| june
23
|
A few pop culture notes.
I am crushing again. It happens. Took about ¾ of
the first episode of The Wire,
which I was lucky enough to land on cassette because Marc, my French journalist
friend, needs to view them before finishing his book about American television.
I glutted on five episodes and am now thirsty -- nay! Parched! --
for the next, which I won't get until after July 4. Rats. And dontcha know, he's a Brit. He may play a hardboiled Baltimore Irish cop, but damned if I can't pick the Anglo in the bunch. It's a gift. Or a curse. Anyway, Dominic. The man. Oh, the show's brilliant. Slow, but in an excellent way. It's called The Wire, but so far, there's pretty much no Wire in it. It's giving me a fabulous behind the scenes feel for how the police bureaucracy ties things up and makes getting a lot of crime solving done -- it's the desks versus the investigators. This is the greatest show I've seen since Law & Order (which bites these days; what hacks) and David Simon (who created and wrote it; he did the same with Homicide: Life On The Streets, which is why I bothered to watch in the first place) is a genius. Genuis, genius. I want to marry him and Tom Fontana. After Dominic, of course.
Next. Went to see Minority
Report. It's definitely a ten dollar film; that is, it's worth
the dough. I didn't have to see it on opening weekend, but when a well
done sci-fi movie about the future based on a Phillip
K. Dick story comes along, it has to be done. I did not do it for either The story goes a little something like this, in case it was possible to miss the bazillion ads on TV over the past weeks: Tom's a D.C. detective 52 years in the future, and the city is trying out an experiment thanks to "precogs," that is, three precognitive people who apparently don't mind being suspended in a milky white vat and used for their ability to spot crimes before they happen. They see the crime, the "detectives" have to use the visions (which don't seem to necessarily flash on an address) to find the crime and stop it before it happens. They are able to also precognitively tell what time all this happens (do you think daylight savings time screws up the precogs, or do they know it's time a different way?) which adds for suspense -- that is, the future is known and can be stopped but only if the big flying machines get there in time. Kind of a neat premise if you don't mind the so-called realities; for this sort of thing to actually take place in our judicial system, intent would be enough to be punished, and so far there is no basis in Western (or Eastern, I'm sure) law practice to arrest someone for something they might do. As Ben Stone pointed out once in "The Reaper's Helper," where a man assisted a dying AIDS patient in his suicide, you can't know that in the second before the shot was fired the patient didn't think, "Hey, you know, this is a bad idea. Let's stop." With precogs, apparently it's like knowing it'll happen no matter what. Except the precogs must know about the precrime unit, which become a variable in making it not happen, so why don't the precrime unit show up in the vision? That is, if a guy about to stab his wife with a pair of scissors sweats and slips and instead hits her pillow and gives up can happen -- that's a variable, as are the other quantum universes of possiblities -- that's just as much a factor as the precrime unit showing up. Anyway, that's something that makes you wonder. (This is why I could never write this story; I'd be sitting here thinking of ways it wouldn't work.)
Then there's the big plot "duh" turn: Cruise is accused of a crime (which turns out -- spoiler -- to be a fakery to keep him from sniffing out an actual loophole crime in the system; Ferrell is made to look like the baddie who wants to get Cruise screwed, but naturally he's just an Irish red herring) in which it is said he's going to kill a man he's never met in 5 days. Well, I don't know if this is supposed to be a big secret or what, but the fact that I figured it out early on rather took some of the wind out of it for me -- I mean, we're supposed to believe he's being framed, since he insists over and over there's no one he'd ever kill, blah blah blah, he doesn't even know the guy, etc. etc. but you know, know, know absolutely there is of course one man he would kill -- the guy who kidnapped his young son and (presumably) killed him. So much for the tension in that -- either he somehow stumbles across this particular killer or it's made to look as if he does, and so, naturally there is someone he would kill even if he didn't know their name. He does point out one interesting thing at the near-end of the movie: If you know your future, you can change it. That's an important variable. Look, if someone told me I was going to kill someone else in an hour, a day, three days -- whatever, on some particular day or hour or week, and I knew precrime knew about it and would come after me, I'd go sit in a small room with a locked door and some food, hand a friend the key and say "let me out a minute after such and such a time." Viola. Instead, they've got the system so that you immediately go into some kind of (apparently indefinite) suspended animation. Seems to me precrime ought to just be holding these people until the time passes, then saying "okay, that's your one. Try it again and we will lock you up." At the very least! Instead these poor schmucks haven't even done anything and they're getting locked up. I don't see how that makes a whit of sense. Still, there are very cool gizmos (including retina-sniffing "spiders" that check out to see if you're who you're supposed to be, but again -- no consistency. An on-the-run Cruise has his eyeballs removed and replaced (the surgeon who has a thing against him replaces them with a Mr. Yamaguchi's (or someone like that) eyes, so when he gets scanned at The Gap later they greet him with a patently false identity)) and is told not to take the bandages off for 12 hours. The retina spiders find him and lift the bandage and scan him six hours later. In one eye. Yet that eye is not blinded. I figured at least he'd have a stupid patch. Nope! Writing about the future's a hard thing. Do you believe in quantum physics? Are there millions of what if universes? Who can really say what will happen in the future -- is it all set, or can we change it? Do we have to know what it is to change it? Would we? Interesting questions. Most of which are handled very haphazardly in this movie. But the effects are pretty freakin cool. Still. I'll take low-tech "Wire" McNulty any day.
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Anyway,
I honed right in on the Mike Logan-esque character of Detective McNulty
(this fine brute pictured) but the credits are such that I couldn't figure
out who was playing him. Went on the 
