To help me keep regular updates going while Steph and I adjust to the two newest (and loveliest!) additions to our family, I have solicited a number of guest bloggers for the site for the next few weeks.  (I figured my just posting new baby pictures every day probably wasn’t the type of “regular content” that most of you are looking for!)

I posed a simple question to a number of my close friends and colleagues: What is your favorite movie of all time?

I received several wonderful pieces in response that discuss a wide variety of films (so far, no duplication!).  Each writer approached the question from a different angle.  While most discuss the strengths of the film they listed as their favorite — what made it a success and what gives it its enduring power — many also branched out to talk about the first time they saw the film, what personal meaning it holds from them, or other tangents.

Starting on Wednesday, I’ll be posting these pieces in a continuing series over the next several weeks (interspersed with other posts by yours truly on a variety of different topics, of course!).  I think this is a really exciting series that provides a look at an array of different amazing films (some very famous, some a little less so).  I hope you agree!

OK, we’re getting closer!

We’re now six films into DC Comics and Warner Bros.’ exciting new endeavor to launch high-quality direct-to-DVD animated films masterminded by Bruce Timm, one of the key creative forces behind the amazing Batman: The Animated Series from the 90’s.  In my review of the fourth film, Wonder Woman, I wrote that I enjoyed the effort but that I was disappointed that, to that point, the DVD series wasn’t turning out as I had hoped.  I wrote:

The original announcement had seemed to indicate that the series would focus more on adaptations of classic comic stories as opposed to this sort of one-off origin story that isn’t based on any specific source material.  This is the sort of thing that most of the live-action super-hero films do, creating a new story that is sort of a “melange” of various bits of story-lines and background from the many years of the character’s history.  It’s not what I was hoping for from these DVDs.  (To my dismay, the preview included on the Wonder Woman disc seems to indicate that the next DVD, a Green Lantern adventure, will be exactly this same type of not-based-on-anything-specific tale.)  Where is my epic animated adaptation of The Great Darkness Saga?  Or Batman: Year One?  Or Kingdom Come?  How cool would that be?

Other than my philosophical support of its premise, is Superman/Batman: Public Enemies actually any good?  Well, it definitely is, though like the rest of these new DVDs it does not match the heights of any of Bruce Timm’s animated DCU series (Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League, etc.).

The story is simple:  Lex Luthor has been elected President of the United States.  He uses the discovery of an enormous fragment of Kryptonite that is on-course to impact with Earth (to what would be sure to be devastating consequences for the planet) as an excuse to issue a warrant for Superman’s arrest.  Batman quickly gets involved, and the two heroes find themselves on the run from a whole host of super-villains eager for the bounty Luthor has offered.  They also find themselves hunted by a number of heroes who feel a moral imperative to obey the orders of America’s commander in chief.  Meanwhile, there’s still the little matter of finding a way to avert the impending impact of the Kryptonite meteor.

This DVD, as with the original comic books, is pretty much action-action-action.  The animation is, for the most part, really gorgeous (probably the best effort since the first one, Superman: Doomsday).  The animation teams on these DVDs seem to be more comfortable with large action sequences than with intimate dialogue sequences (which is probably why I feel Superman: Doomsday and Public Enemies are the most successful ones, as they’re also the most action-packed).  These guys are AMAZING at choreographing enormous super-hero/villain action sequences.  There’s a lot of fun eye-candy here, and the pace of the story is pretty relentless.

I have really enjoyed how, for each of these DVDs, Timm and his team have created new designs for all of the characters, in an attempt to match the style of the artists of the source material.  Ed McGuinness has a very distinct style of drawing, and I was really surprised and impressed by the way the animation maintained a lot of the flavor of his original work.  Not everything is perfect — there are some instances where what worked in a still drawing doesn’t translate to a moving image, such as the early scene where Captain Atom and Major Force confront Superman.  As the two characters walk towards Superman, one can see that the animators had trouble making their enormously-muscled arms (a distinct McGuinness characteristic) move along with their bodies.  Also, while I found most of the character-designs to be really top-notch (especially the tweaked looks for Luthor and Batman), I was appalled at the hideous depiction of Amanda Waller.  She’s always been a heavy character, but here she was absurdly obese!  Yikes!  I also wasn’t wild about the over-simplified look of Power Girl’s face, with her enormous bird-like eyes.  But these are small quibbles — over-all, as I wrote, the animation is top-notch.

The best feature of this DVD is the return of the classic voices from the original DCU animated series: Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption) as Lex Luthor, Tim Daly as Superman, and Kevin Conroy as Batman.  As far as I’m concerned, those three actors ARE those characters.  There have been many other great actors who have taken a swing at those roles (both in live-action and in the other DC animated DVDs), but no one can beat those three.  (PARTICULARLY Kevin Conroy’s Batman.)  So it was an ENORMOUS delight to have those three all return for this installment, and the film gives them a lot of opportunities to riff off of one another.  (I was further pleased to see several other voices from the original animated series return to reprise their roles, such as CCH Pounder as Amanda Waller.)

So what’s not so good?  Primarily, it’s that the story upon which all of the exciting action hangs is rather weak.  I understand that it’s popular, but Loeb and McGuinness’ original comic-book storyline is far being one of my favorites, and the DVD shares many of its weaknesses.  While the set-up is cool (how would Superman and Batman react if their worst enemy actually was elected, without fraud, to the highest office in the land?), the story quickly devolves into silliness.  By the time one gets to the end, in which Lex has donned his green and purple super-suit and an enormous Superman/Batman robot arrives out of nowhere to save the day, the adventure has veered into total lunacy.  Over-all, Timm and writer Stan Berkowitz have done a good job at trimming away many of the indulgences from the original story (such as the go-nowhere subplots involving the possibility that Superman villain Metallo was the one who shot Bruce Wayne’s parents, and the appearance of the Kingdom Come Superman from the future), but the disappointment of the third act’s story was exactly the same thing that bugged me about the final issues of the original comic.

I also would have enjoyed a lot more fleshing-out of how exactly Luthor got himself elected President.  There’s a great montage that opens the film that sets this premise up, hinting that tough economic times created desperation in the country’s voters, but after a clip of Luthor on a news show declaring his candidacy, we jump right to the announcement that he was elected President.  I would have liked to have seen a lot more info on how he sold himself to the country, how he convinced people to disregard his criminal past, etc. etc.  It’s key to the story that we buy into the notion that Luthor was legitimately elected, and I think more time needed to be spent on fleshing out that idea.

(True, none of that was present in the original comic, but that’s because this story came after several years of storytelling in DC’s various Superman books that DID explore the story of Luthor’s candidacy and eventual election.  Most readers who read those six issues of Superman/Batman in 2003/4 had read those other comics, so Loeb and McGuinness didn’t need to spend too much time on the set-up.  This DVD, on the other hand, needs to stand entirely on its own, and I think they would have been well-served to have taken a little more time to sell the premise.)

I also would have liked to have seen a little more time (even just a scene or two would have sufficed) to explain exactly why certain heroes agree to work for Luthor.  The dilemma of a super-hero having to decide whether his/her respect for the office of the President outweighs his/her personal feelings about the office-holder is an extraordinarily rich hook for the story.  But I felt those juicy issues were quickly swept aside (by the original comics, and even more-so by the DVD movie) in favor of moving on to more action.  This leaves me totally confused as to why heroes like Hawkman and Captain Marvel, for instance, choose to stand against their former colleagues Superman and Batman.  This DVD is the shortest of the six animated DVDs so far (it’s a brisk 67 minutes), so it’s not like they couldn’t have added in a few extra minutes fleshing out some of this character motivation and back-story.

(Speaking of Hawkman and Captain Marvel, by the way, brings me to yet another issue I have with both the DVD and the original comics: I think the drama of Superman and Batman having to fight against other super-heroes would have been much richer if they’d been facing off against other of the DCU’s big guns like Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, as opposed to B-listers like Captain Atom and Black Lightning.)

I’m getting into a lot of niggling complaints, now, and I really shouldn’t.  The DVD really is quite solid.  It’s just that I have extraordinarily high standards for animation, and particularly for the DCU animated projects.  (This is primarily because Timm & co. set the bar SO HIGH for themselves with all of their terrific work on the Batman, Superman, Batman: Beyond, and Justice League TV series!)   Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is a very entertaining and enjoyable entry in the new DVD series, and superior to the last three DVDs.

It’s great… but I am still waiting for the SPECTACULAR.

I followed a link the other day to the 10 Most Insane, Child-Warping Moments of ’80s Cartoons.  Pretty funny stuff there.  I’d also like to direct your attention to this list of the 10 Star Wars Toys that Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities.  (It’s worth your while if only so that you, too, can be stunned by the resemblance of General Riekaan — from The Empire Strikes Back — to Senator John Kerry!!)

I’ve just discovered a phenomenal web-comic called Let’s Be Friends Again.  It’s mostly about comic books.  I love it to death, and it’s well worth your precious time, so check it out.

Have you seen this ten-minute fan-made live-action G.I. Joe film, Battle For the Serpent Stone?  I’m a big proponent of fan-films, and this one is of pretty high quality.  It’s quite an achievement — take a look.

Here’s a link to an terrific interview with IDW Comics editor Scott Dunbier, discussing his work in putting out the gorgeous new hardcover Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume One (1980-1982), the first of five books that will collect every single strip (many of which have never before been collected) of Berkeley Breathed’s masterpiece comic strip.  I lust after this collection, and very much hope that Mr. Dunbier is able to move forward with collections of Outland and Opus as well.

This is a great story about an annoying movie theatre patron.  I wish there was a theatre like The Alamo Drafthouse here in Boston, because I would be more than happy to spend an enormous amount of money watching movies there and nowhere else.  I am sick to death of having my enjoyment of a movie interrupted by some jackass talking, texting, or some other such nonsense.

Harvard University is offering a class on The Wire??? Sign me up!!

I never believed it would happen, but filming on the two-film adaptation of The Hobbit is coming closer and closer to getting underway.  Click here for an interesting interview with director Guillermo del Toro with some updates on how things are progressing.

Despite my renewed appreciation for the final run of episodes of Battlestar Galactica, this hilarious evisceration of the plot points in the last 45 minutes of the finale is impossible to argue with.

Here’s a terrific list of one fellow’s Top 15 Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series.  It’s an interesting list.  I absolutely adore episodes such as “Over The Edge,” “Mad Love,” “Robin’s Reckoning,” and “Heart of Ice,” and I was also pleased to see some lesser-known gems like “The Ultimate Thrill” and “Growing Pains” make the cut.  (However, while “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” and “The Clock King” are solid episodes, I definitely wouldn’t count them among the series’ 15 best.)  I posted my own best-of episode list for Batman: The Animated Series last year, so click here to read my selections!

This, my friends, is how you follow up a Best Picture Oscar win.

After No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers released the wonderfully bizarre Burn After Reading (read my review here). Less than a year later, they have bestowed upon us the even more wonderful (and even more bizarre) new film, A Serious Man.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a mild-mannered Jewish physics professor living in Minnesota. Despite (or perhaps because of?) his seemingly gentle, meek nature, trouble upon trouble piles atop poor Larry’s head, as if he were an American suburban reincarnation of the prophet Job. Larry’s son is constantly getting into trouble in Hebrew school, and seems less interested in preparing for his Bar Mitzvah than he is in watching TV and listening to records. His daughter rushes out of the house whenever she can. His wife has informed him that she is having an affair with Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed, creating one of the most stand-out characters I’ve seen on the big screen recently in just a few scenes). Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind, a familiar face from Spin City and Curb Your Enthusiasm), who might be a genius or who might be completely mad but who definitely has problems, has moved into the house with them. Meanwhile, Larry is up for consideration for tenure, but the head of the university board has informed him that someone has started writing them letters that are enormously critical of his teaching abilities. Also, a Korean student failing his class has attempted to bribe him for a passing grade and becomes belligerent when Larry tries to turn down the offer of money.

The Coens (ably assisted by terrific performances across the board from their cast) do a masterful job in creating a slow-burning feeling of powerful dread. It seems clear from the opening frames that things are not going to go well for this Jewish suburban family.  Although this is a very funny film, it is also one that does not shy away from examining the small miseries that can accumulate in a modern life. In addition to the Coens and their actors, credit must also go to the haunting score by Carter Burwell. (There’s a short theme of several notes on a piano that recurs throughout the film that I found to be at once poignant and also evocative of coming doom.)

The narrative is strengthened by the Coens’ care in ensuring that the troubles that beset Larry aren’t over-wrought typical “movie” problems, but more mundane (though no less crushing) sorts.  I particularly appreciated the fact that (small spoiler ahead) a scene that shows us that Larry has engaged in a fling with the gorgeous pot-smoking housewife-next-door didn’t actually happen — it was just a dream.  (Otherwise I’d have felt that I was in The Ice Storm.)

The film is filled with fantastic vignettes that have stayed with me long after the end credits rolled. The “goy’s teeth” story might rival the commode story (from Reservoir Dogs) in terms of mid-movie show-stopping hilarity.

I also loved the opening scene in the shtetl. What a fantastically unusual way to open a movie! It is true that, after the movie ended, I had to spend some time pondering what the heck that sequence had to do with the rest of the film, but I must say that I LOVED that the Coens didn’t feel the need to spoon-feed us those answers.  Plus, I think that if you paid attention to the themes of the film, the connection of that introductory vignette to the rest of the story is fairly clear. (My conclusion: it was an illustration of the “it’s a matter of perspective” differences seen so often in the rest of the film.  To the wife, the elderly visitor is clearly a dybbuk, and to the husband he’s just an old guy. Neither one can find any way to comprehend the other’s point of view.)

As for that ending — boy, I guess the Coens really love ending their films about 15-20 minutes before you expect them to!!  Though this wasn’t quite as much of a fuck-you ending as that of No Country For Old Men (whose sudden ending really sunk what had until then been a phenomenal film for me), but I was equally shocked here when the lights came up.  HOWEVER, while I was startled that the movie was just OVER all of a sudden, I do think that the ending (with both literal and metaphorical tornadoes of further trouble on the way for the Gopniks) did seem fitting for the narrative of the film as a whole (which I did NOT think was the case with No Country.)

I should also mention, if you haven’t figured this out yet, that A Serious Man is an extraordinarily Jewish film. Apparently, the Coens have based much of the story on their own childhoods. To whatever degree that may be, this film is steeped in the experience of growing up Jewish and middle class in suburban America. I mentioned above the Coen’s willingness to avoid spoon-feeding their audience (with a clear explanation of the opening sequence). They similarly demonstrate a brave determination not to over-explain (or, frankly, just to explain even once) most of the Jewish terms and phrases (Hashem, dubbuk, tikkun olam, get, etc. etc.) that pepper the film. I thought this worked wonderfully, as it allowed me to fully enter this world the Coens were creating (or maybe I should say re-creating, from their youth in the ‘60s) without getting bogged down in boring explanatory exposition, though I wonder whether a non-Jewish audience member would have trouble following all of the details.

But speaking for myself, I absolutely adored A Serious Man. It is another triumph from the Coen Brothers, and the type of unique, I’ve-never-seen-a-film-quite-like-it idiosyncratic work that I’m always on the look-out for when I go see a movie. Wonderful. It may not have gotten a very wide release, but do check it out if it’s still playing at a theatre near you.

A little over a year ago, I wrote that I was excited to have begun watching the newly-released (and long-anticipated) DVDs of Spaced: The Complete Series.  Well, I can’t believe how long it took me a while to finally finish the set (despite there only being two seasons of seven episodes each, Steph and I decided to draw out our viewing to savor the enjoyment — we didn’t want the series to end!), but I’ve finally done so.

I am happy to report that the series is every bit as wonderful and weird as I’d been hearing for all these years!!

Spaced was a short-lived British TV show that had two seasons (or “series,” as they like to call them across the pond) of seven episodes each (with the first batch coming out in 1999 and the second in 2001).  It was written by and starred Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and now Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek) and Jessica Hynes, and was directed by Edgar Wright.

Simon and Jessica played Tim and Daisy, two mismatched North Londoners who pretend to be married in order to qualify for renting an affordable flat that they both had their eye on.  The series follows the misadventures of Tim and Daisy and their small and bizarre group of friends: the military-loving Mike, the delightfully daft Twist, the depressed conceptual artist Brian, and Tim and Daisy’s droll, alcoholic landlady Marsha.

What’s so wonderful about the series is the way that it doesn’t idealize the lives of these sort-of-lost (mostly) young people.  This isn’t Friends, where everyone is perky and lives in extraordinarily large and beautiful apartments.  Tim and Daisy are both unendingly lazy and unambitious, and their flat is endearingly small and believably cluttered.

But the series isn’t depressing — rather, it is a ridiculous amount of fun.  Though each character is filled with quirks, they all quickly become surprisingly lovable, and it is great fun watching them go through their little day-to-day adventures.  Also, the series is practically built around an ever-increasing number of rapid-fire references to (and parodies of) a wide variety of movies, TV shows, and all sorts of other aspects of sci-fi, comic books, and lots more geeky stuff.  The closest thing I could compare all of this silliness to is the fantasy sequences found in Scrubs — though the fantasies here are much more elegantly done and more intricately woven into the narrative.  It is great fun spotting all of the little winks and nods included in each episode.  (There’s even an homage-o-meter included as a special feature on the DVDs.)  Some of the references are a little dated (there are a lot of jokes about The Matrix and Star Wars: Episode I, for instance) but that’s not really bothersome — and for any joke that’s a little old there is another gag just around the corner that is bound to tickle your funny-bone (a brilliant One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest gag from one of the final episodes is springing to my mind).

I should also praise the show for the wonderfully cinematic style of the show as directed by Edgar Wright.  Rather than the familiar sitcom set-up, Spaced was filmed with only one camera and utilized rapid-fire editing and a constant array of different sets, locations, and camera angles.  Those techniques have become much more common in TV today (in shows like Arrested Development, Scrubs, 30 Rock, the American version of The Office, and others) but which were extraordinarily groundbreaking back in 1999.

The DVD is also filled to overflowing with terrific special features.  The most notable is a phenomenal feature-length documentary on the entire series entitled “Skip to the End.”  This is exactly the type of making-of documentary that I wish could be found on EVERY TV-on DVD release.  It is an extraordinarily exhaustive look at all aspects of the making of the show, featuring interviews with all of the show’s key players (and many of its not-so-key players — they got interviews from EVERYONE!).  It is also notable for its inspired closing minutes (hence the doc’s title) that provide a wonderfully sweet epilogue to the series that is not-to-be missed.

The DVD set is also filled with an array of deleted scenes, out-takes, a cast reunion from the 2007 Comic-Con, and many, many episode commentaries from the cast and crew and notable fans of the show such as Kevin Smith, Diablo Cody, and Quentin Tarantino.

Spaced is a unique, hysterical show that is not-too-terribly well-known here in the States, and that’s a shame.  It’s fantastic to see the show finally get an American DVD release — and the fact that the DVD package is so spectacular is a terrific bonus.  Any fan of this web-site will love this show, I have no doubt.  Check it out!

In addition to highlighting some of the very best comic book series that are out there (click here to read about 100 Bullets or here to read about Planetary) I’ve also been having fun writing about some of the great books that I’ve been following on a monthly basis (or semi-monthly basis, as the case may be) when I make my weekly visits to the comic book shop.  Click here to read about books like Incognito, Kick-Ass, and The Nightly News, and here to read about books like Hellboy, Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, The Dark Tower, and Batman: Streets of Gotham.

What else have I been reading?

Detective Comics — I am all for female heroes in my comic books (as well as TV shows and movies, for that matter) but generally I tend to think that female versions of male super-heroes (She-Hulk, Supergirl, etc.) are pretty lame.  So when I read that Detective Comics was going to start focusing on the newly-introduced character of Batwoman, I was less than overwhelmed.  However, when I heard that Greg Rucka and J. H. Williams III were the creators coming on board the title, I quickly changed my tune and decided to sample the series.  Boy I’m glad I did, because the first five issues of their run have been terrific.  Mr. Rucka is spinning a taught, tense mystery/adventure story (something at which he excels), and Mr. Williams III’s art is absolutely jaw-dropping.  I’m baffled as to how exactly he produces the art I’m seeing before me (and surely colorist Dave Stewart is a key player), but it seems to be a constant mix of different media and styles, presented in wonderfully eccentric panel layouts (no simple panel grids to be found here).  Each page is truly a work of art.  Really wonderful.

Star Trek Romulans: Schism — The very first time, as a kid, that I paid any notice to the names of the creators behind the comic books I was reading was because I noticed that there was one guy whose work I was enjoying way more than anyone else’s.  That was John Byrne.  He was the first artist I really followed, and I made it my business to track down back-issues of his famous work (his lengthy runs on Uncanny X-Men and Fantastic Four) as well as his less-famous work (Alpha Flight, Namor, etc.).  About the time that he was writing and illustrating the magnificent series John Byrne’s Next Men, I was convinced that he was the greatest comic book creator of the time.  Lately, Mr. Byrne seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor within the industry — he’s a name I often see criticized, and it’s been quite a while since he’s worked on a really high-profile project.  I must admit that I, too, have found myself disinterested by some of his recent work.  But I’ve found myself quite taken with his recent batch of Star Trek comics for IDW.  (I’ve long suspected that Mr. Byrne had a fondness for Star Trek, ever since noticing, as a kid, all the little Trek references that seemed to slip into his work on X-Men.)  Schism is the third part in what has turned into a trilogy of stories exploring the Klingon/Romulan alliance that was hinted at (but never really delved into) in the third season of the original Star Trek series.  Mr. Byrne has created a fascinating (no pun intended) story with lots of sci-fi action, great political intrigue, and the reappearance of a number of familiar faces (most notably the Klingons Kor and Koloth).  More, please!

X-Factor — Speaking of Star Trek, I’ve been a big, big fan of Peter David’s work ever since I noticed, back in the 80’s, that his Star Trek comics were way better than those written by anyone else.  I’ve followed Mr. David through a number of different comic book series for a number of different comic book publishers over the years, and I’ve seldom been disappointed.  I’ve also been following Mr. David’s work with X-Factor through several different incarnations of the series ever since he took over the book way back in 1991 (after the “Mutant Genesis” storyline).  As always, David’s X-Factor is full of ripping adventure yarns, terrific character development and continuity, and a lot of really funny humor.  The book has struggled a bit to find a consistent artist, but the recent work by Valentine De Landro has been very solid.  It’s by far the most bizarre, idiosyncratic of all the X-books, and that’s just the way I like it.  Here’s hoping the series continues to run for another 50 issues, at least!

Astonishing X-Men — The ridiculous delays since Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi took over this series had tampered by enthusiasm significantly, but issue #31, which began a new story-arc with artist Phil Jiminez, absolutely blew my socks off.  Agent Brand’s encounter with the Brood on an asteroid orbiting Earth goes terribly wrong, and the X-Men have to spring into action to attempt a rescue before her escape pod burns up upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.  What follows is a riveting, edge-of-your-seat read.  As always, Mr, Ellis takes the sci-fi aspects of the story very seriously, which brings a real complexity and plausibility to what could easily be just another chronicle of silly super-heroics.  He is also able to masterfully pile on the tension in page after page, as each attempt by Agent Brand and the X-Men to extricate her from her situation only leads to new problems.  This issue is also the best work by Phil Jimenez that I have ever seen.  He layers an extraordinary amount of detail into every panel, all of which effectively serves his story-telling as the reader is kept clear on the ever-changing geography of the issue-long action sequence.  If the series continues with issues like this one (and if it is published on something approaching a regular schedule), then I will definitely be along for the ride!

The exclamation point in the title of Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Informant! should tip you off right away that this isn’t another ultra-serious film about a corporate whistle-blower a la The Insider.  (That’s not a knock against The Insider, by the way, which is a terrific film.)  But Steven Soderbergh has something else in mind with this movie.

A plump Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a biochemist who is also the youngest vice president of A.D.M., a giant manufacturer of, among other things, the amino acid lysine that is a core component of much of the food that we eat here in the U.S.  In the 1990’s, Mark supplied the F.B.I. with evidence implicating A.D.M. in a price-fixing scheme with several other worldwide companies in their business.  But, of course, this based-on-a-true-story tale (originally covered in the book The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald) is a lot more complicated than that.

Steven Soderbergh is an extraordinarily intelligent filmmaker, and when his films work for me (Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Full Frontal) or when they don’t (The Good German, Solaris, and Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve which convinced me I didn’t need to see Thirteen), I always know that there will be something there of interest in the viewing.  Each of his films that I have seen has been remarkably different in style and tone from all the rest.  He consistently reinvents himself as a movie-maker, and that is endlessly fascinating to me.

Here in The Informant!, he has managed to tell what is really a very serious story in a manner full of whimsy.  Matt Damon dances along the fine line between drama and farce with the elegance of an actor skilled in both arenas.  His bizarre, rambling voice-overs that run throughout the film are wonderful — my favorite part of the movie.  Not only are his non sequitur observations hilarious, they also embody the idea that this numbskull is really the hero of his own story.  This idea is further enhanced by Marvin Hamlisch’s wonderfully over-the-top score (in which he practically gives Mr. Whitacre his own theme music!).  All of that silliness could easily tip the film over into total lunacy, but Mr. Soderbergh keeps his hands firmly on the reins, making sure than the audience is kept engaged with Mark’s unfolding story.

I should also mention here that it’s absolutely terrific to see Scott Bakula (Dr. Samuel Beckett himself) in a big role as F.B.I. Special Agent Brian Shepard.  Bakula’s best roles have been mostly confined to TV for the past two decades, but he really is a wonderful actor with a lot of charisma.  He does great work here, and I’d love to see him in more movies down the line.

The Informant! is a bizarre little film.  It’s not for everyone — I could see some audience members having trouble figuring out a movie like this that skirts continuously between drama and comedy.  While I wouldn’t say that I walked out of the film thinking to myself “this is a film that I will definitely own on DVD,” I quite enjoyed it.  There seems to be an ever-shrinking market for small little films like this, and that’s a shame.  As long as Steven Soderbergh keeps making new weird and interesting movies like this one, I’ll keep going to see ‘em.

On Wednesday I wrote about Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s magnificent series Planetary, which is truly one of the greatest comic book series of all time.  It was also, for quite a while, one of the most frustrating, as fans have been waiting for the final issue, number 27, to be published for about three years now.  (The penultimate issue, number 26, was published way back in December, 2006.)

There’s truly no excuse for such a ridiculous delay, but putting those frustrations aside, what did I think of Planetary’s swan song?

It was magnificent.

I must admit, I was ready for disappointment.  Bringing a long-form story to a close is fiendishly difficult (whether that story be a comic book series that’s been published for the last decade or a long-running TV series or a series of novels, etc. etc.)  Add to that the amazing anticipation and expectation built up after THREE LONG YEARS of waiting, and the potential for crushing disappointment was vast.  I told myself over and over again to curb my hopes because there was no way that Planetary #27 could possibly live up to what I wanted it to be.

I’m sorry I doubted you, Mr. Ellis and Mr. Cassaday!!

At the end of issue 26, it seemed that the main thrust of the over-all Planetary story was over, as the Planetary team (Elijah, Jakita, and the Drummer) had, it seemed, finally defeated their long-standing adversaries, the Four.  But that victory was not the end of the story.  Before we leave them, Planetary has one last wrong to set right, and we finally get some resolution to one of the series’ most enigmatic chapters, issue #9’s flashback to the death of former Planetary team member Abrose Chase.  Along the way, issue #27 is filled with Mr. Ellis’s usual brand of snarky humor and head-scratchingly complex sci-fi theorizing.  (There were several pages whose explanatory dialogue I had to go back and read several times — and that is not a criticism!  This is some dense, dense stuff.)  The central idea behind Elijah’s efforts in this final issue (which I won’t dare even hint at here) is a wonderful hook for this last story, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how many previous issues this final tale referred to (whether it was appearances by Doc Brass and Anna Hark to the familiar look of the central machine which finally gives some context to the I-thought-this-was-just-a-random-adventure Planetary/Justice League one-shot crossover from 2003).  I am really glad to have just recently re-read the entire series, as that helped me to get a lot more, I think, out of the goings-on in this final issue.

There are so many fantastic moments contained within, from Elijah’s deliciously meta ruminations on the nature of storytelling in a 2-D universe, to Jakita’s fears at being useless now that the adventure is all over, to the Drummer’s talk of Schrodingers and Heienbergs.  The final ten-or-so pages of the issue were absolute nail-biters.  I like all the characters so much that I was sort-of hoping for a happy ending, but Planetary has been, often, a fairly grim series that doesn’t shy away from some tough, tragic events in its story-telling.  Without going into detail, I will say that I found the ending — and, in particular, the final page — to be just perfect.

I heaped a lot of praise on John Cassaday’s artistic skills in my previous post — what more can I say here?  Perhaps I can mention that I have spent a long time poring over issue #27’s extraordinary tri-fold cover, which I believe contains pretty much every single character of consequence who has appeared in the entire series, all wrapped up in a gorgeous, intricate design.  George Perez would be proud.  As for the interiors: as always, this issue is an epic story that covers a lot of ground, all of which is wonderfully brought to life by Mr. Cassaday’s illustrations.  Magnificent panel after magnificent panel, there is nary a single line out of place.  Just extraordinary.

I am sorry to see Planetary go.  After re-reading the entire series last month, I am convinced that there is still a lot of life in this series, and I wish that Ellis and Cassaday would go on telling stories in this universe, with these characters, for years more to come!  But I guess they have told the story they set out to tell.  I will have to content myself with the near-perfection of the 27 issues (and three one-shots) that they gave us.

This is a series that I know I will be returning to, time and again, for many years to come.  It’s a high water-mark in comic book storytelling.  Well done, sirs!

With the release of the long, long, looooong-awaited (the last issue was published in 2006!!) 27th and final issue of Warren Ellis and John Cassiday’s comic book series Planetary last month, I took the opportunity to re-read the entire series from start to finish.  This only renewed my long-held love for and admiration of this brilliant series, one of the best comic book works I have read in the last decade.

Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner, and the young man known only as “the drummer” make up the field team of an enigmatic world-wide organization known as Planetary.  They are the “archaeologists of the unknown,” traveling the globe to uncover the secret history of the world.

In each issue (at least at the start of the series, before an even more fascinating larger story came into play), Elijah and his team would investigate different bizarre phenomena.  The core idea behind this series — and its brilliant hook — is that the phenomena that Planetary was investigating were Ellis and Cassaday’s versions of familiar sci-fi, adventure, and fantasy creatures from movies, TV shows, and comic books.  An enormous part of the fun of those early issues was in paying close attention to the clues in the artwork and dialogue to try to figure out just who or what Ellis and Cassaday were referencing each time.

In issue #2 (an issue which, by the way, boasts what is almost certainly the greatest opening line I have ever read in a comic book), the Planetary team investigate “Island Zero,” a small island on the far north-western tip of the Japanese archipelago, on which are found the skeletal remains of numerous enormously large, bizarre creatures.  (Yep, it’s Godzilla, Mothra, and other monsters from those films!)  Issues #1 and #5 delve into the 1950’s adventures of bronze-hued super-intelligent superhuman adventurer Doc. Brass (who canny readers will note bears a remarkable similarity to Doc. Savage!).  Issue #6 covers the truth behind the spaceflight in which four adventurers were gifted with fantastic powers (sounds a whole like Marvel Comics’ FF to me!).  Then there is my favorite issue of the series, #11, in which the Planetary team learns of three super-powered visitors to Earth: a baby rocketed through space from a doomed planet, a member of an intergalactic police-force powered by lanterns, and the emissary from a secret island of Amazons.  If those descriptions remind you of three of DC Comics’ core pantheon of heroes, then good for you — except that here in Planetary, those three adventurers met most unfortunate ends.

As in 100 Bullets (the fantastic crime series by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso which I recently reviewed), Planetary probably could have coasted through to the finish based purely on the power of that original “hook” to its stand-alone stories.  But as with that series, the stand-alone tales in Planetary gradually made way for a much-more epic, continuing story that makes up most of the series’ second half.  I won’t spoil the details here — suffice to say that the Planetary team find themselves facing a group whose aims run quite contrary to their own, and the century-long past of the mysteriously long-lived Elijah comes to the fore.

This series is absolutely magnificent.  Mr. Ellis’s scripts are endlessly clever — packed full-to-overflowing with astounding ideas and references to everything from super-hero comics from the 1960’s to today’s most cutting-edge scientific theories.  Ellis knows when to pile on the exposition (in which his characters spill forth in a wonderful torrent of words that can be pored over, again and again, by the reader to try to suss out all the levels of meaning), and when to let the action unfold, for pages at a time, in total silence, carried along by Mr. Cassaday’s magnificent art.  Cassaday is an artistic genius, and I bow before his planet-sized talent.  He can pack more detail into a single tiny panel than any artist since Dave Gibbons (of Watchmen fame), and yet he’s not above giving one of his characters an occasionally cartoonishly simplified expression.  The man can also, apparently, draw just about anything.  This is quite a critical ability when working on a series such as this in which he is called upon to depict locales as diverse as the streets of Hong Kong, the Australian outback, African jungles, Frankenstein’s castle, or Sherlock Holmes’ study from issue to issue.  The man is an artistic giant.  (I also praised his exemplary work in my review of his collaboration with Joss Whedon on Astonishing X-Men from a few years back.)

Each issue of Planetary is a wonderfully complete little gem all its own.  What struck me as I was re-reading the series all at once (as opposed to reading it issue by issue as it was published, with months if not years passing between issues due to the series’, er, somewhat erratic publishing schedule since it launched back in 1999) was how well the issues fit together into the remarkably intricate over-all story that Ellis was crafting.  Each issue is a small piece of a much-larger puzzle (an idea made literal in the cover image of the series’ penultimate issue, #26) and I was very surprised and pleased by the way that ideas set up in the first handful of issues paid off in the final handful of issues.

Planetary is a true masterpiece, and not to be missed.  If you’ve never sampled the series, start with the first collection All Over The World and Other Stories (there are four volumes that collect the entire series, plus a fifth volume that collects three stand-alone crossover specials).  I guarantee you that you’ll be hooked.

So what did I think of the final issue, #27, that was FINALLY released last month??  Check back on Friday to find out!

Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, starts off strong.  The film juxtaposes narration from a movie about the fall of the Roman Empire with images of the United States of America from the last year and a half.  Moore’s point is clear.

It is hardly surprising, for anyone who has ever seen a Michael Moore film before, that Mr. Moore is taking this position.  After movie after movie filled with enormous criticism of the actions of the auto industry, the medical & health insurance industries, and more, Capitalism: A Love Story seems to be the ultimate, logical progression of Mr. Moore’s anger: an attempted condemnation of the overarching system of life here in the U.S.: Capitalism.

So how well does he make his case?

After the terrific opening, I felt the first half of the film floundered somewhat.  Mr. Moore presents several anguishing stories, each of which are certainly tragic and worthy of outrage.  (One vignette that sticks with me is the plight of a group of kids sentenced to lengthy stays in a privately-owned juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, PA, by a judge in the pocket of the owners of that center.) But this first half of the film feels all over the place.  The vignettes are sad, but the connection to Moore’s overall message about the inherent evils of Capitalism seems thin.  (Judges and other important officials have certainly been bribed in non-Capitalist countries…)

There are other flaws with this first half.  Early on we meet several families being evicted from their homes, and we’re clearly meant to feel great sympathy for them.  But we don’t learn more about the circumstances of their evictions until much later in the film.  Without that background, I didn’t find the images of these families to be all that effective — frankly I responded the opposite way, reacting against what I perceived as Moore’s attempt at manipulation of the audience.  Yes, families being kicked out of their homes is a terrible sight.  But until and unless we, the audience, learn the reasons behind their evictions, watching those images unfold did not, for me, help Moore make his point.

Then there is the time spent with actor Wallace Shawn.  I absolutely adore Wallace Shawn (and not just for his most famous role as Vizzini in The Princess Bride), but what the heck do I care what he has to say about the economic situation in America today?  That’s nice that he seems to agree with Mr. Moore, but so what?  I was quite perplexed by the focus on Mr. Shawn in the film’s early-going.  It just added to my sense that the first half of the film was bouncing around aimlessly.

It sort of feels like Mr. Moore was working on a movie and then, once the economic collapse happened last year, he decided to shape his film around that topic — but he didn’t want to lose the material he’d already been working on.  (Having done a good deal of reading about the film after seeing it, it does seem that Moore was hard-at-work on this film before the collapse last year.)  The result is a film that, while extraordinarily powerful at points, loses some of its effectiveness because it seems to lurch constantly from topic to topic.

This is particularly frustrating because, in the second half of the film, once Moore starts directly addressing the recent economic collapse, the film really takes off.  Obviously there is a lot of anger out there about what went down, and rightly so, and Moore is extraordinarily effective at cutting through all of the complicated talk and double-speak to shine a harsh light on the actions of many in the finance industry and our government.  The exchange in which Mr. Moore tries to get an understandable explanation for derivatives out of a pleasant-enough-sounding Wall Street banker is a riot (and makes my stomach clench), as does some frankly shocking exchanges with members of Congress about how little they knew about the bailout they approved.  Some statements by Rep. Marcy Kapur (D-Ohio) are particularly eye-opening.

All of the above is intercut with several of the stunts for which Michael Moore is known for (and which you might have seen in the film’s trailers), such as his arrival at AIG headquarters with an armored car so that he can demand the return of the bailout money, or running yellow crime scene tape around blocks of Wall Street.  These are great moments.  But overall, the film is pretty light on Mr. Moore’s trademark humor.  The man seems clearly frustrated that, after twenty years of making movies (and TV shows such as his fantastic The Angry Truth series) about these types of subjects, these problems seem to have gotten worse rather than better.

Hey, I am too!

While a far cry from his strongest work (which, for me, would be Bowling For Columbine), I still found Capitalism: A Love Story to be a worthwhile (even if at times frustrating and aggravating) film.  Agree with him or disagree with him, Mr. Moore is unafraid to look head-on at the many enormous problems facing our nation today.  For that he has my respect, and my attention.

The story of The Invention of Lying, as you’ve probably figured out from the trailers, unfolds in a universe almost identical to our own.  Except that, in this world, no human being has ever told a lie.  Ricky Gervais plays a rather Ricky Gervais-like character named Mark Bellison, an affable fellow who has not found himself particularly lucky with his advancement at work or with his love life.  And yet, as the film unfolds, something extraordinary finally happens to him — in a moment of desperation, something shifts in his brain and he tells a lie.

Things spiral a little bit out of control from there.

I’ve read and heard some negative reactions to this film, but don’t you believe them!  The Invention of Lying is a wonderful film, one of my favorites of the year.

The film is being sold as a comedy, and indeed, it is a very funny film.  Ricky Gervais (who, in addition to starring in the film co-wrote and co-directed it with Matthew Robinson) is a riot, and he brings a lot of whimsy to every aspect of the movie.  (There’s a particularly wonderful opening narration by Mr. Gervais that kicks off the film on exactly the right note.)  Supporting Mr. Gervais are a number of talented comedians who are along for the ride, such as Tina Fey (30 Rock), Louis C.K. (currently knocking ‘em dead in a recurring guest role on Parks and Recreation), Jeffrey Tambor (The Larry Sanders Show, Arrested Development) as well as a number of familiar funny faces in small cameos, such as Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks), Christopher Guest (Spinal Tap, Waiting For Guffman), Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) and The Daily Show vets Nathan Corddry and John Hodgman.

But while The Invention of Lying is a very funny film, I don’t really consider it to be a comedy.  Rather, I think of it as a fascinating piece of speculative fiction.  What the film does is to take a central idea (in this case, a world where no one has ever told a lie), and explore in great depth what that world would actually be like.  No one can lie — what would that mean for all of the daily, casual interactions we have with one another?  What would that mean for dating?  How about advertising?  Or writing?  (Gervais’ character is a screenwriter, and the film’s depiction of a screenwriter’s job in a world where fiction does not exist is just one of the many clever little touches that brings this parallel universe to life.)

This is also a film that, gasp, actually has something to say, and I was surprised by the left-hand turn that the film takes in a moment, late in the movie, when Gervais’ attempt to comfort his dying mother sets up enormous ripple effects in this world without lies.

I mentioned all of the terrific comedians who have roles in the film, but I should not neglect two key performers more known for their serious work.  Rob Lowe (The West Wing) plays Brad Kessler, another screenwriter who is everything that Gervais’ Mark Bellison is not: handsome and successful.  Lowe is mostly known for his dramatic chops (though he certainly displayed comedic skills often enough on The West Wing, and he was also a fun presence in the Austin Powers films), but I thought he was a riot here.  (He makes a good decision in playing his role entirely straight, minimizing any comedic mugging for the camera.)  I also, as always, found myself quite smitten by Jennifer Garner (Juno, Sydney Bristow on Alias) as Anna, the woman for whom Mark longs.  She brings an enormous amount of humanity to a role that, in lesser hands, could have come across as shallow.

From the very first time I watched the British version of The Office, it was clear to me that Ricky Gervais was a comedic talent with a distinct voice.  I have followed him through most of his projects ever since, without regret.  (Though I did skip that American film in which he acted where he played a dentist who sees dead people.)  If The Invention of Lying is still playing in a theatre near you when you read this, I highly recommend that you go give it a look.

As with Monday’s post, today’s blog contains SPOILERS for many plot twists of the spectacular Battlestar Galactica series, so be warned!  If you haven’t seen the series (or if you’re in the midst of watching it on DVD but haven’t made it to the end yet), then I hope you enjoy today’s hi-LARious Inglourious Basterds cartoon, and then c’mon back on Friday for my review of The Invention of Lying.

OK, all the rest of you BSG fans still with me?  Then let’s dive in.

Starting with the very first episode of the first season, “33,” each installment of BSG (for the first few years) began with the words (say ‘em with me now):

The Cylons were created by man.  They rebelled.  They evolved.  They look and feel human,  Some are programmed to think they are human.  There are many copies.  And they have a plan.

It was that last line, “and they have a plan,” that was the most intriguing to me — and, ultimately, the most frustrating.  Throughout the early episodes of the show we watched our heroes in the ragtag fleet attempting to flee their destroyed worlds, all the while being dogged by Cylon attack forces as well as various Cylon agents within the fleet.  The bold declaration that “they have a plan” implied that there was more going on than we knew — a larger, over-arching goal towards which the Cylons were working (beyond, apparently, the simple extermination of humanity).  The glimpses we got of the Cylons (mostly through the adventures of Helo, trapped with an Eight on “Cylon-Occupied Caprica”) furthered this notion.

But as the series progressed, and we began to spend more time with the Cylon characters and get to know their histories and the distinct personalities of the different models (and sometimes the differences between Cylons of the same model number), it started to seem that there was no larger plan to speak of.  By the time we got to the New Caprica arc (the high-point of the show, in my mind), it seemed that the Cylons were just as confused and uncertain as the humans.  This provided for fascinating storytelling and the bringing of commendable depth to the “villain” characters, but it also seemed to me to be in contradiction to the bold, declarative statement that “they have a plan.”

While I have complaints about the final season of the show (click here for my thoughts on the finale), one of the plot developments that I most enjoyed was the development of Cavill, played so menacingly by the great Dean Stockwell (Quantum Leap).  As the back-story of the Final Five Cylons was (confusingly) played out, we learned that it was Cavill who was behind much of what had transpired, both during the time-span of the series as well as the back-story (in his placing of the Five into Colonial society some thirty-years before).  The implication, cleverly, was that there WAS indeed a plan all along — it just wasn’t anything like what we’d thought when the show began.  I liked that idea a lot, but I felt that there was still a disconnect between the revelations of the show’s final episodes and all that had gone down during the early seasons.

Well, apparently the BSG writers (or at least talented scribe Jane Espenson) agreed, which brings me (finally!) to the absolutely marvelous new direct-to-DVD film, The Plan.

Written by Ms. Espenson and directed by Edward James Olmos (the Old Man himself, who also directed many terrific episodes of the series), The Plan brings us the story of Cavill.  Or actually, of the TWO Cavills who we first met during the excellent second season two-parter “Lay Down Your Burdens.”  There’s the Cavill who was a part of Sam Anders’ resistance group on Caprica (this is the fedora-wearing Cavill), and the Cavill in the fleet who we first meet as the priest that Tryol goes to when he becomes convinced he’s a Cylon sleeper agent like Boomer (scenes given a much different spin in light of the events of the show’s final year!).  In The Plan, we meet the Cavills in the day immediately preceding the Cylons’ destruction of the Twelve Colonies, and follow their separate stories through the events of the first two seasons of the show until the events of “Lay Down Your Burdens” once again bring them together aboard the Galactica.

But The Plan is not JUST the story of the two Cavills.  It is also a staggeringly complex jigsaw puzzle that pulls together a dazzling number of plot threads and characters from throughout the run of the show.

The Plan allows us to see heretofore unglimpsed exploits of characters who weren’t on the show during the miniseries and the early episodes (like Cavill himself) such as Sam Anders, Ellen Tigh, and Tory Foster.  We get to see, now, how they survived the Cylon attack and how they made it through the tumultuous days that followed until we eventually meet them in the series.  Sam, in particular, gets a lot of screen-time in The Plan, and we see how he transformed from a fun-loving athlete into the tough fighter he was when we (and Kara) first met him in “Resistance.”  We also learn, finally, why it took so long for Ellen Tigh to seek out her husband Saul (in “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down”), despite her having been in the ragtag fleet for months before she first appeared in that episode.  (I must point out, though, that Tory does get short shrift — while The Plan gives us a glimpse of her from right before the Cylon attack, we never actually learn how she got herself onto one of the ships in the ragtag fleet — a curious oversight!)

The Plan also gives us a lot of terrific new character development for many of the Cylon characters.  I was most intrigued by the wonderful story given to one of the Simons (first glimpsed in the series as the doctor operating on Kara Thrace in “The Farm”), who I always felt was the least-developed Cylon on the show.  I was also THRILLED that Simon’s story allowed the writers to bring back the actress Lymari Nadal, who had ONE LINE in the original miniseries (as a civilian woman who Apollo helps out of a shuttle on Colonial One while she asks about her husband) and flesh out a complex and tragic storyline for her character.  We also get to spend an enormous amount of additional time with Boomer.  While her “sleeper agent” storyline during the first season was intriguing, I never exactly understood how all of that worked.  If she didn’t know she was a Cylon, how and when did she “switch on” in order to plant the bombs in Galactica’s water supply (in “Water”) or shoot the Old Man (in “Kobol’s Last Gleaming Pt. II”)?  Well, The Plan finally gives us some answers to those questions, and in a way that only adds to the heartbreaking story of that character.  There’s lots of other fun stuff, too, such as what prompted the Doral in the fleet to blow himself up (in “Litmus”), and, even more interestingly, just how Leoben’s fascination with Kara began.

Finally, and most delightfully, The Plan fills in a number of scenes we suspected might have happened but never saw during the first two seasons of the show.  To my delight, we finally see who Six was talking to in the miniseries, after she leaves Baltar in the park on Caprica to meet someone (to whom we hear her say “you’re late”).  FINALLY now we get to see the other half of that scene — who she’s talking to, and why they were meeting.  And as this DVD movie progresses, we see scene after scene from the early episodes of the show interwoven with new material that answers long-standing questions (such as — YAY! — who wrote Adama the note in the miniseries warning him that “there are twelve models”) as well as countless questions that we never even knew we had.  We get to see how so many of the events of the early seasons connected, and how they fit into of Cavill’s unfolding plan.

This is historical revisionism of the best kind.  I am quite confident that the writers of BSG’s early episodes did not have much of this in mind when they were creating those early shows.  But what Ms. Espenson has done is to make us believe that they DID really have all this in mind, and to allow us to see those events from an entirely different perspective.

This is NOT a movie aimed at a Battlestar newbie.  And if it’s been a while since you’ve seen the first two seasons of the show, there is a lot that might go over your head.  The Plan is extraordinarily fast-placed, constantly jumping around in location and time and bouncing from event to event and character to character.  It relies on your knowing how those early episodes unfolded so that, for instance, when we see Leoben being interrogated by Kara (in “Flesh and Bone”), or when we see Baltar being publicly accused of being a Cylon Collaborator by a Six calling herself Shelley Godfrey (in “Six Degrees of Separation”), you know how those events wound up.  As someone who has watched the first season of BSG several times, I was constantly giggling with glee as I watched The Plan reference one obscure event from those early shows after another.  (And the highest compliment I can pay The Plan is that it makes me want to go back and watch those episodes yet again.)

Before wrapping up, I must also heap additional praise on the stunning, marvelous, jaw-dropping visual effects of The Plan.  BSG has consistently had, ever since the initial miniseries, amazing, feature-film-quality visual effects, but The Plan trumps everything that we’ve seen before.  The astounding opening montage (whose details I won’t spoil here), the horrifying imagery (never-before-seen in detail, just hinted at in the miniseries and in “Razor”) of the Cylons’ destruction of the Twelve Colonies (and finally we see imagery from many of the other colonies, not just Caprica), more great Centurian effects… the list goes on and on.  The effects wizards have outdone themselves this time.  I can’t think of a sci-fi movie from the past two decades that has had better effects.

So, I really liked The Plan, can you tell?  There are one or two mis-steps (such as showing us a shot of Apollo in his fighter while Adama declares “we are at war,” when, oops, Apollo wasn’t with Galactica when that scene happened in the miniseries, rather he was with Roslin on her ship) but nothing that distracts from my tremendous enjoyment of the film.  The Plan is astoundingly complex — never dumbing things down for the audience, but rather assuming that we all know the series very intimately and don’t need to have everything re-explained to us — and also emotionally potent.  It connects the beginning of the series more directly to its ending (without getting bogged down in any of the Final Five silliness that I felt hampered the fourth season), and reminds me of everything I loved about this series, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.

“You can’t declare war on love, brother.”  ”I think I just did.”

Please note:  there are SPOILERS AHEAD, so anyone who has not yet watched the final season of Battlestar Galactica should enjoy today’s cartoon, perhaps take in an archived blog or two (might I suggest my look back at the films of David Mamet?) and then head on their way.  Got that?

Ok, onward!

After watching the series finale of BSG back in March, I wrote at length about my over-all love for the series, as well as some of the dissatisfaction I felt about the finale and the final run of episodes.  Here’s an excerpt:

I think any lingering dissatisfaction that I feel rests not with the finale, which (nit-picks aside) was really a magnificent episode, and more with some of the storytelling decisions made during the course of this last season.  Ever since Kara’s “death” (and I guess now I should remove those quotation marks, huh?) towards the end of season 3, the show became much more about the various mysteries that were being presented than it ever had been before.  Questions such as what happened to Kara, what was her destiny, who was her guide, how did she survive… who was the final Cylon… what was the nature of the final five, how could they be Cylons, what was their history… what, in fact, does it mean to be a “Cylon”… who was Daniel, and what, if any, connection did he have to Starbuck… what really happened back on Earth, and on Kobol, 2-3,000 years ago…???  Etc etc etc.  For most of its first three seasons, BSG wasn’t really a show about mysteries (the way Lost is), but I felt that these questions came to dominate the show during its final year.  I would have appreciated it had more of them been answered, in more substantial ways, before we even got to the finale.

With the release of this final batch of episodes (labeled Battlestar Galactica season 4.5) on DVD, I was excited to take another look at the end of the show.  As I wrote a few weeks ago, I love having an opportunity to take in a movie or TV show a second time, so that I can watch it free of any expectations I might have had about what I thought it would be or HOPED it would be, and just enjoy it for what it IS.

So it was that, first of all, in re-watching these final 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica I was reminded (all niggling over certain plot points aside) what a spectacular creation this show was, and how phenomenally well-made every single episode was.  There is extraordinary drama to be found in these final episodes.  I couldn’t possibly list all of the terrific moments contained in this last batch, but I can tell you that some of my favorite scenes include Adama’s angry, drunken show-down with the revealed-as-a-Cylon Tigh (in “Sometimes a Great Notion”), old men Adama and Tigh taking out the Marine guards assigned to escort them to the brig (in “The Oath”), Felix Gaeta’s final scene with Baltar (in the closing moments of “Blood on the Scales”), Ellen’s discovery that Tigh has been intimate with a Six (in “Deadlock”), Tyrol’s devastation at discovering Boomer’s betrayal (in the final moments of “Someone to Watch Over Me”)… I could go on!  Beyond the plots and the acting (which are superb), each episode looks and sounds phenomenally great.  The visual effects, the costumes, the sets, the props, the music — everything comes together in these episodes to produce what was essentially an extraordinarily well-made little movie each week.

The greatest thing about this DVD set, though, is the inclusion of significantly longer cuts of several episodes that are FAR superior to what aired on TV.  If I had a major complaint about these final episodes (other than the unresolved mysteries, as mentioned above), it’s that in many respects I felt the writers moved things too quickly from episode to episode, without giving the viewers a chance to see the characters react logically to the situations unfolding around them.  This concern is significantly addressed by the extra material in these episodes, almost ALL of which represents character moments that fill in a lot of these missing blanks.

The first extended episode is “A Disquiet Follows My Soul,” the second episode of the set.  The BSG gang have just discovered that Earth is a charred cinder, and are left to deal with the fall-out of their complete loss of hope.  There’s some great extra stuff to be found in this extended cut.  The early scene in Adama’s quarters in which the idea of installing Cylon jump-drives in the fleet is significantly longer.  Rather than the “huh?” moment that I felt that plot twist was in the original version, now we see a lot more of the characters debating this issue (as I’d expect they would).  We see a lot more of Lee, Zarek, and the Quorum as the political fall-out of this move is explored (which provides a much better context for Zarek’s actions in the mutiny in the next episode).  There’s a great Baltar/Six scene in the episode’s opening (which is a terrific scene on its own, and also gives Baltar something to do in this episode since he was pretty much absent from the original version).  There’s a whole new sequence, later in the episode, with Adama ripping Zigurski a new one because 10 of their Vipers are grounded because his deck-crew aren’t showing up to work.  (Interestingly enough, in this version the phone-call that Adama gets in his quarters is to inform him about this situation on the hangar deck.  Then the scene with Zigurski leads into his finding Roslin jogging in the corridors, avoiding her cancer treatments.  In the original version they totally cut around this, skipping from Adama receiving a call to his stopping Laura in the hallway, so that we assume the call was about Laura.  A fascinating case in clever editing!)  There are also lots of other nice little bits of business throughout the episode, such as Helo asking the Chief about his son, and more with Tyrol and Hot Dog, little moments that flesh out the relationships between the characters.  In the original version I felt this episode was all over the place, with some interesting moments that didn’t cohere into a unified whole, particularly after the dramatic events of “Sometimes a Great Notion.”  But I think MUCH more highly of the extended version.

I have similarly high praise for the even-more extended version of “Islanded in a Stream of Stars,” the series’ penultimate episode.  (”Disquiet” was extended from 43 minutes to 53 minutes, while “Islanded” is extended from 43 minutes to a whopping hour and three minutes.)  The opening conference in Adama’s quarters is longer, and there’s much more discussion of the futility of trying to rescue Hera (which helps us understand Adama’s decision, in that scene, not to go after her), as well as more explanation of why exactly Cavil wants her.  In a nice continuity note, Boomer is now included in the Opera House visions that we see Laura and Six share.  There’s much more to Baltar’s speech over the wireless about angels (which of course ties in to the events of the finale).  We also now see a cut-away to Kara listening to Baltar as he says a line about God sending angels to steer one back onto one’s path (which more clearly establishes for me the writers’ intentions for all of Kara’s scenes with the piano-player-who-might-have-been-her-father in the previous episode, “Someone to Watch Over Me”).  There’s an I-can’t-believe-this-got-cut scene of Tyrol in the brig (which of course would be the logical consequence of his helping Boomer in the previous episode) being confronted by a furious Athena.  There’s a lot more great Saul/Ellen stuff dealing with his dead son and his relationship with Six that includes a powerful moment in which he angrily declares to Ellen that “these are MY people.”  There are several additional short scenes of Adama visiting Laura in sick-bay which adds some nice tenderness to the episode.  There’s a great scene between Helo and Starbuck (established as good friends in the early seasons of the show but who we seldom saw together in the later seasons) when she talks to him about the hybrid’s description of her as the harbinger of death.  (It’s a great moment, and also one that shows that Baltar isn’t the ONLY person she’s told about this — an implication that I always thought felt wrong in the original version).  There’s a much longer version of the Adama/Tigh scene in which Adama comes around to the necessity of abandoning the Galactica that includes a great joke by Tigh in which he comments that, despite his age of 2,000 years, he still has all of his original teeth (which he then shows off to Bill).  The whole ending of the episode is entirely re-organized.  While the original version ended on their toast to Galactica, here we actually see several sequences of the crew beginning to evacuate (including a beat of Hot Dog escorting a civilian who I believe is actually his mom, Edward James Olmos’ wife), and a great moment of Tigh walking up to stand beside Adama.  The episode ends on a scene that the original version included much earlier in the last act, Kara’s visiting a comatose Sam and saying that “I’m not leaving until we figure this out.”  There are so many great connective-tissue moments added back into this episode, that as with “Disquiet” allow me to see this episode not as a time-waster just getting things in place for the finale, but rather as a key character-focused piece that allows us to spend a lot more time with the beloved characters to whom we’re about to bid farewell.

Which brings me to the finale.  The DVD includes an extended version that knits both originally-aired parts of the finale together while also adding in a number of additional scenes.  These new scenes don’t alter my feelings about the finale as dramatically as they did the other two extended episodes.  Most of the additions come fairly early on, and mostly contain additional flashbacks for some of the supportive characters — specifically Chief Tyrol, Helo, and Boomer.  It’s great fun to see more material of those three in their early days on-board Galactica, and more focus on their relationships with one another.  In particular, one of the Chief’s flashbacks features the return of a long-dead character (that I won’t spoil here) who I was really pleased to see included in the finale.  I was hoping for some more material in the final 45 minutes of the show to address some of the concerns I expressed in my original review of the finale.  In particular, I really wanted at least one scene in which someone dealt with the possibility that maybe SOMEONE among the rag-tag fleet wasn’t too keen on abandoning the ships and destroying all of their technology.  But that was not to be, as those final 45-or-so minutes were presented exactly as they originally were.  Since that was the part of the finale that I had problems with, that was a bit disappointing.

Overall, though, I thoroughly enjoyed re-watching these final episodes.  Rather than obsessing over the mysteries that would ultimately disappoint me, I was able to enjoy all the meaty character drama with which these final episodes were stuffed.  The extended episodes (not to mention all of the additional deleted scenes included with the rest of the episodes) really helped with that, as those extended episodes allowed the story-lines (and the characters) to breathe a little more, and for things to unfold much more naturally and organically than they did in the more breathlessly-paced original versions.

This final season has flaws, no doubt about it.  In many respects, the show did not unfold in the direction in which I had wished it to go.  But with a little distance now I am better able to enjoy the directions in which it DID go, and Battlestar Galactica still stands as one of the very finest television series ever created.

But wait!  The story is not quite over!  Come back on Wednesday for my thoughts on the final piece of the Battlestar Galactica puzzle, the just-released to DVD movie, The Plan!

“All of this has happened before…”