As far as political drama goes, it was no *West Wing*, but the casting was good, the writing accurately captured the soaring rhetoric of hope and change, and a musical score by John Williams and Aretha Franklin never hurt anybody. But while I kept waiting for *something* to happen, to break up the interminable speechifying, the expected terrorist attack/assassination attempt/asteroid collision just never materialized. Also I hope the writers can lighten up the tone a little bit in future episodes. In sum: while it wasn’t the most *gripping* hour of television I’ve watched, it certainly has promise. I hope it gets renewed for another season—I’ll be watching.

I haven’t read much of Vertigo’s *Hellblazer* series, and that’s probably a good thing going into watching *Constantine* the movie, which bears only a superficial resemblance to the comic books on which it was based. It’s not a bad movie, though: it’s well-plotted, with clever twists and turns, and great production design and special effects. There’s also a pretty good cast, with the likes of Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale, Djimon Hounsou, and yes, even Shia LaBeouf—which made it that much more frustrating to me to have to spend most of the movie watching Keanu Reeves plod woodenly through the title role. Jason and I differed on the quality of his performance, but I just wonder how the movie would have turned out with someone a little more charismatic playing John Constantine (I’m not suggesting you make some sort of David Bowie-Sting lovechild, but…okay, maybe I am suggesting that). Hounsou’s one of my favorite actors and even though his role as Papa Midnite is somewhat limited he makes the most of it; likewise, Peter Stormare as Satan and Max Baker as Beeman do nice work. And there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by future leading lady Michelle Monaghan (opposite Shia LaBeouf, no less!) as a demon. Make sure you watch all the way to the end of the credits, too.

I’ve been putting off writing this list for some time, for a couple of reasons, but as we’ve reached the midseason point, I think it’s about time to run down my list of the top new TV shows for the fall.

Unlike last year, the pickings this year are pretty slim, due in large part to the [writers' strike](http://doombot.com/2007/11/18/solidarity-baby/) that hit the industry at last year’s midseason. That meant fewer television pilots got developed, and since only a few pilots make it to series to begin with, fewer shows. By midseason, we’ve also already begun to thin the field—two of my [favorite shows from last year](http://doombot.com/2007/10/23/watch-this/), *Pushing Daisies* and *Dirty Sexy Money*, have already been, er, “not picked up for a full season” (diplomatic talk for “cancelled”). And we’re only a short while away from the launch of the new mid-season shows, the most hotly anticipated of which is probably Joss Whedon’s *Dollhouse*. But that’s a matter for a different post.

I’m not going to bother ranking these shows, because that’s a sucker’s game. Besides, the difficulty with reviewing a television show versus, say, a movie or a book, is that you can’t take a single episode as an indication of quality. Most shows (and especially the kind that I like, that really use the serial medium to its fullest) take a few episodes to develop (of course, sometimes they just get worse; right, *Sarah Connor Chronicles*?). But at the end of the day, my only metric for a show is: is this worth your time? And, by virtue of being on this list, my answer for all these shows is obviously “yes.”
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The second part of Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy is, I’d say, better—or at least more fully realized—than the first. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name (here often called “Manco”—one-armed—because he does most everything with one hand, leaving the other free to shoot with) teams up with bounty killer Douglas Mortimer (Lee van Cleef) to track down ruthless bandit El Indio (Gian Maria Volontè, who also played the chief villain in the first installment). The characters are better drawn: Indio, in particular, is a more compelling villain, and we see Manco meet his match in crack-shot Mortimer. While the two ostensibly have a partnership to catch Indio, they’re clearly rivals, and we see Manco’s flaws as he keeps trying to one up Mortimer and failing. The plot’s also tighter than *Fistful*, and the characters have more interesting motivations. There’s a great shootout in the street when Manco tries to get Mortimer to leave El Paso and the final fight in the little town where Indio and his bandits have holed up is a classic gunfight presaging the likes of the concluding scene of later Westerns like *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid* (albeit, with a happier result). Van Cleef would return to play the villain in the final installment, *The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.*

It’s long. Really long. Nowadays, that’s par for the course for Neal Stephenson, whose books have tended towards the weighty since 1999′s *Cryptonomicon*. It’s interesting to see Stephenson’s progression: the technological fascination of *Snow Crash*, probably his most influential model, carried over into *Cryptonomicon*, which shared characters and some scientific elements with his subsequent three-part Baroque cycle (*Quicksilver*, *The Confusion*, and *The System of the World*), which began to veer into the philosophical. It’s the philosophical that’s front and center in *Anathem*, which takes place on the familiar-yet-alien world of Arbre. On Arbre, philosophers and scientists have largely been cordoned off from the “Saecular” existence of everyday people, leading to a “mathic” world that strongly resembles the religious in our own world. The plot of *Anathem* largely concerns itself with what happens when that equilibrium is disrupted from an outside source. In terms of action, the novel starts slowly, though it takes that much time to get grounded in Stephenson’s world. At first, I thought his constant re-branding of everyday objects and terms was merely, as Jason put it, wankery, but the more I progressed and got comfortable with the world he was creating, I began to realize how important this defamiliarization was. There’s a definite point to it in the plot, especially apparent towards the end of the book, but another facet of it is that Stephenson’s philosophical ideas are so *big* that it required the creation of this entirely separate foundation just to support them. I’d started the book thinking that perhaps Stephenson had finally jumped the shark, but upon finishing it I’ve concluded that he maintains his position as one of the most fascinating, versatile writers in speculative fiction.

Another year, another 50,000 words. This is my fourth year finishing National Novel Writing Month and, by definition, the fourth year of performing a post-mortem on the experience (you can read the [first](http://doombot.com/2005/12/01/breaking-the-embargo/) [three](http://doombot.com/2006/11/30/victory-is-mineand-a-whole-bunch-of-other-peoples-as-well/) [years'](http://doombot.com/2007/11/29/write-on/) entries if you’re feeling courageous).

I’ve started to look at the NaNoWriMo process as an exercise, a chance to try out things that I wouldn’t otherwise. By this point, I’m pretty confident in my ability to write, regardless of what month it is, so it’s an opportunity for experimentation.

Last year, I tried to write a young adult science-fiction novel about a girl who discovers that her older brother is part of a secret organization that fights aliens and deals with the powers of the occult. If that sounds a lot like [*The Middleman*](http://doombot.com/2008/07/22/short-television-review-the-middleman/)…well, it is, but I hadn’t heard about it prior to coming up with the idea. *The Middleman* had roughly the same concept as my story, but with one major difference: vastly superior execution. That’s okay; I don’t regret the experience of writing that story—but I don’t think I’m likely to finish it either.

So, what have I learned this year that I didn’t know last year? Well, I’ve learned that even though I *can* write mainstream fiction, I seem to keep coming up with better genre fiction ideas at the same time (I thought of at least two premises for good stories that I’d like to write). I’ve learned that having an *entire* plot in mind—which I didn’t this time around—really helps not only the day-to-day act of writing, but also the emotional investment in the novel and characters, and I learned that I can produce 50,000 words without breaking too much of a sweat.
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Sergio Leone’s film was one of the earliest and most influential “spaghetti Westerns” (so called because they were produced by Italian studios), and the first to feature Clint Eastwood’s iconic Man with No Name character, who would reappear in two subsequent films, as well as going on to inspire characters such as [Roland Deschain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Deschain), the hero of Stephen King’s *The Dark Tower*. The Man with No Name is also the Man of Few Words—Eastwood’s character doesn’t have a line until eight minutes into the film. Laconic though he may be, he’s both quick with a gun and clever, and he manages to cut a swath of destruction through a town ruled by two rival bosses with just a few well-placed bullets. *Fistful* was inspired largely by Akira Kurosawa’s classic *Yojimbo* (released only three years earlier), and was the subject of a lawsuit by Kurosawa, though both likely drew inspiration from other sources, such as Dashiell Hammett’s *Red Harvest*. Some compare Leon’s use of close-up shots (which had previously been used largely as reaction shots) to the arias from operas, giving the audience insight into a particular character. It works well here, even if the characters are more or less archetypal in nature.

The 1975 spy thriller directed by Sydney Pollack is centered around CIA analyst Joe Turner (Robert Redford, just prior to his crusading reporter turn in *All the President’s Men*)—a kind of proto-Jack Ryan. Turner’s employed by the agency to read books, newspapers, and magazine and try to find material: new ideas, hidden codes, etc. Returning from lunch one day, Turner finds his entire office brutally murdered and is forced to go on the run. He kidnaps a woman (Faye Dunaway, not long removed from her performance in [*Chinatown*](http://doombot.com/2008/10/20/review-chinatown/)) and sets about trying to figure out how to evade contract assassin Joubert (Max von Sydow). This might seem like your archetypal conspiracy flick, but what makes it resonate for me is not only the still-curent themes (guess what’s the motivation behind the nefarious plot?) but the fact that Turner is a hero after my own heart: he’s totally unqualified as a spy except for his inquisitive mind and the fact that he *reads so damn much*. What better argument for literacy? The two final showdowns, between Turner and Joubert and then between Turner and Higgins (Cliff Robertson, perhaps best known to current moviegoers as Tobey Maguire’s Uncle Ben), the only CIA director who Turner thinks he can trust, are nerve-wracking and marvelously juxtaposed, leading to the delicious ambiguity of the ending.

(I would be fascinated, incidentally, to see somebody pitch a modern-day sequel with Redford reprising his role, kind of like Gene Hackman in *Enemy of the State* or Paul Newman in *The Color of Money*.)

Norman Jewison’s Academy Award-winning classic is a story about racism in the south, set against the backdrop of a murder investigation. Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs (Sydney Poitier) is passing through the small town of Sparta, Mississippi at the time of a murder. Virgil reluctantly agrees to stay and help Chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) solve the crime, despite—or perhaps *because* of—the blatant bigotry he encounters. As much as you’re encouraged to feel sympathy for Virgil, a black man beset in the deep south, he’s no saint: he’s stubborn, arrogant, and frankly, kind of a know-it-all. And Gillespie pegs him when he points out that Virgil can’t leave town, because he wants to show up Gillespie and the rest of his redneck police department. There’s no question that Poitier is a great actor, but Steiger provides him an excellent foil here, as the two characters ultimately grow into a grudging mutual respect.

What struck me most is that the movie was made in 1967—just about forty years ago. Even though the Civil Rights Act and National Voting Rights Act had already passed, racism was still highly entrenched, especially in the deep south. Forty years ago may seem like a long time, but it takes on a different perspective when I think that it was only thirteen years before I was born—and at the time, my dad was the exact age I am *now*. There’s also an unpleasant echo of the bigotry [still so prevalent in this country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_8)—in particular, a scene when one character angrily shouts at Gillespie that he had “no right” to let Virgil stay in the room during an interrogation. To espouse a sentiment of entitlement that involves *depriving somebody else of rights* is not only unwittingly ironic, it’s kind of sickening. It’s a shame that we haven’t learned from our mistakes of the past.

First things first: Oliver Stone’s movie about our *beloved* sitting president is not a political film, so if you go in expecting to see *Fahrenheit 911, Part 2*, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not to say there aren’t political elements in it, but despite the fact that the main thrust of the story centers around Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, this is at its heart a character sketch. And in that, Stone succeeds adroitly. It would have been easy to paint Bush as a caricature of himself, reinforcing the perception held by those who already dislike him. But in showing him as a three-dimensional person, Stone creates a portrait of a fairly charismatic guy—who actually *might* have been smart at one point, if it weren’t for all the drugs and alcohol—who ends up in way over his head, all because he wants to prove himself to his father.

Josh Brolin deserves an Oscar for his portrayal of George—he inhabits the role with the perfect blend of folksy charm and cluelessness, tempered with occasional flashes of frustrated insight that he just *doesn’t know what’s going on*: “Why wasn’t I told?” he yells at his advisors late in the movie, as they argue about who’s in charge of searching for WMDs in Iraq after the invasion. Also worth commending are Richard Dreyfuss’s Dick Cheney, James Cromwell’s George H.W. Bush, and Toby Jones’s Karl Rove, all of whom give excellent performances—though make no mistake, it’s Brolin’s film.

There are a couple of missteps: both Geoffrey Wright, who is a tremendous actor, and Thandie Newton, as Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice respectively, spend a little too much time concerned with *sounding* like the people they’re portraying, which becomes distracting. Newton gets a bit shorted on screen time, but Wright has a couple meaty scenes as the lone man of reason in an administration tilting to go to war (including a particular eerie flashback to Gulf War I, where he and Cheney agree that not going to Baghdad is a good idea). Likewise, Elizabeth Banks’s Laura Bush who doesn’t show up until later on in the movie, and seems to be rather ancillary at best.

You do, as one reviewer wrote, come out feeling a bit sorry for Georgie, but such pity doesn’t make Bush any less culpable for his involvement. He’s a man who’s just smart enough to know that he’s *not* smart enough, and that makes him complicit in all the things that his regime does. Worst of all is the fact that the movie deals exclusively with Bush’s first term, which leaves us hanging with the most frustrating question of all: how the hell did he get *re*-elected?