Author: Bryant
I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow again today, and my adoration of Polly Perkins is confirmed. And here’s why. (Spoilers, of course.)
First and foremost, she is a woman who stands on her own two feet. Her career is important to her and by all evidence she’s pretty good at it. On second viewing, the triangle created by the skills of Polly, Dex, and Joe is fairly obvious: Polly notices, Dex analyzes, and Joe acts. Time and time again, Polly’s the one who notices things first. She makes contact with Doctor Jennings. She finds the scrap of map that Dex left behind. She figures out that the staff is important. She realizes the purpose of the rocketship.
And heck — she knew Joe was fooling around on her in Nanjing. A key point, that; it’s clear that Joe fooled around on Polly before she sabotaged his fuel line, and from context (“You’re not going to leave me again!”) it’s also pretty clear that Joe bailed on Polly at least once before. Why, he doesn’t even protest the accusation. It’s not terribly surprising that Polly’s willing to lie to Joe when he’s already proven that he’s not entirely trustworthy himself.
(Speaking of which, why can’t Polly take pictures of the giant robots? It’s supposed to be a big secret even after all the capitals of the world have been attacked? Joe’s a secretive type at heart, clearly.)
In any case, the triangle was crystal clear on second viewing. Joe barely ever figures anything out on his own; he can’t even get the wires cut. Polly is not a deep thinker, but she is very perceptive. She also only has one moment of action, albeit a crucial one. And Dex’s status as the thinker is the clearest of them all.
Other moments of interest: the jettisoning of the rocketship’s cargo. Polly says it needs to happen. Joe agrees, but claims there isn’t time — note once again the emphasis on action. Polly looks at the control panel and spends about two seconds figuring out how to trigger the emergency release, triggers it, and moves on. Joe gets entirely sour, perhaps because he couldn’t have done the same.
Oh, and at the end? The lenscap wasn’t on. Joe and Polly will play their little games with each other until they die, I expect.
“After last night’s victory, the Sox said Bronson Arroyo and Tim Wakefield would pitch Games 3 and 4 (if necessary), but did not say which pitcher would start which game.” (Boston Globe.)
Also, Schilling’s going to pitch Game 1 and Martinez will pitch Game 2.
Advantage: Population: One.
Does anyone (I’m looking at you, Harvard affiliates) happen to have floor plans for San Simeon hanging around? I know I could get a peek at ‘em if I were at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and I know that Thomas Aidala’s Hearst Castle, San Simeon has some. So I could always just snag a used copy, but I figured I’d plumb the depths of the Lazyweb first.
On CNN, they’re citing unnamed conservative blogs as feeling Bush had a mixed performance. It’s amusing to watch blogs get co-opted into the spin. General feeling of positive for Kerry from the CNN talking heads. Maybe the Corner; they’re pretty dubious about how Bush did. CNN thinks Bush looks annoyed. Fox is not calling either man the winner. Fox picked up on how tired Bush looked and how much he sighed. Not to mention annoyed. They don’t know if it was effective or not, but Ceci Connelly is calling the expression sour. They’re admitting that Bush looked shorter due to the framing. Spin is fun.
Jim Lehrer: “And if any of you audience people yak during the debate, I am going to come down there and whip your ass.”
Or something like that.
SpaceShipOne has successfully completed its first qualifying flight. Piloted by Mike Melvill, it reached altitudes of over 63 miles. SpaceShipOne now has two weeks to reach that altitude again; if it succeeds, Scaled Composites will win the X Prize.
Words fail me; my delight is manifest. Space!
Although Ulysses has flaws, CopyWrite has a very similar interface and provides a slightly better editing pane (paragraph spacing) plus in-line formatting. It looks like I can coerce InDesign into handling formatting codes for me, which means named styles are less important. And CopyWrite is about a quarter the price of Ulysses.
I’m doing my latest game (The Kiss of God) in CopyWrite; after I’m done I’ll post about the experience.
One reason I’m fairly confident Kerry will win: he has the best ground game. I’ve been assuming that get out the vote efforts were a major component of the DNC’s strategy this election for a few reasons; most obviously, I’ve just seen a lot of activity oriented towards getting people to the polls this year. More importantly, though, I watched John Kerry win in Iowa because of an absolutely perfect get out the vote operation run by Michael Whouley. Any campaign with Whouley at the center is going to be one that has a good ground game, regardless of anything else.
The really significant thing about the “chaos” in the Kerry campaign last month was not Joe Lockhart’s arrival. The media gets very excited about every Clinton signing, so it was nice for them to be able to run stories about the Clintonistas taking over the campaign — Lockhart was Clinton’s press secretary. The real news, however, was that John Sasso, another experienced Massachusetts political operative, joined the campaign. That made it possible for Michael Whouley to go over to the DNC to be their General Election Manager.
And who’s outsourcing a lot of their get out the vote effort to 527s? The DNC, which now has the best ground game in the business. If Kerry loses this election, it will not be because of poor voter turnout.
The extended edition Return of the King DVDs will include:
- 2 disc 250 minute movie cut
- Commentary by the director and writers
- Commentary by the design team
- Commentary by the production team
- Commentary by the cast (with split personality dialogue between Gollum and Smeagol)
- Tolkien documentary
- From Book to Script documentary
- Designing Middle-Earth documentary
- Big-atures documentary (?)
- 2 WETA documentaries
- Costume design documentary
- Horse Lords documentary
- Cameras in Middle-Earth documentary
- Documentary on completing the trilogy
- Music documentary
- Soundscapes documentary
- 2 documentaries about the end of it all
- Cameron Duncan documentary
- Two Cameron Duncan short films, “DFK6498” and “Strike Zone”
- Mumakil battle multi-angle feature
- Abandoned concept: Aragorn battles Sauron feature
- Photo galleries (2,123+ images)
- Tracing the Journeys of the Fellowship map feature
- New Zealand as Middle-Earth map feature
That’s a hunka hunka burning DVD. Via Twitch.