Back of the Envelope

I caught Howl's Moving Castle for the first time on Cartoon Network last Sunday, and greatly enjoyed it. This is hardly surprising, as it's a Studio Ghibli film, and their work is always astounding. Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation studio responsible for such classics as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. I enjoy all their movies. If you're not familiar with the story of Howl's Moving Castle, it concerns a teenaged hatmaker named Sophie who runs afoul of the Witch of the Waste, who turns her into a crone. She runs away from home and takes shelter inside Howl's moving castle. The Wizard Howl has a nasty reputation of capturing pretty girls so he can eat their hearts and/or steal their souls, although it turns out that's just a rumor. In truth he's a vain and irresponsible young man who is nevertheless remarkably kind to the cursed girl, who takes up a position as the cleaning lady for him, his fire demon, Calcifer, and his young apprentice, Markl. Since Sophie is, in truth, an attractive young girl under a curse, and Howl really is a handsome young man, you can probably see where this is going.

Okay, so that part was a tad predictable, but it was still a great movie. Since it's Studio Ghibli, it was of course beautiful. Great animation, from the oily shadow creatures to the falling stars to the walking castle. The action scenes were big and busy without beng confusing. The voices were well done, although I thought Sophie's old lady voice was less stiff than her young girl one, and Howl occasionally sounded sedated. Billy Crystal did the best job, as you'd expect from an old pro. His Calcifer had the funniest lines, and the delivery to match. The love story, though a tad predictable, didn't feel contrived, and the sense of drama was quite powerful.

The one thing I had trouble with is what I usually do with a Studio Ghibli film (as I mentioned in my remarks on Spirited Away). I came away rather confused on a number of points. Granted, their stories involve magic, and magic doesn't always make sense, but someone familiar with fantasy can usually figure out the internal logic of a fantasy world, since fantasy writers usually have a pretty good idea how such things work and usually like to make those things clear by the end. In a movie, there's not always as much explanation, but still, most don't have you walking away, scratching your head and wodering what happened. Or at least I don't usually like that kind.

I enjoyed this one anyway, but there are a few things that bothered me (spoilers hidden below):


With this many questions, I couldn't leave it alone. So I bought the book. Howl's Moving Castle is adapted from a book of the same name by Diana Wynne Jones. I just finished the book the other night, and I very much enjoyed it. To be honest, I think the movie is better, but that may just be because I saw the movie first. The book was still very good, and in many ways less confusing. But it was also very, very different. More spoilers as I try to explain below.


So, if you've read all that, you may be wondering why I prefer the movie if the book made more sense. Well, there are a couple of things. In the book, the moving castle is just a front--no one actually lives in it, whereas in the movie, that's where they live. This has a tremendous appeal, not just visually, although that is a part of it, such as when Sophie goes out on the balcony and watches the land go by. And while I found Sophie reverting to young age and back confusing, I thought it offered a great deal of dramatic tension. But at the bottom, I think a lot of it comes of seeing the movie before reading the book. They're both very good, and I recommend them highly.

Jonah Goldberg has set himself a difficult task. He wishes to show that fascism, far from being a right-wing phenomenon, is a quintessentially left-wing endeavor, deriving from the same progressive movement that gave rise to socialism and modern liberalism. This is difficult not because it's hard to do--there is no shortage of approving quotes about Mussolini from early-twentieth century American progressives, nor is it hard to trace fascism's poltical roots from socialism and pragmatism--but because conventional wisdom has defined fascism as right-wing, and most liberals will try to shout you down if you say otherwise. It shouldn't be hard: fascism has always been a revolutionary ideology, which by definition is un-conservative. The fact that American Conservatism is based on Classical Liberalism, the belief in individual liberties and property rights, both of which are antithetical to fascism (or any form of statism), should make his case a no-brainer. Nevertheless, he makes a thorough argument concerning the origins of fascism, presenting as its basis a national form of socialism, similar but opposed to the Marxist international socialism.

One part I particularly enjoyed was his chapter on religion and fascism. His definition of fascism as a civil religion fits its origins neatly. Communism, after all, is an atheistic religion, and coming from a similar origin, it is no surprise that fascism is a civil religion with nationalism as its central component. Speaking of nationalism, Jonah also makes the case that nationalism and patriotism are not the same thing. Patriotism is a reverence for the institutions and ideals of a nation (although not without regard for its faults), whereas nationalism believes in the nation, or often, the race, even while trying to tear down the institutions and ideals. It does not have to do away with the original religion--although it often does--if it can subvert it. Jonah cites plenty of evidence of this, and has sufficient quotes to show that the argument that "Hitler was a Christian," which I've heard before, simply does not hold water. Consider, for example, these words of Hitler: "Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia... The German race has existed without Christianity for thousands of years... and will continue after Christianity has disappeared... We must get used to the teachings of blood and race."

Or this campsong used by the Hitler Youth:

We are the happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler's children.
No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots.

How then did fascism come to be thought of as right-wing? It essentially came from the Communist playbook. Communism and Fascism are largely opposed to each other (although not always: the German Communists originally saw Nazism as a stepping stone to true Communism), but it is the opposition of cousins with irreconcilible differences, not the opposition of antitheticals. So when the Communists were trying to paint Fascism in a negative light, despite the fact that it was doing many of the things the Communists said they were for, the Communists painted fascism as right wing, as the last gasp of the ruling class in an attempt to lure the people from the true way. As fascism fell from favor at the end of the Second World War, Communists took to calling everyone they disagreed with fascist. And since Communism remained largely in favor on the American Left, they followed the Communists' lead.

While this "civil religion" definition of fascism is useful, it does lead Jonah to some weaker arguments at the end of his book. Pointing out how modern liberalism is a statist civil religion for many people, he then goes on to point out fascism at work in the modern liberal. I think his arguments could have been stronger here if he'd only used the term fascist less. Yes, a lot of today's politics, mostly on the Left but also on the Right, draw from the same wellspring that gave us fascism, even draw from fascist ideas, but I don't think that's the same as being fascist. And even if it is, calling it such only sounds like name-calling.

Even so, I think Liberal Fascism is worth reading. It's a useful corrective for all the misinformation about fascism that has reduced it to a nasty name to call someone and stripped it of its actual meaning.

Over at the Black Gate blog, Howard has some good things to say about Avatar: The Last Airbender:

There’s one fantasy show on television today that I don’t really hear people talking about. I mean fantasy in a stricter sense, not in the broad sense that would include science fiction or urban fantasy or horror; I mean epic fantasy in an imaginary land with simpler technology where magic works.

The show has vibrant and compelling characters, a richly textured world and mythology, and crisp, clever writing. To these eyes it is the best fantasy show yet produced for television; certainly it is hands down the best written animated show on TV today.

I am referring, of course, to Avatar.

What is Avatar? As Howard says, the short version is that it's a kid's show. But similar to the Harry Potter books or Pixar movies, there's plenty for adults to like, too. A rich plot, complex characters, and entertaining fight scenes make it definitely worth watching.

So, what is it about, really? The world of Avatar is Asian themed, based around the four elements, with nations corresponding to each of them. There are two Water Tribes, at the North and South poles, with civilizations based on the Inuit (eskimo tribes). At four Air Temples, one each for the four cardinal directions, live the Air Nomads, whose lifestyle is similar to the Tibetan monks. The Earth Kingdom is the largest, based on Chinese culture. Finally, there is the Fire Nation, roughly an analogue for Imperial Japan. In each of these nations, there are people who can manipulate, or bend, the native element. Firebenders can shoot fire from their hands and feet, waterbenders can use water as whips, earthbenders can bring rocks out of the ground and throw them at their enemies, and airbenders can fly. Doing so is not simply a matter of mind over matter. Each bending discipline is performed using a different style of martial arts. In addition to benders of each of the four elements, there is the Avatar, a spirit who is reincarnated every generation, who is capable of learning all four bending disciplines.

A hundred years before the start of the series, the Avatar vanished. At roughly the same time, the relatively technologically-advanced (steam power, but no gun powder) Fire Nation launched a war of conquest, wiping out the Air Nomads and attempting to conquer the Earth Kingdom (with frequent raids against the Water Tribes as well). Just when it looks like the Fire Nation will succeed in its conquest, the Avatar is found in a iceberg, where he has been frozen for the last one hundred years. Unfortunately for the world, the Avatar is a 12-year-old Airbender named Aang, who, while he's mastered airbending, has yet to learn any of the other elements. Joining him in a quest to learn each element, starting with Water, are the two teenagers from the Southern Water Tribe who found him: Katara, the only waterbender at the south pole and thus untrained, and Sokka, her warrior brother. But learning waterbending will not be easy, as standing in their way is sixteen-year-old Zuko, the scarred Fire Nation prince who was banished by his father and can only return if he captures the Avatar.

In order to sell you on this show, I want to give some insight into one of the characters. Not one of the heroes, but the villain, Prince Zuko, as he is certainly the most intriguing of the characters. To do so will require spoilers, so beware:


So, if you read that, you've seen how interesting and complex Avatar can make its characters, so you'll appreciate why I think the show is worth watching. If you didn't, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Overall, I highly recommend it. Avatar is available on DVD, almost, but not quite, up to what's aired in the US. You can also get everything that's aired in the US on iTunes, which I like--you can play your iPod on your television with the right connection, its cheaper than DVDs, you can get a season subscription even before the season's done, and you can download it today.

The Sci Fi channel is known for having some really great original series (Battlestar Galactica, Farscape), really bad original movies, and miniseries which are somewhere in the middle. The miniseries which are based on their original series, such as the Farscape finale, can be really good. Ones which are based on a pre-existing property, such as Earthsea, are usually pretty bad. Their original miniseries, which aren't based on any existing property that I know of, fall somewhere in the middle. The Lost Room had a meandering plot and sometimes made little sense, but at least it had decent acting and some genuinely exciting scenes.

Tin Man is based on a pre-existing property, namely Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, which should tell you something right there. It tries to be both a re-imagining of the original story and a sequel to it (and maybe even something of a parody of it), and both the acting and the dialogue leave a lot to be desired. That said, I thought the core story, which wasn't made obvious until the end of the second part, had some good ideas. Not completely original, but an interesting twist which convinced me that I should watch the rest, which was satisfying enough in how the story worked out, if the way it got there wasn't perfect. In that sense, it's somewhat similar to the Star Wars prequels... an interesting enough story at the core, but we had to put up with a lot of bad acting and writing to get there.

Anyway, the reason I mention it is not to say that you should or shouldn't watch the miniseries, but to note that it inspired me to take a look at Frank Baum's original stories, instead of basing my knowledge of Oz solely on the Judy Garland movie. Which led me to this site, where the full text of all of Frank Baum's Oz stories is provided, thanks to the wonders of public domain. I read/skimmed the immediate sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, namely The Marvelous Land of Oz, and I think I understand why there's no big name movie associated with it. It's not that it's a bad story, but the fate of the main character is kind of disturbing for a children's story--many parents would not approve. It has the added effect of presenting the wizard of the movie as a power-grabbing usurper. He was always a con-man, but in the original you got the impression that he didn't mean any particular harm. Of course, I didn't go back to read the first story, so maybe the movie version doesn't exactly line up with the original.

Spoiler alert! There are spoilers to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this post, including to some of what appears in the epilogue, but they really aren't too bad.

Over at the Corner, John Podhoretz believes that J.K. Rowling will be writing a new Harry Potter book sometime in the future. Although that may be a bit misleading--his contention is that she'll write another book in the same world, even if it's not actually about Harry. John Hood suggests it may be a prequel. I'm not so sure about that. A large part of Harry Potter has been the revelations from the past, the truth about the years when James, Lily, Sirius, and Snape were in school, and about when Hagrid and Tom Riddle were in school, and even about Dumbledore's misspent youth. The bottom line is that, even if there are still a lot of blanks, we have a lot of information about the pasts of all the significant characters. There's just not much need for a prequel. If there is one, I'd rather have Lily's or Snape's perspective, rather than, say, James's or Sirius's. And the period between their Hogwarts years and Voldemort's first encounter with Harry would be more interesting than their school years.

Anyway, I think there's a better chance for a sequel than a prequel. The epilogue of Deathly Hallows already introduces us to the likely cast of characters we'd see in it. Of course, there's no clear antagonist there, but that doesn't mean one can't be found. And did anyone else notice that Deathly Hallows takes place in 1997? That nineteen years later in the epilogue lines up with nine years from now, which makes it ten years from the time Rowling would have finished writing Hallows. Ten years is about the time you'd expect it to take before an author returned to their old world... just a thought.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final Harry Potter book, and as such, it is bound to disappoint people. What series, having built up such a following, can possibly live up to everyone's expectations in the final book? There were numerous things I was disappointed in myself. Despite that, I enjoyed the book overall, and if you've read all the others, it's simply impossible not to read the final one. I will not attempt to make this a spoiler-free review. There will be minor ones from this point on. I'll hide the big ones at the end, but there will be small ones throughout.

First, lest anyone has any doubts, this really is the final Harry Potter book. It finishes up everything: it ties up the loose ends, answers all the mysteries that have been dangling since Book 1 (Snape's motivations and Dumbledore's reasons for trusting him being the big one), and closes out with a satisfying finality. Rowling could write more books in this world, certainly, but Harry Potter's story is complete.

It's not too much of a spoiler to reveal that this book takes place away from Hogwarts, as Harry said that he would not be returning to Hogwarts for his final year as a student at the end of the last book. Instead, he spends it wandering around the countryside, looking for Horcruxes. Without the school as the backdrop, a lot of things don't work as well as they could. Harry and his friends spend the whole year wandering, and that means that weeks go by when there's nothing happening. At school, weeks where not much happens are at least filled with classes, but out in the middle of nowhere, nothing means nothing, and I find it hard to imagine that they couldn't come up with something to do.

Another negative is the tendency Rowling has to infodump. This has always been an issue in the Harry Potter books: that final chapter where Dumbledore explains everything, after a whole book of tantalizing hints that you can be sure mean exactly the opposite of they appear to mean. This time around, with the final book and a lot left to explain, there are a lot more infodumps, and a lot less misleading tantalizing hints. Now I like getting information, but I couldn't help feeling that maybe this could have been spread out better.

Boring stretches and infodumps took up way too much of this book, but there were exciting moments too. And those mostly worked out pretty well. Each time a Horcrux was retrieved or destroyed, the account was engaging and entertaining. Unfortunately, the final showdown didn't match the caliber of these exciting interludes.

Now, on to the big spoilers:


As I said, overall I liked it, but it could have been better.

I promised to do this a while ago, but I never got around to it. I finished up Neverwinter Nights 2 right around Christmas time, so it behooves me to give my opinion of it.

Anyone who's familiar with Neverwinter Nights knows that it's the descendant of Baldur's Gate, a classic Dungeons and Dragons game. It's not the direct sequel. That would have been Baldur's Gate II, a game which used a modified version of Baldur's Gate engine, but which was overall much better designed, with a much more interesting storyline. As the second Baldur's Gate is to the first, so is the second Neverwinter Nights to the first. The original Neverwinter Nights was an opportunity to show off the new 3d engine. Graphically, though, there wasn't much to show off. 3d engines at that time gave you a lot of freedom, but they just didn't look very good. Worse still, the game was lacking. The designers designed the game to be as non-linear as possible, but in practice, that meant that the storyline was weak. Typically, you'd travel to a new area, and be given the command to gather up the four pieces of some artifact or other. You could do so in any order, and then it was on to the next area. A worse fault was the missing party system. You could recruit a single cohort, but you had no control over their actions or their advancement. Nor did they, or any other NPC, have a fully developed personality for you to interact with. The problem was that the game was designed primarily with multiplayer in mind, and as with most such games, the single-player felt tacked-on.

Thankfully, Neverwinter Nights corrects these problems. There's a much stronger storyline, and though this makes the game more linear, you still have some freedom in how you pursue your goals. Rather than a single cohort, as in the original Neverwinter Nights, you can have up to 5 characters in your party (including yourself), and these characters have distinctive personalities and interesting perspectives. The game borrows the influence system from Knights of the Old Republic, where your actions affect what the party characters think of you, and this influences how they behave. It's even possible for characters for whom you haven't built up sufficient influence to betray you. The ability to have a lot of characters in your party also means that there's plenty of interparty interaction, often calling on the player to act as referee, or favor one character over another, thus gaining influence with one while losing it with another. And you ultimately recruit characters representing nearly every base class, most of whom will wait for you at your home base while you're joined by the ones you need. Sometimes I'd go for a well-balanced, dungeon raiding party, while at other times I chose for pure offense. It all depended on what you were facing. Overall, this was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. On the downside, while you control your characters' leveling and actions, you can't directly control what classes they take. This means that the prestige classes are only available to the main character.

Prestige classes are character classes which are a little bit more powerful than the regular ones, but which have requirements before you can take them. Some of them combine the most important aspects of two classes (Arcane Trickster, which combines Rogue and Wizard), while others take a character archetype to an extreme (Dwarven Defender, which helps dwarves to stand firm against incredible odds). Most of them are taken from the D&D 3.5 rulebook, but there are some new ones, and some which are strangely missing (there's no mystic thurge, for those who want both arcane and divine spells).

One aspect of the game which I mentioned in another post occurs around the midpoint, where your character is given charge of a ruined keep to repair, restock, and defend. This I considered great fun, as it gave a strategy element to the RPG game. It also gives you a chance to return to places you've visited before and try to recruit people to work at the keep. Trying to come up with the funds to keep it going was a great challenge, but definitely worth it.

Of course, sooner or later, the main plot catches up, and you have to defend your keep against the main enemy. Once that's done, it's time to take your party against the enemy, and the final battle involves just about every party character, for a massive fight.

I enjoyed this game immensely. In fact, I've started playing it again, with a different type of character, since I wanted to play around with some multiclassing, whereas I played straight bard the first time through.

Well, I've just reached a fun new minigame in Neverwinter Nights 2. I've been given a ruined keep, along with instructions to rebuild it and garrison it. To that end I've been given command of fifty soldiers and 70000 gold. This is all a rather involved minigame. The first order of business, as I saw it, was starting up a steady revenue stream, in this case money I can tithe from merchants using the road. In order to do that, first I need to attract merchants to the road, which I can do by sending my soldiers to patrol it. But my soldiers aren't effective until they're trained, for which I need to recruit a sargeant, and equipped, which requires recruiting an armorer and a weaponsmith and paying them to produce the goods. But I can't recruit either of those until I build a smithy, which requires gold. You see? Fortunately, the seed money is enough to build the smithy and begin repair on the walls and the roads, but only just. It's not enough to rebuild the keep or buy the best equipment for my troops yet. Part of the fun is recruiting. Rather than just being given a list of people to select from, I need to go out and talk to the NPCs I've dealt with over the course of the game so far, and convince them to join me at my keep. I also got a visit from some adventurers looking to follow in my footsteps, and asking if I have any quests for them. Unfortunately, adventurers are notoriously unreliable. You ask them to look into reports of spies in a town and they get sidetracked rescuing a farmer's daughter from goblins, or you tell them to clear out the bandits in an area and halfway there they stumble on a long forgotten tomb and start searching it for lost treasures. Still, usually they do a decent job once they get around to it, except that these seem to be even less competent than most.

Overall, it's an interesting and fun game in itself. Of course, it's a sideplot and there's more to be done in the main plot, but it was enough to keep me up way late a night or two.

Doc Rampage has positive things to say about the new Sci-Fi channel show Eureka. I TiVoed the pilot, but I still haven't gotten around to watching it. Doc's positive comments have encouraged me to take a look.

This past Saturday I went to see the third X-Men movie, subtitled "The Last Stand," with some friends of mine. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it was the least faithful to the X-Men continuity of any of the movies.

In the world of X-Men, mutants are the ultimate minority group. Some of them are born with obvious deformities, others with superhuman powers, and others with both. Because people fear mutants, they are highly discriminated against. However, mutants have stronger means to fight back than most minority groups. Thus the mutants as a whole divide into two groups. Professor Xavier, a mutant with the power to read and control minds, runs a school to train mutants to use their powers responsibly. He and his X-Men want to peacefully coexist with the human race, procuring mutant rights through legal, political means. Magneto, a mutant and Holocaust survivor with the power to control metal, leads a band of rebels who believe they must subjugate or even exterminate the inferior humans in order to live in peace.

When the third movie starts, things seem to be going fairly well for human/mutant relations. The president is sympathetic, and has formed a cabinet-level Department of Mutant Affairs and appointed a mutant (nicknamed Beast) to run it. Of course, it wouldn't be much of a movie if things stayed that way. Conflict quickly comes about with the development of a cure for mutation by a pharmaceutical company. Some mutants are desparate for a cure, while others are offended by the very idea that their mutation is something to cure. Even the X-Men are divided. At first, the drug is introduced as a purely voluntary cure for any mutant who wants it, but when the government develops it into a weapon against the more violent mutants, then things go crazy. When Jean Gray, the psychic X-Man who apparently died at the end of the second movie, returns as the uberpowerful and insane Phoenix, things get even more interesting.

There are some spoilers in the rest, so click show to see more:



Still, while the movie isn't big on character development, it's fun, with lots of action and plenty of destruction. Not a bad way to spend a few bucks.

I grew up on Petra, a Christian rock band that's been around a few years longer than I have. Ironically, they were not my introduction to Christian music, but they were my introduction to modern rock. I had previously listened to Christian pop artists such as Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, but I initially found Petra too hard edged, although I liked some of their soft songs. It wasn't until I used one of their tapes in my alarm clock and woke up to "You Are My Rock" from the album This Means War!, a song I had heard before but which struck me as particularly beautiful as it woke me up that morning, that I really decided that I loved their music. I was a teenager living in Virginia at the time, and by the time I went to one of their concerts, the album was Beyond Belief. To this day, I consider it their best album, although Beat the System and This Means War! came close. I eagerly bought their next album, Unseen Power, but I was disappointed. There were some songs that I liked, but none that I really loved and several that I strongly disliked. Their next album, Wake Up Call, was no better, and thereafter I no longer bought their new albums, although I did start collecting some earlier stuff, such as Back to the Street and Not of this World, which were both great. I had decided that Petra's music had drifted away from the stuff I liked, which was fine, but I had lost interest.

However, if I had known they were doing their farewell tour over a year ago, I would have made every effort to attend. Unfortunately, I don't follow the music news that closely, and I missed it. Still, I bought the album, and I'm glad I did. Farewell is a concert album, recording a live performance--their final one, I think. It contains a lot of the old stuff I really loved, and a lot of new stuff as well. To my surprise and pleasure, I found that I really liked some of the new songs, especially "Test of Time," but also "Jekyll and Hyde" and their rendition of "Amazing Grace." I don't know whether my taste has changed, or their music just swung back around to the style I loved. There are also some great old songs on it, including performances of "Creed" and "Beyond Belief," "Graverobber," and two medleys, one of older songs such as "It is Finished" (one of my favorites), "This Means War!", and "I Am On the Rock," and an acoustic guitar set with guest singer Greg Volz (the former lead singer), which includes "Love", "Road to Zion", "No Doubt", and "More Power to Ya".

Overall, I'm really enjoying the CD, and it's encouraged me to check out some of the albums I skipped.

Jonah Goldberg has a great article on Groundhog Day, the movie, at National Review:

Here's a line you'll either recognize or you won't: "This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather." If you don't recognize this little gem, you've either never seen Groundhog Day or you're not a fan of what is, in my opinion, one of the best films of the last 40 years. As the day of the groundhog again approaches, it seems only fitting to celebrate what will almost undoubtedly join It's a Wonderful Life in the pantheon of America's most uplifting, morally serious, enjoyable, and timeless movies.

When I set out to write this article, I thought it'd be fun to do a quirky homage to an offbeat flick, one I think is brilliant as both comedy and moral philosophy. But while doing what I intended to be cursory research — how much reporting do you need for a review of a twelve-year-old movie that plays constantly on cable? — I discovered that I wasn't alone in my interest. In the years since its release the film has been taken up by Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and followers of the oppressed Chinese Falun Gong movement. Meanwhile, the Internet brims with weighty philosophical treatises on the deep Platonist, Aristotelian, and existentialist themes providing the skin and bones beneath the film's clown makeup. On National Review Online's group blog, The Corner, I asked readers to send in their views on the film. Over 200 e-mails later I had learned that countless professors use it to teach ethics and a host of philosophical approaches. Several pastors sent me excerpts from sermons in which Groundhog Day was the central metaphor. And dozens of committed Christians of all denominations related that it was one of their most cherished movies.

If you're not familiar with it, Groundhog Day is an American tradition based on an old wive's tale, that if the Groundhog comes out on February 2nd and sees his shadow, it'll frighten him and he'll go back into his hole and we'll get six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't, then we'll get an early spring. The town of Punxsutawney, in Pennsylvania, has a whole festival dedicated to this day, complete with the "official" Groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, who predicts the weather. I'm not sure how they decided he was the official one, and by this point I'm sure they've gone through lots of Phils, but it's good publicity for a little town.

The movie, Groundhog Day, is about this festival as seen through the eyes of a jaded weatherman, again and again and again. It turns out that the weatherman, whose name is Phil Connors and who is played by Bill Murray, is stuck in a time loop. The reason for this is never made clear, but for some reason he's forced to live the day over and over again, while everyone else is experiencing it for the first time. The time loop is not an unfamiliar subject in science fiction--there was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode about this, a Stargate: SG1 episode, and the sci-fi movie "12:01 am", and I won't even hazard a guess at who first put this idea into a story (although I'm pretty sure Groundhog Day beat the other three I could remember by name). However, Groundhog Day is particularly well done. The others focus on the pseudoscience of the occasion, and getting out, while Phil in Groundhog Day never discovers the reason for it. He eventually gets out, but not because he solves some great mystery, but because the mystery changes him. He becomes a better person, eventually living through the day perfectly. The spiritual symbolism that people see in the movie is not, I think, intentional, but there is something real there. Groundhog Day is more about redemption than anything else, and redemption is a very spiritual concept.

In any case, Groundhog Day is a great movie, and if you don't have it, you need to get it.

All sorts of people are singing the praises of Sci-Fi's new Battlestar Galactica series these days, not just Dean Esmay and Jonah Goldberg, but also James Poniewozik in Time. I'm probably going to lose my Sci-Fi credentials for this, but I never really got into the show. I watched the pilot miniseries and the whole first season, and while I agreed that the plot was wonderfully convoluted, the politics intriguing, and the philosophical and theological implications fascinating, that isn't enough for me. I'll read a book or watch a movie on the promise of a strong premise, but if you want me to commit to an entire series of books or television episodes, then I need to love the characters. And on that level, this new Battlestar Galactica never worked for me. A few of the characters were likeable, more were tolerable, and all of them were intriguing, but I couldn't get attached to any of them. I couldn't care about them. Perhaps their personalities just grated on mine. Perhaps the writers' efforts to make them flawed made them too flawed for me to like them. Perhaps there's no real reason at all. In the end, I lost interest in the show, and I'm no longer watching it.

Mark Steyn actually likes March of the Penguins, but he still finds plenty to complain about:

So where do I come down – do I see these fellows as conservative penguins or gay swinger penguins? Well, call me crazy but they’re penguins, and I don’t look to these guys for broader lessons in life, at least until this new ice age that’s about to frost up Europe gets going. Perhaps the problem is that penguins come, as it were, pre-anthropomorphized. The moment they come into view in Luc Jacquet’s documentary, waddling across the ice, swaying from side to side, they look like well-fed flat-footed pillars of the community making their way down Main Street to a Rotary Club luncheon...

Given the natural appeal of penguins, Jacquet might have thought twice about adding quite such an over-anthropomorphized commentary, read by Morgan Freeman, whose distinctive voice only underlines the arch over-egging...

So forget Freeman’s voiceover and the overly nudging score, and enjoy the cinematography and the animals and a vivid pictorial record of a system they’ve made work in one of the crummiest parts of the world. They’re great-looking penguins, so why worry about a larger message? The Emperors have no clothes, and they don’t need ‘em.

Read the whole thing.

I watched the movie Spirited Away for the first time last night. It was, as I had heard, gorgeous, and for the most part I liked the story. However, there was a lot that I didn't understand. Doubtless, some of that is simply from not knowing much about Japanese culture and their myths, and some of it is from the English dubbing. I'll watch it again sometime, this time with the subtitles, as those tend to be better translations of the Japanese and may illuminate some of what I missed. Meanwhile, here are some of the questions I ended up with. If anyone can cast illumination on them, I'd be grateful. But beware, there be spoilers below:


Overall, a very bizarre movie. I liked it.

I recently finished George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows. In many ways I was disappointed. When I read a book, I mostly read it for the characters, because I care about them and have some investment in their fate. Martin has always been brutal to his characters. The Stark family, the noble family from the north who form the central cast of this story, has been scattered, the patriarch unjustly executed and the eldest brother betrayed and murdered. Most of the others are presumed dead. When it comes to the wide and varied cast of characters, the Starks are the ones I most care about, and the ones we hear the least about in this book.

Martin found that the book he had written was too long and unwieldy, so he divided it in two. A Feast for Crows is one half, while A Dance with Dragons will be the other. Rather than divide it chronologically, however, in the first half he wrote about certain characters, who are active in a certain region, while in the second half, he'll talk about the concurrent activities of the rest of the cast. In this slice, therefore, we only learned about two of the Starks, the sisters Arya and Sansa, who have gone their separate ways. Sansa's part I found the most interesting, as she has grown up a lot, while Arya... she just plain creeps me out. She's become quite the little assassin. I wish her well, as long as she kills the bad guys, but I can't like her. Those two made up only a small part of the book, maybe a fifth in all. The rest of the story was about minor characters and the enemy, the Lannisters, the family that's stolen the throne and tried to destroy the Starks. Some of the Lannisters are all right--Tyrion, the scorned dwarf, and even Jaime have some sense of honor and justice, even if their loyalty to their family puts them on the wrong side. Tyrion ended up killing his own father, but I can't hold that against him, as Tywin needed killing. I'd like to hear more about his activities, but he doesn't appear in this book. Jaime appears a lot, and his point of view wasn't too annoying. Cersei's was awful. Cersei, Jaime's and Tyrion's sister, is the queen regent, ruling for her son Tommen, and she's nowhere near as clever as she thinks she is. In fact, she's a fool, and an evil one, and reading about her was painful. Tyrion and Jaime I liked even when they were on the wrong side of the conflict, but I wanted Cersei to die. There were a couple of minor characters who were important in this book, such as Samwell and Brienne, but they didn't do a whole lot. Now, if I really cared about Brienne and Samwell, they could have spent the whole book at a feast and I would have enjoyed reading it. To be honest, I like them, but I couldn't get too attached. As I mentioned before, Martin is brutal to his characters, and that makes it difficult to care much about characters who may not last long. Those who don't die for no good reason often fall from grace. Sometimes both. Arya has become a little monster, and her mother, Catelyn, was raised from the dead to become something worse, less than human and more than cruel. If she were to kill just Lannisters and Freys (the family who betrayed the eldest Stark brother, Robb), then it wouldn't matter so much, but she no longer seems able to tell friend from foe.

There's something to be said for being willing to kill off important characters. It gives the work greater emotional impact, the readers a stronger sense of risk, but with Martin it's reached the point where it's hard to invest in the characters knowing that they might be snatched away at any moment. I found myself calculating their probability of survival, and weighing my emotional investment based on that. The ones whom I think will survive, for a while, anyway, are Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Jon, the younger Starks who've had significant roles thus far, although Sansa isn't a sure thing. Then there's Tyrion, the dwarf Lannister who seems decent. And Daenerys, the Targaryen heir who should be queen, even if I don't like her much--she seems to want to wipe out the Starks as much as the Lannisters do. Of those, only Arya and Sansa had lengthy parts in this book. The rest of the book was about people I didn't dare get too attached to, assuming I didn't actively want them dead.

Here's hoping that the next book will be mostly about people I care about.

I caught the premiere of the new WB show, Supernatural, the other night. This, unfortunately, put me behind on the second revision of my story, and now I'm going to get myself even more behind by writing the review of it. Be forewarned, there are spoilers below, but only for the first fifteen minutes or so of the first episode.

I've always had a soft spot for stories of humans against the supernatural. There have been plenty of TV shows on the subject, from Friday the 13th: The Series and Poltergeist: The Legacy (neither of which had any connection to the movies whose names they share) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-files. They had a wide range of quality and style. X-files and Buffy are two of the better known, and they take very different approaches. In X-files, the heroes were ordinary humans up against things they barely understood, while Buffy had heroes who were as supernatural as the enemy and who had vast stores of knowledge they could access to discover the villain-of-the-week's Achilles' Heel. Overall, I think I prefer the X-files take, although there the supernatural elements were rare intermissions from the uberstory of aliens and government conspiracies.

To give you a sense of the mood of this new show, let me describe the opening sequence, which begins twenty-two years ago:

A couple is putting their infant son and his four year old brother to bed in their home. As they leave the baby's bedroom and shut the door, the nightlight inside start flickering and the mobile starts turning on its own. Unaware of this, the parents go to bed.

Later, the mother awakes due to strange static-riddled sounds on the baby monitor. Her husband is not in bed with her. She goes to the baby's room and sees his shadowed form standing over the baby's crib. She starts to speak but he shushes her, so she heads back to bed, pausing along the way to tap at the hallway light, which is flickering. As she does so, she hears the TV going downstairs. Going to check on it, she finds her husband asleep in front of the television. In a panic, she runs back to the baby's room...

There's a scream, and the father wakes up from where he's sleeping in his easy chair, and he hurries up to the baby's room calling his wife's name. He finds his son awake but fitful, but no sign of his wife. He starts to tuck him in when a drop of dark liquid falls on the infant's blanket. He looks up...

His wife is lying on the ceiling as if gravity were reversed for her. Her eyes are wide and her mouth open, but the only sound she makes is a wheezing breath. Blood drips from some wound in her stomach. Even as he stares in shock, the ceiling behind her bursts into flame, the fire slowly reaching out to consume the woman as well. The father grabs his son, and when he finds his older child in the hallway, awakened by the commotion, he hands the infant to him and tells him to run. Then the father goes back in, and we see a rush of flame with a vaguely humanoid shape

The two brothers make it to the yard, where they are joined by their father, who was unable to save his wife.

That beginning was definitely disturbing and frightening enough to grab my attention. From there, the show shifts to the present day, where the younger son, Sam, is in college and preparing for a Law School interview. His brother, Dean, shows up in the middle of the night, asking for Sam's help to look for their father, who vanished on a "hunting" trip.

It quickly becomes apparent that what their father was "hunting" was ghosts. Whether or not he did this before his wife's death, in the years since he's become obsessed with tracking down the thing that killed her, along the way taking out any other supernatural entity he encounters. He trained his sons to do the same, teaching them weapons and martial arts in the process. As ghost hunting doesn't pay well (unless you get a show with the Sci-Fi channel), the three of them have supported themselves in some less than honest ways. And without the FBI badges which gave Mulder and Scully such access, they use a host of fake IDs and cover stories in their investigations. The younger son has been trying to find a normal life in college, and is reluctant to be drawn back in. Do I even have to tell you how successful he'll be at that?

We see how the two brothers approach the mystery their father disappeared while trying to solve, interviewing witnesses and researching history until they identify the type of menace they're dealing with, a type with which they're familiar, tellingly. Getting rid of it isn't a matter of choosing the right weapon, although bullets do turn out to be surprisingly effective, but of identifying the entity's weakness. I found the resolution very satisfying, although I thought the special effects involved were overdone. Subtle and sparing effects work well in this sort of show, and I was impressed with most of how they did things.

Overall, I really liked the show. It was both disturbing and scary, and managed to convey the feel of uncovering a dark mystery much better than shows like Buffy. Many series of this type start well, but quickly descend into a monster-of-the-week mentality, where dark and mysterious degrades into ugly and bizarre. I have no idea how well this show will manage, but I intend to keep an eye on it.

Old Post: The first part of this review can be found here.

One tendency that Christians have when telling a conversion story is to overemphasize the bad before conversion, and overemphasize the good afterwards. Thus, to hear many such stories, the subject was a demon in human flesh before he was Born Again, but a saint afterwards. This is a mistake. The transforming power of God is an awesome enough work to witness that anything less than the stark, honest truth lessons the impact. Thus I appreciate Jonathan Aitken's candor and fairness towards Colson in his biography, both before and after Colson's conversion. Thus, even in his younger days, we see in Colson someone who is often compassionate and loyal, and even after his conversion we see someone who is often overbearing and proud. Aitken shows us a Colson who was neither a villain before his conversion, nor an angel afterwards. What changed was not so much his manner and personality, his strengths and his weaknesses, but his motivation. Conversion works from the core outward, not from the outside in.

Aitken is in a unique position to empathetically tell Colson's tell. He, like Colson, was an up-and-comer in conservative politics, British politics in his case, before scandal hit. Jonathan Aitken served a seven month prison sentence for perjury in a civil case, and because of Charles Colson's ministry to him in that time, he became a Christian. The fact that Aitken is a Christian shows clearly in the latter part of the book, as I doubt any secular author could speak so readily of the work of the Holy Spirit and the life of faith without condescension. It is also clear that he is not an American Christian, as he can objectively describe the American Christian community, describing its various factions without the bias you'd expect from someone who was a part of it. He does have a narrower definition of what counts as an evangelical than I do, but while I would have disagreed with him over some of the technicalities of the movement, I do appreciate the outsider's view he brings to it.

One thing about Aitken's writing that I found annoying was that he straddled the line between a chronological and thematic ordering of the story. He would often take a theme, such as Prison Fellowship's growth in its early years, and follow it for a certain time, then go to another theme, rewinding a couple of years to explain Colson's growing interest in theology, and follow that. After touching a few more themes, he would come back to Prison Fellowship and later developments. This made it difficult to sort out when events took place, and which events were concurrent, which came before, and which came after. Occassionally Aitken would make the attempt to tie significant events together, pointing out that Colson's study of theology had encouraged him to begin a ministry teaching Christian Worldview issues, but the jumping around made it difficult to see connections which Aitken failed to explicitly take note of. Perhaps this is inevitable with biographies--I'll admit I haven't read a lot of them recently--but that doesn't make it less annoying. I sometimes wished for a timeline.

Overall, however, Aitken's book is an excellent sympathetic biography that makes his subject's flaws just as fascinating as his virtues, and convincingly shows that Chuck Colson has indeed been redeemed by God.

This review of Jonathan Aitken's biography of Chuck Colson will have two parts. The first will be a brief summary of Colson's life, while the second will be an analysis of the book itself.

Chuck Colson has led an interesting and varied life in the public eye. At one time, he served as Nixon's public liaison, responsible for courting and recruiting special interest groups to support the President. He was also known as a master of dirty tricks, conducting all sorts of deceitful publicity stunts and smear campaigns in support of that goal. He left the White House at the start of Nixon's second term, and as a result of a talk he had with Tom Phillips, the president of Raytheon, whose company he was trying to recruit for his law firm, Colson was Born Again. The term Born Again is big in evangelical circles, referring to a conversion experience, and Colson's fits the traditional evangelical definition perfectly: a feeling of powerful conviction, followed by a prayer of confession, and an overwhelming sense of relief and acceptance as a result. Many evangelicals leave it there, but many take the more pragmatic view that an emotional experience only means so much, it is the visible changes in a person's life afterwards that demonstrate the truth of being Born Again. The changes in Colson's life began in fits and starts, as he tried to understand what his faith meant, and he began to realize that the Body of Christ transcended the traditional political boundaries he had lived by before. When word of his conversion leaked out, many viewed his newfound faith skeptically, especially as the Watergate scandal really blew open.

Colson himself was not involved in Watergate. He was never convicted of any charge related to it. But Colson knew that he could not escape the fallout from it as it turned into a political witch-hunt, nor could he honestly claim to be an innocent bystander. He and Nixon had fed each other's darker impulses, Colson actively encouraging underhanded activities and carrying them out with fanatic loyalty. He viewed his lack of involvement in Watergate as mere coincidence, and seriously considered pleading guilty to charges he was technically innocent of. He likely would have done so if it would not have required him to turn against Nixon and others, to say things he did not believe and testify about activities he had no knowledge of. Instead, he pled guilty to a crime he was not accused of, to something that was probably not, in fact, a crime. He had attempted to smear a political opponent of Nixon, named Ellsberg, who was undergoing a criminal trial, by planting stories about his lawyer in the press. The trouble was that even if this was illegal, he hadn't actually succeeded--no one in the press had printed the story he fed them. So the charge he pled guilty to was attempted obstruction of justice.

Of course, once word of Colson's plea reached the press, they went wild. The tiger had shown his true stripes and would be attacking Nixon in exchange for a lighter sentence. The problem was that they were wrong on all counts. Colson had made no bargain for his plea: he would not be taking a lighter sentence nor would he be presenting any evidence against Nixon. The sentence he was handed was, in fact, harsher than what was warranted: one to three years for obstruction of justice even though he'd pled guilty to attempted obstruction of justice.

As a result of this, Chuck Colson went to prison. With the benefit of hindsight, Colson sees this as one of the best things to have happened to him. Without it, he would have been a Christian who went to church and prayed and even did good deeds, but prison was a necessary part of the process which broke down his old pride and his sin until he was someone whom God could use. While in prison, he began a Bible study with the other prisoners, and really began ministering to them and praying with them, and assisting them in practical ways.

After he got out, he began a ministry called Prison Fellowship, now the largest prison ministry in the world, which has done much not only to help prison inmates spiritually but to reform the prison system, not only in the US but all over the world. You may have heard of Angel Tree, a program of Prison Fellowship which delivers gifts to the children of inmates. Beyond Prison Fellowship, Colson has a radio program called Breakpoint which addresses important societal issues, as he strongly believes that addressing the worldview of our society is an important step in transforming it. Chuck Colson has also played an integral part in setting up the organization Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which has done much to reconcile the two largest branches of the Christian church, while recognizing the reality of the doctrinal divide. Finally, he's written numerous books, including the autobiographical Born Again, which helped make the evangelical doctrine a household name, Kingdoms in Conflict, The Body, and How Now Shall We Live? Colson is now seventy-four years old, and however much longer he lives, it seems that his legacy will live after him.

In the next part of this review, I'll talk a little bit about the book's author and its writing.

I said I'd have an anecdote from the Colson biography I'm reading posted by last night, but I'm afraid I didn't get it done as early as expected. Sorry.

If you don't know who Chuck Colson is, he was, at one time, Nixon's hatchet man. His relationship with Nixon was similar to Karl Rove's relationship with Bush: a masterful political strategist. Like Rove, he was a hated figure, suspected and accused of more dirty tricks and illegal maneuvers than even Rove. The evidence against him was certainly better than what's been arrayed against Rove so far. When Colson converted to Christianity shortly after he left the White House, people were highly skeptical and largely hostile. While still a young Christian, he spent some time in prison as a result of the Watergate investigation, but afterwards he was much sought after to give his testimony, both for religious and secular audiences. One of his toughest and most hostile audiences was the student body at George Washington University, where he gave a talk on "Watergate, Prison, and Spiritual Rebirth." One particular anecdote from that talk really struck me. Quoting from Jonathan Aitken's Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed:

"You say you've seen the light, Mr. Colson, but Nixon still doesn't think he's done anything wrong. How do you feel about him?" asked a yound coed, her voice screeching with scorn. Colson was under pressure on this one. He still admired Nixon but he felt betrayed by many dislosures on the White House tapes, particularly by the ex-president's lies to his aides and to the American people. Yet he could not bear to go down the road traveled by Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and others by expressing condemnation of his former boss. Before the meeting Colson had prayed with Rhodes to be given wisdom and discernment if an anti-Nixon question was asked. Now he was on the spot.

"Like every man the former president has his weaknesses and strengths. We all know his weaknesses. They've been hashed over for many months. He has his good side too. In all fairness we need to remember this," replied Colson. He hesitated a moment before continuing, "But Richard Nixon has been my friend and I'm not going to turn away from a friend."

The last sentence was spoken with real passion. For a moment there was stunned silence. Colson expected the hall to explode with anger. Instead it erupted with spontaneous and sustained applause. Afterward several students came up to say that the courage of the reply had touched the need in their own lives for loyal friendship.

It certainly touched me.

I previously gave my quick review of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, being very vague in the attempt to avoid spoilers. Now I want to be very specific, and discuss the events near the end of the book, but in doing so I will be telling you precisely what happened, and quoting extensively from the book. If you don't want to know what happens, DON'T READ. I'm hiding the relevant text, which means that if you want to read it, you have to click the (show) link. Only do this if you want to know how the book ends.
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