I’m always happy to watch a fun swashbuckler of a film, and I watched a pretty good one last night: The Count of Monte Cristo, released earlier this year and now out on video. I don’t know how accurate the film is with respect to the original novel by Alexandre Dumas, but it’s a highly enjoyable film nonetheless, with impostors to French aristocracy, Napoleonic conspiracies, swordfights, grand celebrations at a beautiful chalet complete with the mysterious host’s entrance via balloon, a treasure map, a naive hero imprisoned by people who know his innocence, the hero’s imprisonment and subsequent escape from a horrible French jail, a never-forgotten love who has married the hero’s best friend in the hero’s absence, and so on.

The story opens as a group of sailors land on a Mediterranean island at night, seeking immediate medical aid for their captain, who has taken sick. Unfortunately, the island is Elba, originally intended to be the final resting place for Napoleon Bonaparte in his exile. Napoleon gives one of the sailors, Edmond Dontes (James Caviezel), a letter which he is to give to one of Napoleon’s friends, and Dontes — somewhat stupidly — agrees. He is discovered before he can deliver the letter, and he cannot even read it, being illiterate; however, this is enough for a shady police officer to have him taken to a prison island where he spends a number of years, despairing of ever having his freedom again — until another prisoner, a priest played by Richard Harris, tunnels up into his cell. “I knew the outer wall would be in one of two directions,” the priest says. “I sadly chose the wrong one.” Harris and Dontes dig anew, and during the months that they dig Harris teaches Dontes how to read, how to think, and how to fight. It will come as absolutely no surprise that Dontes does finally escape, at which point he seeks revenge against those who wronged him. Along the way he picks up some unexpected allies, wheedles his way into French aristocracy, and uncovers more plots that were the real reason for his betrayal. All of this leads up to the final confrontation with his main adversary, who — of course — had once been his best friend.

Very little that happens in The Count of Monte Cristo is a surprise. The film is solidly traditional, with candlelit studies and cavernous French baths and those typical prisons with long, winding staircases punctuated by heavy oaken doors with equally heavy iron locks. Watching this film, one expects Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power to walk onto the screen to do lethal duel against Claude Rains or Basil Rathbone. This is not an indictment. Sometimes one wants the solidly familiar, and this film delivers it with good acting, witty dialogue, excellent photography, solid production design, and brisk pacing. The film is never boring, avoiding the danger of delving too deeply into political machinations.

There are only two real flaws in the film. First is the score by Edward Shearmur. It is decent music, big and orchestral, but it’s not terribly distinctive. There is no central theme to unify the score — at least none that I could detect, or remember after the film was over. The other flaw is in the film’s climax, which doesn’t so much build as arrive — and then the obligatory last fight between hero and villain is a bit disappointing. This is the type of film that screams out for one of those wonderful Errol Flynn swordfights in a dark castle, moving from room to room, into and out of complete darkness, at one point with the combatants fighting offscreen while their gigantic shadows duel against the wall. Here, the fight takes place outdoors, with some flashy camera movement that is distracting, and then it is over rather quickly. But those are really the only flaws, and they don’t detract from the film’s otherwise high level of entertainment.

Now that we’ve seen that a good swashbuckler can still be made, maybe my favorite old, dead genre — the pirate film — can be resurrected (Cutthroat Island notwithstanding).

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Watkins Glen State Park, Watkins Glen, NY.

Having moved from Western New York to Central New York, I have to get used to a whole new bit of geological features. I no longer live on the shores of Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes; now I’m about thirty miles inland from Lake Ontario, which is much deeper and colder. I am also much nearer to the Finger Lakes region, home to a series of long, narrow and deep lakes that run north-south. These lakes were formed when the glaciers receded after the last ice age, carving out great valleys and gorges many of which then filled with water. The Finger Lakes are the dominant feature of Central New York, but there are also other gorges, smaller and more spectacular, that are the home to frequent waterfalls, pools, and streams. The most spectacular of these is that found in Watkins Glen State Park, where footpaths follow a small stream through the deep gorge that it has carved as it spills over nineteen waterfalls and is surrounded by 300-foot cliffs of limestone. At one point, the footpath even goes behind one particularly large waterfall, for an enchanting effect.

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In the long history of rock-and-roll song covers, the only time I can recall ever liking a cover more than the original is the Phil Collins version of “You Can’t Hurry Love”. (The Supremes did it well, but Phil’s version just…well, it “bounces” better.) And some covers are just-plain-ill-advised: Michael Bolton’s “When A Man Loves A Woman” and the Guns-n-Roses “Live and Let Die” leap to mind.

But for the life of me, I never ever thought I would live to see Dolly Parton do a cover of “Stairway To Heaven”…but guess what? She has, in fact, done just that. No, it’s not as good as the original. But no, it’s not a disaster. The sound is actually intriguing. She’s emphasized the song’s elegiac qualities and given it a folk-style treatment. Parton has actually put some thought into this. Listen to it here.

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Assuming that we humans are still around five hundred or a thousand years from now, I suspect that this era will be remembered as when we began the process of leaving our planet for other worlds, and for the stars. The exploration and colonization of space has always seemed to me to be absolutely essential, not only to our survival as a species but also as a fulfillment to some part of us, deep deep down, that yearns to wander into the sky. This view of mine, that leaving Earth is our destiny and that we’d best be on with it, is no doubt a large part of why I enjoy what I call “exploratory science fiction” so much. I take this term, which I have just coined this minute, to refer to those SF stories which outline the possible “future histories” of the human race as we begin our journeys to other worlds. Kim Stanley Robinson’s magnificent Mars trilogy (along with its companion volume of short fiction, The Martians) is a classic in this SF subgenre. Carl Sagan’s novel Contact and the resulting film are also examples. Star Trek can also be seen in this way, at least in some of its stories such as First Contact. And so is the book I have just finished, Michael Flynn’s Firestar.

This book deeply thrilled me. It is a very near-future history that centers on a very rich woman, Mariesa van Huyten, who owns a gigantic industrial conglomerate whose resources she employs in creating her very own space program. She is convinced that space is the destiny of humanity, and she is also keenly disappointed in our society’s failure to live up to the early promise of its space program, to the point where she condemns the Apollo moonshots as a mistake because we eschewed the establishment of a permanent human presence in space in favor of sensational landings on the Moon which were never repeated. Everything Mariesa does, her entire life, is geared toward her ultimate goal of permanence in space. “Always the Goal”, she is constantly saying when it appears that her subordinates are becoming sidetracked. Mariesa van Huyten is a visionary character, whose vision is so grandiose that we are never quite given all the reasons for why she has this particular vision in the first place, although we can make certain guesses (she is inordinately concerned with asteroids, for example). And her vision is so grandiose that the larger portion of it still lies ahead at the novel’s conclusion. I assume more will become clear later on; this 850-page novel is only the first in a series of four volumes.

Mariesa’s project, in Firestar, centers on the testing and development of reusable Earth-to-low-orbit vehicles which are called “Planks”. (I wish Flynn had chosen a more appealing name for the ships, but oh well.) To this end, a good chunk of the novel focuses on the trials and tribulations of the test pilots her organization has recruited. This program, a sort of “Next Generation” of The Right Stuff, could make for a fascinating novel on its own, but Flynn isn’t content to stop there. He also delves into the political background of Mariesa van Huyten’s project. Flynn is absolutely aware that a private space program would have its detractors, and he shows us plenty of them: the government is against it (Mariesa is encroaching on the government’s territory), a prominent environmentalist group is against it (for a number of reasons — Flynn does a good job at depicting the conflicting motivations at the heart of the environmental movement, even if I am more sympathetic to the environmentalists than Flynn seems to be), and there are also shadowy competitors who are willing to stoop to very low levels to dissuade Mariesa.

But the book’s complexity doesn’t even stop there, with the test pilots and the political background. Mariesa is also interested in creating the first generation of the true “space age”, and to this end one of her subsidiary companies is a school-management company that takes over troubled public schools. In this way Mariesa is able to shepherd future generations to her liking, although we aren’t entirely sure why. This seems to be the plotline that will wind its way through Flynn’s entire tetralogy.

All this is fascinating enough, but Flynn also knows that there is a dark side to Mariesa van Huyten’s visionary status. Her family life is barely more than functional (and sometimes less than that), and she is frequently an unrepentant manipulator of the people around her. Flynn gives us a keen sense of Mariesa’s loneliness, but he also shows us that in large part her loneliness is of her own creation, with results that are both expected and unexpected. Flynn knows that it is lonely at the top, and to his credit he depicts it as such. (He also is well aware that loneliness is not exclusive to those at the top, however. In fact, nearly every character in the book is suffering from some kind of loneliness.)

Firestar is not without its flaws. Coincidence plays too large a role, as the lives of a fairly large cast of characters keep intersecting over the ten years that the novel spans. I found Flynn’s apparent belief that all we need is a benevolent capitalist to overcome the barriers erected by a sometimes evil but mostly hegemonic government somewhat cloying. The conflicts sometimes come off as forced, as if Flynn needed a conflict at that particular point; one character’s deep resentment of Mariesa stems from her overhearing a conversation not meant for her ears, which is something of a soap-opera cliche.

The book also suffers from the same flaw that most near-future stories suffer: once the years of their events come and go, a certain sense of plausibility is lost. Of course, there is nothing that Flynn can do to avoid this; it’s simply the way things are in telling future stories. (According to Star Trek, for example, by now we should have launched at least four more Voyager probes and killed a huge portion of the human population in a war over genetic engineering.) The school-privatization movement has lost a bit of the steam that it had when Flynn wrote this book (1996); the Russian space station Mir is used as a setting, years after its destruction; and so forth. I suppose this isn’t exactly a flaw; it’s just the “nature of the beast”. At least Flynn gives us fictional US Presidents, instead of the Robert Zemeckis approach of digitally shoehorning Bill Clinton into the film version of Contact.

At 850 pages, I still found Firestar a very fast read. It’s full of thrilling ideas, interesting characters, and a sense that it really could play out this way. Part of why I read science fiction is to assure myself that our destiny as a species really, truly does lie amongst the stars. Firestar appealed to that part of me, and I’ve already bought Rogue Star, the second book in the series.

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During the last three seasons, the Buffalo Bills have posted a regular season record of 22-26 and appeared in the playoffs once (1999, when their season ended in a wildcard game at Tennessee). In that same period, the St. Louis Rams have posted a regular season record of 36-12 and made the playoffs each year, twice going to the Super Bowl and once winning it (also 1999). So how weird is it that three games into this season, the Bills have a better record (1-2) than the Rams (0-3)? The Bills have looked very tough in their three games thus far, and if not for the horrible special teams play in the opener against the Jets they’d be 2-1. Their offense has played with some fire (although the running game is still too inconsistent and Drew Bledsoe is taking way too many hits, both faults clearly indicative of the offensive line’s youth and inexperience), and the defense — while giving up a lot of yards — has been a lot tougher than I expected. The Bills are a pleasant surprise, but I still think they’re rebuilding and a 6-10 finish is likely. But look out next year, especially if Tom Donahoe (the Bills’ GM) has another offseason like the last one, in which he drastically upgraded the team’s talent.

So what about the Rams? I didn’t pick them to go to the Super Bowl this year — so far I’m sticking with Philly as my pick for NFC Champion — but I certainly didn’t expect 0-3. I think we’re seeing a combination of bad luck and bad coaching. During last night’s game, in which the Rams lost to the Bucs, two observations were made by Al Michaels and John Madden that illustrate the Rams’ problems. First is something Madden said: Rams quarterback Kurt Warner is a rhythm quarterback. When he gets in a rhythm, he will cut your defense apart, make your defensive backs look foolish, and humiliate you as he passes for 300 yards and four touchdowns. But when he’s not in a rhythm, he looks shockingly ordinary — forcing passes into triple coverage, throwing too early on timing patterns, missing open receivers. Thus one key to beating the Rams is to upset Warner’s rhythm, which is exactly what the Patriots did to perfection in last year’s Super Bowl. Warner never got on track in that game, except for the drive late in the fourth quarter when he tied the game (only to lose when the Pats got back into field-goal range). Some of this is bad luck: the Rams are having big problems at right tackle on their offensive line, so Warner is seeing a lot more pressure than he is accustomed to. But a lot of it is simply bad coaching, which also goes back to that Super Bowl: if the opposing defense is having so much success at disrupting Kurt Warner’s rhythm, then why on earth does Mike Martz insist on staying with the pass when he could simply switch to a running game that would tilt things back in his team’s favor? Why would Martz not have taken one look at the defensive-back heavy scheme that New England showed him in the Super Bowl and then, licking his chops, directed Warner to hand off the Marshall Faulk on each and every down? Who knows….but that’s what the Rams have done. And then, last night when Mike Martz finally shows a sign that he’s realized the error of his ways and uses Faulk like he’s supposed to, Faulk gets hurt. That’s just horrible luck.

The other key observation last night was the telling statistic that the Rams currently own the longest losing streak in football when they’re trailing at the outset of the fourth quarter (it was either 16 or 19 games; I don’t recall which). That indicates a team that simply does not respond well to adversity, which is also indicative of coaching. Chris Berman of ESPN has often said: “Nobody circles the wagons like the Buffalo Bills.” Well, it seems like the St. Louis Rams don’t circle the wagons at all. The Rams look like a team that is floundering without direction, and then when they do start to show some direction the injury bug nips them.

(And for the Love of GOD, will someone please beat the Patriots? Aieee!!!)

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Oh my God, it’s finally over.

Yes, the Move ™ is at long, long last complete. Except for all the boxes that still need unpacking…and the furniture that needs arranging…and the subscriptions that need changing…and the jobs that need finding. Other than that, it’s all over.

We’re now in the lovely town of Syracuse, NY. We’ve actually been here since last Friday, but I haven’t been able to go online because our phone lines were actually broken and required servicing, which didn’t get done until just this afternoon. Thus I was able to use time that I would probably have otherwise used for posting to Byzantium’s Shores to actually unpack. Some random thoughts on the move:

:: My God, I own a ton of books. I still have many of my college texts (mostly the ones from my philosophy classes, complete with marginalia scrawled ten years ago). I also have a lot of books that I simply no longer want, so I’m planning to make my first foray into selling things on Ebay sometime in the next month.

:: Moving in the space of a single week does not give one enough time to go through one’s belongings and weed them out. You end up moving everything, and only when you’re unpacking it all do you say, “Hmmm, I still own this? Well, to the dumpster with it!”

:: It’s fairly convenient that roughly every two years or so I start to thinking that we should really get a couch…and then we have to move, which firmly banishes the thought of couch-ownership for another two years. I’m back to my “happy with the papasan chair and the crappy recliner” state of mind.

:: One of the sadder duties in life is trying to explain to one’s three-year-old why she can’t go to the park down the street anymore…because it is now 130 miles down the street.

:: Design flaws are us: The second day after the move I got the TV and VCR hooked up, mainly so I could distract the three-year-old with her Disney movies while we unpacked. She was thrilled when I announced that I had all the wires hooked up, and all I had to do was turn everything on — whereupon I learn that the VCR, when unplugged long enough before being replugged, goes into its handy “setup” mode upon being turned on that first time. The bad part is that to work the setup mode, the remote control is required. And the remote control was still at the bottom of some box, somewhere, someplace. Not only is there no way to work the setup mode with the VCR’s front panel buttons, there is no way to cancel the setup mode — until the setup mode’s second screen, where you can cancel the thing by pressing “Clear” on the remote.

:: Design flaws, part two. Actually, I’m not sure if this is a design flaw, but our phone lines were out of order until today. Yesterday morning, the knob on our new apartment’s front door broke and was inoperable — with all of us inside. So we’re locked in, and we can’t call the maintenance people. We had to wait twenty minutes or so until someone actually wandered by outside, at which point we shouted for them to call the maintenance folks. Ugh. (The maintenance folks, though, arrived within five minutes of our flagging down the neighbor.)

:: Our property is shared by a golf course. So far I’ve counted four golfers who have managed to land their shots on our building’s front lawn, which is not remotely in the same direction as the hole toward which they are theoretically shooting. And I’m sorry, golfers, but I consider the golf cart to be one of the most ridiculous inventions of all time. I watch these guys shoot, return to the cart, put their club away, hop in and drive to the ball’s present location in roughly the same amount of time that I could have walked there in the first place. Unless you’re that pro golfer with the ailment that makes the cart necessary, you don’t need the cart.

:: Good stuff I’ve discovered about Syracuse: the Barnes&Noble here is larger than either of the B&N’s in Buffalo, which surprised me immensely. The main shopping mall, the Carousel Center, is one of the most beautiful malls I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been in a lot of malls). A project is afoot to expand the Carousel Center until it becomes the largest mall in North America, which wouldn’t bother me at all (although I wonder a bit why they’d want to build such a thing in a small town like Syracuse, which is roughly the same size as Cedar Rapids, Iowa). The Buffalo Bills are still on TV here, and to the best of my knowledge there is as yet no Krispy Kreme store in Syracuse. (Believe me, that’s a good thing. Of course, I’ll also consider it a good thing when they get one.)

And, for those dying to know what Syracuse looks like, here’s a photograph of what is apparently the tallest building in the city. The photo links to a site where various images of the city can be found.

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It’s amazing how the twists and turns of life are sometimes — well, most times, to be realistic — completely unexpected and, though welcome, also traumatic.

My wife’s company rewarded two years of her hard work two days ago with a promotion, effective one week from today. That’s the great part. The traumatic part comes into play thusly: the promotion entails moving the family, in the space of a single week, one hundred twenty miles down the road to Syracuse, New York.

Leaving Buffalo is sad enough; leaving Buffalo basically with no notice whatsoever is utterly shocking. And it’s more than a bit scary, as I really know nothing at all about Syracuse. A move is hard enough; a move to a place that us pretty much completely unfamiliar is quite scary. (And there’s the fact that my wife and I have always maintained that if and when we ever moved away from Buffalo we would head west, not farther east.) We spent the last two days there apartment hunting (we seem to have found one), and the town seems fairly nice. It’s got a Borders and a Barnes&Noble, so I won’t go completely crazy. I was dismayed to find that there is no Target there, but then I was relieved to find that the first Target in Syracuse will be opening sometime next month. (Which means they will be hiring….hmmmmm…..) I also find myself worrying that life in Syracuse won’t be as fulfilling as life in Buffalo; Syracuse is one-half Buffalo’s size, and I’m also afraid that the Great Lakes character that I love so much about Buffalo — hell, about the entire Great Lakes region, from Buffalo to Cleveland to Chicago to Wisconsin and, stretching the definition a bit, to the Twin Cities — will be absent. These fears will, I hope and expect, be laid to rest as I explore my new “home”. At the same time, though, I suspect that it will be a long time before I can refer to Syracuse as “home” without the quote-marks.

(If I have any readers from Syracuse, feel free to let me know what’s great about your city!)

(And because of the immediacy of the move, this will be the last post to Byzantium’s Shores for at least five days, and maybe as much as a week. If disaster strikes, it will be ten days before I’m writing here again — but I don’t expect it to be that long.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Test vehicle for NASA’s Project Orion.

Project Orion was a concept of a spacecraft that would be used for interstellar travel. The ship would achieve propulsion by detonating nuclear explosions against a collision plate at the bottom of the ship, kicking the ship along in a kind of nuclear “putt-putt” motion. According to Carl Sagan in Cosmos, development of Orion was set aside when the United States signed a treaty that forbade the detonation of nuclear weapons in space. “This seems to me a great pity,” Sagan writes. “The Orion starship is the best use of nuclear weapons I can think of.”

The test vehicle pictured here was actually flown in 1959 (using conventional charges, not nukes). It remains the only live test of an Orion vehicle to date. More on Project Orion can be found here.

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I have added a couple of new blogs to the “other journeys” section at left: one belonging to Dominion, called A Skeptical Blog (note the neat “shifty eyes” in his masthead), and Die Puny Humans, by comics writer (among other things) Warren Ellis. He’s got an entry on Batman that….well, see for yourself.

I’ve also added permalinks to Arts and Letters Daily, National Public Radio, and WBFO (Buffalo’s local NPR station).

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AICN has an article containing some reactions to a screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away, including a conversation with the great filmmaker himself. An interesting error occurs in the transcription of the conversation (at least I assume it is an error). Miyazaki is quoted thusly:

“Fantasy is an absolutely essential element for children, as a temporary respite or escape or as a sucker and source of support. But if you go to completely into it and surrender to it, it can become a psychosis. It may sound hypocritical, since we sell videos: but I believe you should watch the films just once.”

I could be wrong, but I suspect that he said “succor”, not “sucker”.

I’m also interested that Miyazaki, one of cinema’s finest fantasists, evidently judges fantasy worthwhile almost entirely for its cathartic abilities. He doesn’t mention the possibilities that fantasy offers for exploring theme, which interests me because of the strong theme of family that seems present in much of his work.

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