Month: June 2002

The American Film Institute has spoken. In a special that aired on CBS tonight, they revealed the top 100 romantic films of all time. Number Three was West Side Story. Number Two was Gone With the Wind. And number One?

Casablanca.

I can live with that.

The list was fascinating. I love these shows, not just for debating their choices but also for the trip down memory lane for wonderful films that I may not have seen in quite a while (I really want to watch From Here to Eternity right now) and the reminder of films that I really do need to see (The Quiet Man and The Goodbye Girl leap to mind). I didn’t even have as many quibbles with this list as I have with the previous AFI “Lists” (the 100 greatest movies, the 100 funniest comedies, the 100 most exciting action films). I am convinced that Kevin Costner has starred in two of the finest cinematic love stories of all time: Dances With Wolves and Bull Durham, which were not on the AFI’s list. One of my favorite cinematic love stories, believe it or not, is the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — the one Bond film in which Bond actually falls in love. I’ve also always had something of a soft spot for Somewhere in Time. And there’s the wonderful suspense-mystery-reincarnation-dual love story starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, Dead Again. I’m sure I could come up with a few more, given time.

As for films the AFI named which I would omit from their list, there weren’t a whole lot of these. I really don’t consider It’s a Wonderful Life a love story (and, to be frank, I don’t much like the film in the first place). If they had to include two Gene Kelly movies, Brigadoon or For Me and My Gal would have been a better choice than the colossally-overrated An American In Paris, an overlong film that suffers greatly in the love department because Leslie Caron is, to my eyes, completely uninteresting. She and Kelly have no chemistry together. I also can’t stomach Love Story, which I’ve always found treacly and overly manipulative. But my heart soared to see my single favorite musical, My Fair Lady, on the list. (One confusing thing about the show, though: why did they feel the need to have Jennifer Love Hewitt comment on every Audrey Hepburn film that was on the list? Were they symbolically trying to anoint Miss Hewitt as the next Miss Hepburn? Good lord, I hope not….)

I wonder if the AFI will do another list for next year. I’m not sure if there are any topics left that lend themselves to 100 films; perhaps a series of specials devoted to specific genres? I’d tune in to see the AFI’s Top 25 SF films, Top 25 Westerns, Top 25 Film Noir’s, et cetera.

(By the way, according to the AFI’s website the next recipient of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award will be Tom Hanks.)

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My new issue of WIRED Magazine came in the mail today….thus reminding me that I never read last month’s issue, which is now online at the WIRED website. I found several articles particularly notable:

:: An interview with Steven Spielberg on the eve of Minority Report, his new film based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. What I found most interesting is Spielberg’s rejection of purely digital cinema. He really feels that something will be lost when celluloid is a thing of the past, and judging by the mixed reviews I’ve seen of the digital projections of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, I have to wonder if maybe he’s right.

:: This article on the upcoming LucasArts game, Star Wars Galaxies. This game will create the Star Wars universe in an online environment that could involve as many as millions of gamers whose actions will create and shape the ongoing mythology of Star Wars once the films are complete. I’m wondering: suppose one user becomes as powerful and as charismatic a figure, in the game, as the fictional Dark Lords of the Sith? Will Lucas allow the Empire to rise again in his creation, once it’s in the hands of the gamers?

:: A profile of Stephen Wolfram, the at-times megalomaniacal genius behind Mathematica and the new book, A New Kind of Science, which — according to its author — is just that, a grand new paradigm that may be the most important development in science since Einstein or Newton, or — according to its critics — merely repackages some old ideas in unscientific fashion, a sin doubly compounded by Wolfram’s decision to forego the traditional mechanism of peer review in science in favor of self-publishing and self-promoting.

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For some light reading, I checked out from the library Molly Ivins’s collection of columns entitled You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years. This made for an enjoyable evening, but it was slightly eerie to read her mentioning offhandedly the World Trade Center bombing, and realize that she was talking about the botched demolition attempt of 1993. This was rather eerie.

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I’ve finally figured out why I’ve been writing so much horror recently: because I want to win one of these. If this isn’t the coolest trophy out there, I don’t know what is. Who wouldn’t want a Bram Stoker Award on the mantelpiece?

Congratulations to all the winners. (Neil Gaiman took the Stoker for Best Novel of 2001, for American Gods.)

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The New York Times has this interesting article about blogging and, specifically, a rift that is apparently developing between “war bloggers” and “regular bloggers”. (I suppose that’s what you’d call them.)

This seems a good time to discuss my stance just a bit, perhaps violating my own “no politics” policy. In the menu to the left, there is a quote from one of the characters in Guy Gavriel Kay’s magnificent novel The Lions of Al-Rassan. Stripped of its context, the quote probably seems anti-war, almost pacifist in nature. The novel, though, is a fantasy inspired by the fall of Moorish Iberia and the rise of Catholic Espana; war is one of the book’s central themes. The words of this particular quote are spoken by a man who is one of the great poets of his day, in Kay’s world; this same man, though, is one of the most dangerous men in the world. He is extremely skilled with a number of weapons, and he kills a number of men in the course of the novel. War, for this man, is a necessary evil, a part of the world that must be accepted — but must not be allowed to become everything.

That, I suppose, is the reason for what I am doing with this blog. The current war is extremely important and will be for a long time to come; but it is not everything. There is still a world full of books and music and art, and I offer my oft-inadequate musings here as a reminder of that. I am not a pacifist; I generally support the war, although I am troubled by a number of aspects of it. It worries me, for example, when we are told by the Vice President that “The war will not be over in our lifetime”; I worry that this is simply a means for rescusitating a formerly-shaky defense industry. I am disturbed by the idea of military tribunals. I wonder just what our plan is for all those detainees at Guantanamo Bay. I question whether or not we should go after Saddam Hussein (my opinion on this changes daily). All this is irrelevant, though, to my writing here.

When we are asked why we fight, so often we answer, “Freedom”. Art — be it great art, shallow art, or junk-food art — is born of Freedom. What do we fight for? Freedom. But what do we want to produce as a result of our freedom? I recently read a comment by some historian — whose name I cannot recall — that went something like, “Every epoch is known for two things: its art and its wars.” I’m glad we have warbloggers to write about the wars. I prefer to write about our art.

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One can find here the top 20 science fiction films of all time, as selected by WIRED Magazine.

I haven’t seen all of their picks, so I can’t judge the list entirely. In fact, I haven’t seen seven of their twenty films, though one — Akira — is on my shelf, still shrinkwrapped and waiting to be watched. (Viewing films like Akira is logistically difficult when one’s home includes a two-year-old.) The list purports to judge films by their “adrenaline rush” and by how well the films’ worlds are realized. World-building is, of course, of tantamount concern in SF and fantasy (and, to a lesser extent, horror), so judging films on those grounds is certainly understandable. I don’t understand their third criterion, though: Precision, or how well the science holds up. Quite frankly, some of their films are so scientifically implausible as to merit serious consideration as fantasy. Star Wars is not hard SF, and that is that. How can we approach the science of a film that gives us FTL-drives as standard equipment, super-laser beams that can obliterate entire planets, a space-station the size and configuration of the Death Star (where are its thrusters?), weapons comprised by a laser beam that stops in mid-air, et cetera? And for all the wonderful gee-whizzery of Jurassic Park, that film is on no better scientific ground. Splicing ancient DNA with frog DNA, and thus being able to create full-fledged organisms? And since when do we know anything about the visual acuity of a T-Rex? I am more inclined to judge the films on the basis of their influence, their storytelling, and their worldbuilding than in judging their science. On that basis I will gladly admit both Star Wars (which is, after all, in my opinion the finest film ever made — sorry, Citizen Kane) and Jurassic Park.

I would, though, omit a number of the films on this list. I have never liked Bladerunner much, and I wouldn’t call it a “Top 20” film, and I certainly wouldn’t rank it first. I find Bladerunner anemic on the adrenaline side; its story never draws me in and excites me. As for the worldbuilding, according to this film 2019 Los Angeles looks like a futuristic Tokyo….when, given the rapid ascent of the Latino population in California, would seem to imply a futuristic Mexico City. The acting always seems flat; how Rutger Hauer parlayed this role into a career playing basically the same part over and over again is beyond me. To be fair, I haven’t seen the much-praised Director’s Cut of the film. (Bladerunner‘s music score, by Vangelis, is wonderful.)

Likewise, I would omit Alien and I would not allow any of its sequels anywhere near The List. I found the original Alien to be a fairly effective horror-in-space movie, but I also find that it loses a great deal of its punch on repeat viewings. A scare-movie that depends on horrible beasts leaping out from behind things and general gross-out effect for its suspense doesn’t have that much to offer in a second go-round; as for the worldbuilding, it’s nothing spectacular — just a claustrophobic spaceship. As for Aliens, that film has never been one of my favorites either, mainly due to its predictability. The film had no surprises for me, and again its worldbuilding is basically a series of claustrophobic sets of mostly dank metal and smoke.

I also have to reluctantly omit The Matrix, a film which I liked immensely upon first seeing it but which has suffered on repeat viewings. The film’s pseudo-myth of “The One” seems hollow the more I examine it, and the idea of a “reality beyond the reality” is toyed with intriguingly only to be tossed aside in favor of a massive gunfight at the end. And I must admit to great difficulty believing Keanu Reeves as a martial-arts genius, or whatever it is he’s supposed to be.

Tron is a film that I actually like, but I wonder if it’s more of a cult-film than one of the standing greats. Nevertheless, I can excuse its presence here. Its worldbuilding is quite amazing, really, being steeped in the video-game culture of the early 1980s. As a cyber-thriller, I find Tron to be much more inventive — and effective — than The Matrix. The same objection — that it is more of a cult-film than one-for-the-ages — applies to Road Warrior, a fun bit of post-apocalyptic dystopia that isn’t really as good as WIRED seems to believe.

There are some glaring omissions, as there will be in any such list. Close Encounters of the Third Kind maybe suffers in the worldbuilding department, simply because it’s set in the real world and thus isn’t much subject to the same kind of flights of fancy that populate a film like Star Wars. But its storytelling is nothing short of amazing, and in this film we can see many of the tropes that would later surface in The X-Files and other “government paranoia” stories. Terminator 2: Judgement Day probably deserves recognition on the list even more than its predecessor, The Terminator. T2 is a masterpiece of adrenaline-pumping action, and it features one of the most menacing villains of all cinema, in the T-1000. The WIRED listmakers were right to include two James Cameron films; I just think they named the wrong ones. The Abyss is one of the most underrated films of all time. It is loaded with SF “sense of wonder”; it shows us a new world (one on our very doorstep); it is exciting and moving and touching; and it’s even highly influential, being one of the earliest examples of the “morphing” special effect that would later be used to such amazing effect in T2 and would later pave the way for Jurassic Park and the marvels in the Star Wars prequels. (NOTE: I prefer the Director’s Cut of The Abyss to the original, despite the fact that the Director’s Cut makes the film’s ending far more preachy than it should be.) And while I personally might want to make a case for all five (and probably the sixth, when it arrives in 2005) Star Wars films, certainly a case could be made for The Empire Strikes Back, the film which fleshes out the Star Wars universe and gives its mythology its soundest basis. Plus, it’s exciting as hell — pure adrenaline — and a wonder of worldbuilding.

I also think that a historical case could be possibly made for King Kong, Forbidden Planet, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

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One of Buffalo’s biggest arts events, the Allentown Art Festival, was this weekend. And I missed it by not realizing when it was, and making other plans. How revolting.

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I’ve been delayed from writing my thoughts on the series finale of The X-Files, so here they are: The episode itself was well done, but I think it came a bit too late. The show really should have gone to movies after the end of Season Seven, when Scully had been revealed pregnant and Mulder abducted. Everything that has transpired since then has felt padded. I envision a scene like this at Ten Thirteen:

CHRIS CARTER: “We’ve gotta come up with two more seasons of stuff. How about, oh, supersoldiers?”

STAFF WRITER: “What are those, Chris?”

CHRIS CARTER: “They’re government-created humans who can’t be killed, which will save us from the aliens when they come. And maybe Scully’s baby is one of them. And since David won’t be around, we’ll need a new agent to pair with Scully. Anybody like the name ‘Doggett’?”

STAFF WRITER: “What about the black oil?”

CHRIS CARTER: “I’m still talking about this guy Doggett. And of course he should have a partner….”

STAFF WRITER: “Wait. Isn’t his partner Scully?”

CHRIS CARTER: “Hmmm. Well, I’m about to make Scully a single mom, so we can’t have her flying off into unknown danger all the time. Responsibilities, you know. So we’ll do what we did six years ago when Gillian was pregnant in real life: we’ll have Scully do a lot of desk-work and autopsies.”

STAFF WRITER: “Well, OK. Not really the best use for an actress of Gillian’s talent, but then, she looks better in scrubs and a lab coat than half the women on ER.”

CHRIS CARTER: “Gillian’s a trooper. I mean, when we did ‘Humbug’ she actually ate a beetle! You can’t buy that….Now, about these Super Soldiers….”

STAFF WRITER: “Hey, is Smoking Man really Mulder’s father? We never really came out and said so.”

CHRIS CARTER: “Hmmmm. Well, if we did come out and say so, it would seem like a rip-off of Star Wars.”

STAFF WRITER: “Say, I have a question. Remember how on Frasier, when Daphne realized she was in love with Niles, someone told her that maybe it was time to stop calling him “Dr. Crane”? Well, Mulder and Scully have a kid now. Should they really call each other by their last names still?”

….and so on.

It took me a long time to really get into The X-Files. I watched it intermittently during its first two seasons, but I didn’t get hooked until the brilliant two-parter “Piper Maru/Apocrypha” from the third season. At its best, The X-Files was a smart and witty blend of paranoia, fin-du-siecle anxiety, and good old fashioned horror storytelling. I even liked the first movie, even though it admittedly was skewed a bit too much toward the show’s already-converted fans. And I still liked some of episodes from the wildly uneven eighth and ninth seasons. It was hard to watch the show peter out as Chris Carter and the folks at Ten Thirteen made a game effort to keep drawing a story out of a franchise that had really given all it had to give, in terms of its overall mytharc, two years before.

As for the finale episode, again, it was well-done. Putting Mulder on trial was a fun idea (although the way it was set up is one of the more contrived plot devices I’ve ever seen). I’m glad Mitch Pileggi got such a chance to shine, and I liked seeing the Cigarette Smoking Man living as some kind of Indian ascetic. The episode’s biggest flaw isn’t even the episode’s fault. The entire series once was clearly leading up to Mulder’s discovery, at long last, of just what happened to his sister. Unfortunately, the series “resolved” that issue a few years back, and not in entirely satisfactory fashion, either. That was really the “Truth” that was out there; for Mulder, everything revolved around that particular quest; I think that is really why everything that came after felt so deflated. When The X-Files was at its best — and it was at its best for quite a long time — it was centered squarely on Mulder, Scully, and the quest for Samantha. The attempt to make it about something else simply didn’t work (although perhaps it could have worked, given the very high quality of the episode in which Agent Doggett learned how his son was murdered).

So, the show limped through its final two seasons, bereft of the story that had been at its heart. Nevertheless, I will miss the show. Maybe sometime soon I’ll watch one of the amazing three-part episodes: Duane Barry/Ascension/One Breath, perhaps; or maybe Gethsemane/Redux/Redux II. And then there will always be the pinnacle of The X-Files: Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip. And then some of the almost-as-good two parters: Colony/End Game, Talitha Cumi/Herrenvolk, Tunguska/Terma….and the great standalone episodes like Home, Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, Small Potatoes, Humbug, Squeeze, Tooms….the truth may not be out there anymore, but it’s sure somewhere.

“Is there any way I can get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior?” –Fox Mulder, Tooms.

“Well, I could have done without that Flukeman thing.” –Dana Scully (I don’t recall the episode).

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The scene of destruction is very familiar to us all. But consider the spherical object at the lower left. This is what it looked like before 11 September 2001:

The spherical object is Fritz Koenig’s sculpture, “The Sphere”, which used to stand in the concourse between the WTC’s twin towers. The destruction of the World Trade Center carried with it an almost unimaginable loss of life. Not to be discounted, though, is the loss to the human heritage of art and creativity. The WTC was not merely a pair of very large office buildings; it was also the repository of a surprisingly large number of artworks and historical documents that are now lost. It is clearer than ever that the magnitude of what was lost that horrible day might never be known.

(The first of these images links to an AP article about the items lost in the WTC attack.)

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Sometimes I encounter a book that, upon its completion, makes me wonder: “Just why did this author feel the need to write this book?” I encountered just such a book this week. It is 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the classics of science fiction, a truly fine novel that is often obscured by the elephantine shadow cast by its companion film. The sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two, was an excellent book, if not on the level of its predecessor. I don’t recall much about 2061: Odyssey Three, except that I wasn’t particularly impressed. 3001 gives the series some closure, which is Clarke’s biggest mistake. This is not a story that should have closure, at all.

The book opens with a comet-prospector finding a non-cometary object floating in a near-deepspace orbit. It turns out to be the body of astronaut Frank Poole, the co-pilot of the spaceship Discovery who was killed in the first book by the schizophrenic computer HAL-9000. Medical technology has advanced such that Poole is able to be revived, and the book then deals mostly with his assimilation into a society that is as far ahead of him as he was ahead of the people of the Dark Ages. The society that Clarke presents is really nothing new; it’s the standard Star Trek-style utopia in which religion has been left behind (and is even characterized as a form of psychosis), material needs are a thing of the past, et cetera. The most interesting thing in the book is Clarke’s construct of a gigantic artificial ring-system around the earth, but this strangely is left undeveloped. Clarke posits that people who live on the Rings cannot live long on Earth, and yet he never develops the hint that two entirely different societies would evolve from such a state. Do the Earthbound folks look on the Ring-people with suspicion? do the Ring-people look down — figuratively and literally — on the Earthbound? Clarke doesn’t indicate anything of the sort. His society here is conflictless, and thus not very interesting to read about. This is a pity.

The book’s most serious problems, though, come when Frank Poole journeys to the Galilean Moons (formerly of Jupiter, the gas-giant planet having been converted into a second sun late in 2010). Here he apparently means to make contact with his old friend, Dave Bowman, who along with HAL has become one with the monolith. Frank doesn’t seem to feel any emotions at all in this. Would he feel any anger toward HAL for killing him? would he feel concern for Dave’s plight? would he feel anything? Not really, if Clarke is to be believed. This was a lost opportunity. Perhaps it couldn’t be any other way; Clarke’s books and stories have never much been about emotion and feeling. But the lack of it here totally undermines his characters. They begin to feel like automatons in a plot.

The book’s climax arrives when it is discovered that the Monolith (the really big Monolith, the one on Europa, as opposed to its smaller twins on Earth and the Moon) may very well be on the verge of destroying humanity (the reasons for this involve time, distance, and the speed of light). Poole must play the vital role in defusing the threat of the Monolith in a way which is unfortunately reminiscent of the ending of Independence Day, a fact which Clarke bemoans in his Afterword. The whole threat lacks conviction, though, and instead it makes plain the book’s largest error: it explains the Monolith. What made 2001 so memorable is the fact that even at the end, after Dave Bowman has been reincarnated as the Star Child, we still don’t know what the Monolith is or who made it or why it has been left here or what its purpose at all is — we don’t even know if the Monolith is an alien artifact or an alien itself. It was this air of mystery, that sense of the cosmic unknown, that elevated 2001 to the level of a classic. Even 2010 left much of the mystery intact, even as it continued the story. But in 3001, Clarke tells us that the Monolith is a mindless automaton, and he even refers to its internal circuitry. We shouldn’t know that much about the Monolith. It ceases to be a constant pointer to the eternal reality that there will always be an unknown, and instead joins the ranks of things we’ve figured out. It has been said that the most critical aspect of the best science fiction is the intangible “sense of wonder”. 2001: A Space Odyssey had it in spades; 2010 had it but to a lesser extent; 2063 didn’t have a whole lot of it but was still a readable novel. 3001‘s biggest problem is simple: no wonder. Reading it makes me feel as if Samuel Beckett had written a second play, called Oh, There’s Godot.

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