Who Killed Chandra Levy?

Wow. Blast from the past. I haven't thought about Chandra Levy in years. The Wash Post is doing a long piece on it, though. It's Washington's most famous, unsolved crime. Remember when the Congressman was caught throwing some of her stuff away in a fast food bag as he was being followed by the police?

How Not to Roll

This does not bode well for the driver's health. He was rolling into that ATM pretty fast, too, if you ask me.

TDK (4 stars out of 4 stars)

Like you thought I was going to say something different. I sat in the darkness with 300 strangers, in a kind of mystical, orgasm of cinema for 2 and a half hours. It was great. Nolan's handling of this material is top shelf - maybe as good as just about anything DC has ever done, or if not that high, as good as most Batman stories ever told at the very least. There's something different about Joker and Two-Face in this movie. It's very hard to put your finger on it exactly. Like with Batman in Batman Begins, Nolan manages to make their presence in Gotham necessary and believable. You forget Batman is wearing a costume and that the other two are insane psychopath, supervillains. Harvey Dent is by far the most human we've ever seen him. They took a lot of the Batman: Year One concept of Harvey Dent as a collaborator with Wayne and Gordon in an obsessive, idealistic fight against Gotham's criminals, and made his transition to evil much more twisted than I was expecting. If I elaborated, I'd give it away, so I won't. Of course, Ledger was excellent in this. His part was pretty crucial to the level of the story, and I can't believe Ledger won't be reprising it in a third film. It's one of the lesser tragedies of his premature death, but it's still nonetheless tragic that this is the last time we'll see him. It was a fantastic final performance, though - one that I think any actor would be proud to have as his last role. Nolan through Ledger brought some fascinating things to Joker's part. Most of the time, Joker plays it crazy-straight, but every now and then he's genuinely funny, and when those situations arise, it's actually hysterical. He seems to be channeling Charlie Chaplin at times, too. Who knew Ledger had such a knack for that kind of physical comedy? We also see the messiah-savior figure in the superhero explored in this movie, as with most superhero movies, but done so in a way that is fresh and revealing about both the messiah-savior icon and Batman himself. He carries the sins of the guilty as a scapegoat in order to be his people's protector. Very powerful. I will be seeing it again in the theater. As a friend emailed me today and said, that's about as high of praise you can give a movie.

Note to others, though. At 12:15 in my town, the movie was literally lined up around the block. If your a gambling man, I'd recommend going and buying 20-30 seven o'clock tickets and trying your hand at scalping. I had a long conversation with a scalper doing that very thing while in line, and he seemed confident that he'd double-triple his money. I had not seen a line like that since the Phantom Menace, in all seriousness. With only two theaters in my city, I think it might be worth a shot. But, each theater has 2-3 screens, staggered, so unless they all sell out, you're talking about competing with some substitutes. I think my city is going to have the capacity to handle demand for evening shows, but you never know. It could very well sell out en masse, enabling you to turn a small profit, if you don't get caught. Update: Looks like I was right.

Black Market

Last night, we watched Black Market (Battlestar Galactiac), which is on the first or second disk of season 2.5. It was the first episode that I'd seen since we started watched the series that I actively hated. I was wondering if I was alone, and so checked wikipedia. Sure enough, Ron Moore hated it too.

Executive producer Ron Moore openly disdains this episode, and from the beginning of the episode's podcast commentary simply admits that it failed as an episode. He then spends almost the entire podcast pointing out things he feels are wrong with it. The underlying reason Moore felt was behind this drop in quality for this episode was the increased workload of the series' second season; the episode's initial script looked good on paper, and only realized that it wasn't turning out well when (due to increased time constraints) it was far too late to rewrite the episode.

The number of things in it that I had problems with it were storytelling, the characterization, but also the economics of the black market. It's really hard for me to believe that black markets are bad things, when neither the crew nor the citizens can get basic necessities due to some kind of serious economic problems among the survivors. But the writers take the evil-ness of black market trading for granted, and so never bother to explain what exactly is so wrong about someone trading a gold bracelet to get liquor, or some other commodity to get antibiotics for their dying child. Since nothing is obviously wrong with those trades, it seemed like they just threw together a bit about child prostitution to really make their point. I kept telling my wife, that as far as I could see, the black market was helping move goods and services to those people who wanted them the most, and that if it didn't exist, things would undoubtedly be far worse since these rationings were resulting in serious health risks, among other things. But the storytelling was also really bad. We're introduced to Apollo's new girlfriend, who is a prostitute, and flashbacks to a woman he left behind, who we've never seen before, and is never explained in the context of the hour. It was all very confusing. Anyway, looks like its problems had to do with the writers' workload. I would've loved to have heard more about the black market idea, though, because this was potentially a very interesting thing to explore. These sci-fi shows tend to take utopian economies for granted, and the idea that Madame President is having to manage an economy, and doing a bad job of it, and dealing with crime at the same time as she's trying to keep humanity alive from constant Cylon attacks is really interesting.

Deleted Scenes from TDK

I'm really hoping that the Director's Cut puts this one back in.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

More Batman Good News

NYT reviews the movie and gives it very strong remarks.

In its grim intensity, “The Dark Knight” can feel closer to David Fincher’s “Zodiac” than Tim Burton’s playfully gothic “Batman,” which means it’s also closer to Bob Kane’s original comic and Frank Miller’s 1986 reinterpretation. That makes it heavy, at times almost pop-Wagnerian, but Mr. Ledger’s performance and the film’s visual beauty are transporting. (In Imax, it’s even more operatic.) No matter how cynical you feel about Hollywood, it is hard not to fall for a film that makes room for a shot of the Joker leaning out the window of a stolen police car and laughing into the wind, the city’s colored lights gleaming behind him like jewels. He’s just a clown painted on black velvet, but he’s also some kind of masterpiece.

Watchmen Trailer

I didn't go to Batman last night. Too tired. But this trailer was supposedly shown.