Reality and Historic Movies

Movies based on real events are often nominated for Oscars. These are always fictionalized accounts of actual events. People know this but they still expect the movies to be accurate. This has become an issue, this year.

Three nominees are based on real events and all have their own controversies. Zero Dark Thirty shows torture producing results which critics say was not the case.

The big controversy in Lincoln is with the Congressional vote on the 13th amendment which abolished slavery. Connecticut is shown with a split vote (with the names of the people voting against changed to protect their families). Actually, the state's delegation was solidly in favor of the amendment. The vote was changed in order to introduce drama. This is not an important change although people from Connecticut are miffed. Since the movie boasted about its accuracy down to using one of Lincoln's favorite jokes and the sound of his watch ticking, there is an expectation that things were kept as accurate as possible.

The biggest offender was Argo. By the end of the movie the Iranians realized that American Embassy staff members were loose and sent a scary-looking squad to capture them. The pursuit includes police cars chasing a jetliner down a runway. There is also a hold placed on the operation by the President which almost leaves the embassy staff members trapped. All of this was added in order to add suspense to the end of the movie.

I say that it is the biggest offender because the other changes are invisible. You have to have detail knowledge of the actual events to know that anything was changed. In Argo I kept thinking, "This couldn't have happened." When the changes are so over-the-top that the audience starts questioning them then they have gone too far.

Who can create?

Recently the head of the School Board of the State of Ohio got into trouble after she used her private Twitter account to compare the current initiative at banning certain weapons to Nazi Germany disarming its citizens. This caused an uproar that lasted weeks. People insisted that she as comparing President Obama to Adolph Hitler and demanded her resignation. They felt that private anti-Obama views disqualified her from holding her job.

Think about that for a moment before I move on.

That brings me to DC Comics and Orson Scott Card. DC is coming out with a new series of comics about Superman designed to tie in with the upcoming movie and Card is the writer. This has become controversial because Card is a leader in the crusade against gay rights in general and gay marriage in particular.

I am not going to defend Card's views. His views on gays seem 50 years or more out of date. The big question is if these views disqualify him for his job. The activist group All Out thinks so and has started a petition drive to have him fired.

As far as I know, none of Card's views are included in the stories. The controversy is not over the work he is doing for DC, it is over the right of someone to hold views that some group finds offensive.

DC has taken what I consider to be the proper view:

As content creators we steadfastly support freedom of expression. However, the personal views of individuals associated with DC Comics are just that — personal views — and not those of the company itself.

This is important because as polarized as current society is, virtually everyone holds views that others find unacceptable. A writer that All Out approves of would be unacceptable to the organization that Card is on the board of. As long as writers refrain from preaching, I don't really care about their personal views.

At the same time, I don't like it a bit when they do preach. I think that does a disservice to the reader.

Even there, I will make exceptions when it is obvious going in that a certain point of view is going to be pushed. A few years ago Marvel re-imagined the Rawhide Kid as a gay cowboy. It was all tongue in cheek with lots of innuendo and in-jokes. Anyone who looked at the cover knew what the content was going to be and had no excuse for objecting. The same goes for DC's new Occupy-inspired comics.

On the other end of the spectrum, around three years ago an issue of Captain America implied that the Tea Party is unfriendly to minorities. That was uncalled for.

My point is that readers have to allow creators to have a variety of opinions and creators need to give the same respect to their readers.

The Battle of Hoth

Wired has a series of articles on Star Wars including a detailed look at the Battle of Hoth which takes place in the first part of the second movie (officially labeled the 5th movie) The Empire Strikes Back. Wired has lots of criticism about every facet of the battle. A lot of it is unjustified if you make one assumption - Darth Vader was not there to destroy the Rebel Alliance, he was there to capture Luke.

Before I look at Vader's side I want to spend a moment defending the Alliance. Wired comes down hard on them but they were poorly-equipped. They had to make do with whatever they could get their hands on. So their first line of defense was to hide on an obscure planet. Their only backup was a force field that would give them enough time to evacuate if discovered. even then the, force field had to be dropped long enough for ships to get through so they had to accompany this with fire from an ion cannon. Sub-optimal but it actually worked.

On to Vader.

Wired's first complaint is that the Imperial fleet came out of hyperspace too far away to surprise the rebels. Maybe, or maybe they didn't have any choice. There is a good chance that gravity wells (planets) disrupt travel through hyperspace so they had to keep their distance. Han alluded to that in the first (4th?) movie.

Once there, Vader's forces found the force field waiting for them so they landed a ground force to take care of it. This force suffered heavy losses - 2 walkers lost out of four or five but accomplished its mission. Given Vader's disregard for his own men, this is in character.

While the ground assault was going on, Vader seemed uninterested in the rebel fleet passing by him. Why? Because he could sense that Luke was still on the planet and Luke was the real objective. That is why Vader led the assault personally instead of blasting everything from space.

As it turned out, Luke was one of the last off of the planet but he was also in a tiny, hard-to-detect ship.

So Vader turned his interest on the Millennium Falcon. Why? There are two possibilities. One is that he sensed Leia. She was his daughter. He might have mistaken her for Luke, at least for a while.

More likely is that he had a vision in which the occupants of the Falcon would lead him to Luke. Luke had a similar vision of Han and Leia.

At some point between the first and second movies Vader realized that Luke was his son. It was mentioned in one of the prequels that there are only two Siths at a time so Vader must have been planning to turn Luke and overthrow the Emperor. At the same time, the Emperor must have been planning the same for Vader. Maybe it was the Emperor who realized who Luke was and sent Vader after Luke. Regardless, the driving point of the movie was Vader's pursuit of Han and Leia which he knew would bring Luke to him. If you keep this in mind then the battle of Hoth seems quite reasonable.

The Microsoft Surface and OS/2

In the early 1990s, IBM had a great alternative to Windows called OS/2. One big problem with Windows at the time was that one program error could crash everything. OS/2 was much more resilient. It was also a more advanced operating system since Windows, at that time, was an add-on running on top of command-line DOS.

Back then DOS had a limit of 640k RAM. There were several ways to get around this. Most games ran from DOS and it seemed like each one had its own way of bypassing the 640k limit. This meant that every time you wanted to play a game you had to boot your PC from a floppy disk with the proper memory drivers on it.

OS/2 fixed all of that. You could run Windows program or command-line DOS programs. Most games ran fine without any need to reboot.

In fact, this was its fatal flaw - it ran everything else so well that no one bothered developing native OS/2 applications. I used OS/2 for a few years but I only used one native program - something called Golden ComPass which worked with Compuserve. I paid for my Compuserve access by the minute. Under DOS or Windows, I had to stay connected to read messages. With Golden ComPass, I could fetch all of the new messages at once then read them off-line and write my replies. Then it would batch the replies. It worked great.

When Microsoft introduced Windows 95, there was no longer any perceived utility in using OS/2. Windows 95 offered a single memory model so everyone could launch their games from Windows instead of DOS. It had other enhancements including built-in networking which OS/2 did not have.

OS/2 was quickly left in the dust.

Microsoft has forgotten the lessons from those days. It just introduced an emulator that will let people run Android apps on their new Surface Pro tablet. That means that no one will bother to develop native Surface apps. And that will be that.

The Hobbit the second time around

We went to see The Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey for the second time over the weekend. Both my wife and I thought that it is a better movie the second time you see it.

The first time I saw it I was distracted by the additions to Tolkien's plot. A number of scenes were added that are alluded to in The Hobbit, suggested in the LotR appendix, or simply made up whole. The second time through I knew they were coming and could appreciate how they added to the overall story line.

It also made it easier knowing where the movie was going to end. The novel is one continuous narrative. Looking back at the first movie, I can see that there are some natural breaks. The escape from the Orcs is one. Not long after this Gandolf goes his own way and Frodo, now armed with the Ring, suddenly becomes the one the group depends on for rescues from tight spots. The next break will probably come after the company makes it through Murkwood and escapes from the elves with the final movie covering their time at the Lonely Mountain and the War of the Five Armies. In the book, a great battle was fought at the same time further south and the Necromancer driven out (and into Mordor).

My wife found it easier to keep the characters straight, especially the 13 dwarves.

All of this makes the movie seem much shorter. It kind of flies along the second time when it seemed a little sluggish the first time.

Comic Book Marriages

Very few comic book characters get married. Even fewer stay married.

Probably one reason for this is the conviction that comic book readers are too young to relate to someone married. This may have been true in the 1950s and 1960s when the average reader was still young enough to think that girls had cooties. During this period, women were a distraction. Supposedly Superman cared for Lois Lane but his relationship with her largely consisted of him hiding his identity as Clark Kent from her. On Lois's part, it was obvious that she only cared about Clark if he was really Superman.

There were a few exceptions. The biggest one was Reed Richards and Sue Storm. They actually got engaged, married, and had a kid. That last part is probably what kept their marriage together. They have had problems. Sue left Reed for a while in the early 1970s. In the 1980s, Reed was accused of child molestation but eventually proved innocent. He "died" at one point and it was months before he came back. At another point Sue seemed to marry Doctor Doom but it turned out that this was Reed in Doom's body.

There have been several high-profile marriages. Superman and Lois Lane, Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson, Cyclops and Jean Grey, The Hulk and Betty Ross all come to mind. None of those lasted.

Superman's marriage was wiped out of existence in one of DC's many reboots.

Marvel tried for years to undo Spider-Man's marriage. First they decided to bring back a clone who had appeared in one issue in the 1970s (in a plot that most people hate). The idea was that it would turn out that the Peter Parker we knew was the real clone. He would lose his powers and go off to a happy ending with Mary Jane. That idea was scuttled in internal politics but they were already committed to the clone story arc. So, for several months, the clone took over the books but no one's heart was in it. It was obvious that they were just marking time until Peter was brought back as the real Spider-Man.

After that, Mary Jane left Peter and for a while was assumed dead. They had a reconciliation only to have their entire marriage erased by a deal with the devil that Peter made in order to save Aunt May.

Cyclops married both Jean and her clone Maddie (not at the same time) but they later broke up and Jean ascended to a higher plane or something.

The Hulk's alter-ego married Betty in the 1980s and they stayed married for a long time until her sudden death. She was resurrected but maintained that her death and his subsequent marriage amounted to an annulment.

Most other comic book marriages have ended badly.

The Sub-Mariner's bride, Dorma was killed at their wedding.

Henry Pym (Giant Man/Ant Man/Yellowjacket/ etc) had his first wife killed by communists during the cold war. He eventually married the Wasp (who looked like his first wife). They split up for several years and reconciled before she was killed.

The Human Torch married the Thing's long-time girl-friend Alicia. It turned out that she was an alien Skrull.

The Vision married the Scarlet Witch and had twin boys. They later broke up after it turned out that their children never really existed and after the Vision's artificial brain was rebooted.

The Black Panther married Storm but later had the marriage annulled.

Supporting characters Ned Leeds and Betty Brant were married for several years but Ned was killed.

Prior to marrying the Hulk, Betty Ross married Glen Talbot but Glen was killed.

Things are not any better at DC.

Barry Allen/ the Flash's wife was killed. He was killed later.

The Elongated Man's wife was killed. He was killed later.

Wonder Girl married her boyfriend. They later broke up. Later, her continuity was changed and that version of Wonder Girl never existed.

Both the Golden Age and Silver Age versions of Hawkman and Hawkgirl/Hawkwoman were married. This was written out of the continuity.

Oscars - the animated movies

The nominees for best animated feature film this year are: "Brave", "Frankenweenie", "ParaNorman", "The Pirates! Band of Misfits", and "Wreck-It Ralph".

I haven't seen Wreck-It Ralph. I have seen the others. All are worthy of the nomination and reminiscent of the days when the live action Best Picture Oscar nominations went to entertaining movies instead of depressing art house releases.

There were five animated nominees instead of three. It looks like animation is here to stay. Only two are full CGI movies. The other three were mainly stop-motion animated with some CGI added.

Of the ones I have seen, ParaNorman stands out. Frankenweenie was good and the funniest of the group but it had a slow start. Because Tim Burton directed it, it is the most likely to become a cult classic.

There was nothing wrong with Brave but it didn't stand out as much as a Pixar movie usually does. It felt more like a Disney princess movie than a Pixar one. It would make a great double feature with Tangled (which was one of Disney's best).

Pirates was fun but it took a while before the plot really got off the ground.

I still think that Arthur Christmas and TinTin were robbed last year. Watching Arthur Christmas again this December confirmed this. It should have won the Oscar and it didn't even get nominated.

Books and EBooks

Kathleen Parker has become the latest to bemoan the rise of electronic media over print. Like many, she has a sentimental attachment to ink on paper.

Paper, because it is real, provides an organic connection to our natural world: The tree from whence the paper came; the sun, water and soil that nourished the tree. By contrast, a digital device is alien, man-made, hard and cold to human flesh.

Yes, paper is organic although books are printed on paper that is mostly cotton, not wood fiber. Raising cotton stresses the environment. So does ink. I keep my ebook in a nice cover that feels like real leather and is much nicer than a glossy paperback cover and has much less impact on the environment.

Parker believes that real paper adds to the reading experience.

One can read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" on a Kindle or an iPad, but one cannot see, hear, feel and smell the story in the same way. I'm unlikely to race to the sofa, there to nuzzle an electronic gizmo, with the same anticipation as with a book. Or to the hammock with the same relish I would with a new magazine. Somehow, napping with a gadget blinking notice of its dwindling power doesn't hold the same appeal as falling asleep in the hammock with your paperback opened to where you dozed off.
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude from a paperback. I don't remember much about the texture or smell of that particular book but around that time many science fiction books were printed using a very low-cost method. The pages smelled bad and often came loose from the binding as I read. Sometimes it was a single page that came out. Sometimes it was a whole section. Yes, it did add to the sensory experience but not in a good way.

My wife still mainly reads printed books. When she falls asleep with one she loses her place. That doesn't happen with my ebooks.

As I have said before, the important thing to me is the content. I don't read because I love fondling pieces of paper. I want the easiest access to the actual words. Right now I am alternating between a novel and a non-fiction history of Marvel Comics. I have both on a 7" tablet (a Nook Color) and I can switch between them painlessly. If I was reading the printed editions I would be carrying two books around, one of them a heavy hardback or trade. And I can read them in a larger font on a brighter surface than a printed book. If I find myself waiting at the doctor's I can use my phone to pick up reading either one without losing my place.

Another important factor is availability. Parker mentions One Hundred Years of Solitude which was written around 40 years ago. How many other books from that period are still in print? And how hard is it to find them? There are several writers from early 20th century whose works I like but are not in print. Sometimes they are available through the library. Many of these are available for free through Project Gutenberg. I've read several novels that way and availability will only become easier as more books are converted to electronic format.

It doesn't matter how nice the feel of a book is if you can't get a hold of it. Conversely, if I hear of a book I can start reading it in minutes electronically.

There is nothing special about paper. It was the only technology available for centuries. Now other options exist.

Get used to it.

The End of Spider-Man

In Amazing Spider-Man #700, the hero dies and the comic book is cancelled.

Of course that's not the end of it. It's actually Doctor Octopus who dies but manages to transfer his mind into Peter Parker's body, essentially killing and replacing him. Instead of an issue #701, they will have a new comic - the Superior Spider-Man.

We all know that eventually things will go back to the status quo. Nothing has changed in Spider-Man since the 1970s. We thought that it had but the demon Mephisto wiped out 30 years of continuity.

Besides, killing or crippling a hero and replacing him is so 1980s. It's already been done with Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern (multiple times) and (ahem) Spider-Man.

Reportedly there have been death threats over this plot line. Why bother? As soon as they have enough material to fill a graphic novel or two they will put things back like they were.

Personally, Spider-Man has been dead to me since they rolled back the continuity five years ago.

The Hobbit

Fans of the novel The Hobbit may be disappointed to know that the movie of that name is not exactly an adaptation of the book. Yes, the movie features Bilbo Baggins and 13 dwarves (which Tolkien later admitted should have been spelled "dwarfs") but the movie goes beyond this and expands on every reference made to contemporary events in the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings.

These changes were inevitable. There was a lot of pressure to expand the project from one movie with a cut-down plot to two. Add in the desire to link this more closely with the LotR movies and you get the final product.

The result works pretty well. The movie did drag in a few places, mainly because I was wondering exactly where it would break off. The LotR has several natural breaks but the Hobbit is one continuous narrative. That means that the producers had to arbitrarily divide it up. I'm sure that it will flow better on future viewings.

There is a lot of foreshadowing that was not in the Hobbit but implied by the appendixes. That is fair since we know more than Tolkien about the results of this quest.

The tone is lighter than the LotR which matches the book. The scenes with the three trolls and with Gollum have laugh out loud moments. The movie is also lusher. Hobbiton and Rivendale look bigger and more detailed. Gollum is even more realistic.

Martin Freeman eases into the character of Bilbo so easily that you forget that he shares the character with Ian Holm.

About the only change I didn't care for was the addition of a one-armed orc as a sworn enemy of Thorin.

Lincoln and 1776

The movies Lincoln and 1776 are very different in tone but they make interesting bookends to a chapter of American history.

1776 is a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It follows the months from the original motion to declare independence to the signing of the document. It was adapted from a stage play so the action takes place on a few sets and location shots.

Lincoln is a drama about the passage of the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery. It runs from early January, 1865 through Lincoln's assassination. It was adapted from a non-fiction book. The movie goes to lengths to appear to have been shot completely on location with natural lighting.

Both movies take a few liberties with history but strive to accurately show the behind-the-schemes maneuvering that went into these events. Some of the best lines in 1776 are actual quotes and care was taken with the script for Lincoln.

In both movies the tone is fairly light considering the subject matter. Both have a good deal of humor. Both of them also have a message about the horrors of war. 1776 has a soldier singing a mournful song about the dead on a battlefield. Lincoln begins with a gory (and slightly over-the-top) battle followed by some soldiers relating their experiences to Lincoln himself. There is also a scene at a hospital for soldiers with mangled legs.

In both a vote that seems impossible finally comes together at the last minute.

1776 shows the beginning of America and makes it clear that we would not have existed as a nation if the free states had not accepted slavery. Lincoln shows the struggle to bring that chapter of history to an end.

They would make an interesting 4 of July marathon.

Windows 8 - XP or Vista?

The initial press on Windows 8 has been negative. Some of it very negative.

More recently there has been some push back, reminding people that Windows XP also got some initial bad press. Obviously, XP overcame the initial problems but after twelve years, three service packs and innumerable hardware upgrades, XP seems rock solid.

Compare that with Windows Vista. Vista also got a lot of bad press when it came out. After a service pack and a new set of drivers it became stable but it already had a bad reputation. It was also a memory and CPU hog at a time when the big thing was low-end net books that could not run XP.

So, where does that leave Windows 8?

It has a lot of problems and most of them relate to the user interface. They can probably be fixed with a service pack but in the meantime it has the reputation of being hard to use and of removing functionality.

It doesn't help Microsoft that businesses are still running out Windows 7. It will be a couple of years before most businesses seriously consider Windows 8. Microsoft might have Windows 9 out by then. At minimum, they will have a service pack or two out.

It is possible that Microsoft will continue to push Windows 8 long enough to iron out its many problems. By most accounts, the underlying operating system itself is very fast and stable but Windows 7 is also fast and stable. The issue is in the user interface and Microsoft's goal of having one interface for PCs and tablets. If they abandon that goal then there are no other issues with Windows 8. If they continue to make a workstation act like a touch-screen then the complaints will continue. Dredging up old articles will not affect this.

Black Friday

According to Wikipedia, the term "Black Friday" originally came from Philadelphia and referred to the crowded streets and stores. This was before 1961 which means before shopping malls. Back then most people shopped at downtown department stores and they got really crowded the day after Thanksgiving. Parking garages filled up and there were long lines to check out. Back then, many big stores did not have individual cash registers. Instead the clerk put the payment into a cylinder and stuck it into a pneumatic tube that took it to a central accounting department. They processed the payment and sent it back in a different tube (this inspired the tubes in Futurama).

Other dates may have more shoppers, but the effect would not have been as bad since the Black Friday shoppers were sharing roads and parking with office workers.

The term "Black Friday" became common by the mid-1970s. Stores, especially chains, started having day-after-Thanksgiving promotions in the 1980s. The current fad for being open all night or on Thanksgiving started then. I think that is when stores started having door-buster sales where they would have an item at a very low price in very low quantities in order to get people through the door (and sell them an upgraded model).

The current usage of "Black Friday" is an example of folk entomology. Someone assumed that the term was a good thing because of all of the business the date brings in. So that person guessed that this was date represents the profit margin for the year - the date that a store goes from losing money (in the red) to making money (in the black).

Many stores make their profits from Christmas sales. Most men receive electric shavers as gifts instead of buying one so Christmas accounts for most of the profits for companies like Norelco. For other companies, Christmas provides a boost in off-season sales. But, there are not many companies that can point to a specific day that they went from the red to the black.

Also, that concept only works when you take the year as a whole. The same thing happens on "tax freedom day" in April. That day represents how much of the year you worked for the government. After that you are working for yourself. Except, of course, you get your pay with taxes withheld on a regular basis.

What is new this year is the frenzy to expand Black Friday. Some stores declared that every Friday in November was Black Friday. Others began leaking their Black Friday specials early or made the entire month Black Friday.

Personally, I'm not going near a retail establishment today.

Argo

People who want to see a movie about real espionage should give a pass on the new James Bond movie and go to see Argo instead.

In November, 1979, a mob of Iranian "students" broke into the US Embassy and took the staff hostage. Minorities and women were released fairly quickly in the hopes of starting an American civil war (this part is ignored in the movie). The rest of the staff was held hostage for 444 days, finally released just as Ronald Reagan took his oath of office.

But a half-dozen members of the embassy staff got out before they could be taken hostage. Eventually they got out using Canadian passports. What was not generally known until until now is that the CIA was heavily involved in creating a cover story for the embassy staff. How this was done is the plot of Argo.

This is a movie where none of the Americans are even shown with a gun. No one is shot (at least not by an American). But, it still has more suspense than a half dozen Bond movies. It also shows the CIA in a good light, something very rare for a Hollywood movie.

The movie is also a great period piece. Most of the actors were chosen to look like their real counterparts including the big glasses and heavy mustaches that many men wore.

The Iranian revolution came before cell phones and the internet were ubiquitous so, even though I can remember hearing reports about the violence at the time, it is still a shock to see it brought to life.

I have one quibble with the movie and it comes in the first minute. A prologue states that the elected government of Iran was overthrown and the Shaw put in power because the elected government had nationalized oil production and was giving the profits back to the people. This is ridiculous. It was the Cold War and we supported a pro-American government over a Pro-Soviet one.

Anno Dracula

Yesterday was Bram Stoker's 165 birthday (or would have been if he was still around). This seems like a good time to talk about the novel I am re-reading - Anno Dracula by Kim Newman. This is a revised re-issue of a book that came out 20 reads ago.

The novel takes place in 1888 in an alternate timeline from Dracula. In this version, Dracula survived Van Helsing and company and went on to marry Queen Victoria. By the time the novel takes place, vampires are not only accepted, they are fashionable. They also run the country. England is not exactly a paradise. People who object to the new regime are rounded up and taken to a concentration camp called the Devil's Dyke. To advance in society, you really need to be a vampire. So many people are becoming vampires that bloodlines have become polluted and most new vampires are twisted and unlikely to live very long.

On top of that, Jack Seward (from the novel) has gone crazy and is killing vampire prostitutes under the name Jack the Ripper. This threatens the already-fraying social fabric of London.

Charles Beauregard, agent of the Diogenese Club is sent to investigate. He is aided by Geneviève Dieudonné, an elder vampire who eternally looks sixteen. Along the way we find that multiple characters have their own conflicting agendas. Even the Diogenese Club is playing a deeper game than just sending an agent to solve a crime.

The depth of the novel is amazing. Wikipedia has a list of all of the fictional and historic characters who appear. Some of them are less than a cameo. Early on Lord Ruthven (from The Vampyre, the first vampire story written in English) gives a list of other elder vampires and why only he is suitable to being Prime Minister. Other characters are given major supporting status. Even Geneviève is taken from some of Newman's other works.

Dracula himself is more of a presence than an active character. He only appears in two scenes - a flashback to the night that Mina Haker became a vampire and a scene near the end of the novel.

The novel led to two sequels with a third planned for next year.

Disney and Lucas

The headlines say that Disney bought Star Wars and go on to talk about the new Star Wars movies. There is a lot more to the announcement than that.

While Star Wars is the best know part of the Lucas empire, ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) is more important. This is the world's premier special effects facility. They have been involved in nearly every groundbreaking special effects achievement in the last 25 years has come from ILM. They did the first morphing (Willow) and the first computer-generated character (an animated stained glass window in Young Sherlock Holmes).

ILM was created as part of Star Wars. Lucas originally planned to send the movie out to a special effects facility and was amazed to find out that no such entity existed. So he founded one. At first he was paying people who were moonlighting from Disney. The word in the industry was, "Working for George Lucas is a lot of fun but you'll never get rich doing it."

At first they were just Lucas's in-house facility but they broke out in 1981 with Dragonslayer. They have been part of nearly every major franchise including Star Trek, Harry Potter, Back to the Future, the Mummy, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Avengers (and Iron Man). Some of the most memorable Best Picture Oscars depended on ILM, movies such as Forrest Gump and Titanic. Disney has a long relationship with ILM going back to Dragonslayer.

ILM also beat out Disney's Pixar for Best Animated Movie with Rango.

The purchase also includes Skywalked Sound which is a major recording facility for movies.

What about the Star Wars franchise? Consider this - the two best out of the series (The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) were written and directed by someone else.

Pixar, the Avengers, and the Muppets all continued without being "Disneyfied" so there is no reason to think that Disney will pressure Star Wars to change.

Mockingbird Lane

Previously I expressed skepticism about the reboot of the Munsters. After viewing the pilot, NBC apparently decided to pass on the series but showed the pilot as a Halloween special.

Mockingbird Lane, as the series was renamed, turns the original premise on its head. In the original show the characters looked like classic Universal monsters but acted like regular people and seemed unaware that they were unusual. They thought of themselves as being a normal working-class family and many of the plots could have been rewritten for normal shows.

In the new show, the Munsters know that they are unusual. One of the plots involves Herman getting up the nerve to tell Eddy that he is a werewolf.

Herman looks fairly normal except for all of the scars. Unlike the original, he is smart. He goes through hearts so often that his chest has a zipper. Another of the plots involves getting a new heart for Herman.

Lilly is a sex symbol (rather ironically since the actress who plays her is gay). She still worries that when Eddy was born she wanted to eat him instead of nursing him.

In the original series, Grandpa looked like a vampire but acted like a mad scientist. In the new series he is a vampire who has been obtaining in order to set a good example for Eddy. He has decided to start drinking again and decided that Eddy's scoutmaster would be a good place to start as well as a potential heart donor for Herman. He also bakes cookies infused with his blood so that he can enslave the neighbors.

Eddy wants to be normal and is very upset when Herman finally tells him that he is a werewolf.

At one point Grandpa and Marylin are explaining the cycle of life to Eddy. They are in a hunting blind, watching a deer and explaining about the deer dying and fertilizing the ground for the next generation of deer. Then a cougar kills the deer.

"Does anything kill cougars?" Eddy asks.

A giant, winged creature swoops down on the cougar and Marylin answers, "Sometimes Grandpa does."

The show is expensive and stylish but it is also violent with a dark side that was never in the original. Given the production values, I doubt that NBC could have made money on it. They probably spent more on the special effects for the pilot than on the entire original series.

Comic Book Ghosts

It's Halloween, a date associated with ghosts. Here's a quick survey of ghosts in comic books.

The most prominent comic book ghost is Casper the Friendly Ghost. He started out in film shorts but I know him best from Harvey Comics, the same people who published Richie Rich.

Casper was portrayed as an oddity among ghosts. Most ghosts want to scare people but Casper wants to be friends. Of course, people are inevitably scared when they realize that he is a ghost. While the movie explained that he was, indeed, a dead boy, the comics skirted this issue. Ghosts seemed to be just another class of supernatural creature.

Casper had a large supporting cast who often stared in solo stories. These included the Ghostly Trio - three older, larger ghosts who loved to scare people, Spooky the Tough Little Ghost who wore a derby and had a Jersey accent, Nightmare the Ghost Horse and Wendy the Good Little Witch who had her own version of the Ghostly Trio.

There have been a few ghosts in super hero comics. The most important of these is DC's Specter. There have been numerous versions of the Specter. In the Golden age he was a powerful super hero. He returned in the Silver Age and seemed to be able to pull powers out of the proverbial hat. In these versions he was the ghost of detective Jim Corrigan but he had used his powers to revive Corrigan so the two were separate beings. The Specter needed to rest in Corrigan's body but otherwise they went their separate ways.

In the 1970s the Specter was recreated. In this version he and Corrigan were the same being. Corrigan would investigate murders. When the murderer was found, he would become the Specter and take horrific vengeance in the name of the murdered.

In the 1980s the Specter became the embodiment of good (or something like that), and nearly all-powerful. After Green Lantern Hall Jordan went crazy and tried to destroy the universe, he spent a while doing penance as the new Specter.

DC's other ghost couldn't be more different from the Specter. This was Dead Man, an assassinated trapeze artist who came back as a ghost to find his killer. Dead Man was invisible and immaterial. He could only interact with the physical world by possessing people. Dead Man stories were hard-edged and realistic. Ironically, Neal Adams drew both the Specter and Dead Man at the same time.

DC also had a villain called the Gentleman Ghost who was a real ghost.

As far as I can remember Marvel has had very few ghosts. Many characters have returned from the dead but most return to life instead of becoming ghosts. Marvel is full of supernatural characters like the Ghost Rider who is not a ghost.

I can think of a couple of exceptions, both one-shots. Mephisto, the embodiment of evil, wanted a surrogate against the Silver Surfer and used the Flying Dutchman.

The World War I aviator, the Phantom Eagle, was killed and came back as a ghost complete with a ghost biplane.

Other comic book companies have used ghosts as heroes. Independent publisher Black Horse had a character named "Ghost" who was a detective who returned from the dead. She wore tight, white pants and a top that was cut low to show lots of cleavage. She had a long headpiece like a veil that suggested a ghost's sheet. She carried a pair of black pistols in a white holster. Her stories tended to be very adult.

A more traditional ghost superhero was Nemesis who appeared in the Silver Age. He was a detective who was killed by a gangster. The person currently serving as the Grim Reaper (the guy who sends you onto Heaven) had been killed by the same gangster and sent the detective back as a superhero. Nemesis wore a red top with an hour glass on it, striped trunks, gloves and boots, a short hood and a domino mask. He only lasted a few issues.

Halloween Movies

Here are a few great movies for Halloween:

Hocus Pocus - After 300 years, three notorious witches return to Salem, Mass. to suck the life out of children so that they can live forever. Over the top performances by the witches. Plus a zombie and a talking cat.

ParaNorman - This one just came out a few months ago. The plot has similarities to Hocus Pocus with a completely different resolution. Filmed in stop-motion.

Sleepy Hollow - Just about any movie by Tim Burton counts as a Halloween movie but this one revolves around a super natural murder mystery. The Horseman is Burton's scariest creation. He is an unstoppable killing machine. This movie is also notable for restarting Christopher Lee's career. His cameo in this movie reminded directors that he was still alive and working and led to his roles in Star Wars and Lord of the Rings (and in the upcoming Hobbit).

Any Christopher Lee vampire movie - The Horror of Dracula, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, The Scars of Dracula, The Brides of Dracula. They all feature Christopher Lee as the remorseless Count driven on revenge. Plus an extra helping of blood and cleavage.

Son of Dracula - This underrated movie is the best of Universal's Dracula movies. Lon Cheney jr. plays the count's son who is also a vampire. The plot is off-beat. The female lead becomes a vampire and the hero goes crazy.

Fright Night (the original) - A teenager who watches too many horror movies realizes that his next door neighbor is a vampire. After the vampire notices him he goes to an aging horror actor for help.

Face-Off - Season 3

Face-Off is the one reality show that my wife and I really like. It is a contest to choose the best make-up artist.

There are several attractions. The principle one is the level of talent involved. These people create fantastic makeup-jobs.

One thing that my wife likes is the interaction between the contestants. They help each other. They offer each other advice. This happens every season. My wife watches some cooking contests and she says that in those shows they would probably disqualify a cook for helping someone else, even if it ever occurred to them.

Most of the show is about the creative process instead of the interaction between contestants. Previous seasons had a bit of friction between contestants but that was never the point of the show. Instead we get artists going confident to anxiety. They second guess themselves. There is obviously a lot of stress. Doing well on this show not only means a big cash prize, it can also open industry doors. This is their chance to move up from doing make-up for haunted houses to movies (the first season winner worked on Hunger Games).

The level of the guests has changed. In the first couple of seasons they had actors. Now they get producers and directors.

The judges seem to be spending more time mentoring the contestants.

The caliber of the contestants has improved, also. The first two seasons had several people whose makeup was bad. That happened very seldom in the third season (with the exception of the first episode).

The show is down to its finale. I had expected Roy and Laura to be finalists. I was close. Roy was the last to be eliminated before the final challenge.

Of the finalists, we have Laura who has the strongest track record of any of the artists, Derek who has won some competitions but has also come close to being eliminated, and Nichole who actually was eliminated and allowed to come back (I'd love to know how and why the producers decided to bring back someone). This is the first time a woman has made the finals and I will be surprised if one of the women does not win. Personally, I'm rooting for Laura since I picked her as the likely winner in the second episode.

The show will have a two-part finale starting on October 30 and ending with a live vote on Halloween.