For some reason I chose to watch an episode of the old BBC on Netflix last night.  The parallel between the Guide and Wikipedia was striking.  Have a question?  Look it up in the [Guide/Wikipedia].  Foolproof?  No.  Useful?  Take a look at this before you answer – seems to guarantee a practical best-seller to me!

For our Christmas night treat we watched the last installment of The Lost Room, a six-hour three-part miniseries which debuted on the SciFi channel earlier this month.  Highly recommended!

The premise: an unknown supernatural event occurred in a motel room in New Mexico in 1961, tearing at the fabric of reality and giving all the mundane Objects collected in the room at the time special powers.  For instance, the Key appears to be an ordinary motel room key, but has the extraordinary the power to open any door with a keyhole, and by passing through a door thus opened, you end up directly in room #10, which no longer resides next to rooom #9 but in alternate reality of some sort.  When you leave the room, you emerge from any door in the world that you choose.  A handy way to travel!

Such Objects have different powers - some subtle and often undiscovered, others dangerous or deadly, and yet others quite silly.  The power of these strange Objects has spawned collectors, brokers and economies, secret societies of the good, evil, and simply misguided types - all searching, and sometimes killing, for the powers the Objects bring, and their beliefs about the transcendent reality they imply.

Detective Joe Miller stumbles across the key during an unearthly murder investigation, and plunges into the underground society of those aware of the Objects, meeting a whole cast of unique and intriguing characters and having a constant set of adventures along the way.

I don’t see a repeat coming up soon on the SciFi channel, but there are versions floating around in BitTorrent (I devoted a few nights of Internet bandwidth to downloading the last episode which didn’t record directly.)

Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me!  Catch it if you can!

From Paul, a geography quiz that humbled me.  Even if you’ve heard of Burkina Faso, can you point it out on a map with a clock ticking?  Which of "Democratic People’s Republic of Korea" and "Republic of Korea" are North or South?

Took me three attempts to get an easy enough set of questions to squeek past Paul’s score ;-).  Thank goodness I got a string of South American countries instead of African!

The game is especially humbling in that it doesn’t give you the right answer when you fail, leaving you aware of your geographic failings.

Also check out Stained Glass, a fun little color puzzle on the same site (the side of each tile needs to match the color of the tile next to it.)

You know what I hate?  When a movie ignores its own logical system.  National Treasure, which is IMO a pretty good action movie if you can stand Nicholas Cage’s same old tortured character (who made this guy an action hero?).  Stop reading if you don’t want any spoilers.

The logic of the movie is a series of hidden clues ala DaVinci Code or it’s much superior predecessor Focault’s Pendulum, leading to a fabulous treasure hidden by the Knights Templar.  Each clue provides a clue, ambiguous to any objective observer but somehow obvious to the hero, which may lead closer to the final treasure or to an uncertain end.

So the part that really gets me is the clue involving a particular shadow on a particular wall at a particular time.  They make a big deal about the introduction of daylight savings time since the clue was laid, yet blithely ignore the fact that the shadow will naturally fall on different spots on different days of the year!  What seasonal progression of shadows?  Any old day will do!

Can we assume that the writer of the story was unaware of this obvious fact of nature?  That anyone could escape experiencing that in their lives?  I don’t think so.  Can we assume the director chopped this important fact for time reasons, keeping the clever but relatively unimportant daylight savings time connection?  Did they have so little imagination they couldn’t find a way to fix the problem?  Were they just lazy?  Did they think that their intended audience wouldn’t see such a celestial flaw?  I don’t know how this omission came to be, but the end result is that the viewer’s intelligence is insulted.  And that’s what I hate.

Took off early to go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my daughter.  My expectations are usually low (and rarely inaccurate) for Tim Burton movies, so I can’t say I was terribly disappointed.  But it was nevertheless far less satisfying than the Gene Wilder version or just reading the book.  The problem is that while Mr. Burton has a large imagination, he has a much smaller sense of finesse, so by the time I’m halfway through any of his movies I’m just tired of the whole thing.  I’m always thinking "what’s Burton going to do next?" instead of "what’s Charlie going to do next?"  The style overwhelms the story.  And it’s not just an excess of style (I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events), but style that doesn’t seem to be in the best service of the movie.

For instance, the songs are so overproduced even the characters end up commenting on their lack of spontaneity, a far cry from the simple outbreaks of rhyme Roald Dahl uses to summarize the moral.  The voices are so processed that you can’t understand a single word anyway, and the choreography is like a mixture of a surf movie and the Gong show.  The Oompa-loompas are all played by a single actor, multiplied through CG and compositing into dozens of dancing little clones.  Whenever these little guys are on the screen, the cloning is so overdone (eventually devolving to sight gags) that it totally obliterates any immersion in the story.

And what’s with Johnny Depp?  He looked and acted like Michael Jackson, and the parallels between Wonkaland and Neverland are difficult not to infer.  There’s a way to endear your character to the audience (not!)  I would have wanted to shout "run children run!" if I was immersed in the story to any meaningful degree.

I definitely plan to stay away from the Corpse Bride (Mr. Burton’s next release, which looks to have about as much subtlety as Lemony Snickett has happy endings) in favor of Wallace and Grommit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (I already watched the trailer several times ;-).

[Update 2005-08-10: some sort of clever access control seemed to be preventing the display of the images linked from imdb.com.  So I copied them instead, and added links back to imdb.com.  Corrected some other links too.]