It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

Here’s what I’ve been reading and watching in the last few weeks:

Books
The Pilgrim Project, Hank Searls (1964), I reviewed on my Space Books blog here.

The Daily Mirror Book of Garth 1975, Frank Bellamy (1974). I remember Garth from the 1970s and early 1980s. I often stayed at my grandparents, and they took the Daily Mirror every day. The central premise is that Garth, who is immensely strong, has various adventures in time and space, usually righting wrongs as part of a war between Good and Evil – with Good represented by Garth’s “lover through the ages”, Astra. Usually, when travelling through time, Garth occupies the body of a man who resembles him in every way. The comic strip was limited by its format, and often had to repeat information each day, but the stories were reasonably inventive and Frank Bellamy’s art was excellent.

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler (2004), I decided to read after seeing the film, which I enjoyed. I have several books by Fowler – Sarah Canary, and a couple of collections – but I’d not read any of her mainstream fiction. The Jane Austen Book Club is cleverly structured – the discussion of each of Austen’s books is led by one member of the group, and that allows Fowler to tell their life-story, which in part echoes the themes of the Austen novel. Fowler also plays games with the narrator – the book opens with “our book club” and “we”, and returns to second person at various points, but none of the characters actually narrates the book. The film is a mostly faithful adaptation, although Jocelyn is played by Maria Bello and so younger than the book version. The sole male, Grigg is also more successful in the film, having made money in a dot com start-up; in the book, he’s just tech support. Overall, it seems strange to describe a novel by Karen Joy Fowler as light reading, but that’s what The Jane Austen Book Club is.

Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes (1984), I picked to broaden my reading. I’d not read any Barnes before, so I had little idea what to expect. And… this is not a book which wears its research lightly. The narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, is an amateur Flaubert expert and the novel is as much a dissection of the French writer’s life as it is about its putative plot – in which Braithwaite tries to determine which of the stuffed parrots on display in two Flaubert museums is the actual one Flaubert used when writing ‘Un coeur simple’. Braithwaite also has a secret of his own, which he gradually reveals as the book progresses. Flaubert’s Parrot is very clever and informative… but the central metaphor strikes me as a bit thin and Braithwaite’s own story doesn’t actually reflect thematically on his Flaubert expertise. As a readable and interesting treatise on Flaubert, the book succeeds very well; but as a novel, it feels unbalanced and Braithwaite fails to compete with the subject of his expertise.

After the Vikings, G David Nordley (2004), is a self-published collection of five stories which had previously appeared in Analog and Asimov’s during the first half of 1990s. They all take place on Mars, and are tied together with a framing narrative in which a pair of aliens discuss the extinct race which once lived on the planet. My copy is the 2004 revised edition, and it features some of the worst cover art I’ve ever seen (not the same as the version shown on Amazon). But the stories…. Back in the late-1990s, I tipped Nordley as a writer to watch, chiefly on the strength of his novella ‘Into the Miranda Rift’, originally published in the July 1993 issue of Analog and nominated for the Hugo and Nebula that year. He’s still regularly published in Asimov’s and Analog but since I’ve not seen either magazine for nearly 10 years, I’ve read only a handful of stories by Nordley and none recently. And he’s yet to produce a novel. After the Vikings is less good than I expected – the stories are very much 1990s Analog/Asimov’s sf, a little heavy in places on the science and the moralising, but well put together. I’m not sure about the final novelette, ‘Martian Valkyrie’, which features an inventive means of getting to Mars, but also includes some heavy-handed racial stereotyping and an unpleasant undercurrent of sexism.

Eclipse 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan (2008), I bought because of the good reviews it’s received. And because I wanted to read more recent genre short fiction. The anthology is a good read, although I found the contents mixed. The stand-outs are Tony Daniel’s ‘Ex Cathedra’ and Peter S Beagle’s ‘The Rabbi’s Hobby’. Terry Dowling’s ‘Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose’ is near-incomprehensible as it requires the reader to be familiar with the universe of Dowling’s novel, Wormwood – although, to be fair, the novel does seem like it might be worth reading. Alastair Reynold’s ‘Fury’ contains some good ideas, but feels a bit weak for him. Stephen Baxter’s ‘The Turing Apples’ is polished, but felt a bit cold and uninvolving to me. Nancy Kress’s ‘Elevator’ is just plain dull. The rest are all enjoyable and well-written, but none really struck me as especially exciting. Oh, and there’s a Chiang too. Which won the BSFA Award this year. And I wrote about it here.

Starship Fall, Eric Brown (2009), from NewCon Press is a sequel of sorts to an earlier novella, Starship Summer, published by PS Publishing. It’s set on the same world, Chalcedony, and features the same cast. With Brown, you always know you’re going to get well-written character-driven sf, and Starship Fall is no exception. There’s no cutting-edge idea at the heart of it, just a story about people on an alien world which unfolds in elegant prose to an inevitable bitter-sweet conclusion.

Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual, Christopher Riley & Phil Dolling (2009), I read for my Space Books blog. A review will be appearing there later this month.

Films
The Dark Is Rising, dir. David L Cunningham (2007), is yet another attempt to create a film franchise from a YA fantasy series. Hollywood hasn’t done too well so far – Pullman’s His Dark Materials never got to book two, which is a shame; and the second Chronicles of Narnia film didn’t do very well at the box office. The Dark Is Rising is adapted from the 1973 novel of the same name by Louise Cooper, actually the second book of the series. A boy on his fourteenth birthday learns that he is the “Seeker”, who must find the six Signs so the Light can defeat the Dark. There’s something old-fashioned about the film despite an attempt to drag it into the twenty-first century. It feels very mid-twentieth century, all English village halls and village schools and fierce winters. Although it doesn’t appear on screen, there’s a sense of austerity to the story. Not having ever read the book, I can’t say how well it has been adapted, but most of the adult cast appear to be sleepwalking through their parts. Christopher Ecclestone as the Rider is especially poor. I suspect The Dark Is Rising will be another film franchise which slowly fades away uncompleted.

Guard Post, dir. Su-chang Kong (2008), is set in a, well, in a guard post, in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. A company of South Korean soldiers have turned up to GP 506 (the film’s original title) to relieve the company on duty. Except they find said company slaughtered, but for a single survivor. Over the next few days, they try to discover what happened, while one by one they themselves die. This film isn’t as gruesome as I expected – which is good, because I’m not a big fan of grue. But neither is it quite as suspenseful as the premise suggests. It’s done well, but nothing about it really stood out for me.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4 and The Final Season (2008 – 2009), probably deserves a post of its own, but never mind. Lots of people have written at greater length and more intelligently than I could manage on this television series. What is interesting about the various commentaries scattered about the tinterweb are the points each commentator has picked up on. For me, BSG often failed because the writers didn’t have a clear idea right from the start what they were trying to do. So some episodes contradicted others, some made no sense in light of earlier revelations, and some were clearly knocked together in service to the “moral of the week”. The devil, they say, is in the details, and that’s where BSG often let itself down. When the fleet finds Earth, they determine that it was once populated by Cylons…. How? If they can identify 2,000 year old remains as Cylons, then why could they never determine who was a Cylon in the earlier seasons? But then I was never convinced by the Cylons – the BSG writers never seemed to grasp what machine intelligence might actually mean, or what machine intelligences in human bodies would be like. As for the final episode, ‘Daybreak’, I’m not as annoyed by it as some were. I quite like the idea of the Colonials feeding into the genetic heritage of Earth, and I can’t get upset at them walking away from their culture. Which is notoriously ephemeral anyway.

Boy Meets Girl (2009), was for review for videovista.net. See here.

The Last Sentinel, dir. Jesse V Johnson (2007), was also for review for videovista.net. See here.

Once Upon A Time In America, dir. Sergio Leone (1984), is in the Time Out Centenary Top 100 Films, but I don’t understand why. How a film can be so highly regarded when its central character rapes two women and suffers no qualms or consequences is beyond me. Once Upon A Time In America covers the beginnings of a group of Jewish gangsters in New York during Prohibition, and their eventual demise. The story is framed by the return of one, played by Robert DeNiro, thirty years later in answer to a mysterious summons. It’s all to do with the way his fellow gangsters met their deaths. The characters, being gangsters, are all nasty pieces of work, and quite frankly it’s difficult to care about them or what happens to them. At least in Westerns, there’s a disconnect – the milieu seems to be unrelated to the world as it is – so vile behaviour by characters is less likely to break the emotional compact with the viewer. And anyway, most Westerns are essentially white hats versus black hats. Once Upon A Time In America at least doesn’t romanticise gangsters – but then, that’s why it’s not especially entertaining.

Inkheart, dir. Iain Softley (2008), is yet another attempt by a Hollywood studio to kick off a new fantasy franchise. This time it’s based on the YA novels by Cornelia Funke. Brendan Fraser can apparently bring characters to life when he reads a story out loud – i.e., magically create them as real live people in his world. And he discovered this by reading a blindingly-obscure YA fantasy by an Italian writer to his young daughter… and subsequently giving life to the book’s chief villain and causing his wife to disappear into the book. And ever since he’s been hunting for copies of that book in order to try and “read” his wife out of it. With daughter, now twelve-years-old, in tow. Funke is German, and her books were first published in that country… which means this film has a European flavour somewhat at odds with its Hollywood treatment. It’s all very picturesque, and the European view of literature and fairy-tales sits uneasily on the US’s typical approach to this type of fiction. If The Dark Is Rising felt like 1950s England, then Inkheart feels even less anchored in the here and now.

The Band’s Visit, dir. Eran Kolirin (2007), is an Israeli film about, well, a band visiting Israel. The band are the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra from Egypt, and they’ve been invited to play at the opening of a new Arab cultural centre in Petah Tikva. Unfortunately, when they arrive at the airport, there’s no one there to meet them so they have to make their own way. They get it wrong and end up in Bet Hatikva, a dead-end town on the edge of the Negev Desert. (Arabic has no “p”, only a “b”, so the confusion is understandable.) The band are stuck overnight in Bet Hatikva, as there are no more buses. A local café owner, Dina, helps out, providing food and somewhere for the band members to stay. This is not a film in which much happens, but it’s well observed and the gentle humour and sharp characterisation carries you through to the end. Sasson Gabai as band leader Colonel Tawfiq Zakaria is especially good.

Honeydripper, dir. John Sayles (2007), is the latest film from my near-namesake. In this one, Danny Glover plays the owner of the eponymous ramshackle club in Alabama in 1950. He’s in danger of losing it – receipts are down and his unscrupulous landlord wants him out; and the local sheriff also wants to go into “partnership” with him. So Glover pins all his hopes on a live performance by Guitar Sam, a New Orleans star. Who doesn’t show. Happily, a young substitute takes his place, the concert is a success, and Glover gets to keep his bar. Given the period and location, it’s no surprise that the whites are pretty much entirely unlikable; but then neither are the blacks presented as paragons. Of course, much of the appeal of a film like Honeydripper is the music – blues, and early rock and roll. Although the latter only makes an appearance in the final scene. A polished work, with a sharp script, featuring polished performances and some good music; although overall not as good as Sayles’s Lone Star or Matewan.

This is turning into a sort of irregular thing. And why not? This time it’s more watching then reading, but never mind.

Books
The Dorsai Companion(1986) and The Spirit of Dorsai (1979), Gordon R Dickson, I read in the, ah, spirit of completeness. I’d loved the original Dorsai trilogy when I’d read them as a kid, but I was less impressed when I reread them a couple of years ago – see here. But there is still something a little fascinating about Dickson’s future history, and The Dorsai Companion gives more information on it than are contained in the various novels. It also contains several short stories set in that future history. And like a lot of sf of that period, the plot is carried via the dialogue. They’re very talky. Which made for an odd experience after reading more contemporary sf. The Spirit of Dorsai shares much of its contents with The Dorsai Companion (or vice versa), so I only had to read a handful of additional pages to finish both books.

How to Build Your Own Spaceship, Piers Bizony (2008) was a review book sent to me by Portobello Books – well, I requested it, and they kindly sent me a copy. So, thank you very much. I reviewed it here on my Space Books blog. It’s very good.

The Discovery of Heaven, Harry Mulisch (1992), I wanted to read after seeing and liking the film (which I reviewed for videovista.net – see here). Having now read the book, I think the film adapted it very well indeed. The novel is richer, of course, and more happens in it, but nothing of real substance is missing from the movie – if anything, the book does have a tendency to ramble in places. I can also understand Mulisch’s insistence that Stephen Fry be cast in the role of Onno Quist. I doubt it’s a novel I’ll be returning to, although it is very good. Bizarrely, it didn’t strike me as being very Dutch, despite Mulisch being one of the “Great Three” of Dutch postwar writers and this his best-known and best-selling work.

First on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins (1970). I’m reading a bunch of books on Apollo 11 in order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing on my Space Books blog. So a review of this book will appear there some time around 20th July. For now, it’s much, much, much better than Shepard & Slayton’s Moon Shot (reviewed here).

Offworld, Robin Parrish (2009), was read for a review for Interzone.

A Law for the Stars, John Morressy (1976), is the first of two of Morressy’s Sternverein novels which were never published in the UK. I managed to pick up a Laser Books edition a while ago (which has an especially ugly cover). Unlike the other Sternverein novels, this one focuses on the Security Troops. Ryne is an orphan from a low-tech world who becomes the perfect Sternverein Security Trooper. From what I remember of the other books, this one isn’t quite as well written, although it does have its moments.

Films
The Duchess, dir. Saul Dibb (2008), is a dramatisation of the life of Georgiana Cavendish, the 18th century Duchess of Devonshire. It’s clearly a star vehicle for Keira Knightley, so it’s somewhat unfortunate that throughout the film she looked uncannily like a puppet from a Gerry Anderson television programme. Other than that, it’s a British period drama. It probably takes liberties with history – I’ve not read the book on which it is based, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, so I’m only guessing. Sumptuously shot, slow in places, and it provided a couple of hours of mild entertainment.

Star Wreck 6: In The Pirkinning, dir. Timo Vuorensola (2005), I watched and reviewed for videovista.net. See here. I also watched Star Wrecks 1 through 5 in order to write my review. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry….

Valkyrie, dir. Bryan Singer (2008), I watched and reviewed for videovista.net. See here.

Tokyo Story, dir. Yasujiro Ozu (1953), is on the Time Out’s 1995 Centenary Top 100 Films at No. 9. Much as I appreciate Tarkovsky’s films and their glacial pace, at least his cinematography provides sufficient eye candy to hold your attention. Tokyo Story is a slow film, but its focus is on its characters. They’re well-drawn but ultimately it wasn’t enough for me and my eyes were starting to glaze before reaching the halfway mark. Perhaps I’ll try it again some day, although I may need to down half a dozen cans of Red Bull first.

Sunrise, dir. FW Murnau (1927) is also on Time Out’s 1995 Centenary Top 100 Films. At No. 84. And despite being only 95 minutes, it felt as long as Metropolis (153 mins) or Pandora’s Box (133 mins). Perhaps that was because it was silent. Or perhaps German Expressionist films just seem to drag on and on. Ah well, at least I can cross it off the list.

Titan A.E., dir. Don Bluth (2000), is a strange beast. It’s an animated sf film, which uses CGI backgrounds but traditional cell animation for the characters and foreground “sets”. The two main characters are voiced by Matt Damon and Drew Barrymore, and her voice doesn’t quite fit her character’s appearance. The story has its moments, and some of the CGI set-pieces are quite impressive. Apparently, it’s now a cult film. Maybe that’s because it feels like anime, although it looks like a Hollywood animated film.

Juno, dir. Jason Reitman (2007), is a mildly-amusing comedy about a teenage mother, the title character. Unfortunately, she talks throughout like someone whose lines were written to be witty and precocious, so she never feels real.

Battle Beyond the Stars, dir. Jimmy T Murakami (1980), is a Roger Corman cash-in onStar Wars, with a plot shamelessly stolen from The Magnificent Seven (and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai). Robert Vaughn even reprises his role from the western. There’s a lot in it that will make you cringe – George Peppard especially, who appears to have spent the entire film pissed – but Richard Thomas plays a good part, and John Saxon as the villain gives the scenery a thorough chewing.

Code Unknown, dir. Michael Haneke (2000), is one of those films whose plot spirals out from a single seemingly unimportant event, showing the ramifications of it on a variety of peoples’ lives. In this case, it’s the casual mistreatment by a French teenager of a Romanian woman begging on the streets of Paris. A young man, the son of Malian immigrants, tells the teenager to apologise to the woman. He refuses… and this leads to a fight. The police turn up and the Malian is carted off. By the time the film finishes, we’ve seen how that one moment of thoughtlessness altered their lives, and yet nothing much seems to have changed. A film it is difficult to like.

Supernova, dir. Thomas Lee (2000) – Thomas Lee is actually Walter Hill, but he pulled his name from this, because apparently the studio were unhappy with his cut and brought in Jack Sholder to film additional scenes and Francis Ford Coppola to re-edit it. I can’t say I think much of their “rescue” job because the film is rubbish. I wonder if Hill’s original was any better.

Tales From Earthsea, dir. Goro Miyazaki (2006), is a charm-free adaptation of Le Guin’s tetrology. Sort of. It’s been a while since I read the books, But I seem to recall that Tehanu dealt a lot with Tenar’s domestic life – and she lives on small farm in this film. Sparrowhawk is also in his thirties or forties – hard to tell, being animation. He’s voiced by Timothy Dalton, and he’s another example of an animated character whose voice doesn’t fit their appearance.

My Darling Clementine, dir. John Ford (1946), is another film from Time Out’s 1995 Centenary Top 100 Films. It’s at No. 38. The film is also notable for its claim of accuracy – when a youth Ford had known Wyatt Earp, and the shoot-out at the OK Corral is staged as Earp described it to him. There’s a horrible casualness to killing in the film, as if the first solution to every problem was to shoot the other person in the back. Makes you wonder why they ever bothered with marshals and sheriffs. I’m not a huge fan of westerns – well, except for Rio Bravo – but this is one of the good ones.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars, dir. Byron Haskin (1964), is a classic piece of sf cinema. A US spacecraft surveying Mars narrowly avoids a collision with a meteorite. Both crewmen ject, but only Commander Draper and the craft’s pet monkey survive the landing. He is marooned on the red planet, where he discovers how to manufacture sufficient “air” for him to breathe, finds water, and even finds a native plant which proves edible. It’s all wildly inaccurate – hardly surprising given when it was made. And gets even more fanciful when alien humans from a star in Orion’s belt appear and mine ore using slaves. One of the slaves escapes and becomes Friday to Draper’s Robinson Crusoe. The slave is played by Victor Lundin, and I kept on expecting him to break into an Elvis Presley impression.

Fahrenheit 451, dir. François Truffaut (1966), remains a favourite after this rewatch. It’s complete nonsense of course, although it makes more sense than Bradbury’s vastly overrated novel. Books are banned… but people can still read. How do they learn to read if there are no books? Never mind. There’s something quintessentially English about the film – despite being directed by a Frenchman, starring an Austrian, and based on a novel by an American. It sort of exudes a late 1960s / early 1970s menacing UK charm, a cross between the quaint contemporary futurism of G-Plan-furnished A-plan houses in green suburban streets lined with silver birches and the reality of Brutalist high-rise sink estates.

5 X 2, dir. François Ozon (2004), is constructed from five incidents in the shared lives of a married couple, recounted backwards from their divorce to their first meeting. The husband, Gilles, is thoroughly unlikeable, and any explanation for his bad behaviour is only hinted at and never explained. It’s clear where Ozon’s sympathies lay. I like Ozon’s films, but he never quite delivers what you expect, or quite lives up to what he’s promised. Admittedly, I’ve not seen all his films. Yet.