Wii are Distressed with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Hitting One Out of Bounds

Now, I'm all for tough scoring in golf. I've never been one of those people willing to kick a ball out of the rough or improve my lie. Consequently, my golf scores have never been very good – I've always wanted to break 100, I've come quite close to breaking 100, but I've never actually gotten there. It vexes me, but one day I'm convinced that I'll get there, it's going to take some work, but I'll get there.

One place where my golf game does excel (and has for years) is in videogames. Okay, so it's not real, but it's still pretty thrilling to put up a 59 at St. Andrews (take that, Old Course!). As with just about any fan of computer- or console-based golf, I like my Tiger Woods, and having a Wii, Tiger is just about essential. This year, as has been widely reported and reviewed, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 for Wii added a cute little device called WiiMotion Plus to the mix. WiiMotion Plus gives an added sense of "touch" to the game by enabling the controller to better mimic a player's actions. For me, it made buying the new version of Tiger, even though I had one from a couple years ago, absolutely necessary.

It was a great purchase, I'm thrilled with the game. This new version of Tiger is as close to actually playing golf as I've ever come on a computer or console. However, it's not perfect. I've noticed a preponderance of lip-outs – that annoying moment where the ball circles the hole or dips into the hole only to come back out again. Oh sure, that should happen from time to time, but they do seem to occur with a little too much frequency in the game.

While distressing, that is the sort of thing I can learn to live with, the sort of thing that I can accept. After all, I'm still shooting in the low-60s, just about 40 strokes better than my real-life scoring average. Today though I encountered a completely new facet of the game, one that makes it much harder to love the program. I like to think of this new problem as ultra-tough scoring, and unfortunately, it's not a difficulty setting that can be altered. Having perfect touch one won't help this one, it's just the sort of thing you have to suffer through. Here, have a look at exactly what occurred:

To be clear, I hit the ball from the fairway, landed it just beyond the hole, and the ball trickled back oh-so-beautifully into the cup. Normally, that's just the sort of thing you hope to happen. In this case, Tiger informed me that I'd hit the ball out of bounds. Since when is in the cup out of bounds?

In the past, EA was able to beautifully mock an error in the game which allowed golfers walk on water, literally. There was a specific moment in the game where, a ball hit into the water would float, and a golfer could go out and hit there next shot (the Jesus Shot, if you will). For the Tiger edition the following year, EA went out and made this video as a response:

That error probably allowed for easier scoring (what with no penalty for puting the ball into the hazard), and too easy scoring has been one of the criticisms of the series.  This error however seems to overcorrect the problem.

Maybe they'll work it out next year…

Can Royal Pains Ever Achieve Greatness?

After several weeks of watching it, I find myself totally and completely unconvinced by Royal Pains. I'm not saying that it's bad, I'm not even saying I dislike it, I'm just saying that I don't get it.

Watching the series I have the very strong impression that I'm supposed to like it, that I'm supposed to find it witty and clever and just generally awesome. I don't. I think all the characters are fine. I think all the actors are fine. I'm okay with everything that takes place on the show, I'm just not so enthused and I really think I should be.

I had the same sense with another USA series last year, and ended up deciding that instead of just not being enthused with In Plain Sight, I passively disliked it (I removed it from my TiVo Season Pass list, otherwise the dislike may have become active). Royal Pains isn't like that—I don't have any dislike of the show, I'm not even anywhere near removing it from my TiVo list, I just feel… blah about it. How is that possible?

I don't want to remove it from my TiVo list, because I honestly think it may become fantastically fun and wonderful. After watching the first half of every episode though I end up deciding that the show will not be becoming fantastically fun and wonderful this week, but that greatness still may be just beyond the horizon. Who knows? Maybe it is.

Maybe next week I'll decide that Evan R. Lawson (Paulo Costanzo) is the greatest sidekick ever and oh-so-much better than Costanzo's character on Joey. Right now though, he's just oh-so-much better than Costanzo's character on Joey.

Maybe next week I'll decide that Jill Casey (Jill Flint) is believable as a hospital administrator, because right now she isn't. It's not Flint's fault, Flint makes Casey believable as a character, but I'm not seeing how that character runs a hospital, even a sad little local one.

Maybe next week I'll decide that Divya Katdare (Reshma Shetty) is a fully-fledged character, there are definitely hints that she might be. Right now though, it feels like she just exists on the show because someone somewhere in the development process realized that the show was terribly monochromatic and desperately needed some diversity.

Maybe next week I'll decide that there's actually some semblance of a reason that makes sense for Dr. Hank Lawson (Mark Feuerstein), our main character, to have stayed in the Hamptons in a job he seems so much to dislike. He's been against this "concierge doctor" thing from the beginning, and even when he seems to grudgingly accept it, he still seems to not like it. I just don't buy that he has to be doing it though. Maybe next week I'll get his motivations, maybe next week I'll believe them. At this point I don't.

I don't feel as though any of these obstacles are insurmountable – perhaps more insurmountable is the fact that almost all of Lawson's rich clients are unlikable, but that too can change. No, most of the problems the show has are things that can be fixed, altered, edited, corrected with time and a little bit of effort. That's why, it seems to me, I'm still on board, it's why I haven't deleted the Season Pass from my TiVo.

For Royal Pains, greatness may be just around the corner, and it's my hope that eventually the show will both reach and turn that corner. I don't think it's a moving target, but it still may not be easy to get to. I'm hoping it does though. I'm rooting for it and not just because I've invested so much time, because I think it has a chance.

Leverage Returns and Dark Blue Premieres

Next week, July 15 to be exact, TNT will be launching its third wave of summer original programming. This time out it's the premiere of the second season of the Timothy Hutton-starrer, Leverage at 9pm, followed by the series premiere of Dark Blue, executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, at 10pm.

At the end of the first season of Leverage, the show appeared to be firing on all cylinders – the stories interesting, the cons fun, and the repartee between the cast members witty. The second season doesn't start out quite as strong.

The finale of season one found the team sacrificing their home base and going their separate ways, which means that a portion of the opening episode of the new season has to be spent putting the band back together. That particular task is actually accomplished quite smoothly, and while the con the team works up is good enough, the problem is the criminal. When the "big reveal" is finally made and the bad guy talks about all his plans, the audience will just be left sitting there in disbelief—the caricature created is foolish in the extreme. It is a case of ripped-from-the-headlines gone horribly awry.

That being said, the stars of the show – Gina Bellman, Christian Kane, Aldis Hodge, Beth Riesgraf, and the aforementioned Timothy Hutton - still seem in top form for the second season and even when the plot is a weak one, the characters help make up the difference. It is Hodge as Alec Hardison who may be the standout, but he may just get the best lines. In truth, Leverage is a fun show, and even though it has serious moments and tries to have a positive message, isn't a show that takes itself all too seriously. Everyone in front of the camera appears to be having fun, and that certainly helps the audience enjoy themselves.

Dark Blue, on the other hand, is a show that takes itself incredibly seriously. Starring Dylan McDermott, the show is about a group of undercover cops in Los Angeles. While there will assuredly be reviews that call Dark Blue "riveting," full of "edge of your seat excitement," "intense," and "powerful," this will not be one of them. I would actually use the terms "clichéd" and "foolish." The first two episodes of the series focus on two different members of Carter Shaw's (McDermott's) team – in the premiere we're led to worry about whether or not Dean (Logan Marshall-Green) has been undercover so long he's flipped sides, and in the next episode Ty (Omari Hardwick) opts to ignore protocol and go back to see his wife while undercover.

The problem isn't so much that every undercover cop/federal agent movie/television show/miniseries/radio drama has used one of these two storylines before, it's much more that the audience has absolutely no investment in the characters at the point at which we begin to question their actions. The stakes are not properly established and one has to question why Shaw would ever have either of these guys as part of his team, and why he would bring in newcomer and liar extraordinaire Jaimie Allen (Nicki Aycox). The audience is left with the impression that Shaw's methods may be unorthodox, but that he gets results (and is therefore given a long leash). I think we've all heard that one before, right?

In its first two episodes, Dark Blue very much feels like it is simply cashing in on the memory we have of a multitude of other shows that have done the undercover-possibly-dirty-cop-thing better than it does. The episodes fail to break any new ground whatsoever, both simply use standard genre tropes as their main plot points. Dylan McDermott may be a talented, intense, actor, but the material as presented is terribly worn.

The undercover cop genre assuredly has a lot of material to focus on, it's a shame that Dark Blue has initially simply opted to cover old ground.

SciFi? Syfy? Either way, it's Sci-Fi (for now)

Yesterday, the network once known as SciFi (pronounced like sci-fi) became the network currently known as Syfy (still pronounced like sci-fi).  Is it no longer a sci-fi based network?  Well, no, it probably is.  They, technically speaking now don't necessarily have to be, but they launched the new name the same day they launched a new series, Warehouse 13, which is most definitely a new sci-fi show for Syfy.

The easiest way to explain Warehouse 13 – to those who used to watch SciFi anyway – is to cross Sanctuary with Eureka.  Imagine, if you will, that all those cool toys the folks on Eureka make in Eureka ended up in the sanctuary on Sanctuary.  Said new sanctuary could be Warehouse 13's Warehouse 13.

No?  Too goofy?  Okay then, how about this – Warehouse 13 features some Secret Service agents who have been assigned to watch over the vast quantities of miraculous, magical, and altogether dangerous doodads that have been collected for over a century in Warehouse 13.  You know, fun stuff like Pandora's Box (now empty), and Aladdin's Lamp (wish for something impossible and you get a ferret… seriously).  The Secret Service agents get all sorts of fun toys to play with, stuff discovered by the greatest scientific minds ever – things like Philo T. Farnsworth's two-way video walkie-talkie, and a stun gun made by Nikola Tesla (who, of course, is a reappearing character on Sanctuary).

So, Warehouse 13 is essentially the exact sort of show that the SciFi Network used to make, and which one can only assume the Syfy Network will continue to make.  One doesn't have to have watched Warehouse 13 to figure that out though, one only needs to have seen some of the truly swell and fun promos that Syfy used to help launch the change (and their new "Imagine Greater" tag).  The various promos featured characters from SciFi shows which will now be on Syfy and upcoming shows like Caprica (which takes place in the Battlestar Galactica universe before the events on that show) and Stargate Universe (the next series in the Stargate franchise, the last two series of which of course aired – at least partially – on SciFi).

A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but would the bloom come off if we called it a roze? 

In the case of Syfy, I can't imagine that it will.  Warehouse 13 wasn't by any means perfect –  in addition to other issues, the level of seriousness vs. goofiness seemed uneasy at times last night – but it was definitely an enjoyable two-hour experience.  And, who doesn't like Saul Rubinek (as long as he's not Sol Roobinek, I guess, but maybe even then he'd be enjoyable). 

In recent years SciFi was a strong cable network, and the new Syfy seems to be playing to SciFi's sci-fi strengths, so there's no reason to think that Syfy won't be everything SciFi was (and possibly more) in the near future.  The rebranding though may just allow them to expand beyond the niche they've been so successful in.  Is that a good idea?  Maybe.  All I know is that I don't want them to stop making those incredibly bad original movies.

Want to know more about the new Syfy?  Here, check out their "House of Imagination."

Diving into The Deep

In 1975, the film Jaws opened.  It was, as you may already know, a huge hit.  In fact, some argue that Jaws helped bring about the current "blockbuster" era of filmmaking, but that's neither here nor there.  Whether or not Jaws reshaped the film industry (personally, I'd argue that it did), it certainly gave way to a lot of imitators.  It is a truism of any form of media that upon witnessing the success of something, someone else will try and duplicate that success with a similar item.  Thus, 1977 brought filmgoers the Peter Yates (Bullitt) helmed film, The Deep.

As with Jaws, The Deep is based on a novel by Peter Benchley (this time out Benchley got to write the screenplay alongside Tracy Keenan Wynn), stars Robert Shaw,  and much of the film revolves around the water.  However, it is there that the similarities end.  Where Jaws was an edge-of-your-seat, at times scary, thriller that takes in a sleepy New England town, The Deep is a much more lackadaisical film which uses Bermuda as its setting.  Rather than thrills, The Deep attempts to get audiences on the edge of their seat with shots of Jacqueline Bisset scuba diving in a white shirt. 

In brief, the deep finds a couple, David Sanders (Nick Nolte) and Gail Berke (Bisset), getting accidentally involved in the drug trade and sunken ships after scuba diving where they shouldn't have been on a Bermudan vacation.  Local trafficker Henri Cloche (Louis Gossett Jr.) is desperate to get his hands on a stash of morphine the couple found, and treasure hunter Romer Treece (Shaw), already having glory, helps the couple in order to get his hands on a possible fortune in sunken treasure.

Watching The Deep, one can't help but get the sense that there are two very different films at work – one a superbly shot film focusing on underwater exploration and sunken treasure, and the other a terribly dull drug-based thriller.  Simply put, though Gossett tries, Cloche is an uninteresting villain and the drug story fails to take off.  Cloche relies on Sanders and company to do his scuba diving for him, putting him at their mercy, when he could just as easily hire a couple of divers and not have to worry about being double-crossed.  Why Cloche thinks he's better off with scare tactics is never made clear and is not believable.

The other film, the underwater film about naval history and sunken ships, is wonderfully exciting and interesting.  The footage shot underwater is brilliant.  It's mostly silent and it uses that silence and isolation to draw the viewer in.  We're told in a behind-the-scenes featurette that not only did the cast do the scuba sequences, but also that none of the cast had ever dove before.  An incredible amount of effort had to have taken place to make those underwater scenes work, and it really comes across in the finished piece.  It's just a shame that the treasure-hunting story have to be tied to the drug one, if it hadn't been, The Deep could have been an excellent film.

As with the plot itself, the Blu-ray release of The Deep is kind of a tale of two films.  The print is, for the most part, a clean one, and much of the definition and detail is good.  However, and this is a major problem (though it may be one related to the film's shooting and not the Blu-ray), dark scenes lose all detail, becoming murky, muddy, at times almost indecipherable messes.  The audio presentation is somewhat better, mainly due to its representation of scuba diving.  There are definitely moments in the TrueHD 5.1 track where the audience actually gets the sense of being underwater via the muffled sounds that accompany such a trip.

The special features on the release of The Deep are rather weak.  There is the aforementioned behind-the-scenes making of piece which seems to have simply been lifted from a television special and is narrated by Robert Shaw, and select scenes from a three hour special edition of the movie.  The former is somewhat informative and interesting in bits and pieces, and the latter rather flabbergasting.  With a runtime of just over two hours, one gets the sense that the film is about 15 or 20 minutes too long already, a three hour edition would have to significantly deepen some plots to make it worthwhile, but even that may be a tough sell.  These select scenes are also odd in that while they are in high definition, one can't actually watch the entirety of the three hour special edition on this Blu-ray.  Thus, if one loved the movie enough to spend the time with the special features, they will be instantly disappointed upon realizing that a special edition release seems to be just around the corner and the money spent on this Blu-ray was wasted.

Though it certainly has some very good moments, in the end, The Deep never quite shakes the feeling that it only exists to try and capitalize on the success of Jaws.  Maybe that sense will be corrected if the three hour special edition gets released, we'll just have to wait and see.

Catching up with some Grumpy Old Men

There are some comedy duos that just plain work, pairs that are natural together and inherently funny.  Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were one of those teams.  Even when the film they were wasn't the best, when the two men were on screen opposite one other, there was magic at work.  When the script they were working with was good, the two were an unbeatable duo.  The recently released to Blu-ray Grumpy Old Men certainly isn't the height of their comic genius, but it does represent a truly funny movie and Lemmon and Matthau are at the top of their game in it.

The story follows two older men, John Gustafson (Lemmon) and Max Goldman (Matthau) as they engage in a next-door neighbor rivalry that has been going on for nearly 50 years.  Things reach a head in the film as a new, attractive woman, Ariel Truax (Ann-Margret), moves in across the street.  Gustafson and Goldman didn't really need anything new to fight about, but both will use any excuse they can possibly latch onto to attack the other.

It is in these attacks that the film finds most of its humor.  The two crotchety men battle it out doing everything from changing television channels in the middle of a show (Goldman in his house using a remote to affect the TV in Gustafson's), to placing a dead fish in the other's backseat, to numerous other, equally memorable, things.

Donald Petrie's direction of Mark Steven Johnson's script doesn't just let Matthau and Lemmon get away with cheap practical jokes however.  No, instead, the two actors are also forced to look at some of the harsh realities of getting old.  Both men are widowers, and both men's kids (played by Darryl Hannah and Kevin Pollak) have lives of their own.  Gustafson and Goldman don't really live in a world which has passed them by – they are very much involved in their community – but there is a certainly loneliness the men both feel.

Without that sense of loneliness, the practical jokes that they play one another may come across as harsh or cruel, but, with that loneliness, they don't.  No matter how much the two men complain about one another and claim to hate each other, they quite obviously revel in joking with each other – they're infuriated by the other, but there's clearly a great respect and love (even if they won't admit it) underneath it all.

Grumpy Old Men works as a film because of that love and respect.  These aren't two cutthroat heartless souls, they are two men who care very much about the world and each other.  There's nothing overtly said for much of the film about that respect, it's just a sense that Lemmon and Matthau are able to infuse into the characters.

Another reason the film feels like more than just a series of cruel practical jokes is the well-rounded cast.  In addition to the main stars and supporting players listed above, the film is full of other great supporting members.  Burgess Meredith appears as John's father, Ossie Davis as the owner of the local bait-and-tackle shop, and Buck Henry as an IRS agent. 

The Blu-ray release of Grumpy Old Men, is, sadly, a very bare-bones affair – it doesn't even start on a menu screen, it launches right into the movie, which seems to be because the menu is practically non-existent.  Soundtrack selection (Dolby TrueHD 2.0 and Dolby Digital 2.0) as well as subtitles (English, French, and Spanish) can't be selected from the main menu, only from the in-film pop-up menu.  And, the only extra on the disc is a trailer.  The 2.0 sound is perfectly adequate for a comedy, but certainly not all-encompassing.  The visuals are only slightly better than a DVD (the detail in the creases of Matthau's face are impressive), and while the print is a relatively clean one, there are still imperfections to be found in it.  The opening particularly looks poor, with the static shot of the Warner Bros. shield flickering noticeably. 

Whatever imperfections the release itself may have, the film is still an hysterically funny one.  Lemmon and Matthau are stellar actors who play brilliantly off one another, and the script not only gives the two the chance to be funny, but to show their serious sides as well.  Additionally, the supporting cast (especially Meredith) are excellent.  Like its stars, Grumpy Old Men isn't the flashiest film ever created, but it is well-crafted and well worth one's time.

Taking the Battle to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

Movies based on videogames do not have a terribly good reputation.  While it is possible to make a successful and popular film based on a game, more often than not, the audience is left with a terribly disappointing movie, one which only diehard fans (and sometimes not even them) seem to enjoy.  Exactly why so few good films are made based on videogames is difficult to say, and Street Fighter:  The Legend of Chun-Li is certainly not one of the better adaptations.

This film, the second big-screen live-action adaptation of the Street Fighter game franchise, tells the story of Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk), and how she went from being an innocent pianist to a superb fighter.  While full of a well-known, well-recognized cast including Kreuk, Chris Klein, Neal McDonough, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Moon Bloodgood, the film is full of wooden performance; disappearing, reappearing accents (McDonough's accent magically comes and goes); and a ridiculous thread-bare plot. 

At a young age, Chun-li's father is murdered by the evil Bison (McDonough), and years later Chun-li makes it her mission to avenge the killing… only her father isn't really dead, he's been helping Bison for years.  Dear old dad has been helping out the villain for years because every time he does Bison gives him a picture or video of Chun-li – apparently his love his so strong that he doesn't mind helping out hurting thousands and thousands of people just to see a picture of his girl.  But, Chun-li doesn't know that, so she heads off to learn about a cult because someone left a scroll she can't read in her dressing room following a performance and the leader of said cult trains her to fight Bison.

But, Bison is, as stated above, a pretty bad dude, so there are others after him as well, mainly INTERPOL agent Charlie Nash (Klein), who teams up with local police in Bangkok, mainly Maya Sunee (Bloodgood), to track Bison.  How exactly Nash seems to know more about Sunee's city than she does, and what exactly her attraction to him might be based on is wholly unclear – it's just another one of the movie's dropped threads. 

As the film progresses, we learn some of Bison's improbable history, and Chun-li learns to create and wield spheres of energy which she can use to pummel opponents in fights (not that she does that until the final battle, but everyone knows it's coming from the first time her teacher, Gen, shows her such a sphere).  It is actually here, in the fight sequences, that the film is at its best, but even that isn't terribly good.  Some of the movies we get to see are pretty impressive, but director Andrzej Baartkowiak keeps the cuts quick and angles ever-changing so that never does the audience actually believe the battle to be a choreographed whole as opposed to just bits and pieces strung together.

At best, the film is an uneven one, and the same is true of the video presentation on the Blu-ray.  The vast majority of the film looks stunning, with spectacularly beautiful location shots and well-designed interiors.  The picture tends to be sharp and bold, with good detail.  However, there is the occasional night sequence where digital noise is overly present, making one wonder why that portion of the transfer is so pure.  The audio is far better, with pounding bass, good use of surrounds, and a nice, if a little too loud sometimes in action sequences, mix. 

As for extras, 20th Century FOX appears to have gone for the standard "kitchen sink" mentality.  The Blu-ray comes with the theatrical cut, an unrated cut, commentary by two producers as well as McDonough and Klein, a pop-up trivia track, deleted scenes, behind the scenes featurettes, a look at an upcoming game, and three different still galleries.  A second disc contains a digital copy of the movie, while a third has Street Fighter Round One: Fight!, a full-length animated piece which can be viewed both with comic-esque bubbles and without.  The inclusion of this last disc seems very much an attempt to appeal to fans of the franchise, though it may actually be more fun than the live-action feature.

For all its issues, for all its problems, for all its foolishness, it must be remembered that the first live-action Street Fighter movie was also incredibly poor (and sadly starred Raul Julia as M. Bison in his last big screen role).  This film, which seems to operate in an entirely different universe than that one, tells a wholly separate, but equally foolish tale.  Hopefully, if a third live-action film is made, a new tack is taken yet again.

A Few Summer TV Options

Today I awoke and found myself oddly pleased with the summer television fare available to me.  Usually, I dread summer TV, or, at the very least, I recall dreading summer TV, whether I did or not may be debatable.  In any case, I don't tend to think highly of my options for summer television, usually I find my TiVo noticeably empty and me scouring my DVD collection for something I haven't seen in ages.  I know it's only the beginning of July, but that hasn't happened yet.

Perhaps – and I'm willing to admit this – the reason I've found myself so content is that I was away for a week and a half in June and my TiVo was able to load up 10 days worth of shows for my viewing please.  That, combined with various review materials which piled up during my absence, may have been what filled my time, but I just don't think that's the case.

An example of why I think that's wrong lies with last night's televisual opportunities.  Last night I sat back, turned on my TiVo and found The Apprentice UK, Hawthorne, The Superstars, and Better off Ted all there waiting for me.  Okay, they weren't all quite waiting for me when I started, the first two were and the other two magically appeared as I watched the first two.  But, that's not the point, the point is that four hours of television was readily available to me last night, and not just any four hours, four hours which I kind of, sort of, almost enjoyed.

I know, I've seen the ratings, and based on the above list of shows I watched, you may have watched Hawthorne, but that's probably about it.  I'm not going to do anything foolish like go out and call Better off Ted or The Superstars great TV, but both are more than adequate.  I actually look forward to Better off Ted every week, it's the exact sort of funny, quirky comedy that ought to do better than it does.  It's the exact sort of funny quirky comedy which I enjoy – not love, just enjoy – and which I hope for the successive.  It's also the exact sort of quirky comedy which tends to disappoint in the ratings and soon enough leave me forever. 

Better off Ted, however, has been picked up for a second season, it'll air with Scrubs again next season, which is a perfect pairing in terms of content, theme, and ratings.  Offbeat comedy?  Check.  Character which talks to the audience all the time?  Check.  Amusing but never (anymore) laugh out loud funny?  Check.  Attractive blonde actress?  Check.  Few people other than yours truly watching?  Check.

And then, even though I missed the first week, I opted to take a look at The Superstars too last night.  Outside of the foolishness of the name (few of these people are actually "superstars," although the roster of athletes is impressive), the show appears to be just a plain old fun competition.  I found myself terribly sad not to have seen the first week of the series because Terrell Owens and Joanna Krupa seemed on fire last night and it's hard to imagine how they could possibly have been eliminated the previous week (they were brought back due to another player getting injured).  The teammates weren't perfect, mostly because T.O., as we all know, has an attitude the size of… the size of… the size of… well, honestly I don't know that they've ever measured anything quite that large before. 

What I really enjoyed about the show was not just the fact that the events only had a little bit of a spin from basic sporting events, but the fact that everyone seemed to be having fun on the show.  What's not to like?  They do a couple of hours of work every day and get a free stay at Atlantis in the Bahamas for their trouble.  I'd take that job too.

I guess what I'm saying about last night's shows is that there definitely feels to be stuff out there to watch this summer, it might be in unexpected places – like The Superstars – but there's stuff there.  Just keep digging.

Doing a Little Waltz with Bashir

There are times when someone sits down to watch a film and after 90 minutes realize that they've been sitting there in stunned silence the entire time.  Did they like it?  Maybe, maybe not.  Was it a good movie?  Well, it was certainly a "good for you" movie.  But was it fun, was it enjoyable?  It was both technically impressive and entirely engrossing, but enjoyable, who knows.  Perhaps, just perhaps, the person you're talking to just finished watching Waltz with Bashir.  This 2008 release, which won a DGA award for Best Documentary, a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same category is certainly an experience.

When I was in graduate school, I had a professor – a documentary professor – who had an incredibly broad definition of what makes for a documentary film.  Waltz with Bashir unquestionably would fit my documentary professor's amorphous, widely encompassing definition, but it might not fit the standard definition.  The film, written and directed by Ari Folman, is an animated one. 

The main character in it is Ari, and his character spends the majority of the film remembering and interviewing people about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon (the First Lebanon War).  Within the context of the film, Ari is trying to remember what part he played – if any – in a massacre, and to that end, he is interviewing other people with whom he spent time during the war and/or folks who may be able to shed light on what happened.  The film, consequently, is loaded with flashbacks and functions much more as a series of short stories rather than a single story.

As for the truth behind it, and what makes this a documentary, all tales told by veterans in the film are true, or, at the very least, true for the people who told them (one of the themes the movie deals with is the vicissitudes of memory).  The vast majority of the real people who are turned into animated characters for the film are in fact the people to whom the stories happened (only two actors were used).  However, while the film strings the stories together into a single overarching plot, that part isn't necessarily true, Ari didn't go out and find friends from the war and link up with other people through them, he put up an advertisement looking for stories from the war.

Is that relevant?  I don't know; that probably depends on your definition of "truth."  The stories from the war actually took place, they just don't necessarily go together, and don't necessarily fit with Ari's life in such a neat, pat, manner.  Plus, as I indicated above, the film is animated, which, for some, may hurt its truth claim.

As for the animation, it's absolutely brilliant and completely unique.  It may look a little like rotoscoping, but in one of the behind the scenes featurettes, an animator is quite clear about the fact that it isn't, everything in the film (save the last few live actions shots) is in fact fully animated.  Several of the featurettes deal with the construction of the film and the animation (there is also a Q&A with Ari Folman).  The entire piece was actually filmed first and then edited.  Storyboards were made from that, those were then roughly animated, and then the final film's animation was done on computer using the rough animatics as a guide.  The final result is a completely different visual look for the piece, one that is cartoony and stylized, but real in an oddly disturbing way.

Sadly, the Blu-ray release of the film doesn't do the actual animation any favors, as the many night scenes appear terribly grainy.  Additionally, the live action footage at the end of the film was clearly not shot in high definition (it is too old for that), and doesn't look particularly good when upconverted.  Both the Hebrew and English audio tracks for the main feature are far better than the video.  The sound is crisp and clear and even some of the more difficult accents completely intelligible.

Waltz with Bashir represents not just a brilliant achievement in terms of animation, but it tells a fascinating story – set of stories – about war and responsibility and action and inaction.  It is an examination of a what people do during war, what they forget, and where war leaves the survivors.  It is a powerful and wonderfully interesting film. 

Is it true?  Is it documentary? 

There's truth in it certainly, there's documentary in it.  Does the rest matter?

The Triumphant Return of Nova scienceNOW

Traditionally speaking, television in the summer is filled with reality shows, burn-offs of series that failed, and lots and lots of repeats. Cable has slowly started to change the game, launching lots of original scripted series over the summer. However, even many of those feel like they have a light-hearted air about them. It should come as no surprise, perhaps, then that when PBS has a summer television series, it too is a relatively light affair ("light" in PBS terms anyway). On June 30th, PBS's Nova scienceNOW is returning for its fourth season, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is retaining hosting duties.

Watching this season's premiere, the show seems to have undergone no major changes from last year to this, which, rather than being seen as a negative, this falls much more into the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" category. The hour-long show is still divided into four separate stories, one of which is a biographical piece.

What the show really has going for it though is that it is fun. Every story every week is made in an extremely accessible fashion. Segments often begin with an amusing green screen introduction -- in the premiere viewers are treated to Tyson acting out pieces of Raiders of the Lost Ark and singing in various locales. It may just be my imagination, but the introductions seem expanded from previous seasons, but, even if they're not, they still do set a wonderful tone for the show.

As for the stories themselves in the premiere, one learns about making synthetic diamonds, using computers to control a singer's pitch, an examination of the trail investigators followed in tracking down the terrorist(s) behind the 2001 anthrax attacks, and a profile of Luis von Ahn, the genius professor who created all those ridiculous type-the-word-when-signing-up-for-this-so-that-we-know-that-you're-a-person-and-not-a-computer-things (they're called Captchas and Recaptchas).

One of the very impressive things about scienceNOW is that the show is not only able to handle a lighter-side story like Auto-Tune controlling a singer's pitch and have a breezy feel as a whole to it, but that it can quickly switch gears and examine something as serious as the 2001 anthrax attacks. The piece is, clearly, an incredibly serious one, and the show handles it with the gravitas that such a piece requires. scienceNOW explores the investigation from the point of view of the scientists involved, examining exactly how it was determined where the anthrax came from, something that required a lot of thinking and cutting-edge tests. The story is, certainly, far less light than the rest of the show, but it still meshes with that which surrounds it.

As I've done since the show's second season, I now must point out the real reason the show is as much fun as it is -- Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, is the type of person I always prayed would teach my college science classes -- he is not only hysterically funny, but he helps the average person approach science in a wholly accessible and interesting way. I may question is choice of vests, but even those show that he is simply having fun, and making science fun. Really, it is the entire production team that deserves credit for making what could otherwise be rather dry incredibly enjoyable.

If my professors had made science one-fourth as fun as it is in Nova scienceNOW, maybe I'd have put my bachelor's degree to better use than simply reviewing science-based shows.