It occurs to me that the passengers aboard Northwest Flight 253 saved Obama’s presidency. If Abdulmutallab had succeeded in blowing up the plane, and it then became known that the government knew he was on the flight, but had simply decided to question him after he landed . . .

Well, let’s just say that I don’t think we’d talk about anything else for the next three years and I doubt there are very many circumstances that would have been able to align to bring about his re-election.

If Obama winds up as a two-term president with a grand, historical record, it will be in large part because a group of anonymous patriots kept a very large dog from barking.

In case you missed my Christmas present to you, Red Letter Media has posted new hotness: A trailer for his review of Attack of the Clones:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkxQ6HYDwIA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I cannot wait.

Back when Snatch was released, Brad Pitt predicted that one day Guy Ritchie would re-invent the Western. Maybe. With Sherlock Holmes, however, Ritchie has re-invented the buddy-cop movie. And it’s kind of awesome.

There’s a lot to like about Ritchie’s Holmes–how he structures it like a series of magic tricks; how he uses flash-backs to keep himself honest while also demonstrating Holmes’s cleverness; how Jude Law has triumphantly returned to character acting. But the thing that struck me most was how closely Ritchie and Downey’s Holmes resembles Hugh Laurie’s House.

Before Steve Sailer mentioned it, I had never considered what a close cousin House was to Holmes. But the Ritchie’s Holmes and Watson could be House and Wilson’s brothers.

Update: With deep chagrin I now realize that Galley Friend Erasmus was on the House/Holmes case years ago. In addition to noting the direct relations, Erasmus picked up that (1) House has Black Adder on his TiVo; and (2) House actually lives in 221B.

Santino is back and blogging full time.

As the marines say in Avatar, go get some!

Tom Friedman is all butched out today calling on Muslim societies to act responsibly and conjure up a sense of shame about terrorism committed in their name. He’s so tough he practically sounds like George W. Bush! Only sensible and fair-minded!

In the course of this nothing-burger column, however, Friedman tosses out this bit of off-handed wisdom: “Every faith has its violent extreme.”

Really? Is that true? There are violent extremist Quakers? And Unitarians? And B’hais? And Buddhists? And, well, never mind.

Earlier in the week Froma Harrop, who seems to be on staff at the otherwise very smart RealClear Politics, wrote that Democrats shouldn’t get all worked up about the 2010 elections yet. Here’s her stunning conclusion: “Ignore the polls-du-jour. Democrats could lose big on Nov. 2, 2010. Or, perhaps they won’t.”

How’s that for earning penetrating insight?

Harrop’s general proposition–that polls 10 months out need not be determinative for Democrats–isn’t necessarily silly. It would be interesting to see some data points: What did the polls look like at this point in the 2006 cycle? Or the 2002 cycle? Or the 1994 cycle? But Harrop wants nothing to do with data. Data is hard! Some of it might not even be available on the internet! You might have to pay $35 for an academic journal article. Or actually call someone at Gallup!

Instead, Harrop’s entire analysis is based on this: “Yes, most Americans have told pollsters that they don’t approve of the health care legislation. But an even greater percentage — I guarantee you — has little idea what’s really in it.” And really, what’s a little bit of data in the face of a columnist’s personal guarantee.

A couple weeks ago I noted a story about the environmental impact of dogs and wondered how people who claim to be deeply concerned with the environment would react when challenged about part of their lives that they deemed important: Namely their pets. Now we have our answer.

Someone over at TNR has posted a brilliant econometric analysis: Dog walking promotes vibrant communities, and hence

And if the parks and streets are safer, wouldn’t that convince more people to live in those urban neighborhoods (say, instead of the suburbs)? Doesn’t that ultimately have a green effect? I don’t know how it all tallies up, but surely there are a few marks on the positive side of the dog externality ledger.

Who can say how it all tallies up! But dogs are awesome, so they must be a net green. Ditto for other things noble-hearted liberals like, such as vacations to France.

PS: Elsewhere TNR has a long take-down of Malcolm Gladwell that’s worth reading. Sample hotness:

Gladwell’s overarching thesis in Outliers is so obviously correct that it hardly merits discussion. “The people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” Also, tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of your life. Gladwell writes as if he is the only person in the world in possession of this platitudinous wisdom. The central irony of Outliers is that, Gladwell’s discomfort with the self-help genre notwithstanding, he has written a book that conforms to it perfectly. This is a motivational manual. It is larded with inspirational stories, and with interactive games to capture the reader’s attention–with handy charts and portentous graphs. Its language puts one in mind of, say, Tony Robbins. (On his blog Gladwell recently referred to two speaking engagements on his book tour as “shows.”) We are in guru-land here. “We’re going to conduct a crash investigation,” Gladwell exhorts–a little tastelessly–near the start of a chapter on plane wrecks. Occasionally he tells the reader to write things down. Sometimes he preaches hope: “The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.” Si, se puede. His stories display the mild melodrama of all inspirational books: they are either uplifting or tragic (and therefore also uplifting). One subject’s tale is called “heartbreaking” three times in less than six pages.

And:

Unfortunately it is buried beneath more claims about society. “We think that, say, Nobel Prize winners in science must have the highest IQ scores imaginable, ” Gladwell flatly states, before going on to patiently explain that many Nobel Prize winners do not go to Harvard. In a footnote, he admits that in fact Harvard “produces more Nobel Prize winners than any other school.” Finally, he adds: “But wouldn’t you expect schools like Harvard to win more Nobels than they do?” Here is the Gladwell method nicely on display: a questionable assumption, a partial walk-back of an earlier claim, and finally another questionable assumption synthesizing the half-reversal. The upshot is the mundane observation that Harvard produces more Nobel winners than anyone else, but not too many more. Gladwell wants to be provocative and inoffensive. It is, in fact, his special gift.

Ouch.

It’s funny how the things deemed really harmful to the planet–SUVs, plasma TVs, children–are things liberal environmentalists are generally happy to live without.

Mostly spoilers below, so be warned.

Saw it in non-IMAX 3D over vacation and was struck by several things. First, the movie Cameron has released differs in small, but ultimately substantial, ways from the scriptment many people read over the last few years. Ultimately, the scriptment is better–much better–in some important ways. And since I suspect that Cameron got to make exactly the movie he wanted, I wonder why he made different choices in the end. It’s one thing never get a story quite right. It’s another to have had the story basically honed, and then to change your mind.

Examples? The biggest is the character of Pandora itself. In the scriptment, Pandora plays roughly the same role that New York City plays in Law & Order–it’s basically the chief protagonist. Cameron establishes Pandora as such an entity by (1) Beginning the story on Earth, so we can see what the “real world” looks like and (2) Spending a goodly amount of time on the human base in Pandora, showing us how the humans must cope with this new and strange land. In the film, we begin with Jake Sully coming out of cryo-sleep and spend only a small bit of time on the main base before Cameron gets the lead characters out of Dodge. The end result is that we get more time on Pandora, but I would argue that we get less of a sense of its alien-ness. Finally, the scriptment creates a little a mystery, with some odd occurrances (random animal attacks; animals working together) which pay off with the revelation that Pandora itself is a semi-conscious, networked entity. In the movie, all of that is dispensed with; the idea of a living Pandora is dealt with mostly through exposition.

The second thing that struck me is that many of the substantive criticisms leveled against the film are perfectly valid. Galley Friend Mike Russell has a long and very thoughtful critique over at AICN and I can’t say that I disagree with much, if any of it. To hit on just a few of the film’s problems:

* The villains–both the blood-thirsty colonel and the Company’s on-site executive–are terribly under-written. They’re stock bad guys. Cameron is so lazy about telling us how weasely the Company boss is that he’s introduced by showing him putting golf-balls in the command center. It’s astonishing that a movie as inventive and artful as Avatar would resort to something so cliched and off-the-shelf. Likewise, the Colonel is an uninteresting adversary. He’s neither intelligent, nor cunning, nor particularly competent. His motivations are unclear. What’s worse, he’s so out of control that it’s not obvious why a big, important corporation would trust the security of their most expensive and lucrative operation to him. And it’s not like Cameron doesn’t know how to create complicated, interesting villains (see Aliens).

* Another big issue of motivations: Why do the humans need Unobtanium so badly? Why is it worth the expense? Why would anyone be willing to go to Pandora? (These questions are all answered quite well in the scriptment, by the way.)

* There’s something a little on-the-nose about how simplistically thug-ish the (para?) military types are. And Cameron hits the nose over and over. “Shock and awe.” “Let’s get some.” “Hoo-ah.” Nearly every line ever uttered in cinema by an out-of-control war-dog is used. And it’s all unnecessary. We all understand what Cameron is trying to say without any of that help. I promise.

* How noble are these savages? The most noblest savages, ever. They’re all wise and brave and fair-minded. Even their hot-headed warriors aren’t all that mean to Jake Sully. Mind you, even the ewoks had a suspicious, over-protective, vaguely villainous shaman type. Not the Navi.

* At one point, the evil Colonel is using a Mech-Warrior suit. And he pulls from the Mech-Warrior’s waistband a giant Bowie knife. Really.

All of that said, I was kind of blown away by Avatar. It’s nowhere near a perfect movie. But it’s certainly a great, and probably important, movie. I’d argue that it’s worthy of admiration, even if you deem it a failure.

When people say that Avatar is “immersive,” you may not quite understand what they mean. It isn’t just the CGI used to create Pandora, which blends computers and live-action about as well as we’re likely to see–CGI milestones come and go–it’s that he combines this with 3-D that’s so different from anything you’ve ever seen before that this he’s essentially creating a new format for in-theater movies.

I think Avatar’s box office bears this out. It opened very big (though only half so big as the Transformers sequel. But then look at these dailies: In its second week of release it showed increases on five of the seven days. On its third Saturday of release, it made a little bit more money than it did on its first Saturday. It’s at $352M domestically and we yet we have very little idea of what its final take will be. The only other movie I’ve ever seen with an early performance pattern like this is this one. As a point of reference, by this point in its release, Titanic had earned $157M, just 25 percent of its total domestic take. I doubt Avatar is headed toward $1.4B domestically. (Though you never know.) The Box Office Guru sees a relatively easy path to $547M. All I know for sure is that I’ll be heading out to a theater to see it again.

And by the way, if Avatar doesn’t win Best Picture, I’ll be shocked. I’ve seen maybe five movies this year, so this isn’t a comment on the quality of other films. I like Jason Reitman very much and I’m sure that Up In the Air is a fantastic movie. But the Oscars are industry awards and if the industry as a whole really is worried about its future in the digital age–piracy, big-screen HD TVs, video on-demand, movies on iPod and all the rest–then they’d be suicidal not to do everything in their power to promote a product which showcases the unique power of film on a giant screen and points the way to the future for other filmmakers.

The trailer for the Karate Kid remake is out.

Would be kind of awesome if the kids had to compete in kumite at the end instead of a sanctioned karate competition.