Son of a bitch! When I went to bed last night/this morning, I was ahead in the voting. God, I slept so well – better than I have since the end of last month’s Film Fight – secure in the knowledge that I had finally gotten the better of Kim Jones and that, at long last, Chronicle readers had come to their senses. All was right with the world: God was in his heaven The dew was on the grass Six preceded seven The priest was at his mass. The dove was softly cooing Alone up in her tree And girls were fit for wooing The world had voted “me.” Then I wake up this morning/afternoon to find that somehow, some way, somewhere I’m behind again. This is treachery! I’m convinced of it. I doubt some foul play. Get me Warren Christopher! Get me Ron Klain! Get me Katherine Harris! Something must have happened in the interim, but I can’t see what it was. The only thing that changed between then and now (unless the moon somehow came too close to the Earth) is that I posted my latest two entries. Nothing strange there, right? But then I got to thinking: It appears the more I write the less I win. Every time I post some 3000-word essay on the relative merits of Laurence Olivier vs. Claire Danes, I somehow come out with the fuzzy end of the lollipop. I think I see a pattern. So, being no fool, I’m taking a new approach to winning Film Fight. Convinced the more words I write the fewer votes I get, I will now be the first person in Western history to attempt victory in a debate without saying anything. I will be silent as the stars, quiet as the sand, clammed up as the clam. I shall speak no more forever. Starting tomorrow.

The rumors were out there, thanks to some loose lips at a cocktail party I attended last year, so when Paul Saucido, the VJ Host of Sonido Boombox sent the word last week that he was laid off from ME Television, I wasn't surprised -- sad, but not surprised. The Los Angeleno turned Austinite has worked hard to raise the profile of Rock en Español in Austin -- an uphill climb Saucido didn't expect. Challenged by those who refuse to see that Latino music is not bound by boundaries of any kind, Saucido was quick to see that some of the most exciting Latino acts in this town are not recreating the wheel, but spinning out their own music, embracing all their influences -- from heavy metal to yes, the rhythmic ranchera music pulsing from the radios in the kitchens of their youth. As a longtime Los Angeles resident (by way of Arizona), he came to Austin skeptical that Austin was really all that. He soon discovered it is. Here's set down roots here and says he has no plans to leave. Saucido was not the only VJ to be cut loose. Hip hopper and fellow VJ Bavu Blakes was also shown the door, two of the "temporary layoffs" to occur in ME TV's programming and production departments, according to Connie Wodlinger, President and CEO of ME Television, via e-mail. She further states that Saucido and Blakes "will continue to be invited to make on-air appearances ... [and] "we hope to be back to full staff by year-end."

As Josh mentioned in his 4am dispatch, we previously agreed that today's fight would come down to Shakespeare adaptations which use the Bard's language versus pictures that are "merely" inspired or suggested by him. Josh is pro original-language, and I'm ... against it? Sheesh. I guess I never meant to say non-Shakespearean language is better per se -- only that they're just as worthy adaptations as the classical ones -- but you know what? Fine. I'll go with it. You know why? Because I have West Side Story on my side, and you don't.

True, I loved McKellen’s Richard III. It was absolutely brilliant from beginning to (almost) end. And true, it was always going to be hard for me to claim that old Shakespeare movies are always better than new Shakespeare movies, come what may, especially when you’ve got new movies like that one on your side. So, you’ve backed me into a bit of a corner (insidiously, as you admit: inviting me over to watch a movie in the middle of our first day of debate, knowing full well that movie was an ace up your sleeve – a modern interpretation on a par with the best of Orson Welles). But, as the fella once said, “’Tis the sport to have the enginer hoist with his own petar,” and so Kim, I’ll delve one yard below this mine of yours and – to kick off day two’s battle - see if I can’t turn this treachery back on you: How can you relish so much McKellen’s Richard and then turn around and claim that movies based on Shakespeare’s plays but that don’t use Shakespeare’s language are better than those that do? I look forward to waking up to your answer.

Okay, Kim, as much as I hate to admit that you made a good point, I have to admit you made a good point. The gaudy materialism and ostentation of Luhrmann’s visual aesthetic does go a long way to communicating the moral vacancy in the lives of rich kids who are overindulged by their absent parents as a way of making up for their own waywardness and self-indulgence. Fair enough. (And screw you.) But then: It’s all well and good to use Shakespeare to make a point about societal dysfunction and adolescent immorality and to indulge in all sorts of hyperkinetic camera trickery and audio manipulation when you’re shooting a bunch of tattooed gang-boys shooting up neighborhoods and showing off their belt buckles. But what do you do when it comes time to shoot a scene that’s predicated on the more inward-facing, considered human emotions, the emotions that don’t change regardless of the prevailing cultural winds or the particular aesthetic whims of the day, emotions like love and despair? Do you, as a directorial practitioner of the antic arts, try to temper some of your more outlandish tendencies in service of the story and its characters, or do you just throw consideration to the wind, make no distinction between different emotional states in a screenplay, and crank everything up to the same frenetic pitch in the hopes that audiences will be swept away by the sheer overwhelming physicality of the experience?

Alright, I admit it: I threw down the gauntlet to you – to defend classical adaptations – all stealthy-like while we were in mid-watch of Richard III. Not the Olivier version, mind you – I dozed through most of that one, with the occasional rouse to snicker at his beaky schnozz and bright blue Prince Valiant cut – but the 1995 Richard Loncraine version starring Ian McKellen (who also adapted the text to the screen). It was a rotten trick of me, I know, to charge you to defend the old guard whilst parading around the bright shiny new one… but it worked, didn’t it? It’s a terrific adaptation – smart and sneaky and spry as hell. Shakespeare’s play of a conniving would-be monarch is still a bloodbath (and some of the deaths are downright shocking), but McKellen’s Duke of Gloucester is such a frisky, artful bastard, you can’t help but feel endeared to him. The setting is transposed to 30’s England, and not arbitrarily but to real effect: Just watch as Richard circles nearer the crown – the costumes, already militaristic, grow increasingly fascist-inspired. The sitting-duck Queen (Annette Bening) and her brother (Robert Downey Jr.) are ladder-climbing American upstarts; the wretched Queen Anne (Kristin Scott Thomas) is now in a druggie slide toward covert heroin injection; and after Dame Maggie Smith delivers her withering “I curse you” speech to son Richard, he quivers just a moment to reveal a lifetime of hurt of the “mommy never loved me enough” variety. In short, a thumping reinvention, yet utterly Shakespeare-sacrosanct.

I think you’re running with that Versace crack to prove a point that this is some flashy, unsubstantative, tinkering-for-the-sake-of-tinkering modernization. I’d argue the exact opposite – that without leaning too hard on it, Luhrmann has used the designer threads, the casual drug and gun play, the Papa Capulet-sponsored Bacchanalia, to frame the text very much in the now – a monied now of absent parents who overindulge then rule with an iron fist and their overprivileged children, desperate to give meaning to their lives. You ask: “Where’s the love? Where’s the lust? Where’s the poetry? Where’s the diction?” The love is there, alright, and so is the lust – those two kids are pawing at each other something fierce in the pool scene. That lust is tempered later with something far more solemn – in the wake of their secret marriage, his unfortunate slaying of her cousin, and also the fact that these two kids are embarking upon the scary/exciting rite of first sex. But there’s a reason Luhrmann plays their morning-after as a romp: Because these two kids, flush with new love, are just that – two kids. The poetry’s there, too – Luhrmann may have truncated the text, but that’s still Standard Bard everybody’s spouting, and the diction – well, possibly you’re too hung up on the plummy, theatrical enunciation of those yawning Shakespearean Actorly Actors. There’s worth there in Leo and Claire’s sometimes-stumbling but newborn interpretations. But how now, Rosenblatt: You haven’t done much but attack Romeo + Juliet. Where’s your own impassioned defense of the traditional adaptation? Go on -- sing you the praises of those Actorly Actors with their plummy, theatrical enunciations. I'm eager for it.

I'll fly in the face of your manifesto (i suspect your strategy is death by word count) and make this brief: 1. You reduced me to a giggling fit over that Ecstasy diatribe... which doesn't bode well for me at all. 2. Nope, didn't notice that I linked to a Spanish-language clip from R+J. But the language of the Bard is universal, es verdad? 3. Luhrmann knew what he was doing when he made Romeo clutch a journal, and when I called him a wannabe poet, I didn't mean that as a compliment. You remember that when the play opens, Romeo's lovesick over Rosalind, and those pretty words he's penning are the mark of a teenage drama queen too quick to moan how he'll just die if he doesn't get the girl. When Romeo actually kills himself for love, it's the most grownup thing he's ever done – and no, not just because it shows a little follow-through, but because he finally found the girl worth dying for.

Prologue: Ahhhhhhh …. Film Fight, my Film Fight. God, how I’ve missed you. I’ve spent this past month in low-grade agony, without the thrill of constant argumentation and online contentiousness that made July bearable, without the joy of starting each day by reading 1000 words slandering my character, claiming to the heavens that I’m a misinformed, maladjusted, cantankerous jackass with a stone for a heart and oatmeal for brains. Suddenly thrust back into the role of the amiable citizen after all that wonderful Chronicle-sanctioned confrontation, I found myself at a loss, wandering the streets at odd hours looking for trouble, stopping shoppers in the grocery store and demanding they defend the collected works of William Wyler or prove to me that John Carpenter’s The Thing is better than Howard Hawk’s The Thing From Another World. (An old man in the cereal aisle at HEB actually came up with a pretty convincing argument for that last one, by the way. I’ll never look at Kurt Russell the same way.) But, Kim, Kim! - here we are (and what was just a world is a star!), back in the trenches, back at war, back where we belong, back at each other’s throats, back fighting the good fight. The Film Fight. The pleasure, may I say, is all mine. (Of course, if I lose this go-round as egregiously as I did the last, I’m taking my ball, going home, and never speaking to you again.) So … have at you, Miss Jones; it begins here: "Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere."