to the Batcave

Perhaps the best place for me to be this week is in an honest-to-goodness cave. Where else can I go to avoid the hype surrounding the new Batman movie? With all the publicity I've seen so far, until yesterday I really thought "The Dark Knight" was opening tomorrow (or tonight at midnight). There's actually another week to wait. Or more if it's sold out on opening day.

Christian Bale and Heath Ledger were on the cover of the Entertainment Weekly that came in the mail last Saturday. There's a review of the movie in the Time magazine with Mark Twain on the cover. I had to take my wife's advice and stop reading it when it started to reveal more about the film than I want to know. She knows how I can be. When I'm really looking forward to a movie, I'll watch and read too much about it. "Get Smart" was a disappointment for me because I had seen all the best jokes in the trailers.

To a certain extent, I can't help it. Batman stuff is everywhere. Today on the Knoxville Blog Network, I saw an interesting entry from The Screening Log about the Bat Signal in Manhattan. In my on-screen satellite guide I saw a listing for a show on History called "Batman Unmasked: The Psychology of the Dark Knight." I set it up to record.

The aforementioned Entertainment Weekly had a Batman reference that didn't spoil anything. Under the heading "Even the Darkest of Knights Shines Brightly on Blu-ray" was a near-silhouette of Adam West as Batman standing on a Gotham rooftop. It was an ad for the Blu-ray edition of "Batman: The Movie." I enjoyed the connection between the old and the new. By the way, when Adam West appeared on the "Today" show recently, it was to promote that same Blu-ray disc.

It's clear that Christian Bale is the best Batman since Adam West. Oh alright, Bale is the best Batman since Kevin Conroy, who was the best Batman since Adam West.

the bad, the good and the promising

After seeing "The Happening" this past weekend, I wasn't particularly inspired to write about it. An hour into the movie, people were laughing at parts that weren't meant to be funny. On the plus side, I think it might play better on HBO or DVD. All the hype about it being M. Night Shyamalan's first R-rated movie seemed overblown to me. One or two quick edits probably would have brought it back down to PG-13.

Another movie I saw over the weekend was a pleasant surprise on DVD. "Dan in Real Life" was much better than I expected from the marketing campaign. Neither the TV commercials nor the theatrical trailer did it justice. There's a scene at the end of the trailer that wasn't even in the movie. The part where Dan panics as his daughter pulls out into traffic turns up in the DVD extras. Forget the trailer. All you need to know is that Dan inadvertently meets and falls for his brother's new girlfriend right before she shows up at a family gathering. Except for one cliched pratfall off a roof, the jokes are original and very enjoyable. Steve Carell plays Dan. An understated Dane Cook plays his brother. Don't let your Dane Cook preconceptions get in your way. A radiant Juliette Binoche plays the woman in the middle.

Meanwhile, Steve Carell has been all over TV tonight in the commercials for "Get Smart." My wife and I are still planning to see it this weekend, probably on Sunday.

hoping for the movie

TV Squad is showing the love to "Arrested Development" this week. I just spent 22 minutes watching one of the episodes they featured in their Retro Squad department. They started on Monday with a review of the pilot and continued with a top ten list of recurring characters and the top five GOB moments.

I can get in the mood for the Bluths pretty easily. "Arrested Development" was a frequent blog topic of mine back in 2005. I often flip over to HDNet to catch a commercial-free rerun at 12:30 p.m. in high definition. Even if I turn it on late, I can jump right back into any of the complicated plotlines.

The other day I revised my Amazon.com wish list. I replaced the separate entries for the DVDs of each season with the complete set. It's more cost-effective to buy all three seasons together. With the episodes available on Hulu.com, I may not need the DVDs but I still have an urge to collect them.

not the pooch!

The new mini-series on the Discovery Channel has my inner child counting the minutes until the next episode. I am loving "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions." They have lots of NASA film footage that I've never seen before. And it's all been remastered for HD. The two episodes that were on this past Sunday covered the Mercury and Gemini missions. Like most people, I am primarily interested in the Apollo flights, which will be featured next Sunday.

There seem to be relatively few commercial breaks, unless you count the whole show as an ad for the DVD set. Maybe if you buy the set, you won't be subjected to the promotional announcements on the bottom third of the screen. At least once the graphic obscured something important in the show. A military helicopter was struggling to rescue both Gus Grissom and his Liberty Bell 7 capsule. The NASA footage showed the helicopter trying to lift the water-filled capsule. Near the climactic moment, the spacecraft was behind a big blue bar promoting the Discovery Channel's mobile phone website. Lame.

If you missed the first two episodes on Sunday, you can get caught up on Saturday.

ridin' the whip

The opening weekend crowds didn't deter us from going to see "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" yesterday. It may not be the best in the series but it is certainly not the worst either. I think it's just as good as "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." The new movie is a feel-good thrill ride that hits all the points you would expect. The plot twists didn't surprise me but they didn't disappoint me either. From big ants to atom bombs to UFOs, it is filled with nods to science fiction movies of the 1950s. Many of reviewers who had no problem with the supernatural elements of the first three movies found the plot of this fourth movie to be far-fetched. Without giving too much away, it shouldn't shock anyone that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are big believers in space aliens. They probably read "Chariots of the Gods" back in the '70s too. I thought it would have been funny if the creature in the body bag at the beginning of the film looked just like E.T.

I went to my TiVo to see what Roeper & Phillips (a/k/a Not Siskel & Not Ebert) had to say about the latest Jones saga. Unfortunately some basketball game ran late and WATE joined the show in progress. Naturally, Indiana Jones was the first movie they reviewed, so I missed it. The episode is still not on their website as I write this. For what it's worth, I think Michael Phillips should get the job as Roger Ebert's permanent on-camera replacement, even if he didn't like "IJatKotCK." There is a review of "The Last Crusade" in the Siskel & Ebert archives. I didn't expect Gene Siskel to give it a thumbs down.

After watching the new movie yesterday, I tried to think about how it compared to the first three. That's when I realized that I had absolutely no recollection of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." The synopsis on IMDB.com didn't help either. Thuggees? Doesn't ring a bell. It's like I have amnesia. I'm positive that I saw "Temple of Doom" in a theatre. I'm pretty sure that it was a midnight screening on the day it first opened. Did I fall asleep? Last night after dinner we popped in the DVD of "Temple of Doom." It was really bad. No wonder I had blocked it out. Did you remember that "Temple of Doom" was a prequel to "Raiders of the Lost Ark"? I didn't.



My friend Richard Cheese sent an email plugging his version of the Indiana Jones Theme, now available on iTunes. I heard it on his MySpace page. The instrumental tune sounds like something from the soundtrack of "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

My matinée ticket cost $6.50 at West Town Mall, 25 cents cheaper than a ticket at the Pinnacle at Turkey Creek. Evening tickets cost two dollars more at each place. An article in the Kansas City Star points out that many theaters raise their ticket prices on Memorial Day weekend. An executive at the AMC Theatres chain said that their most recent ticket price increase was due to the rising cost of corn. Corn! An executive with Regal Cinemas says that movie tickets would cost $20 if not for the concessions. I don't buy popcorn and therefore I don't mind that high concession prices help keep my ticket price lower. But I don't want my ticket price to go up just to keep the popcorn price from rising. It's a double standard, I know.

now batting, number 16...

The Washington Nationals will be in New York to play the Mets on Thursday, April 17. That morning the new Nationals Park will open its doors at 6:30 a.m. to 45,000 fans who are not expecting to see any baseball. Instead, the Pope will be in center field on the day after his 81st birthday.

Yesterday my brother-in-law sent out an email urging everyone in our extended family not to buy tickets to the Papal Mass. They're supposed to be free. He may have seen a recent Washington Post article about the event. Here's a quote from it:

Plans for distributing tickets have not been completed. In the past, tickets to major Catholic events have been distributed through parishes and Catholic organizations.

The archdiocese has been asked whether non-Catholics can attend (yes) and whether the Mass is part of the Nationals baseball ticket package (no).

The archdiocese is trying to keep the free tickets from popping up on eBay and falling into the hands of scalpers.

The Mass "is for the faithful who want to be with the Holy Father," [Archdiocese spokeswoman Susan] Gibbs said. "It shouldn't be an opportunity for people to make money."

The popemobile -- a specially designed automobile used by the pope during public appearances -- will be used to transport the pope into and around the stadium.

Although I can't make it, I've heard that some local Catholics are planning a bus trip to D.C. for the day. Back when I was in college, I went to a Papal Mass celebrated by John Paul II in Philadelphia. Afterward, we stood outside St. Charles Borromeo Seminary and waited for the Pope's motorcade to arrive so we could get a closer look at him.

My friend Bean went to the Vatican in September. While he was there, he bought me a couple of very thoughtful Christmas presents. I am now the proud owner of a Papa Benedetto XVI candle and a 14 episode DVD set titled "Discovering the Vatican," produced by Telewizja Polska. Fortunately for me, the discs have an English audio track in addition to German, Italian and Polish.

the adventures of ottoman

Fortunately the negative review by Tom Shales didn't discourage me from watching "Pioneers of Television" on PBS the other night. The episode about sitcoms has been airing throughout this week. I took it at face value and found it to be enjoyable.

The clips from "I Love Lucy" and "The Andy Griffith Show" were okay. The scenes from "The Dick Van Dyke Show" made me want to watch more often, like I did with "The Beverly Hillbillies" a couple of years ago. According to my TiVo listings, nobody is showing the reruns at this time. The clips showed Laura Petrie to be the perfect wife, fun and flirty. By coincidence, the scenes were from two episodes that my perfect wife received on a cheapo DVD for Christmas. Those will have to do unless I want to either invest in the boxed set or download individual episodes at $1.99 each.

Next week's "Pioneers" is about late-night talk shows. I found a couple of web-only clips on YouTube featuring Dick Cavett and Betty White each reminiscing about Johnny Carson. The remaining two episodes are about variety shows and game shows. Sounds like must-see to me.

a little mad sometimes

This is going to sound like the setup for a meme, even though it's not. What was the first DVD you ever bought? Go ahead and post your answer in the comments. About nine years ago I chose one of the all-time classics, "Psycho," as my first disc. At the time I didn't have a DVD player but I had just gotten a DVD-ROM drive for our family computer. I loved the idea that technology had progressed to the point where I could keep a permanent copy of one of my favorite movies. It wasn't on a tape that could get erased or on film that could decay. This was a digital video disc with Hitchcock's masterpiece converted to bits and bytes, preserved forever in plastic.

Last week Perry Simon posted a link to an interesting blog about the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs. The author points out that consumers have resisted replacing their DVD collections and are mainly buying only new releases in the new formats. Like most people I am in no rush to buy a machine in either format. I already made that mistake years ago when I bought a Betamax VCR.

Cut to the present day. My son has to do a presentation on movie villains for his speech class. The other students in his group are covering Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter. My son is reporting on Norman Bates. I told him a few things that I remembered about "Psycho" from the Intro to Film class I took when I was his age. My high school teacher, Mr. Naversen, took us through the famous shower scene frame by frame, being careful not to melt the film on the projector bulb.

We got my copy of the "Psycho" Collector's Edition DVD from its cool, dry place and placed it into the fancy Onkyo DVD changer that we got last year. The machine couldn't read the disc! Then we tried it in the Sony DVP-NS50P in our family room. Still nothing. As a last resort, we put the disc into a couple of laptop computers to no avail. What on earth could have happened to this nine-year-old disc that made it unreadable in all my machines? I tried cleaning it with a soft cloth but that didn't make any difference. Has the technology changed? Is my "Psycho" obsolete? Why won't it work and what can I do about it?

not bird nor plane nor even frog

Many great cartoons have been made into bad live-action films. You can probably think of three or more right off the top of your head. I want to hate the new "Underdog" movie, I really do. Jason Lee's voice is ideally suited for "My Name is Earl" but not for the nerdy Underdog and Shoeshine Boy. The cartoon version was perfect as it was. Since I was in the mood to hear Wally Cox again, I used my TiVo to search for some old episodes but couldn't find any.

My nose was turned up in haughty disapproval at the first trailer for the "Underdog" movie. Now my head is tilted like a curious dog when the newer trailer comes on. The reason for my increased interest is the rock cover version of the "Underdog" theme used in the trailer. I don't know if the song is by the B.H. Surfers or not (I think that's what the band was called on the old WHFS) but it is somewhat similar to their cover of the tune, which was on a 1995 CD called "Saturday Morning Cartoons' Greatest Hits." A YouTuber has taken the Surfers' song and put it with clips of the classic cartoon. While I was on YouTube, I found several episodes of the old show to satisfy my "Underdog" jones. Or I suppose I could just pre-order the DVDs.

first day of the rest of your life

After a long day yesterday, I took today off. Completely off. It was great. I didn't have to leave home at all. Instead, I went for a swim and then read most of the new issue of Entertainment Weekly. It features the list of 100 stars they love right now. I also gave the TiVo a rest and watched a couple of DVDs that have been on my stack for a while. They both looked great on the plasma screen even though they contained footage from a time before anyone had dreamed of that technology. First I watched highlights of the New York Mets World Series victories in 1969 and 1986. Then I popped in a disc of lost episodes of "You Bet Your Life," a show that went off the air a week after I was born. I remember watching reruns of Groucho's show when I was in seventh and eighth grades. Finally, I turned on the computer to look for Mass times and to search for any Roadside America attractions along the route of a trip we are planning for later this summer. Oh and best of all, I had a slice of leftover cake with lunch.

goes on sale today (hint, hint)