From a Reuters column today:

Disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk said on Tuesday he spent part of private donations for his research in failed attempts to clone mammoths, extinct members of the elephant family.

Fearing imprisonment for fraud and embezzlement, Dr. Woo-suk was last seen on a plane headed to Isla Nublar, just off the coast of Costa Rica. Witnesses say he was carrying a briefcase and several cans of shaving cream.

Ross Douthat takes on the great Anthony Lane–and wins! Here’s Lane on the linguistics of Star Wars:

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond question by “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” the latest—and, you will be shattered to hear, the last—installment of his sci-fi bonanza, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth. All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

And here’s Douthat:

Pace Lane, I actually think that “Sith” is one of the better names that Lucas coined; the worst include Dexter Jettster, Greedo, General Grievous, Count Dooku, and (of course) Jar Jar Binks.

Count Dooku gets my vote for worst name in the Star Wars universe.

For the Mann obsessives out there, I’ve got a short report on Miami Vice which contains some mildly spoilerish stuff. Read at your own risk.

***

I’m still not sure what I make of Miami Vice. I can never fully digest Mann movies in one sitting. But it’s 18 hours later and I’m still thinking intensely about it; that’s the first time a movie has stuck in my brain in a while.

My initial reaction is that it’s good, not great. But then again, I felt the same way after seeing Heat, The Insider, and Collateral for the first time. The Viper camera he uses is pretty astounding. There are images, like one panorama of hills in Paraguay at sunset with a single thunderhead looming in the distance, that I will never forget. This is a beautiful movie.

And Mann has managed to make a cops-and-robbers flick where the ideal, the goal that motivates the protagonist, is middle-class marriage. That’s no small trick. And my God, you’d think that he’s the only guy in Hollywood who’s ever heard a real gun fired. The sound work on the gun fights is shocking–you hear the different reports and registers and none of them sounds like typical movie gunfire. It makes a big difference.

Also, while the movie has moments of shocking violence, Mann demonstrates tremendous restraint. There’s a scene where a character has been brutally tortured and murdered. But Mann doesn’t show that to us–or even tell us about it with dialogue. Instead, we get a very tight shot of an enormous, scary looking man as he’s rooting through a refrigerator. We see the back of his bulging, bald cranium, his enormous arms, and a sea of tattoos. As the camera pulls back a few inches, we see that he’s wearing big blue rubber gloves that go up to his elbows. Then we notice the blood on them. And as the camera pivots, we see, in the background, someone’s foot and ankle on the floor, peeking out from around the corner of a doorway. Anyway, without showing any gore or violence, Mann convinces us that something unspeakably terrible has just happened and sends shivers down our spines.

I thought directors had forgotten how to do that.

The knock on Mann is that he’s all surface. A glorious surface, to be sure, but that there’s nothing more than cold, shiny sleekness to his work.

For me, that criticism doesn’t hold. Mann is not a director of ideas, although there is one big idea behind Miami Vice. As a director, his strength is his ability to combine narrative and atmosphere; he’s a combination of the best qualities of Spielberg and Kubrick.

Mann likes to skip beginnings and jump into stories from the middle–he does this in almost all of his movies, forcing the audience to play catch up. But he then drives relentlessly to the ending. And he shows you fully inhabited worlds that are more spectacular than anything you’d get from ILM. Even judged on pure visual appeal, I take Mann’s Los Angeles or Miami over Naboo any day of the week.

Miami Vice fits nicely into the Mann canon.

AICN’s brilliant TV correspondent, Hercules the Strong, has a rundown on the fall shows. He’s very high on Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60. No surprise there.

What is surprising is Herc’s apparent fetish for hot moms:

Dana Delany is incredible, and today defines “milftastico.” . . .

Fey, now possessed of big American post-pregnancy breasts, continues to hold a vexing physical allure.

Someone get Herc some saltpeter.

Zidane’s mother Malika–who is totally not a terrorist–now says that:

nglish tabloid The Mirror quotes Malika — who is recovering from illness — as telling friends: “I am utterly disgusted by what I have heard. I praise my son for defending his family’s honour.”

“No one should be subjected to such foul insults on or off the football pitch and I don’t care if it was a World Cup Final. I have nothing but contempt for Materazzi and, if what he said is true, then I want his balls on a platter.”

Yup.

“Ah, Bats! You’re just in time to stem the rose! Let me put a smile on your face!”

Whatever. Hollywood can do what they want. They’ll never be able to take Identity Crisis away from me.

There’s nothing funny about Haley Joel Osment’s car crash, but the hidden detail in the story is pretty great: He was driving a 1995 Saturn.

This makes perfect sense, of course. Osment is surely quite wealthy, but all teenagers should have humble first cars. For one thing, it keeps their shiny new driver’s license from going to their heads and for another, they’re terrible drivers and often get into scrapes. I hope Osment makes a speedy recovery and kudos to his parents or guardians (or maybe even to him, if the Saturn was hist choice) for the Saturn.

And while we’re on good upbringing of child stars, there’s a satisfying tidbit about Star Wars moppet Jake Lloyd who, IMDB says, “works at Pac Sun at an outdoor mall in Carmel, Indiana.”

Again, Lloyd certainly can’t need the money. But he’s in high school now and every high school kid should have at least one crummy job. It builds character. Again, good for his parents and good for him.

Not every kid actor is LiLo.

The new slug is just little shout out because I’m seeing Miami Vice on Monday afternoon and I won’t lie, I’m pretty excited.

I’ll risk the rath of Ross Douthat and suggest here that Mann is one of the two truly great American directors working who is still at the height of his powers. Discuss.

More on Mann after Monday.