On Starbuck remaining human — and alive, or
Have You Scriptwriters Completely Lost Your Minds??
postscript appended and reposted 5-6-2007 5:41 p.m.
original post 5-5-2007 11:56 p.m.

I heard a rumor the other day — afterwards seemingly 'confirmed' by reading online posts — that on of my favorite fcitional characters on SyFy's reboot of Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck, is the fifth and final previously unknown Cylon model. The fact that she appears to Apollo at the end of the season finale (or was he hallucinating, like Baltar the mad scientist?) is supposed to make the matter clear. I understand that even Ron Moore has confirmed this (forgive me for bringing it up at this late date, but I only recently saw a tape of the finale, not having functioning cable myself).

Another bombshell in a show loaded with them, you say. Nope: just a bomb, as in dud. In fact, for the first time since the series began, Moore has made a really dumb error (if, indeed, the rumor is true). How unexpected and disappointing that in searching for a final twist for the episode, he should go for a solution so trite, superfluous, and, if you think about it, predictable. He’d practically telegraphed it. Bo-ring …

How much more interesting, though, if poor Starbuck were to return and still remain human, only to be disbelieved. Feared. Spurned.

Discovering The Fountain
posted 12-11-2006

 
Darren Aronovsky’s film The Fountain was meant to be an indie film. This, despite the fact that big studios were involved early on during nearly ten years’ worth of attempts to make the film, attempts that always fell through for one reason or another, until Aronovsky decided to make it on his own. That meant giving up all the resources that connection to a major studio might provide, including costly special effects and computer-generated imagery. In the end, Aronovsky returned to his indie background in order to get the film made, and the film is better for it.

Remarkable. That’s the first word that occurs once one has seen it.

Raw. Powerful. Provocative. Moving. It’s all that. The editing is so tight and artless that it’s invisible – the flow feels completely uninterrupted. The casting is precisely right: you’d never guess that Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz weren’t Aronovsky’s original choices for the lead roles. Weisz seems born to have been Izzie. Jackman is a revelation: you realize as you watch him that you really didn’t know him before, that you didn’t know he had this in him. And that he’d been wasted in everything he’d done before this. Ellen Burstyn is pitch-perfect in what could have been a throwaway supporting role. In fact, everyone is pitch-perfect. No one sets a foot wrong; there’s not one extraneous gesture, not one wrong word anywhere. Even the sets and locations hit just the right note in atmosphere.