Category: Personal

Despite a 0-16 road record (5-27 overall), coach Marty Mornhinweg and president Matt Millen have been given a third year by owner William Clay Ford to run the Detroit Lions. Why would be a good question but you know that kind of honesty will not be forthcoming. Maybe Ford figured he’ll make the same money anyway, from attendance and TV, and won’t have to buy out expensive contracts.

“Geez, Stu, we’re supposed to have this greeting down already–it has to go out on the wires before midnight! What we’re we thinking, taking this job on. But that woman, she sure is hot. She can convince us to do anything.”

“Bro, you are way to high strung! How did we ever get to be twins?”

“Oh that helps a lot! Come on, sit down and let’s get to work on this message. We need to cut 284 pages down into a moving, snappy greeting.”

“Arggh! Okay, write this down: 2003, gonna be lots o’ loving, hope you get yours!”

“Please, be serious. We can’t send that out to anyone. Man, I just now we’re going to miss the deadline. Just because you sweep into town and sell one lousy script, you think you know everything.”

“Whatever. At least I’m getting laid. Man, those starlets can be yummy.”

“Focus already. And don’t forget I won an Oscar for my first movie.”

“Sure, I know. And, hey, I do love you bro. Here’s our greeting:

“From Bill and Stu to everyone: Happy New Year, and may 2003 be better be happier, more satisfying, and more joyful than any year you’ve already lived!”

Just wrong: The New York Times previews the possibility of the Giants and Jets meeting in the Super Bowl in an article entitled Subway Bowl Definitely a Can-Do. Subway Bowl my ass! Neither team has played a home game in the state or city of New York in over 20 years but the fans and team executives refuse to accept reality. I remember that back in the ’80s there was a push in the NJ state legislature to require any team playing its home games in a facility owned by the state to use NJ in their official designation. The Jets, especially, panicked and brought all the muscle they could to bear on the politicians, and the issue died. But to go so far as to call this a possible Subway Bowl is absurd even for the Times! Wouldn’t the New Jersey Bowl be more appropriate?

A sweet coming of age story, the 1990 Australian film Flirting features Noah Taylor and Thandie Newton (her movie big role) as two naive yet brainy teenagers (think good looking brainiacs) at prep school who fall in love but are torn apart by events larger than they understand in middle of nowhere, Australia, in 1965. The pair think that reading Camus and Sartre mean they understand the world, that everything they do is so serious and fraught with meaning, only to learn that 16 is truly a very young age.

Taylor (most recently he was Lara Croft’s computer geek) and Newton (Mission: Impossible 2 and The Truth About Charlie), close enough in age to their characters, easily convey the missteps and emotions that clutter young love. Nicole Kidman is the older girl who at first is mean to Newton but in the end softens when she sees her own past reflected and Naomi Watts has a small part as one of Newton’s close friends. Newton’s character is from Uganda and her father is a political activist who goes home when Idi Amin’s coup happens; she’s soon forced to follow and before she leaves the couple find a way to say goodbye that neither will forget.

Flirting is a very sweet movie until writer/director John Duigan (Sirens) pushes past the point of good taste to teach his children their lesson. Before that, one can see that Duigan is a stylist, using fantasy and photographs to connect this little pair of schools to the larger world, having one of Taylor’s classmates laugh incessantly, appropriate or not, to bring some relief to the barely relieved seriousness. This is film as literature, a movie that would never be understood in Hollywood, and a good example of why I’m glad Tivo believes I like Australian films.

Recommended

So here I go again, no matter who says don’t do it: Bill’s Best of 2002.

Ready for another fun off-season? The last regular season game doesn’t start for another seven hours and the hijinks have started already!

Tyrone Willingham announced on Saturday he won’t help the league solve it’s minority hiring problems by leaving Notre Dame after one year. And why would he, since he won ten games and restored respectability with players recruited by Bob Davies? Jerry Jones (doesn’t he have an oil business to run?) hasn’t fired Dave Campo but is already interviewing replacements. He’s met twice with Bill Parcells but–oops!–Tampa Bay claims they own the Tuna’s rights and any team that wants to talk or sign him owes the Bucs compensation; Jones met lose a draft pick just for this tampering, which won’t help the Cowboys recover from a third straight 5-11 season with or without Campo. Jones has also interviewed ex-Vikings coach Denny Green but only on the phone and this is causing a ruckus of its own, since at least one group is claiming this is an attempt to wiggle around the NFL’s commitment to consider minority candidates for every open coaching and GM spot.

Meanwhile, the executions are underway as well. Cincinnati fired Dick LeBeau, Jacksonville dumped Tom Coughlin, the only coach they’ve ever had, and (as I was writing this) Dallas booted Campo. I feel sorriest for LeBeau, who had a miserable record but could only barely be held responsible; the real culprit is GM Mike Brown and he can’t be fired since he also owns the team. Though this year’s 2-14 was the worst ever for the franchise, the team has had years of poor drafts, lots of injuries, and a complete inability to sign decent free agents. I’ve read that other owners and team executives have urged Commissioner Tagliabue to step in and make Brown hire a real GM but so far that hasn’t happened. The Bengals haven’t made the playoffs since Brown took over and you can bet that won’t change next year, no matter who comes in as coach.

Coughlin didn’t want to leave but the Jaguars have crashed to earth after making the strongest debut of any expansion team in NFL history, going 19-29 and not reaching the playoffs once in the past three years. The decision will cost owner Wayne Weaver serious money because of provisions in Coughlin’s contract, which has two years still to run, plus he reportedly wants the new man to have previous head coaching experience: the short list on ESPN.com is Denny Green, Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops (who turned down big money offers last year after winning the national title), and recent perennial candidate for every opening Nick Saban from LSU. What the Jags really need are a new starting quarterback and running back tandem who can stay healthy for more than eight games a year. And a GM who isn’t also the coach, which rarely makes for a winning team.

Dallas is another tough spot for a proven coach to take on. Dave Campo, Chan Gailey, Barry Switzer, Jimmy Johnson, win or not, none of them has been able to overcome the ego of Jerry Jones. One wonders if Parcells is really interested in the job, where he couldn’t be GM or even have real personnel control, or if this is mostly a ploy on his part to let other owners with openings know he’s ready to return. (By the way, the Cowboys have a s-l-l-o-o-o-w-w-w-w website!)

There’s gonna be more changes, you just know it. Will Holmgren get the boot in Seattle? Owner Paul Allen may be distracted by his dizzying corporate maneuvers and the Trailblazers but this team hasn’t made the playoffs lately and 7-9 doesn’t look so good hanging up on a banner all winter. How about Schottenheimer in San Diego? From 6-1 to missing the playoffs at 8-8, another year, another collapse, but this is Marty’s first year at the helm and he will almost surely get a break. Martz in St. Louis is a tossup but possibly dependent on how well he and his bosses see the personnel lining up for 2003.

Good bets to be gone are the Detroit duo of Marty Mornhinweg and chief executive Matt Millen; though the team was starting to look good with rookie QB Joey Harrington, his season ended early with an injury and owner William Ford will probably look for a more seasoned head coach and a less, um, forceful, GM. John Fox was probably safe anyway, it being his first year and the team being riddled with injuries at QB and running back, but four late wins to end at 7-9 make that a lock. Not so safe is fellow NFC South coach Jim Hazlett, whose Saints lost a playoff spot by ending the year with losses to Minnesota (forgivable), Cincinnati (those two wins had to come from some where), and Fox’s Panthers (unforgivable with a chance to get back into the post-season and only two field goals to show for the effort).

The CoachingGoRound starts again!

For a cheap date, we went to see Friday After Next last night at the CinemaSaver over in Milpitas, $3 a ticket. Not a bad movie for the price but being stoned would have probably made it a lot funnier. Ice Cube and Mike Epps are back as the cousins, complaining about lack of money and a lack of honeys, and their dads are back, complete with bathroom jokes, partnered in a BBQ joint (“The food is so good you’ll slap your momma” is their slogan).

Good for HBO

All four teams I favor have made it into the second season: 49ers, Giants, Raiders, and Jets. And Cleveland! Which is cool because it means the Patriots go home early. Yesterday was fun, although a little nerve-wracking as the crapo referees took away two Giants touchdowns with bad holding calls. The Raiders just toyed with the Chiefs all afternoon; they used the monsoon to get their first shutdown in 85 games against them. The 49ers don’t play until tomorrow but their result is meaningless now and the biggest need is to avoid injury, which means that Tim Rattay, Paul Smith, and Cedric Wilson should get a lot of playing time–they even get a break with the scheduling as they’ll host the late game on Sunday. The Jets destroyed the Packers, which was a joyful outcome, and completed an amwesome turnaround from a 1-4 start.

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the top science fiction authors today and certainly one of my current favorites. Eleven of her novels, the first published in 1986, have focused on the life and career of Miles Vorkosigian, physcially challenged son of the second most prominent family on the planet Barrayar. His life has taken him all over the human-settled universe (called the Nexus) posited by Bujold; his activities leading a mercenary band and as an acknowledged soldier and, more recently, freelance representative (think combination Minister without Portfolio and Supreme Court Justice) of the Barrayaran Empire have brought him close to (and once back from) death.

Diplomatic Immunity takes place as Miles and new wife Ekaterina on the return leg of their honeymoon, beginning with a vague note from his boss the Emperor that sends them to Quaddiespace so Miles can resolve a potentially costly standoff. Quaddies are humans genetically altered to have four arms with the extra pair where you and I have legs; they were originally developed before (in this future) artificial gravity was developed and when their corporate masters attempted to throw them out as so much trash, escaped to make their own home–this was the subject of Bujold’s first novel, Falling Free.

Many of her loyal readers were wondering, hopefully, if Bujold would ever bring the Quaddies back and she tells a great story here that makes great use of them. Barrayarans are prejudiced against any person who is not fully, naturally human–Miles’ own physical differences, caused by his mother’s being poisoned while pregnant, have been a major source of difficulty through the years–and the Quaddies, with arms instead of legs, bring the attitude out in force. Which brings a blanket resentment and distrust of Miles and the Barrayarans from the Quaddies.

The first order of business is to reconstruct the sequence of events that necessitated Miles’ presence. The Admiral in charge of the trade fleet has one point of view and the Quaddie officials quite another. In the end, the explanation is quite different, involving Barrayar’s main opposing polity, the Cetagandans. Before the resolution, Miles is nearly assassinated when the villain (identity not known at the time) uses a power riveter as a machine gun and then later nearly dies after being poisoned with a bioweapon. Though to the surprise of no reader, he and Ekaterina make it home in time to attend the birth of their twins. Reproduction is different in the future.

Bujold has done a really good job here, matching smart opponents, bringing in the long-desired Quaddies, bringing back a major character we haven’t seen in many books (the Betan hermaphrodite Bel Thorn), and furthering the Barrayaran-Cetagandan relationship. The writing is familiar and, as usual, somewhat more dependant on exposition than really desirable. And I know that even though it will probably be 2004 at least before the next Vorkosigian novel appears, I’ll be jumping to read it.

Definitely recommended

A John Williams composition that sounds more like Henry Mancini and a cartoonish title animation that’s heavily reminiscent of the Pink Panther’s set a breezy tone for Steven Spielberg’s Christmas Candy confection, Catch Me if You Can. They’ve even recreated the old game show What’s My Line? with our boy as the mystery guest. But unlike the candy, this film is not just sweet empty calories but a terrific entertainment; quite a surprise since most recent movies based on true stories, as this one is, are terrible.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr., an extremely smart 16 year old from the New York City suburbs who freaks out when his parents (Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye) split up. Instead of choosing a parent to live with, Frank runs away. He begins to impersonate almost anyone, starting with airline pilots, and to forge checks and other useful documentation. Smart or not, one bit that shouldn’t have been left out is how someone his age learned how to do this.

After awhile–long enough for the boy to scam enough to buy his bankrupt dad a new Cadillac–he attracts the attention of Carl Hanratty of the FBI’s Bank Fraud squad. This is a very interesting role for Tom Hanks, quite opposite the killer of Road to Pertition. Hanratty is the quintessential workaholic, he’s left his (since remarried) wife and young daughter behind, and is even in the office when Abagnale calls him on Christmas. 15 years ago Hanks made a Dragnet movie and he, without going over the top, almost takes Dan Ackroyd’s Joe Friday as his model for this role.

The con, and the pursuit, go on, with the capture almost made time after time. What drives Hanratty the most seems to be his inability to outwit a teenager. Spielberg emphasizes this by coming back, again and again, as Hanratty asks Abagnale how he cheated to pass the bar exam in Louisiana; this just doesn’t seem to be something that the boy could talk his way through. After his stint as a co-pilot who never actually takes the controls, our hero decides to settle down for awhile as a doctor in Georgia–he talks his way into a supervisory position that doesn’t require him to put hands on a patient.

While there he meets and falls for a lovely blonde (Brenda, played by Amy Adams) and, although the audience never sees this, presumably senses that his time is running short. He asks Brenda to marry him, she is all over the idea, and they’re off to visit her parents. Daddy’s (Martin Sheen) a district attorney in New Orleans, so Abagnale mentions he has a law degree in addition to his M.D. and sure enough the next month he’s working as an assistant DA.

But all good things, the vision of familial love he so desires and sees in the Strongs, are illusory to an 18 year old. Hanratty has tracked him down to the huge engagement party the Strongs put on and he has to run. He wants to take the girl with him but she’s too weak and he flees to Europe in the company of eight comely young wanna-be stewardesses. The chase needs to conclude and so we aren’t shown the escapades on the Continent, just told that there is more than enough to get Hanratty on a plane to France for a final confrontation.

Interspersed through the film have been short scenes of Abagnale’s French prison and flight back to America courtesy of Uncle Sam. Arriving at LaGuardia Airport, he makes one more escape only to find that the reason for all of his efforts the past three years have been for nothing, and just like with Humpty Dumpty, the pieces couldn’t be put back together again. To be honest, I would have ended the movie right there, with DiCaprio running on the tarmac, but the story continues as we see imprisonment and eventual redemption by using his understanding of bank fraud as an employee of the FBI.

Another change I would have made, to cut Catch Me from 140 minutes to 100: The movie opens with over 30 minutes of buildup to his departure, which does give us a very solid grounding in our protagonist and his motivation, but one thinks a director as skilled as Spielberg could have cut this act in half without sacrificing any clarity. Certainly, one can’t hold the screenwriter, Jeff Nathanson too accountable–this is his first serious production, since I would barely count Rush Hour 2 and Speed 2 not at all.

One observation: DiCaprio is great as Abagnale but I wonder just how long he’ll be able to get away with playing teenage roles. His next part, not yet in production is the title character in Baz Luhrman’s Alexander the Great. Much of the meat of the story takes place before the Macedonian king’s 21 birthday.

Definitely recommended

The unstoppable gravitational pull of the future landed another right hook this week with the announcement (to be taken with a large grain of salt, until confirmed) that the Raelians have created a human baby through cloning. Jason Levine, however, strains credulity by expecting strict rationality from a cult that believes Humanity was brought to Earth 25,000 years ago by aliens AND that was founded in France. Jason, thanks for the laugh.

Coming up on the end of the year, I made a lot of updates and additions to Big 2003 Movies. Movies to which I’m most looking forward: The Lord of the Ring: Return of the King, Ripley’s Game, both follow-ons to The Matrix, and Julia Roberts’ bid for a second Best Actress Oscar, Mona Lisa Smile. Three promising comedies: Sandler and Nicholson in Anger Management, Jim Carrey as God for a week in Bruce Almighty, and Woody Allen’s next, Anything Else.

This morning I went with a pal to Fry’s Electronics in Santa Clara to take advantage of a pretty serious sale. A pack of glossy photo paper, usually $3.99, only 99 cents, with two brands on sale so I could get two instead of just one. A 64MB USB Flash drive, regularly $49.99, marked down to $39.99, and with a $35.00 mail in rebate, for a final price of $4.99. My pal wanted two of the 512MB DDR RAM that was on special for $84.99, so I bought one for him, and he also scooped up a 80GB hard disk for $49.95. I can’t add any more RAM or disk to this laptop (than it already has) so I skipped those values.

Very cool. But you would not have believed the line! We thought going early might minimize this, but the parking lot was nearly full when we pulled in around 9:20. People had to line up to get the Flash drives and memory but there was one line, all the way to one side, that most people didn’t see and we did, so that didn’t take long. Walked across the store to get the glossy paper. Altogether about 10 minutes.

Then I saw a line of people and wondered what great deal had so many people waiting for it. I asked someone and he said, “Oh, this is the checkout line.” Now, you have to understand we were probably a couple of hundred feet away from the normal entrance to the checkout counter. We started walking back along the line, it turned up an aisle and I thought that was the end. Um, nope! Keep going. All the way to the far side of the store–and Fry’s is not a small store–to find the last person.

A day like today is when you finally realize why the store has 60 cash registers. Because there were probably 400-600 people in front of us on that line. Yet it was always moving and in the end we probably got to a cashier in maybe 30-35 minutes. Where we ran into another bottleneck, that took almost 15 minutes to resolve, caused by nearly everyone wanting one of the USB Flash drives. Finally signed the charge slip and left at 10:40. Time for coffee.

Some people like shopping at Fry’s and some don’t, claiming the prices are no longer the bargains they used to be, but you have to give them a lot of credit for knowing how to handle sale crowds. Most stores wouldn’t come close to moving such a crowd through in anywhere near that little time. Now to mail in for that rebate.

A new photo gallery is unwrapped for your viewing pleasure: Dec. with the Family! Over 30 (thirty!) photos for your eyes to feast on. Wow! (LOL)

The Associated Press reports that Saudi Arabia Frowns on Christmas Cheer. Gee, that’s a shock, isn’t it? Foreign Christians (and any other non-Muslims) are not allowed to worship or show signs of their religion in public. By definition any non-Muslims located inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are foreigners since that nation’s constitution requires all citizens to adhere to that religion. What really got my gaul, though, is that our government is so willing to defer to others’ fears and biases that no Jews are ever assigned to work there. The Kingdom, our great and wonderful allies, generally won’t let people of my religion into the country.

I was moved to write about this to Colin Powell, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Anna Eshoo:

I just became aware that the Department of State discriminates against Jewish employees by not allowing them to serve in positions located in, or requiring travel to, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I believe that no American should be limited in such endeavors due to the racism of other nations. I’m sure if the Saudis had the same policy regarding women officers we would not acquiesce and cannot see how this is different.

I would appreciate your assistance in correcting this situation.

———–

I would have written more but I doubt even that little bit will get read or any attention. I know Israel does not prohibit Muslim diplomats.

Sometimes I can be a very generous soul. More often when I’m employed than not, but even I can’t skip the holiday season completely. So Vivian and I gave a good buddy this film on DVD today and after lunch we watched it together.

Reservoir Dogs was Quentin Tarantino’s debut as a writer and director, released ten years ago, and boy what a blast it is. Five career criminals who only know each other by color nicknames (Mr. White, Mr. Brown, and so forth) given to them by the old crime boss who’s planned the job and brought them together.

The acting is terrific and for awhile I wondered how Tarantino scored such recognizable names for his small movie but then I realized that anyone reading the script would understand the quality and want to be in it. Harvery Keitel (Mr. White) and Tim Roth (Mr. Orange) have the biggest roles but Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink and don’t think he didn’t chafe at that assignment), Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde), Lawrence Tierney as the old hand who organizes the smash and grab, and Chris Penn as Tierney’s son Nice Guy Eddie all hit their marks.

One thing that most people (certainly me) on realize after repeated watchings, and then go “damn that was so obvious but so smart,” is that even though this film is all about the events leading up to and after a jewelry store robbery, the robbery itself (and the inside of the jewelry store too) is never shown. This is such a smart, and unHollywood-like choice, but really characterizes the kind of movie Tarantino made. Why show the job? It would hardly add anything to the film except time, be expensive, and this way the dialog can create visions of mystery and violence in the viewer’s mind. Another scene uses a similar technique on a smaller scale: when Madsen’s Blonde is left alone with the beat cop he’s kidnapped, the camera focuses away from the gruesome act itself but we hear the actors instead. The DVD shows two alternate takes where the explicit action was filmed but in editing they realized that nothing onscreen could match what would be generated in the mind.

Tarantino also plays serious games in sequencing the scenes and the flow of time, much as he would in Pulp Fiction. The first scene is the whole crew talking over breakfast before the job and the second is an abrupt jump to Roth and Keitel driving away from the robbery, Roth bleeding from a bullet in his belly all over the back seat, screaming and crying, Keitel trying to calm him down. We aren’t shown until much later, nearly at the end, how Roth was shot. We get to see how some of the characters (Madsen, Keitel, Roth) are brought into the job but not the others and these scenes are also scattered, in a manner almost random yet clearly calculated.

Bloody but amazing. Still my favorite QT movie. And I did like Jackie Brown even though almost everyone else didn’t.

Highly recommended but not for those who shun violence and blood

Joe Strummer died yesterday of heart failure at age 50. He was, for a short burning few years, the leader of The Clash. Not too long ago it was Joey Ramone, lead singer of The Ramones, who died from cancer at 49. So now the time people dread, when the bright lights of your youth start dying not from foolishness or accident but from the realities of life, illness and disease rather than drugs and car crashes.

I remember back in high school when some friends turned me on to The Ramones. The wacked out energy of Beat on the Brat was just so perfect for a 15 year old suburban boy. When, a few months later, the much more serious but just as unhappy Sex Pistols came along, I was hooked on punk. I had to buy it as an import but The Clash’s first album (Clash) seemed to fuse the two approaches: Johnny Rotten’s angry disruptive lyrics and the Ramones’ group ethic of making the music powerful yet fun.

A couple of years later, Strummer and Jones released their masterwork, London Calling–generally regarded as one of the top ten rock albums. 23 years on, mainly what one hears on the radio is the throwaway pop tune Train in Vain, a song that was barely included and not even noted on the album cover or record label. Much less often we might get the title tune, though Jaguar seems to have no difficulty using this forecast of apocalypse to attract consumers.

“The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in

Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin

A nuclear error but I have no fear

London is drowning and I live by the river”

But the heat was white hot, too much for them to touch each other much longer. There were a couple more records released and they had hits with Should I Stay or Should I Go and Rock the Casbah from them but by 1983 Strummer and Jones were so caught up in their own needs that the guitarist was given the boot. New guitarists were brought in, the drumsticks changed hands as well, but things fell just about as quickly as you’d expect. Neither Strummer nor Jones ever made significant, substantial music on his own.

Some of my favorite memories of my own punk era are from 1979, when I was home from freshman year of college, and took the bus into Manhattan many nights with a rediscovered buddy named Brian Karlman. We’d been friends at age four or five, then lost touch until this time; we’d hang out at the Mudd Club, an after hours club called Atlantis, and a bunch of other punk dives in the City. Brian at least had the artifically bright blue and green hair but I refused to change my look just for the scene and continued wearing my plaid lumberjack shirts despite never getting anywhere with the women. It was the music.

The Clash finally made the 25 year mark and were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to be inducted in the ceremony next month. Strummer and Jones had apparently played a few gigs together and intended to reunite to play a few songs that evening, a shame but it won’t happen now.

I sort of liked this movie but two major factors keep me from making a wholehearted endorsement. First, Kevin Spacey is a very good actor but he’s settled too much into playing the same character in movie after movie; where is the successor to Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects or John Doe from Se7en? Second, Lasse Hallstrom’s direction seems heavy handed here, as if he instructed the cast to mirror the wintry torpor in their movements and emotions.

The Shipping News is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx and set, mainly, during a few winter months in a small coastal town in Nova Scotia. Spacey plays R.G. Quoyle (though throughout the film he is always called Quoyle by the others and I only got the R.G. from IMDB), a hapless loser, hated by his father, used and then abandoned by his amazingly slutty wife, and generally so picked on by life that he’s meeker than a mouse. Perhaps, then, a more extreme example but essentially the same character he played in American Beauty, Pay It Forward, and K-PAX. Spacey does a fine job, as one would expect, but has gone to this well at least once too often: man goes through a mid-life crisis that’s closer to a coming of age trial twenty years later than he should have.

Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Cider House Rules, Chocolat) does have a mastery of lush winterscapes and small town life. Where he found pockets of passion and energy in Chocolat and a truly naife-to-man transformation in Cider House, Shipping News loses too much of what was probably much more subtle and sophisticated inner growth in Proulx’s novel. I just didn’t see sufficient action on the screen to justify Quoyle’s growth. Tobey Maguire had Michael Caine as both mentor and antagonist and Juliette Binoche had true magic, her daughter, and the charming antagonism of Alfred Molina. Robert Nelson Jacobs’ script gives us the older reporter Billy Pretty as somewhat of a mentor and Cate Blanchett as the treacherous wife, yet neither goes far enough, while Julianne Moore as Spacey’s true love is simply not significantly passionate, and this all adds up to not enough spark.

Yet Spacey is still Spacey, one of the top actors of this generation–Gregory Peck to Tom Hank’s Jimmy Stewart–so he makes the most of the script. Hallstrom, a Swede, has the ability to bring the winter landscape to life, a participant in the movie. Scott Glenn is terrific as the newspaper publisher and Blanchett is just…hot as the thong wearing slut.

Semi-recommended

(Gallery coming soon!)

Firefly, Robbery Homicide Division, Birds of Prey, Dante Culpepper. Just kidding about the last, of course, but he’s having an incredibly miserable first half against the Dolphins this morning. Two interceptions in the end zone, three fumbles. The Dolphins haven’t done much to take advantage and only lead 7-3 as they walk into the clubhouse. Saturday NFL football is great, as long as the Niners win this afternoon.

I think the saddest of these choices is Firefly. Not the easiest show to love but surely one of the more creative. A western set in a strange post-futuristic Civil War ‘verse from Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel), the show follows a ragged band of bad guys with hearts of gold traipsing through human-settled space. Other than Ron Glass (you remember him as the snazzy detective with the ‘fro from Barney Miller) and Adam Baldwin (a personal fav from My Bodyguard all those years ago), who aren’t exactly major stars, the other regulars are new to primetime. A taste from one of the show’s writer/directors, Tim Minear, can also be had.

Fox, I think, made a very poor choice by not showing the two hour pilot Whedon made right up front; for some reason they held it off and only burned it off last night after the cancellation (it will be replaced by relocating Fastlane from Wednesdays). The key plot line driving the episodes this year is River and Simon’s attempt to stay free of a government that has done strange, unexplained work to River’s brain; the pilot episode opens this up like a present unwrapped on Xmas morning and makes so much of what was perviously shown clear. Firefly’s complexity works against it with an audience that prefers simple straightforward shows like CSI, which I can’t stand, but Fox only made it worse.

Fox plans a major overhaul of the Wednesday night schedule beginning the week after New Years. That ’70s Show scoots over from Tuesday, followed by a half hour of the second American Idol, and Bernie Mac and Cedric the Entertainer take half of the 9:00 hour each. The two comics are probably better suited to the later time periods anyway. American Idol will take the whole 8:00 hour on Tuesday nights.

Robbery Homicide Division is a more traditional series, focusing on the police work of an elite Los Angeles PD unit led by Tom Sizemore (Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan). But this show has Sizemore, a much more interesting actor than William Peterson or David Caruso, and writers who got better and better as the episodes went by. A recent episode where RHD went undercover against an Asian gang was typical: Sizemore fell in love with the gang leader’s wife, slept with her, dreamed of taking the relationship past the bust, only to have her die during the climactic gun battle. A new show, called Queens Supreme, will debut on Jan. 10 to carry CBS’ hopes. Stars Oliver Platt and Annabella Sciorra as judges on the Queens (NY) Supreme Court. In New York state, the local courts rather than the highest court, are called supreme courts.

Bird of Prey never really met its potential, and viewers recognized this as the ratings went down week after week. The premise was there for another success on the level of Smallville (from the same producers) though I think the cast never gelled–a particular Smallville strength. Beautiful, heroic women and dark villains but the writers didn’t do enough in the way of dramatic tension. Whedon’s Angel will move over from Sundays to this timeslot.

The second half just started in Minneapolis, b the way, and the Vikings scored a TD to go up 10-7. Randy Moss is more or less invisible except for when he’s dropping passes. Update: Dolphins put up seven points on the next drive, then Randy Moss woke himself up by catching a 60 yarder from Culpepper and throwing a 13 yard touchdown pass to Bates. Dolphins managed a field goal to tie things up but the Vikings made South Florida cry with a Gary Anderson field goal to win the game with only seconds left on the clock. Probably the best outcome for the Raiders, which is the only reason I am the least bit interested.

And at least Friends will be coming back next year, after telling us for months we’re watching the last one, for a tenth season. NBC couldn’t not to pay the price, which is a huge $9 million per half hour, and the six pals probably said to each other “Hey, our movie careers aren’t going all that well and the $22 million each will be handy when we’re old.” Except Jennifer Aniston, who will probably make some decent money in films and in any case is set because her hubby Brad makes $20 million for one movie.