Highlander

Diana and I watched the beginning of Highlander the other day, the original movie. Diana had never seen it, so it was interesting to hear her pick apart all of the huge gaping plot holes and inconsistencies. Still, it's a good movie from a mid-80s sci-fi stand point. I was struck by just how teen-boy centric it is. I mean, it's got immortals, sword fighting, nudity, and gratuitous decapitation. And if you happen to find Christopher Lambert attractive, it works for the teen-girls too. After all, it's got immortals falling in love with mortals, angst, costumes, etc. If the Highlander sparkled and had a clumsy teen love-interest, I'd wonder if Stephenie Meyer was a fan.



I've never seen any of the sequels or the TV show. I always preferred to think of it as a stand-alone kind of thing. The plot is ridiculous enough, trying to make it work beyond one movie is just too big of a stretch. The whole point is "there can be only one," making sequels inherently oxymorons.

If you need an example of how ridiculous the movie is at times, just take a look at Sean Connery's character. In a move called "Highlander" one of the most famous Scotsman of all time plays an Egyptian named "Ramirez". Scratch your head about that one for a while. This was at the end of Connery's really-bad-career-downswing after James Bond but before The Untouchables when he made films like Zardoz and Meteor. Really, 1986 was the beginning of his renaissance. That year he was in Highlander and The Name of the Rose. A year later he'd win his Oscar and by 1989 he'd have re-established himself as a big name at the box-office. Though, no one ever said he made good career moves. He was reportedly offered the role of Gandalf for 15% of worldwide box-office receipts but turned it down. He would have made about $400 million off that, but it's hard to imagine those movies being as good without Ian McKellen.

Unfortunately Highlander was really the pinnacle of Christopher Lambert's career. Well, his Hollywood career anyway. (He's having something of his own renaissance right now in the world of French cinema.) I always thought he did Tarzan after Highlander, but I was wrong. When he made Tarzan he didn't really speak English at all which worked fine for the character (not that it mattered that Andie MacDowell spoke English, as all of her dialogue as Jane was overdubbed by Glenn Close). He'd just learned English when he made Highlander, which explains his completely whacked accent in the film. He's French, but was born in the US, but grew up mostly in Switzerland. So when the Highlander says he's from "lots of different places," it's kinda meta.

And while you may or may not recognize Clancy Brown as the villain, you should recognize his voice. He's done voice acting in just about every animated series on TV in the last 30 years. He's Mr. Krabs:

Crowdsourced Star Wars Remake!

I found out about this through a post on Mental Floss. It's a crowdsourced remake of Star Wars called "Star Wars Uncut" where anyone in the world could sign up to be in charge of one 15 second segment of the move. Then they were all cut together into a full-length remake. Some of the segments are really funny, some are clever, some are impressive, and some are just darn cute as people got their kids and pets involved. Some of them are just weird. One way or another though, for a fan, it's highly entertaining:

In Movie News

The Artist is the only film nominated for a major Academy Award that I've seen. At least I saw 1. I hope it wins a lot.

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This is not what you think it is:


It's actually part of a Honda commercial that will air during the Super Bowl.

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Most (if not all) of the remaining living members of Monty Python are reuniting for a film called "Absolutely Anything" (source), but it's not being called a "Python" movie. It just happens to star them. Robin Williams might also be in the film. Still, it's pretty exciting.

No Winners Yesterday

I always find it much more satisfying to watch a team win a game rather than watch a team lose it. Unfortunately, both conference championship games yesterday ended with a team losing.

The Ravens-Patriots game ended on one of the least satisfying final plays in all of professional sports: a missed  field goal. Actually, I should qualify that a bit. A missed field goal on its own is not an unsatisfying way to end a game. If a team is down a point or two and the field goal is a game-winning attempt and it's from a challenging distance (be it too close or too far) it's a perfectly satisfying way to end a game. Everyone knows going into the play that it's going to be the last play of the game, and the kicker isn't expected to make it from that distance. The problem with a game-tying attempt from easy distance is that no one expects it to be the end. You assume you're going to overtime. Then suddenly it's over and you've won (or lost) and no one knows quite how to react because no one was prepared for that outcome.

Then you have the Giants-49ers game, which hinged on two special teams turnovers by the back-up kick-off returner pressed into service when the regular guy got injured last week. This is not only ironic, as the 49ers lead the league in turnover ratio, but also sad that the game hinged on a team losing. As the game headed into overtime, I turned to Diana and said "the first team that makes a mistake is going to lose", and then it happened.

I'm not saying that the better team didn't win. Championship teams make fewer mistakes. I'm just saying I would rather have seen Eli Manning lead the Giants on some super-human drive to win the game than see a back-up fail to protect the football. Still, in a championship game between two evenly-matched opponents, it often comes down to either who makes the superstar play or who makes the mistake. Yesterday, in spit of two superstar quarterbacks, both games came down to mistakes.

Niners!

I'm not a big NFL fan. I follow it passively and in passing during the regular season, if at all, and mostly only if the Bears are making any noise. I only start paying attention during the postseason, once College Football has wrapped up.

Still, if there's a team I've historically found myself rooting for in Super Bowls more than others, it would be the 49ers. That's partly because they've played in quite a few, but Joe Montana and Steve Young were just so enjoyable to watch. So even though I harbor some issues with Jim Harbaugh because he played at Michigan, I still find myself rooting for the Niners this post season. It'd be fun if they won.

Project Runway All Stars Episode 1: Read All About It

I watched Project Runway All Stars on demand last night. I will freely admit I afforded myself the luxury of fast forwarding through large portions of it, including anything that looked like gratuitous drama and most of the runway critiquing and judging. Really, most of the second half. I didn't care what any of those people had to say about the looks, judges and contestants included.

I found watching it a very interesting experience. On the one hand, I enjoyed seeing some familiar faces and was interested in what they were doing. On the other hand I was bored.

Gone are Heidi, Nina, Michael, and Tim. Instead we have host Angela Lindvall. She may be a supermodel, but she is no Heidi Klum. She was wooden and never looked natural on camera. Heidi never looked like she was reading lines even when she clearly was. Angela always looked like she was reading lines even when she clearly wasn't. But if Angela was wooden, than judge Georgina Chapman was a petrified forest. Everything she said sounded like she'd rehearsed it about 70 times and we were watching the 40th take.

Then there's Isaac Mizrahi. You may remember him as the co-host of Bravo's Project Runway replacement The Fashion Show, or from his many TV appearances. He's also apparently a designer. Frankly, he comes off to me as a desperate wannabe. Everything he says sounds fake and insincere. He's doesn't come off as reading lines at least, but he does come off as acting.

Then we have Joanna Coles stepping into Tim Gun's shoes. I actually have no problem with her. She seemed to give good advice, and they've scaled back her role some.

Still, the biggest problem with the show isn't them, it's the designers. They're all there, and they're all the same. Kenely's still a bitch. Austin's still fabulous. April's still soft-spoken. Elisa's still bat-shit crazy, and Michael Costello is still gross. Surprise, surprise, his dress looked exactly like what someone else was making.

That's the problem, though. They're all still the same. Watching the regular show, you don't these people at all. It takes a while to get to know them. You get character development and arcs. Here, we know all these people already. We know how this experience changed them or didn't change them. There's nothing interesting to see here, except how they interact with each other. And that's just going to be over-produced manufactured drama. I just don't care.

All I really wanted to see was the finished dresses, who won and who lost. I'll probably just follow it online.

Oh, they eliminated Elisa (thank god). As stated, she's still crazy, but at least she was grateful in defeat. Rami won. He's my early favorite, mostly because he's the only one who looks like he's enjoying himself, and he looks like he's having a great time. That's compelling to watch.

Literally Pointless or Any Given Sunday Syndrome

Well, that was boring and pointless. I mean, LSU went literally point-less yesterday. I'm not sure there's a top ten team that couldn't have beat LSU last night. I certainly would have taken money on any of the other BCS winners, including Michigan and West Virginia, and some of the losers. Would they  have beat Alabama? That's not the point. In the current system it was only ever about who could beat LSU. Do you really think perennial Heisman runner-up Andrew Luck and Standford or 28-year-old wonder-kin Brandon Weeden and Oklahoma State would have lost to LSU last night? I don't think so. The Fiesta Bowl, that was your title game. I don't mean it should have been those teams as #1 and #2, but the game played in the Fiesta Bowl was a game worthy of being a Title Game. The game played last night in New Orleans was a joke.

The inherent problem with football, with any sport really, is the Any Given Sunday Syndrome. It's typified by the NFL. The saying goes "any given Sunday any team can beat any other team." It doesn't matter what their records are going into the game, if the personnel match up right, if the coaching matches up right, if luck matches up right, any team can win. Every sport has their way of dealing with that. Every sport, that is, except College Football.

Baseball is the most susceptible to this because so much depends on starting pitching. Even teams with the best winning percentages over a season in baseball history still lost 25% - 30% of their games. (By contrast, the BCS team with the worst record this season lost less than 30% of their games.) Baseball solves this by playing series, even in their regular season. The NHL and NBA do the same when they get to their post-season. If you can win a best-of-five or best-of-seven series head-to-head with another team, you're the better team. Even that's still a little arbitrary and subject to the whims of luck, but it's a sufficient gauntlet to run.

The NFL can't do that. The physical demands of the sport make that impossible. They use the regular season to narrow things down to a pool of mostly winning teams, and then make them win 3-4 more games against opponents in that pool and crown a champion. Sure Any Given Sunday Syndrome still applies, but if you can run that gauntlet and win those 3-4 games, you've proven yourself a champion.

College Basketball does the same thing. The regular season narrow things down to 68 teams (one team more than there were AQ schools last season in football), and then you give them all a chance. The team that runs that gauntlet proves themselves a champion.

College Football has no answer to the Any Given Sunday Syndrome. It's a little less of an issue to be sure. Northern Illinois could play a whole season against South Carolina and never win a game. But in the higher level programs it's certainly true. If you took the top ten BCS team and made them play each other once, you'd be hard pressed to find an undefeated team at the end of it.

College Football has no gauntlet. Or rather, the regular season is supposed to be the gauntlet. Except that the regular season isn't a basketball tournament where the opponents get more difficult as the season progresses. Instead you have Alabama playing Georgia Southern in mid-November. And before you start hyping the SEC as a gauntlet unto itself, remember that Vanderbilt, Kentucky, and Mississippi State are all SEC teams.

That's why the "plus 1" system is getting so much talk now. That would be a gauntlet. A mini one, but one nonetheless. It would keep fluke wins like Iowa State over OSU from ruining a season, and it would test your unbeatens. If LSU had taken down Stanford before losing big to Alabama, I'd have no complaints.

Instead College Football just takes an arbitrary top two teams and makes them win one head-to-head contest that is completely subject to Any Given Sunday Syndrome. Last night's game was proof of that. On November 5th, LSU won. Last night Alabama won. Play a third game and then you'll know who was really the champion.