Evil

Resident Evil: Extinction, the video-game-based film that opens today and stars Milla Jovovich, was not screened for critics. See photos from Resident Evil: Extinction at baltimoresun.com/evil

We welcome a guest gripist this week: Live Free or Die Hard director Len Wiseman. The subject of our spotlight (see Page 3) was amused by early speculation that his film, the fourth in the blockbuster Die Hard franchise, centered on a plot to sabotage the Internet. In an interview last month, he chuckled at rumors of Bruce Willis' John McClane - who thwarts bad guys intent on explosive evil - fighting to save the information highway. "I'd seen a lot of stuff like, you know, `John McClane fights against a man who's going to take down the Internet,'" Wiseman said.

DENVER-- --The Boston Red Sox obviously have forgotten where they came from. Didn't this used to be the long-suffering American League franchise that waited 86 years between World Series titles and led the majors in historic baseball angst for most of the 20th century? Well, it's a new century and the Red Sox look a lot more like their archrivals in New York than the team that used to torment its fans with ever more imaginative ways to either stay out of the World Series or, failing that, let the Fall Classic slip away in historically frustrating fashion.

World is better off with Hussein gone Saddam Hussein has been hanged by his former subjects for his enormously evil deeds. And Iraq - and the world - are a far better place ("Executed," Dec. 30). I hope that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syria's Bashar Assad learn from this example. Mr. Hussein's crimes were on a world-historical scale, rivaling in brutality, if not sheer numbers, those of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Only the willfully blind choose to ignore such enormous evil.

WASHINGTON -- Faced with continuing polls that make Texas Gov. George W. Bush seem to be the likely GOP presidential candidate in 2000, Democratic and Republican foes alike are in search of his political Achilles' heel.It is a particularly difficult quest because Mr. Bush's strategy of sticking to generalities in wrapping himself in the mantle of "compassionate conservatism" has given them such slim pickings.The latest example of the phenomenon is the way President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore jumped on Mr. Bush's published reaction to the recent church shooting in Fort Worth, Texas.

Has Austin Powers sold out?"Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" is so full of product placements, and so calculated to appeal to the young audience that made the first "Austin Powers" movie such a hit, that it looks like the little-movie-that-could of 1997 has blossomed into a big, bad franchise.Luckily, the franchise is a winning one, at least so far. And Mike Myers, the author of the "Austin Powers" concept and the protean actor behind the story's two main characters, provides such a genial sense of good fun that even the crassest elements of "The Spy Who Shagged Me" come off as sneakily cheeky.

Washington Week in Review," PBS' long-running public affairs program, is a stolid, dependable performer that features Washington reporters talking about current events, adding a bit of information when that seems called for.Its devotees think "Washington Week" is deep. It is, but only as you compare it to the political food fights that take place elsewhere on the television dial.Nevertheless, it is going through a bad time. Its producers want to pep it up, give it more attitude, get panelists to be bolder, edgier.

FOR NEARLY two weeks, we've listened to psychologists, pop culture experts, police, politicians, educators -- even religious leaders -- as they tried to make sense of the shooting rampage at Columbine High School.They've blamed it on the Internet, violent video games, a permissive society, the modern dysfunctional family, the gun culture, violence in films and television, bigotry, alienation, and the failure by the Littleton, Colo., school to identify the two shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, as potentially violent.

I have never been a fan of Stephen King or the annual miniseries that he has helped adapt from his books for ABC every May the last five years.But I'm a fan of his new one, "Stephen King's Storm of the Century," a six-hour miniseries about an evil stranger who arrives on a tiny island off the coast of Maine along with a whopper of a winter storm.The film, which begins tomorrow night on ABC, is classic storytelling. It's Stephen King as spellbinder, gathering us around the prime-time campfire -- enthralling, dazzling and scaring our pants off before sending us to bed afraid to turn off the lights.

FORT WORTH, Texas -- The man who walked into Wedgwood Baptist Church on Wednesday did not look like he belonged to the congregation. No one apparently knew Larry Gene Ashbrook or what this man in blue jeans and a black leather jacket might want. People would later learn that he was a jobless loner, an ex-sailor prone to foul moods and feared by several of his neighbors.But at that moment, the only thing that seemed strange was that he was smoking a cigarette in church. A janitor approached him about the cigarette, and authorities say Ashbrook shot him. He shot a woman sitting nearby in the head, they say.And then he followed the sounds of music and voices into the sanctuary, where hundreds of teen-agers had gathered for a contemporary Christian music concert.

I hope this column makes you sick. See, we'll be talking about Nazis, something many of us are doing lately. Indeed, just this week a fellow named Joseph e-mailed me about a caller he heard on a radio show. The man, vexed over health-care reform, likened President Obama to Adolf Hitler. Asked why, he said, "Hitler took over the car companies, then health care and then he killed the Jews." Said Joseph: "I almost swerved my vehicle off the road when I heard that." But the caller is hardly unique.

It seems like no matter what the original topic on my blog at Dining@Large, sooner or later the readers commenting get back to the same things they want to talk about. Here are the 10 topics we've dissected, examined, rehashed and argued over more times than I can count: 1 Children misbehaving in restaurants 2 Whose fault poor service is - the restaurant's or the customer's 3 Which restaurant has the best crab cakes. Why they are terrible because they are made with alien crab meat 4 Everything tastes better in New York (bagels, reubens, pizza, etc.)

Bile. Blood. Embalming fluid. All the creepy critters or buzzing insects that feast on rotting flesh. Indeed, anything that can issue from the upper half of a living or decaying body spills over and sometimes into the anti-heroine of Drag Me to Hell. This Los Angeles loan officer (Alison Lohman) unthinkingly entangles herself in evil. In a moment of moral weakness, she spurns an aging Hungarian woman's request for a mortgage extension. That bad act makes her the target of a gypsy curse.

Even to speak of it in a serious way is to feel a bit like a rube, a yokel from some backwater where nobody ever heard of clinical depression, sociopathy or any of the other terminology we use to explain the cruelties human beings sometimes perpetrate. To ascribe such behaviors to something so vague and indefinable is faintly embarrassing. But it also feels unavoidable, given the awful anniversary we observe this week. Ten years ago Monday, two boys, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, walked into Columbine High in Littleton, Colo.

A press box colleague pointed out the most vociferous boo-birds on Opening Day were not booing Mark Teixeira for going to the Evil Empire, but for saying at a news conference he had always been a Yankees fan. (For more, go to baltimoresun.com/schmuckblog)

I've been waiting for weeks to hear those two glorious words spoken with vitriol as only Vickie Guerrero can. Goodbye, whimpering, apologetic Vickie. Welcome back, scowling queen of mean. I'm so glad that WWE has resisted turning SmackDown's wickedly entertaining general manager babyface (reportedly that was to be the original ending of her story line with Edge). It was great to see her morph back into the woman viewers love to hate on SmackDown. (Go to baltimoresun.com/ringposts)

You didn't think Lewis Black was going to let convention week go by without stirring the political pot on his weekly The Root of All Evil show on Comedy Central. This week's topic: Red States vs. Blue States. The question: Which is the greater threat? Black's "history" of conservative and liberal geography is worth a tune-in by itself: "The Civil War ended in 1865, unless you live in the South." Unfortunately, I can't find another line to quote that wouldn't offend someone. But one of the jobs of a comedian, especially a political comedian, is to push the boundaries and make us uncomfortable enough to rethink our beliefs and prejudices - and cable TV is the place to do that.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Peter Rodman is dead. And memory is dying with them. Over the weekend, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, the 89-year-old literary titan, and Mr. Rodman, the American foreign policy intellectual, passed away. I knew Mr. Rodman and liked him very much. We were partners in a debate at Oxford University last year. He provided the gravitas. A former protege of Henry Kissinger and high-ranking official in two Republican administrations, Mr. Rodman was one of the wisest of the wise men of the conservative foreign policy establishment.

You want to understand the evil of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who was arrested last week for war crimes committed in the Balkans during the early 1990s? Then read the obituary that has just appeared of Dinko Sakic, who was convicted of war crimes in the Balkans during the Holocaust. And consider, too, the behaviors, beliefs and psychologies of mass murderers in other places, both leaders and followers, who were no less monstrous than they were. Almost invariably, this rogue's gallery of killers remained unrepentant about what they did, believing to the end in the justice of their actions and their causes.

Yankees@Orioles 7 P.M. [MASN2] The Evil Empire hits town, with Daniel Cabrera (above) scheduled to pitch for the Orioles. The Yankees, who typically look at a lot of pitches, were not a terrific matchup for the big guy last year. Cabrera was 1-3, giving up 18 earned runs in 27 innings. But the victory was a shutout in which he went 6 2/3 innings and gave up just two hits.