wearing a hoodie with wires hanging out the back. He eluded the bobbies, but the news people, despite knowing nothing about him other than that "tall African American or Asian wearing a hoodie with wires hanging out the back" so they just repeated that over and over, like some kind of moronic chant, an invocation to call this suspect out of hiding.

That was the main thing that bothered me: they had nothing to tell. Live coverage is only significant if something is happening, and largely, during the hours I heard the show, most everything was unknown or under control. It is a testament to London's emergency response teams that most everything was buttoned down and everyone largely safe.

Anyway, I didn't stick around long enough to get any real facts, so I don't know what actually happened. And you know what? It doesn't matter. Very little that happens in the subways of London is affected by me and what I know, and very little that happens there affects me. I know that terrorism cannot be tolerated anywhere, and it is important to know that something has happened, but I don't need a play by play, especially when nothing's happening.

Another year passes and I fall prey to the ritual I've yet to miss for at least a decade: watching the Superbowl. I didn't even know which teams were playing until two weeks ago, but was able to pick up enough snippets and tidbits (from a conversation in which I was but a silent observer) then to survive simple exchanges now about the game. I wanted to root for Philadelphia primarily because they're the underdogs, and because I don't know offhand of anybody who's a die hard fan of either team to goad or prop up.

Jessica and I ended up watching it by ourselves. 'Twas a big change from past years of big, gala parties thrown by friends, but this year neither of us got around to finding a party to attend nor planned one of our own. Which really isn't that big of a deal anyway, as it wasn't that great of a game to watch, with lackluster commercials and an adequate but not spectacular halftime show. Then again the really good parties have little at all to do with watching the game and mostly with just hanging out. After all, I didn't find out until long after it'd happened about the whole wardrobe malfunction thing, despite being in a house with three TVs showing the game.

Our single TV was tuned into the game over the airwaves, and Fox made sure to tell us every twelve minutes that they were simulcasting it in HDTV, as though we would otherwise let our expensive HDTV tuner and massively wide-screen TV go to waste showing the low-definition, poor people version. Oh wait, we don't have HDTV or a big screen, poor us.

Except that the game wasn't worth it. It was obvious enough even with fuzzy reception that McNabb and company just weren't playing together well, and that the Patriots were all a bit overconfident and lazy. Nobody even got around to trying to score in the first quarter, after all, which lasted several hours and allowed Fox to reveal the real stars: the commercials.

Ford had one for their upcoming Mustang convertible that was vaguely amusing once, but they made sure to play it at least six times. This is, mind you, for a car that you can't even buy for a number of months. Boy, am I hyped or what!

The Pepsi folks got lazy too, re-showing the same P. Diddy in a Diet Pepsi truck one three times, twice in a shorter, worse version.

Jessica laughed at the careerbuilder monkeys (of the YEKNOM office). Overall it seemed that they were just phoning in the commercials. When Fox pointed out that they lost $24 million bucks to plug their show 24 I was dumbstruck that the price had fallen so, and yet was so high. Most companies got more attention by releasing their rejected or 'banned' ads on the web in the weeks leading to today, and they paid a lot less for the eyeballs.

And what was with the countertop/bathtub people? I would have given them some slack if they'd joined Nationwide and the snack food company in using M.C. Hammer, but instead they gave us a bathing Dennis Rodman. Next, please?

Fedex went all out with a self-referential piece on the ten components of a successful Superbowl ad, and for the most part they nailed it. Burt Reynolds probably made more money in those twenty odd seconds than he did with Cannonball Run 2. Oddly enough nobody else really followed their formula too closely, except for the odd Budweiser commercial and its ilk.

All in all, disappointing. Every Mustang repeat was another cringe as much as every time Donny McNabb lobbed a pass into the defense's hands. Also tedious was the glass-breaking sound effects used every twelve seconds by Fox to indicate that a number or letter had changed at the top of the screen. Some twelve-year-old must've thought that was really, really cool.

And why the hell don't they put the down and the yards to go on the stupid status bar? This year they occasionally superimposed it with an arrow (in case it wasn't obvious which way the offense meant to go) on the field, but this wasn't enough and at the same time too much. Just put it up top, dammit.

At last, the game ended and was followed by another eternity of the post-game show which was obvious analysis, stealth advertising, and back-patting. I sat through it only because I wanted to see the pilot of American Dad, and frankly, I shouldn't have wasted the time.

The Simpsons episode before it was underwhelming. I think it may be due in part to my habit of watching shows without commercials, but a general response of apathy grew in me more and more as the show dragged on. It wasn't funny and Groenig and company are capable of far, far better.

Seth McFarlane, on the other hand, is running low on ideas. Though to my knowledge there has never been a sitcom about a family boarding an alien and a talking goldfish, headed up by a government agent, but the whole thing seemed blatantly derivative. American Dad is no, and cannot be, Family Guy, but I think it loses a lot in the efforts made to distance the two shows. Most of which is lost seems to be the offbeat humor and biting satire.

That said, it's entirely possible that such is deliberate, that this is the new That's my Bush! and the whole cliche feel to the show is a witty jab at the very conventions it seems to dumbly flaunt. If so, well, let me know in advance next time, okay?

Next year, I think I'll just download or stream all the interesting bits at my leisure afterwards, and reclaim the evening for something more useful than sitting around watching stuff I don't really want to see. Alas, another year.

It could be the fact that I never watched the show nor was I watching any cartoons in 1968 at all, but Wacky Races wasn't all that interesting. Perhaps if I had seen only two episodes a week for seventeen weeks, spread out over two years or so, instead of thirty-four episodes (actually, two so-called episodes comprise a half hour, but I'll get to that later) in under a week, then I might not be so un-enamored with the show, but whatever the reason it just didn't grab me.

It's so much of the same thing, over and over, oftentimes even the same cels pasted onto different backgrounds or the same gags slightly re-drawn. The announcer begins to grate quickly and the repetition moreso. Admittedly (again) the original audience watched a little bit a week, inbetween other cartoons, and not the entire series at once as I do with this DVD set, but even then I think it would've gotten old quickly.

Of course kids eat this kind of stuff up, I guess.

In a more grown-up sense, although admittedly about childish or at least mischevious adults, is Jeux D'Enfants (Love me if you dare) which Jessica and I just watched. Clearly sold and produced as an Amelie follower if not imitator, it matches the former film in whimsy and colorful palette if not quite the same playful and cute attitude that set Amelie so much apart.

This is, I think, a sad thing, as Jeux D'Enfants gains little from cranking up the color saturation quota. It's really a different movie, albiet with a little of the same ideas. To know that one film would not have been widely released if not for the success of the other is to realize that it is pocketbooks and not plotlines that dictate what we end up able to watch.

I wouldn't even be watching this if not for the fact that the trailer for it has been on every Paramount Classics DVD I've watched from Northfork on back. For that matter, I only watched Northfork because of the trailer for it that showed up on an earlier Paramount Classics DVD. Damn that DVD, whatever it was.

Today we finished watching the third season of 24 on DVD. Jessica had been excited to watch this one in particular with its theme of a virus threat and her epidemiological background and whatnot, but I hadn't been holding my breath. The previous seasons were, I must admit, interesting but even to the beginning a lot of it seemed too contrived and the characters all seemed a bit too capable (Jack Bauer is basically superhuman, even without a good night's sleep) for too many hours.

Also, nobody ever uses a restroom except for conversations, chloroforming or other activities unrelated to, er, personal relief. For something that was trying to be purportedly accurate to the minute, that's a pretty big omission. It's certainly possible that everybody runs off and pees when the focus (split screen style) shifts to another place, but still that's a lot of coordination and inconvenience to organize around.

But enough about bathroom matters. I don't want to say the whole show is crap, though it's not nearly as interesting as other shows I've seen. The suspense is at times obviously exaggerated (in the manner of the brain-destoying pauses after Regis asked "Is that your final answer?") and the show's expectations are far too high for the suspension of disbelief. Then again, given the superhuman capabilities of the agents and villains to resist torture and sleep deprivation and the laws of physics, perhaps the show's creators expect a similar elevation of suspension of disbelief from the audience. They didn't get it from me.

I managed to get myself back on the treadmill, but only for the first thirty or forty minutes of Something's gotta give. That movie was all right but not outstanding, though I would say that Diane Keaton does turn in quite a good performance. Amanda Peet, on the other hand, does not. Keanu Reeves has a role that's no bigger than hers but he plays his far better, and what can you say about somebody who is outshone by Keanu Reeves?

Yesterday I finished packing up my cubicle and I did so in the same fashion that I have done every other move: I packed several containers (this time around they were high-tech Tyga boxes) in a nice and organized fashion several days before the end, and then at the last moments I took everything else and shoved it willy-nilly into the other containers.

All of this just to move into a cubicle that is in fact smaller than my one before.

Enough about work. Yesterday I also finished watching the Wire and it held my interest to the end. I have already reserved the second season DVDs from the library though I'm pretty sure that set hasn't been released yet. It was really, really good. Toward the end I found myself wanting more, though, and not just more afterward but the stuff in between. Though it spans nearly thirteen hours, I got the feeling more than once that the show skipped over side story stuff and didn't delve into other things nearly as much as it should have.

These are all minor quibbles. This show rocks, and I'm disappointed now that I need to wait for my next fix. I suppose I could check out some of the other HBO shows again (I'm at least two DVD seasons behind on the Sopranos and I've never watched Six feet under or Band of brothers), but there's no shortage of them for me to reserve.

It's funny, though. I say that I don't watch TV, and technically I don't. I skip the broadcasts (and paying for premium channels and cable altogether) and wait for them on DVD. So does that count? Snobbery is so precise.