There has been some rumbling on the left side of the Blogoverse in the last couple of days about something James Lileks wrote about Michael Moore. (Link is to Tom Tomorrow’s entry on the subject.) I used to link to both Lileks’s site and to Moore’s site, but I removed both links a while ago (not at the same time) because, quite frankly, I came to find both of them insufferable, and pretty much for the same reasons: neither of them, as humorists, convey humor to me as much as smugness and superiority, while both of them came to basically resemble one-trick ponies.
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One of the authors on my list to dip into in 2003 is Ursula K. Le Guin. I’ve read her essays, off and on, for years — she wrote a particularly fascinating one that I need to reread, about American Puritanism and how it affects fantasy as a genre — and she has a new one about writing, courtesy the LA Times. (Beware popups. The LA Times generates lots of the little devils.) The only problem I have with her essay here is that it appears to be a response to an earlier essay by some other writer, and that earlier essay is not linked in the current one. D’oh.
Oh, and it was announced this week that Le Guin is the SFWA’s newest Grand Master. Now I really have to read her. (I read The Dispossessed and A Wizard of Earthsea when I was in junior high, disliked both, and I’ve never read her fiction since. Operating under the assumption that any opinions that I formed in junior high are likely to be suspect, I’m planning to read some Le Guin this year.)
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As I noted a few days ago, my inauguration into the DVD era came via the film Spiderman.
My take on Spiderman is this: they made three-fourths of a great movie, but the ending doesn’t work. The problem, for me, was mythology. (Full disclosure here: of all the superhero comics I used to read, the Spiderman titles were my favorite. He has always been my favorite superhero.)
The problem faced by filmmakers who are creating silver-screen versions of classic comic books is that since they only have two hours or so to tell a single story, they need to make it fairly self-contained but also establish all of the mythology — or as much as they can — that the comic book has had years to develop. Inevitably, things are left out. Normally, this is all well and good. Superman didn’t suffer, as a film, by the fact that Clark Kent’s teen love Lana Lang appears in a single scene; X-Men likewise did not have me squirming and wondering where the original X-Men (Angel, Beast, et cetera) were. (Of course, the X-Men have been such a revolving door over the years that they could have selected mutant heroes at random from the comic’s entire run and had a good movie — as long as they included Wolverine, who is probably the only essential X-Man.)
So, starting off in Spiderman, the film gets almost all of the mythology right. We have Peter Parker as a teen weakling, Mary Jane Watson in her abusive household, Peter’s jock rival Flash Thompson, best friend Harry Osborne (and, in turn, rich father Norman), and of course there are Uncle Ben and Aunt May. In truth, the entire first half of the film is a delight, with only a couple of problems. The key to any superhero film lies in the casting, and the cast assembled here does very well, although they might have been better served having the characters in college rather than in high school. All of the actors looked slightly too old to me for high school — but that’s not a fatal complaint. If I have any quibble at all with the film’s “origin” scenes, it would be that I think Peter’s emergent spider powers are a bit over-the-top. I can see him catching Mary Jane when she slips in the cafeteria, but the way he catches everything on the tray was a bit freakish, and I didn’t really buy the whole confrontation with Flash in the hallway. I think these scenes could have used a little more subtlety and more of a sense of fear and fascination from Peter. For the most part, though, it all works. I liked how the spider-bite was updated (genetic engineering instead of radioactivity, the fear of the 2000’s as opposed to that of the 1960s), and I also enjoyed Peter’s scheme to get money fast. Of course he’d try pro wrestling! That got a laugh, but then a sense of dread when I released what was unfolding.
It’s no secret that the seminal event of Peter Parker’s life is the death of Uncle Ben. The whole tagline, “With great power comes great responsibility”, has to be hammered home. In the original comic, I believe it was a home-burglary; here it is a carjacking, but the result is the same: a criminal whom Peter could have stopped earlier later kills Uncle Ben. (A nice touch, absent from the original comic, is the way Peter initially thinks that allowing the crook to get away is comeuppance for the unscrupulous wrestling promoter. This was a nice bit of subtext, Peter’s first example of he should defend even those who don’t give a rip about him in return.) I didn’t care for the “teen rebel” angle the filmmakers added to Ben’s demise, so that Peter’s last words to him were spoken in anger, but I can see why they did this. Central to the Peter Parker character, in the comic, was his ever-present sense of self-loathing and inadequacy.
Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborne is terrific, and I loved the scene where his dual personalities converse with one another via a mirror. I didn’t care for the Green Goblin costume, though. With its aerodynamic plastic helmet, it just didn’t look right to me. The glider, though, looked perfect. I found the film’s visual effects occasionally disappointing, but the Goblin on the glider worked well.
So, what to say about the ending? Well, first of all, the visuals. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert complained that the visuals are too obviously CGI, giving little sense of the momentums involved in webslinging and in the last scene of the tremendous weights involved. I have to agree here. The webs themselves appear to have the consistency of Silly String. I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to believe Peter Parker swinging around on them, but I couldn’t believe him hanging by one of them with one hand while using another web, in his other hand, to hold a fully-laden cable car above the East River. I know Spiderman has a great deal of strength, but this strained credibility. Spiderman’s key ability, to me, was never his strength as much as it was his incredible agility and speed. The scene did not convey to me the sense that Peter was about to be pulled apart, or that he would drop the cable car, or anything like that. The film tried to convey this, but it didn’t succeed, at least for me. In the comic, Spiderman occasionally had to pull off a feat of superhuman strength — really superhuman strength — and when he did, the comic conveyed tremendous strain and agony, with Spiderman nearly blacking out and finally succeeding through sheer force of will. It’s not that I don’t think Spidey could have done the things the film depicts in this scene; it’s that as they present it, it doesn’t look to me like a Spiderman feat. It looks more like a Superman feat.
My other problem with the climactic scene on the bridge can be summed up in two words: Gwen Stacy.
I conceded above that films of comic book stories have to make hard decisions about which things from the mythology to include and which ones to leave out. In the comics, while Peter did know Mary Jane for years, his first true love was Gwen Stacy, and it was Gwen whom the Green Goblin dangled off the Brooklyn Bridge. However, in the comic, Spiderman failed to save her. The Goblin drops her from the height, and Spiderman snags her with a web, breaking her fall, but she dies in the effort (if she was alive to begin with). This was Peter Parker’s second great life lesson: not just that “With great power comes great responsibility”, but that “Sometimes great power just isn’t enough”. The death of Gwen Stacy was just as important to the Spiderman character as the death of Uncle Ben, and as such to see the events of her death replayed in the film — but with Mary Jane, this time, and with Spiderman saving the girl — created in me a sort of “cognitive dissonance” that I just couldn’t get around. I can understand why the filmmakers would omit Gwen Stacy from their story of Peter Parker’s life, just as I can understand why the filmmakers of Superman would omit Lana Lang, but Gwen Stacy is far more important to Spiderman than Lana Lang is to Superman. I might have been able to accept a Spiderman who was never in love with Gwen Stacy, but in giving me Gwen’s death without Gwen and without the death, the film basically kept reminding me of her. For me, it was the Big White Elephant in the room. Under some circumstances, I can be made to ignore it — but not if you’re going to point my chair at the elephant and have the beast nuzzle me with its trunk.
I also didn’t care for the film’s very last scene. Mary Jane’s sudden profession of love was totally unconvincing, so Peter’s “sacrifice” was robbed of whatever emotional value it might have had. I guess I just don’t think that Peter Parker and Mary Jane have been though enough together for her to love him. Yet. (And I could have done without the Big! Obvious! Sequel! idea laid out when Harry Osborne swears to “make Spiderman pay”.)
And rounding out my small set of complaints is the score by Danny Elfman, a composer who seems to be retrogressing faster and faster into the realm of “sonic wallpaper”. Superhero scores need themes, and the score for Spiderman doesn’t have one. The John Williams Superman theme is one of the most famous film music themes ever written, and Elfman himself wrote a very memorable theme for Batman in those movies, so why is it that I couldn’t hum a single theme from Spiderman within minutes of watching the film? The score is all mood and no substance, and is one of the most disappointing film scores I have ever experienced.
I hope I’m not giving the idea that I disliked Spiderman, because I didn’t. Not even close. In fact, I think it’s probably the best superhero film made since the original Superman. I loved many of the webslinging scenes, and it was so nice to see a superhero film with action sequences that take place in daylight. (Thanks to the Batman films, I’ve seen enough fight-scenes-at-night-in-the-rain for a lifetime.) The film’s feel is right, although I would have liked a little more of the Daily Bugle. I’ve also always had a weakness for women with red hair, so Kirsten Dunst was of particular pleasure here. Tobey Maguire’s performance as Peter Parker is excellent. While I think he could have conveyed more of a “sense of wonder” when he discovers his new, buff physique, Maguire pulls off the film’s most important acting task: he sells the idea of a guy in a spider-suit. (Anyone who remembers the old live-action Spiderman television series from the late 70s will know that this is no small thing.) I enjoyed the little touches, like Mary Jane calling Peter “Tiger” and his self-referent “You friendly neighborhood Spiderman”. I can’t wait for the sequel, and not just because I want to see Doctor Octopus. (Speaking of him, will any of these new Marvel comics-into-movies involve Doctor Doom?)
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In sad news for the film music world (a small world, to be sure, but a passionate one), English composer Ron Goodwin has died. He was particularly famous for his scores to war-related films, such as Where Eagles Dare and The Battle of Britain. Many of the finest film composers hailed from England, and Goodwin was a particularly fine one.
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In the midst of my New Year’s Resolutions posting, I mentioned my intention to catch up on a lot of classic science fiction novels, mainly the ones on this list. In the days since, a few other such lists have been cited on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written. Check them out: here, here, and here.
Some of these — I haven’t looked through each of them in detail — may also include fantasy works. Not every SF afficionado insists on keeping the genres rigidly separated.
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SF writer William Gibson is many things: he’s one of the foremost pioneers of the cyberpunk subgenre; he’s the writer of one of the finest opening sentences of a novel ever (Neuromancer: “The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel”); and now he’s a blogger.
(Crossposted to COLLABORATORY.)
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Over on Electrolite a raging discussion is going on (well, it’s not “raging” so much as “active”) about the merits of independent bookstores versus the “giants”, the chain megaliths like Borders and Barnes&Noble.
My take on this is simple: I love both of the big chains, and I wouldn’t much like life without them.
As is the case with so many things in life, how we view the Big Bookstore Chains arises from our experiences as readers. My formative years as a book buyer, which pretty much began when I was ten and started receiving an allowance with which I was more likely to buy books than toys, were spent living in a small town in western New York, in which there was a single bookstore — a tiny independent in the local mall. We’re talking a store the size of a small WaldenBooks, in a mall housing forty stores. (Both the mall and the bookstore are still there.) That was it. My reading search either started there or at the local library.
Now, as a family we weren’t content to spend every day and every weekend in that town. I was blessed in that my parents loved going for long drives, so just about every week we would pile in the car and go to Buffalo, Rochester, or Erie, PA. At those cities we would go to the bigger malls — places that had ritzier stores than we had at home, stores like JCPenney — and I would shop for books at Waldens or B. Dalton. (Aside: I haven’t seen a B. Dalton in years. Do they still exist?) Then my sister went to college, and then to grad school (in Pittsburgh and Buffalo, respectively), so I got to go to independent bookstores in both cities. I don’t recall Pittsburgh so much, but Buffalo’s major independent bookstore was Talking Leaves Books. (It still is, actually, and Talking Leaves is proof positive that independents can actually fluorish: not only is its original location doing just fine, but they actually opened a second store on Buffalo’s trendy Elmwood Strip two years ago. Granted, none of Buffalo’s three Big Chain locations is within five miles of either Talking Leaves location.) I enjoyed Talking Leaves, but the books they stocked — literature, humanities, and the like — didn’t suit my reading interests, so I rarely ended up shopping there. As for genre bookstores, Buffalo did have a science-fiction bookstore, but I don’t recall it having a very large inventory, as it was a small place and also dedicated to comics and fantasy role-playing paraphernalia. And in any event, at the time my reading interests in SF and fantasy were along the lines of Stephen R. Donaldson, Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov (who was still alive and quite active then), Terry Brooks, and the like. In short, nothing that couldn’t be found in a shopping mall Waldens. In terms of indepent stores with better selection than mall stores, I was more concerned with music at the time than books. I wanted a store where I could find four or five recordings of a symphony by Shostakovich or of an obscure opera by Verdi. This was the beginning of my flaming interest in classical music.
In terms of books, once I turned back toward literary interests, the Big Chains were beginning to show up. I was thrilled then, and I still am thrilled, that I can find a wonderfully diverse selection of reading material, and that I can find it without driving to the biggest cities. The Big Chains represented, for me, a step up, not a step down. Do I wish there were staff members who were more well-versed in SF and Fantasy? Sure. But I’m pretty well-versed on what’s coming out, and I know that I’ve probably gone to one of the Big Chains looking for a specific title, and left with that specific title in my hands, around ninety percent of the time. I also love the diversity possible, when I can walk into a bookstore and walk out an hour later with a reissue of a Doc Smith space opera; a mass-market paperback of a Larry McMurtry Western; a horror novel by an author whose surname is not Andrews, King or Koontz; and a cookbook of recipes from Provence. (And that’s just assuming that I don’t wander into the music section.)
Are there troubling aspects to having so much of the book business concentrated in two large corporate entities? Sure. Am I happy with the magazine selection in the Big Chain locations in Syracuse? Not really. (Buffalo’s stores were much better at carrying genre magazines; I could read them all, the months they came out. Here, Locus seems to run a month behind; while I can find Analog and Asimov’s easily enough, I haven’t seen a single issue of F&SF since I moved; ditto Weird Tales, Absolute Magnitude, Dreams of Decadence, et cetera.) But do I still love walking into a store that’s bigger than any Gap store I’ve seen in any mall, and seeing that store filled with books? Damn straight.
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According to Kevin Drum, Rush Limbaugh has told someone — presumably a Democrat — that it’s time to get over 2000. I can only assume that this refers to the disputed election, in which a man who shouldn’t have become President was nevertheless allowed to become President. Well, fine. But if we on the Left are supposed to get over 2000 and never talk about it again, then here is a list of things — each of which came before 2000 — that I think the Right needs to get over and never talk about again:
Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, Vince Foster, the White House Travel Office, Waco and the Branch Davidians, the defeat of Robert Bork, Jimmy Carter and his “malaise” speech (in which he didn’t even use the word “malaise”), “Hanoi Jane”, the 1960 election.
I could go on, but that’ll do for starters. Outrage goes both ways, folks.
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I finally joined the twenty-first century last week, at least in part. Actually, it wasn’t so much myself that did the joining; it was a friend of mine who, in the face of mounting frustration that I had not yet joined in this particular way, finally said “Oh, the hell with it” and signed me up himself.
He sent me a DVD player.
I had been holding out for a player, waiting for the price to come down; and then, now that the price has in fact come down, other economic factors reared their ugly heads to still keep me out of DVD-heaven. But this friend, who has been a DVD-nut for at least two years now, got tired of nagging me to buy a player and put up his own hard-earned cash for the thing. The only downside was the timing of the machine’s arrival: late in the afternoon on Friday, when Syracuse was in the midst of receiving a large snow storm, and I had literally returned from a forty-minute drive to Blockbuster and the public library (which is usually no more than a ten minute drive, if I hit every red light in transit) on roads that had not been plowed since the last snow storm. So, I had to wait a day to get a DVD so I could test the machine, a time period during which I had to endure the machine itself, taunting me from inside its box.
The first DVD I rented the next day was the biggest film that I missed last year: Spiderman. (My review is pending, probably tomorrow or Thursday.) Satisfied that the thing worked, and amazed at the picture quality, I rushed out the next day and bought the anniversary edition DVD of Singin’ In The Rain and rented the DVD of Princess Mononoke. Today I rushed out and bought The Phantom Menace (which I am convinced is the single most unfairly-maligned film in history) and Rob Roy, a truly great film that was overshadowed by sharing a release year with Braveheart, a greater film also set in Scotland.
So here I am, a new DVD fanatic, all because of a guy named Matt whom I have known longer than any person in my life who isn’t a blood-relative. If he had a blog, I’d tell you to go visit it. And if he’d finish his own novel and get the thing published, I’d tell you to buy it. As it is, I’ll just tell you to root for the Philadelphia Eagles, the Duke Blue Devils, and when college football starts up again, the Penn State Nittany Lions.
(Now I gotta get the TV fixed sometime. The color’s been off for a year and a half — it doesn’t render greens and yellows correctly. It’s always something.)