I THINK HE'LL BE VERY SEXCESSFUL: I know it's taken me a while to get around to posting about the season premiere of So You Think You Can Dance, but honestly, I was kind of annoyed by the first episode. I appreciate the entertainment value of a delusional non-dancer thinking he's Pavlova as much as the next person, but I felt like the premiere went a bit overboard with things like the second and third outings of Golden Inferno and that ridiculous airtime slut whose name I shall not mention here except to note that it rhymes with hex, as in "a hex on Nigel Lythgoe for agreeing to bring this guy back year after year and giving him the same condescending 'get real and stop dancing' speech every time." There were great moments -- the redemption of Twitch, the popping wonder with no bones, and the judges calling attention to season three finalist Dominic's reaction to the hot girl dancing on stage, for example -- and it's impossible to hate Cat Deeley's sunny good humor. That being said, like AI, this is a show that blossoms when it gets to the Hollywood Vegas round.

I haven't seen anything in the press that would indicate that the format for this season has changed, and so I am assuming that season four will progress much like season three; to wit: in Vegas, the judges will winnow the dancers down to ten guys and ten girls. For the next five weeks, we will see assigned pairings dance assigned dances, from samba to krumping to lyrical to jive. America will choose the bottom three couples, and after each of the bottom six dances a quick solo in his or her own individual style, the judges eliminate one guy and one girl. The partners of the eliminees become partners the next week, and so on. Once we're down to ten contestants, the pairings and the dance assignments become totally random.

During our coverage of SYTYCD, you will undoubtedly hear me opine about the strategy behind the judges' choice of comments, and you will hear Isaac ruminate on the show's complicated relationship with homosexuality in the world of dance. This is a show that really challenges its competitors and rewards its fans -- if you haven't watched it during prior seasons, consider giving it a try this time. But you might want to wait until the audition episodes have come to a close -- otherwise, you might find yourself wondering why it was only AI that got the "stop focusing on the talent-free performers during auditions this year" memo.

ISSUE-RULE-APPLICATION-CONCLUSION: I thought that the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure of the perfect pop song was imprinted on our DNA, but lately I've been mulling a contradictory question: which chorus-free song is closer to the perfect pop ditty, Voxtrot's 2004 The Start of Something or Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin's 2008 Think I Wanna Die? On the one hand, the former contains the lyric "I'd get angry with athletic ease, break common laws in twos and threes," apparently is about loving a communist, and (this is a good thing) sounds like it was recorded under somebody's bed; on the other, the latter apologizes for being twee, and that's not a metaphor -- the lyric says "sorry if that's twee." And the only way I can get either one out of my head is by getting the other one in it.

THIS BLOG POST IS LIMITED TO THE PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES, FOR THE SUBJECT OF HBO MOVIES ABOUT ELECTION LAW GENERALLY PRESENTS MANY COMPLEXITIES: Much like the giddiness I imagine archaeologists must have felt with the 1981 release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I greatly anticipated and tonight enjoyed the debut of HBO's film Recount, which details the legal battles regarding Florida's electoral votes in 2000. [Okay, I still need to see the first half-hour, but I'm generally aware of what happened.]

Prudence and rules of ALOTT5MA comity dictate that I limit my review to the filmmaking and not my opinions on the underlying subject matter; suffice it to say that this is well-cast, balanced storytelling, and that if you have any interest in seeing it you will find it gripping. No, the ending is no more of a surprise than that in Steve Coll's masterful The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, which I also completed today, but it's about all the details along the way. Kevin Spacey finally finds a non-sucky role as Gore lawyer Ron Klain, and Ed Begley Jr. is darn-near-unrecognizable as David Boies. On the other side, kudos to Laura Dern for finding something sympathetic in her Katherine Harris portrayal, and given that I enjoy Bob Balaban in just about everything (but especially his Warren Littlefield in HBO's The Late Shift), that appreciation certainly extends to his Ben Ginsburg.

The only weirdness was in both the casting and portrayal of the Supreme Court. Though not as nutty as Boston Legal's take on the nine, at least its justices looked and sounded closer to reality, and having HBO's Stevens and Scalia read to the camera their opinions on the applications for stay was a bit odd.

One final question: we saw an awful lot of team meetings among the lawyers. I don't recall seeing any scene in which lawyers actually sat down and wrote briefs and motions. We do that sometimes, after all. [Also, seriously, the guy who directed the Austin Powers films directed this? Wow. Seems about as likely as Errol Morris helming Larry the Cable Guy's next flick.]

WHIP-LASH: I suspect we need a Crystal Skull spoiler thread--I quite enjoyed, despite (or perhaps because of) massive gaping holes in physics and logic, though I had a big problem with the CGI orgy that served as a climax (not the final scene, though, which was just about perfect), and an earlier sequence, which I'll talk about in the comments. Also, was anyone else seriously distracted by the casting of one of the FBI agents early in the film? It's not that he was bad, it's just the problem of seeing any actor who's had a long-term television role doing something different. Also for discussion--are further films in the franchise appropriate, and does the conclusion make you more or less interested in seeing more.

ALMOST AS INCOHERENT AS PAULA: Yes, Idol is big, but it's far from the biggest singing contest in the world--that would, of course, be the annual Eurovision Song Contest, with full details here. Your winner this year is Russian performer Dima Bilan with "Believe." Prior winners include ABBA (1974 for "Waterloo"), Celine Dion (1988 for "Ne parlez sans moi," representing Switzerland), Katrina and the Waves (1997 for "Love Shine A Light"), and Finnish metal band Lordi. Nothing seems to be as awesome or meta-tastic as 2006 Lithuanian entry "We Are The Winners," performed by Lithuanian supergroup LT United.

IT CANNOT, MUST NOT, RAIN AT INDIAN WELLS: Now, I, like many of you, already own the complete series of Sports Night on DVD (though the set is now apparently out of print), but the transfers are balky and pixelized, and the set is entirely free of special features, so I'll likely be shelling out for this September's new 10th Anniversary set, which will feature not just the 45 episodes, but two disks of bonus features, including deleted scenes, commentaries, and interviews (personally, I'd love some screen tests/auditions). It's from Shout!Factory, the fine folks behind box sets for many shows beloved in these parts, including My So-Called Life, The Electric Company, Undeclared, and Freaks and Geeks.

BUNDESDERDEUSTCHLAND: There are many questions to be asked about Germany--do Germans, in fact, love David Hasselhoff? (Answer--not sure, seemed liked they were much more into Amy Winehouse, especially this one, which I hadn't heard before, and which is six kinds of awesome, though it takes about a minute to get started.) Is currywurst actually any good? (Gray's Papaya is just as good, though has less of a kick.) But what I want to talk about is museum theory. Sure, many of the museums don't require a lot of perspective--a 16th-17th century painting is a painting, and Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art/sculpture are pretty easy to talk about. The more difficult thing for Germany is the 20th Century, and Berlin in particular is still grappling with it, as, especially in the East, there's no real desire to remember or exhibit pretty much anything from the rise of Nazism in the 30s to the '89 fall of the wall.

While there's the old Fawlty Towers "don't mention the war" bit, at least post-reunification, there's been movement away from that--there's an impressive section on the rise of Nazism, the Nazi government, and the division of Germany at the German History Museum, an entire privately owned/operated museum devoted to a (surprisingly neutral) assessment of East Germany and its government (Stasi=bad, full employment=good!), and the relatively recent Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish Museum, as well as a small (and sadly, almost all-German) Memorial Museum of Resistance to Nazism. It raises an interesting question--how do you exhibit and discuss a period in history that you played the negative/villain role in? In most circumstances, the German museums do so with admitted frankness, talking about how demagoguery can reach people at their lowest points and (particularly at the Jewish Museum) being frank about the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and how it's been exploited. Talking about how things went wrong and why with honesty seems to me important, and it's impressive to see that the German government, which runs a number of these museums, is willing to do so, and raises challenges for us. (Contrast with, for instance, the Clinton Library in Little Rock, which turns the entirety of Monicagate and various other scandals into nothing more than a single panel of exhibit, and I say that as someone who voted for Clinton in '96, and would have done so in '92 had I been of age to do so.)