Roswell reboot...initial impressions

I just discovered that there's a new Roswell -- or rather, a show called Roswell, New Mexico, which is loosely based on Melinda Metz'  Roswell High and has no connection to the old CW show beyond also being produced by CW.      Obviously, I had to try it, given how much I loved the original book series in middle school, and my affection for the later tv show.  I was largely surprised by the show, and not in good ways.

 The main premise is the same (three aliens' lifelong secret is threatened when Liz is shot and Max is compelled by his love for her to heal her), but in this show it happens during a ten-year high school reunion.   Liz is apparently the only character who left town, and those who remain are in very strange spots given their characters in the previous mediums -- most notably Alex Manes,  who appears as a USAF airman, despite his well established animosity toward the military.   The one nice change is that Liz Parker has been restored to Liz Ortecho, complete with the tragic dead sister.    

Although I'd hoped to enjoy the reboot show more than I did, its tone is fairly obnoxious: in an effort to make itself more relevant,  the writers chose to throw in reference after reference to Trump, the wall, and immigration.  I'm sure the people of Roswell, New Mexico appreciate being tarred as obsessive racists by CW.  Liz' restoration has seemingly only happened not to be more faithful to the books (there are no other similarities) , but to  smack the viewer around and poison what could be an entertaining and nostalgia-inducing show with the vile poision of politics.  Immediately in the first episode there's gratuitous near-sex and forced romantic relationships between characters who have never had an ounce of chemistry before.  Isabel is apparently culpable in the death of Liz's sister  and two children, to boot!

 Although I'm open to trying episode two,  I strongly doubt I'll buy the entire series. 

Reads to Reels: Ready Player One

The Redbox technician hadn't long placed copies of Ready Player One in my local machine before I eagerly rented one. I experienced the  book a few weeks back, enthralled by the story and Wil Wheaton's delivery of it,  and so launched into this with a stupid grin on my face as the move rolled to Van Halen's "Jump". It didn't take me long to realize this wasn't the story I'd  experienced, but knowing that adjustments have to made for the sake of different mediums, I  resolved to enjoy it nontheless. 

  As a movie it's a perfectly fun action-adventure thriller with a bounty of pop-culture references.  The acting is fine, and the production seamessly integrates live-action scenes and characters with pure-CGI ones, since the characters themselves spend most of their time within a computer-generated gameworld called the Oasis.  For those who haven't read the book,  Ready Player One is set in the near fuure in which everything has gotten worse: poverty, unemployment, the environment, pick your poison. What has improved is massively multiplayer online games, and the only one that matters is the Oasis.  There players can appear  however they like, and visit planet after planet of adventures and activities.   Aside from eating, sleeping, and excretion, everything is done in the Oasis.     When the creator of the Oasis dies, his will invites the entire world to a treasure hunt. He's hidden an Easter egg somewhere in the Oasis,  accessible only to those who find three concealed keys guarded by riddles and challenges.  The reward? Control of the Oasis and trillions of dollars.  Not bad.

While I'm actively resisting the urge to compare the movie too much for the book,  that is in fact the whole purpose of Reads to Reels: to comment both on adaptions' worth in themselves and as re-tellings of literary originals.  The broad outline of the RPO novel and movie are the same, as are its characters -- but the story told is much different. The movie opens with a drag race,  something oddly out of place in the novel's  fantasy-questing theme. The entire atmosphere of the book -- the massive revival of eighties culture inspired by global study of Halliday's own fixation on his childhood -- just isn't there.  Those who watch the movie without reading the book will probably find the eighties soundtrack a little odd, because there's nothing to explain it.

In fairness to the movie, though, the author helped with this screenplay and the mediums of book and cinema have different demands. A big-budget production couldn't have a plot with a lot of pondering over intricate riddles and fooling with text-based games, let alone a sequence where a character has to log into a TRS-180 and play Zork. It's a lot easier to sell a race laden with T-Rex and King Kong as obstacles instead of an eight-bit arcade game as the challenge, I get it.  Ditto for the emphasis on action drama (the lead characters are in mortal peril for pretty much the entire movie), instead of Parzival's  relationships with his friends, the turmoil their bonds undergo, and the growing realization that a planet lost in the Oasis is just..wrong.  Instead we get action-adventure and then we're hit with the reality/unreality moral  with all the subtly of a baseball bat.

While Ready Player One is a fun action movie, one I wouldn't mind watching again,  it doesn't succeed as an adaptation of the original for me.

On a side note,  I was amused that my mental image of the villain, casting him as Ben Mendelsohn, proved to be on the nose, as he appears here as the big bad. (I was mostly inspired by his performance in The Dark Knight Rises.) I didn't care for the characters in-game avatars, particularly Art3mis, but that's subjective. I imagined her as the hero of Dungeon Siege: 

 

 The producers went a...different direction. 

 That's not a cartoon of the character, that's how the character actually looks  Kind of like a cat.

Reads to Reels: The Circle

Trailer:

Knowing is good. Knowing everything is better.

Imagine that the movie version of 1984 had ended with Winston Smith being promised by the Party that the reign of Big Brother was through, that they would immediately hold elections to replace him, and - well done, Winston, for your patriotic rebellion! Huzzah!  Now, if you'd read the novel, you'd be confused. For one thing, the mood of this proposed ending is completely different from that of the novel's, with its promise that the future was a boot stamping on a human face forever. Secondly...Big Brother never existed except as an all-seeing eye to frighten people into obedience and subservience. There was no dictator at the core of the party;  the tyranny emanated from the party itself, from the culture it created and its system of control. The movie  would have missed the entire point of the book!

When the ending credits rolled for The Circle last night, its ending left me with that same conviction: the screenwriter missed the point.  Dave Eggers' novel mixed dystopia with satirical dark comedy to produce a thriller that was as mocking as it was foreboding. The movie isn't satirical in the least, although it follows the same basic plot:  enter Mae Holland, played by Emma Watson, who gets a job at the world's biggest and most innovative tech company.  Embracing its culture completely,  Mae rises in the ranks while being increasingly estranged from her real-life family and friends. Repeated encounters with a mysterious man who seems to know more than anyone should bring Mae to a crisis point however, and she has to make a decision.  The decision she makes seems to vary from book to movie, but the movie's ultimate ending renders the difference moot.

Up until that point, I'd been enjoying The Circle as an illustration of the novel.  When Mae is "transparent", streaming her every waking moment, comments from her audience appear as little floating boxes off to the side. They wink in and out fairly quickly,  but a quick eye or a pause button, can get some measure of the variety of the comments.  In keeping with the nature of youtube comments and such, few are substantive: many, in fact, are completely self-absorbed, using Mae's feed only to moan about their lives.  The shallowness of the Circle culture is also pointed out when some outside presenters ask a group to name a historic personality; after a moment of mental paralysis, one volunteers..."Mae Holland!"   That said, I don't think the movie would be nearly as enjoyable without having read the book,  because its plot is rushed, and the creeping dread of The Circle is...well, not so creeping. The mysterious figure from the book takes almost four hundred pages to reveal his identity; here, he offers it to Mae on their second meeting. His aura of mystery, Mae's bookish anxiety to see him again to figure him out, are done away with completely: in the film he's the guy from Star Wars, staring at his phone and  condemning the Circle every time they get past the  pleasantries.  Similarly absent is Mae's constant tension with her ex-boyfriend, Mercer;  in the book he is a foil and a  burr under the saddle, and when Mae uses him to demonstrate a program in the book,   it demonstrates how corroded her own soul has become. In the movie, she and Mercer are merely disagreeable friends, and she doesn't want to use him to test her program (basically, a crowd-sourced way to find a single person on the planet).   While it's nice to see her and Mercer getting along, it does little for the plot of the movie.

The screenplay of The Circle  thus takes Eggers' ominous view of the future of  the socially networked web and turns it into a light thriller with the kind of  head-in-the-clouds naivete one only ever sees on election day. Instead of prompting people to think critically about the way social networks alter their lives, it tacitly promotes life inside the glass cage -- so long as meanies aren't in charge.

Reads to Reels: Brave Cowboy/Lonely are the Brave

Lonely are the Brave dramatizes Edward Abbey's Brave Cowboy, and I daresay improves upon it.  As with Abbey's original, the plot features a cowhand who still lives and breathes in the Old West, thrown into conflict against the forces of the modernizing west. When he learns that a friend is imprisoned, he rides to the rescue, arranging a jailbreak and fleeing to the mountains to elude the law. But in the modern west, sheriff's posses include Jeeps, helicopters, and CB-radio coordination.

Here again is the solid story, of a man defending his friends and their conscience against cold, bureaucratic tyranny.  The sheriff here is a warmer character, though, played by Walter Matthau, who admires his foe from afar.  The acting in general is superb, and the cast includes many a familiar face aside from the stars. Carroll O'Connor, better known as Archie Bunker, appears  several times as a truck driver....and George Kennedy, whose booming voice and massive teeth appear in Cool Hand Luke to Oscar-winning fame, shows up here as one of the cruel deputies. The cinematography manages to capture the beauty of New Mexico even rendered without color.   The ending, too, is improved with a dash of ambiguity, creating ample reason to believe the cowboy will hit the saddle again.  I enjoyed the music, done by the same fellow who later scored several Star Trek films, and could only find one little fly in the ointment. The cowboy's friend, Paul, is imprisoned not for fighting the draft, but for helping Mexicans cross the Rio Grande.    I suppose on the eve of American involvement in Vietnam, defying conscription wasn't quite as palatable as it might have been in the early fifties when the book was set.  (Central characters Jack and Paul had served in the Army, after all; their contempt was not against fighting, but what they and Murray Rothbard viewed as state slavery.)

Lonely are the Brave is easily the best book-to-film adaptation I've seen, in terms of faithfulness and cinematic quality.

Smoking Guns, Sinister Schemes, and Still More Dangerous Blondes

Faced with the specter of a three-day weekend, but late-summer heat still too oppressive to venture out in, I enjoyed a little classic-movie marathon. I mention this here because while it's not a read-to-reels post, all three movies are based on books (or a play).   The collection gathers The Big Sleep, Dial M for Murder, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.   (It also includes The Maltese Falcon, but I've seen it a few times already.) Reader Cyberkitten mentioned that he would be hard-pressed to choose a favorite from among these three, and having watched them I now sympathize. They're all exceptionally well done.

I began with The Big Sleep, which continues a trend of Humphrey Bogart movies for me. This wasn't like the rest, though, as they (Across the Pacific, Passage to Marseilles, Action in the North Atlantic) were all WW2 movies.   The Big Sleep was actually filmed and finished before World War 2 was over, but its release was delayed to make room for a few war movies to air. Instead, it's another detective mystery like The Maltese Falcon.  Bogart is employed by an elderly general to find out who is blackmailing him, and to pay the money if need be. When the blackmailer is mysteriously murdered -- lots of murder in this movie -- Bogart realizes there's more to the story, especially when everyone (including the general's family) insists he drop the issue.  The plot is very complicated, but Lauren Bacall is amazing at being Bogart's slightly antagonistic client-love interest. Her hautiness is matched only Bogarts' utter refusal to take anyone's nonsense seriously. (One of their better scenes here:

Dial M for Murder featured the direction of Alfred Hitchcock, who has never failed to deliver a gripping tale.  M for Murder immediately introduces the reader to a confident seller of sports equipment, Tony Wendice. Though he  seems to dote on his beautiful blonde wife (Grace Kelly!), nevertheless Wendice plans to do her in. In years past, while he was traveling the world playing tennis, she was having a little dalliance with an American criminal novelist. His revenge? To arrange for her murder, via blackmail of a morally dubious classmate, and to use the novelist as his alibi. The perfect crime, but when it goes awry he  seems achieve an even greater revenge by quick thinking  -- but the devil is in the details!  Part of the fun is that several important characters are concealing key information from not only the murder-mastermind, but the viewer.  The novelist character adds a certain flair. The ending, when  Wendice closes a door and recognizes that something profound has happened,  has a marvelous touch of class.

Lastly, I finished the weekend out with The Postman Always Rings Twice, which featured neither familiar acting nor  direction. The story begins with a hitchhiker arriving at a roadside cafe and deciding to put in a little work there.  The owner is a happy-albeit-doddering old fellow, Nick, who is married to another beautiful blonde who enters rooms one hip at a time.  I knew  right away she was trouble,  and soon enough she and the hitchhiker have fallen in love and have decided to use Nick's frequent bouts of drunken stupor to arrange for a fatal accident.  Their first attempt fails, but the second try succeeds...albeit with unwanted results, and soon the two are fighting each other as well as resisting justice -- justice that the movie's end supplies, with an artful level of tragedy.

If I had to choose a favorite, I would select Dial M for Murder; as masterfully performed as Bogart and Bacall's roles were,   M for Murder's deceptively straightforward plot won me completely.

Reads to Reels: Roswell

In 1998, Melinda Metz introduced a new series of young-adult science fiction: the story of three teenagers whose earliest memories were of climbing out of incubation pods in the desert outside of Roswell, New Mexico.  When they emerged, they appeared to be human children, and -- wandering around in the desert -- were scooped up by the local authorities and adopted by various families, oblivious to their origin. Max, Isabel, and Michael likewise had no clue where they came from...but they knew it wasn't New Mexico.   In The Outsider,  the trio's lifetime of mutual secret-keeping is derailed when a stray bullet nearly claimed the life of the girl Max loved. A sheriff is soon sniffing around, but he's not any sheriff -- he's an agent of a secretive government agency whose task is to conceal and contain the threat of the Roswell Incident.  There are other aliens out there...and what follows for the three and their friends (Liz, Alex, and Maria) is nothing but trouble. 

I adored this series in middle school. My best friend and I discovered it together, feeding our mutual addiction.  I was confused and appalled when, midway through the series, the cover art abruptly changed to feature some random-looking teenagers who were nothing like the characters I'd grown so fond of.  Roswell High had been made into a television show!    I wouldn't be able to watch that show for another six years, when it appeared on DVD, and when I did I realized it wasn't so much an adaption of the books as a completely different story. The television show and book series are so completely different, in fact, that they only share the setting of Roswell, and the names of most of the main characters. (I say most, because Liz Ortecho becomes Liz Parker;  Isabel is the only character whose character is recognizable in both, but she's something of a trope,being a blonde ice queen.) The origin stories are utterly different: in the  books, the kids are the children of alien scientists whose ship was sabotaged, who are concealed by the lone surviving crewman.    In the television show, the kids are...cloned reincarnations of alien rulers killed in a civil war, whose personalities have been made manifest in human bodies.

 The television's drama was a story that could never decide where it wanted to go, and as science fiction it was far inferior.  The original books had an overarching and integrated plot;  for instance, the second villain is leading a revolution against the third villain, the teens'  home planet's social order, and while he's psychotic the history books will pretty him up if he wins.   The television show was almost random in the baddies.  (The less said about "The Skins", the better. ) But as much as I regard the plot of the books and the development of most of the characters inferior, I am still a fan of the show -- I've watched all three seasons through perhaps four times in the last ten years. Why?  

It's all about William Sadler, who plays Sheriff Jim Valenti. (You may recognize him as Agent Sloan from Deep Space Nine, or Chesty Puller from The Pacific)  In the books, the sheriff is nothing but evil incarnate. He is misery wearing black shades, a grey man who silently stalks and kills. His son Kyle has slightly more personality, being an obnoxious jock with a penchant for evil, but both creatures are beyond redemption.  In Roswell, Valenti is the best character in the series. He begins as the aliens' antagonist, trying to figure out what happened in that restaurant when Max saved Liz,but by the second season he is their ally -- and he pays for it. His son Kyle likewise starts an obnoxious jock, and  while he's never as gloriously redeemed as his father, he is utterly sympathetic...and, hilariously, Buddhist. (There is a "I Love Kyle Valenti" tumbler.)  Valenti's character is written far more humanely here, but Sadler's acting is what really sells him.   I've never liked clean-shaven and professional heroes; Sadler is more weathered -- craggy, even.  He wouldn't be out of place in a western.  Sadler is given some of the same threads as the teenagers in Roswell -- relationships, trying to find his place in the scheme of things -- but his acting outclasses the stars, giving the drama an earnestness.   Sadler gives a show of teen drama a level of adult seriousness; it is he who loses his job and nearly his son trying to protect the aliens, and it is he who breaks the news to them when one of the show's main characters is abruptly killed off. 

While Sadler's acting and Valenti's storyline are the main reason I found the show  appealing, it has other aspects going for it.   The supporting characters are a good lot;  Agent Delco from CSI Miami appears here as Jesse Ramirez, another solid addition. There are a few novelty episodes, like Isabella fantasizing that she is in a wacky 1960s sitcom called I Married an Alien, or using the characters in a retelling of the Roswell incident.   Personally, I enjoy the first season the most, skipping around on the second and third. The show was cancelled and ends abruptly, but it has its moments.  As far as book-to-box adaptions go,  Roswell remains the furtherest from the source...if enjoyable in its own ways. 

(And if nothing else, there's Katherine Heigl,  in character as Isabel, whose fears are hidden by aloof superiority...)

Reads to ...er, Reels: War of the Worlds

"...coming this way, about twenty yards from my ri—"

Tonight I turned off the lights and put on a recording of Orson Welles' 1938 radio dramatization of H.G. Wells' (confusing, that) The War of the Worlds.  According to a popular urban myth,  the format of this radio-play  so confused and alarmed the listening audience that they began running amok, wandering into the country and firing guns at anything suspicious-like.  While the extent of that panic is greatly exaggerated,  having experienced the play I can appreciate why people might believe the myth.  After an introduction which identifies the novel as its inspiration, the play begins as a period music broadcast which is interrupted periodically by news accounts of strange activity on Mars, then some sort of impact in New Jersey, and then -- by golly -- the dots are connected.  The interruptions are first routine and annoying (I was rather enjoying "Stardust", though the version wasn't close to Glenn Miller's)  and then increasingly panicked.  The scene in which an on-site reporter arrives at the first impact and witnesses the cylinder begin to open are especially well done, and later we seem to hear a man killed by the Heat Ray on air.   Broadcast interruptions are frequent, as the fictional network officials scramble to keep accurate reporting even as the affair widens. By the time we reach an assumed-dead scientist commenting in a "it's the world as we know it" fashion, musing over the events of the last several days, the radio-play status of the broadcast is much more obvious. The recording ends with Orson Welles reminding readers that this was a Halloween play, and please do not run amok.  I don't know how the panic myth started, but I certainly enjoyed listening to the play and experiencing an odd piece of American history.  You can find copies on YouTube, of course.

Reads to Reels: Great Expectations

"Hallo! Here's a church. Let's go in. Hallo! Here's some gloves. Let's put `em on! Hallo! Here's Ms. Skiffins. Let's have a wedding!" 

I've never done a reels this close on the heels to a read before, but there's no waiting with a movie that stars Ioan Gruffud and Ian McDiarmid! As soon as I discovered my library had this, I wanted to watch it, and waited only until I had finished the final pages of the book to begin.  This version is a 1999 television miniseries, but I thought it was marvelous.  Having just finished the book yesterday, of course, I caught a lot of the alterations made to the book.  A lot of frankly tedious scenes are dispatched with single lines here while characters are moving to action to action, and the attempted escape exit of Pip's Mysterious Patron is simplified nicely.  The Masterpiece host informed me at the end of the movie that there were two endings to Dickens' novel; the original had Estella married off to someone else, and a second ending left the matter of Pip and her relationship more ambiguous. The movie plays to the idea of the second ending, though in a far more spiriting way: the final shot is of Pip and Estella playing cards in a now-restored Satis house, not as lovers but together still. 

 Casting was on the whole superbly done, with the exception being Miss Haversham.  Yes, that's her on the cover, looking considerably less deathly than she's described in the book. She looks more appropriately corpselike in the actual film, but was too lively for the part.  Ian McDiarmid's casting as the lawyer Jaggers makes him absolutely sinister in retrospect, since the modern viewer is half expecting him to give a menacing smile and send Pip off on some murderous mission involving a sabre.  I know Gruffud from the Horatio Hornblower movies, and here he looks and sounds very much like good ol' Horry. He starts the film off affecting a brogue, but once he begins his education as a gentleman he reverts to RP. (Hearing Gruffud speak with anything less is jarring, especially when he did an American accent in Fantastic Four.)   As a curiosity, I'm tolerably sure the fellow who plays Wemmick (Jaggers' clerk and a friend to Pip) played the traitor Wolfe in the A&E movies, shot around the same time. He was a sterling addition here.  

Good pacing, excellent actors, nice music -- the only fly in the soup here is that midway through, Masterpeice SPOILS THE MOVIE'S ENDING! It's a television miniseries, consisting of two episodes, and midway through they stick in the preview trailer for the second half. The trailer actually gives away the patron's identity long before he appears in the movie properly.  I am astonished that PBS created a trailer that completely wrecks the twist,  and doubly so that they stuck it into the middle of the film. If you watch it with someone who's never seen the film, you'll need to fast forward through that bit.  Otherwise, it's a winner.

Reads to Reels: The Time Machine

Showing up late for a dinner is bad enough, but when a man is the host? Still worse, he stumbles in looking like he’s been run down by a carriage, and with a wild tale of having traveled through time to boot. That’s the start of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, the story of a scientist-inventor who creates a way to move through the “fourth dimension”, time.   This 1960 dramatization is fairly faithful to the original, though the tenor of the story is delivered differently.  It’s an old enough book that most readers will know the plot: a man is thrown forward in time and discovers the descendants of man, a race of dim but happy Barbie people lolling about and eating fruit by day….and being occasionally dragged underground by hairy industrial Morlocks by night.  After many scenes of wonder and peril, the unnamed Time Traveler escapes to the future, where he watches the sun die before returning home, in dire need of mutton.  Here,  any travel past the age of Eloi and Morlocks is dropped, and “George’s” entire story becomes one about fleeing man’s penchant for fratricidal wars.

Although the  movie’s general theme changes from scientific wonder to bemoaning war, in truth the viewer loses nothing in the dropped scenes or the added message.  Had the original novel been filmed scene for scene, we would have seen at best a rude model of a swollen sun, one that would surely appear dated now. In contrast, the time-lapse videography that so astounds George --  the sight of flowers blooming and folding, of the sun roaring across the sky in seconds – these still have power to amaze, even in an age of Planet-Earth-type visuals.  There is almost some humor in George’s misfortune at the outset: his first forays take him first to England amid the Great War, then World War 2, and then – so help me – the beginning of World War 3.  His arrival among the Eloi is the result of attempting to escape a nuclear bomb, the resulting fallout, and geologic upheaval.  George is a man of H.G. Well’s sensibility, who believed that scientific progress would be not only material, but societal as well, leading to global peace and prosperity. Seeing material progress still plagued by war – and then destroyed by it – makes George an unhappy camper, especially when he sees that humans have become docile vegetables, happy to bake in the sun and then be eaten.  He injects some much-needed spirit  in their little lives to resist the Morlocks, before returning home to fulfill his dinner obligation (a very polite gentleman is George) and then going back for the girl he left behind.

You can almost hear the ST TOS fight music.

There are dated elements, especially the other visual effects: the Morlocks' costumes, Weena's classic fifties hair, and odd shots like the 'recording discs' that are played by being spun like a top.  Altogether, though, it ages tolerably well, and is a delightful, old-fashioned story...quite a nice change of pace from today's 'gritty reboots'.  (Speaking of: Wells fans may like Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells builds his time machine and promptly loses it to Jack the Ripper.  Horrified at the idea of a beast running around in the utopia that will be The Future, Wells pursues him only to arrive in 1979 San Francisco.  Paradise, it ain't.)

There's a fun little joke on one of the props: the machine bears a plate that identifies it as having been manufactured by one H. George Wells. And so it was!

Reads to Reels: 2001 A Space Odyssey

 "You can tell who read the book (2001) before they watched the movie", said a friend of mine, because they’re the only ones in the theater who aren’t asking, 'What was THAT?'" at its end.   2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the two strangest films I’ve seen, but one of the most impressive technically. My first hint of the strangeness came in watching a ship from Earth travel to an orbiting space station, docking with it at the speed of tectonic drift and then later slowly cruising to the Moon to settle in there.  Reflecting on the year it was created, however, I realized this may have been one of the very first times human actions in space was ever modeled before cameras.  No doubt they wanted to savor the accomplishment, especially considering that this was filmed during the Apollo program, when man’s foot had yet to step down upon the moon.  As a piece of craftsmanship, it’s impressive in many other ways; the ships and stations do not scream “obvious model”, and some of the video effects were stunners.  In the last section of the film, for instance, the lead character is taken into a hyperspace tunnel, both he and the reader bombarded with a light show that makes one think of acid trips. What sells the experience are interspersed shots of the astronaut’s face in increasing flashes of wrenching terror and panic.

These accomplishments withstanding,  2001 does present some issues.  There is virtually no exposition, for instance, so when another mysterious light show accompanied by wailing ends with a cock-eyed giant baby hovering around Earth,  and the credits roll, the only people who have any idea what was happening are those who read the book. (The rest, presumably, look a bit like the man in the hyperspace tunnel.)  This is  problem that dogs the entire film,  because without that narrative it seems to consist of four completely different sequences with little connection to one another,  all of which consist of preposterously long tracking shots. These feature ten minutes of an astronaut drifting in space and breathing, as well as many scenes with spacecraft moving seemingly in real time.  Even the hyperspace scene was marred by this, because terror loses its edge if it is prolonged. I commented afterward that half the film seemed to be tracking visuals and music, with a spoken script that might have fit on a pocket notebook.  It is if nothing else  a unique film, one that left me wondering what on earth the producers were on while they created it.  Its classic status is well merited. 

Reads to Reels: The Last Kingdom

Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories series begins with a young boy losing his father and brother to a Viking raid.  Incensed, the child attacks them on his own – and as amuses the lord leading the invasion that he adopts the boy as his own, raising him as a Dane.    Even as he grows to become a man, Uhtred of Bebbanburg – now Uhtred Ragnarson – loses his adoptive father in a powerplay. Blamed for the murder, he becomes an outcast, a man of no tribe.  To the Danes, he is a sniveling Saxon traitor; to the Christian English, he is an unknown factor at best, and a godless beast at worst.   What Uhtred craves is respect as a lord, a return to his Saxon father’s estate in Northumbria and fame in battle. The path to both is open only through alliance with the last remaining Christian king in England – Alfred.  Such is the set up for both Cornwell’s fantastic series, and the BBC’s fair adaption of it.

It took me a while to warm up to this DVD version of The Last Kingdom,  as Cornwell’s dramatic narrative voice and witty dialogue are almost wholly absent.   Initially, Uhtred is rather selfish and whiny, and matures in fits and starts throughout the series.  Visually, the series is superb, especially in the final episode when the two armies meet in battle.  Some of the later Vikings have outstanding appearances.  It’s been ages since I read the first book,  but the series as a whole seemed to borrow a few elements from other novels in Cornwell's work.  The Danes, who seemed rather tame at first, quickly developed some pizzazz.   This actually became my enduring gripe with the series: despite the Danes being invaders, thieves, and rapers of England,  it is the defenders who are held in contempt.  The Danes bounce around dancing, drinking,  battling, and whoring, while the Christians are moving mud around their farm and praying.  When another Saxon child-turned Dane whines about their kinsmen – “Why are they so miserable?” – it was too much.  Brida, dear, ‘tis the Dark Ages. Believe me, the Danes at home are moving mud around their farms as well.   It’s work that creates civilization, not face-paint and thieving.  The contempt for the English  grows more outrageous toward the end, when the Danes are aided by a Celtic sorceress who is psychic and heals a baby through folk-magic.   When the Danes spend the entire series laughing at the Christians for praying for guidance,   it’s a bit ridiculous for their side to have an actual psychic. (HBO’s Vikings has a similar problem: the Norse are tough and cool, with a psychic woman, and the Saxons soft and whimpering. )

The Last Kingdom is at its most interesting when considering its relationships. Uhtred’s divided loyalties are explored more fully in the books, of course, but we get glimpses of it here.  Two of the Danish soldiers that threaten  the English remnant are Uhtred’s adoptive brother  Ragnar, and his companion-lover Brida.   He doesn’t want to fight them, and they don’t want to kill him (Ragnar, at least; Brida is more unpredictable)   Another man who is immediately antagonistic toward Uhtred, but becomes his best friend on the English side, is Leofric. Their growing friendship gives the series the majority of its humor, and the only time the dialogue ever approaches Cornwell’s snappy writing is when they are goading one another.

  I mostly enjoyed the series, save for its contempt of its own. If the BBC produces a series 2, I will probably view it…but given the cheap shots at the Saxons, I think I’ll wait for the DVDs to be discounted first.   There’s only so much modern snobbery one can tolerate at retail prices.

"Hey, remember when the Saxons were the cool ones kicking around the Britons, instead of the guys being kicked around by Ubba Come-Lately?"

Reads to Reels: The Martian

It has been seven weeks since I ran out of ketchup. 

Last week I stopped at Books-A-Million while waiting for the 3:00 showing of The Martian, and thought of purchasing a shirt -- "THE BOOK WAS BETTER THAN THE MOVIE" --  and wearing it to the theater as a joke.  I'm glad I didn't, because The Martian is a rare movie that not only lives up to the book, but improves upon it in some ways. True, it is a slightly different story, with less explanation-rich attempts to figure out science problems and more emphasis on emotional drama. The science is abundant, but scaled back to a level that movie-goers --  encountering it in quickly-passing lines of dialogue and narration -- can appreciate on the fly.  This is a genuine science-fiction movie, however; every problem Watney encounters is of scientific nature.  He is a botanist and biochemist,  a master of ad-hoc engineering. Eventually NASA realizes there's something alive --and something familiar -- on Mars, and attempt a rescue, but they too have problems to puzzle through. So it goes, trial after trial,  one solution leading to another dilemma until at long last the end is reached.  The Martian communicates the emotional drama more than a book,   the anguish read on the faces of his crewmen who realize they left a man behind, the awe of a satellite-monitoring intern who realizes Watney isn't giving up.  There's little to no trace of convenient movie physics;  I was especially impressed by the fact that when NASA spots Watney on satellite, they were dealing with very pixelated footage; no CSI-magic to zoom in and enhance! Though this is science fiction, in the end what finally triumphs is the human spirit - Watney's refusal to give in to apathy, and his crewmates' decision to take part in a rescue attempt at peril of their own life. In translating The Martian from pageleaves to reels, nothing has been lost save a little gratuitous language -- and the reader turned viewer gains astonishing landscapes in the bargain.  Very well done, I think. This adapation of one of my top five favorite books in 2014 is a movie that will no doubt find its way into my DVD collection when it comes out.

Reads to Reels: Starship Troopers

C'mon, you apes ! You wanna live forever?

            Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers combined intelligent speculation about the future of space warfare and controversial if thoughtful political philosophy; Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers does not. The dramatization of Troopers has the same characters, the same belligerents,  and the same labels; what it lacks in every department save for looks and mocking humor, is substance. A military adventure flick that spits in the face of military adventurism, Troopers uses a generically ominous world government’s bombastic war against a planet of “Bugs” to deride military enthusiasm and pugnacious patriotism generally. The tactics employed by the ‘Terran Federation’ are so execrable that even Hollywood must have winced to see them onscreen: imagine sending scores of ships across the galaxy to dump a mob of men armed with light machine guns, into a desert, with orders to kill anything that moves, eventually deployed against a building-sized monster with a flamethrower!  Although the film’s desert setting might scream “Iraq” to modern viewers,  the characters’ costumes and the  series of propaganda reels that serves as a framing service are drawn more from the 1930s and 40s, with officers looking like members of the SS.  The graphics strike me as impressive for 1997, especially the varieties of ‘Bugs’ that rise against the human invaders, and  -- assuming one can forget any attachment for the actual book --  the film is stupidly fun.   All would be well were it not for the fact that the film does pretend to be a version of Robert Heinlein’s story, and so much is lost that claim is tragic. There’s no trace of the motorized suits Heinlein imagined, for instance, and one of the book’s better moments – Johnny’s discovery that his father, who scorned him for choosing the military, had joined the service himself – is  completely erased.  I enjoyed it for the lampooning of warmongering, but I now understand why Starship Troopers fans grimace at its mention. 

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Reads to Reels: Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice has been subjected to several dramatizations, but the 2005 movie starring Kiera Knightly is my first.  I only finished the book a day or two before watching the movie, and indeed looked for the movie because I wanted to experience the story again -- and it was a success in fanning the flames of my enjoyment.  Liberties are taken, of course: quite a few lines are added, and areas of the book are squished. The scene in which Mr. Darcy is rebutted by Jane is a prime example. After he declares his love and proposes (woodenly so, an exception to most of the scenes), Jane  refuses him and then tells him why, in no uncertain terms. In the novel, Darcy sends a letter to answer her condemnations of his character, but here he tries to argue with her. The letter is still used, but doesn't dump as much information at once.  The letters in general are integrated into the story well, with the most potent bits being used as narrative, read aloud by one character during transition scenes -- like a carriage ride between estates. Lydia's transgression is truncated: the family learns she's run off and is shacking up with a dandy, they're scandalized, and the next moment they receive word that she's married, and all is well. The tension should have been stretched out a bit there, I  think.

Visually and musically, this is a most attractive film. Jane and Elizabeth Bennet are supposed to be right beauties, and the casting captures that. Elizabeth's first scene charmed me immediately:  little can match the allure of a woman walking through a beautiful countryside, caught up in a book. Mr. Darcy is a bit rough around the edges for a polished blueblood, always tromping in from fields with a five-o'clock shadow.  The music is wonderful, from a piano piece that echoes throughout the film to the ballroom dancing scene. I'm biased, of course: dancing always captivates me, and if a period movie involves it, the dancing scenes will rank among my favorite -- as they did in the Patrick Stewart version of A Christmas Carol.  The only negative point for me was the spottiness of Matthew Macfadyen (Mr. Darcy)'s acting: although his character is supposed to be emotionless and reserved, when Darcy makes his anguished declaration of love, he sounds...bored. Fortunately that's quickly forgotten when he's memorably rebuked by Jane.

A memorable and fun movie -- definitely a keeper for me.

Reeds to Reals: The Hunger Games (No Spoilers)

In the not-too-distant future, civilization as we know it is long-vanished, replaced by a sprawling empire centered on North America that murders children for sport. To punish its twelve constituent districts for past rebellion, the government  of Capitol forces them to each send two children to participate in a multiweek struggle of wilderness survival and combat to the death --the Hunger Games. It is a perverse punishment that not only destroys the lives of young people, but makes their last harrowing hours into a source of entertainment when the drama is televised and made mandatory viewing, so that the people under Capitol's yoke can "celebrate" the forever end of rebellion. But when Katniss Everdeen volunteers for the games to save her sister from dying in the arena, the days of submission are over...because Katniss doesn't do submission well.

I was quite taken with The Hunger Games, which I read at the tail end of December, and its jump to the big screen is an impressive success, particularly visually:  the Capitol uses aesthetic styles that illustrate their inhumanity, like Soviet Union-esque brutalism, and the trite artificiality of the Capitol citizens themselves -- their obsession with prettiness, the way they get caught up in the pomp and excitement of the games while ignoring the fact that they're entertaining themselves by watching children die - is perfectly loathsome, as is their make-up.  A dramatized filming of the Hunger Games is problematic, however: although people viewing the movie aren't celebrating the deaths of children, we are still entertaining ourselves through the onscreen depiction of the same. The film almost avoids this, however: the bloodiest deaths happen to older actors who wouldn't look out of place being skewered on the beaches of Troy or some other sword-and-sandal epic. The death with the greatest potential for being obscene is handled as discretely as possible, with a cutaway and then a return to the saddening consequence.

In the books, Katniss tells the story, and her narration adds details and flavor that are sometimes missed in the on-screen version,  where action carries the day. There are added scenes, however, that tell the story Katniss gave in the books, and these work especially well given that they featured President Snow, who is a more prominent character in Catching Fire.  Other than this, the only real injustice given to the book was the appearance of Thresh: in the book, he and Katniss have a poignant connection, whereas here they merely brush by one another, and he's barely more than an extra. Their moment together, bonding over the death of another character, and the consequences of that bond, were one of my favorite parts of the book and I count the movie as worse for having discarded that.

Definitely worthwhile for a Hunger Games fan.

Reads into Reels: Timeline

Book Review

Chris is a twenty-something guy with the hots for Kate, an archaeology student who is studying under Chris's dad, The Professor. But smitten as she is by the world of medieval France, Kate won't give Chris the time of day. Fortunately, The Professor has gotten himself lost, via time machine, in medieval France, and the Amoral Corporation responsible for this has decided to send in a bunch of archaeology students to rescue him, which will give Chris and Kate some bonding time. Sure, they're just kids; they know nothing about self defense, they haven't been inoculated for anything, and they apparently know nothing about the culture they're going into except for the fact that once upon a time, Evil British guys hung a young woman from a castle under siege, and it so enraged the French army that they captured the castle in one night -- but the corporation has decided to send them in instead of security goons, because they're at least aware that the medieval world is marginally different from the modern world and won't spend their time wondering where all the cars are. 

Unfortunately for the students, not only do they transport into time right over water, they also appear right in the middle of a chase scene. Some Evil British fellows on horseback are pursuing a young French woman, and although she gets away, the aforementioned Evil Brits decide a bunch of wet young people dressed in generic-but-clean medieval clothes will do nicely. When the students are presented to the Evil Brits' lord,  Oliver, they introduce themselves as Scottish.  Now, if *I* were to be transported into the court of a medieval English lord during the hundred years war, when England fought against France and its chronic ally Scotland, I would not say to the lord, "I am a Scot".  This, to me, would be like infiltrating the Taliban and pretending to be Israeli.  But I'm just a lowly history student. Perhaps archaeology students possess more wisdom, wisdom that can make full use of being imprisoned in a town that will be set ablaze by an angry French army within a few hours' time.  

In present course, the kids escape through a hole in the roof, though it does them little good since the Evil Brits find out quickly enough and the Chase Scene continues until the end of the movie. The movie is in fact one great long Chase Scene,  with occasional breaks for speeches and war.  The chase scene could be set anywhere, and that's the great problem with this adaption of Michael Crichton's novel of the same name, because the novel was a unique blend of history and science fiction, but the movie is generic. In the novel, the medieval world itself presented the challenge that characters had to contend with. They had to grapple with the fact that modern English and modern French would be mutually unintelligible to the medieval forms and dialects of these languages:  social mores were an obstacle that had to be navigated, as Chris learned in the novel when he accidentally accepted a challenge to a duel by picking up a laid-down glove.  Here, the kids might as well as had invaded a Renaissance fair. 

I watched this movie because I wanted something medieval, and because I'd read the book. In retrospect I'm glad I read the book before watching the movie, because I probably would not have read a book with a plot I thought to be as irrelevant as this.  The movie's technical setup establishes that while the Amoral Corporation was trying to figure out teleportation, their machine connected to a Wormhole that sent everything from the machine into 1357 France.  Part of the reason the corporation sent the professor and the kids into the past was so that they could figure out why this was the case. This is immediately forgotten by everyone involved.  The movie has exactly one interesting character, Andre Marek, who is portrayed by the film's salvation, Gerard Butler. Butler, who also played King Leonidas in 300, appears in Timeline's every scene of worth, starting from an early one in which a passionate Marek attempts convey the value of studying history to Chris.

The presence of two other actors is a highlight for me: Billy Connelly, who played Uncle Monty in A Series of Unfortunate Events, is a professor here, rather like Monty except that his penchant is for medieval history instead of snakes, and David Thewlis, who is the project head for the Amoral Corporation. You may know him as Professor Lupin. Predictably, the movie is poor history: the opposing armies each wear uniforms, red for the villainous English and blue for the valiant French. Each speaks modern English or French, with the only barrier to communication being that a French woman doesn't understand Marek's euphemisms when he attempts to chat her up. "Am I seeing anyone? I see you..."

Timeline doesn't do justice to the book, and it's not a particularly good movie by itself, but if you're really in the mood for swords and bows, it should prove entertaining, especially seeing as it features Gerard Butler, who I became a fan of while watching it. You might be better off with Men in Tights, however, which has as much historical integrity and much better acting.