Slowly Going Bald

So, I'm in Memphis one weekend my senior year of college, because when you attend a private religious university in the middle of the Texas desert, driving 650 miles one-way to spend less than 3 days walking Beale Street and eating pork barbecue makes sense. I went with a friend and his fiancee, which was a whole other barrel of awkward that will not here be addressed, but the point is that I was with Friend and Fiancee at the grocery store one night procuring some drinks, and as we wandered the refrigerated aisle looking for the happy medium between price and quality, we were approached and engaged in coversation by a pretty hyperactive little guy.

He was about 28, black, maybe 5' 7", glasses, a short-sleeved yellow-plaid-based button shirt. Maybe cargo pants. It was a while ago, and you should be impressed I remember that much. I'll be honest, at the time we assigned him a hypothetical nickname that we found hilarious and was used in running jokes for at least a year, but I've forgotten it, and will make no attempt to re-create one. So what the hell, call him Willy.

So Willy comes up to me and Friend and Fiancee, and asks us if we're partying that night. Then he guides me over to the Schlitz and says, "This is it, son, this is panty-dropping stuff. You drink this and their drawers be off." Something to file away. Thanks, Willy.

Then he looks at me through the fog of semi-drunkenness, since he was obviously voted most sober at his party and tasked with making the beer run, and he notices that I'm sporting some pretty substantial sideburns (college), and gives a little jump back and says, "You look like my boy, you know ..." and here he holds up his fists and makes a couple of "shink-shink" noises, "from X-Men..." and he just kind of stands there.

"Wolverine?" I ask.

"Yeah, yeah!" Man, that made his night. "Wolverine!" Then he drops his voice into what could only be considered a conspiratorial tone and says, "You be poking Storm, right?" Then he spins around a couple times (he's still got his fists up, by the way), apparently as happens when Wolverine and Storm get freaky.

My friends and I slowly sidle away. Willy checks out at the cashier next to us, and walks out behind us to the parking lot and asks for a ride. We politely decline as we book it over to our car, though we can still hear him calling after us, relentless as Michael Myers. In our haste to leave Willy in the parking lot, we ran right over the curb.

Lessons:

1) If you're drunk, I look like Wolverine.

2) Memphis is well worth visiting.

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"'We'll worry about that tomorrow.' We said that yesterday."

Clickety-click.

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The 10 Worst Blockbusters of All Time

The Notorious Bettie Page

The Proposition

An Inconvenient Truth

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Let it be known at the start that these trifling thoughts in no way constitute a full review of X-Men: The Last Stand, henceforth referred to as X3 for the sake of brevity and because it's just less pretentious. I did the same thing after I saw Mission: Impossible III, mainly because I know enough about J.J. Abrams and I just wanted to throw some stuff out there. So if you want a big, regular review, look elsewhere.

• The film was visually pleasing, so that's something. But the effects were perfunctory, not once jaw-dropping or engaging or arresting or anything you'd expect from a superhero film of this magnitude.

• X3 was so poorly structured as to be laughable. There was absolutely no drama, no tension, no build, no arc, no character dynamic. Not a thing. The film ended with a supposedly climactic battle at Alcatraz, but there was no sense that things had been building to this point, merely that the scenes had stumbled along with a minimum of grace and skill to get us to the final fight.

• Kitty Pryde is a great character, and Ellen Page is a talented actress who certainly looks the part. But it's a shame she never had much to do with the film series up to this point. Page is the third actress to play Kitty, after Sumela Kay in X-Men and Katie Stuart in X2. In Ratner's film, Kitty at least gets a few lines, though she doesn't do a lot besides flirt with Iceman, which is annoying for several reasons, mainly (1) Ice Guy has been hung up on the slutty but untouchable Rogue for two movies now, and (2) Kitty is supposed to be with Colossus. Which is a good segue:

• In what could be the weirdest change from the first two films, the character of Colossus is now an American dude named Pete, not a Russian guy named Peter. Why this change was made escapes me. And also, seriously, Kitty should stop flirting with Iceman.

• No spoilers here, so don't worry. But I will express my disgust that more than one major character was killed with the kind of cavalier manner that suggests both Ratner's inability to tell a story with the remotest semblance of competence and his lack of understanding of how to effectively utilize characters. George Lucas once callously said that anyone could manipulate the audience just by showing a kitten onscreen and then having someone break its neck. But Ratner doesn't understand that having a canonical, integral character mutter five lines before getting utterly disintegrated by a villain is just a boneheaded thing to do. Trust me, it's possible to kill a briefly used character and make it an emotionally resonant moment for the audience. Not to mention that having one of the X-Men — not just a random mutant, or even a student at Xavier’s academy, but a full-on member of the team — choose to give up their powers by taking the scientifically developed "cure" for mutancy is stupid and weak and pathetic and pick your own adjective.

• Ratner seems to be pandering to the fanboys by introducing more and more classic characters. After all, who doesn't want to see Beast onscreen? And I will concede that the casting of Kelsey Grammer for that role is beyond inspired; therefore, I'm obviously curious how much a role Ratner played in that decision. But more characters means less overall development, which is one of the main reasons there's no tension or story. It's all but impossible to do anything with a main cast of 13 mutants, surrounded by a host of others, in 1 hour and 45 minutes. And to the naysayers who would complain that I'm an idiot for asking for some kind of character development in a superhero movie, (1) shut up, and (2) it's possible. Very possible.

• The real hell of it, the real kick in the nuts, is how great X3 could have been. The story line about a cure for mutancy has its roots in the surprisingly good cartoon from my childhood and Joss Whedon's run of recent "Astonishing X-Men" stories. There's a great possibility here to talk about rights, and prejudice, and government's control over citizens it might deem different. There could have been a real nuance to the story, too: It's not just mutants vs. humans, or good guys vs. bad. All the mutants want freedom, to be able to live without fear of discriminationor extermination, and it's how far each one is willing to go to achieve that freedom that determines whether they're "good" or "bad." There's not really a clear line between the two; they exist at either end of a continuum, a sliding scale ruled by your willingness to compromise yourself for the pursuit of your goals. But, well, Ratner doesn't have the faintest glint of any of this. He has no idea just how close he came to telling a truly epic story. And that's the biggest disappointment.

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"Cowboys do it till you get rope burn."

"Christians do it with an overpowering sense of guilt and shame."

"BBQ cooks do it with spatulas."

"Small-town residents do it with a dull-eyed stare of ennui as if they've realized the pointlessness of their existence."

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That pic's mainly for my dad, who's developed a near pathological crush on Evangeline Lilly, despite her early work. Anyway, there you go, Dad. It's gonna be a long summer of reruns, so let the photo tide you over.

As for the rest of you, I know you probably weren't even able to sleep or urinate or eat or do anything out of sheer anticipation of my knee-jerk, off-the-cuff reactions to last night's second-season finale of "Lost." Well, ask and it shall be given unto you.

• When Desmond, in a fit of drunken rage (the best kind), told Locke that there's nothing left but the island, he referred to it as a "snowglobe," which I couldn't help think was a thinly veiled reference/jab to "St. Elsewhere," the events of which were all inside some autistic kid's head while he played with a snowglobe. I'd say it's the writers telling us that such theories are bunk, and that the whole show isn't happening inside Hurley's head or something, which would be beyond stupid.

• Last night's episode was merely the last one of the season, whereas the first year's climax was a full-blown finale: The stakes were higher, they packed a lot more action and plot into two hours, and the parallelism of the cuts between the castaways boarding the plane before takeoff and watching them blow open the hatch were heartbreaking.

• The Dharma Initiative is shaping up to be this show's version of Milo Rambaldi. For those who didn't watch "Alias," Rambaldi was a 15th-century inventor whose prophecies unfolded on the show and whose writings influenced the show's overall direction, writing, story lines, etc. Depending on how the "Lost" showrunners handle it, Dharma could be very cool, like Rambaldi, or very bad, like Jenna Elfman.

• How depressed am I that I actually made that Elfman joke.

• Speaking of "Alias": The shift "Lost" seemed to make last night, away from the castaways as subjects and toward the story of Dharma and the island, could in time be seen as the moment the show decided to reboot its main focus, and its future success will be judged on whether viewers are willing to accept that. In the middle of the second season of "Alias," the good guys won, and I'm not talking a minor victory; I mean they beat the huge syndicate of villains, the Alliance, they'd been fighting all along. They took down SD-6, the local cell run by Arvin Sloane, as well as every SD outpost around the world. Halfway through the second year, the show abruptly changed from Sydney's efforts to take down SD-6 while living a double life to her attempts as a CIA agent to pursue the now independently evil Sloane, and the rest of the series hinged upon whether this switch was pulled off efficiently (it was) and whether it was a good idea (not completely). By abandoning the show's original conceit of double agents, double lives, and the pursuit of justice via vengeance, "Alias" lost most of the energy that had kept it going, so that by the end of its third season, it had run out of emotional and creative steam. Case in point: The fourth-season finale involved Russian zombies. So while it's possible that "Lost" could survive such a creative realignment, if indeed that's what happened last night, whether such a move would be wise won't be made clear until next season. Offhand, though, I'd say it's a bad idea.

• Eko was pretty stupid to think that dynamite would open the blast doors. They're called blast doors for a reason, man. Crazy priest.

• First Locke, then Rousseau. Now Desmond Hume. I get it, okay, guys? I get it. You took Intro to Philosophy. I get it. But knock it off. There hasn't been a forced mishmash of supposedly relevant philosophy this bad since the Matrix films, and we all know how those turned out.

• So the plane crashed because it was sucked down by the electromagnet? What's the point of having all the characters know each other from before the crash if the accident was Dharma-related, i.e., didn't involve them at all?

• There are now two shows trying to co-exist within the same space: The first involves Dharma and the hatches and Desmond and the electromagnetic clusterf**k that wrecked the plane, not to mention the multi-layered sociological experiments that were performed there. The second show wants to make use of the fact that the castaways all had tangential relationships before the crash, and that something pretty spooky and otherworldly is going on with the island, see for example the island's ability to restore Locke's ability to walk, Walt's natural psychokinetic abilities launching off the charts, the fact that everyone seems to have pretty relevant dreams about ghosts and/or the future, the whispering voices in the woods, the duplicitous Others, the black sentient cloud of whatever that flies around and at one point had a stare-down with Eko, etc. I like the second show.

And just like last year, I'll have a solid four months for my questions to be answered. ABC is supposed to air the first seven or so episodes this fall, then break, then air the rest. Here's hoping they stick to that, since the uneven repeat schedule this year was annoying. And here's hoping that J.J. Abrams gets back in the saddle to do some writing and directing. He should bring back David Fury, too. "Lost" promised to be a great show, and it was, and it could be great again. Just not the way things are going.

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I walked down the hall to get a soda from the machine, which is right next to the men's room, which I always thought was weird, since the last thing you want to smell as you stand there waiting on your Dr Pepper to drop is the foggy remnants of all those anonymous office dumps.

So I put in my 75 cents to get a DP (drinks are 65 cents, which is unholy, but whatever), and I reach down to the hepatitis-infected slot to grab my dime when my finger finds a whole little treasure trove of silver down there. I pulled out almost a dollar in change. Either (1) somebody/-bodies used a dollar each time to purchase two drinks and didn't collect their change or (2) somebody stuck in a dollar, which the machine ate, and they walked away mad, at which point the machine, sensing victory, returned the dollar in coin form.

Either way, it was a windfall for me. Winning the vending machine lottery like this has been in the back of everyone's mind since middle school, when we'd put in money and push two buttons at once and, on rare occasions, actually get two drinks for the price of one.

I don't know who used the soda machine before I did, but I've got your change now, sucker. Good luck getting it back.

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Two quick points, and, well, you know:

• It's time once again for The Pajiba trade round-up. We spent all week putting that together for you people, so enjoy it.

• Maybe Desmond's in that boat that started cruising toward the island right as Hurley was getting all weepy over the still-warm corpse of Libby (who would never sleep with you, dude, so this kind of separation was probably inevitable). At any rate, it's kind of a relief to see the slope-eyed and definitely testicularly enhanced Michelle Rodriguez gone from the show. And I'm glad Sayid is still smart. But man oh man, tonight's finale has nowhere near the interest going in as last year's, which had the hatch and pirate ships and kidnapped babies and dynamite and all manner of goodness. I'll still watch tonight, though. I must obey the inscutable exhortations of my soul, for those who know what I mean. I just have to watch.

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Coworker #1: Sports-related question?

Me: Sufficiently sports-related answer using detail cribbed from Bill Simmons.

Coworker #1: General approval of response.

Coworker #2: Arcane and rapid-fire question about baseball?

Coworker #1: Equally obscure statement of agreement, displaying casual use of facts I do not know.

Me: Joking attempt to steer conversation back toward basketball game currently being televised!

Coworker #1: [Blank stare.] Grudging acceptance of same.

Coworker #2: Another baseball question?

Me: [Silent wish for Coworker #2 to trip and fall and break something and die.] Extremely vague baseball statement, demonstrating a solid grasp of the basic rules but nothing more. Attempt at casual mention of DH. Woeful misstep.

Coworker #2: [Glance at Coworker #1.]

Coworker #1: Derisive comment about my sexual orientation and/or ability to physically satisfy a woman.

Me: Laughing acceptance of same.

[Game ends.]

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As I watched this the other night, I knew right away that the voice-over from NBC Sports had been lifted from an old Sam Seaborn speech. And sure enough, Jon Stewart tore into the guy.

Lessons:

1. Don't steal huge chunks of prose from other writers.

2. Don't steal from popular TV shows.

3. Don't steal from popular TV shows on your own network, you tard.

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"Ride me, cowboy."

"Let's go do it in the tent."

"My backside's all sore from the constant gay sex."

"We should use our jobs as ranch hands as a cover to fool our wives and escape to the mountains for illicit gay sexual escapades every few months."

"Blowdown at the OK Corral."

"Let's go to the rodeo … the ass rodeo."

"I wonder if the boss will fire us if he finds out we're doing it."

"That's one gay mustache."

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A note to Adelphia Cable Co., the faceless entity upon whom I rely for TV and Internet service and which has proven itself to be on occasion pretty stupid:

Perusing the cable listings on Friday afternoon, I saw that Crash was airing on one of the dozen or so HBOs I get (which is awesome). I highlighted the program to read the little info box you guys work up for movies, mainly out of curiosity/indignation/resignation that whoever writes these little blurbs gave the film a four-star rating. So I hit "Enter" on my remote to tune in, hoping I was just in time for that totally awesome scene. You know, the one where that guy figures out he's kind of a racist. That one.

Anyway, to my surprise, I was greeted not with the image of Sandra Bullock crying and hugging her maid (right), but by shirtless and scar-chested Elias Koteas, who was working himself into a sexual frenzy photographing an accident scene while James Spader drove them slowly by a pile of wreckage.

So, I guess what I'm saying to the programmers at Adelphia is this:

Crash and Crash are two very different films. Try not to mix them up.

Also, while we're at it, you keep mixing up The Rookie and The Rookie. English is a fairly limited language, and from time to time you're bound to find multiple films with the same title. Don't get confused, fellas. This is turning into scheduling anarchy.

That's all.

Thanks,

Daniel Carlson

P.S. Try to keep the Internet service from messing up. It's really annoying. Thanks. -DC

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I don't think at this point that I need to remind anyone of my geek-level fandom/love for Aaron Sorkin. There are already other clips up for his new show, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which has received a 13-episode pickup for NBC this fall, but this one's the longest. It's worth putting up with the crappy video and out-of-sync audio to get a glimpse of the show.

It's good to see Judd Hirsch as the angry producer, since Sorkin actually pictured Hirsch playing the role of Leo McGarry, who was originally called Leo Jacoby. And of course Bradley Whitford and Timothy Busfield are practically contract players for the guy at this point; Busfield even directed a few episodes of "Sports Night." All that to say that it looks like Sorkin is at least playing to his strengths. It's also my sincere hope that one of the characters is a Jew from New England who sees a therapist about dealing with the death of a sibling. That's pretty much a Sorkinian standard.

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I know you've all been just positively torn apart these past two weeks without another of my self-indulgent reviews to read. Well, take heart, constant readers, for I have returned from the Key City (mostly) unharmed and once again implore you:

Clickety-click.

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The mind reels.

Thoughts:

• This was undoubtedly brought on by the rise of pseudo-performers like the uber-creepy David Blaine, who at first seemed to have struck a deal with Satan himself to perform some pretty wicked sleight of hand but who has since devolved into a non-magician, e.g., standing on a pole or hiding underground and refusing to escape. I mean, the guy makes it a specific point not to escape or do anything dazzling; it's basically found magic. So the increasing popularity of found magic must have been what pushed Copperfield into the sad little stunt captured in this video.

• Carson Daly is a truly terrifying human being.

• I know that fire is hot and all, but Daly says that they're pumping cold air into the chamber, which is how Copperfield is able to do the trick. He's telling us how the trick is done. True, it's not much of a trick, but still, it totally kills the mystery, and Daly says it with the same dull-eyed cheer he used back in the day on "TRL." Moron.

• This had to have been brought on not just by Copperfield's waning popularity in the face of Blaine the Dark Prince but also the fact that Copperfield's personal life turned into a festering craphole. He was engaged to Claudia Schiffer for a while, though she left him in 1999, and I'm inclined to believe the speculation that he was paying her because it's never a good idea to box above your weight class, and that was one freakishly mismatched pair. Then again, Ric Ocasek has managed to maintain a hold on Paulina Porizkova, and that guy makes Copperfield look like a Fight Club-era Brad Pitt, so maybe Schiffer was one of those women who just really wanted money and didn't care about looks or C-level celebrity status. But the fact that she dumped him must have left Copperfield reeling, since having a supermodel break up with you on the national stage can do some substantial damage to a man's ego, even/especially if that man is a weird little magician. So it's almost like Copperfield had nothing left to live for by the time this aired in 2001, and given the rote way in which he preps for and performs this stunt, you get the idea that he wouldn't be too upset if the Tornado of Fire got out of control and ended his sad existence.

• Tornado of Fire must be capitalized. The nature of the term demands it. This is concrete.

• How is a flightsuit supposed to withstand the Tornado of Fire? Why wear a one-piece cotton jumper and jump into a flaming vortex of certain doom? You might as well douse yourself in kerosene, Dave.

• "That is one hot fire." Direct quote from Daly.

• Copperfield kind of looks like Bob Saget's handsome cousin.

• Daly tells the audience this isn't a fake tornado, but that it's been specifically engineered to be real. And the earnestness with which he says this self-contradictory statement almost makes me want to believe him.

• Do the assistants really need to be dressed as henchmen from Moonraker?

• Copperfield lasts all of four seconds in this thing before shutting it off and collapsing. His final words: "Aaaah! It's HOT!" I don't know what to say.

• Daly: "I have one word: Unbelievable." This guy could run for office.

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Do you like reading the news?

Do you like being offended?

Have you ever wished someone would figure out how to combine the two?

My friend, I bring you good news from distant lands:

The Pajiba trade round-up.

It's what Wednesdays are for (besides "Lost" repeats).

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After seven years on the air — three stellar, one amazing, one horrible, one tolerable, and one not bad — "The West Wing" took its final bow Sunday night on NBC, and I, for one, am glad to see it finally go.

The show has had its fair share of ups and downs, not to mention the most flagrant disregard for dramatic continuity in recent TV memory. Major characters disappeared without a mention: Emily Procter as Ainsley Hayes was slowly phased out in Season 2; John Larroquette as the White House counsel made only a brief appearance early on, and Oliver Platt took over the job and actually stuck around for a few story arcs; but the biggest vanishing act was easily Moira Kelly as Mandy the Annoying PR Woman, whose character was poorly defined to begin with and served no purpose during Season 1 except to help the viewer realize just how much Kelly as an actress was dragging the show down. So without a word, between the first and second seasons, she disappeared. The first year ended in an assassination attempt cliffhanger, and when the second year picked up in the middle of the action, Mandy was gone, never to be mentioned again. I can understand the showrunners' willingness to eliminate her, but come on, at least toss out a line about why she left.

And yeah, sure, the series played pretty fast and loose with time, flowing pretty steadily during its first few seasons but somehow skipping a year to get to the next presidential election, as if the producers knew they'd have to wrap things up soon. But that's just a minor symptom of the bigger problem: When creator Aaron Sorkin departed after the show's fourth season, the series suffered a dramatic drop in quality. Under the guiding hand of producer John Wells, "West Wing" started to soon look like Wells' "ER," which is to say poorly lit, full of film-student camera work, and heavy to the point of being soporific. Sorkin took the show's heart and soul when he left, and it showed.

No great show can ever sustain its momentum, and on the heels of the recent death of "Arrested Development," which still stings a little, I'm reminded of how I would have been happy if "The West Wing" had ended after Sorkin left. Actually, I would have preferred it if NBC had just looked the other way when it came to Sorkin's substantial coke habits and just let him keep running the show. Come on guys, just pretend he's an athlete. You let them get away with anything.

All that to say that I'm glad Sorkin is returning to the air with this fall's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." It's set to air on Thursday nights, right against the newly moved "Grey's Anatomy," and it's my hope that "Studio 60" is either amazing for its entire run or canceled before it gets too old. Two great seasons is preferable to five mediocre ones.

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• It's deeply unsettling to ride in a plane with propellers, i.e., a non-jet plane. I saw it pull up at the airport and felt like I was living in that scene in Major League where the team thinks they're about to board a jet but is instead shunted onto a small, rickety old deathtrap. If only I'd had Serrano to keep me company.

• Riding on said deathtrap is equally frightening. The single flight attendant, she announced to us over the intercom (though she really could have just raised her voice, it was that small an area), had been forbidden by the captain to walk around, because of the turbulence. As we began our descent into DFW, the captain told us to prepare for landing, only instead of using the airline-standard "Flight attendants, please prepare for landing," he said, "Jesseca, please get ready to land," because when you've only got one flight attendant, you might as well call her by name, no matter how much it might freak out the passengers.

• Her name really was Jesseca, with all Es, not 2 Es and an I. It's like her parents loved her enough to give her a normal-sounding name but also hated her enough to give it a brutally retarded spelling, so she'll have to correct people on the matter for the rest of her life.

• People in Texas get excited about pretty much anything; people in L.A. get excited about pretty much nothing.

• There's something in the air or the water in the middle of nowhere in West Texas that turns most of the girls there into some frighteningly hot women. And it's different than the L.A. kind of hot. Flying out of California, the woman in front of me as we boarded at LAX kept unconsciously shaking her head to show off her hair, and stood there with back slightly arched and chest high and ass slightly out, as if trying to signal to every nearby male her potential to breed. But the mix of desert and heat and decades of religiously and politically conservative ideologies in Texas adds like 19 new levels of psychic anguish to the whole ordeal, because the girls there are often known to wear the highest bottoms and the lowest tops and skip gaily through the May sun and in general destroy the central nervous systems of countless fraternity boys, but when it comes right down to it, their personalities are a mixture of a "Sorry, Bobby / Can't go past the lobby" kind of teasing disappointment and something bordering on shock that all these good ol' boys are walking around having these bad ol' thoughts about the legions of nubile coeds that seem to swarm underfoot like crickets in August. Los Angeles is a place of open sexuality, but the Key City seems to ask that those hormones be repressed, fought against, tied down, which leads to a generally palpable sexual tension in the air, sending many of the young men into alternately downward spirals of physical debauchery and self-flagellating periods of piety.

• All that to say that college is an emotionally interesting era.

• About the getting excited: This is mainly because there's not much to do in West Texas, so that social events become havens from boredom and rare chances to get all gussied up, whereas there's so much crap to do after dark in L.A. that you usually bail on it all and just stay home. It's a weird rule, but tends to hold.

• Many, many people in Texas use "Coke" to mean any kind of carbonated soft drink. It is useless to try and change their ways on this.

• Texas looks like Texas, even from the air. Some people would say that roads and trees and fields look like roads and trees and fields pretty much anywhere, and that to distinguish Texas from the air is impossible, but these people are dead wrong, and if you follow their teachings you will stray from the path of learning. Texas looks like Texas. I'm a (relatively) smart guy, so I understand the idiocy of that tautology, but there's almost no other way to define it. It just looks like Texas: Wide fields, access roads next to the highways, a kind of casual enormity to the cities that communicates the idea that the planners and residents gorged themselves on the open space around them and decided to spread everything out just for fun. It's directly against the idea you'd expect most people to have, where you would put things in a city near each other for the sake of convenience. But Texas is second nationally in land mass only to Alaska, and its citizens like their space.

• People drive slow in West Texas, and I don't mean slower than you or I or slower than one would expect, but full-on objectively slow. It's amazing. If the speed limit on a given street is 40 mph, you can bet they'll be tooling along around 36, playing it safe, enjoying the sunshine and talking about how Dr Pepper is the only kind of Coke they like. But I think they drive so slowly because they have nowhere to go, both in the immediate and meta senses. It's not just that their destination of the store or the flea market is so mundane that any sense of urgency in travel has long withered and died, but that they're past middle age and have by some unknown force of the cosmos or some truly bad karma found themselves living in West Texas with nothing to do. They don't drive so slow because they're lazy, but because they've looked into the future and seen that they have nowhere important to go. Ever.

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Over at Pajiba, we've been having ourselves a bit of a night. In what could be considered a sick joke but is really just more a gigantic headache, we've been temporarily shut down by the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, you read that correctly.

But all is not lost, constant readers, for while Dustin and the army of dwarves he employs work steadily through the next few days to restore to working order the greatness you've come to know and love from our little corner of the interwebs, you can bide your time by checking out Seth's take on the "Veronica Mars" season finale, which I think should go without saying was balls-out amazing. Seriously, if you're not watching this show, you're not watching the best teen-girl-solves-mysteries-while-dealing-with-class-issues-and-heartbreak show on TV. Some of you might think it's a little odd for a college grad well into his 20s to be wrapped up in a show like this one, but to you naysayers I say simply: Eat me. The first season's on DVD, with the just-wrapped second year hitting shelves in August. If you buy it, you just might become a better person.

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Due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control, I lived for a brief period of time with a girl named Karmen, who was Chinese and originally hailed from Canada, resulting in one of the calmest roommates I've ever had. It usually fell to me to check the mail, which was when I noticed the letters sent to her were actually addressed to Kar-Yee. In an attempt to Anglicize her name, I guess because it would be easier to get along, she'd gone with Karmen, a decision I found more puzzling every time I thought about it.

First, why change it to a name that doesn't really exist? Karmen is like Shawwn or Cyndee. The phonetics betray the fact that the names aren't real, and were probably chosen by very high or very stupid parents.

But more importantly, why just change half your name? It's not as if there are a lot of poeple running around out there names Xiangzabeth or Wongjamin or Yingtopher. Keeping half your name still means you've lost half. Just go with Karen or Jenny or something, or else stick with the original and hold that head high.

Karmen's mom visited once, and I stumbled into the kitchen one morning in my underwear to find her slicing up a fish head, which remained in our freezer for weeks.

I hated Karmen.

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Gretchen Mol. Yowza.

This is my second week in a row to review a bad movie with a knockout lead.

Clickety-click.

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Mission: Impossible III was enjoyable from the first frame, a non-stop, blistering, well-executed action movie that gave me everything I'd hoped for and not a drop more. Directed by J.J. Abrams, of "Lost" and "Alias," the film elevated the franchise above John Woo's vision of ridiculous wire-fu amid doves and flames, harkening back to the Brian De Palma-helmed feature from 1996. In Abrams' film, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) finally gets to use a team. In the first film, his teammates were assassinated in the opening sequence by the now-evil Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), and aside from the asinine move of eliminating Phelps, who could have played a major role in the films, we also lost out on seeing Ethan and his fellow agents function together on multiple missions. And the second film was just plain bad, nothing but Ethan and motorcycle tricks. I'm still annoyed that, in his final showdown with the villian in Mission: Impossible II, Ethan throws down his gun and opts to take out the bad guy using Guile's flash kick instead of just shooting the guy. Stupid.

But Abrams' film is a welcome return to form, and for "Alias" fans like myself, it's a comfortably familiar film. In the film's opening action setpiece, Ethan rescues kidnapped agent Lindsey Ferris (Keri Russell), and to get her up and running, he injects adrenaline directly into her heart. Roger Ebert thinks that Abrams is ripping off Tarantino, but (1) that's impossible, since that would mean ripping off a rip-off, and that much generational loss means it's basically fair game, since an act's appearance in a Tarantino film is its official coronation as a cliche, and (2) Abrams already used the scene on "Alias," when Sydney rescues Vaughn from K-Directorate at the beginning of Season 2 after he's been poisoned by the giant floating red ball of Rambaldi water and left behind while Sydney was briefly captured and tortured by her thought-to-be-dead-KGB-spy mother (it makes sense in context).

So when Ethan shot Lindsey's heart full of adrenaline, I wasn't thinking of Tarantino, but of how Abrams is smart enough to recycle his best tricks. And then there's Ethan's Shanghai hideout, Apt. 1406 in a run-down old building. Combining two digits and rearranging the rest makes 47, a number that figures prominently and often arbitrarily into the world of "Alias." But far from thinking Abrams a hack, I was pleased to see the arcane in-joke. Then again, I'm a geek like that. There's also an ops tech character played by Simon Pegg that's clearly modeled after Marshall Flenkman on "Alias." And Ethan spends the film in pursuit of the Rabbit's Foot, another generic but motivating MacGuffin, like the dozens that have formed the basis for various "Alias" episodes.

It's true that when TV directors make the jump to the big screen, they can often bring with them too many of the stylistic nuances of their TV shows, thus unfortunately limiting the film's broader appeal. However, Abrams manages to balance his old stuff with the new pretty well. The film's climactic battle manages to honor both, as Ethan once again takes on the bad guy, but his wife (Michelle Monaghan) does her share of damage by emptying clips into various henchmen. Abrams has come full circle, since "Alias" was born out of his musings about what would happen if Felicity were recruited by the CIA. Who else could save the day for Abrams but the girl with the gun?

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This maze game is harder than it looks. Drag the pointer to the end, but don't touch the walls. Level 3 will probably defeat you the first time through.

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Fact #47: "Pasadena" is Spanish for "Here's where we keep all the Asians."

Fact #3: In-N-Out burgers are, ironically enough, made from ground-up immigrants.

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PCU (1994)

• This is one of the first features in which I remember seeing Jeremy Piven, though the first time I really noticed him was ABC's "Cupid" (I watched a lot of weird crap in high school. Deal.). Still, by the time PCU hit theaters, he was 28 years old, playing a college senior, albeit a Van Wilder kind of dilettante. But his receding hairline and naturally older appearance make him look like anything but an undergrad, however lazy. The film co-stars David Spade as another college senior, and he's actually a year older than Piven in real life. Very old men playing very young men. Always a sign of thorough casting.

• Jon Favreau plays a stoner, complete with mini-dreads. I'm a fan of Favreau, and while I used to think he was physically cut but has since gone a little downhill as a normal part of aging, upon charting the Rudy-PCU-Swingers-Made-Elf arc, I realized he's actually a pretty stout guy who just got really in shape for Swingers so he could wear those wife-beaters. Don't be ashamed, Favs. It's okay to be big. Chin up, bud.

• Seriously, the cast is astounding: Lucille Bluth as the cruel university president. The always-frightening Jake Busey as another stoner. The one and only Pixley as the love interest. If you're looking for early-'90s B-level where-are-they-now kind of talent, look no further.

• George Clinton is the musical guest/party band. Who thought that would be remotely cool? P-Funk? How are college students supposed to relate to that? This is like an episode of "Saved by the Bell" where the kids form a band and play crappy music but try and act like it's cutting-edge stuff, but you as a viewer aren't buying it.

• It was directed by Hart Bochner, aka Ellis, Who Gets A Hole Blown Right Through His Head By Hans Gruber. This makes the movie intensely awesome on like seven more levels. Since when is Ellis a director? Too nuts.

Verdict: Oddly enjoyable afternoon cable viewing, from the guys who wrote (uh oh) Bio-Dome. And even back then, Piven talked just like Ari Gold.

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I told a good friend of mine about the following news item, and his response was, "Holy s*** f***ing cow dogs," which I guess is about an accurate and honest reaction as you could hope to receive.

Succumbing to years of public pressure, George Lucas, the flannel-clad douche who took my boyhood dreams and pissed all over them with Episodes I-III, has finally deigned to release the original theatrical cuts of the first Star Wars trilogy. The discs hit shelves Sept. 12, which will probably be soon immortalized online as Virgin Unification Day, and will be pulled from stores by the end of the year. The DVDs will include the original versions of the film and the digital orgies of self-indulgence that Lucas released in later years.

I fully support using film preservation technology to digitally clean up master prints so that movies can be kept for the future. It's a process that's been happening to paintings for a long time, and ensuring the survival of a work of art is an important process. But to use that same technology to alter the original movie by inserting new aliens or cityscapes, or to stupidly backpedal and turn your anti-hero into a spineless jerk, well, then you're making a whole new movie. The geeky kid in me wants the original films the way I saw them when I was 6 years old, but the movie nerd in me wants the original films because of their importance to the larger scale of cinema history.

A film is a snapshot of what the world or a specific country was like at the time of its release, an amalgam of what we could achieve at a certain point in time with regards to effects and writing and production and storytelling. The reason Citizen Kane is so revered is that it went technically beyond what anyone else thought you could do in the early 1940s. Similarly, Lucas' original space trilogy ushered in a new Dark Age of summer blockbusters that used A-level budgets for B-level stories, fusing the sublime and the ridiculous so permanently that, 30 years later, we're still feeling its effects. The original films aren't just valuable for their nostalgia, but as a picture of what one 33-year-old filmmaker did to change the face of American film.

And besides, I think it's high time Lucas did something to atone for Jar-Jar and Hayden Christensen and the stunning disappointments of the prequel trilogy. Releasing the original films is a good way to start.

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The Girl Next Door (2004)

I have many problems with this movie, many of which can be traced back to the stupidity of the main characters.

• Why would Matthew (Emile Hirsch) seriously consider dating Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert)? She's a porn star. That's beyond used goods; that's battered, damaged goods that needs to get tested every six weeks. Seriously, Matty. This is a bad, bad idea.

• Danielle's age is never given, but she's clearly young. Cuthbert was only 21 when the movie was released, and the character of Danielle can be said to be the same age. At one point, Danielle's manager, Kelly (Timothy Olyphant), says to Matthew: "I just think you'd want someone more your age." Matthew responds, "She is my age," to which Kelly replies, "Yeah, I meant ... experience-wise." So Danielle is between 18 and 21, and already a full-fledged porn star. Again, Matthew, this is a bad area.

• The fact that Danielle is at most 21 and already well-established in the skin business makes me think she got into it when she was under 18. And even if she waited until she turned legal to start having sex on film, which is doubtful, what's so appealing to Matthew about a girl his own age who works in porn? No girl grows up wanting to be a porn star, Matthew.

• Why is Danielle a porn star? What made her turn to such a profession?

• The film opens with Danielle moving in next door to Matthew because she's running from Kelly. Why is she running? Did something bad happen to make her normal porn-star existence even worse?

• Matthew and his buddies make a safe-sex instruction video starring adult film actresses, April and Ferrari (why anyone would think it would be cool to get it on with someone named after a car is a whole other therapy session). The girls address the camera and talk about the pressure some teens feel to lose their virginity at their senior prom. Ferrari says she lost hers at prom, and then asks April when it happened for her, and April's response is, "When I was 10." And Ferrari plays it for a joke by waiting a beat and moving on. How is that funny? How is that anything other than really, really disturbing? Thinking about it for longer than a second leads you down a dark path of reasoning, leading to even more unsettling questions: What happened to that girl? How did she end up here?

Really, it goes on and on. The film wants to come across as the new generation's answer to Risky Business, which came across even lighter than writer-director Paul Brickman had intended, since studio meddling made the film end rosier than the original tale of Reagan-era excess was meant to have. But at least that film had some kind of cautionary message, however blurred, hidden inside. The Girl Next Door tries to play like a mix of Brickman's film and American Pie, some straight-ahead sex romp with an edge. But instead it's just really depressing.

Verdict: If you're a high school guy, try and catch it on cable. But then go take a good long look in the mirror.

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What are you doing right now? Nothing. Well, you're reading this, which is about the same. So you should really do something more meaningful with the next few minutes, which you seem to have free, otherwise you wouldn't be here. With that in mind, you should go see this:

The 10 Worst Blockbusters of All Time.

It's a good list. Feel free to chime in with the comments, but you should know in advance that (1) the list isn't changing, and (2) for our purposes, a "blockbuster" had a domestic gross higher than $100 million. So, as much as you might hate Waterworld, it toppeed out at $88 million, so don't bother telling us we missed it. Okay then. Now go read the list. Stop reading this. Now. Stop ... now.

UPDATE: In case you just can't get enough of the list in all its glory, Pajiba got a shout-out on KROQ this morning. I no longer live the kind of lifestyle that requires me to be awake before 10 a.m., for which I am truly thankful, but I do miss catching Ralph Garman's showbiz report on the Kevin & Bean show. And now that Garman has done a bit about something I've actually contributed to, well, I'm just that much closer to full-on world domination. Or at least a free t-shirt.

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Following on the unwanted heels of parts one and two, I expand the list as follows.

The Sigher

You'd think this is the same as The Groaner, but oh, you'd be wrong. The Groaner elicits full-on throaty growling while he urinates, but The Sigher is much more discreet. While standing before the stall, he'll let out a light sigh, just shy of a moan, and it's genuinely unnerving. Tony, the old man in my office, is a constant sigher, and I'm always worried that the next sigh I hear will be a death rattle.

The Scouter

The Scouter is a crafty public pisser, especially when it comes to the office restroom. If he's looking for a stall, and at least one is occupied, he'll bolt and continue searching for a toilet not in use. The urinals are a different matter: If there are walls between the urinals, then The Scouter will usually use one regardless of whether the others are occupied. But if there are no walls, he might deem the proposition too risky.

The Reader

Many men will take a magazine to the stall, but it's another kind of man altogether that takes reading material on a urinal trip. I've seen it done, too. This guy stood there with a Sports Illustrated in one hand while peeing with the other. I like Rick Reilly as much as the next guy, but seriously, nothing's that compelling.

The Horse Whisperer

This guy can't finish the job of urinating without making little passive-aggressive noises in an effort to get his body to stop the flow. It's not uncommon to be stanidng next to him and hear "hut hut" as he's wrapping up.

The Conference Caller

Simple: This is the guy who answers his phone while at the urinal, which we've all done, since there's something inherently satisfying about the multitasking, not to mention the minor challenge of digging your phone out of your pants without letting them fall while maintaining a constant stream and avoiding a mess. The ballsier Conference Caller will actually place calls while in the bathroom, as if the acoustics and space to think are what he really needed to motivate him to do business by phone.

[Many thanks to The Oldest Guy I Know for assistance with the last two items on the list.]

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I didn't think it was possible, but I now love Stephen Colbert even more. He spoke at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner over the weekend, and unleashed a fierce barrage of jokes aimed at the Bush administration, delivered in the character of the blowhard newsman Colbert portrays four nights a week. Colbert stood less than ten feet from the leader of the free world and didn't hold back. He's got balls of titanium. Radioactive titanium. With spikes. He told truth to power. Some of Colbert's quotes from the evening:

On the topic of aircraft carrier landings and New Orleans visits: "No matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

On the topic of the White House: "Everybody [in the press] asks for personnel changes, so the White House has personnel changes. And then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking, this administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg."

It becomes clear early on that some of the people in the audience are plainly shocked at the roast Colbert is putting on, which is pretty stupid; what did you expect from a guy who hosts a show on Comedy Central that lampoons the president and conservative media? Anyway, the video's well worth watching.

[UPDATE: Some interesting coverage on how various news outlets covered Colbert's performance, or failed to do so.]

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

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Editor: Wisteria Lane is the street, right?

Crazy Old Tony: It's the street where they live. It's littered with condoms. You'd know it anywhere.

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