A Man for all Seasons

This movie, about how a devout Catholic (Thomas More) keeps to his beliefs, is one of my favrite historical movies, despite the fact that I am an atheist (I love watching it with 'Lady Jane' about how a young woman, in the next generation, holds to her protestant beliefs.)

I was surprised to just learn that the play (and screen adaptation) were written by an agnostic. This from Wikipedia:

The 20th-century agnostic playwright Robert Bolt portrayed More as the ultimate man of conscience in his play A Man for All Seasons, the title drawn from what Robert Whittington in 1520 wrote of him:
"More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons."[23]

In 1966, the play was made into the successful film A Man for All Seasons directed by Fred Zinnemann, adapted for the screen by the playwright himself, and starring Paul Scofield in an Oscar-winning performance. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture for that year.

Star Trek: a Brief Review (with spoilers)

Star Trek was very good, though not quite as overwhelming to me as some made it out to be.

There were a couple of ridiculous deus ex machinas: Spock kicks Kirk off the Enterprise, to some ice planet (Delta Vega? oddly close enough to Vulcan so that Old Spock can see it destroyed), where he is miraculously is rescued by old Spock, and they walk to a nearby Star Fleet installation, where they meet Scotty, who just happens to have figured out 'trans-warp beaming' so they can send themselves to the Enterprise while it is at warp, presumably very far away. They didn't even have trams-warp beaming in the Next-gen time...

And they throw promotions around like there's no tomorrow. Kirk goes from 'Just about to graduate but under suspension,' to 1st officer of the fleet flagship (named by Captain Pike) to acting captain, then officially named captain of the brand new flagship of star fleet. Pretty ridiculous. Harry Kim stayed an ensign under extreme circumstances for 7 years on Voyager.

That said, the casting was great. There are some funny lines, Sulu gets to do some acrobatic fighting (you see a little in the previews); and John Cho was cute playing him. Karl Urban probably came closest to channelling the original actor (DeForest Kelley) as Dr. McCoy, but I was fine with the others doing their own take on the characters. Chris Pine makes a great young Kirk (it was cute, right at the very end, when he's in the captain's chair and he crosses his legs just like Shatner often would at the end of an episode), and Quinto is pretty amazing as Spock. Oh and that weird kind of romance thing with supposedly emotionless Spock and Uhura that I didn't care for it or understand it, and found a little creepy. No rules about fraternizing with superior officers I guess!

Special effects were great of course.

In a world... where Sarah Palin is Vice President

Sarah Palin as McCain's VP choice? What a cynical, hypocritical choice. After slamming Obama as inexperienced, he picks this person with even less experience. It's obvious to anyone with a brain that he is going after the Hillary voters by naming a woman... any woman. And we're not supposed to talk about her family, but here she is, a glaring example of why abstinence-only sex ed (which she strongly advocates) just doesn't work. And yet all these socially conservative women seem to choose to ignore this and are all excited about Palin. I heard them this morning on NPR just dismissing that issue by saying "Teenagers will do what they do no matter what." How convenient.

All this is Very bad for Obama. But maybe she'll get up on that stage and completely freeze up, or say something that will completely alienate those conservative women. I can always hope.

All that said, Obama will have no one to blame but himself for his arrogance in not asking Hillary Clinton to be his running mate, then this Palin disaster woudn't have happened.

In unrelated news, sadly, Don LaFontaine, the movie-trailer voice-over guy who immortalized the phrase "In a world..." with his distinctive sound, has died. Note in the Wiki article that a few years ago he appeared on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me to play Not My Job. He didn't win Carl Kassel's voice for the contestant, but offered to do the voice himself! Nothing against Carl, but I think I would rather have had Don's voice! "In a world... where TK can't come to the phone..."

Wall•e

I saw Wall•e with V. yesterday at the 11:30 am show. Of course there were kids but it wasn't too bad. And the movie was GREAT! It was so cute, and very clever.