Chicago film critic Roger Ebert recently gutted Transformers II (”f you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.”) and received a number of indignant responses including that he’s over-educated about movies and doesn’t appreciate what Real People like. To which he responded:

A reader named Jared Diamond, a senior at Syracuse, sports editor of The Daily Orange, put my disturbance eloquently in a post asking: “Why in this society are the intelligent vilified? Why is education so undervalued and those who preach it considered arrogant or pretentious?” Why, indeed? If sports fans were like certain movie fans, they would hate sports writers, commentators and sports talk hosts for always discussing fine points, quoting statistics and bringing up games and players of the past. If all you want to do is drink beer in the sunshine and watch a ball game, why should some elitist play-by-play announcer bore you with his knowledge? Yet sports fans are proud of their baseball knowledge, and respect commentators who know their stuff.

Yes, I took part of last weekend to see Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (the title puzzled me until I learned X-Men Origins: Magneto is next up). I’m not going into detail on the plots, but there will be a couple of spoilers, so move on if that’s a problem.

Star Trek: I find the “reboot” approach where this is outside the longstanding TV continuity annoying (in a sense, they’re not the “real” Spock and Kirk). But that being said, it’s a solidly entertaining movie, with some excellent performances and a chunk of the Star Trek spirit. Though I really hate the new bridge—much too shiny and cluttered, and doesn’t look at all like the one I know (even in a reboot, some things shouldn’t change, darn it!).

X-Men Origins: Wolverine does a very good job making a coherent story out of Logan’s extremely convoluted comic-book history. Even for non-geeks, it’s pretty satisfying: Lots of action, colorful mutants, a nasty villain, a good performance from Hugh Jackman (as my female friends keep pointing out, it’s a good shirtless performance, which counts for a lot with them) and Liev Schrieber is a nasty piece of work as Sabertooth.

I have spent much worse time at the movies.

I also spent Sunday evening watching a recording of They Were Expendable, John Ford’s 1945 story of Robert Montgomery and John Wayne sending PT boats against the Japanese navy. For people who think realistic war movies began with Saving Private Ryan, this grim drama will change your mind.

If any of the fans who criticized my earlier post about the book series are reading this, how does the movie compare to the book? And why can’t Edward read Bella’s thoughts?

While I wouldn’t rate the movie as a deathless classic, I enjoyed it (though I thought Edgar was a weak actor). It would be worth giving up two-plus hours even if i wasn’t on vacation, and that’s probably a better measure than money.

Dream man for so many women of my acquaintance.

Charitable do-gooder in his later years.

And as an actor, the man who gave us terrific performances in Hud, The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, The Sting, The Verdict, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and many more.

Anyone seen this 2004 film? It’s a historical mockumentary that traces the impact on American history of the South’s victory in the Civil War (via convincing France and England to commit troops to fight alongside the Confederates, something I find implausible): The conquest of the Northern states, the push to reintroduce slavery to the Union side, the conquest and occupation of Central and South America.

As a mockumentary, it’s a perfect clone of the PBS documentaries you see on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, with great touches such as commercials for the Slave Shopping Network and clips from the biopic THE JEFFERSON DAVIS STORY and the Cold War thriller (the Cold War being between the US and abolitionist Canada) I MARRIED AN ABOLITIONIST.

As an alternate history, it flops on multiple grounds, even if I bought the initial premise. For one thing, it doesn’t think through the consequences: If the CSA expelled all the Jews around the turn of the 20th century, where did we get the atomic scientists to launch an a-bomb project (fleeing Hungarian Jews gave a monumental boost to American physics back in the thirties)? If the CSA sat out the war in Europe, how did the Allies beat the Nazis?

Which leads to another weakness: Despite the huge changes, too much history comes out the same as it did in our timeline. The Allies do win World War II; we get rock-and-roll based on “race music,” even if the stars have to go to Canada to perform; Kennedy and Nixon both run for president in 1960 (albeit Kennedy is a Republican running on an abolitionist platform); and so forth. This is something that annoys me a lot in alternate history; I have the same problem with Philip Roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA (in which despite a wildly different World War II, history apparently goes completely back “on track” afterwards) and even the superb JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, in which the presence of a powerful wizard in the Napoleonic Wars doesn’t accelerate Napoleon’s downfall at all (for that matter, having a powerful half-faerie wizard rule much of England in the Middle Ages hasn’t apparently changed subsequent history). It’s one reason I like Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series: Having dragons in the Napoleonic wars is leading to some major divergences as the series progresses.

A minor point is that the writers seem less to be building a plausible 21st century confederate nation than coming up with a government that reflects modern white supremacy movements. There’s no real reason I can see that the CSA would proclaim itself a Christian nation and exile all Jews, for instance (any experts on the Confederacy who disagree, feel free to correct me), but that does conform to the hate agenda of many modern white militants, Southern or otherwise. As a friend of mine points out, dystopian fiction (the opposite of utopian fiction) usually says as much about our fears in the present as what’s really likely to arrive in the future (or in some alternate timeline).