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The 2005 IDEA Awards make for interesting reading. I don’t necessarily agree with all the choices, but it’s hard to argue that they don’t constitute food for thought.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. Most humans do the reverse, inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. Hayao Miyazaki breathes in ink and breathes out story.

I enjoyed Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, but Howl’s Moving Castle is the most enchanting of his works I’ve seen to date. To watch it is to quickly find oneself lost in a world where wonder lurks behind every corner and magic may hide in the most mundane of objects. That’s all I’m going to say about the movie itself, aside from “See it.”

I have a fantasy. In it, the major studios, having razed their hand-drawn animation divisions to the ground in the foolish belief that technology trumps the ability to tell an engaging story regardless of medium, realize the depth of their mistake and approach Miyazaki, cap in hand, to plead for his help in reaquainting themselves with the arts they so shortsightedly threw away. In the fantasy, he makes them crawl for it — although from everything I’ve heard about the man, he’s far too kind to engage in such vengefulness, even when it’s deserved.

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Batman Begins is better than it had any right to be, but it’s certainly better than it had any need to be.

I mean, it’s a summer actioner, right? Start with a mixture of fight sequences and car chases, leaven with formulaic macho dialogue, season with explosions as needed, bake briefly — halfway is fine — and you’re done. Motivation, character development, and similar frills are a waste of energy and effort.

Except that Christopher Nolan seems not to have gotten the memo.

And thank God for that, because his apparent ignorance of the way these things are supposed to be done has led him to create a movie that doesn’t for a moment assume that it can get by on its good looks alone. The dialogue, co-written by Nolan, crackles with intelligence and wit, and the actors attack it with both relish and considerable skill. But it’s the expert fit and finish of the story overall that really dazzle.

Thomas Wayne gets maybe five minutes of screen time — but under Nolan’s sure hand, that’s all he needs to establish himself as the cornerstone of his young son’s world. You have absolutely no difficulty understanding how the murder of such a man could shatter that world, and provide motivation enough to fuel a lifelong crusade.

Michael Caine has done his share of absolutely awful movies, but he nearly makes amends for all of them with his performance here. It may or may not be worthy of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but a nomination certainly wouldn’t go amiss. His Alfred the Butler is Bruce Wayne’s mooring to the rest of humanity, a source of warmth and humor for a man who sometimes seems at risk of forgetting his own.

Even the movie’s villains are a cut — make that two — above average. There’s none of the usual “observe as I revel in the delicious purity of my own evil” scenery-chewing nonsense. Tom Wilkinson is perfectly credible as the cynical, pragmatic crime boss, while Cillian Murphy is creepily detached as the man of science whose curiosity has completely eclipsed his decency.

This is, when all is said and done, that most hallowed and satisfying of comic-book forms: the origin story. That being the case, it almost can’t help but keep you waiting a while before giving you your first glimpse of Batman unleashing himself upon Gotham’s underworld in his full glory. But that’s just fine. Actually, it’s better than fine. It’s grand. Because while you were waiting, you watched Bruce Wayne forge himself into a living weapon — edged with fury, tempered with mercy — and are thus in a position to understand on just how many levels his opponents are hopelessly outmatched. When he finally attacks, he’s actually frightening, and you feel just the tiniest stir of pity for his prey.

Thomas Wayne wouldn’t want it any other way. Bless Chris Nolan for understanding that, and for using that understanding to make one hell of a movie.

Dirk took me to see The Unsane, with Made Out Of Babies and Blackfire Revelation opening, at The Blank Club tonight.

Had you recieved a prescription for 100-plus decibels of fat, crunchy noise, this would have been the place to get it filled. You could feel it thrumming across your chest, the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet. There are times when that sort of sonic assault is exactly the cure for what ails you, and tonight was one of them. All in all, a damn fine show.

I don’t know why this impresses me so much more that the veritable glut of eye candy that issued forth from Revenge of the Sith. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s embedded in a realistic setting, and reflects its environment so accurately that the only way you know it has to be rendered is that no one yet knows how to build a standalone three-story-tall dancing robot for real.

“It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity.”

– Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Where to begin with this one? Well, with the facts, I suppose.

1. Newsweek publishes a small sidebar item alleging that interrogators at Guantanamo flushed a copy of the Qur’an down a toilet.
2. The faithful in Afghanistan, incensed by this, stage riots in which several persons are killed.
3. Newsweek determines that it cannot substantiate the allegation, and retracts it.
4. The White House, scrupulous and unwavering adherent to the absolute truth that it is, comes down with the righteous indignation of injured virtue on Newsweek for running with something it wasn’t absolutely certain about, insinuating in the process that the blood of the dead Afghans is solely on Newsweek‘s hands. (Because this is, after all, a sentence in the exalted Periscope section, by all that’s holy, not something trivial like the decision to invade and ineptly occupy a fractious country in one of the most volatile regions in the world.)

   Stepping in to assist with the arduous and thankless task of pillorying Newsweek is the full force of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and the rest of the Jingosphere, who are never so indignant about the death of Muslims as when liberals or the mainstream media might somehow be implicated.

5. A Pentagon investigation prompted by the furor over the Newsweek report determines that while it cannot be substantiated that the Qur’an was ever flushed down a toilet, it was definitely stepped on, kicked, and splashed — inadvertently, it would seem — with urine. In the proud tradition of righteous vindication and unblemished consciences since time immemorial, these findings are released late on a Friday afternoon, ensuring that they would quickly be plowed under by the weekend news cycle.

There is so much scorn and contempt to be dished out here that it’s hard to decide who gets the first helping.

The administration gets its usual generous serving, of course — this time for having the gall and effrontery to accuse Newsweek of insufficient regard for the truth. This from the people with such a long record of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies that we’ll need to devise a new numbering scheme just to catalog them all. It takes a certain kind of genius to straight-facedly accuse others of playing fast and loose with the facts when you yourself have swept so much dirt under the rug that the resulting bulge is making it hard to keep the lamps standing. It’s a kind of genius I don’t understand, and hope I never will.

Let’s save a healthy portion of the aforementioned scorn and contempt for the rioters, though. You need to be in possession of a highly-refined grade of dumbshit to let yourself, or fifteen of your countrymen, get killed over a book. I don’t care if it’s a holy book. If your God is so small and weak that treating a copy of His words with disrespect actually diminshes Him, then He and you both have more pressing problems.

Lest you think that I’m being cavalier because it’s not my holy book, let me disabuse you. You can damage or destroy as many copies of things I hold dear as you have the energy for. Shred them. Burn them. Piss on them. Wipe your ass with them. I don’t care. Because they are merely symbols, representations of things that cannot be destroyed unless you manage to kill every last person who knows and loves them. If you can’t understand the distinction, then you probably get a lot of weird looks in restaurants, too, because you must wind up forgetting yourself and taking a bite out of the pictures in the menu from time to time.

About the only people who don’t wind up looking bad in this entire pathetic shitstorm are the folks at Newsweek. They got the essence of the story right, if not its details. The fact that other people were stupid enough to kill or die over it is not Newsweek‘s fault. When it was revealed that they’d made a factual mistake, they went into a veritable frenzy of excruciatingly public self-examination, vowing to amend their processes in ways that would prevent a recurrence. If I’m worried about anything as regards them, it’s not that they’ll make a similar mistake again, but that this whole sorry affair has left them so cautious as to be ineffective. The people running the clown show need more scrutiny, not less, and Newsweek needs to keep its part to provide it.

Season two of Battlestar Galactica will premiere in the U.S. on July 15th. I’m bringing the pizza.

The ranks of those who both (a) care passionately about games and (b) can write coherently — let alone thoughtfully and engagingly — about them is painfully, excruciatingly small. (Probably in no small part because it’s such a brutally unrewarding enterprise: your reward for calling a spade a spade is typically a giant steaming heap of angry e-mail, liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks and precious little in the way of intelligence, from a horde of subliterate fanboys apparently lacking anything better to do.)

So it’s doubly heartening to see that the guys over at Pointless Waste of Time are willing to fight the good fight regardless.

Slate’s William Saletan succinctly explains why it’s even stronger than you think.