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Posted 8:41 AM by WiN

Omar, Bravo!

Who is this? Why do I care? Why should you?

Can it be that, at long last, we are going to take steps against the mullahs to save the lives of our fighters and the Iraqi civilians who have been targeted by the terrorists who are armed and manipulated by the Iranians and the Syrians? Faster, please.

But that is nothing compared to the clear message from On High on the soccer fields of Germany. No, I’m not talking about the demonstrations against President Ahmadinejad, I’m talking about the Mexican victory over Iran in the first round of the World Cup.

With the game tied 1-1, a Mexican player named Omar Bravo scored for Mexico, which went on to win 3-1. That name, Omar Bravo, sends chills down the spines of the mullahs. “Bravo” is a universal plaudit, enthusiastic praise for the person to whom the “bravo” is directed. And Omar? Well...Omar is the most hated name in the Shiite lexicon, the symbol of the forces of evil, the incarnation of satanic influence on earth.

Read why the mullahs of Iran "must be asking themselves what they have done to incur the Divine wrath":
Michael Ledeen on Iran on National Review Online

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Posted 7:26 AM by WiN

Time to withdraw?

Is it really time to admit defeat, withdraw all of our resources and end the war? Well, the answer depends on which war we're talking about.

I'm not sure who Todd Manzi is, but his syndicated column has recently been added to the Townhall.com columnists' page, and his column today is a doozy.

It is time to admit the war on poverty is a quagmire and the federal government should withdraw. The Constitution never authorized us to enter this war in the first place. Let's send a strong message to the individual states: we are going to cut and run from the war on poverty. There is no need to point fingers about who lied us into this war. We don't have to highlight the numerous mistakes that were made. Nor do we have to identify who benefited themselves by getting elected to office under the cover of fighting poverty. All we need to do is assess the situation and act accordingly.

He proposes a deal for the cut-and-run liberal crowd:

The War on Terror has been much more successful than the war on poverty, but both of these wars should end as soon as possible. How about if we compromise with the Democrats? As we draw down our troop levels in Iraq, we will also reduce the size of our federal welfare bureaucracy. On the day we are completely out of Iraq, we will also completely eliminate all federal welfare.

I'd say, let's throw in the "War on Drugs" and make a deal. Both the "War on Poverty" and the "War on Drugs" have been colossal failures on a scale that dwarfs our miscues in Iraq and even our most humiliating military clusterfarge, Vietnam. Both have consumed billions and billions of dollars, while leaving millions of Americans worse off than they were in the pre-war early sixties. Welfare reform enacted during the Clinton administration was a good start, but only a tiny piece of the puzzle towards ending welfare dependency and placing the bulk of what we now think of as 'welfare' back where it belongs, in the hands of private charities. The war on drugs is a similar disaster, creating a vast criminal underground that profits and thrives on the drug trade, while making criminals out of pot-smokers. The ultimate measure of the futility of our "War on Drugs" is that the street price of most drugs, in constant dollars, has stayed steady or even declined during the period of increased enforcement.

Time to get the Federal Government out of the welfare business, and place law enforcement back into the hands of local government where it belongs. We'll not only pare back huge expenditures from the Federal budget, but we'll set a good example of healthy democracy for the new democratic government of Iraq, as we draw down our troops and let them stand on their own two feet as a free people, delivered from the tyranny of a government that tried to control every aspect of society. And shouldn't we all want that?

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Posted 8:52 AM by WiN

Happy 80th, Bill!

Though there will no doubt be hundreds, I can't imagine a better tribute to William F. Buckley Jr. on the occasion of his 80th birthday than this one by one of my favorite 'old time' columnists, William Murchison. I started reading, and enjoying, Bill Murchison's folksy conservatism years ago in my home town paper, the Dallas Morning News, and soon thereafter was introduced to Bill Buckley and his consummate creation, National Review. Although I must admit that I have never quite developed the taste for Buckley's writing that I did for Murchison, the magic of his creation is that it has introduced me to dozens of other writers that I love, such as John Derbyshire, Jonah Goldberg, Michael Leedon, Larry Kudlow, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Victor Davis Hanson and many, many others. And I do willingly confess a weakness for Buckley's fiction, as manifest in his Blackford Oakes novels.

But as to Buckley's contribution to American life, there can be no doubt. As Murchison aptly puts it:

Life would unquestionably be quieter, absent our brother Bill and also more fraught with peril and/or pure tedium. Without Buckley, without his wit, grace and brains, the dominant liberalism of post-World War II America might have washed all dissent out to sea. There would have been no conservative comeback; no Goldwater, no Reagan. The present menace to life and limb would be the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile, instead of the jihadist suicide bomb. Our taxes would certainly be steeper, our lives more bureaucratized, our hands less free to improvise and invent.

That is because the essence of conservatism, as Bill Buckley understood and began advertising it, half a century ago, was Christian freedom as shaped by tradition. It was a proposition at odds with all the ends of human manipulation.

Manipulation, by those who understood themselves to be wise and generous at heart, was the style of the times: the product mostly of the Depression era and vain, boastful science. Buckley and fellow believers in the higher freedom began as a scattered lot. Gradually, they came together under his leadership and inspiration to preach the gospel of human freedom as mediated by the spirit of Christianity.

And later:

[D]on't you see, that's why they did come and still do -- because a creed of freedom lived out in gratitude to the God whose service is perfect freedom was about the richness of all life. You could speak with a modified prep school accent, like Bill Buckley; or with a Texas twang; or in a language with no resemblance to English. Still, you were conservative. And probably are now -- that is, if you prize the nobly ordered freedom depicted for so long, so ably, so engagingly by Bill Buckley.

For whose sterling gifts, O Lord, make us truly thankful.

To which I add, with all my conservative brothers and sisters, Amen.

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Posted 7:16 AM by WiN

On movie screenings, reserve seats, and more Serenity

Since attending the screening of Serenity, the Big Damn Movie (BDM) Tuesday night as part of a blog promotional scheme, I've been poking around trying to get a handle on how well the promotional aspect went off. As one indication, pinging Google Blog Search for "Serenity movie" returns almost 14,000 hits, so I'd say that's pretty good response. Without exception, all of the reviews I've clicked on were positive, and most of them were positively glowing (not to say orgasmic). But another common thread is the dissatisfaction of bloggers with the way the screening invitations were handled by the promoter.

Everyone that signed up to attend the screening received an email confirmation that began "Congratulations! You are one of the lucky bloggers to be chosen and confirmed for the screening of SERENITY for the time, date and the number of guests that you have requested. Please note, this confirmation DOES NOT guarantee you a seat at the screening." Now this didn't bother me because I've been to a ton of screenings in the last year thanks to a guy I work with who has a hook-up through his daughter to get passes for anything Sony is involved with. There are always a few rows right in the center of the theater roped off for reviewers and VIPs. I have never seen those rows fill up before the show starts. The rest of the seats are open, however, and allocated on a first come, first served basis to other pass holders (like myself) who are there through the good graces of a local radio station promotion or whatever, so usually there's a line beginning about 90 minutes or so before show time. No big deal, trade an hour or so of your time for a free movie, right? But if you don't know what's going on and get there late (as I have done), you risk sitting on the front row or not getting in at all.

Well, when I saw the email, I knew that I would have to get there in time to get one of those 'press row' seats, but since they usually don't fill up anyway I figured no problemo. Sure enough, I got there about 45 minutes before showtime and there were still plenty of seats, not only in the press section but also on the floor with the hoi polloi. There was, however, one very large African American gentleman who had a little problem with the concept of 'first come, first served'. As is typical in a crowded theater, those who get there first tend to sit either right in the center of the row or on the aisle. As the upper section had filled quickly, there were only a few scattered seats left, and the ones he wanted were on a row anchored by an enormous African-American girl, who was not budging. After a minute or two of unsuccessfully trying to convince her to move over so that he and his (also large) buddy could sit down, he began yelling, cursing and threatening her and everyone around her. The mostly white audience was getting pretty darned nervous by the time the manager came to try to calm him down. He was not convinced to give up in his quest for the seats until two rather nervous-looking private security guards appeared to back the manager up. Meanwhile, all the seats on the floor filled up, so he had no choice but to leave and come back Friday.

Anyway, the moral of the story is get there early and don't sweat it. I was glad to be able to sit in the press section, which did actually fill up, probably due to the bloggers, but I doubt anyone who had signed up to review the movie got turned away unless they waited until the last 10 minutes or so to arrive. So even though there were no "guaranteed" seats, anyone who wanted to review it could have. From what I've seen, there were at least some controls to prevent overbooking of blog reviewers.

A little bit more on the movie itself. I said yesterday that "The Operative" seemed to supersede the "Blue Hands" guys from the series, and that it seemed to be something of a discontinuity. Well, last night I finally got around to seeing the final show, "Objects in Space", which also adds a bounty hunter into the mix of ruthless characters after River. The bounty hunter, Early, happens to be black, as is also The Operative from the movie. The only other black male who is prominent in the series, though not in the movie, is the enigmatic Shepard Book. Book is the subject of much speculation amongst fans due to the fact that his background is mostly unexplained and he has a penchant for inexplicably displaying talents that a holy man would not ordinarily posses, such as gun marksmanship and decking a guy with a single punch. Early, the bounty hunter, also makes the comment "That's no Shepard" when he sees Book, but we aren't given any indication on what basis that assessment is made. It's just one of the little mysterious sidelines that make the characters and the series so interesting, but one which now appears may never be resolved (it isn't in the movie). But it does appear that, whatever Book's transgressions may have been in a previous life, his quiet faith and timely wisdom, along with his willingness to help the crew out of tight spots, is serving to draw Mal back to his faith (as evidenced during the battle scenes from the pilot "Serenity"). Just one of the many facets of this little world that Whedon has so successfully sucked us into.

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Posted 11:35 AM by WiN

Serenity Flies Again

What happens when a TV show goes beyond the banal, the kitschy, the trendy and the formulaic and goes for high-quality and high-concept with non-trivial characterization and a great story line?. Well, in the case of Firefly, Joss Whedon's late, much-lamented sci-fi show originally produced for FOX, you can garner a rabidly fanatical fan base in a short production run, and keep the dream alive by producing a high quality action-adventure movie that could very well become another cult classic.

Although the TV series was cancelled in late 2002 after only 11 episodes aired (14 total episodes were shot), Whedon fans along with fans of the new show continued to push as first UPN then the SciFi channel considered continuing the series. It was never picked up, however, and the sets were struck for the final time in February of 2003. (info from Browncoats.com)

But evidence of a solid fan base for the show continued to grow, so much so that the decision was made to release the series in its entirety to DVD later that year. Brisk sales of the set, egged on by internet word-of-mouth, convinced studio executives to pick up the option in March of 2004 to produce a full-length film featuring the original characters, much as the similarly-fated 'Star Trek' series had years earlier. The film is set for wide release this Friday, September 30th.

I heard about Firefly a few weeks back while chasing some rabbit trail on the internet and was intrigued by what I read about character development and well-rounded story lines. Although not a huge fan of sci-fi in general, I decided to ping NetFlix and found that the DVD's were available. On a lark, I added them to my list thinking I would try a few shows to see if it lived up to the hype. After watching 'Serenity', the original pilot, I was hooked. In fact, after watching the first two disks I ordered a set for myself. My timing could not have been better, as I then found out that the long-awaited movie would soon be forthcoming. Last Friday I saw on Townhall.com a chance to join the 'Serenity Blogger Bonanza' and get a pass for an early screening of the show, which was last night. Oh, happy day!

For non-fans of the series, the movie starts out with a few minutes of back-story about the evacuation from 'Earth that was' and the seeding of a new solar system with inhabitable planets for the evacuees to settle. Human nature being what it is, even 500 years in the future, some folks decided that running just their own planet wasn't enough and that those on the 'outer' planets would need to be coerced, or forced, to join an 'Alliance' of evacuee-inhabited planets. The independent human spirit being what it is, some folks disagreed, especially the 'pioneers' on the outer planets furthest from 'civilization', and a civil war ensued. Our story picks up in a 'post-reconstruction' era similar to that of our own society, with the conquered itching to put some distance between themselves and the conquerors by eking out a living on the furthest frontier. Our heroes are members of this misfit society of rebels who make their way in the brave new world of the Alliance as futuristic rum-runners in a small but elusive 'Firefly' cargo vessel dubbed the Serenity by its captain and owner, Malcolm 'Mal' Reynolds (Nathan Fillion). He is joined on his crew by his former cohort in the 'Resistance', Zoe (Gina Torres), her husband Wash, the pilot of the ship (Alan Tudyk), mercenary Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin), and mechanic Kaylee (Jewel Staite). The ship also hosts a 'companion' (consort) named Inara (Morena Baccarin), who provides something of a love interest for Mal and an entree for the operation onto many an otherwise unwelcoming planet.

This tightly-knit, though not always affable, group takes on a couple of 'fares' in the pilot show, a doctor from one of the inner (civilized) planets, Simon(Sean Maher), who carries some highly secret and valuable cargo, and a 'Shepard' (holy man) who has an itch to wander after spending years in a spiritual enclave (Ron Glass). Simon's cargo turns out to be his sister River (Summer Glau), a super-intellect with psychic powers whom he has rescued from an Alliance laboratory (the movie also fills in the back-story on the rescue).

Serenity begins with the initial stages of an Alliance investigation into River's abduction, and introduces us to a super-assassin, known in the movie only as 'The Operative' (Chiwetel Ejiofor). This operative differs slightly from the series, where a pair of mysterious blue-gloved agents are seen to be shadowing River and the crew, seeking her return (or demise). Perhaps in the movie, the 'Blue Hands' have failed and been replaced by the uber-agent 'Operative'.

As in the series, River is obviously a very dangerous person for the Alliance to have roaming around on the loose, whether due to her super-human abilities, the fact that she 'knows too much', or both. She is number one on the Alliance's 'Most Wanted' list with a bullet, and that creates problems for Mal and his crew whose business thrives on keeping a low profile (except for Inara). He threatens to leave River and her brother behind (once in the movie, multiple times in the series), but somehow never seems to follow through, and Simon's skills as a doctor often come in handy as gunfights and fisticuffs are a regular occurrence, lending to the show's 'Old West' flair. In his spare time, when not mending bullet holes and broken limbs, Simon strives to unravel the mysteries behind River's violent dreams and psychotic episodes, brought on by the hinted-at atrocities of the Alliance lab. In the movie, we find that River holds the key to a horrendous secret that threatens to bring down the Alliance should it ever be revealed, which explains their dogged determination and utter malevolence in hunting her down.

And speaking of malevolence, we also get a little better idea of why the otherwise manly Jayne always appears on the verge of losing bladder control every time someone mentions the presence of 'Reavers'. As sketched in the series, Reavers are a tribe of utterly depraved, cannibalistic former humans, with both zombie and Borg-like characteristics. As with the Borg in the Star Trek series, the terror of Reaver encounters punctuates a number of 'Firefly' story lines, and the movie is no exception. The movie 'fleshes out' the Reavers, both literally and figuratively, and they are even more terrifying for it.

I would characterize this film as an 'action-adventure' movie, and it doesn't disappoint on either count. Unlike the most successful Sci-Fi films of the recent past, vast 'space battle' scenes are surprisingly sparse. The emphasis, as in the series, is on people, not technology. The fight scenes are numerous and well-choreographed, but with none of the Matrix-like cinematography so popular lately. Be warned, there is a little more blood and gore than Star Trek and Star Wars fans might be used to, thus the PG-13 rating for 'sequences of intense violence and action', but it's no Kill Bill. Like their captain, Serenity's crew is always ready to mix it up (even some you wouldn't expect to).

My main concern going into the theater was whether the film could succeed as a stand-alone effort for those not familiar with the series. I think I can give a qualified yes to that question. Although some of the characters that we know much better from, and add much to, the series are almost reduced to bit players, there is enough development of the core group to make a 'non-Browncoat' care about their fate, and root for the success of their mission. Familiar cues from similar genres helps, such as the Han Solo/Chewbacca-like relationship of Mal and Zoe, Jayne's slow-witted gunsel and Kaylee's Gilligan-like cheerfulness to Mal's gruff 'Skipper'. Even Serenity herself, seemingly held together through Kaylee's genius and a little spit-n-bailin'-wire, harkens back to the Millennium Falcon. I doubt any even semi-open-minded SciFi or action-adventure fan will be disappointed. Whether that is enough to garner the kind of box-office that will provide the needed bounce to re-instate the series, which is Whedon and the die-hard Firefly fan's fondest wish, remains to be seen, but once it is released to video it will no doubt join a select and fairly short list of films that will be enjoyed by fans over and over again for years to come.

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Posted 2:50 PM by WiN

Serenity screening tonight

I've garnered passes to a screening of the new Serenity movie, based on the television series Firefly, thanks to the good folks at Townhall.com. Here is a synopsis of the movie:

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

I'll be blogging on it tomorrow sometime, until then here is the official website.