The people behind the “spider dog” prank briefly scare the dickens out of Jurassic World actor Chris Pratt. (Caution, some indelicate language here.)
If you’re not familiar with the spider dog prank, here it is. (I thought I’d posted this previously, but if so I can’t find it.)
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Peter Jackson (best known for The Lord of the Rings films) directed this surprisingly touching and understated adaptation of a novel by Alice Sebold. Like Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging it’s told from the viewpoint of a 14-year-old girl, but it’s a completely different and much darker sort of film.
At the start the heroine tells us in a voiceover, “My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name: Susie. I was 14 years old when I was murdered on December 6th, 1973.”
But before we get to that part of her story we spend some time getting to know Susie, who is very well portrayed by a young actress of talent and distinctive beauty named Saoirse Ronan. We’re introduced to her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz), her amusingly daft grandmother (Susan Sarandon), her brother and sister (Christian Ashdale and Rose McIver), and the handsome and likable boy she’s smitten with (Reece Ritchie). She has no idea he knows she exists, but at the end of school one day he surprises her by asking her to meet him at the mall, and it’s clear he likes her as much as she likes him.
Less than an hour later, a neighbor rapes and murders her.
By this point I’d come to really like Susie, and I’m grateful that her death is not shown on screen. I don’t think I could have watched it. (Apparently it’s described in detail in the novel, the author having herself been raped at the same age.)
Susie lingers on Earth, at first unaware she’s dead, then watching as her disappearance tears her family apart and seeing how much the boy she never got to kiss misses her. A mysterious little girl, another ghost, keeps urging Susie to move on to the next stage in the afterlife, but Susie isn’t ready to let go.
The Lovely Bones is a tragic ghost story but not at all unendurably sad. It’s strange and atmospheric and certainly not everyone’s sort of film, but I liked it better than anything else I’ve seen by Peter Jackson, and I recommend it.
by The former governor of California, having more free time on his hands now, decides to take a walk around Los Angeles in Terminator makeup, winding up in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum where he has fun scaring people.
Actually, the stunt was a promo for the next Terminator movie, this one co-starring Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s Game of Thrones), which if I’m not mistaken opens a week from today.
by I’ve noticed that a lot of this film’s reviews begin the same way, something like, “I was dreading the prospect of having to watch a romantic comedy aimed at teenaged girls,” and then going on to confess how much they liked it.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I have no strong prejudice against teen romantic comedies (I liked 16 Candles, for example), and I’d heard good thing about the long-running series of books (by Louise Rennison) that inspired this movie. In fact a couples of years ago I gave the first volume to someone as a Christmas present, mainly because I liked its title: Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging. (The film distributor apparently preferred a less-explicit adjective.)
The setting is Eastbourne, a city on the English Channel southeast of London, where Georgia Nicolson is a fairly typical 14-year-old: self-absorbed, worried about her looks, obnoxious to her parents, and constantly embarrassing herself one way or another. But she’s more cluelessly thoughtless than malicious and feels genuinely sorry when she realizes that she’s hurt someone. The actress who plays her, Georgia Groome, is excellent in the role.
Georgia’s best friend Jas (Eleanor Tomlinson) is a nice person and quite beautiful. When Jas asks Georgia if her hair looks OK, Georgia assures her it’s “Keira Knightley-ish,” which is a bit of an in-joke. The same director, Gurinder Chadha, had previously made Bend It Like Beckham, in which the female protagonist also had a beautiful best friend, in that film played by Keira Knightley.
Georgia likes a new boy in school, but unfortunately he’s already been snagged by the school’s most notorious hot blonde, so in an effort to compete, Georgia enrolls for kissing lessons from a boy in her class who has had the genius idea of setting himself up as a snogging tutor. (Why the hell didn’t I think of that when I was in junior high?) Meanwhile, Georgia’s father’s boss sends him to New Zealand on an extended assignment and her mother spends a lot of time with the muscularly handsome young fellow helping her refurbish and redecorate their home, which puts Georgia in a panic that her parents are headed for divorce.
Angus, by the way, is Georgia’s huge, scowling tomcat, a menacing beast who chases neighborhood dogs but patiently allows Georgia’s little sister to dress him up in costumes from bride to cowboy.
The story is admittedly unsophisticated, the comic bits very silly, and the ending a huge, implausible contrivance, but it was all enough fun I didn’t mind.
by Yesterday’s video from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website (link) is a short one produced by the National Spaced Society to remind people what’s coming very soon: the first flyby of Pluto. (The images of Pluto shown are of course mere conjecture.) The New Horizons spacecraft will come closest to Pluto on Bastille Day, July 14.
By the way, how old are you? If you were around before March 3, 1972, congratulations: You’re among the minority of humans born before the first interstellar spacecraft from Earth was launched. I’m afraid the rest of you missed it.
I occasionally still hear it said that the vast distance between the stars makes it interstellar travel impossible, overlooking the fact that five interstellar spacecraft are already on their way — Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons. Voyager 1 is the farthest away (see this page for the current distance to about the nearest half-second) and will continue to hold the record until a faster spacecraft is launched. (New Horizons was faster for a while, but it has slowed and Voyager 1 is once again the fastest-moving spacecraft from Earth.)
Even Voyager 1 will take about 40,000 years to come anywhere near a star other than our own, passing a little over a light-year from the red dwarf Gliese 445, and that only because Gliese 445 is headed in our direction. Otherwise it would take nearly twice that long to reach the star system currently closest to our own, Proxima Centauri. Either way, that’s several times the length of all of human history. Voyager 1 will stop being a functioning spacecraft long before then, in just a decade or so from now, in fact.
But still, five spacecraft from Earth are headed out among the stars, and that’s something.
Could spacecraft go faster than that? Indeed they could. It’s been suggested, going back at least as far as physicist Robert L Forward’s sf novel Flight of the Dragon Fly (see this Wikipedia entry about it) to use light sails propelled by solar-powered masers or lasers to propel spacecraft to nearby stars in centuries or even decades. The lasers would stay in the solar system, probably orbiting fairly close to the Sun, and their beams would be focused on those distant light sails by lenses also in the solar system by many times farther from the Sun than Earth.
Such a propulsion system would require a number of technological advances and would not be cheap. But based on a calculation I saw, such as system could be cheaper than the Iraq war, and probably a better use of the money.
Incidentally, the total cost of the Voyager 1 mission, from building and launching the probe to the ongoing monitoring and analysis of its transmissions, has averaged less than ten cents a year per American.
All of NASA’s spending combined, from its beginning in the 1950s through early satellites, the Moon landings, the International Space Station, multiple space telescopes, rovers on Mars, New Horizons spacecraft nearing Pluto, and all the other missions of exploration, adjusted for inflation, is roughly comparable to current U.S. defense expenditures for just one single year. (See this earlier post.)
(Updated 2015 July 6 to correct a typo and improve, I hope, some clumsy phrasing.)
by Not quite as bad as I’d expected, with some impressive if ridiculously over-the-top end-of-the-world special effects, which are almost as over-the-top as Nicolas Cage, who somehow miraculously manages not to be in it. (John Cusack stars.)
But man is it dumb, even in little ways, for example having a Navy admiral give a rudder command as “Hard to port!” For the better part of a century commands to the helmsman have been given in terms of left and right rudder. The old “hard a-port” is now “right full rudder” (rudder and helm directions being opposite).
That complaint might sound a tad arcane and picky, but there are just so damned many things like that, you start to wonder why they didn’t run the script past a reasonably well-read sixth-grader.
The most offensive gaffe, I thought, was depicting Queen Elizabeth II as one of those elite few chosen to survive the end of the world (and even bringing along her Corgis). Whatever one’s opinion of the woman, this seems unbelievable. She fully remembers what her mother said during World War II when there were suggestions that the royal children should be sent to safety overseas. Her mother replied that she would not send the children away unless she could accompany them, and she could not leave England while the King remained, “and the King will never leave.”
Sadly, there were apparently people who really did expect the world to end late in 2012, at least until they realized there was no real danger of Romney getting elected, and quite a number of others who expected the date to produce instead a great transformation of the world into a better place. So pretty much all of them were disappointed, one way or another.
by For now robots don’t appear to present much danger to our Pop-Tart supplies, nor are they likely to be rivals for our dogs’ affections.
by I’d rate this the best film yet from Dreamworks Animation (probably best known for the Shrek series). Based loosely on a children’s book by Cressida Cowell, it’s the story of an adolescent boy named Hiccup (a really stupid name, but the rest of the film makes up for it), who lives in a Viking village on island that’s regularly raided by different sorts of dragons, who steal sheep, start fires, bite off limbs, and worse. Unlike his imposing father, the leader of the village, Hiccup is a scrawny klutz. He dreams of someday slaying a dragon to earn some respect (not to mention get a date), but when he’s alone in a remote part of the island and has a chance to kill a wounded dragon, he just can’t bring himself to do it.
In fact, he secretly makes the dragon his pet, and eventually learns to ride it. (This is a film I regret not seeing it in 3D, because the flying sequences must have been exhilarating.)
Meanwhile his father puts him in dragon combat training, and to everyone’s astonishment he starts to do really well at it, mainly by using things he’s learned from experience with his secret pet. It helps that he’s not actually supposed to destroy the dragons he battles during training (captive dragons presumably being hard to come by). He’s mainly supposed to learn how to avoid being killed by them, at least until the final lesson, when the best student will be granted the honor of making a kill.
There’s nothing very original about his relationship with a loving but disappointed father or his unlikely romance with Astrid, the dangerous young beauty of his dreams (and those of most of the other boys on the island). But as with several films I’ve seen recently, the personalities and the dialog more than make up for plot clichés, especially the characters of Hiccup, Astrid, and the pet dragon. Recommended.
The sequel, set five years after the first film, finds Hiccup a far more respected member of his island community, but he prefers solitary exploring on the back of his pet dragon to accepting new responsibilities in the village. On one such flight he encounters more captive dragons and eventually learns the identity of a mysterious Dragon Rider and of a villain’s plot to place all dragons, and a good amount of territory, under his control.
This leads to major battles and some tragedies and a considerable change in mood from the first film, with parts of it considerably darker. I liked it a fair amount less than the original, but other people liked it more. The filmmakers intended for this to be the middle film of a trilogy, but it tells a complete story and leaves nothing hanging.
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From KSNT television in Topeka, an innocent reporter is harassed by cicadas in this clip recorded June 9. The get out only once every 17 years and when they do they’re ready to mate with somebody. It’s something like a prom.
by George Clooney’s job is to fly around the country firing people to save their bosses the discomfort. When an enthusiastic, fresh-out-of-college new hire (the very cute Anna Kendrick) convinces the boss they could save money by firing people in webcam chats, Clooney’s outraged reaction prompts the boss to send the the young woman around with Clooney so she can gather some real-world information on how the new tactic might work.
The story, based on the novel by Walter Kim, is smart enough not to go for the cliché of a romantic relationship between Clooney and the much younger Kendrick. (In fact, at one point he’s clearly shocked to overhear her telling her boyfriend that she doesn’t think about Clooney that way at all, because, like, he’s really old. Ouch, said every middle-aged guy in the audience.) Instead he connects with another regular traveler closer to his age, Vera Farmiga, first as a sex partner and later as a friend, which helps him break out of his deliberate avoidance of ties with friends and family.
While it’s fairly entertaining and well-acted, Clooney’s character is at times a borderline cartoon and some plot developments are a bit too contrived. I liked it but also wondered “So what?”
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