Important Safety Tip

Which is, don't hang out near the lions' watering hole this coming August 14th.

According to this research, you are more likely to be eaten by a lion before the moon is out the day after a full moon. The next full moon is August 13. So from sunset until moonrise on August 14th, you and I are prime cuts at Simba's deli counter.

The reason is the combination of leonine hunger and darkness, both of which are greater after sunset before the not-quite-full-anymore moon rises. As the moon waxes, the nights have more brightly lit hours in which even clumsy poor-scent-organ having human beings will notice a quarter ton of feline death hanging out with that certain gleam in its eye. Thus, lions have more trouble catching prey, especially since most of their prey are critters that run fast, jump high or can do both. Trouble catching prey means hungry lions.

After the full moon, the hours before moonrise are not at all well-lit, meaning Leo and Leona can get within paw-whapping, jaw-snapping distance of a whole lot of things that might otherwise spot them coming.

Of course, the danger is relatively light in any case. Researchers studied nearly 500 lion attacks in Tanzania that happened in the 21 years between 1988 and 2009. That works out to just over 250 full moons, meaning there were slightly less than two attacks per full moon in a country of about 40 million people. That puts your risk of being attacked by a lion during a full moon at about .00000005 percent, which falls even more if you do not happen to be in Tanzania.

Unless, of course, that's what the lions want us to think.

Never Trust a TV Channel Over 30...

Up unaccountably early this morning after a week of church camp, I surfed some televised soporifics in hopes of returning to slumber. I didn't succeed, but I ran across an interesting sequence of broadcasts on the VH-1 Classics channel.

Monday marks the 30th birthday of the former Music Television, or MTV, and some of its partner channels are airing programs from over the original's lifetime. I surfed in during some footage from Live Aid, the 1985 two-continent benefit concert to raise funds to send food to African famine regions. Airing at the time I watched was part of the set by Queen, whose frontman Freddy Mercury managed to get nearly every one of the 72,000 people at London's Wembley Stadium to sing choruses with him. The late Mr. Mercury, a showman who really has yet to be equaled in pop music, strutted, stalked, vamped and air-guitared his way across the stage costumed in nothing more elaborate than a T-shirt and jeans. Among the songs played in the part I heard was "Radio Ga Ga." An aside to Ms. Germanotta -- the "Ga Ga" of the title is not a complimentary reference.

As "Radio Ga Ga" ended, original VJ's Nina Blackwood and Alan Hunter threw us to a commercial break, and the break from the Live Aid broadcast coincided with a real one. When we returned from break, we skipped ahead several years in MTV history to watch Ashton Kutcher snicker like a vapidly mean middle-schooler through an episode of his lame Candid Camera ripoff Punk'd. At least, I'm assuming that's what he did; I hit the channel button after about 15 seconds so I don't know how the rest of the segment went.

A music and pop culture writer for the St. Petersburg Times muses about the history of the channel, but since he's a real reporter instead of a guy running his mouth, he interviewed some original MTV people, including the perpetually cute Martha Quinn. Quinn points out that one of the real differences with the MTV of the days when it aired music videos and today is not just the difference in programming, although Jersey Shore and its ilk are a large part of why the channel is awful (I may have added that last part myself). Today's videos would be driven by what's popular in young ears -- meaning significant portions of the day might look like Glee re-runs. Quinn says that in her early time with the network, some of the rebellious attitude may have been manufactured, but a lot of it was real because the channel was something entirely new and no one could guarantee success. Today, with MTV a brand name, there is no edge to ride on and no risk is being taken.

I might disagree with how much of the rebel attitude was manufactured vs. how much was real, because popular music has carefully crafted its image since there have been images to craft. But she's right in that there is virtually no risk involved in MTV programming anymore. It breaks no new ground and rebels against nothing, going along with the flow and airing what it does only because people watch what it airs.

More's the pity.

From the Rental Vault: The Train

Although he was certainly one of the biggest box-office draws of his era, Burt Lancaster had an affinity for some melancholy spins on his action, war or Western crowd-pleasers. Working with John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate, he helped create one such movie in the 1964 black-and-white war picture The Train.

Near the end of Germany's occupation of Paris, German Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) has hundreds of priceless works of art crated up to be taken to Germany. The musuem curator contacts the French resistance to see if he can be stopped. The cell, led by Paul Labiche (Lancaster), decides not to try to save the train, saying it will be too great a risk for their diminished numbers. Labiche is the switching director of a Paris trainyard, and has created a plan to stall a German artillery train so it can be bombed by the Allies. Other cell members and some engineers have decided they will try to stall von Waldheim's train long enough for the Allies to retake Paris and save the art. Against his will and better judgment, Labiche joins their efforts, which are equal part sabotage, Mission-Impossible-style caper and straight-up espionage. As the human cost of stalling the train mounts, Labiche must decide if the price is worth it, while von Waldheim comes closer and closer to completely losing it in his desire to get the train into Germany.

Frankenheimer's direction elevates the trains themselves to star status in the movie -- their ponderous weight and immense strength at the mercy of the minimal contact between wheel and rail parallels how the movie's two antagonists barely manage to contain the energy behind their efforts. He includes a number of deep-focus, long tracking shots that add layers of realism to the action. Things are never still; a railyard is full of workers and soldiers moving about their business behind the leads as they talk, offices scurry with activity as German soldiers burn documents they can't transport or leave behind.

Lancaster is, as usual, a massive presence in almost every scene where he plays against other actors because of his stature. Only when he's alone and outdoors does he seem normal-sized or at all vulnerable to injury. Scofield's intensity starts out icy as he finesses his way past a general's appropriation of all trains for military purposes, then begins to burn with mania as his plans keep being thwarted. Both men seem as unable to change their course as a train is to leave its tracks, even though the human beings have a free will the machines do not.

The black-and-white photography -- The Train may have been the last major action picture not filmed in color -- adds to the bleakness of the story and the setting. There are plenty of taut action sequences among the brilliant performances, but The Train isn't what modern audiences would call a thriller -- it shows victories as well as defeats have costs. It's still well worth its two-hours-plus running time and the thinking it might bring about.

Murder Squared

Television producer/bestseller writer Stephen J. Cannell set up his mainstay series character, Shane Scully, to travel in a slightly different direction in this, his 10th novel featuring the LAPD detective. But Cannell died about the same time The Prostitute's Ball was released, meaning that Scully's new direction forms an end to his adventures rather than a bridge.

Scully is assigned a new partner, flashy detective Sumner Hitchens. Nobody in his unit likes Hitchens, who made a mint selling the story of one of his cases to a major studio. "Hitch" seems more into deal-making and showbiz than police work, and Scully is not happy. He's even less happy when his media-hungry new partner and he catch a case involving the murder of a major Hollywood producer and two high-priced escorts at a wild party featuring several other escorts and even more Hollywood elite. Scully thinks "Hitch" doesn't have his mind on the job, but they catch an astounding early break and manage to make serious headway on the case very quickly. The problem is that their evidence also draws out information about a 25-year-old cold case that will only complicate things.

Cannell's novels, like much of his television output, are pure froth. Well-sketched but not terribly innovative characters, witty but not very deep dialogue and interesting but not very challenging twists make for a quick but not memorable read. You could probably read the Scully novels about every six months or so and enjoy them just as much because they're unlikely to stick with you much longer than that. Cannell has developed Scully as a character over the course of the series; he began as a loner but now is deeply connected to his wife, son and many of his co-workers. It's a good example of a writer figuring that airport novels gain just as much from time spent on their characters and plots as do Serious Literary Works and being willing to invest that time on them. Just because it's the literary equivalent of a hamburger, to paraphrase Stephen King, doesn't mean it can't be made a darn fine hamburger by a cook who takes some pride in his or her work.

It would have been nice to have seen what new ideas Cannell had planned on trying with Scully and his cast, but The Prostitute's Ball serves as a good place to wish them all farewell and happy literary trails.

Hey! You Sank My Faith You Have Any Ideas Left at All

Seen on several sites so far these last couple of days -- a trailer for a movie version of the old "Battleship" game.

I give up.

From the Rental Vault: Ashes of Time Redux

Although I'd probably not be the kind of guy to catch a lot of international movies in the theater, DVD is a pretty good way to open out my horizons to things I might not otherwise see.

One of my main reasons for skipping foreign films when they're onscreen is that I too often find myself missing things going on while I'm reading the subtitles. There's often a lot of great things happening on the screen besides the faces of the people who are talking. And even in the closeups, I might miss a facial expression or gesture while my eyes are busy following the dialogue at the bottom of the screen. But when I watch a DVD, I can pause or back up if I find myself wondering if something happened that I missed. Or I can watch it all again right then and there -- the 2002 movie Hero with Jet Li has some uses of color and light that just beg for repeat viewing, for example.

Had I seen Ashes of Time Redux -- famous Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai's 2008 re-edit of his 1994 movie Ashes of Time -- in a theater, I probably would have been ambivalent at best and more likely downright negative. Its elliptical storyline and stylized fight scenes leave a viewer saying, "Waitaminute. What just happened?" waaaaay too often for enjoyment in a theater that wouldn't oblige me by backing up and running it again.

Nearly every online entry I read about this movie explains the story differently, so here goes nothing as I try to sketch the plot. In ancient China, a semi-retired swordsman named Ouyang Feng acts as an agent for still-active sword-fighters. Ouyang is bitter, cynical and contemptuous of the people who hire his fighters' services and is no sweet source of light to his friends, either. The bounty hunters who work for him, from the Blind Swordsman to Hong Qi to his own friend Huang Yaoshi, all leave him as they find something they wish to love more than fighting and money, but Ouyang remains. The movie is set up so that the tale of how each swordsman finds meaning in his life is its own short story, although some elements of each narrative leak into the others.

Wong said Ashes of Time was based on the 1957 novel Legend of the Condor Heroes, even though nothing in his movie bears any resemblance to that book's story of two men on opposite sides of the conflict between the Song and Jin Dynasties. The Hong Kong movie industry prides itself on orderly, economical shoots, but Wong took two years and nearly 40 million dollars to finish Ashes of Time, and even managed to shoehorn another move, a parody of the Condor novel called Legend of the Eagle-Shooting Heroes, into the production schedule using the cast members of Ashes of Time.

Action-movie fans or people who follow what the Hong Kong studios call wuxia films, or stories of swordsmen and soldiers in ancient China, will probably not find a lot to like in Ashes of Time or its later re-edited cut. There's way too much talking, the battle scenes are stylized to the point they look like a series of blurred still images and the movie loops around itself too many times to follow easily. But Ouyang's stubborn resistance to seeing people, even hardened killers like himself, make connections with others and his continued rejection of that possibility is a pretty fascinating character study. If you do pick it up, keep that DVD remote handy so you can back up and catch a scene or two again and figure out just what happened. Or to press stop if it finally exhausts your patience.

A Fifth for the Fourth

For his fourth Mickey Haller novel, Michael Connelly brings us The Fifth Witness. We first met Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, so-called because he had no permanent office and worked from the back seat of his Lincoln. Matthew McConaughey played Haller in a movie version of that book earlier this year, a fact that helps Connelly write a nice little joke at one point of Fifth Witness.

The Haller books are much lighter in tone than Connelly's Harry Bosch stories, as Haller seems much less damaged by life than his police investigator half-brother. Fifth Witness is no exception, even though the matter in the middle is as serious as any other -- a mortgage banker has been murdered. The accused, Lisa Trammel, was already Mickey's client because the bank the man worked at was foreclosing her house and he had been taking on foreclosure work in light of the drying up of criminal practice. Lisa maintains her innocence, which earlier on in the series would have been a must for Mickey, as he refused to represent someone unless he believed the person was innocent. These days, he's not so idealistic.

But innocent or not, she's a significant pain as a client, believing her statement of innocence is the same as innocence and continually getting in the way of Mickey's efforts to represent her in the trial and in possible media exploitation of the case. He also has to deal with a tough prosecutor with her eyes on the prize of the district attorney's office sometime in her future and get a lot closer to some shadowy connections to organized crime than may be good for him.

As always, Connelly's writing flows smoothly over the pages, carrying the reader along in the current of the story pretty much effortlessly. His explanations of how he puts on his case and why he does what he does in the courtroom ring true and their wry nature offers interesting flavor to the story.

Some expository dialogue about the mortgage foreclosure crisis makes for a few eddies in the current but they don't slow things down too much and are never so long you lose the story when you skip them. Mickey takes on some definition as a character as he tries to find a way to deal with the not-as-over-as-he-thought-it-was relationship with Maggie McPherson, his first ex-wife and mother of his daughter.

Fifth Witness doesn't carry as much immediacy as the earlier Mickey Haller books, almost as if Connelly is using it to set something else up in a later volume. But it is still well-ahead of a huge percentage of its companions on the bookshelves and can be enjoyed for the beach read it is.