BBOOOIIIINNNNGGGGG!!!!

That's my reaction to Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. I got about 120 pages in, and I couldn't get any farther. I was totally, utterly, uninterested in the story as it was proceeding. I'll try it again sometime, as I've found more often that bouncing off a book is more indicative of my actual reading mood at the time than the quality of the book itself. For now, I've shifted gears entirely and am sinking my teeth into a Ken Follett thriller (Jackdaws). (I am of course disappointed that my first attempt at digging into the classic works of SF that I haven't yet read should have met with failure, but I shall plug on undaunted.)

In other book news, last week I finished Julie Czerneda's A Thousand Words For Stranger, which I enjoyed even though I found the goings-on in the book very hazy and hard-to-follow. It's a space-opera-slash-romance about a woman named Sira who finds herself in the middle of a spaceport on some dingy planet, with no memory of who she is, and her adventures as she pursues her own memories and is herself pursued by...well, pursuers. She meets up with the captain of a space-freighter, Jason Morgan, and ends up joining him first as something of a refugee, then as a member of his crew (the only member, it turns out -- he's got a small ship) and finally they fall in love. Complications abound when it turns out that Sira is a member of The Clan, a race of beings who look just like humans but have telepathic powers and who can tap into and travel through something called the M'hir. The Clan is after Sira for some reason (it is explained late in the book), as is a group of Enforcers from the Trade Pact (I'm still fuzzy on just what the Trade Pact is -- I think it's a federation of star systems, organized around trade). In fact, everyone is after Sira, but she does not know at all who she is or why they might be after her. So, she and Captain Morgan (yes, I kept thinking of spiced rum every time I encountered his name) evade the pursuers all the while trying to unlock her past. It was a fun novel, and I plan to read the sequels (collectively called "The Trade Pact Universe"), but I found that A Thousand Words For Stranger was lacking in the exposition. Too much of the backstory is revealed very late in the book, so much of the story ends up being harder to follow than it really needs to be -- characters' motivations are kept shrouded in mystery, and Sira's own motives are obviously a total mystery, so the effect ended up being that much of the time I was simply wondering, "Why on earth are all of these characters doing these things?" There were a couple of times that I nearly stopped reading, but the strength of Czerneda's characterizations kept me going. I hope that the next books in the series are more fleshed-out, though.

This news item isn't particularly humorous in and of itself, but Warren Ellis's one-sentence summation of it disrupted my breakfast this morning when I read it. Fortunately I had just swallowed, or my keyboard and printer would have been sprayed with partially-chewed bits of shredded-wheat. (My monitor, being positioned to the right, would have been spared.)

Boy, once the NFL playoffs end and/or the commercials featuring Don Cheadle are put online someplace, my daily hit total is going to take a big drop. I'm getting at least ten hits a day from people looking for those ads. I don't have them, but if they show up somewhere I'll definitely link to them.

I'm hoping against hope that this isn't for real. I mean, come on, people.

There has been some rumbling on the left side of the Blogoverse in the last couple of days about something James Lileks wrote about Michael Moore. (Link is to Tom Tomorrow's entry on the subject.) I used to link to both Lileks's site and to Moore's site, but I removed both links a while ago (not at the same time) because, quite frankly, I came to find both of them insufferable, and pretty much for the same reasons: neither of them, as humorists, convey humor to me as much as smugness and superiority, while both of them came to basically resemble one-trick ponies.

One of the authors on my list to dip into in 2003 is Ursula K. Le Guin. I've read her essays, off and on, for years -- she wrote a particularly fascinating one that I need to reread, about American Puritanism and how it affects fantasy as a genre -- and she has a new one about writing, courtesy the LA Times. (Beware popups. The LA Times generates lots of the little devils.) The only problem I have with her essay here is that it appears to be a response to an earlier essay by some other writer, and that earlier essay is not linked in the current one. D'oh.

Oh, and it was announced this week that Le Guin is the SFWA's newest Grand Master. Now I really have to read her. (I read The Dispossessed and A Wizard of Earthsea when I was in junior high, disliked both, and I've never read her fiction since. Operating under the assumption that any opinions that I formed in junior high are likely to be suspect, I'm planning to read some Le Guin this year.)

As I noted a few days ago, my inauguration into the DVD era came via the film Spiderman.

My take on Spiderman is this: they made three-fourths of a great movie, but the ending doesn't work. The problem, for me, was mythology. (Full disclosure here: of all the superhero comics I used to read, the Spiderman titles were my favorite. He has always been my favorite superhero.)

The problem faced by filmmakers who are creating silver-screen versions of classic comic books is that since they only have two hours or so to tell a single story, they need to make it fairly self-contained but also establish all of the mythology -- or as much as they can -- that the comic book has had years to develop. Inevitably, things are left out. Normally, this is all well and good. Superman didn't suffer, as a film, by the fact that Clark Kent's teen love Lana Lang appears in a single scene; X-Men likewise did not have me squirming and wondering where the original X-Men (Angel, Beast, et cetera) were. (Of course, the X-Men have been such a revolving door over the years that they could have selected mutant heroes at random from the comic's entire run and had a good movie -- as long as they included Wolverine, who is probably the only essential X-Man.)

So, starting off in Spiderman, the film gets almost all of the mythology right. We have Peter Parker as a teen weakling, Mary Jane Watson in her abusive household, Peter's jock rival Flash Thompson, best friend Harry Osborne (and, in turn, rich father Norman), and of course there are Uncle Ben and Aunt May. In truth, the entire first half of the film is a delight, with only a couple of problems. The key to any superhero film lies in the casting, and the cast assembled here does very well, although they might have been better served having the characters in college rather than in high school. All of the actors looked slightly too old to me for high school -- but that's not a fatal complaint. If I have any quibble at all with the film's "origin" scenes, it would be that I think Peter's emergent spider powers are a bit over-the-top. I can see him catching Mary Jane when she slips in the cafeteria, but the way he catches everything on the tray was a bit freakish, and I didn't really buy the whole confrontation with Flash in the hallway. I think these scenes could have used a little more subtlety and more of a sense of fear and fascination from Peter. For the most part, though, it all works. I liked how the spider-bite was updated (genetic engineering instead of radioactivity, the fear of the 2000's as opposed to that of the 1960s), and I also enjoyed Peter's scheme to get money fast. Of course he'd try pro wrestling! That got a laugh, but then a sense of dread when I released what was unfolding.

It's no secret that the seminal event of Peter Parker's life is the death of Uncle Ben. The whole tagline, "With great power comes great responsibility", has to be hammered home. In the original comic, I believe it was a home-burglary; here it is a carjacking, but the result is the same: a criminal whom Peter could have stopped earlier later kills Uncle Ben. (A nice touch, absent from the original comic, is the way Peter initially thinks that allowing the crook to get away is comeuppance for the unscrupulous wrestling promoter. This was a nice bit of subtext, Peter's first example of he should defend even those who don't give a rip about him in return.) I didn't care for the "teen rebel" angle the filmmakers added to Ben's demise, so that Peter's last words to him were spoken in anger, but I can see why they did this. Central to the Peter Parker character, in the comic, was his ever-present sense of self-loathing and inadequacy.

Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborne is terrific, and I loved the scene where his dual personalities converse with one another via a mirror. I didn't care for the Green Goblin costume, though. With its aerodynamic plastic helmet, it just didn't look right to me. The glider, though, looked perfect. I found the film's visual effects occasionally disappointing, but the Goblin on the glider worked well.

So, what to say about the ending? Well, first of all, the visuals. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert complained that the visuals are too obviously CGI, giving little sense of the momentums involved in webslinging and in the last scene of the tremendous weights involved. I have to agree here. The webs themselves appear to have the consistency of Silly String. I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to believe Peter Parker swinging around on them, but I couldn't believe him hanging by one of them with one hand while using another web, in his other hand, to hold a fully-laden cable car above the East River. I know Spiderman has a great deal of strength, but this strained credibility. Spiderman's key ability, to me, was never his strength as much as it was his incredible agility and speed. The scene did not convey to me the sense that Peter was about to be pulled apart, or that he would drop the cable car, or anything like that. The film tried to convey this, but it didn't succeed, at least for me. In the comic, Spiderman occasionally had to pull off a feat of superhuman strength -- really superhuman strength -- and when he did, the comic conveyed tremendous strain and agony, with Spiderman nearly blacking out and finally succeeding through sheer force of will. It's not that I don't think Spidey could have done the things the film depicts in this scene; it's that as they present it, it doesn't look to me like a Spiderman feat. It looks more like a Superman feat.

My other problem with the climactic scene on the bridge can be summed up in two words: Gwen Stacy.

I conceded above that films of comic book stories have to make hard decisions about which things from the mythology to include and which ones to leave out. In the comics, while Peter did know Mary Jane for years, his first true love was Gwen Stacy, and it was Gwen whom the Green Goblin dangled off the Brooklyn Bridge. However, in the comic, Spiderman failed to save her. The Goblin drops her from the height, and Spiderman snags her with a web, breaking her fall, but she dies in the effort (if she was alive to begin with). This was Peter Parker's second great life lesson: not just that "With great power comes great responsibility", but that "Sometimes great power just isn't enough". The death of Gwen Stacy was just as important to the Spiderman character as the death of Uncle Ben, and as such to see the events of her death replayed in the film -- but with Mary Jane, this time, and with Spiderman saving the girl -- created in me a sort of "cognitive dissonance" that I just couldn't get around. I can understand why the filmmakers would omit Gwen Stacy from their story of Peter Parker's life, just as I can understand why the filmmakers of Superman would omit Lana Lang, but Gwen Stacy is far more important to Spiderman than Lana Lang is to Superman. I might have been able to accept a Spiderman who was never in love with Gwen Stacy, but in giving me Gwen's death without Gwen and without the death, the film basically kept reminding me of her. For me, it was the Big White Elephant in the room. Under some circumstances, I can be made to ignore it -- but not if you're going to point my chair at the elephant and have the beast nuzzle me with its trunk.

I also didn't care for the film's very last scene. Mary Jane's sudden profession of love was totally unconvincing, so Peter's "sacrifice" was robbed of whatever emotional value it might have had. I guess I just don't think that Peter Parker and Mary Jane have been though enough together for her to love him. Yet. (And I could have done without the Big! Obvious! Sequel! idea laid out when Harry Osborne swears to "make Spiderman pay".)

And rounding out my small set of complaints is the score by Danny Elfman, a composer who seems to be retrogressing faster and faster into the realm of "sonic wallpaper". Superhero scores need themes, and the score for Spiderman doesn't have one. The John Williams Superman theme is one of the most famous film music themes ever written, and Elfman himself wrote a very memorable theme for Batman in those movies, so why is it that I couldn't hum a single theme from Spiderman within minutes of watching the film? The score is all mood and no substance, and is one of the most disappointing film scores I have ever experienced.

I hope I'm not giving the idea that I disliked Spiderman, because I didn't. Not even close. In fact, I think it's probably the best superhero film made since the original Superman. I loved many of the webslinging scenes, and it was so nice to see a superhero film with action sequences that take place in daylight. (Thanks to the Batman films, I've seen enough fight-scenes-at-night-in-the-rain for a lifetime.) The film's feel is right, although I would have liked a little more of the Daily Bugle. I've also always had a weakness for women with red hair, so Kirsten Dunst was of particular pleasure here. Tobey Maguire's performance as Peter Parker is excellent. While I think he could have conveyed more of a "sense of wonder" when he discovers his new, buff physique, Maguire pulls off the film's most important acting task: he sells the idea of a guy in a spider-suit. (Anyone who remembers the old live-action Spiderman television series from the late 70s will know that this is no small thing.) I enjoyed the little touches, like Mary Jane calling Peter "Tiger" and his self-referent "You friendly neighborhood Spiderman". I can't wait for the sequel, and not just because I want to see Doctor Octopus. (Speaking of him, will any of these new Marvel comics-into-movies involve Doctor Doom?)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

OK, I got lazy. Usually I spend a little time searching out images of things that I find interesting to pass on, but this week I pretty much shut it down as soon as I saw these on AICN. And I'm sure you've seen them too. But it's my blog, and I wanted to use this!

In sad news for the film music world (a small world, to be sure, but a passionate one), English composer Ron Goodwin has died. He was particularly famous for his scores to war-related films, such as Where Eagles Dare and The Battle of Britain. Many of the finest film composers hailed from England, and Goodwin was a particularly fine one.

In the midst of my New Year's Resolutions posting, I mentioned my intention to catch up on a lot of classic science fiction novels, mainly the ones on this list. In the days since, a few other such lists have been cited on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written. Check them out: here, here, and here.

Some of these -- I haven't looked through each of them in detail -- may also include fantasy works. Not every SF afficionado insists on keeping the genres rigidly separated.

SF writer William Gibson is many things: he's one of the foremost pioneers of the cyberpunk subgenre; he's the writer of one of the finest opening sentences of a novel ever (Neuromancer: "The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel"); and now he's a blogger.

(Crossposted to COLLABORATORY.)

Over on Electrolite a raging discussion is going on (well, it's not "raging" so much as "active") about the merits of independent bookstores versus the "giants", the chain megaliths like Borders and Barnes&Noble.

My take on this is simple: I love both of the big chains, and I wouldn't much like life without them.

As is the case with so many things in life, how we view the Big Bookstore Chains arises from our experiences as readers. My formative years as a book buyer, which pretty much began when I was ten and started receiving an allowance with which I was more likely to buy books than toys, were spent living in a small town in western New York, in which there was a single bookstore -- a tiny independent in the local mall. We're talking a store the size of a small WaldenBooks, in a mall housing forty stores. (Both the mall and the bookstore are still there.) That was it. My reading search either started there or at the local library.

Now, as a family we weren't content to spend every day and every weekend in that town. I was blessed in that my parents loved going for long drives, so just about every week we would pile in the car and go to Buffalo, Rochester, or Erie, PA. At those cities we would go to the bigger malls -- places that had ritzier stores than we had at home, stores like JCPenney -- and I would shop for books at Waldens or B. Dalton. (Aside: I haven't seen a B. Dalton in years. Do they still exist?) Then my sister went to college, and then to grad school (in Pittsburgh and Buffalo, respectively), so I got to go to independent bookstores in both cities. I don't recall Pittsburgh so much, but Buffalo's major independent bookstore was Talking Leaves Books. (It still is, actually, and Talking Leaves is proof positive that independents can actually fluorish: not only is its original location doing just fine, but they actually opened a second store on Buffalo's trendy Elmwood Strip two years ago. Granted, none of Buffalo's three Big Chain locations is within five miles of either Talking Leaves location.) I enjoyed Talking Leaves, but the books they stocked -- literature, humanities, and the like -- didn't suit my reading interests, so I rarely ended up shopping there. As for genre bookstores, Buffalo did have a science-fiction bookstore, but I don't recall it having a very large inventory, as it was a small place and also dedicated to comics and fantasy role-playing paraphernalia. And in any event, at the time my reading interests in SF and fantasy were along the lines of Stephen R. Donaldson, Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov (who was still alive and quite active then), Terry Brooks, and the like. In short, nothing that couldn't be found in a shopping mall Waldens. In terms of indepent stores with better selection than mall stores, I was more concerned with music at the time than books. I wanted a store where I could find four or five recordings of a symphony by Shostakovich or of an obscure opera by Verdi. This was the beginning of my flaming interest in classical music.

In terms of books, once I turned back toward literary interests, the Big Chains were beginning to show up. I was thrilled then, and I still am thrilled, that I can find a wonderfully diverse selection of reading material, and that I can find it without driving to the biggest cities. The Big Chains represented, for me, a step up, not a step down. Do I wish there were staff members who were more well-versed in SF and Fantasy? Sure. But I'm pretty well-versed on what's coming out, and I know that I've probably gone to one of the Big Chains looking for a specific title, and left with that specific title in my hands, around ninety percent of the time. I also love the diversity possible, when I can walk into a bookstore and walk out an hour later with a reissue of a Doc Smith space opera; a mass-market paperback of a Larry McMurtry Western; a horror novel by an author whose surname is not Andrews, King or Koontz; and a cookbook of recipes from Provence. (And that's just assuming that I don't wander into the music section.)

Are there troubling aspects to having so much of the book business concentrated in two large corporate entities? Sure. Am I happy with the magazine selection in the Big Chain locations in Syracuse? Not really. (Buffalo's stores were much better at carrying genre magazines; I could read them all, the months they came out. Here, Locus seems to run a month behind; while I can find Analog and Asimov's easily enough, I haven't seen a single issue of F&SF since I moved; ditto Weird Tales, Absolute Magnitude, Dreams of Decadence, et cetera.) But do I still love walking into a store that's bigger than any Gap store I've seen in any mall, and seeing that store filled with books? Damn straight.

According to Kevin Drum, Rush Limbaugh has told someone -- presumably a Democrat -- that it's time to get over 2000. I can only assume that this refers to the disputed election, in which a man who shouldn't have become President was nevertheless allowed to become President. Well, fine. But if we on the Left are supposed to get over 2000 and never talk about it again, then here is a list of things -- each of which came before 2000 -- that I think the Right needs to get over and never talk about again:

Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, Vince Foster, the White House Travel Office, Waco and the Branch Davidians, the defeat of Robert Bork, Jimmy Carter and his "malaise" speech (in which he didn't even use the word "malaise"), "Hanoi Jane", the 1960 election.

I could go on, but that'll do for starters. Outrage goes both ways, folks.

I finally joined the twenty-first century last week, at least in part. Actually, it wasn't so much myself that did the joining; it was a friend of mine who, in the face of mounting frustration that I had not yet joined in this particular way, finally said "Oh, the hell with it" and signed me up himself.

He sent me a DVD player.

I had been holding out for a player, waiting for the price to come down; and then, now that the price has in fact come down, other economic factors reared their ugly heads to still keep me out of DVD-heaven. But this friend, who has been a DVD-nut for at least two years now, got tired of nagging me to buy a player and put up his own hard-earned cash for the thing. The only downside was the timing of the machine's arrival: late in the afternoon on Friday, when Syracuse was in the midst of receiving a large snow storm, and I had literally returned from a forty-minute drive to Blockbuster and the public library (which is usually no more than a ten minute drive, if I hit every red light in transit) on roads that had not been plowed since the last snow storm. So, I had to wait a day to get a DVD so I could test the machine, a time period during which I had to endure the machine itself, taunting me from inside its box.

The first DVD I rented the next day was the biggest film that I missed last year: Spiderman. (My review is pending, probably tomorrow or Thursday.) Satisfied that the thing worked, and amazed at the picture quality, I rushed out the next day and bought the anniversary edition DVD of Singin' In The Rain and rented the DVD of Princess Mononoke. Today I rushed out and bought The Phantom Menace (which I am convinced is the single most unfairly-maligned film in history) and Rob Roy, a truly great film that was overshadowed by sharing a release year with Braveheart, a greater film also set in Scotland.

So here I am, a new DVD fanatic, all because of a guy named Matt whom I have known longer than any person in my life who isn't a blood-relative. If he had a blog, I'd tell you to go visit it. And if he'd finish his own novel and get the thing published, I'd tell you to buy it. As it is, I'll just tell you to root for the Philadelphia Eagles, the Duke Blue Devils, and when college football starts up again, the Penn State Nittany Lions.

(Now I gotta get the TV fixed sometime. The color's been off for a year and a half -- it doesn't render greens and yellows correctly. It's always something.)

Uh-oh, Sean is not going to like this. Wow.

(Scroll down to the fourth news item on the page.)

Addendum to my post about yesterday's NFL games below: according to some NFL big-wig, the refs really did blow the call at the end of the 49ers-Giants game. Apparently the receiver really was eligible, so it really was pass-interference; and apparently the holder on the kick really couldn't have spiked the ball, because spiking is only allowed on a direct snap from the center and not on a long-snap.

What seems weird to me is that you can apparently report to the refs before the game, and say that you will line up as an eligible receiver on all field goals. I guess that was the Giants' safety valve all along, but if that was the case, why didn't Jim Fassel make a huge stink about it as the game ended?

Kudos to author John Scalzi, who serialized a novel on the Web some time back -- and just had it picked up for publication by TOR Books, courtesy of editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

There is an unspoken assumption about written fiction appearing on the Web: that it is somehow inferior product that was not good enough to make it into the traditional print markets. This is certainly not true in all cases, and I'm not remotely equipped to even say if it's true in most cases. I suspect that it's not totally true: while Sturgeon's Law almost certainly applies, and while the exact percentage might be skewed a bit -- say, 93% crud as opposed to the classically-ordained 90% -- it seems to me that there must be professional quality work out there, somewhere. (I'm talking about work posted directly to the Web, at the author's expense. I'm not talking about pay-markets that exist on the Web, some of which are fairly good if not excellent.)

Some creators -- notably those working with comics, like Scott McCloud -- have been speculating on the future of the Web as a "post-publishing industry" alternative, where creators will be able to place their work directly in front of the eyes of their audiences without having to go through a "middleman". Some people view file-sharing utilities such as Napster or KaZaA in this light. Other creators, though, post their work to the Web for more prosaic reasons: it's been rejected everywhere else. This second camp is primarily responsible for the view of Web-content as being second-rate content, although the history of publishing -- indeed, of art in general -- is replete with examples of works rejected many, many times before finally catching on, somehow, somewhere. This is what Scalzi has done.

The only fiction of mine that I have posted to Byzantium's Shores is a small sample from the first chapter of my novel-in-progress, and a very short story I wrote (and didn't much like) in the wake of 9-11-01. (Links to these items can be found at left, under "Notable Dispatches".) I posted them for different reasons, and I haven't yet considered posting much more of my fiction here, because some of my stories are still at market and will be for some time. A while back, though, I did consider doing a serial project on the Web in a blog format. It was going to be a space opera, and I even wrote the first chapter of it and have it on my hard drive even now. I also tinkered a bit with the design for the weblog I would have used to create the thing, even selecting a few stellar photographs from some online repositories of Hubble Space Telescope images for a masthead. The story has tugged at my mind more than a little since then, and I've actually worked out some of the background in my mind. (In truth, a lot of the background would have been pilfered from another, older project that I am certain will never see the light of day except for a certain devious soul who lives in Washington, DC. He knows who he is....) But, I've waffled as to whether or not to undertake the actual project.

I've waffled in part because of the "two many directions at once" factor. After all, I do a lot of writing for Byzantium's Shores, I have a novel on the front burner that is constantly simmering if not outright boiling, and there is always a short story or novelet going as well. I didn't want to spread myself too thin by adding a serial work to the mix.

Additionally, there are other considerations pertaining to such a project that I haven't really thought out. How should I approach such a work? I've considered doing it as an open-ended story, with no definite resolution in mind, rather like an ongoing comic book without the images; I've also considered the reverse, doing it as a definitively-planned story. Then there are problems of structure and point-of-view, which are also important concerns. Foremost here is the nature of the Web: most experts on such matters will tell you that, when posting text to the Web, "shorter is better"; we are told to keep it direct and to the point, with posts restricted to easily-digestible lengths. But then, considering the many sites out there that seem to generate high amounts of traffic despite consistent violation of the "shorter is better" dictum, perhaps this isn't as much a concern as I've been thinking.

So...I don't know. I like the story that's in my mind, but I'm not sure if a Web-serial would be the way to go. We'll see.

It's funny to see the things I post, most of the time as a throw-away thought, that end up bringing a bunch of hits from search-engine results. Such is the case with my brief mention last week of the NFL playoff commercials, featuring actor Don Cheadle. I'm assuming that people are looking for a place online to view these ads. I've looked too, and I haven't found them yet. If anyone locates them, I hope you drop me a line.

As for the football games themselves, this was a hell of a weekend. We had history, on several fronts: the second and fourth largest playoff comebacks in history, the Packers' first ever playoff loss at home, the latest chapter in the miserable history of the Cleveland Browns, what is sure to be the first of many Michael Vick playoff games, and Jeff Garcia's coming of age in San Francisco. All that, and a pretty impressive old-fashioned blow-out to kick it all off.

:: I've noted at several points this year that home-field advantage in the AFC is an almost guarantee of not making it to the Super Bowl. The way the Jets are playing, I think that the Raiders may learn this the hard way. I'm not sure when the last 9-7 team went to the Super Bowl, but the Jets could very well do it. I certainly think they're capable of beating any of the three teams still alive in the AFC.

:: I finally got to watch Michael Vick play, and he is definitely impressive. His improvisational style of play reminds me of Steve Young in his prime and Randall Cunningham early in his career, in the way he very quickly scans the field and, if his receivers aren't open, he takes off. But Vick is more physically gifted -- by several factors -- than Young or Cunningham, which makes him even more dangerous than those guys were when they went on the run. As long as no conservative coach comes in and tries to force Vick into being a pocket-quarterback, he could end up being one of the most exciting players in years.

:: There's not much I can say about the Steelers-Browns game or the 49ers-Giants game that hasn't been said elsewhere, except to note the lack of fundamentals that doomed the Browns and Giants. In the former case, it was the lack of a running game and therefore the ability to control the game's tempo. In the latter case, of course it was the multi-faceted botching of that field goal attempt. I don't know if I've ever seen more fundamental breakdowns on a single play: you had a bad snap, a holder who forgot that he could have just spiked the thing to get another shot, and ineligible men downfield. On the FOX postgame show the Giants were pretty well roasted for the breakdown on that play, but Jimmy Johnson had the best comments when he noted that the "ineligible receiver" penalty didn't involve a single lineman, as is usually the case, but four or five guys who should have known better.

:: I don't recall the exact date, but it's fitting that the 49ers' and Steelers' comebacks yesterday fell roughly on the tenth anniversary of the greatest NFL comeback of all time, when the Buffalo Bills rallied from a 35-3 third-quarter deficit to beat Houston in OT, 41-38. That game was played in the wild-card round in January, 1993.

:: A few stats from Sunday's two games are in order. The four teams scored a combined 19 touchdowns, with only 5 of those being rushing TDs. The four quarterbacks were a combined 84 for 178, 1469 yards, 13 touchdowns, and 5 interceptions. These four gentlemen, each of whom played valiantly, combined for a passer rating of 133.5. (Results courtesy this calculator.)

What a weekend.

Good God, here we go again.

I find it hard enough coming to grips with the idea of a Timothy McVeigh or an Osama Bin Laden -- a person who has come to the belief that killing large numbers of innocent people, possibly killing oneself in the process, is a viable means of attaining one's desired political or spiritual goals. But I'm truly at a loss for words -- nay, rational thought -- when I consider the fact that an entire culture of Palestinians has apparently drawn the same conclusion. To hear stories in the news of murder and horrible pain, of shrapnel and glass and blood in the streets, of the slain being people buying coffee and hopping the bus to work and eating lunch...and then to hear of the murderers being called "martyrs", to see their deeds painted in heroic light, and to listen to a Paletinian spokesman condemning "Israeli aggression"...I end up wondering not at the continuing "cycle of violence" (with the feet on the pedals being, so far as I can tell, exclusively Palestinian), but at the fact of Israel's continuous restraint.

I've always believed in space exploration and colonization, but it's things like this that make me almost agree with George Carlin when he dismisses the notion with the sarcastic rejoinder: "Yeah, I'll bet the rest of the Universe just can't wait for us to show up."

Now that 2002 is gone, it's time for my yearly recap of my film music collecting activity over the past year, concentrating on the best new things to enter my collection. In past years I've posted this article to the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.movies, but this year I am inflicting it upon the blogosphere.

Disclaimer Number One: I have always believed that seeing the film is not essential to enjoyment and appreciation of a film score. Good film music should be good music first, and good music by definition can stand alone.

Disclaimer Number Two: This is not a summation of film scores for films released in 2002, but a summation of film scores I acquired in 2002, no matter what year the film came out.

:: John Williams, 2002. I always start my summation with Williams, because he is the composer who launched my fascination with film music that began in 1980 when I used my allowance, saved over a number of weeks, to buy the double-LP of the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back. Williams is the composer to whose music I most often return and whose work I still most anticipate, although I now feel that he is on the back side of a remarkable career. Of course, that is a statement that requires qualification: it sounds bad to say that a baseball player's average has dropped thirty points over the last five years, but if he was hitting .387 five years ago, that means he's still hitting pretty well.

Williams opened 2002 by conducting the premiere performance of his theme for the 2002 Winter Olympics, at the opening ceremonies, on his seventieth birthday. That's a hell of a way to spend one's birthday, to be sure, and Williams's entire 2002 had that same whirlwind quality, with no fewer than four new film scores appearing, along with several new releases of his concert works and the news that he is composing an opera commissioned by Placido Domingo. I haven't yet heard Williams's score to Minority Report, but I've heard good things about it. His newest score is Catch Me If You Can, which is enjoyable if light; Williams was a jazz musician before becoming a classically-motivated film composer, and that jazz knowledge comes into play in Catch Me…. The score album is entertaining, and the score sounds like a hybrid of Williams's typical sound and the sound James Horner applied in his score to Sneakers.

Less successful is his effort for the second Harry Potter film, for which he had a collaborator. I did not buy the CD; instead, I listened to the album via a streaming audio that AOL provided before its release, and I found it overly reliant on the themes from the original film (themes that I never found all that compelling to begin with) and some new material that sounded recycled from earlier Williams scores, such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The best Williams score this year, and perhaps the best film score of the year as far as I have heard (although there are some highly-regarded ones that I haven't heard yet) is Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Williams doesn't break much new ground here, but he begins to blend the sound he developed in the 1990s – primarily with scores like Nixon -- with the sound of the classic trilogy, with fascinating results. The main contribution of this score to the Star Wars musical world is the love theme for Anakin and Padme, a ravishing minor-key variation on his original Star Wars main theme. The score's action music is also wonderful, although it's taken me a long time to decide that I do, in fact, like it. There was some consternation in film music circles when the film's final third turned out to be mostly scored with music tracked in from Williams's score to The Phantom Menace, but this didn't bother me that much – the music, as used, worked well (except for one notable use of Yoda's Theme at a point when such makes no dramatic sense at all). That said, I do wish that the film's final battle scenes could have been completed in time for Williams to actually compose new battle music, but the compromise brokered here is not remotely the disaster that many film music fans think it is.

I should also mention an old Williams score that saw new, and much deserved, light this year: his score to the 1970s horror film The Fury. This brooding, scary music is excellent work indeed from Williams's greatest period (the late 1970s and early 1980s), and this score, combined with his Dracula and some of the darker cues for Close Encounters of the Third Kind make me wish he would get to score another full-fledged horror film.

:: I had another good year for collecting the filmscores of Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, who is best known for his scores to Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful anime films. I missed out, unfortunately, on seeing Spirited Away -- it only played here for a week, and we simply couldn't get free that week to see it. Grumble, grumble…and wait for the video. I did get the score album, though, and it is a delight, full of Hisaishi's wonderful ability to combine a Japanese folk sound with Western orchestral colors. The other Hisaishi scores I acquired this year are Kiki's Delivery Service, which has a lot less Japanese color (appropriate to the film's setting in an unnamed European city) and the Symphonic arrangement of his score to Laputa: Castle In the Sky. (It’s a common practice with anime-related filmscores to have multiple releases, one featuring the actual music tracks from the film and one featuring a rearrangement of the film’s music into longer suites, called "symphonic albums". These symphonic albums are always welcome, but the OST albums are not to be discounted. Where money is not a factor, a listener is well-advised to acquire both.) Both Kiki and Laputa are treasures. Most of Hisaishi's music is only available on fairly expensive import CDs (Spirited Away is a welcome exception), so collecting him involves something of an investment. But I've never spent the money on a Hisaishi score and not felt I was getting my money's worth.

(News this week is that Hayao Miyazaki is already at work on another film, which means another Hisaishi score sometime in the future.)

:: The other huge name in film music today is Jerry Goldsmith. I found his newest score, Star Trek Nemesis, to be a huge disappointment, and I enjoyed delving in Goldsmith’s past more. An expanded edition of his wonderful score to the Ah-nuld SF flick Total Recall came out this year, and it’s a highly enjoyable effort, both exciting in its action parts and evocative of the "sense of wonder" that is SF’s most important, but also most elusive, quality. Goldsmith's more important achievement this year, though, was his weathering of a fairly serious illness.

:: Important work continues on restoring and releasing the classic, and sadly neglected, film music of yesteryear. In many cases, the original tracks are being unearthed in the vaults of the major studios – the ones who care about such things, anyway; some studios are apparently totally uninterested in such things, and are allowing the tapes to dissolve into that vinegary sludge that old magnetic tapes become – and remastered for the digital age. The best such release, from my point of view, is Miklos Rozsa's score to the Biblical epic, King of Kings. Other Rozsa releases this year include the original tracks to Ivanhoe (the music to which was done admirable service in a fine rerecording by Intrada a few years back) and Lust For Life.

Where original tracks are no longer available, a secondary possibility lies in making a new recording entirely with a modern orchestra from the original score. Rerecordings sometimes take a back seat with film music collectors, but if film music is good music and ergo can stand alone, then it follows that, like classical music, film music can stand up to different interpretations by different conductors. Rerecordings are also frequently the only way to make the music available to modern audiences, and are especially valuable on that basis. I don't own the recording yet, but I have been told that the new Chandos recording of the film music by great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the finest such recordings to come down the pike in some time. I look forward to getting this one.

Rerecordings, though, like recordings of classical works are not always perfect. My biggest film music disappointment of the year was in the recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold scores conducted by Andre Previn. Korngold's music has long been near-and-dear to my heart, with its brilliant orchestrations, sweeping melodies, blazing fanfares and excitement evident in nearly every bar. Sadly, Previn leads the London Symphony Orchestra in a bass-heavy recording that blunts the impact of Korngold's great brass writing, and he selects tempi that are invariably too slow to allow the music to really take flight. Most unforgivably, Previn omits the male chorus ("Strike For the Shores of Dover") from The Sea Hawk, an omission that makes absolutely no sense. The nearly thirty-year old rerecordings of this material made by conductor Charles Gerhard are still the gold standard here. Previn is a great conductor, and he has a great deal of Broadway and Hollywood experience as well as experience on the classical podium, so the lackluster results of this recording are all the more mystifying. The album is technically proficient, but almost totally lacking in fire, which is the essential quality of Korngold's music.

:: Film music took something of a back seat for me this year as I turned my attentions to bolstering my classical collection – something that was aided and abetted by my inexplicably-delayed introduction to the Naxos label. Classical music has always formed the center of my musical life, but in recent years it had taken a secondary position to film music. This year, though, I became more interested in longer musical works with a concentration on structure and form, which are typically the two areas least well-served by film music. The most notable additions this year to my film music collection in 2002, apart from the ones already listed, are:

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Howard Shore. (I'll have much more to say about this one once I've seen the film.)
Possession, Gabriel Yared.
Gigi, Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics).
The Warsaw Concerto and other Piano Concertos from the Movies, a Naxos collection.
Powder, Jerry Goldsmith.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Alan Sylvestri.
The Rescuers Down Under, Bruce Broughton.

:: What film music events are in the future that I'm looking forward to? Rerecordings of scores by Dimitri Tiomkin, for one. At the end of 2003 we'll have Howard Shore's completion of his work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, when The Return of the King arrives. I'm not sure what John Williams has in the offing; it would depend, I suppose, on whatever Steven Spielberg is working on. We're still two-and-a-half years from hearing Williams's final excursion into the galaxy far, far away in Star Wars Episode III. And the biggest film music event for me, in the short-term, is the reissues this coming February of all of the scores from the James Bond films (up to GoldenEye), some of which – most importantly, On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- will be expanded releases containing music long unheard except for in the films.

The year 2002 was pretty good for me, in terms of film music. I'm looking forward to more good things in 2003.