Burn Up
I guess we can thank the writer’s strike for the recent surge in miniseries, and perhaps to a lesser extent Battlestar Galactica.
The recent remake of The Andromeda Strain for example was great, and not just because of the parade of 24 guest stars like Daniel Dae Kim. They kept it close enough to the novel to recapture the spirit and feel as well as have a few recognizable bits. But they also updated it with more recent technology and a funky new twist I totally want to spoil but I wouldn’t do that to Jon.
Burn Up, the other noteworthy miniseries was a different duck, as a former manager of mine would say. I enjoyed the performances and the subject matter was interesting but it somehow didn’t hold my attention as well as The Andromeda Strain. Part of the blame rests with me as I was distracted by my new computer, a cake, and tuned in late to the second half.
Bradley Whitford as the ‘bad guy’ was great although I felt they didn’t give him enough to play. The guy from Love & Monsters (Doctor Who) and Hustle was great. I think a problem was they cast far too many blonde Caucasian guys in business attire all speaking with an English accent. I had trouble keeping track of them and I think part of the problem was the characterization of each was also very similar.
Hopefully they’ll rerun it so I can watch more carefully a second time.
The story was interesting but could have used some polishing and tightening, the same being true of The Andromeda Strain which makes Nash irrelevant to the central plot during the entire second half. One thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the idea of a Kyoto 2 treaty negotiated in Calgary - by rights it should be the Calgary Treaty. I know why they did this, name recognition; you say Kyoto and are more likely to think of the treaty than the place.
I guess the message is that there are several paths to seriously addressing climate change at the corporate and government level and we’re not doing them and one day, perhaps sooner than we think, the oil will be gone.
This makes me think 2 things.
1) Maybe the high price of oil is just expressing the hidden costs and dangers in economic terms. In economics we know that if you want large numbers of people to do or not do something you assign it a value and then provide either an incentive or disincentive depending on what you want them to do. So while high gas prices suck, they could be forcing us to change in ways we need to, treating it like the limited and dangerous resource it is.
2) Vote Obama.
