In Wuhan, where we watched the eclipse we were joined by an American astronaut, Alvin Drew. Drew at the time was the US representative to the Russian space program and was stationed in Moscow for a year. He had read about our group in an article in the New York Times and decided to join us.

In this earlier blog post, http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/23/a-solar-eclipse-is-much-more-than-just-a-visual-experience/, I wrote about the overall experience of watching the eclipse and included a picture of Drew with myself and another member of our group Howard Spero.

And here is a picture with Drew, myself, and Miriam and Tamar:

Drew was selected to be a member of the current visit to the Space Station, the last visit, http://www.nasa.gov/.

It was an honor to spend time with him talking about the space program and a thrill to actually have met an astronaut who has now flown in outer space. He even let us put on his special multi-million dollar sun glasses, a great guy.

Now if they would only bring back Firefly with new episodes, http://www.whedon.info/Firefly-Reruns-Join-The-Sci-Fi.html.

I guess this is one of those films I had to see in the theatre to really appreciate rather than my usual 20-30 minutes at a time on the elliptical walker down in the basement.

Got high marks on Rotten Tomatoes, I remember the noise when it first came out. I had some difficulty getting involved with a young woman who dates a guy who considers doing drug deals a step up, has to beg money from her banker-father who is having an affair and has evidently gotten a member of the Board of Directors pregnant, and who has what seems to be Raggedy Ann orange-red hair. Well, I did like the hair.

I guess it was considered clever integrating a bit of animation into the middle of the film and having repetitions of the plot with different endings, each cycle punctuated with the young woman shouting loud and high enough to break glass. There was even a tiny bit of Donny Darko, with at least the young woman seemingly remembering what happened from the previous repetitions.

I found it uninvolving and thought the boyfriend should have ended up in jail. If one of my daughters showed up with that twit, it would make me very unhappy.

The movie theatre that starts showing movies earliest, at least the one that is close to us, is the AMC Movie theatres at Tysons Corners. Since they also have an IMAX theatre, they are my most likely to be the go-to-a-movie-theatre-by-myself location.

Anyway, that is why I found myself, by myself, at Tysons, for the 10am showing of Tron Legacy, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10011582-TRON_legacy/, in 3D IMAX, Christmas morning.

I suspect that anyone who is particularly likely to see Tron has already done so. And since I don’t really do movie reviews, I will note that if I accidently write a spoiler or two I apologize in advance for doing so.

For those who haven’t seen Tron Legacy, I will say that having only read about, but not seen, the original, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/tron/, I suspect I didn’t really understand all of the references.

My quick summary is that if you like relatively mindless, loud, cgi-intensive movies Tron Legacy provides a few hours of distraction. Though, I kept thinking I was watching a version of The Big Lebowski, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/big_lebowski/,  versus the Super Mario Brothers.

So Jeff Bridges in the original evidently went into a digital world, created a copy of himself called CLU which stands for three words that being with C-L-U, and a helper called Tron. Whatever happened in that original one, he never returns to ‘real life’. I could call real life, off-grid but evidently you can be on the grid inside the digital world or off the grid, so we will call the outside world off-off-grid.

The movie starts off-off-grid, where Bridges son has grown up and has lost control of the company that Bridges owned/founded (whatever) and which the son, Sam, is the largest shareholder in. The company is called Encom, which is an interesting name though the original movie was released years before the Enron scandal.

The obligatory Hollywood poke at everything capitalistic, except that is in Hollywood, is gotten over with at the beginning of the movie when it is announced that Encom is releasing its newest, most secure operating system called version 12 (I guess five is better than seven?). When the CEO is asked what has been changed about the new operating system, the answer is we put the number 12 on the box. There is lamenting about how the operating system should be open and free to the public; coincidentally Sam has copied and released the operating system to the world during the course of this conversation. My supposition is that Encom at this point represented Microsoft, which it seemed to me hasn’t been doing well enough these days to be represented as such an evil organization.

In any event, after a while, Sam through the help of an old friend of his father, imported from the original Tron movie, played by Bruce Boxleitner, who I liked better in Babylon V, enters the grid, where he wanders from the grid to off-grid and back on the grid. I cannot summarize, or in fact even afterwards entirely understand the plot from that point until the end of the movie.

While in the grid, Sam meets Clu who evidently is an actor with Jeff Bridges face looking like it did in the original film, which was a bit creepy and his actual father, played by Jeff Bridges with his current face, who as I mentioned earlier is channeling The Dude. I noticed that in the key age old question as to whether the male hero should end up with the blonde, Beau Garnett in this case, or the brunette, Olivia Wilde, Tron Legacy came down on the side of the brunette. This is always a key issue in fanboy movies.

My favorite performer was Michael Sheen who played a nightclub owner pretending to be Martin Short. Michael Sheen is wonderful in every movie I have ever seen him. Even when my younger daughter, forced me, to see Twilight New Moon, he represented the one part, and I emphasize in that case, the only part of the movie I found more than drivel.  Well, in the interests of honest disclosure the reality is that I wasn’t forced, I went because of my endless need I have to spend even a few minutes with either or both my daughters; though if asked to go to another Twilight movie would be the ultimate test of that need.

In any event, another movie checked off. I suspect if it stays in movie theatres long enough, my next by-myself movie will be Rare Exports, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/rare_exports/.

BTW, does anyone know why the Tysons in Tysons Corners has an s and no apostrophe?

This was an animated cartoon based on the series where DC killed off Superman in the early 1990′s. At the time, it cause quite a reaction, getting coverage in the national and even international press. Millions of readers who had never read comics, bought copies.

While I had religiously read lots of comics when  young, by 1992, under the pressure of pretending to be adult, I had stopped. Thus I never read the original series.

Evidently throughout the 90′s there were attempts to turn this series into a movie; it almost got off the ground with of all people Nicolas Cage scheduled to star as Superman with Tim Burton directing. The mind boggles at what might have been the result, however it was never made.

Instead a direct to DVD animated cartoon was released in 2007, it was this that I got from Netflix.

I thought it was pretty good. It was interesting watching the story of how the original comics were created. A number of the people got pretty teary about some of the scenes in the comics when Superman died. Don’t tell my daughters, but so did I a little bit when watching the cartoon.

If you ever read Superman comics, I would recommend renting it. It brought many fond memories.

AND as an added bonus, Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne in the Firefly TV series, was the voice talent for Superman.

For references to this, see the end of the interview I gave for the DotGov Buzz, http://www.usa.gov/Federal_Employees/USA_Buzz/Newsletter_0522.html#dotgovspotlight, and the reference from a column in Federal Computer Week, written by then rising star Chris Dorobek, http://fcw.com/Articles/2007/09/16/Circuit_633659049783559373.aspx.

I even ran into Firefly fans when in China this last summer when we went to see a solar eclipse, http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/21/serenity-on-the-yangtze/.

I was glad to observe a Firefly reference last night in the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory, http://www.cbs.com/primetime/big_bang_theory/. In it the two leads, and roommates, Sheldon and Leonard have a big fight over who will get to accompany Leonard to see the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva on Valentine ’s Day, Leonard’s girl friend Penny or Sheldon.

Even when Sheldon points out that in their very detailed Roommate Agreement  it states clearly if one roommate is going to see the Large Hadron Collider and can bring the other roommate with them, they have to; Leonard still insists he will take Penny. Other Agreement clauses include one that if one roommate becomes a Zombie, the other promises not to kill them.

Sheldon tries to embarrass Leonard by saying that Darth Vader, Rupert Murdoch, and Leonard were three notorious traitors. Rupert was in the list because he owned Fox and Fox canceled Firefly. And thus the reference.

In addition, there are always great things to do and see and learn about when we visit Hilton Head and the area around it, as we did this last weekend, January 9^th and 10^th.

Among David’s many volunteer activities he does in his very active retirement has been over the last year to arrange the children’s programs for the Hilton Head Branch of the Beaufort County Library; a program called Super Saturdays, held every second Saturday of the month at 11:00am, http://www.beaufortcountylibrary.org/bcl_calendar

The Saturday we were in Hilton Head, the program entertainer was a local ventriloquist and puppet maker called Conrad Hartz. Naturally, since I offered to join David, along with soon-to-be ticket taker Ellen, I looked up this guy on the Internet. It turned out that not only was he one of the leading professionals in the business, http://personal.lig.bellsouth.net/g/k/gkoepke/hartz/ and http://www.puppetcircus.com/conrad.htm, but had a long history of making all of his puppets by hand out of wood.

To top it off, it turned out that perhaps the last performance, albeit informal, that Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody ever did, was in Beaufort with Hartz operating Howdy for the routine. Coincidentally, Buffalo Bob lived in New Rochelle, when not visiting Doodyville, and his son Chris was a fellow student of my wife’s. It was years before she learned that not every school had Howdy Doody come visit on a regular basis.

The show was really terrific. Over 100 kids and their parents attended. They got to see puppet birds who laid an egg, puppet clowns who blew balloons and floated up above the ground, puppet jugglers who actually juggled wooden balls in the air, and even a puppet replica of Conrad Hartz when he ran away and became a clown in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. At the end they were entertained by magic tricks as the multi-talented Hartz finished with a flourish.

The initial visit to East Berlin was sobering. On the West Berlin side, the Christmas season lead to brightly colored decorations, shoppers, and a great deal of activity both day and night. I remember that when we were in East Berlin one evening, it was almost as if we were in The Wizard of Oz, going back to Kansas, from color to black and white film.

There were literally no bright lights at all in East Berlin. Well, except for, of all things, a Diners Club sign in a bar that was near the wall on the East side. This blue blinking sign stood out in the grays and whites of everything else.

A discussion of the Berlin wall and the movie after the jump …

The wall, for those who never saw it or saw pictures of it, was actually not just a single wall. It was an initial wall with barbed wire and tanks followed by a second wall approximately 100-110 yards away (I looked up the distance in Wikipedia). All I remembered was being amazed at those people who even attempted to cross over, having not just to scale a single wall as many thought who had never visited Berlin, but having to cross that flat cleared out space between the walls and then a second wall to get to West Berlin.

Two other memories stand-out from that part of the trip.

First, a private conversation with our East German guide, a young woman who took us to visit the various sites, many of Russian memorials, scattered throughout the city. In a conversation with just a few of us, she talked about the fact that only the very old were allowed to travel to the West, since they assumed that they were more likely to return. And that she hoped that one day she would have the freedom to travel wherever she wanted. To college-age or just post-college-age kids from the US, trying to understand what it was like living in a society with such restrictions was hard to understand.

Second, we had, of course, representatives from many different US groups, ranging from hard-line on foreign policy, interestingly consider today’s situation, the most hard-line being from the US labor movement, to College Republicans and Young Democrats, to the NAACP, and others. One person I spent a lot of time talking to was a former Senator McGovern supporter who was a member of the New Hampshire legislation, called the General Court.

We spent time talking about the Berlin Wall. I was convinced that it represented the failure of the East German and communist systems in general and was a mechanism to keep East German’s in. He felt that it represented an attempt by the East German government to keep the negative aspects of Western culture and society out. I thought East German’s, like me, wanted free-market capitalism and political freedom; he felt that they preferred their own, different system of government and economics. In retrospect, while I still feel that I was closer to reality, we were both naïve in the conclusions we came to.

In that context, I recently watched the wonderful, moving The Lives of Others, a 2006 film which won a Best Foreign Film Oscar, tells the story of what it was like to live in the oppressive regime of East Germany during the 1980’s before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A Captain in the Stasi, the East German not so secret police, played by a remarkably controlled Ulrich Muhe, is assigned to spy on a well-known playwright, Georg Dreyman, and his actress-lover Christa-Maria Sieland. Captain Gerd Wiesler, a believer in the state and the role of the Stasi, is given this job by his long-time friend and now boss, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz, hoping to befriend an important, albeit slimy, Minister.

During the course of the film we are introduced to a variety of artistic friends of Dreyman and Sieland, and see how each deals or doesn’t deal with the ever-present police and informants. The slow realization by Wiesler of the humanity of those he is listening to and the inhumanity of who he works for and with is a wonder to watch. Always self-controlled and internally constrained, Muhe gives a performance that will long haunt my memories; an imperfect person struggling to deal with how to achieve some meaning, however limited, in an otherwise wasted life in support of a society that was soon to disappear.

As we move toward the climax of the three-way relationship, only understood by the ever-watchful Wiesler, and then beyond it to events occurring after the fall of the wall, we share in the tragedy and triumph of the creative human spirit even in times of enormous duress.    

A truly remarkable achievement by first-time director Florian Henckel von Connersmarck and by Muhe, who sadly passed away shortly after the film won its many awards, I strongly recommend this ultimately very emotional film.

Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lives_of_others/

Considered by many to be the iconic film noir about the vacuity of Hollywood, it is well worth seeing. Norma Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, who herself had been a star in silent films and didn’t make the transition to ‘talkies’, her young lover was played by William Holden. Neither was the first choice for their respective parts but they each played them well.

Characters in the film include Cecil B DeMille, Buster Keaton, and Hedda Hopper all playing themselves. Desmond’s driver and 1^st husband, Max, was played by Gloria Swanson’s real-life silent film director, Erich von Stroheim. The movie was directed by Billy Wilder and was rated in the top 20 films in history by AFI.

I was struck by a very young, smiling Jack Webb, who I had only seen on the TV Dragnet before seeing this film. Toward the end of the film, William Holden makes a comment about how old Norma Desmond/Gloria Swanson is: “There’s nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you’re trying to be twenty-five.” These days, at least to me, fifty doesn’t seem old enough to be old.

As Norma Desmond said about stars “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”. You’ll remember hers long after the film ends.

The story about the film is worth reading including how Wilder worked to avoid being censored during a time of pretty strict film censorship in America:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Boulevard_(film)

and here:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6980/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sunset_boulevard/

A 98 from Rotten Tomatoes.

Four stars, out of five, from me.

Firefly was a TV show created by Joss Whedon, who among other things was the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which lasted less than one season. It was shown on the Fox Network who evidently weren’t exactly clear on what to do with a quirky, character driven, space western whose principals ran around in a spaceship, used six-shooters, rustled cattle, and whenever feeling strong emotions would rattle off a phrase or two in Chinese. 

The end result is that only 11 of the 14 filmed episodes were ever shown on TV and the show was canceled. 

I never saw Firefly on TV during that season. 

However, Firefly fanatics, often called Browncoats from the color of the jacket that the Captain in the show wore as did other rebels during the losing war against the Alliance (don’t ask, rent the DVD’s), agitated and lobbied enough that Universal decided to authorize a film version of the show named after the name of the spaceship, Serenity. 

I saw Serenity in a movie theater and loved it. Rented the TV DVD’s and loved the TV show even more. 

Since then I have demonstrated the results of that passion in a number of different ways. I hosted a Firefly lunch once a month for the three years I was a the US Department of Transportation as the CIO for a small but equally addicted group where we watch one of the Firefly TV episodes, repeating the set when we finished the 14 filmed episodes. Getting dispensation from the DOT General Counsel that we were conducting Team Building exercises, we showed the two-hour movie, Serenity, twice, at the end of each cycle. 

I attend and this year worked at the annual showing of Serenity at the Arlington Cinema and Draft House which also servers as a fund raiser for Equality Now, a favorite charity of Joss Whedon. 

And here I am finishing up my Yangtze River cruise in China, getting ready for the eclipse we hope to see in Wuhan. The other day at lunch, I sat with members of a family from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. 

“Edmonton”, I noted, is the home of Nathan Fillion, the Captain in the TV show Firefly. Amazingly the response from the otherwise seemingly normal fellow members of the group, was the beginnings of a detailed discussion of which episode they liked best and which individual scenes illustrated the qualities of each of the characters from the show. They too had not seen the show on TV, were loaned the DVD set from a friend, watched the shows and joined me in wondering how such a great TV show could have been canceled. 

The family was even familiar with the Edmonton comedy group, Three Dead Trolls in a Baggy, a completely unexpected bonus. A conversation I rarely have been able to have anywhere and certainly unanticipated on the Yangtze River in the middle of China.