I mentioned last night that Oz was in the public domain, and that there was a thriving subculture of fans writing and publishing Oz books. I would not be me if I were unable to provide a link or two. Or three. I find this whole thing inexpressibly charming.
Category: Culture
Spoilers.
This is a difficult movie. I laughed pretty hard through a lot of it, except where I was wincing. Sympathetic wincing, not angry wincing. The Coens are not in the business of making movies that are easy to figure out, and they don’t do open access. This is like that.
A lot of the criticism of this movie revolves around how unlikeable the characters are. Filmspotting talked about the Coen tendency to mock stupid characters. There’s no doubt that most of the protagonists are dumb and/or cold and/or malicious, but I don’t think I can write the movie off as an exercise in mockery.
Frances McDormand and, oddly, George Clooney saved it from that. Clooney’s performance is really way overmannered — for most of the movie. After sleeping on it for a couple of days, though, I’ve come around to thinking that was purposeful. Clooney isn’t a great actor, but he’s a smart actor, and he can do subtle. Watch what he does with the character after he kills Brad Pitt. I think what we’re seeing is someone who’s overacting because the character overacts. The scene where he calls his wife and begs her to come home? That’s someone stripped of his pretensions, and I think Clooney played it perfectly. Not to mention the symbolism of destroying his own phallic substitute sex toy; he’s destroying his own facade right there, poor guy.
His earlier lines about his quick reactions and his, ha ha, “I’ve never discharged a firearm” are the set up. On first glance, that’s part of the fakery. Those are his lines which he uses to get laid. But the Pitt death shows us a) that he does have really good reflexes and b) that he really hasn’t fired his gun in anger before. That’s the hook demonstrating that there’s a person underneath it all.
McDormand’s role is less complex. It wasn’t hard at all for me to sympathize with her. Yeah, she does horribly stupid things, but she’s intensely lonely. Richard Jenkins humanizes her in a wonderful performance by letting us see why someone would love her. To a degree, she’s a monster — but with someone as decent as Jenkins emotionally involved with her, you can’t write her off as nothing but monstrosity.
So I do wind up — not liking them, but at least wishing them redemption. The arc of the movie brings them together, then thrusts them apart. They’re definitely the centerpiece. And in the end, of course, they’re the protagonists who get out of it all alive. If not happy.
With that in mind, it’s another tragedy. It’s just that the Coens have no scruples about tragic movies overlaid with brutal humor.
(Not Fringeworthy, that’s different.)
Use Nemesis, which is fairly simple and free. A couple of nomenclature changes — Madness Meters are Stability Meters, and most difficulties are fairly low. Things are weird but not alien weird. The Unnatural track is the Fringe track. Trump dice are likewise Fringe dice.
There is no supernatural, but there is fringe science, obviously. Those versed in fringe science might go above 5d in a given stat. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nina turned out to have 6d in Body, and Dr. Bishop has 6d Mind. Perhaps more.
Regular combat still exists. Right now the show looks more procedural than actiony, which means firearms should be deadly, which I think they are in Nemesis. However, the interesting combat scenes are scientific. This works more or less like regular combat.
1. Declare your character’s action. The show’s set up with one main scientist, which works fine — everyone else does supporting actions, which feed back into the scientist’s work, giving him bonus dice.
2. Roll the appropriate dice pool. Narrate accordingly. Sometimes it’s going to be science skill vs. science skill (can we figure out how to undo this dimensional transposition before it explodes in downtown Boston?), and sometimes it’d be science skill vs. something else. I think the whole tank scene in the pilot was vs. tactics, for example.
3. Damage is to be contemplated. Could be physical. Could be time ebbing away. Possibly losing a fight results in Stability Meter checks. Mostly I think I like time passing; a lot of this stuff is going to be mad science on the clock, since it’s a procedural show. So it’s… when you run out of wound boxes, you’re out of time or the experiment failed.
You don’t have weapons. You have centrifuges, which get statted up the same way.
It is rather difficult to talk about Neal Stephenson’s newest without spoiling lots. In generic, cloudy, unsatisfying terms: it’s a Stephenson book, with lots of thought experiments and science and so forth. There are action scenes. The world changes dramatically during the course of the book, as a result of the actions of the protagonists. There is a romance of sorts, in which a practical female character falls for a slightly fuzzy-minded idealist.
The alien world setting is nice. I found myself very engaged by the society and the worldbuilding. Which is good, because there’s a lot of it before the plot proper starts.
OK, spoilers. Don’t get too excited, since it’s just gonna be a one-liner quip.
I’ve been enjoying the Filmspotting podcast; decent opinions, good chemistry between the hosts, a wide variety of topics. One of the regular features is a movie marathon. Over the course of a month or two, they watch one movie per week from a given genre and comment on it. The idea is that listeners can follow along.
They just finished a heist marathon, and will be moving onto a 60s British Angry Young Men marathon in September, which sounds cool. So I’m gonna hop on board. I will no doubt post reviews here, and if anyone local’s interested in joining me and my Netflix queue for viewings, feel free to speak up.
For reference, the list:
- Look Back In Anger — Richard Burton and class warfare. A review of the original play coined the term “angry young men.” The play was filmed for television in 1979, with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, so I’m gonna watch that version too.
- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — Albert Finney as an alienated factory worker.
- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner — a sports movie! Well, no, not really; it’s a movie about the oppressive nature of British society.
- The Sporting Life — Richard Harris, William Hartnell. More sports as the vehicle for social criticism.
- Billy Liar — early John Schlesinger, which is awesome by me.
- If… — classic allegory with Malcolm McDowell; directed by Lindsay Anderson, who also directed The Sporting Life, so it’ll be fun to compare. Really stoked for this.
For reference.
Quantum of Solace
JCVD
Synecdoche, New York
W. (if I get to it)
Milk
Frost/Nixon, depending on reviews
The Wrestler
The Brothers Bloom
Slumdog Millionaire
We finally caught it over this last weekend. I guess a lot of other people did too, since it’s hit 300 million bucks already. I am eagerly waiting to find out if it has the sort of legs that’ll get it into the top five ever domestic, although I suspect it won’t.
Somewhat surprisingly, it didn’t blow me away. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t overwhelm me. Great acting, excellent plot and theme — I thought the whole balance of duty and public personae was superb, and it echoed through both good guys and bad guys. The early Scarecrow appearance was ideal.
Still and all, the movie needed to be half an hour shorter. I’m not sure what you’d cut — you could lose the foreign travel and edit out the cell phone moral dilemma, but you’d still have a movie that feels somewhat overstuffed. I’ve heard a lot of people call the movie relentless, and it was, and I liked that. I just think it would have been tighter with a couple fewer beats in the Joker’s plan.
Nobody’s ever accused Christopher Nolan of being insufficiently intricate, I suppose.
Second, the fight scenes were muddy. I have a sudden fear that I’m getting too old here, except I recall liking the fight scenes in the last Bond movie, so — crap. Yeah, I’m getting old. Well, the fight scenes were still muddy. Batman’s sonar vision did not help this in the least. Nolan’s not known as an action director, obviously, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but he ought to get someone to give him a hand with the fight scenes next time. In all fairness, the car chase was pretty great.
So as not to give the impression that I didn’t like the movie…
Really good acting all around; probably the best I’ve ever seen in a superhero movie. I loved that it wasn’t Batman’s movie — it was about Commissioner Gordon, the Joker, and Harvey Dent. All three of those guys were great. Particularly Gary Oldman. I wish it had been more Rachel Dawes’ movie, but even so, Maggie Gyllenhaal kicks Katie Holmes’ ass.
Batman really doesn’t make a lot of choices during the movie, and the one choice he does make is predicted and subverted by the Joker. That’s practically a theme — Harvey Dent takes Batman’s choices away from him, the Joker does it a few times, and so on. Thus, the aforementioned trio has to drive the movie, and they’re really good at it.
Also, Heath Ledger’s performance is about as scary-good as people are saying; emphasis on scary. The movie’s worth it just for that.
The Starman Omnibus is awesome. Probably less awesome if you’re not a fan. DC’s going to do six volumes, which are slated to include every issue of Starman plus all the related material (e.g., the Shade miniseries and so on).
The art’s still gorgeous, if less surprising than it was at the time of publication. Beautiful art deco cityscapes, excellent use of shadow and darkness. Tony Harris was so good. It benefits from the high quality of the hardcover’s paper, too.
And there’s nothing wrong with the story. James Robinson notes in the afterword that he was after the sort of weirdness/superhero fusion that early Vertigo had, before the editoral dictate to separate Vertigo from mainstream DC. He nailed it. The additional dollop of DC continuity fetish that he brought to the table probably wasn’t strictly speaking necessary, but I’m not sure it hurts.
Five more volumes to come, at around 18-20 comic book issues per volume. Not too bad. I’m hearing DC is doing omnibus-style volumes for other books as well; good call.
eBooks on the iPhone are pretty obvious; I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good reader. Here’s the first cut: Stanza (App Store link).
The key is being able to download your own books, which Stanza allows. Grab Stanza Desktop and load your books into there, then select Enable Sharing from the Tools menu and fire up the iPhone Stanza app. Shared Books -> Books on Macintosh displays the list of currently open books in Stanza Desktop. Select the ones you want, and there you go.
(Helpful hint: go back to the Mac to tell Stanza Desktop that it’s OK for the iPhone to connect. I couldn’t figure out why the iPhone app was hanging at first.)
Stanza Desktop supports a nice list of file types, including Open eBook, Kindle, Mobipocket, HTML, PDF, LIT, PalmDoc, RTF, and Word. It does not support Sony Reader or PDF files. Good enough for my purposes but not perfect.
The iPhone UI could use a little polish but it’s very functional. I’m happy for the nonce. The apps are currently free; the web site says the Desktop will cost something once it’s out of beta.
Sadly I’m not going again this year, for good reasons involving schedule and finances, but that’s OK. It will not stop me from considering the lineup at length.
The ticketing is wild this year. The festival starts this Thursday; tickets go on sale tomorrow. The schedule only came out like Friday. Make your decisions quick. I’m thinking next year I just choose a week and trust in fate for the movies. Or go for two weeks. Mmm, two weeks.
Here is the volume. Here is the pump. Here is the dance floor. Do what is right.