The original version was a British show, and it was very, very good. I’ve written on this show before, when the second season was set to begin on BBC America. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to have access to videos of the BBC broadcast versions of both series AND the spin-off, “Ashes to Ashes.”

I’m not complaining about how BBC America operates, but there is a quantitative difference between the UK and US versions. The British Broadcasting Corporation is a “quasi-autonomous public corporation” which raises revenues through licensing fees. No commercials. So original hour-long episodes of “Life on Mars” run for 58 minutes. BBC America shows ads, and to make room for them they have to edit down the episodes to about 42 minutes. Comparing the American versions to the British originals the cut-down method becomes apparent: They remove any nudity and carve out or minimize the “B” stories. This gives the cut shows a peculiar, staccato rhythm, and as they they stick close to the “A” stories they seem fast-paced and focused.

Making the American version apparently hasn’t been easy. The first U.S. version was driven by David E. Kelly: A pilot was shot, set in Los Angeles, and it featured Jason O’Mara as Sam Tyler and Colm Meaney (”Star Trek: Deep Space 9″) as Gene Hunt. Then the strike hit, and the network decided they didn’t like it. It was completely retooled: The show was moved to New York, and they upped the ante by getting three heavy-hitters in the cast: Gretchen Mol (The Notorious Bettie Page), Michael Imperioli (“The Sopranos”), and Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets) as Gene Hunt. Jason O’Mara still plays Sam Tyler.

Even now, less than a week to premiere, the show has been remarkably well hidden from the public. I have looked hard online for extended scenes and such and all I have found are several rapid-fire previews. This may actually be a bad sign (no extensive previews might mean it sucks in the details) or it might be a sign of how cautious the network is being.

If it’s two-thirds as good as the original series it’ll be better than almost anything on American television.

–Skot C.

Here’s a show-biz way to look at it: The accumulated wealth completely destroyed in one day by jittery brokers was over twice as much as the accumulated box office of the top 100 films of all time – everything between Titanic (#1, US$1.83 billion) and Madagascar (#100, US$407 million). I calculated the top 100 cumulatively made US$530 billion– A drop in the bucket, apparently.

Another fun-fact take on today’s calamity: It was enough money to make Spiderman 3, the largest-budget movie of all time, 4,170 times. But nobody wants to do that (one Spiderman 3 is way more than enough). So: If we assume the studio insists the next Spidey movies hold at the US$258 million budget mark, they could have used today’s losses to release one all-new, screechy, inconsequential, effects-laden Spiderman sequel every weekend from now until January 2089.

All good fun, but It’s a bit of a stretch to post an article about divertissiment such as movies, television and music when global markets are imploding. I know people who have already lost substantial amounts of retirement money– and the way Washington is failing to offer meaningful help and leadership, they could lose a lot more. It is historically awful stuff, and it’s gonna hit us all.

And it will affect the movie industry. It already is. The credit market is tightening up, and that is going to make movies look like a riskier investment. This makes dealmaking all that more difficult. And dealmaking is the definition of Hollywood: Agents, Producers, Managers, D-people, an army of people in splendid offices spendng all day on the phone getting people to pay for things.

If the film industry is going to try to play it safe, they’ll go two ways: big and small. Big studios proved very well that tentpoles (big movies like The Dark Knight and Iron Man) are still a solid investment, so long as the money is well-spent. Cutting out under-performing over-the-title talent is an obvious way to save money, so I think the upcoming movies will look a lot like the upcoming Watchmen: big effects, big budget, no stars. Watch for the stars of today to be increasingly doing their stuff in digital and small-budget Oscar-bait movies.

Of course there are other opinions– In fact, Peter Bart is positively bullish on Tinsel town.

If we are sliding into a recession– and at this point, it’s not really a question of “if” anymore– the most intriguing question is how it’s going to culturally affect things. For instance, CW has an armful of shows about spoiled rich kids: “Priviliged,” “Gossip Girl,” and the relaunched “90210.” In the coming weeks and months of economic recession are we going to find the sexy antics of the leisure class as just fun, upper-crust diversions, the 21st Century version of 1930s Nick and Nora movies and white telephone films? Or are we going to find them infuriating, elitist, and disconnected from reality?

–Skot C.

Slate, the online magazine, did an informal survey of its readers to find out which was the most ordered and not watched movie among them. The concensus? HOTEL RWANDA. The much-lauded Don Cheadle movie based on a true story is in the top ten most popular rentals at Netflix, and apparently also the one most often guiltily sent back without ever seeing the inside of of a DVD player. Good news if you’re bugged by scratched DVDs - HOTEL RWANDA is probably always in mint condition!

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey told me the company doesn’t keep track of which movies its subscribers hold onto the longest but said he wouldn’t be surprised if Hotel Rwanda was the one. He confessed he’s been sitting on a copy since September 2006.

I’m guilty of this kind of thing myself, but not lately. In the last 90 days I’ve watched everything I ordered. The one I wish I’d returned without watching was IDIOCRACY, which depressed and frightened me. Maybe I’ll feel the same about WALL-E. But God knows I’ve sent back plenty of material, from foreign classics to studio blockbusters.  In fact, here’s a list:

GHOST RIDER
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
DEAD MAN
THE THIRD MAN
CONTROL ROOM
FINDING NEMO

As you can see, my rejection tastes are very eclectic.  I got a documentary, a classic, a couple of huge hits, and a couple of quirky independents. And come to think of it, I started to watch DEAD MAN but fell asleep.

I can’t speak to Netflix as a business model, but it has revolutionized the renting of movies. It allows you to consider renting any number of things that you would never go near if you had to pay for them individually. If you never go near them once you’ve rented them anyway, that’s your problem.

-daniel k.

It does something no Pixar film has yet done: mix live-action inserts into the realistically animated scenes. WALL-E, the incredibly cute robotic protagonist of the piece, has a job compacting garbage in the ruins of an abandoned city and stacking the trash cubes into immense towers. He spends his nights obsessively watching an ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly! (d. Gene Kelly, 1969). And not a CG-imitation version: the real thing, an actual clip of Michael Crawford and Marianne McAndrew (and interestingly, not Barbra Streisand: cheaper appearance residual payments!). Fred Willard also makes a sly on-camera cameo as an ineffectual George W. Bush type. The combination of live action, incredibly vivid computer animation and visual design assisted by Roger Deakins (The Coen Brothers’ favored DP) has resulted in a film that is at times breathtakingly beautiful and cinematic.

The first half of the story is stark and simple, a tale of a lonely robot meeting another one in a desolate cityscape. The second half takes place in a humongous spaceship in which humanity has escaped their polluted, used-up home planet. And as this half develops, I recognized a strangely familiar premise being presented.

WALL-E takes place 700 years in the future. Between now and this time, a large Costco or Wal-Mart like corporation called Buy-N-Large takes over everything everywhere. It’s hyper-consumerist ways eventually produce so much garbage, pollution and environmental degradation that its customers (that is, the human race) are ferried off-planet, leaving an army of robots behind to clean up. Meanwhile, the people on the ship have evolved into the ultimate consumers: Sessile blobs who cannot move off their floating couches, constantly staring at a video screen which floats in front of their faces, unaware of their very surroundings.

The Mike Judge film Idiocracy (2006: I reviewed it here a few months ago) painted an almost identical dystopian scenario three years ago (it got delayed a year in release). In the future of Idiocracy the story actually gets into gear when the protagonist’s suspended-animation casket is delivered via an avalanche from an immense tower of trash. There are more companies in existence in this universe than in WALL-E’s, but a centerpiece location is a gigantic Costco, so vast it stretches off into the horizon and so cavernous crashed planes stick out of it. Brawndo, a sports-drink manufacturer, also figures into the plot, as a corporation so large they bought the FDA and basically replaced all sources of drinkable water with its beverage.

Future humans are basically represented the same way in both films: hyper-consumers who have become hopelessly dependent on the machines that keep them alive. And the point of depicting them as such is the same in both films: these pampered, infantile, soft people are obviously us. These two films look so much alike in some scenes they could conceivably be the same storyline. Idiocracy is part 1, before the Earth is evacuated: WALL-E is part 2, after we’ve taken off for space.

But there are differences, mostly in the attitude of the filmmakers. Mike Judge is cynical: We are a stupid, doomed race, and the efforts of the relatively smart, present-day hero to save humanity only delays our inevitable extinction. The folks at Pixar believe people are basically good and kinda smart, and the creative efforts of robots and humans alike are a constant source of hope.

Legend has it WALL-E is the final project generated at a single idea session at Pixar, one that also generated Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. No doubt that may be so, but the details look a lot like something from a 3-year-old failed satire.

–Skot C.

We went to see Iron Man, but we changed our mind at the box office and decided to catch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because it started a half-hour earlier.

We shoulda waited.

It’s not that Crystal Skull is a bad film: It’s quite well-made, with engaging performances by all the principals, a fast-paced story, and impressive sets and special effects. But ultimately there is something deadening about the whole affair, a sort of weariness with it’s safe, familiar sort of action movie conventions.

In fact, the best part is the beginning, which opens in the desert Southwest in 1957. It’s fun to see how a 1930s character like Indiana Jones is fitted into the Cold War era, and there’s plenty of nifty 50s stuff there too, like A-bombs and saucer men from Mars (and, because this is a George Lucas movie, a deuce coupe: A 1932 Ford hot rod). Actually, only when Shia LaBeouf shows up doing his shaky Brando bit twenty-odd minutes in does it start to falter. And by the time the main plot kicks in, it all starts to look so lazy– The bad guys wear red stars instead of swastikas, but aside from that it’s all been done before, thrice.

What didn’t help the mild sense of ennui I experienced was the attached trailer– the preview that came with the print, which shows last. It was for Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This film, which opens in August, is a CG animated movie that will kick off the upcoming “Clone Wars” TV series.

Apparently, it takes place at some time between Episodes II and III, in the thick of the actual Clone War. Here’s the synopsis, courtesy of the IMDb:

The Clone Wars are raging between the Separatists and the Galactic Republic. When Jabba the Hutt’s son is taken by a group of renegades, two Jedi are summoned to investigate. Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi depart in search of answers: where is the Hutt’s son, and who is controlling this mysterious renegade group? Yoda sends Ahsoka Tano along as Anakin’s apprentice, Obi-Wan duels Asajj Ventress, and Anakin finds himself dueling Count Dooku once more. Meanwhile, the Sith plan to instigate a three-way war, including the Hutts.

Alright, since the end of this particular story was told in Episode III, what on earth is the point of all this? Because we know who must survive, every major character is shielded from harm. So we’re expected to watch them duel with lightsabers, knowing exactly who is going to win every time. And No doubt the new characters with the funny consonant-heavy names are gonna be so much Bantha fodder or, to use a term from another franchise, red shirts.

I have already complained that George Lucas needs crank up some new franchises. Crystal Skull and Clone Wars are two more strong arguments for quitting. They are leaden with ennui. Canon continuity means the good guys can’t die, and in the case of Star Wars neither can the bad guys. Truly new ideas cannot take root: they are incompatible with the crushing force of precedence. Therefore, trying to raise a sense of jeopardy and suspense is impossible. The tiredness of these franchises make for diminishing returns: no matter how much effort they put into these new offerings, they offer fewer surprises and less compelling reasons for audiences to engage them at all.

When Crystal Skull ends, the filmmakers convey in a subtle manner a feeling the series will not continue. I don’t want to bet against Mr. LaBeouf taking up the brown fedora at some future date, though. Oh boy.

–Skot C.