Movies in June

Kind of a lot this month. When the public library is your movie source, it's feast or famine, I guess. Most notably, a lot of these movies are things I've been meaning to see for a long, long time.

First up, the movie version of The Fountainhead. Quin just recently finished reading the novel and wanted to see this. I warned him I'd heard that it sucked. I had heard correctly. Which is strange, as Ayn Rand did the adaptation herself. Apparently she's in love with her character's long speeches to the expense of storytelling. That isn't true of the novel, but when cutting her story down to a Hollywood runtime, that seems to be what she did. Pity. There's got to be a watchable movie that could be made from this source material; I'm surprised no one's tried again.

A movie based on something I haven't read by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it at the time, but a month later it hasn't really stayed with me the way most David Fincher movies do. In fact, I also saw Zodiac for the first time this month and enjoyed that more. Fincher is the master of making you think you've seen some horrible thing you haven't seen. (Like Gwyneth's head in the box in Seven, you have a visceral response to something he didn't even show on film). Zodiac left me with the impression that computers in general and networked ones in particular are a great boon to police work.

I also saw 12 Angry Men for the first time ever, although I've seen so many other references to it I pretty much knew the whole story already. I found it completely engrossing despite that.

I wouldn't say I was dying to see Wild Wild West, but after watching Kevin Smith lay into it in one of his life shows, how could I resist? Yes, there's a giant spider at the end and the whole thing is summer tent pole movie cheesy, but I found it surprisingly fun. Perhaps it's just me being overly generous; there are so few remotely steam punky films out there. Coming in with low expectations helps as well.

Speaking of Kevin Smith, we finished off the DVDs of his live shows with Sold Out: A Threevening with Kevin Smith, which he did in New Jersey. Lots of fun stories from his childhood.

The boys saw the Adam Sandler movie Bedtime Stories some time ago and have been insisting that I watch it. It was OK. Lucy Lawless and Guy Pierce looked like they were having fun. They also saw the Peter Jackson King Kong without me when we first got it on DVD and I never got around to watching it until now. I loved it, gorgeously shot with compelling characters and the giant ape was so wonderfully emotive (thanks to Andy Serkis). This might be another one where it helps to come in with lower expectations, or at least not post-LOTR, Peter Jackson is the king of the world expectations.

Quin and I caught Superbad on cable. I'm a Michael Cera fan, and Seth Rogan had the most perfect cop mustache. Still, glad I didn't pay for this one either.

The Pink Panther 2 was a letdown. We had enjoyed the first one, but this one had replaced Kevin Kline with John Cleese. Not that I don't like John Cleese, but swapping out parts of the cast is never a good sign. Strangely, the mystery story line I thought was very well done and was genuinely interesting, it was the jokes that fell flat. And since this was meant to be a comedy, that's a problem. (If you've seen Aishwarya Rai Bacchan in Doom 2 you'll immediately suspect how the plot is going to turn out, but it's still well-played).

One last item in the "should have seen it years ago" category: Roots, the miniseries. Aidan has been studying the Civil War for history, so this seemed like a nice supplement to that. It's fun to watch now; it's a little encapsulation of which TV stars were hot in the late 70s. The boys both liked it as well; I think Oliver felt a particular kinship to Kunta Kinte. They share a fierce rebellious streak.

The library let me down when I went searching for Satyajit Ray films. They only had Pather Panchali and The Chess Players. I liked them both, although they are very different films. Pather Panchali is the first of three films about a boy in Calcutta named Apu, although this one really focuses on his older sister, a free spirit trapped in poverty. The parents were interesting as well; the father is incapable of worrying about anything, leaving the poor mother to struggle in all sorts of ways to keep her children fed. She was also a bit socially isolated; her body language whenever a neighbor woman would come by to talk to her was fantastic (as someone who also finds friendly chitchat a bit aggressive, I really felt for her). It's a beautifully shot film as well. So is The Chess Players, with an equally engaging cast of characters. The story centers on two men who are always playing chess, to the dismay of one ignored wife and the pleasure of another, elsewhere-occupied wife. While they are busy playing chess, their king is losing his kingdom to the British. I think that's my favorite scene, when the king refuses to sign the documents, but instead takes the crown from his head and hands it over. He's so overwhelmed with emotion, and the gesture is such a symbolic one, and yet the British officers are practically squirming in their discomfort (I'm not saying they're emotionally repressed, but...)

The last film to turn up under Satyajit Ray's name was one where he only provided the music, a Merchant-Ivory film called Shakespeare Wallah. Like Bombay Talkie it's a train wreck of selfish people in relationships. If that's your sort of thing, this is a nice example of it. But I don't care much for films where I want to slap all the characters.

Last of all, a TV on DVD, season 1 of Two and a Half Men, a show my brother has been recommending to me since it first aired. I could tell you how much I liked it, but the real proof is in the fact that my husband, who despises sit coms, keeps finding ways to be doing things in the room when I'm watching this. If you ask him what he thinks he'll just disparage the use of laugh track, but even so he's always there. I'm just saying.

"On Desperate Seas" is up at A Fly in Amber

...and they've made it their featured piece of fiction for the July issue. Woot! I'm very pleased. If you've never poked around my website, I have a page with little bits of info about the stories I've published: where I got the ideas, or what the names mean, that sort of thing. For instance, here's what I have to say on this piece:

This was a story I had originally intended to submit to Fantasist Enterprises for their Sails and Sorcery anthology. Sadly I missed the deadline (by a couple of months, no less), but that is the reason for the nautical setting. I've always been interested in Arctic and Antarctic explorations, I had just finished Tao of Troth and wasn't done writing about the Inuit, and I had a hankering to try something that invoked a little Poe. Hence the title, although I was specifically thinking of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; the careful reader will spot what I borrowed in most respectful homage (or, if you will, outright stole). I had a kernel of an idea that involved a sailor's wife with half a heart, but the story didn't really pull together until a random clicking through Wikipedia turned up this little phrase: "Eventually, more ships and men were lost looking for Franklin than in the expedition itself." and it all pulled together. In an almost unsellable way; this was liked by a lot of places where it just didn't quite fit.

This story is also famous for giving me nightmares while writing it. Some months after I had finished it I saw the NOVA special about the Franklin Expedition; it didn't come close to matching the horror that was going on when I "lived" through it.

On the Importance of Naming: Edgar should be obvious, Penelope is a simple mythological reference, and Jane's name is meant to be the most unassuming name possible, and yet a strong-sounding one. Teddy's Inuit name Tetqataq means "flying before the wind", a lovely name for an Inuit sailor, but also the name of one of the men who came across some of the last of the Franklin men pulling a boat across the ice, trying to walk south to the Back River.

And the title, of course, is a line from Poe's "To Helen". Which in my head will always be read by Tom Hanks.

Books in June

So it seems like my pattern with Niven is an alterating one between like it/hate it. This month Lucifer's Hammer fell in the "hate it" category. For me, the character I found the most interesting and sympathetic was the comet that smashed into the Earth. Poor comet. The people I mostly didn't care about one way or the other. Tim Hamner and Eileen had an interesting dyamic between them, but there wasn't enough of them to carry me through this too-long novel. (And I could gripe about the women, or the assertion that women's lib ended five minutes after the comet hit, but given that the majority of the black people who survived formed a pseudo-religious cannabilistic group leads me to believe the women got off easy).

Oath of Fealty I really liked, though. The idea of a self-contained city as one giant building is an interesting one, although I wished it had been explored more. I can see the appeal of living in a community where every one is carefully chosen and there is no riff-raff, but what happens in a few generations when some of the descendants become the riff-raff themselves? Will they be booted over the objections of their relatives? Perhaps someday we'll have a sequel to this one; that could be a good read.

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I read a few books for research (not even for a novel, just a short story; I've yet to sell enough short stories to earn back what I've spent researching them). Both are books by Pandit Rajmani Tugunait, who has a very readable style and an east-meets-west mentality that suits my purposes exactly. Sakti: The Power In Tantra is really a scholarly look at other texts; texts which I haven't read, as it happens, so I imagine a second, more informed read later in life will be more fruitful for me. More helpful was Tantra Unveiled, a nice overview of a topic much misunderstood in the west.

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Rounding off with one more work of fiction: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins grabbed me at word one and didn't let me go (even at the very cliffhangery end; luckily there's a sequel). This is set in future US where teenagers are chosen by lottery to compete in a Survivor-type game. I don't generally like first person, or present tense. The present tense didn't bother me much here, although I still find it too quirky for the most part. I do wonder if the suspense could have been upped with a multiple POV. When the book is in the first person, and the plot centers on a game where only the victor is still living at the end, you pretty much know who's going to win, present tense or not. Still, it's not the ending so much as how she reaches it that provides the suspense, and this novel had suspense in spades. Highly recommend this one.

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And now I'm off to storm the Bastille...