All kinds of mish-mosh in this one...

So I finally went to see War of the Worlds this past weekend. Amazing... and quite disturbing. I figure that movie must have just barely scraped a PG-13 rating, but it's not surprising to me, seeing as how violence and brutalization of fellow humans is just hunky-dory in American society, as long as there's not a 1/2-second flash of a woman's nipple.

Anyway, the film. Of course it stars Tom Cruise, who would really like you to know that he's not gay, in a retooling of virtually every character he's played to date, including himself in real life. Brash, cocky guy who smiles a lot, is flippant with the ladies, and has some trouble with a key relationship (his dad, his One True Love, his kids, etc.) which is fixed right up by the end of the movie. As I was telling a friend of mine recently, Tom Cruise is a movie star. Not an actor... a movie star. So for me, it was a bit hard to see his character as anyone else but Tom Cruise the Extremely Heterosexual Movie Star.

Little Dakota Fanning, who has all Hollywood blubbering over her because hey, she's 11 and can actually act quite well, basically moved from one traumatizing scene to another. She screamed, she screamed a little more, she admonished her dad, Maverick, then screamed again. Then she went catatonic. But in the end, she was reunited with her mom, Éowyn, and everything ended happily. Given Spielberg's penchant for schlocky moments, I'm surprised Maverick and Éowyn didn't get back together at the end while the violins swelled rapturously.

Amazing, stupendous special effects though... and really, a pretty great movie all in all, with the exception of an ending which was the cinematic equivalent of blowing up a balloon until it was just short of the bursting point, then just letting the air all seep out of it. I liked the premise of the ending, because there was no way humans were going to just beat up on these aliens (their weapons were staggering... the wholesale casual massacre of people was one of several really horrifying and disturbing scenes), but it was presented in a manner that was so completely anticlimactic, it's like they just ran out of time or money and rushed an ending together.

Anyway, what's going on in Washington?

I thought for a fleeting moment that Bush might be a renaissance man and nominate a woman or a minority to the Supreme Court, but no... just one of his rich, white buddies. Honestly, this Roberts guy seems like a decent enough fellow, but does he really have the credentials at this point to sit on the highest court in the country? (For that matter, did Bush, with one entire term as governor of Texas, have the credentials to be elected President?)

Then there's Rove. It's good to know censorship is alive and well in this country, with several newspapers pulling a daily strip of Doonesbury because it referenced Rove in an unflattering manner. This is what Bush's administration seems to want though: government of the people, of the people, and of the people.

Meanwhile, down in the banana republic of Florida, NASA finally got on around to launching the space shuttle. Now they're trying their darndest to keep a stiff upper lip and say all the right things, but really, folks? Here's the nuts and bolts of it: They spent 2 1/2 years and north of a billion dollars to fix the damn thing, and the exact same problem that doomed Columbia happened again. The chunk of foam that fell off this time also hit the wing of the orbiter, and it's even almost the same size (bit smaller) than the piece that hit Columbia's wing. The same, identical problem!! Look, I understand that the space shuttle is an immensely, inordinately complex vehicle (to say the least). But given 30 months, a billion dollars, and presumably some of the best and brightest engineering minds in the country only to have the exact same problem crop up on the very next launch? I don't care how much spin you put on it, that's just fucking lame.