jeff eaton

You know that something's gone horribly, horribly wrong when people talking about your movie say things like, "Well... It's no Dragonheart..." Nate and I saw Dragon Wars this evening, and I'm not sure I really have words. We knew it would be craptastic, but I don't think either of us were prepared for the profoundness of it.

The couple in front of us collapsed into giggling within minutes of the title screen. At the thirty minute mark, they staggered out of the theater, supporting each other, laughing audibly. They turned to us and started to apologize -- then just laughed again. An hour later, as giant lizards from feudal Japan fired missiles at tanks in downtown Los Angeles and a six-hundred-foot snake chased a pizza delivery car to Mexico, we would envy them.

The protagonist is an emo-surfer-boy star reporter from the Buck Cameron school of investigative reporting. He works for CGNN, and never files a story. His token black sidekick is thrown off an overpass by the Evil Warlord Named Jack in the middle of one fight and left for dead without a second thought -- only to show up at work the next day with a band-aid on his forehead. There are, at times, four nested layers of flashback active simultaneously. One of the flashbacks features a flash-forward. I'm really not accustomed to using reference counting to keep track of my place in the flashback stack, and I think it's a sign that something's gone terribly wrong.

Like a terrible high school relationship you just can't end, Dragon Wars is baffling, painful, yet filled with a scary kind of excitement. How intensely bad can it get? Very.

Very.

Fred Clark's years-long systematic analysis of Left Behind on the Slacktivist blog is a thing of beauty. He painstakingly documents the book's literary sins, but even more interesting is his intelligent and insightful commentary on the theology that underlies the story.

In today's entry, he discusses a speech given by The Antichrist at the UN. (In Left Behind, The Antichrist is a charismatic Romanian who becomes the leader of the UN -- and by extension the ruler of the planet -- within a week of entering the world political scene. And you thought Obama was a golden child, eh?) The interesting part isn't the shockingly dull account of how The Antichrist impressed everyone by knowing their first names and remembering UN history. It's the fact that what The Antichrist is talking about -- using the diplomatic leverage of the UN's top members to calm down a world that's veering into chaos -- is portrayed as obviously, intuitively evil.

A healthy skepticism of those who feel they can solve the world's problems is natural. If someone says they're going to end humanity's wars, take it with a pound of salt. Cautious understanding of mankind's limitations and shared failings is a good thing, and it can keep you from getting sucked into doomed utopian schemes. All the worst disasters -- The Soviet Union, the Invasion of Iraq, a live action version of The Tick -- start with good intentions and crumble on the rocky shores of human nature.

But in the Through The Looking Glass world fundamentalist evangelical culture, healthy skepticism has been replaced by smug omniscience. Like move-watchers who read the spoilers, they believe they already know how everything will end. They already know that the evil destroyer of the world will pose as a man of peace -- and that he'll fool everyone. This results in a sort of dysfunctional spot-the-Antichrist game: Is a leader charismatic? Is he well-liked? Does he does he talk too much about peace, instead of being all tough? Most importantly, does he come from a group or hold opinions we already distrust? Ho there! Potential Antichrist! Time to oppose his plans!

They've ignored, of course, Christ's own words that no one knows when "The End" will come, and that it's pointless to try to speculate to predict. They ignore the fact that 'blessed are the peacemakers' was one of the things Christ actually said. They ignore the fact that even in a book like Left Behind, The Antichrist's ideas are popular because they're good ideas, at least at this point in the story.

It's like watching a murder mystery and deciding that anyone who serves tea is a killer -- because butlers serve tea, and butlers are killers. If these people were just watching movies, it wouldn't be distressing, just silly. The scary part is that they have influence in our country, and their prejudices are now our nation's prejudices.

The sad irony is that scripture also says that the Antichrist, whoever he or she is, will deceive the elect -- in other words, the Christians that happily decide they've got it all figured out. If the Antichrist really were around, their eagerness to go to war rather than 'trust false peace' would make the perfect foundation for his nefarious plans.

Get your war on, indeed.

It's a well known fact that I am a slave to novelty candy. Put some refined sugar into a new shape, or mix it with chemicals and make it behave slightly differently than yesterday's refined sugar (gel, powder, fluff, plasma, etc) and I will be all over that.

So the other week, when I wandered by Wallgreens to pick up some stuff, spotting The Mallow Burger was a dream come true. I've had mini-gummi hot dogs, and I've had mini-gummi pizzas. But a genuine Marshmallow Hamburger, as big as an honest to goodness White Castle Slider? Bring it on, man. Bring. It. On.

Occasionally, when it comes to playing the Six Degrees game, I'll pull out a fun trivia tidbit. I'm only three degrees away from Mobutu Sese Seko, the former dictator of Zaire. Via, of course, Pat Robertson.

It's good for a chuckle -- albeit a nervous one -- but it's true. Many many moons ago (think the 80s), I published a zine. I did this before I'd ever heard of a zine, and thought it was just called a publication or perhaps a news magazine. It involved lots of work with paste-up boards and an old daisy-wheel printer, scamming interviews with interesting people, and convincing publishers to send me 'review copies' of books. What a life!

Eventually, the 'Awww, kid publishes magazine! How cute!' angle got some publicity and there were about 300 or so subscribers around the country. At its peak, I was asked to co-host an episode of The 700 Club, a well-known Christian news/talk show hosted by now-infamous Christian televangelist and political personality Pat Robertson. Pat wasn't there that day (alas -- I'd only be TWO degrees from Mr. Seko) but the results are still... curious.

Now, thanks to the wonder of Google Video, you can witness it, too. Hilights include me with a scarily fluffy mullet, news clips about Michael Gorbachev's new vice president, the awkward interrogation of a black child on live television, and The World's Most Morbid Interview Ever.

Bonus! For the truly curious, my childhood encounter with bodybuilder Jake Steinfield. Don't Quit!

EDIT: Where Are They Now links for Rachel Saunders, Gabrielle Carmouche, and Sheila Walsh, my erstwhile cohosts.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent...

[15:55] blinky: this was unexpected
[15:56] blinky: my CTO and 4 of our employees are recreating our office facilities
[15:56] blinky: in coffeemud
[15:56] blinky: . o O (?!?!)
[15:57] percussion: like a scale model?
[15:57] blinky: yes.
[15:57] blinky: atleast as far of a scale model as a dynamic environment can be explained in simple english text :p
[16:01] eaton: blinky, that's.... rather.... unexpected.
[16:01] blinky: eaton, it is... especially given that they didnt bother yet to modify the base races and classes in the mud as of yet
[16:02] blinky: so i am now logged in, and am an elf mage with his own personal assistant and a CFO.
[16:02] eaton: ...
[16:02] eaton: blinky, that is AWESOME.
[16:03] blinky: the scary thing is
[16:03] blinky: they want it to actually be an official communication channel for end customers
[16:03] blinky: like, 'dun wanna call us, fax us, or email us?'
[16:03] blinky: 'no problem, just log in to our mud, and convince our CTO to fix your transit uplinks over a duel with 2 forks'
[16:04] blinky: i do wonder how that would do.
[16:04] blinky: isp industry is not known for the open mindness and patience of the userbase...

There's a scene from the movie Three Kings that has always stuck with me. In it, a CNN reporter is touring Iraq in the days following the '91 gulf war. The Humvee she's riding in breaks down and she's stranded at a shattered petroleum facility, overlooking a flock of birds covered in oil. They flap, dying, squawking piteously. She stares, and sinks to the ground, overcome. "It's... It's all so goddamn horrible," she breathes.

That's what watching the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice feels like. It is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of Jane Austen adaptations. It's a painful abomination. My soul weeps, and yours should, too.

Before going any further, I want to establish my credibility as someone who actually enjoys Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility was one of my favorite films growing up -- that, and Remains of the Day. I was an odd kid. When I finally saw the BBC miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, I was really blown away. Great acting, awesome script, an all-around class act. Colin Firth set the bar very, very high for future Mister Darcys. I've watched and enjoyed Clueless and Bride And Prejudice, too, so you can't say that I'm averse to creative reinterperetations of the source material. I even saw the low budget Bollywood zany-fest, I Have Found It, with its deep veins of inexplicable cultural context and baffling metaphor.

At the most superficial level, the makers of the 2005 Pride and Prejudice have obviously lavished attention on the sets, on the costumes, on capturing certain curious and cool nuances of architecture and decor and fashion. A few scenes -- Mister Bingley obsessing to Mister Darcy over his proposal to Jane -- are cute. It hits all the key plot points, and the scenery is quite pretty when it's not wrapped in an inexplicable Sleepy Hollow Fog.

In almost every other way, though, the story has been sucked dry by bad acting, a bad script, and just plain bad casting. Kiera Knightly, for example, makes a fine soccer-playing tomboy in Bend it Like Beckham. In Jane Austen's day, though, her skinny physique would be cause for immediate medical intervention and open pity, not a cover shoot for Elle.

That's unfortunate but forgivable -- unlike the film's constant mangling of characters. The absurd, fawning Mister Collins of the book is a stiff, vaguely creepy weirdo. Mister Bennet's a hust of himself here, shuffling from scene to scene with a stricken look, muttering his lines and looking like he'd much rather be Gandalf. His isn't the fretting mother hen from the book. Instead. She's a genuinely panicked woman lost in her world of matchmaking. Mister Bingley? A fish-eyed weirdo. Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed, but the role was played so well in the BBC version. There, Bingley was a good-humored extrovert, not a staring oggler. It made sense that Jane would enjoy his company, not just the promise of his fortune. The common thread in all of these bad bits of acting is their weighty seriousness. Jane Austen wrote snappy, witty stuff. Her characters were funny -- not because they cracked jokes but because they were comical charicatures. That's gone from this film, replaced by heavy gothic seriousness.

Talk of characters, naturally, brings us to Mister Darcy. Colin Firth's job was incredible in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. He had a tough job -- play a proud, arrogant man who dislikes interacting with others, but make us like him. He captured the vibe of an upper-crust guy who's still uncomfortable in his own skin, annoyed by social demands, and distant -- even antagonistic -- with strangers. When we saw him in a new context -- on his own turf, riding around his home or taking care of his sister -- the differences felt natural, they made sense. The New And Improved Darcy is just a stony-faced cipher, blank outside and empty inside. When his 'transformation' comes, it's an inexplicable shift from stiff-to-jovial. It's as if the entire film is populated by actors incapable of capturing more than one emotion at a time. The cast is not thread-safe.

Key conversations are rendered baffling by backported 20th-century worldviews, like Charlotte's angry defensiveness when Lizzie protests her loveless marriage to Mister Collins. "Don't judge me," she hisses. "Don't you dare judge me!" Er. Okay? The book's Charlotte was no romantic, and she told Lizzie as much, but the conversation was about reassuring Lizzie she would be happy, not asserting some personal moral independence. Often, the film tries to bludgeon the viewer with over-wrought class-and-manners moments. Extreme closeups on disapproving looks from rich neighbors with loooooooong stretches of silence to remind us Just How Scandalous some random gaffe is. Moments later, though, an upper-class man walks into a woman's bedchamber just to say "Hi" and no one thinks anything of it. Hello, inappropriate.

The film's sins keep piling up. I could go on and on, but I'll just leave it at this: The 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice is a humorless ride through drama-ville. Stick with the BBC version. It's longer, but more than worth it: it captures the wit and humor of Austen's writing, not just the plot points.

For many years, I've heard rumors of the infamous Star Wars Christmas Special. It went straight to television in 1978, just a year after the explosive debut of the first Star Wars movie. It's spoken of in sad, hushed tones -- like a little-mentioned brother that died trying to juggle power drills.

Jason and Steph have a copy of it, thanks to a hardcore geek friend of ours, but I've never gotten around to watching it. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, though, it's now available for viewing on YouTube. Naturally, I clicked.

Just two minutes in, I can see that the rumors were true. It is not, in fact, a terrible Droids-esque cartoon. It is a live action drama starring all the original actors! This isn't the respectable art-film sort of train wreck. It's the bury-the-footage, pretend-it-never-happened cut-it-from-the-continuity sort of trainwreck that only happens when words like contractual obligation and thirty kilos of mescaline are involved.

It's a Christmas Special. It's Star Wars. And Chewbacca has a wife named Paula. This one's a keeper.

Edit: Five minutes in, now. The opening scene is a cozy domestic act, with Paula tidying up the house and pining for Chewbacca's return. Their son Lumpy and his grandfather Itchy -- yes, Lumpy and Itchy -- scuffle playfully. What's wrong with this picture? They're all wookies, and none of them speak english. It's like Leave It To Beaver meets the first twenty minutes of 2001...

Edit: Ten minutes. Mark Hamil. Art Carney. R2D2. Paula the wookie preparing dinner while watching a purple, four-armed Martha Stewart alien on television. Slapstick comedy. Camera cuts away to a tie fighter battle. Hello!

Edit: Fifteen minutes. Art Carney just gave Itchy the wookie LSD-influenced holo-porn as a LifeDay gift. Sample quote: "You... are my fantasy!" Cue suggestive wookie growling. Cut back to the holo-fantasy... singing a wookie lounge song! The goggles, they do nothing!

Edit: Fifteen minutes, thirty seconds. More tie-fighters. Chewie and Han are running a blockade.

Edit: Sixteen minutes.Uhoh. Storm troopers everywhere at wookie home! The tidy domestic scene is threatened. They're searching the house, and asking questions... A stormtrooper opens a device of some sort, and... Jefferson Airplane appears. In the middle of a giant purple kaliedescope. Playing a ballad. What... The...

Edit: Eighteen minutes. Cartoon interlude! Mark Hamil and Carrie Fisher look like extras from Aeon Flux! Fistfight with Boba Fett! He's riding a sea monster!

Edit: Twenty-two minutes. Bea Arthur is a bartender as Mos Eisley Cantina. And a lounge singer. This isn't happening to me. Dear God, this isn't happening to me.