Delusions of Adequacy

I apologize for the previous two posts.

It's just that, barring unforeseen, in a few hours, I shall have a DVD copy of the best fantasy film ever made. And boy, am I happy about that.

That's right; today is the day The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King comes out on DVD. And for all that I had a few problems with it when it came out in theaters back at Christmas -- mainly, the elimination of Eomer's discovery of an apparently dead Eowyn before the gates of Minas Tirith, and his "Ride to ruin and the world's ending! Death! Death!" speech (which probably would serve Bush well, if he'd just give it at some point) -- it's STILL the greatest fantasy film ever made.

Now, if only they'd hurry up with the five-hour version, already...

Hello, boys and girls! This is your old pal, Stinky Wizzleteats!
This is a song about a whale!?
NO! This is a song about being HAPPY!
That's right! It's the happy happy, joy joy song!

Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy joy!

I don't think you're happy enough!
That's right!
I'll TEACH you to be happy!
I'll teach your grandmother to suck eggs!

Now, boys and girls, let's try it again!

Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy joy!

If'n you ain't the grand-daddy of all liars!
The little critters of nature...
They don't know that they're ugly!
That's very funny! A fly marrying a bumble bee!
I told you I'd shoot! But you didn't believe me!
WHY didn't you believe me?

Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy, joy joy!
Happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy, joy joy joy!

Uh... yeah yeah, ha ha, mic check, mic check... yeah, mic check mic check... yeah, MY NAME IS...

SHAKE ZULA! Tha mic rula! Tha old schoola!
Ya wanna trip? I'll bring it to ya!

Yeah, FRYLOCK and I'm on top, rock ya like a cop,
Meatwad ya up next wit' ya knock-knock!

MEATWAD make tha money, see
Meatwad get tha honeys, G
Drivin' in my car
Livin' like a star
Ice on my fingers and my toes and I'm a Taurus

Ha ha... check it... uh, check check it, yeah...

'Cause we are tha AQUA TEENS!
Make tha homies say "Ho!" and tha girlies wanna scream!
'Cause we are tha AQUA TEENS!
Make tha homies say "Ho!" and tha girlies wanna scream!

Yeah, Aqua Teen Hunger Force... number one in tha hood, G...

For some reason, posts I'm making today (5/25) are showing up as having been posted on 5/20.

Thus, it seems I am eerily prescient in writing about Richard Biggs' passing, and that I saw an advance screening of Shrek 2.

Trying something to fix it... we'll have to see if it works.

Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Stephen Franklin on Babylon 5, died Saturday, May 22.

He was 43.

It really is as good as everybody's saying it is.

Too many pop culture references to count. Thankfully, no Matrix ones this time around, or at least none that I can remember. Maybe I just suppressed them.

Of course, most of the humor flies right over the heads of the kids who make up the vast majority of this movie's target audience. Sort of like "Rebel L" flew over the heads of the youngest Sesame Street viewers back in 1990.

Judging from the fact that most of the time I was the only one in the theater laughing, most of the humor flew right over the heads of the grown-ups, too. (Or maybe they were too annoyed at having their kids drag them to the movies to laugh.)

Not only is it consistently funny and engaging, it's also a well-timed satire on the whole "Extreme Makeover" phenomenon.

In the howling, wind-scoured wasteland that is Katie Couric's mind... a flickering light dawns.

In all honesty, I grant that Brock may have a point on certain things, and a media that tilts predominantly right would be no better, and perhaps worse, than one that tilts left. But as a news consumer who gets most of his information from ABC, CBS, and NPR, it sure looks to me like the predominant bias right now is to the left. You have to have cable to get FNC (which, granted, most normal denizens of the 21st century have), and you have to have a work schedule that allows you to listen to radio in the afternoon (or a station that rebroadcasts it) to listen to Rush. Essentially, I find that left-tilted news comes right to me, while I have to actively search for right-tilted news.

Hat tip: La Shawn Barber's Corner.

Via Cox & Forkum, an article from the Telegraph on warnings to US athletes not to celebrate victories in an overtly patriotic fashion. Mike Moran, a former spokesman for the USOC who's now acting as a consultant is quoted in the piece:

"If a Kenyan or a Russian grabs their national flag and runs round the track or holds it high over their heads, it might not be viewed as confrontational. Where we are in the world right now, an American athlete doing that might be viewed in another manner."

Sad.

Thanks to all the people out there trying to see to it that THE TRUTH about NICK BERG is known!

Little-known facts about Nick Berg:

1. Nick Berg was once asked what those thingies really are at the top of cell phone towers. HIS REPLY? "Mind-control lasers." INDEED.

2. Nick Berg spelled backward is Greb Kcin. This means something.

3. Some people who attended a party with Nick Berg reported that his reaction to the song "Secret Agent Man" was to sing along with tears in his eyes. COINCIDENCE?

4. Nick Berg was not 26, but pushing 66. His remarkably youthful appearance is the product of a secret DARPA project whose goal was to find an anti-agathic capable of keeping the military's best soldiers alive for hundreds of years.

5. Nick Berg's liberal family politics are a well-known "fact." But records indicate Berg may have served as a county coordinator for the Bush 2000 campaign in Florida and may have been involved in stealing the election for Bush! MORE DETAILS FORTHCOMING.

6. It is a KNOWN FACT that no-one can account for Nick Berg's whereabouts on November 22, 1963.

All these facts and more are detailed in Seymour Hersh's upcoming book NICK BERG: AL-QAEDA OPERATIVE OR HELPLESS VICTIM OF BUSH'S FOREIGN FIASCO? Film, scheduled for release in 2006, will be produced by Oliver Stone and directed by Michael Moore.

Again, thanks to all the diligent seekers of truth out there. Down with Bush!

Via World Magazine Blog, an interesting column by Mark Helprin. Helprin gives articulate voice to many of the concerns I've had about the war in Iraq in recent weeks. He takes the Bush administration to task with brutal yet clinical precision, stating in his opening paragraph:

Though America has condemned the cruelties of Abu Ghraib, they remain nonetheless a symbol of the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership.

And that's the gentle paragraph. Helprin spends the next seven succinctly cataloguing the missteps and mistakes made by the civilian leadership in Washington -- ie., Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. These seven paragraphs are, by Helprin's estimate, "the briefest summary of mismanagement" on the part of the administration and the military leadership.

But Democrats are, in Helprin's view, worse, because they lack even the resolve to fight against America's enemies:

John Kerry may say one thing and another, but no matter how the topgallants break in the Democratic Party, its ideological keel is a leaden and unthinking pacifism, a pretentious and illogical deference to all things European, and the unhinged belief that America by its very nature transforms every aspect of its self-defense into an aggression that justifies the offense against which it is defending itself... Their allergy to military expenditure assures that, unlike Republicans, who provided just enough to accomplish an arrogant plan if nothing went wrong, they would not provide enough to accomplish a humble plan if everything went right.

Helprin proposes that once the situation has stabilized -- after we've allowed the Kurds, Shia, and Sunni factions to obtain control over their territories, we should emplace strongmen, set up a federation, and withdraw, "with or without permission," to bases in Saudi Arabia -- which seems to represent nothing better than a return to the status quo ante... though the absence of Saddam is a definite boon. And this modified status quo ante may be the best we can hope for.

Agree or disagree with him, Mark Helprin's is a voice that should not be casually ignored. The bio at the bottom of the piece states that he's a novelist, a WSJ contributing editor, and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. What it doesn't say, and should, is that he is also a speechwriter for Republican presidents and has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli Air Force, and the IDF. He, in other words, knows what he's talking about when it comes to military matters, and his words should carry weight with Republicans and conservatives in general.

Some random thoughts on Troy.

1. Brad Pitt as Achilles? Suuuure.

2. Eric Bana as Hector? Believable.

3. Brian Cox as Agamemnon? Oh, yeah.

4. The battle scenes are nice, and realistic-looking. The opening confrontation -- between the armies of the Aecheans and the Thessalonians -- reminded me of a contemporary description of the Greek way of war, paraphrased from John Keegan's A History of Warfare: "When the Greeks fight, they find the flattest, widest place they can, and go down and have their battle there." The entire Greek concept of decisive battle -- standing toe-to-toe with the enemy and having it out until one side is utterly victorious, the other utterly broken -- is nicely presented here... though whether the filmmakers were conscious of it, or whether it arises naturally from the source material, is something I can't comment on, as I have still not read The Iliad. (And I'm not so sure that the translation in that nice leather-bound Barnes & Noble edition, a translation that dates from the 1890's, is the best available. I think maybe I'll try some of the newer ones.)


5. The real highlights of the movie -- as of the book, I'm sure -- are the personal combats: Achilles vs. Boagrios, Paris vs. Menelaus, Hector vs. Ajax, Hector vs. Patroklos, Achilles vs. Hector, Paris vs. Achilles. They're worth the price of admission for an action junkie like myself.

6. A glaring exception to the "realistic battles" and "personal combats=highlights of movie" points above is Achilles. Of course, Achilles was a great warrior, the strongest of the Greeks, the leader of the Myrmidons, blah blah blah... but did he really have those cool wuxia moves, or that Mortal Kombat-style jump-thrust with the sword? Were all those flourishes and exaggerated balletic moves -- first shown in Achilles' training session with Patroklos -- really part of any real fighting style? Highly doubtful -- movies are always more concerned with looking good than with being correct. And Achilles' fighting style -- so out of place with the fierce, sudden-death fights of the rest of the movie -- saps much of the emotional involvement out of his fights. Fortunately for the filmmakers, both Pitt's and Bana's performances at the fateful duel between Achilles and Hector redeem most of that scene's intensity from the pansy theatrics of Pitt's fanciful swordplay.

7. Why no gods? Mad gods plotting against each other would have added so much to this movie.

8. And why does it seem, from the movie, that the war lasted no more than a few days? Everybody knows it lastest ten years.

Overall, I'd give it 4 out of 5 stars. I plan to see it again.

Many thanks to fellow RASSMer Michael Ponte for the Colossal Death Robot quiz I found at his site.


Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

First time I'd ever even heard of this character.

Why, Kim Le? Why did you foist this obsession with personality quizzes on me with your off-hand comment on the list?

We have kids for five more days.

Grades are due today by five. I'd forgotten that till just now. Oh, well; not like we did much this six weeks, anyway, between my illnesses.

(Actually, the class that did a lot of actual real work is the one that hates work the most: my 12-week eighth graders. I've spent the last three weeks going from student to student, wheeling and dealing to get them to work. I've hated it, they've hated it... apparently, I am both sadistic and masochistic at the same time.)

This week is a loss as far as instruction is concerned. I will be showing The Princess Bride to all my classes. Oddly, their reaction to the first thirty minutes tracked precisely with those of Fred Savage's character; initial skepticism, followed by feigned cool detachment, followed by "You could keep going, if you want to." If we finish it before Friday, they will want to watch it again, and I, in my best Peter Falk impression, will say, "As you wish."

... is up at Credenda/Agenda's website.

For those interested.

Occasionally -- far more often than my dad would like, not nearly as often as he probably thinks -- I go on a CD-buying binge and pick up three or four discs at once. Then a month or three pass when I don't get anything, then I'll buy one, then another few months of silence, then three or four at once.

I'm coming off the end of such a binge, and the results have been a bit more mixed than I'd like, but that's par for the course.

Guadalcanal Diary: Standing in the Shadow of the Big Man/Jamboree

This is a two-fer, with one of the brighter lights to emerge from the jangle-pop scene of 1980's-era Athens, Georgia. Guadalcanal Diary released four albums during their initial run; the two on this disc, the first two they released, are widely hailed among their fans as two of the best... but then, GD didn't really have time to put out a bad album; they broke up before they reached their U2 Rattle and Hum/REM Monster/Smashing Pumpkins Adore phase. My only previous exposure to them was their last studio album, 1989's Flip-Flop, a truly guiltless pleasure that I've listened to enough to nearly wear out the tape... which is why I'm also getting a CD of it, finally, though it's something of a rarity.

WHAT I THOUGHT OF GUADALCANAL DIARY BACK THEN: "These guys are good; I hope they make more records."
WHAT I THINK OF GUADALCANAL DIARY NOW: "These guys were really good; why didn't I buy more of their records back then?"

Also, they reunited briefly in the late 90's and went on tour. I found this out on Tuesday. Arrgh.

Hymns Triumphant

A two-disc collection of hymns performed by the London Philharmonic Choir and London National Philharmonic Orchestra, including most, if not all, of the hymns on my lists below. Glowing reviews from other Amazon.com customers had me salivating in anticipation; alas, rather than complete renditions of the hymns, these seem to be mostly medleys. Double arrgh. I despise medleys. Master-pieces. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, so perhaps I won't end up hating it despite its gorgeous performances, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

WHAT I THOUGHT WHEN I ORDERED IT: "London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. Classic hymns. What could go wrong?"
WHAT I THOUGHT WHEN I LISTENED TO IT: "Crap in a hat."

The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs, Vol. 3 and i

I first heard Magnetic Fields on an episode of The Shield; in that, I'm probably in good company. The song was the heart-breaking "All My Little Words" and it is officially one of my Favorite Songs of All Time. I can listen to it five or six times in a row, and I learned to play it (sort of) on the guitar. I got the CD it's on, 69 Love Songs Vol. 1, and promptly discovered a goodly number of other gems among its 23 tracks (each of the three volumes contains 23 songs; do the math), including "I Don't Want to Get Over You," "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," and "Book of Love." None of them has really approached, for me, the simple, powerful beauty of "All My Little Words," but I continue to mine the Fields' discs for hidden treasures. I've not listened to either Vol. 3 or i (their new release) enough to form solid opinions on them, but my early impression is that there will be some good stuff here.

WHAT I THOUGHT WHEN I FIRST STARTED LISTENING TO VOL. 1: "I hope I find something on this as good as 'All My Little Words.'"
WHAT I THOUGHT WHEN I STARTED LISTENING TO VOL. 3 AND i: "I hope I find something on these as good as 'All My Little Words.'"

They probably hate that song.

That's how Google's automatic page translation of a Le Monde editorial renders the French version of "Allahu Akbar."

File under "completely useless information."

I want to write about the Nick Berg atrocity, but I am still too angry to focus. Maybe this post is some sort of psychological compensation.

A very interesting thread is developing over at World Magazine Blog. The topic is the beheading of Nick Berg -- an act which, if nothing else, throws the Abu Ghraib disgrace into perspective -- and one of the commenters is a professing Muslim who is denouncing terrorism.

Hopefully, this thread will continue to generate more light than heat.

I hesitate to even classify this song as a hymn. I doubt whether it was written as one, and I've heard it in church exactly one time in my life; still, it makes an occasional appearance in hymnals, so I feel I'm on reasonably solid morphological grounds here.

The song is "The Church in the Wildwood," and there seem to be many versions of it. Most of the ones I've found follow these lyrics, though I have found some -- here and here, for example -- that have additional verses that make it a bit more pious.

Still, those extra verses referring to the Savior and heavenly treasures are very much an exercise in making silk purses from sows' ears. They simply cannot atone for the relentless sentimentality, the greeting-card nostalgia, or the laser-focused self-centeredness of the chorus:

No spot is so dear to my childhood
As the little brown church in the vale.

Well, that's what church is all about, isn't it? Kindling your childhood memories? Tugging at the ol' heartstrings? Let's just lay aside all that foofaraw about crosses and amazing grace and concentrate on what really matters: a Hallmark moment with the family all dressed in their Sunday best, and going to church twice a year whether we need it or not.

Strange how this subject keeps cropping up. At church yesterday, our pastor spoke briefly on the relative merits of modern "praise" music (in quotes not to disparage but to set it aside as a particular genre within Christian music) and the old hymns. His point -- which I find utterly convincing -- is that praise music is good or bad depending on its emphasis on God.

Much praise music takes as its theme not the character of God, nor Christ's work on the cross, but rather a focus on worship; and not worship in itself, but worship as what we are going to do. The songs do not worship God; they talk about worshipping God. They do not say "We worship you, Lord" but rather "We're going to worship the Lord."

This may seem a subtle distinction, but it's an important one (and I want to be at pains, as was our pastor, not to paint with too broad a brush; there is much praise music that escapes this trap and is profitable for use in private and corporate worship, perhaps even the majority of it, but the songs that fall into the trap are far too numerous for comfort). Songs that refer to worship rather than engaging in worship create a barrier between the worshiper and God. Like characters in a David Mamet play, we wonder if we're talking, or just talking about talking.

And the barrier is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that by placing our reaction, our emotions at the center of worship, we demote God from the centrality He by rights should enjoy. To put it bluntly, when we worship, it isn't about us.

Does it matter? Only if you consider your approach to the eternal, sovereign God to be of even passing importance. Are we playing games when we worship the Most High?

Kim kindly pointed me to the RASSM Blogroll, which should be linked now over there on the left somewhere. Which is where most RASSMers are to me, socially and politically. To the left. So if you don't like what I have to say, check out some of their stuff.

As of this writing, I'm not on the blogroll. But if you're reading this, you know where I am, so there's not much point in worrying about it.

UPDATE: Added also, a link to the Livejournal of my friend David Robson. Dave is like a brother to me in many ways... in spite of, or perhaps because of, the many ways in which we're diametrically opposite. You will search far and wide for a person as generous, talented, kind, and all-around great as David Robson. I'm grateful to know him.

... or maybe just American white bread. If the James Lileks screed linked below doesn't tickle your fancy, perhaps his examination of the 1949 info-comic The Story of Bread will.

And if you don't like this look at a page from a Daktari Big Little Book, we can no longer be friends.

Over at La Shawn Barber's Corner, there's this intriguing critique of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. What happens when the Supreme Court does the right thing (ending government-sanctioned segregation) in the wrong way? You get an activist court that imposes its own view of social issues on the law, rather than interpreting the law as it is written. This may even seem like a good idea... until you remember that this door will most definitely swing both ways, and a court that is moderate today may veer to extremes (on either side) tomorrow. As La Shawn concludes: "...judge-made law, no matter how beneficial to certain Americans, threatens the freedom of all Americans."

I'm just a man ahead of my time, I guess. Within days after my entry about hymns (Apr. 23), this thread opened up at World Magazine Blog.

And, to my shrieking horror*, I realized that my list of favorite hymns was far from complete. How could I have missed:

Beneath the Cross of Jesus
Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us
Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed
I Know Whom I Have Believed
Christ the Lord is Risen Today
Abide With Me
Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior
Be Thou My Vision
Lead Me to Calvary
Low in the Grave He Lay (aka Up From the Grave He Arose)
How Firm a Foundation
The Church's One Foundation
O Worship the King
Angels From the Realms of Glory
This Is My Father's World (I can't listen to the music from Fellowship of the Ring without thinking of this one)

I also commend to you the wholly lovely hymn by St. Francis of Assisi, All Creatures of Our God and King. Even when we fallible, imperfect humans fail to praise God as we ought, "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth His handiwork." All creation honors God:

Thou flowing water, pure and clear,
Make music for thy Lord to hear,
O praise Him! Alleluia!
Thou fire so masterful and bright,
That givest man both warmth and light
O praise Him! O praise Him!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

But one of the most haunting and beautiful hymns I've ever heard was one whose name I can't remember. I only heard it sung once, when I was about ten years old, in a huge church in downtown Uruapan, Michoacan, Mexico. We had just returned from a week-long mission to the coast city of Colonia Lazardo Cardenas, and we were attending a last service with all of the short-term missionaries we'd been escorting around the city and doing interpretation work for, and one of the hymns sung contained a line that moved me to tears -- probably the first time I ever wept while singing a hymn. (But not the last, by far.)

Hermosisimo el camino, hacia a la eternidad.

A loose translation of the line, preserving as much of its dignity as I can, would be, "Surpassingly beautiful is the road that leads to eternity."

That's it; that's all I remember about the song. I can sing that snippet to this day, but the rest of the hymn -- words, music, title -- is lost to me. But I do remember that I lost it at that point; I simply could not finish singing it. I have a vague memory of Mom asking me what was wrong, and not being able to explain it; but at that moment all I could think about was my great-grandparents, whom I knew to be in heaven at that very moment, and the way the words meshed with the minor notes of the chorus was moving enough without thinking of the people I knew who at that very moment were standing before the throne of God offering their own praises.

Which, of course, is the whole point of hymns. On Sunday morning, we are not attending a social club or an entertainment. We are joining with the angelic hosts and the living creatures and the saints who have already crossed over the river; we join with them in spirit to offer worship and praise to the Most High God. The music we choose to employ in our worship is not inconsequential. God desires worship "in spirit and in truth"; and while a heartfelt rendition of the shallowest P&W song is better than a cold and unfeeling performance of any hymn on my lists, is it not better to give greatest room to that music that teaches us the most about God, and uses a more elevated style of music and literary form in the words, than what we might listen to while driving around town?

I don't know... maybe I'm just being too narrow and crotchety. Again, there are obviously plenty of people who benefit from the music I hold in lesser regard, and there are plenty of people praising God with it. Who am I to judge? All I know is that most modern music (with some glorious exceptions) leaves me cold, while the hymns listed here and at World Mag Blog make me want to fly to my Lord and offer Him all the honor and praise I can muster. In the end, each person must decide what brings them closer to "spirit and truth."

Thanks to all the commenters at World Magazine Blog for reminding me of the hymns I love.

---------
*Note: I did not really shriek.

From James Lileks, this hysterical screed deconstructing and demolishing a Brit's attempt to comprehend the USA based on a trip to Olive Garden.

Read it; it's good stuff.

Via InstaPundit.

The Belmont Club has this very interesting analysis of the situation in Fallujah. What looks like a tremendous PR victory for the insurgents there -- the "withdrawal" of the Marines besieging the last pocket of resistance in the northwestern corner of the city, a withdrawal unlikely to be viewed in the Arab world as anything but a defeat for the US -- is, according to one US general, a strategy to isolate the most hardcore insurgent elements from those "who thought they were defending their city based upon the call of the imams...."

As Wretchard writes, "Only time will tell if the plan will work."

RASSM regular and Friend Across the Waters Policraticus McEwok posted this review of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World to RASSM last week. It is reproduced here by his kind permission. Pol's thoughts on the movie are good, and I actually agree with them -- mostly. But I still love the movie. And I suspect Pol has more affection for it than his Scottish disposition will allow him to demonstrate openly...

I took the unforgivable liberty of editing out a potential spoiler for those who might plan to read the books... which everyone should.

I was... I dunno. I'd say ambiguous, but that's not quite right.

The title is a mouthfull - they didn't need "Master & Commander", since AFAIK, it's only used as a series title in limited Eastern Seaboard contexts, and it's a historical canard... but they almost made up for it with the beautiful font they used for the titles and credits.

Cinematography was superb, set design was phenomenally impressive (I mean, it helps that they could just buy HMS Rose, but can we complain?), the acting was of a very high standard, and as storyline goes, the film was an impressive distillation of the series into the context of a Holywood movie...

But it was still a Holywood movie - O'Brien's novels flow effortlessley in the way the best sea stories do, but this was surprisingly episodic. We had a selection of moments fans would expect to see (trepanning Joe Plaice, the lesser of two weevils, the floating island in the shape of the Galapagos), and every supporting character gets a look-in (except Diana [SPOILER] - though Jack's relationship with Sophie is cued with a locket and one of his endless letters)... but inevitably, characterization suffers (Padeen - who may be bog-Irish and slow, but is nevertheless a competent barber-surgeon, and a Latin-speaking confidant of Stephen's for medical matters he can't discuss with Jack, is reduced to clumsily carrying stuff)...

In fact, you could see the trajectory of every character from the outset of the films, with the real stalwarts of the series (Tom Pullings, Barret Bonden, Preserved Killick) being relegated to for'ead-knuckling - subtle, constant characters, Weir didn't really seem terribly interested in them...

More worryingly, the story was emphatically a post-September 11th swashbuckler, not so much a trivialization as an attempt to impart a level of obnoxious moral selfrighteousness that's mercifully absent in the novels - Aubrey and Maturin get in the obligatory GOP vs. anticapitalist argument, but the subtleties are lost (Aubrey, the shire Tory, is the son of a Liberal MP, and his reputation is built entirely on his bravery at sea, while Maturin is Irish, Catholic, and a British Secret Agent)... and very soon, even that token gesture is thrown to the wind in favour of the 'need' to fight the monster frigate Acheron, a slightly classier sister-ship of the Black Pearl...

Aubrey's "this ship is England" speech is a template for American commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan - I'm not sure Weir realised the absurdity of the idea of "a guillotine set up in Picadilly" as late as 1805, and the audience certainly won't... In the final battle, we finally see the bad guys as more than a monster - in the shape of an improbable horde of pike-wielding sans-culottes crewing the French frigate (an American frigate in the novel - need I say more)... and Maturin throws principle to the wind and charges into the battle, weapons in hand...

We close with a burial at sea... and of course, the entire ship's crew gather round. All good English-speaking Protestants, unquestioning now in their unity.... anyone who knows the novels might note a slight shift of emphasis from the way O'Brien plays such stuff... such subtlety as remains in the film (the sneaky French captain, and the fact that the monstrous Acheron is American-built) is, I suspect, entirely unintentional...

All that would have been forgivable for fans of the novels, though, if the characters we know had been brought to life...

But the casting?! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! That's not to say that the actors didn't inhabit their roles adequately - just that they weren't the characters from the novels. Paul Bettany is just about acceptable as Stephen Maturin (too young, too handsome, not Irish enough, not wearing a wig - Colin Farrel was born for the role), but Billy Boyd has quite clearly wandered in from the wrong film. Twelve-year-old Max Pirkis deserves special mention for being brilliant (and, unlike almost anyone else in the movie, perfectly cast) as Mr. Midshipman Lord Blakeney, but while the fact that he has such a chance to shine is a testament to his genuine talent, and Weir deserves a comendation from some sort of minority rights committee for writing such a major part for a one-armed twelve-year-old, the fact that he's elevated to a position alongside Aubrey and Maturin in the film is that this is a Peter Weir film before it's an adaptation of the novels. Alongside Pirkis, Weir gave us another well-cast young unknown in seventeen-year-old Max Benitz - superb as the doomed Anakin Solo, though his character didn't get quite the screentime that Blakeney did.

And again, wrong bloody franchise.

And as Jack Aubrey, Russel Crowe is just a mistake. Not a bad actor, not any sort of doubts about the character he plays. Just not the character he should be playing - and that's not his fault. It's well-known that O'Brien originally wanted Chuck Heston in the role, and Weir's slightly snide jokes about this show how much he missed the point. Jack Aubrey has the energy, physical stature and mild insanity of Chuck at his best. Or Burt Lancaster, perhaps, if Weir wanted someone slightly more credible...

And this is the main problem with the film. We have a credible character whose determination and courage border on the obsessive, but in doing so, Weir creates a narrower world, one that seems compassed by the confines of his own outlook and attitudes (the ambiguity this sets up against the political subtext seems unintended)... Aubrey in the novels is a character of subtlety and nuance, yes... he gets depressive and obsessive sometimes, but he's not "prickly and hard to eradicate" - on the most fundamental level he's like his sword - big, heavy, sharp-edged, and built to kill things...

There's a scene near the start where Crowe, climbing back to deck, catches himself, drawing breath, and hangs - stunned and shocked by what's going on around him. NO! Aubrey is, in his own way, an articulate and conscienscious man, but if he ever did have that sort of moment (I think it does come from one of the novels) it would end with a mad sort of smile, and a hollering order to some member of his crew.

The same problem runs through the film. We have a character who's far more like Hornblower than Aubrey should be (is it any coincidence that the novel they ran with is the one with the most superficial similarities to the first Hornblower novel, filmed back in the '50s?) and this has an impact on the battle-scenes. It's carefully-choreographed chaos, certainly but curiously weightless and uninvolving, and somewhat anticlimactic. It's as if Weir doesn't want to face up to the idea of a larger-than-life lunatic who does this for fun - and makes it fun for those around him, too...

Now maybe that sounds darker and more difficult than the film ended up being - but in the novels, it doesn't work like that. It's more real, and also bigger... and the only time we really catch the humour and reality of the novels is in the very last scene... which, ironically enough, I'm pretty sure isn't in the novels - it's 100% Peter Weir, Russel Crowe, and Paul Bettany...

All in all, it could have been much, much better...

Pol'

So; count Pol among the Christopher Hitchens school of thought with regard to M&C...

I suspect Pol may have been expecting rather too much from a two-hour Hollywood movie. I, on the other hand, went in expecting the books to be utterly slaughtered by ham-fisted filmic adapters... and was pleasantly surprised at how much of Patrick O'Brian's brilliant novels ended up on the screen. M&C is far from perfect, as Pol says... but it's much better than it had any business being, given the state of movie-making in the US these days.

And it was a better adaptation, I think, than was Return of the King.