Last night I watched Serenity again. It is the movie Josh Whedon made after Fox canceled Firefly and then it became a huge hit. If you’ve seen the film, you know that River goes crazy, kicking some major The Matrix-style butt, and her brother, Simon, runs in at the last minute and yells, “Blah blah blah blah.” And she falls asleep. We learn all kinds of things in this movie that we didn’t know from watching the series, but the second biggest is that River has been turned into a “killing machine”—not that we didn’t have some indication in “War Stories.” (The biggest thing we learned is that the Operative character would make a cool science fiction version of Kung Fu.)

This time, I knew that Simon was going to run in and yell what he yells, so I listened carefully and it sounded something like “et decorum noch est.” You know: something Latin. And given that I didn’t expect Whedon to know much more Latin than I do, I figured it would be easy to find the phrase given that I felt pretty confident about the first two words, which are from the famous bit of Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland”). But no. There is nothing especially “noch”-y in Latin.

So I went to the source. I tracked down the shooting script (pdf) for Serenity. And I found the line and when I did I knew! I knew that I had no idea what language it was. “Eta Kooram Nah Smech!” Well, that’s not completely true. I knew that it wasn’t Latin, or at least, if it was, it was spelled phonetically for poorly educated screen actors. Otherwise, I was at a loss.

Luckily, I had Google Translate. And I tried its almost entirely useless “detect language” feature and it “detected” Maori, the language of the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand. Not only that, it translated “eta kooram nah smech” into the English non-phrase, “eta Quorum NAH smech.” Why it capitalized Quorum, I have no idea. Ditto: “NAH.” So I went on from there trying various languages. I think I started with German, because face it, “smech” does sound kind of German. It was all a disaster. But finally, I came to Russian. (It would be great to have some dramatic music here!)

It didn’t translate the phrase at all. It just spit back the same phrase in English as it is prone to do. But, like a good Google app, it reported, “Did you mean: eta kooram nah smeh.” I didn’t know, but like so many other things in my life: I hoped. So I clicked. And suddenly, “eta kooram nah smech” was gone and “эта курам на смех” was there. Even more exciting, I got a translation, “This hens laugh at”!

That had to be it, because the phrase, “The chicken’s come home to roost,” is used prominently in the film. But would I come to you with such shoddy “Looks like I got it!” reporting? This isn’t The Wall Street Journal after all! This is a liberal blog where we at least try to be accurate and correct. So I went another step.

So I sent some email to my friend and co-technological conspirator Mikhail who just happens to have been born in Russia. Typically, it was long and probably (for him) boring. You see, I didn’t just want to confirm. I also wanted to know if the phrase was idiomatic, maybe even the Russian equivalent of “The chickens have come home to roost.” So I went on a bit about idioms, but not because I didn’t think he knew what they were. Rather, I have long been meaning to apologize to a non-native English speaker for my constant use of idioms that I know are terribly confusing. “Why do you keep mentioning chickens? We were not talking about chickens!”

According to Mikhail, Google Translate is slightly wrong. Rather than “эта курам на смех,” it should have been “этo курам на смех.” When we make this change in Google Translate, it changes to “It’s chickens to laugh.” Mikhail translated it as, “For the hens to laugh at.” To me, this is probably what you get when you translate an idiomatic phrase like “The chickens have come home to roost” into Russian and back again. Regardless, Whedon was making some kind of comment about the theme of the film: unexpected consequences of good intentions.

But here is a question to ponder. Why did Whedon use a Russian phrase? In the movie and series, Mandarin Chinese is a common second language, for a reason that doesn’t matter. But for this reason, everyone curses in Chinese. Why? I don’t know, but it does sound better than pretend cursing like, “Gosh darn!” I understand that River’s “safe word” couldn’t be English or Chinese. I mean, what if it had been, “Hello River.” She’d be falling asleep all the time. But otherwise, why Russia? I suspect it is because Whedon (the same age as I am) is a Cold War baby. And that means there are only three countries that really matter: America, China, and Russia.

After all that work, I find that I don’t especially care. Although I think it is a fine action film, it isn’t as good as I had remembered. In particular, the dialog is very often hackneyed, the plot is full of holes, and the characterizations—especially of the Operative—are inconsistent. When I saw Marvel’s the Avengers, I thought, “Why would Josh Whedon make something like this?” I now see that that is all he has ever made.

Afterword

Just now, as I finished the first draft of this article, I find that the Wikipedia Page on the film does discuss this very issue. And I must have checked at the beginning of this search. But the page is long and I probably loaded it and searched for Latin and called it a day. Also: the Russian phrase is spelled differently on the page than it is in the shooting script. Regardless, my telling was more exciting. But the page does say that the phrase is a Russian idiom for “That’s ridiculous!” And this my friends, is how I waste my life!

Have you ever seen the alien autopsy video? There’s very little actual video and whenever you got close it went out of focus? I have the same feeling about “daredevil” Shaun Harrington and his supposed close-call with a tiger shark. (See the video below.) The only time we see the shark under water, it is clearly tethered somehow. What’s more, it isn’t moving much and its mouth is hanging open. All told, it looks entirely fake and I’m afraid the shark is either dead or nearly so.

Another really interesting thing here is that there is a total of 40 seconds of video that is repeated over and over again. I would be really careful putting this on television; it seems like an obvious stunt to get some undeserved publicity. But the show’s host seems to fully accept Mr. Harrington at face value. I would think that the producers would have wanted to see more than 40 very edited seconds of video before they believed the story.

What I think the best case for what might have happened is that they caught a tiger shark. And not just any tiger shark. At less than 8 feet long, it was probably a fairly young shark. The idea was to drag the shark around by the line and make a cool looking video. At one point, they lost a bit of control and the shark did get a bit close to Harrington. The reason I say that is because after the “attack” the shark turns far more extremely than would be normal. After all this “play,” they managed to kill the shark, which is what we see at the beginning of the edited footage.

Or—and I’m afraid this is the more likely case—they just killed an adolescent tiger shark (Near Threatened) and then pulled it around on some line. What else could they do? “Man swims with dead tiger shark” would not get said man on television.

What is most perplexing about this is that I consider myself really naive about this kind of stuff. Yet this looked bad immediately. “What’s that line there?” And, “Why is that shark so still with its mouth hanging open?” Yet it has been about a week since the story first appeared (I couldn’t find anything earlier than the 14th, when it seemed to be everywhere including the Daily Mail), and there has been no reporting of it being an obvious hoax. In fact, it has even been reported on today.

I think I—proud coward that I am—might even be up to such a “stunt”:

Afterword

Depending upon how this video came into existence, there is certainly the question in my mind of animal cruelty. As I’ve discussed before, sharks are not just “dumb fish.” What the gang did is at least disrespectful if not fully inhumane.

I finally got around to watching the second season of Sherlock. It is a well made series. But there is a real limit to how much of it I can take. The biggest problem is what they have done to Holmes himself. In the original stories, he is brilliant and arrogant and flawed; but he really does care about humanity. This Holmes is more or less a psychopath. His motivations are exactly the same as those of Moriarty: simple amusement. There is no moral underpinning of Holmes; he could easily have been Moriarty.

This is all seen in the way that the show deals with Homles’ drug “problem.” In the first episode of Sherlock, it is implied that Holmes used to use illegal drugs—presumably cocaine. But now, he uses cigarettes as a substitute. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Are we really to believe that the brilliant Sherlock Holmes couldn’t manage his illegal drug habit without Lestrade and company figuring it out? Regardless, it is kind of a brilliant thing. When Doyle was writing, the use of cocaine was seen very much the way that cigarette smoking is seen today: a nasty habit. I doubt seriously that the producers are aware of this; they are just taking the easy way out of a difficulty with the original character in the modern world. In other words, they lucked out. (However, any period Sherlock Holmes—for example, the Robert Downey versions—that don’t deal with cocaine are simply cowardly.) We have a really screwed up society where psychopaths are perfectly fine for a modern day Sherlock Holmes, but brilliant and otherwise law abiding people with drug addictions are terrible. And in Sherlock, they have swapped an arrogant man who really did care about people but who also injected cocaine and morphine from time to time, into a man who doesn’t care about people but who has more acceptable vice.

The last episode—which was nonetheless great fun—doesn’t make much sense. It is based (loosely as always), on the short story “The Final Problem” where it looks like Holmes and Moriarty have both fallen to their deaths over the Reichenbach Falls. In this case, Moriarty has destroyed Holmes’ reputation and is now making him commit suicide to cement the reputation. He does this by threatening to have Watson, Mrs Hudson, and Lestrade murdered if he doesn’t. There are lots of problems in this episode. First, we’ve never gotten any notion that Holmes cares one wink for Hudson or Lestrade. What’s more, in order to set up the destruction of Holmes’ reputation, Moriarty has to destroy his own, killing himself and being forever known as a mediocre actor whom Holmes hired to played the part of “Moriarty.”

In the end, Moriarty—who was the most interesting character for most of the series—turns out to be whatever the plot requires. In particular, he is brilliant when he needs to be and clueless when he needs to be. He doesn’t think of major things in this episode. If he were this careless throughout his career, he never would have become the criminal legend he is supposed to be. And that’s especially true in terms of the fact that while he thinks to follow the three Holmes “friends” throughout his fiendish plot, he allows Holmes himself the latitude to work out an entire fake suicide. I will come back to this in moment.

The whole dynamic of Holmes and Moriarty is supposed to be like God vs the Devil. And just like that more ancient pair, it is clearly one-sided. Holmes always seems to think one move further out in the chess game than Moriarty. That would be fine, except that Moriarty (just as the plot requires) is always way ahead of Holmes except when it matters most. Arthur Conan Doyle only made up the character of Moriarty as a way to kill off Holmes. In Sherlock, he is central to the series. So I don’t see why they’ve killed off the character. Holmes needs Moriarty and Moriarty needed Holmes. Thus it made no sense for Moriarty to want to kill or otherwise destroy Holmes in the first place.

Now about that fake death of Holmes… I don’t mind fake deaths. But in this episode of Sherlock, we see him quite clearly on the ledge. We see him crying, which we would not see if he knew he were faking his death. We see him step off and fall to the ground. It is broad daylight. There was nothing blocking the view. We see Holmes clearly dead on the ground. There was no way for a fake body to be pushed off and then replaced by the made-up Holmes. Yet clearly, that is what is going to be claimed. The chemistry girl who is in love with Sherlock clearly helped him out with all that. I have no problem with that. But I do have a problem with it being directed in a way that clearly deceives the viewer.

Note a few things. Holmes’ hands are waving while he is falling—so it isn’t just a dummy who is falling. Also, he drops his phone before falling. I get that. Later, someone (the chemistry girl, most likely) ran back up to put it there because it couldn’t fall with him because he had to have been using the phone from somewhere else (because he could see Watson when he was talking to him). I assume that the producers will feel they need to explain how Holmes faked his suicide, because of the way the episode was written—especially Holmes telling the chemistry girl that he needs her. Thus the show will claim something like this:

1. Watson’s view was obstructed, as though that matters;
2. Holmes kept telling Watson to stay back, so he couldn’t see it wasn’t Holmes;
3. There will be something about the bicyclist who stopped Watson from getting to Holmes’ body right away.

The big problem is that there are lots of people around when Holmes falls. Are we to believe they are all in on it? Were they all the Baker Street Irregulars dressed up to look like middle class people? I actually expect it to be something like that. It is rubbish.

Given that Moriarty is most definitely dead, the series will probably get better. Remember that Moriarty has only become a big character since Doyle wrote the books and stories. He was never meant to be more than a plot device to kill off Holmes. And as much as the character was a delight in Sherlock—he really did make the rest of the characters seem dreary—the show was constantly implying that every criminal case that Homles was involved in was actually backed by Moriarty. That’s just silly. So hopefully, the show will go back to what I first liked about it: the focus on a really likable modern day Watson.

In 1844, Alexandre Dumas started serializing The Count of Monte Cristo. It was kind of his War and Peace—a novel with so many characters, you need a chart to keep track of it. Really! Wikipedia provides one: Count of Monte Cristo Relations. And even the highest resolution version is hard to read. But let me say what should not be a controversial statement: he’s a whole lot more fun to read than most of the English writers of that time who I admire.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a revenge story. And everyone loves a good revenge story—especially filmmakers. So the book has been turned into a film countless times. In fact, David Goyer (a really typical and talentless film director) is working on one as we speak. In his case, I doubt that the problems of adapting the book to the screen will really matter. The book has roughly 50 major characters, but I suspect a modern Hollywood interpretation of the film will only be guaranteed to have: Dantes is wrongly imprisoned, escapes, becomes Count of Monte Cristo, and kicks some major ass. Will he wear a shirt with MC emblazoned on it? Time will tell.

But in 1975, a big-budget (for the time) version of the book was made for television starring Richard Chamberlain. And yes, it changes a number of things in the book, but overall, it is about as close as you could get in under two hours. And perhaps most important, it doesn’t lose the thematic basis of the book, which is that vengeance changes a man. The Count of Monte Cristo is not Edmond Dantes. There is a lovely scene at the beginning of the film where Dantes will not turn over a thief to the authorities, “I wouldn’t imprison any man who is used to the freedom of the sea, sir.” Wonderful foreshadowing, of course. But the scene contrasts nicely to a later scene where the Count watches approvingly as the same man his killed. (The details are completely different in the book.)

The film has quite a cast. In addition to Chamberlain, who almost defined this kind of made-for-TV drama, there was Trevor Howard, Donald Pleasence, and Tony Curtis. Howard is really great as Dantes’ prison companion, Abbe Faria. But what most stands out, and I really am not trying to be mean here, is what a limited actor Tony Curtis is. In the final scene between Curtis and Chamberlain it is especially obvious. All I could think was, go back to what you do best: Some Like it Hot and The Great Race. His performance as Mondego was an embarrassment. One final point on acting: this film is from that wonderful period when no one cared about accents. I actually kind of like it. Few things are as annoying as watching Leonardo DiCaprio trying to do an accent.

When I was a kid, I watched this version on television—probably on its premiere. My mother was not only a lover of old books, but I think she had a crush on Richard Chamberlain. And why not? The man has it all, except, in the case of my mother’s crush, any interest in women. But does that matter, anyway? The great thing about such crushes is that they will go unrequited by definition. Anyway, I loved it as a kid. But I didn’t get the more important aspects of the story. It was just great to watch the man so badly abused get his revenge. The funny thing is that having watched it last night, it was still all that and I still delighted in it. But it was also more. It was inspiring because justice was done, but also sad because no amount of justice could bring back the idealism of the young Dantes.

I highly recommend watching it. And it is available for free on YouTube. I will say what I usually say: it is much better than what you probably will watch:

Afterword

Wikipedia had the following to say about Richard Chamberlain’s personal life:

I think it shows an amazing amout of progress that the entry does not start with, “Chamberlain is gay.” Or, “Chamberlain was outted in 1989.” The thing is, even in the 1970s, we all assumed that Chamberlain was gay. I remember my mother remarking that it was a shame that all the great looking men were gay.

By the way, I just looked up the net worth of Chamberlain: $20 million. That’s not bad and about what I think we can all agree that a man of his enormous success should be worth. So I looked up Leonardo DiCaprio’s net worth: $200 million. DiCaprio is in no way more successful in his time than Chamberlain was in his time. Our winner-take-all markets have become even more winner-take-all. It makes me think of the line, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” The actors just get smaller but their paychecks just get bigger.