Brian McWilliams’ Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements is a surprisingly good tale. I was expecting more of a survey of the field, but it’s instead a well-told narrative with bizarre characters and unexpected developments. In fact, it’s a page turner.

You can read the first chapter here.

(But what’s with the “%*@)#” in the title? Last time I looked, “penis” wasn’t a dirty word. Is it so spam filters won’t block messages that talk about the book? But won’t the spam filters also catch “porn”?)

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1. The Doom movie is in pre-production in Prague. Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave, Romeo Must Die) is directing and Karl Urban (“What business does an elf, man, and a dwarf have in the Ridder-Mark? Speak quickly”, LOTR 2) will play the lead. The script is not the same as the script of Doom 3, which is the same as the script of Doom 1. which is the same as Die Hards 1-7, Rambo’s 1-12, and every psychopathically sympathy-free mow-’em-down tale ever told … and I say that as a fan.

The writer, 26-year-old Dave Callaham, has no other screenwriting credits. He gives away a bit of the “plot”:

In the movie he [the space marine] is reunited with his sister, a scientist on the based named Samantha (to be played by Die Another Day villainess Rosamund Pike). They were separated after an accident that killed their parents and Callaham says, “They are a little estranged” However, strange things are afoot on the base as alien monsters begin to appear and both brother and sister have to put aside their differences in order to survive. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will also appear as Sarge, the head space marine…

In the interview, Callaham says that Id agreed to let him put in some real “character development.” That’s code for “I really want to make a Doom movie that will not only betray your vision, but will totally suck.”

The interview got slashdotted. And here’s a 145MB video about the history of Doom. I have not downloaded it.

2. The December issue of Computer Gaming World runs a “Duke Nukem Timeline” that points out: “Rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched, and successfully landed on Mars in less time.” Yeah, but did NASA have to worry about pixel shading? I don’t think so. Ok, well, actually the NASA imaging software probably did, but, Duke Nukem is going to totally kick NASA’s ass!

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Gabriel Chafetz, the son of a guy I love, has created a 28-minute film. I haven’t yet seen it, but Gabriel says: “It’s sort of a hip hop “get out the vote” documentary/musical starring Walter Mondale.” How could it be bad?

There’s a streaming version here. It’s being broadcast in Minnesota on PBS.

Broadcast Times:
TPT 17 Saturday, October 23 at 8PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 24 at 11PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 31 at 5:30PM

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Over at BlogCritics.org I’ve posted a review of the classic British mystery, “The Singing Sands,” by Josephine Tey. I liked it a lot when I read it in high school. I did not like it a lot this time through…

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I know y’all have read The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith — in fact, I see at Amazon that it’s the Today Show Book Club #8, so presumably Katie Couric has read it by the light of a colonoscope — but I just read it. Very enjoyable, if a bit self-conscious. I now know 100% more about Botswana than I did before I read it, which is totally shameful but there you have it. (Anyone have any links to Botswana blogs? I couldn’t find any…)

And, while continuing to be hopelessly out of date, a couple of nights ago, our family watched Groundhog Day. I saw it when it came out, I saw it again a few years later, and possibly one time more. Fun for the entire family, even those of us who generally don’t like movies that don’t have sword fights. Learning to do one day right: A good lesson about lessons.

Later: Ethan Zuckerman found a couple of semi-bloggy Botswanan things in English: A volunteer with a church in Botswana, and Mmegi “…not a blog, but an interesting daily paper.”

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I know I’ve already blogged about how confusing I found The Bourne Supremacy, but here’s an email (slightly edited) I sent to Sam Allis at the Boston Globe today in response to his “Critic’s Notebook” that luxuriated in that movie racking up bigger grosses than either Collateral or The Manchurian Candidate, two movies he considers to be smug, predictable, and coasting on their star power:

Sam,

I enjoyed your piece today and am glad to see Damon get the credit he deserves. But one thing you said irked me enough to write to you, primarily because I just can’t figure out what the director and editor were thinking…or why apparently it worked for some viewers.

The very scenes you single out as examples of master craftsmanship I found indecipherable. For example, the long fight you admire has two guys dressed in black, filmed in such short and blurry bursts, frequently with their faces cropped outside the frame, that I couldn’t tell who was gouging whom. Likewise, the car chase was a sequence of blurs. Now, I understand that this was meant to convey the impression of speed and action, but…

Lest my befuddlement be attributed to old fogey-hood (I’m 53), my 13-yr-old son came out of the movie with a headache, declaring it to be the worst movie he’s ever seen because of the incoherence of the action sequences.

Compare the car chase scenes in Supremacy to the Bourne Identity. The latter was clear, exciting and ingenious. The former was none of those. It failed (IMO) at the basic level of telling the story. Or, compare Supremacy overall to Kill Bill I. In fact, compare it to all of Tarrantino’s work. Tarrantino knows how to tell a story, no matter how ridiculous. Uma is mowing down dozens of attackers, all identically dressed, but there isn’t a single “What’s happening?” moment.

And while I’m disagreeing with you (remembering that the overall context is that I enjoyed your article…really), I’d make a plea for Michael Mann’s considerable narrative skills. Even though the acting and the story were, in my opinion, inferior to Supremacy, I’d see Collateral again to watch his directorial technique. If I were to watch Supremacy again, it’d be just to try to figure out which blurry streak is supposed to be Damon’s car.

(I’ll probably blog this because, well, it’s what we bloggers do.)

Best,

David Weinberger

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Meta-death: Al Dvorin, the man who said “Elvis has left the building” has left the building.

Watching the Olympics is becoming more and more like watching Florida election returns.

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Although I hadn’t watched Jeopardy in maybe 20 years, a couple of weeks ago I watched a few featuring Ken Jennings, the million-dollar smart guy. Very impressive. And it struck me how they’re cheating…

Watch some reruns before Jennings was on. The questions were much easier. Having dumber questions favors any contestant who is outlandishly smarter than the others. So, while it’s not quite cheating, it does tilt the board toward Jennings and lets him run up $50,000 daily totals leaving the other contestants with nothing but a snapshot of Alex Trebeck and a tune they can’t get out of their heads.

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