Battlestar: Galactica is ending, which is bad news for fans of smart, dark science fiction. I'd like at least once for them to do the title screen appropriately, with "STARRING JAMIE BAMBER'S TRICEPS." And then, after that, in tiny letters, "ALSO: JAMIE BAMBER." You've gotta love any future society where the required uniform involves sleeveless shirts.What I find kind of impressive about the series was that the theme song was from the Rig Veda - its a hymn in praise to Savitar, which makes its theme song thousands of years older than the Bible. I watch a lot of Bollywood movies, and the amazing thing is, you watch enough subtitled you start to be able to pick out words: Mata = mother, agni = fire (as in to ignite). If you love languages as much as I do, it's fascinating to examine. North Indian languages are actually close cousins to European ones.
After CHILDREN OF MEN and PAN'S LABYRINTH were extremely popular, I was excited that a lot of the dark, adult variety of science fiction that I like would finally make it to screen. Naturally, this was overoptimistic.
If Iraq taught us anything, the key to understanding events isn't economics, or engineering or metal shop, but social studies. To understand why people in Hollywood make bad decisions, just look at Los Angeles itself: as George Carlin said, "no one reads, and there's cilantro on everything."
3 comments:
It's amazing how big his arms loom in my imagination, when seeing him there in that pic, he almost looks wimpy. Apollo, we hardly knew ye. If there's anything BG teaches, is that the key to understanding is comparative religion. My high school Social Studies teacher was forbidden to even mention the subject, so I was told about certain events, like say... the American Revolution, and I never once got a hint of the religious significance to the Masonic founders. It's like watching a space opera while being forbidden to notice that it actually happens in space.
Cheers, Michael
Here's what I find most interesting about BSG: despite my love for beefcake, the guys that are somehow the most sexually intriguing are the older ones. Edward James Olmos, especially towards the end, is a very distinguished looking older guy.
As for understanding world events, religion certainly plays a role. Going back to Iraq, almost every problem in Iraq we've got now could have been foreseen (and was!) if the nitwit highers-up just remembered there were TWO kinds of Muslim, neither of which are exactly busting at the seams with brotherly love for each other.
The moment in Bob Woodward's PLAN OF ATTACK where some white house staffers had to explain the Sunni/Shi'ite split to Bush II was absolutely shocking.
It's like watching a space opera while being forbidden to notice that it actually happens in space.
Yeah, that's something that kinda got my goat about the new BSG: they made a big effort to reversing lots of the space opera conventions to something that you can actually believe in (no "magical" sensors, for one), but they still had gravity in space, a dubious, somewhat magical technology, with no other applications (they don't have anti-gravity technology).
Oy, darlin'... reading this just makes me all the more depressed that its over. This fall and the Battlestar Galactica: The Plan TV movie can't get here soon enough!
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