And of course a movie is being planned.

Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

Comics Code Authority, 1954

Recently my friend Laurie was complaining about being cursed by her own success at work. She's currently booking fitness training sessions at about twice her quota, and has been forced to request that her overtime limit be raised so that she can do all of her administrative tasks as well.

The impressive part is that she's not even trying to sell her services. As she commented, "It's like I can't escape these people, they seem to come out of nowhere!"

My reply was that I could easily imagine what it must be like: closing time at the gym, and she's just turned out the lights (as demanded by dramatic tradition in this area). Then, out of the shadows come the shambling, decaying figures of gym zombies, draped in tattered Lululemon outfits, with the moaning cry of "Traaaainnnnnn.....traaaaaainnn...."*

How is it that zombies have become part of the cultural landscape?

Zombies would seem to be a particularly 20th century conceit. The concept of the revenant, someone who has returned from the dead, exists as far back as the Middle Ages, but unlike the vampire or the werewolf, the current version of the zombie seems to owe very little to its historical antecedents.

EC Comics planted the seed for the modern zombie in its 1950's titles such as Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt, which featured the vengeful return from the grave by murder victims as a staple of its content. The whys and hows of such a return were secondary: the important part was the visual impact of these rotting horrors from the graveyard as they lurched into the homes of their killers to exact a grisly revenge.

Sadly, it was exactly this sort of over-the-top approach to storytelling which led to the downfall of EC Comics and their brethren. A psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham undertook a crusade against the adverse effects of EC's horrific tales and their negative impact on the children who read them, publishing his results in his infamous book The Seduction of the Innocent. In 1954, Congress undertook an investigation of juvenile delinquency, with Wertham as a prominent witness. The congressional committee concluded that comics were not directly responsible for delinquency among youth, but strongly recommended that some sort of control be instituted over the content of comics.

In response, the comics industry created the Comics Code Authority and its list of forbidden content. Since the list was more or less derived directly from the EC Comics material, EC soon found itself out of business.

However, EC left its mark by inserting the whole idea of zombies into the psyche of a generation of comic readers - and eventual movie makers. (The principals of EC also went on to develop MAD Magazine, which left a completely different mark, but I digress.)

The real front man for zombie promotion is of course George Romero, whose 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead might be considered the crop from the seeds planted by EC. In the years since Romero's black and white magnum opus, there have been innumerable zombie movies that have firmly established walking cannibal corpses as part of the horror canon. Interestingly, there's a common thread in these films that blames government experiments gone wrong for the rise of zombies, rather than any sort of supernatural process.

And now, the shelves of bookstores are graced by another attempt by zombies to earn acceptance in the mainstream: Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is actually credited to Jane Austen and Mr. Grahame-Smith. This dual credit strikes me as a marketing ploy - obviously the publishers are hoping that Ms. Austen will rise from the grave to avenge herself. (Perhaps some cameras should be set up near her gravesite in preparation.)

But really, when you think about it, Wertham and the Comics Code Authority people should have known better. After all, everyone knows that zombies eventually find a way in, no matter what.

- Sid

* Sadly, Laurie didn't get the "braaains" reference, but I thought it was funny.

"Wouldn't you rather see the whole movie?"

Imagine if you will: you and a couple of friends decide to head over to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, down there in Austin, Texas - they're going to show The Wrath of Khan, the best of the original series Star Trek movies, as part of this year's Fantastic Fest, and then there's supposed to be a ten minute preview from the new Star Trek prequel movie. There's a bit of chat from the guests from the production team of the new movie about the preview, then Wrath of Khan starts.

Ah, come on - two minutes in and the film jams? Damn analog technology.... Hold on, who's that on stage? Leonard Nimoy? Spock? What? And he's just asked if we wouldn't rather see the WHOLE new Star Trek movie?!

The surprise premiere of the new Star Trek movie at this year's Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, an annual film festival dedicated to fantasy, horror, action and science fiction, has to be the best thank-you to the fan community of all time. It's also an extraordinarily brave thing to do, especially considering that the recent Wolverine work print leak is still echoing around the Internet. But even without that, I have to give Paramount full credit for boldly combining a brilliant guerilla marketing move with an acknowledgement of the importance of the fans to the Star Trek franchise.

It's also going to make those people in the audience into legends in the fan community: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers", as Shakespeare puts it. Of course, the hard core being what it is, you can guarantee that at least one person in the audience was angry about not seeing Wrath of Khan for the 215th time.

- Sid

Look on my works, ye mighty...

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works. Ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

I talked to Terry Gilliam in the '80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ''Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't.'''

Alan Moore

Who watches the Watchmen? Well, last week it was me. Equipped with a bag of dry popcorn (damn you Laurie, for having ruined buttered popcorn for me) I settled in for the almost three hour marathon of Zack Snyder's take on what has arguably been called "the best comic book story of all time". However, it's also been referred to as arguably being unadaptable, and Alan Moore, who wrote the comic book, has refused to allow his name to be associated with the project.

The terrible thing about having read the original series in the late 80's is that when watching the adaptation there was always a hint of checklist in the background. This constant little voice compared the film to the comic: "Right ... yes .... no ... yes ... no ... yes ... yes ... what? ... perfect ... nonono!!". As with The Lord of the Rings movies, I'm going to have to wait for a non-believer to see The Watchmen in order to find out if it makes any sense on its own. *

That being said, I have to admit that the movie completely captured my attention, to the point that, when it ended, my first thought was, "Wait, I thought it was supposed to be almost three hours long?". The odd thing is that I'm not sure it deserved that sort of immersion - as above, I'll have to ask someone who doesn't know the original material.

The Watchmen wavers between moments of complete imitation of the comic book and points of complete departure. Some plot elements are diminished or removed entirely, others are magnified from their original significance. For example, the character of the Comedian holds a larger part of the stage than he did in the comic, whereas Rorschach seems reduced, and a subplot revolving around the original Night Owl has vanished completely. The Ozymandias portrayed in the original series came across as a perfect man, a physical and intellectual paragon who sincerely believes that his actions are in the best interests of humanity and that the end will justify his means, but I found the movie character to be much colder, almost repellent - it's interesting that they made his costume black rather than the comic book character's golden outfit.

There were a number of visual elements of that nature that bothered me on an almost subliminal level, little changes from the comics that weren't vital but which were a bit distracting in combination with the elements that were faithfully duplicated. Rorschach, the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan are portrayed exactly as in the comic, whereas Ozymandias, Night Owl and Silk Spectre have their costumes changed to a greater or lesser extent.

But I have to say that I was astonished by how much some of the people resembled the characters as drawn by Dave Gibbons. Jackie Earle Haley perfectly evokes Rorschach in the scenes where he appears without his mask, and the Night Owl's alter ego of Dan Dreiburg as portrayed by Patrick Wilson is flawless. There were some minor flaws in the Comedian's progression in age, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives the role exactly the right kind of cynical, brutal amusement.

Overall, I found The Watchmen to be a good attempt to adapt something so widely considered to be unadaptable. I say "attempt" because I'm not sure that it succeeds as a whole, but the sum of the parts involved compensates for the places where it fails. Oh, and as per my previous posting on the topic, yes, the ending is radically different in its direction if not in its result. I can understand why they would make the changes they made, and I admit that the ending of the comic book version has been subjected to a certain amount of criticism as having elements of absurdity, but I don't agree with the spin that the new ending forces onto the reactions of the other characters.

One of the elements that made The Watchmen a difficult work for adaptation is the episodic nature of the original story. The logical breaks at the end of each issue allowed for a chapter-based rhythm to the plot structure and for the inclusion of a wide variety of supporting textual material - excerpts from the original Night Owl's biography, Rorschach's psychiatric profile, interviews with Jon Veidt/Ozymandias, and so on - that would be impossible to include in a movie. However, I look forward to seeing if the Watchmen DVD will re-introduce any of those elements once the story has been removed from the exigencies of commercial release. Who knows, if they put some work into that, Alan Moore may even allow them to put his name on it.

- Sid

* Fortunately my friend Alan in Toronto, who hasn't read the comic - and who doesn't read this blog, as far as I know - will likely be able to act as a neutral observer. (He performed a similar role for the Lord of the Rings movies, with which he was also unfamiliar in their written form. Sadly, young Alan is not a big fan of reading.)

"I have been faithful to thee, o Watchmen! in my fashion."

 Many years ago, there was a Jesus comic book.

Written and drawn by Frank Stack under the pseudonym of Foolbert Sturgeon, the concept for this early 70's underground creation was that Jesus had come back to Earth, as had been long awaited, but unfortunately no one cared. And, sadly, Jesus had the same problems with modern life that any long-haired sandal-wearing peace-loving hippy would have, albeit with the ability to turn abusive police officers into actual pigs.

In one issue of The New Adventures of Jesus, Christ goes to the movies to see a film adaptation of the New Testament. He sits enthralled as a muscular, almost Hulk-like screen Jesus fights an equally buff John the Baptist in the early stages of the movie, in the traditional Marvel Comics style hero-meets-hero combat. And, at the end of the movie, when the celluloid Christ uses his cross as a massive weapon to fight the legions, then rallies the Jews and defeats the Roman invaders, Jesus applauds wildly with the rest of the audience.

As the theatre empties, two people behind Jesus are discussing the film. One of them says, "The end's not like the book..."

And so, to the upcoming screen adaptation of The Watchmen.

For readers unfamiliar with The Watchmen in its original comic book form, it was a 12 issue limited series originally published by DC in 1986. Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, it took place in an alternate universe, one where Batman-like vigilantes have been fighting crime for decades, until they are finally declared to be as illegal as their criminal adversaries. In addition, another hero has appeared on the scene, one whose powers are literally godlike. The plot starts with the death of one of the retired heroes (who may not have been that retired) and follows the various characters of the disbanded Watchmen group as they attempt to solve the mystery behind the death, only to uncover a massive conspiracy.

However, that quick summary does an enormous injustice to the series. The Watchmen is considered to be a seminal work, "a comic about comics". Alan Moore's script was intended to turn the myth of the masked avenger on its head, to "show a reality that was very different to the general public image of the super-hero", as Moore himself explained. Every element of the story was planned and considered, from the creation of the archetypal heroes to the development of the style of colouring through the twelve issues, and down to the 9-panel layout and the type of line used to draw the illustrations.

More interestingly, it was also planned to be a demonstration of the unique nature of the comic medium. In fact, it could be said that The Watchmen was deliberately created in opposition to movies, which might explain why a movie adaptation was considered impossible for many years, in spite of the popularity of the series.

But time marches on, and comic books have now become a gold mine for the movie industry. As such, it was inevitable that someone would take up the challenge of The Watchmen. The question, of course, was how they would undertake that challenge.

There are three major points on the curve of comic book adaptation. At one end, you have complete, slavish obedience to the source material - Sin City, 300 - wherein the movie is as close to a one-to-one reproduction of the comic as possible. The middle position involves some compromise, but does its best to be true to the spirit of the original material - the Spiderman and X-Men movies, Hellboy, Iron Man. And at the far end of the curve? Presumably with the best intentions, liberty after liberty is taken, and you end up with Elektra, V, The Hulk, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and maybe Constantine.


Early evidence is that the Watchmen movie falls between slavishness and compromise, with critical scenes being extracted with complete faithfulness to the look of the comic panels. Initial reactions to trailers have been quite positive because of that, with fans of the comic applauding the accuracy with which they see the comic transferred to the screen. There are some differences - some of the costumes have been altered, some of the faces aren't perfect matches for their four-colour counterparts - but so far, people are seeing what they want to see.

However, I recently learned that director Zack Snyder had changed the ending of the film from the apocalyptic conclusion of the comic. I gather that there's still some form of deus ex machina to pull the scattered threads of the conspiracy plot together, but not the one written by Alan Moore.

Personally, I find it to be an odd decision for Snyder to have made, and, to be honest, learning that the ending has been changed casts the whole project into doubt for me. The Watchmen comics present an intensely detailed and layered story, with a wealth of supporting material. Why be careful in ensuring that all the details are accurate if you're not using those details to reach the same conclusion? It's like doing a completely historically accurate presentation of Romeo and Juliet, at the end of which the lovers elope to Mantua.

However, I have to be fair. It could be argued that the plot of the comic series was almost irrelevant, more an excuse for the interaction and development of the characters than an attempt at brilliance. As Dave Gibbons himself commented regarding the plot, "...it just really isn't the most interesting thing about Watchmen. As we actually came to tell the tale, that's where the real creativity came in."

On that basis, any ending that allows for the same degree of depth and creativity in the telling of the tale and the exploration of the characters might turn out to be just as acceptable. And who knows, it may be an improvement on the original. After all, Jesus seemed quite pleased with the Rambo version of His story.

- Sid

That scraping sound you hear is the bottom of the barrel.

The late George Carlin used to do a routine about urinals, which he would preface by admitting that if you found yourself talking about urinals, you'd probably missed some more important topic along the line. Similarly, the news that the Los Angeles Opera is staging a new opera based on The Fly suggests that there must have been SOMETHING else that should have been converted to song and stage first.

And yes, we're talking about the David Cronenberg movie, the one where Jeff Goldblum morphs into a decaying insectoid monster. Okay, if forced to, I could probably come up with some kind of comparison between Brundle and Faust, but it would certainly be a struggle. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of the Simpsons episode where Troy McClure stars in the musical adaptation of Planet of the Apes - although probably not intended to be funny.

- Sid

"Madness, as you know, is like gravity."

"Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don’t have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one. I just do things. I’m a wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s."

The Joker, The Dark Knight

Having now seen The Dark Knight, I have to agree with the general opinion that Heath Ledger does a stellar turn as the Joker. However, it may be too stellar a turn - the Joker's dominance of the movie turns it into something other than a Batman story.

No one that I've spoken to after they've seen the movie makes any reference to the Batman at all. All the comments are about the Joker: as a character, as a performance, as an idea. When The Phantom Menace came out, disgruntled fans did guerilla cuts of the movie without the character of Jar Jar Binks, and I have to wonder how The Dark Knight would play out if someone went through and remove the Batman. What would you have left? It would be a kind of twisted morality play, the Joker versus Harvey Dent, Gotham's white knight, and an almost inevitable turning of that symbol to the sort of insanity and chaos that he has opposed. Normally the Batman acts as an equal counterweight to the Joker, order versus chaos, but in this case he seems overwhelmed by the Joker's glittering madness.

Logic says that credit for the creation of that madness should lie with Jonathon and Christopher Nolan, the screenwriters. After all, an actor is only as good as his material, and so much of the Joker's material is so very quotable. But in this case, the performance so completely suits the material - Heath Ledger gives the Joker a kind of febrile madness completely different from the original "Clown Prince of Crime" version of the character, to the point where Ledger is invisible behind - or within - the role. When we see Jack Nicholson as the Joker, part of the reaction to his performance is the recognition of Nicholson in an uncharacteristic place, whereas Heath Ledge vanishes completely within the smeared, corrupted clown makeup of his Joker.

The New York Post reported that Ledger spent six weeks in virtual isolation as he experimented with the character of the Joker. As part of the process, he is said to have kept a journal of the Joker's thoughts, a document whose appearance in some form or another is inevitable. No one will ever be able to say with any certainty if the performance had any connection with Ledger's death, although personally it seems too much like a convenient news hook rather than a believable tragedy.

And the rest of the cast? I'm sorry to say that I found Christian Bale's performance to be workmanlike, like he was only doing the job he was hired to do. I acknowledge the difficulty of acting behind a cape and cowl, but there are times when his Batman almost feels like a parody, with too much concentration on the gravelly tone of menace. The scenes that he shares with Michael Caine are probably his best, but unfortunately Caine probably has the second best lines in the movie after the Joker's.

Does Batman come in third for dialogue? Sorry, third place goes to Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent. As suggested above, you could easily turn the movie into a struggle between Dent and the Joker, and it's unfortunate that Eckhart and Ledger ended up in the same film. Eckhart could have easily supported an entire plot line with Dent versus Batman, but in this case he ends up as a bit of a sideshow. Oh, and I'm sorry to say that for me, Maggie Gyllenhaal comes across as a placeholder: "Stand here and read these lines - thanks." (I seem to be having a critical summer in terms of female love interests, Glyneth Paltrow also didn't work for me in Iron Man.)

I'm curious as to where they'll go from here. Someone must be kicking themselves about the decision to kill off Two-Face and keep the Joker alive, given how subsequent events have unfolded. It's oddly fitting, somehow - it's almost like some kind of slightly twisted joke...

- Sid

Less than one?

You know, you really have to wonder how many semi-SF amputee-babe-with-weapon-on-the-stump movies the world really needs...

- Sid

Have you heard the one about...

"Sorry I'm late, I was doing a Vanity Fair piece."

-Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Iron Man.

Every now and then when someone accuses me of telling jokes all the time, I defend myself by defining a joke as "a structured anecdote with a punch line" - everything else is just conversation. According to that definition, the movie adaptation of Iron Man is a joke: it's a structured anecdote with a pretty good punch line.

I don't mean to suggest that the movie is either an intentional or unintentional comedy, although it does have the usual number of in-jokes (Stan Lee does his usual walk-on, this time as Hugh Hefner, and a shot of a youthful Tony Stark and his first circuit board shows Tony posing with Bill Gates) and a surprising amount of physical humour. Impressively, the humour in no way detracts from the flow of story and never has any feeling of television-Batman-and-Robin parody.

I think that a lot of the credit for the movie's success has to go to Robert Downey Jr. There's been a lot of media discussion about how the choice of Downey was a risk, based on his well-known issues with substance abuse and subsequent imprisonment, but it makes him an oddly apt choice to play a playboy millionaire character whose alcoholism represented a major story arc in the comic book version. In fact, there's even a reference in the movie to Downey's Burger King epiphany. His portrayal of Tony Stark is by turns flippant and earnest, but has an underlying air of determination that comes across perfectly. The script is loaded with tossed-away one liners from Stark that Downey delivers so casually that I suspect an unattentive audience (such as the one I sat in this evening) won't even notice them.

Similarly, Jeff Bridges does a brilliant job as Obadiah Stane, Stark's mentor and business partner, giving the character a chillingly plausible air of corporate evil. I have to say that the shaved head and full beard help considerably, in that he's almost not recognizable in the role.

And the armour itself? Well, really, it IS the main element of the story, and the three versions all perform admirably. (There's an alarming similarity between the armour-assembly process in the movie and the one from the Blizzard Starcraft II trailer, but that's a separate issue.) The "final" model - final in quotes because it's in pieces by the end of the movie, and apparently sequels are planned - is convincingly detailed, articulated and transformable. Full credit to everyone for trying to figure out a plausible system that would allow someone to actually fly in a suit of armour.

All that being said, Glyneth Paltrow doesn't work as Pepper Potts so completely that I tried to ignore her. Terence Howard as James Rhodes felt all wrong too, I would have preferred someone like Gary Dourdan from CSI, someone with some physical presence. There's a clumsy attempt to establish Tony's post-trauma personality as having an element of fanaticism to it, but it only pops up for a single scene and then falls by the wayside.

Regarding the original comic book character, if you'd asked me last week where Iron Man's origin lay, I would have unhesitatingly said, "Korean War, but they updated it to Vietnam sometime in the 70's - probably Iraq in the movie version." Sadly, the weight of online commentary suggests that it was always Vietnam - sadly because it would have been a better comment on American interventionism for them to have updated the story from Korea to Vietnam to, as it turns out, Afghanistan. The joke is that as Obadiah Stane points out during the climax of the movie, the Tony Stark who announces that his company will no longer manufacture weapons then turns around and makes "the greatest weapon of all". Let's face it, when Iron Man fires a missile into a tank and it blows up, nobody inside the tank is walking away from that. I have to wonder if they're going to address that dichotomy in sequels.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the movie version, especially since it takes things back to the basics. I stopped buying comics a few years back, mostly out of boredom, but from what I gather some of the attempts by writers to alleviate the boredom issue have been more creative than intelligent, unfortunately. (Come on, Teen Iron Man?)

Oh, and the punchline? Sorry, I'd hate to spoil the joke for anyone - and it's a pretty good joke.

- Sid

Even two seems like a lot, when you think about it.

"Do you add to the blog on a regular basis, like do you work on a topic for a while and then post it sort of on a schedule, or just as it comes? Inquiring Cloins want to know..."

Colin Campbell

Since Mr. Campbell, whose Campbell Brothers blog was the inspiration for The Infinite Revolution*, has expressed some curiousity about my process via e-mail, I thought it only appropriate to take a moment and do a posting on posting. I suspect that anyone who does blog postings on an area of interest rather than as a diary ends up doing one of these meta-media things, so I might as well get mine out of the way.

I don't have any sort of set schedule for postings. It's just something I do for fun, and as such there's no reason to sit down every two days and force myself to write something. However, I have to say that life is full of inspiration and opportunity for topics. As an example, let's look at the last week or two.

About a week and a half ago, I discovered that my Friday night dinner-and-drinks friend Chris, who is familiar with Terry Pratchett's work, is (or was, he's fickle) a big Harry Potter fan, likes Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and is gradually weaning himself away from World of Warcraft, had never heard of Michael Moorcock's Elric series. Well, rather than bending the poor fellow's ear for half an hour, I'll probably do an Elric of Melniboné posting to get that out of my system.

I received my income tax refund this week, and as a result did a little non-necessity shopping this weekend. Picked up a copy of the straight to DVD movie Stargate: The Ark of Truth and found that it compared unfavourably to the Firefly and Farscape post-series movies, another good topic for a posting. I also bought a copy of The Crow - comic book adaptations have been uneven as well, lots of grist there for the mill.

I'm currently reading a couple of books (they're in different rooms, if you're wondering how that works) that both deal with hostile or possibly hostile technologically superior aliens. Aliens - good topic, that, one of the big SF concepts as well as being one of the major foundations of the genre as established by H. G. Wells. Wells gave us time travel, space exploration, alien invasion, genetic manipulation (The Food of the Gods) and invisibility, just to name a few of the major themes that he introduced. This one is probably two postings, I've been toying with an H. G. Wells piece for some time.

And so it goes... I've also got a few partial drafts in progress, as well as doing ongoing research for the global/racial/feminist postings. It's difficult sometimes, because I worry about having the right titles and opening paragraphs, not to mention picking out all those quotes. Irritatingly, I find that I tend to compose bits of the postings in my head when I'm at the gym, and end up either forgetting them or trying to scribble them down in my workout log book between sets.

Sourcing images is fun too. In this case the graphic at the top of the page is taken from xkcd, a webcomic of "romance, sarcasm, math and language." Taken without permission, frankly - the Internet is like that - but I'll be happy to remove the image if they complain and at least I've credited them and linked to their site. I've done scanning, pulled images from .avi files, and learned the Unix command that provides a workaround for the fact that Apple disables the screen shot keyboard command when DVD's are playing.

All in all, I find it to be a pleasant little hobby. At one point I was considering taking a class in science fiction as literature, but I think that blogging has removed that desire by giving me a forum to speak my mind without having to worry about being graded.

- Sid

*Much as axe murder was the inspiration for brain surgery.

And after all the terrible things I said about them.

The issue isn't whether you're paranoid, but whether you're paranoid enough.

Strange Days

Lord knows that I've had some issues with Space, but I have to give them full points for picking Strange Days for their New Year's Eve lineup, especially since the climactic action of the film takes place on December 31st just before midnight.

Admittedly a flawed masterpiece, Strange Days has to be acknowledged as a complete departure from the usual space opera/alien monster big screen science fiction film. James Cameron's script is a bit uneven, but the base premise of memory as a saleable commodity is an interesting one - although it's unfortunate that the plot moves away from that premise into a sort of cyberpunk whodunnit. And surprisingly (at least to me) it's such a compact, almost intimate script, considering that I associate Cameron with so many large and elaborate projects.

That sort of "yes, but, although" analysis is characteristic of the ambiguity of the film, which garnered good responses from critics but didn't do well at the box office. In spite of its flaws, I've always found it very watchable: Kathryn Bigelow's direction is perfectly suited to the material, the cast (a fairly impressive lineup featuring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis and Tom Sizemore) all do a great job in their respective roles, and it's great to see a science fiction movie that really doesn't need any special effects other than a few elaborate fades. But I have to say that for me, the biggest flaw in Strange Days is the idea that anyone would pick Juliette Lewis over Angela Bassett.

- Sid

P.S. Oh, and happy New Year, everyone, all the best for 2008. One more step into the future...