Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Battlestar Galactica: the review

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When I heard they were doing a remake of Battlestar Galactica, I said, “Wow, is Hollywood out of ideas. An unbelievably terrible and cheesy show from the 70s? Seriously? That’s all they can come up with?”

Darin felt much the same way. We didn’t watch the miniseries. A few friends told us it was good. I said, “Uh huh.”

During the first season, friends kept saying, “Are you watching? It’s so good.” I was like, Right, I’ve seen the damn ads: they’ve turned the walking-toaster Cylons into hot blonde babe Cylons. It’s a show for adolescent males (which, sadly, still does encompass many of our friends, no matter what their actual sex and age).

One Sunday I even invited Mitch over for dinner and he said he couldn’t. Amongst the reasons? Staying home to watch BG…and he has TiVo.

Okay, okay, we wanted to know what everyone was talking about, so we bought the miniseries and season 1 boxed set. And about six or seven days ago we sat down to watch part 1 of the miniseries.

Tonight we will be watching the final episode of Season 1.

I will say unequivocally: BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION.

I am so sorry I have missed the first half of Season 2. I’m gonna have to buy those DVDs, so I can be ready for the second half, which starts in January.

For those three people out there apparently not watching this yet: Battlestar Galactica is nothing like the one you may have watched as a tot. I did watch it as a young Di. I can’t remember a damn thing about it except the two fighter pilots were Apollo and Starbuck, and Starbuck went on to The A-Team, which led me to my favorite phrase, “Amo conventum instituti,” which of course is Latin for “I love it when a plan comes together.” But I digress.

In this show, the Cylons were robot servants of the humans who became intelligent enough to rebel. The Cylons and humans fight, and then an armistice is declared. No one hears from the Cylons for forty years. Then, on one terrible day, everybody hears from the Cylons, and humanity is almost completely wiped out. The last 50,000 set off to find the mythical “Earth” that their religious legends speak of.

Edward James Olmos is Adama, commander of the almost-retired Battlestar Galactica. Mary McDonnell is the Secretary of Education who unexpectedly finds herself promoted to President of the Colonies when everyone else is wiped out. Apollo is still Adama’s son, only now his name is Lee and his call-sign is Apollo. (Despite the fact that apparently the major religion is the worship of the twelve Greek gods, I don’t think there have been any jokes have been made about how Apollo got that call-sign.) Starbuck is now a woman, the tough (yet blonde) Lt. Thrace.

There’s intrigue. Paranoia. Sexual tension. Sexual intrigue — yes, the Cylons do look human now, including the sexy blonde babe, but she’s not there just for the sex. (One failing of the show is the male Cylons so far have been uniformly kind of scuzzy, whereas the female Cylons are babe-alicious.) The drama is just great, from the excellent sf situations (like in episode “33”), to the tensions and problems between individual characters. And so far every character has done something surprising, something I haven’t expected. And the tensions between the rational and the spiritual (especially between the humans and Cylons — definitely hadn’t expected that!), between humans and robots, between military and civilian, between men and women… So many levels.

Excellent writing. Pretty good acting. (I was less-than-impressed by Jamie Bamber’s (Apollo) acting, until I discovered he’s British. One of the best American accents I’ve heard!)

To give you an idea of how into this show I am, when two characters slept together, I went, “Nooooo!” Darin said, “They’ve been foreshadowing that.” I said, “I know, but…STILL!”

This show is good stuff. I hope they keep it up at this level for a while.

Nota bene: If you haven’t watched any of the show and plan to catch it, definitely see the miniseries first. It not only explains stuff, but there are a few killer surprises in it…one of which is given away every week during the credits of Season 1.

Filed Under: TV

The Weather Man: the review

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It’s November, NaNoWriMo has begun, and when it came time to pick a movie for date night I said, “Let’s go have a long fancy dinner somewhere.” I couldn’t find anything I wanted to see that we hadn’t seen already. The movie probably start flying into the theaters fast and furious in a week or two, but for now there are very slim pickens.

Darin said, “I’d kinda like to see The Weather Man. It’s gotten good reviews.” So we went to see that.

Note to self: next time Darin talks about reviews, read them first.

The Weather Man is the story of a TV weatherman in Chicago (no, not a terrorist — that Weatherman movie might have been interesting), Dave Spritz (Nicolas Cage), whose life is falling apart. He’s divorced, and he doesn’t really know his kids: his overweight daughter who’s miserable in ballet class and smokes, and his teenaged son who’s attracted the unseemly attentions of his drug counselor. His father (Michael Caine) is a Pulitzer-prize winning author who makes Dave uncomfortable, because he feels like nothing he does is good enough. Everything makes Dave miserable: being recognized for being a TV weatherman, his relationship with his ex-wife, whether or not pursuing a job on a national morning show is a good idea. Dave’s emotional range goes from “blank affect” to “emotional constipation,” and the only time we seem him animated and happy is when he’s doing the weather map dance in front of a green screen.

The best scene is definitely the final one, and I’m not completely sure that’s not because it was the final damn scene of the movie.

Slowest. Movie. Ever. It’s cram-packed with actory goodness… Long stretches where the actors talk. Long scenes of people walking across snow. Nicolas Cage as his most nasal. I don’t want every movie to be full of slick dialogue or slam-cuts or problems neatly wrapped up in a bow after ninety minutes. But I’d like, I don’t know, something like an interesting character. Every single person had the same energy, the same languid affect. It felt like the director said, “Okay, take your time, take as long as you need to do this scene.”

The movie’s interminable. I went to the bathroom three times and I’m quite sure I didn’t miss anything.

Darin, for his part, liked the movie. I need to ask him why. No matter what his answer is, though, he never gets to pick a movie again. EVER.

The Rodeo Beach Trail Run

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Today’s trail run was at Fort Cronkhite, in the Marin headlands, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. Two words: utterly gorgeous. We started across the street from a popular surfing spot — the water temperature approached 0 Kelvin, but there were a lot of surfers out there — and we ran up the hill (puff, puff) past lots and lots of WWII (or WWI? or earlier?) concrete gun emplacements. There’s a lotta concrete in the hillside up there, complete with bunkers with iron doors.

Hey, no one ever invaded the Bay, did they? (If I remember correctly, the Presidio was originally built to defend against the Russians…the Tsarist Russians. So it wouldn’t surprise me if those bunkers were WWI or even earlier.)

The start of the run was brutal: pretty much the entire 1100 foot rise was the first half of the run. Everyone was walking after a while, except maybe the extremely fit. I asked Rob if he was getting a workout, and he said, “I don’t do these runs for the workout. I do the workouts so I can do these runs.” (Because they’re so beautiful.)

I’m pretty sure I didn’t beat the 9-year-old this time, but this is definitely a run we’d do again. The surroundings are completely stunning — more than once we stopped not (just) for me to catch my breath, but just to look out at the Bay and the Pacific and the headlands — and, except for not being able to hack the initial run to the top, I didn’t find the trail excruciating. I felt pretty good at the end, actually.

I don’t know what the trail runs will be like during winter. Wet dirt trails don’t sound like much fun, but the uncertainness of the terrain is half the fun of these things. Much better than a boring ol’ flat land run, that’s for sure. And my desire to run (or at least keep jogging) all the way to the top of one of these runs is quite the inventive for me to keep up my program.

What amazes me are the people who do the 50km runs. (Not that I’ve been around long enough to see what they look like when they get back.) They do a run much longer than a marathon over terrain harder than any normal marathon, and there’s no medal at the end, no cars to win.

I would love to be one of those runners. I guess I need to work my way up to doing a 20km run first.

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During the drive back I pulled out my Alphasmart and managed to write 600 words as Rob drove. And now I have to go do my other 1400 for the day.

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Update: Rob points me to a page that talks about the artillery bunkers and emplacements at Fort Cronkhite.