Helvetica is an hour and a half of people with bad hair and bad accents talking about fonts.

I don’t want to discourage people from seeing it, really. It’s a very well-made documentary, doing all the things a documentary should do. It stays neutral throughout (like you’d expect from the subject matter), but a couple of sections are downright clever. You can find plenty of reviews from people who never expected to be at all interested in a documentary about a font, but came out pleasantly surprised.

My problem with it is the same thing that pleasantly surprises people about it: it’s not quite a documentary about a font. They do a great job of giving you the history of it, and the intention behind its design and use, and showing how ubiquitous it’s become, and gauging all the different reactions to it.

But to do this in a film without its turning into a dry History Channel-style documentary, they have to interview a lot of people. People who have strong opinions about fonts. In other words, the kind of people you really wouldn’t want to be spending much time around in real life.

Part of my problem with the movie is that I like to believe that geekery is a contained phenomenon, and not some global pandemic that’s all part of the human condition. It’s like Sanctuary for the people inside the city in Logan’s Run* — I know that in the circles I travel in, people obsess over comic books and TV series continuity and the efficiency of algorithms; but I want to believe that there’s a better world outside where the people are free of that.

But this just perpetuates the idea that because of the Original Sin or something, we’re all mired in our own little worlds of pointless obsessions. I have to hear insufferable people claiming that they know they won’t be popular for this, but The People simply must hear their opinions of “Battlestar Galactica” or BioShock or “Sam & Max”. And now I realize that others have to hear insufferable people saying that Helvetica represents corporate oppression and war, or that they realize they are being iconoclasts and their views might not be popular, but they cannot condone using more than one typeface in a publication.

It’s movies like this that make me think humanity was just better off back when we had to spend all our time worried about finding food and not being mauled by large animals.

* The fact that I used Logan’s Run as an example merely proves my point.

Book
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden

Synopsis
On a battlefield late in World War I, allied soldier Lord Baltimore is attacked by a strange bat-like creature. Now, the war is over, but a mysterious plague has spread through all of Europe. Three of Baltimore’s friends are summoned to a tavern in a dying city, swapping stories of their own encounters with the supernatural while they wait for his arrival and an explanation of what’s causing the plague (spoiler: it’s vampires).

Pros
Inspired combination of Lovecraftian apocalyptic dread, old folk tales, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, and even Blade, which feels like it’s creating a new mythology from its disparate sources. Mignola’s illustrations are perfectly chosen and placed throughout the book, conveying a sense of portent and doom as well in prose as they do in his Hellboy comics. Uses the antiquated story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure to set the time period and mood, but still manages to incorporate a killer fight scene. Makes vampires scary again: tells a vampire story without gimmicks or attempts to make them unnecessarily contemporary.

Cons
Because it’s literally humorless, it feels like a Hellboy story arc with a layer stripped away; there’s the action, and the sense of dread, and the exhaustively-researched set of source material, but nothing to ground it or make it feel “real.” Some passages suffer from overly affected writing. Despite being short and full of illustrations, it still feels ponderous and self-important.

Verdict
A deliberately old-school vampire story that manages to be genuinely scary (and gave me several nights of weird nightmares). But I doubt I would’ve been interested were I not already a fan of Hellboy — it’s got all the same components as a Hellboy story arc told in prose, but without that spark of humor that makes it come alive.

As I mentioned, I was confused for most of last year’s ComicCon, so I missed the “Lost” panel. I wasn’t aware until reading about it on a message board just now, that during that panel they showed another Dharma Initiative orientation film, that was later repeated on ABC’s website.

This one is for station 6, “The Orchid.” And watching it has me more excited about “Lost” than anything since the first orientation film. I’ve already been impressed with the show because of the strength of this season’s episodes, but this just confirms that they’ve still got the same cleverness and attention to detail they did when they first introduced the bunker and the Dharma Initiative. And now they have the freedom to take the story where they want and draw it all towards a conclusion.

In short: I love this series again. Now I’m going to check out the Season 3 DVDs for any special features. You really need to watch the video if you haven’t see it yet.

Edit: As it turns out, the Orchid video is included on the Season 3 set (I’d gotten a copy as a Christmas gift, but hadn’t watched them until today). They’ve also got a thing where the executive producers give definitive answers on some of the questions that have been circulating. There’s nothing earth-shattering there; in pretty much every case, they’re just confirming that the most obvious answer is the “correct” one (e.g., Desmond’s failure to push the button is what caused the 815 crash). It is good that they’re reminding viewers that they haven’t forgotten everything from the first couple of seasons, though.

It’s also good that they thought to include a bit after each “answer” where they interview a bunch of people for their take on the “new info.” Because I just couldn’t rest until I knew how Jimmy Kimmel interpreted the big mysteries of “Lost.” Hopefully the Disney Corporate Synergy department will work its magic on future releases, so I can hear Raven, Miley Cyrus, and the cast of “High School Musical” give their take on the series.

This week’s “Lost” was called “The Economist,” and the series is continuing on its trajectory of pure awesomeness. I genuinely feel bad for the people who’ve given up on the show, because I feel like my patience has paid off. They’re doing exactly what I was hoping they’d do, but better than I imagined they’d be able to pull it off: questions are getting answered. Stuff is really happening. But they’re not just tying together loose ends; they’re still playing with the format, introducing new characters, throwing in tons of new questions, and always feeling like it’s going somewhere instead of stalling for time.

The opening of this episode is my second favorite in a series that’s had some killer openings (my favorite is still Desmond’s introduction, with “Make Your Own Kind of Music”). They’re finally taking advantage of Sayid’s bad-assery, and somehow finding ways to make what could’ve been a cliched, predictable espionage story and keeping me genuinely surprised. It feels like the flash-forwards have blown the series wide open, and the writers have been rejuvenated with the potential to do whatever they want.

(Wouldn’t anyone get bored spending four years to tell a story that takes place over 100 days, with characters who’ve been mostly “set” from the beginning? Isn’t it easy to understand why they keep trying stuff like introducing the tail end, Nikki and Paolo, and the “natives?”)

Big questions raised in this episode: Who’s the “R.C.” in Naomi’s bracelet? Was Sayid’s girlfriend wearing an identical bracelet? What’s with the time difference in the rocket sent from the ship? In particular, am I the only one expecting there to be a greater time difference, or the rocket not to show up at all? What are they going to do with angry ghostbuster Miles? What happened to Jacob’s cabin? Why is Sayid such a puss who keeps falling weepily in love at the drop of a hat? And we’re seeing a lot more of Naomi than we have of other dead people: can we expect her to be coming back?

Via the RiffTrax blog, Bill Corbett shares a relaxing meditation with us all.

Learn it, memorize it, and go in peace.

Book
Jingo by Terry Pratchett

In a series
21st in the series of Discworld books.

Synopsis
The lost island of Leshp suddenly rises in the middle of the ocean, sparking a war between the nations of Ankh-Morpork and Klatch over ownership of the new land. Sam Vimes and the rest of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch get pulled into the war via a murder mystery surrounding the Klatchian Prince.

Pros
It’s a Discworld book: clever, funny, cynical-but-lighthearted, and astoundingly readable and entertaining, while still having enough “meat” in its social commentary and satire that it doesn’t feel like empty, disposable entertainment.

Cons
The Discworld books are so consistently entertaining, it feels like cheating to include one in a New Year’s resolution list. Has occasional, brief passages that suffer from the Impenetrable Wall of Cleverness syndrome: where the story gets pushed to the background in favor of an extended gag or pun. Very much a middle book in the series; gives enough introduction to the characters so you can follow what’s going on, but leaves it to the other books to establish their depth.

Verdict
Terry Pratchett is simply one of the best living writers, and it’s a shame that the Discworld books’ origins as fantasy parodies keeps them just shy of being recognized as “Great Literature.” Jingo would be a bad choice for your first Discworld book (I’d recommend either Mort, Small Gods, or my favorite, Night Watch), but it’s a very solid entry in the series.

Edit: I forgot to mention my favorite thing about this book. Instead of just relying on the valid but obvious statement “racism, prejudice, and jingoism are bad,” Pratchett is careful to show both sides of the brewing war, and makes a profound statement about our potential to over-compensate. We can get so locked into the idea of “Them” as innocent victims of the failings of “Us,” that we forget that “They” have just as much capacity for both evil and goodness as “We” do. No matter how well-intentioned it may be, seeing any group of people as nothing more than “the good guys” or “the victims” does as much to rob them of their humanity as overt racism does.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why I never got around to seeing RoboCop until tonight.

I vaguely remember at the time being scared off by stories of how ultra-violent it was. Later, I just dismissed it as being another 80s action movie. After that, I put it in the same category as Total Recall — I was sure it’d be entertaining enough, but stupid. Even after seeing Starship Troopers and (after a month or two) finally realizing how brilliant that movie is, I still wasn’t that interested in RoboCop.

I think my crippling fear of Ronny Cox had something to do with it, too.

Whatever the case, I finally know what all the fuss was about. What a great, bizarre movie. I can’t even imagine the confidence it’d take to pull something like that off — there’s absolutely nothing subtle about it, and yet you spend the whole time knowing that they’re in on the joke and still wondering if they’re taking it all seriously. It’s kind of like a quantum movie: simultaneously a straightforward, sleazy, cheesy 80s action movie and a satire of those movies and the 80s in general. (The movie has a guy instantly mutated by toxic waste, and Miguel Ferrer snorting coke off a woman’s chest!)

I mentioned it took me a while to get what was going on with Starship Troopers, and that movie was even more obviously campy, plus it came ten years later, after the audience had plenty of time to get used to deconstructionism. I remember watching True Lies and thinking it was such a clever spoof of action movies, but it didn’t even survive two years before seeming clumsy, vapid and obvious. RoboCop feels like it has after-burners: ride the initial launch as a super-violent action movie that seems a little smarter than average; ride through the irony wave of the 90s as a part of pop culture, surviving references and attempts to make fun of it; then gain a new appreciation two decades later, when viewers can marvel at seeing Laura Palmer’s dad as a hip club-goer and Eric’s dad from “That 70s Show” dropping f-bombs and shooting off people’s hands with a shotgun. And even with the jerky stop-motion and the barrage of 80s hair and glasses, you still have to watch it and think, “that’s just cool.”

I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have understood RoboCop in 1987, since 99% of the movies and TV made in the 80s was exactly like that, with no sense of irony. At the time, “Moonlighting” was still a years-ahead-of-its-time masterpiece of self-awareness and post-modernism, and looking back at those episodes now is almost painful.

The genius of RoboCop (and Starship Troopers, to a lesser degree) is that it still works as an action movie, even if you’re not in the mood for satire on urban decay, the evil that corporations do, and the emptiness of the media. It’s pretty ballsy to make movies that unapologetically say “screw you” to everyone, including the movie’s main characters themselves; to do that and make it not angry and pointlessly cynical, but actually entertaining, takes a hell of a lot of talent. And it leaves you vulnerable to so much that can fail from concept to execution — as Basic Instinct and Showgirls both prove.

Best of all: I finally get another reference from an old episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” In “Catalina Capers,” there’s a scene where the bots are saying their bedtime prayers, and Crow says, “and God bless ED-209, although I don’t know why you’d make a robot who couldn’t walk down stairs.” I’ve made it my goal that by the time I die, I’ll have gotten every reference the MST3K guys ever made. There’s still only a few thousand left.

Thursday’s episode of “Lost” was called “Confirmed Dead” and correct me if I’m wrong, but by my count it had (spoilers!):

• Four new characters with immediate flashbacks
• An irritable Asian ghostbuster who uses a dustbuster
• The sunken, decaying corpse of Greg Grunberg
• A through-the-body bullet wound with a tie-in to Locke’s continuity
• Three cases of Ben getting the tar beat out of him
• Vincent the dog leading the gang on a wild goose chase, confirming my suspicions that he’s the ultimate mastermind behind the entire mystery
• A polar bear skeleton in the desert
• More of the mysterious new Live and Let Die-esque villain
• Post-Grindhouse Jeff “Lawnmower Man” Fahey as a cross between Jimmy Buffet, Jeff Lebowski, and pure drunken badassery

I’d say that this was getting back to the “Lost” I used to know, but “Lost” was never that cool. This is what I wanted the old “Lost” to be, the kind of coolness that it always hinted at but never quite delivered on. It’s like they finally said, “Screw it, let’s take the training wheels off” and let her ride with whatever wacky stuff they felt like throwing in there.

Story still doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, and it’s got too much of people standing around looking confused or just moving for the sake of getting to the next plot point for me to say it’s approaching “high art”. But hell if it ain’t moving.

I think the last season ended up redeeming itself by the end, but even after the best episodes, I was never fired up to see the next one. But as it is now, I can’t wait to see what happens next week. Who’s the rest of the Oceanic 6? What’s happening with the cabin? How does Taller Walt Ghost fit in? Who’s Ben’s “man on the boat?” What connection do the new people have with flight 815? Why did they want Ben? What’s the deal with Naomi? When is Libby coming back into the picture? Or Penny and Desmond? Why doesn’t Ben know what the smoke monster is? When do we find out more about Forever Young Nestor Carbonell?

It used to be I had no faith that the show would ever answer its questions; now I’m saying they should keep piling ‘em on. And how cool is a show that can make me genuinely interested in the answer to a question as cheesy as “Who are the Oceanic 6?”