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Recent Reading (KidLit edition)

In reading to The Daughter at night, we’ve recently started to read chapter books a bit at a time, each evening, as opposed to the single-volume storybooks that were the rule until then. This has opened up lots of new vistas for reading, and it’s really rejuvenated a time of night that had for a while felt more like a chore than a treasured portion of our daily routine. I’ve generally tried to choose books that are slightly above her reading level, so as to keep her challenged and exposed to new stuff, and I’ve tried to choose books that I’d like to read as well.

(UPDATE: A reader asks how old she is; The Daughter is eight, and she’s in third grade.)

Here are some of the books we’ve read:

:: Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. This is simply one of my favorite books of all time, be it for children or adults. This one is just sheer, total delight. This story of a young boy living alone with his mechanic father in rural England is full of charm, humor, and also some excitement when our hero, young Danny, learns his father’s deepest and darkest secret. It’s a wonderful “underdog blue-collar folks against the arrogant wealthy” type of tale, with one of the best endings I know. Why this book hasn’t been done into a proper movie, I can’t imagine. (Apparently it was filmed in Britain, but I’ve never seen it or even heard of that production until now — a TV film for the BBC, perhaps?)

:: James and the Giant Peach, also by Roald Dahl. This was new to me, actually; I love Dahl, but somehow I got through childhood without reading this one, although I did see the Tim Burton-produced movie several years ago, which turns out to have added quite a bit to the story. No matter; the main portion of the tale, in which James is liberated from the clutches of his vile Aunts when he comes into the possession of a giant peach, and the friends he makes inside that peach when he meets the insectoid denizens of the fruit, is the real meat of the story. This is classic Dahl, in which supernatural doings are presented simply as a normal part of the world, and in which our author thinks nothing of having the hero’s parents killed by a rhinoceros on page one.

:: Stormbreaker, by Anthony Horowitz. We bought this book at the book fair at the school’s Open House this year, mainly because it had a really cool cover. It’s actually a halfway decent book, the first in a series of spy thrillers featuring thirteen-year-old Alex Rider, who is recruited by MI6 after his caretaker uncle is murdered while investigating an enigmatic industrialist who is about to donate free computers to every school in Britain. It’s a pretty violent story, and there were times in the reading that I wondered if it would have been better left until she was older. She really enjoyed this one, however, finding the suspense sequences pretty spine-tingling. I imagine we’ll be tracking down the subsequent volumes in the future.

:: Larklight by Philip Reeve is an amazingly fun book. We had a blast with this one, as we’d hoped, given that the book is subtitled “A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space”. It’s literally a steampunk space opera: a SF adventure that assumes that certain scientific theories of the nature of the universe long-since disproved in the real world are actually true. Hence, the book posits the existence of the aether, strange beings on every planet, spaceships that literally look like seafaring vessels in the sky. There are space pirates, malevolent aliens living in the ruins of Saturn, ancient races on Mars, a spacefaring British Empire, and a harrowing journey into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. If you can accept the nature of the world Reeve has created here, Larklight is a rollicking blast of a story. We recommend it highly. Of all the books we’ve read lately, this is the one that earned the most heartfelt howls of protest from The Daughter when I told her that the page we were on was where we’d stop for the night.

Reading. I like it.

(Each of these books is good on the merits, so don’t eschew them if you don’t happen to have kids around.)

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Pass the Popcorn!

Alan posts about the Ron Paul Newsletter fiasco today, and gets visited by lots of folks who fill his comment thread with poor spelling and even worse arguments as to why Paul should have no responsibility whatsoever for anything that was printed under his own signature. Fun wow!

Here’s Kevin Drum on the subject:

Question: what’s the difference between a “racist” and someone who was “complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists”? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except that at least the former is bit more honest about things.

So as damning as everyone thinks this stuff is, I think it’s even more damning than that. We’re not children here, after all. It’s plain that Paul knew what was being published in his newsletters. It’s plain that he was familiar with the well-developed strategy that inspired the early-90s turn to racist demagoguery. It’s plain that he knew it was a key part of his fundraising appeal. Paul can weasel all he wants, but it’s plain that he endorsed a strategy of overt appeals to racist sentiment in order to build support for his political career. If he’s given all that up since then, it’s only because he no longer needs it.

This whole affair highlights one of the reasons that I wish everyone would stop swooning over minor candidates who play the part of bold truthteller. When you have no chance of winning and therefore nothing to risk, it’s cheap and easy to stick to your guns. But as Ron Paul has shown, back when it actually mattered he was willing to do whatever he needed to raise money and rekindle his political career. I don’t doubt that he’d do it again if anything serious were on the line.

That’s exactly right. It’s also worth noting that Paul’s steely-eyed libertarianism falters where women’s rights are concerned.

The guy’s a crackpot.

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Passages

My mother mentioned in an e-mail the other day, among other things, that my first ever school band director died last week. I hadn’t seen Mr. Beach (first name Jim) since I graduated high school, but back then he was a fairly heavy smoker and known for his fondness for booze, so his passing isn’t exactly a galloping shock. He looked fairly advanced in years even when I first met him when I was in fifth grade, and his posture was even then terrible; he had a pronounced hunch in his back and his hair was already completely white. It was thus a surprise to learn that he was actually a year younger than my mother.

Mr. Beach was a fairly strange man, as I recall. As a band director, he was adequate, although this is hard to judge by the fact that he was the elementary and junior high band director, so it wasn’t as though he was really tasked with great amounts of musical development on the part of his students. He was fairly encouraging of his more talented charges, but as a direct source of musical wisdom, I don’t recall much from him.

However, I could be wrong here as well, since my own temperament later turned out to be strongly classical, and Mr. Beach’s was strongly jazz oriented. Being a straight “band director” wasn’t really his game, but he was quite good at getting the sound he wanted from the jazz bands under him. The one year that I remember him directing the Senior High Jazz Band was probably the best single musical experience of my high school years; for a high school ensemble from a small town, that band cooked. I can still hear remember our bass trombone player on a haunting arrangement of Gershwin’s “Summertime”, and I can still remember my own frustration that he would never let me play any of the solos. It wouldn’t be until college that I’d realize what he’d surely already known: that I was no jazz musician and had no place in a jazz band other than being a really good section player.

I don’t recall why Mr. Beach only had one year to direct the jazz band, but I do recall that there was some kind of incident that led to our school superintendent stepping in for some reason. The details were never explained to us, but to my knowledge, Mr. Beach never stepped in front of a jazz band again. I had already thought poorly of that particular superintendent, who was one of those guys who takes a position if and only if he thinks it can lead to the next position. (In a fitting postscript, four or five years ago I was in one of Buffalo’s Media Play locations – before they all closed when the chain went belly-up – and recognized one of the cashiers as none other than that ambitious, arrogant superintendent. I found some kind of cosmic karmic justice at work in that; this guy who had once been highly impressed with his own authority in a small town school system was now, fifteen years later, wearing a uniform shirt and a nametag. In his mind, that had to be a blow.)

I remember something else. We used to have a summer jazz band at that school; we’d rehearse a couple of times and then we’d go out and play at various gigs. We’d play the Cattaraugus County Fair, various dances and festivals in the region, and the like. It always went over well; we’d mostly perform the great big-band classics, and the membership of the band would be augmented by other musicians who lived in the area. Those performances were always hard work, but they were also always a joy. One year at the Catt. Co. Fair, we did Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”, but in an arrangement that had an extended clarinet solo. Mr. Beach’s main instrument was the clarinet, and he took that solo himself. To this day that one performance of his – the only time I ever actually heard him perform anything at all – remains one of the most beautiful bits of clarinet playing I’ve ever heard live, and I’ve heard a lot (Richard Stoltzman playing the Mozart clarinet concerto, for example). I wonder if Mr. Beach was one of the many musicians who went to school figuring to be a professional performer, and then found himself a teacher when gigs were harder to come by than he’d thought. I also wonder if he never quite made the transition to teaching in his head or in his heart. Certainly on the night I heard him play “Moonlight Serenade”, it was as if Mr. Beach had grabbed a part of his life he’d maybe thought lost.

Anyhow, I can’t really say that I learned a lot about music from Mr. Beach, but if he hadn’t specifically recruited me for band when I was in fifth grade, I possibly would never have learned anything about music at all. Berlioz? Rachmaninov? Wagner? The Chieftains? Howard Shore? They’d all be just names, I suppose. And I certainly wouldn’t have gone to college in Iowa, thinking to study music; and then I wouldn’t have met a girl a year older than me who played the oboe.

We often judge our teachers by what they teach us, and forget the ones who didn’t so much teach us as simply meet us at a crossroads and say, “Go that way. You’ll like it.” Well, Jim Beach put me on a road, sure enough. So thanks for the nudge down the road, Mr. Beach.

And wherever you are, I hope you’re jamming with Benny Goodman.

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Recent Reading

Here are some thoughts pertaining to some books I’ve read of late:

:: I often find biographies a mixed bag, as a reading interest. Autobiography is something special, but generic biographies can be tough. Even the most interesting of lives can be rendered dull and uninspiring in the hands of a dull writer; conversely, a life that wouldn’t strike anyone as especially notable can, when told by a skilled biographer, become utterly fascinating. In the latter category falls David Michaelis’s new biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts.

It’s a long and exhaustive book, providing great amounts of detail as to the life of the great cartoonist, gleaned from Michaelis’s access to Schulz’s private papers and his work in contacting the people central to Schulz’s life (the ones still alive, at any rate). Schulz lived a long and fruitful life, growing up in St. Paul (with a brief interlude in Needles, California). He had troubles in school. He was socially awkward, fiercely competitive, and (obviously) artistically gifted. He would serve in the Army in World War II, work for an art-lessons-by-mail firm, and eventually create the most famous newspaper comic strip in history. In chronicling this life in fairly impressive detail, Michaelis makes Sparky Schulz come alive. As the book went on, I felt that I was coming to know the great cartoonist. (This is odd in itself, given that a theme of the book is that Schulz was a hard person to get to know in real life.)

The book’s masterstroke is the inclusion of many strips from the fifty-year run of Peanuts. The strips are selected with care, with each one providing a window through which we gradually realize just how much of Schulz’s daily life informed the strip over its run. Anecdotes from Schulz’s life, wisdom from his parents, his fascination with the movie Citizen Kane, his love of classical music: all that and much more made its way into the strip. Schulz knew several Charlie Brown’s in his life, and his mother had once mentioned “Snoopy” as a prospective name for their next dog. Peanuts the comic strip, it turns out, is far more indicative of Schulz’s inner world than I ever realized before.

This is one of the best biographies I have read. (I wish I could quote from the book, but I’ve already returned it to the library. I did post on the subject of the early Peanuts strips here a couple of years ago, however. Here‘s a review of the book by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson.)

:: Bill Bryson, one of my newer favorite authors (by which I mean newer to me, not new as in a new author), has penned a brief life of Shakespeare, helpfully titled Shakespeare: The World as Stage. I enjoyed this book for what it was: a biography of the Bard for those who aren’t really looking for anything exhaustive. The book is an entry in a series called “Eminent Lives”, which consists of “great writers on great figures, short biographies perfect for an age short on time”. At just under two hundred pages, this is exactly what the label entails.

In reading this book, I got the sense that frustration awaits anyone who tries to conclusively nail down the factual particulars of Shakespeare’s life. The unfortunate fact is that very little is known of the Bard and of his life, aside from the works he left behind, most of which would have undoubtedly been lost if not for the efforts of those who produced the First Folio. Bryson addresses this paradox thusly:

It is because we have so much of Shakespeare’s work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things – as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.

Since so little is known of Shakespeare’s life directly, Bryson instead gives a compelling portrait of life in Elizabethan London and the atmosphere that confronted an actor and playwright in that period. Bryson also includes a chapter in which he strenuously attacks the notion that someone other than William Shakespeare penned the works now attributed to him.

Of course, the best way to get to know Shakespeare is not by reading about Shakespeare but by simply reading Shakespeare, but for a casual reader looking to place Shakespeare in some general context, this book suffices well enough.

:: Taking my own advice from the paragraph immediately above this one, I’ve started brushing up my Shakespeare, beginning with Macbeth. I last read this play in my junior year of high school, and it was the play that really started convincing me that maybe this Shakespeare guy wasn’t just some long-winded poof who couldn’t just have people say what they meant. I know, I know, the man wrote drama and as such it’s meant to be experienced as drama — not read but ‘seen’, in other words – but I like reading him. I’m halfway through Act II right now, and it partially amuses me that Macbeth seems to be willing to go along with the whole plan just because some witches and his wife say so.

(On a tangential note, is there such a thing as a Complete Shakespeare that isn’t at least three inches thick? I’m thinking of the way Bibles are printed, on that hyper-thin paper so that the thing can be carried around without causing back strain or so that it can fit into a normal book bag that is also containing other books. My King James Bible is only an inch thick; is there a Complete Shakespeare that accomplishes the same task? Anyone?)

:: On a lighter note, I enjoyed Bill Geist’s book Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-Town America. Geist is a long-time fixture on CBS Sunday Morning, doing the kind of commentaries on out-of-the-way places that used to be Charles Kuralt’s stock in trade. This is the kind of book where one learns of an Iowa town that holds a festival every year on the Summer Solstice, for on that day, the sun sets exactly in the center of the town’s railroad tracks. Or the town at the bottom of the Grand Canyon whose mail is delivered via mule train. Or the town whose claim to fame is that many years ago there a chicken was beheaded but lived on for eighteen months afterward. Or the town in Oklahoma where virtually every bomb used by the US military is manufactured.

In a key bit of wisdom referring to the town of Dyersville, Iowa, where the “Field of Dreams” ballpark-in-the-corn can be found (upon which I’ve walked!), Geist writes:

The most famous line from the movie is “If you build it, he will come,” most often quoted as “If you build it, they will come,” and which I’ve found to be true about 90 percent of the time. Towns build goofy museums and people come. They build biblically themed miniature golf courses, where I got a hole in one on Noah, and people come. They build whole domed stadiums on spec, and professional baseball teams come. Everybody’s looking for something.

How true is that.

More reading to come. I like the reading!

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I knew I should have watched more Buffy….

EDIT: Links un-wrongified.

Hot on the heels of the Presidential Candidates as Star Wars characters, we have the GOP candidates as Buffy villains. Heh.

Not that anyone asked, but here’s my take on the GOP field:

Mitt Romney: He strikes me roughly the same way George W. Bush struck me back in 2000, which gives me pause, given how Bush has turned out to be, well, a bad President.

John McCain: This is his tenth year of seeking the Republican Presidential nomination. I just don’t trust anyone who wants to be President that bad, but I’ll vote for them as long as I agree with them on at least some issues. Since I haven’t agreed with McCain on anything since the whole campaign finance thing, that rules him out. Plus, his general stance of “All war, all the time!” with regard to foreign policy rules him out completely.

Rudy Giuliani: His program seems to be to take all of the bad characteristics of the Bush administration and turn their dials up to ’11’. No thanks.

Ron Paul: Crackpot.

Mike Huckabee: Crackpot.

Fred Thompson: Yeah, right. He seems to want to be President in the same way that I want a pepperoni pizza with an order of breadsticks.

So there we go. As for Democrats? I’ll vote for whoever we end up nominating, obviously, but I don’t think we have an ideal candidate, either. I like Edwards’s progressive stances but find his resume thin; I like Obama’s personality but find his resume even thinner; I like Clinton just fine, although she falls into the “Wow, this person seems to want the Presidency just a tad more than I’m really comfortable with” category. Basically, I wish Al Gore was running again, but he’s not.

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Reading – A Quiz Thing

Snagged from Roger and T&C:

1. Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?

I don’t remember learning to read, per se, because it happened very early on, via my mother. I could read before I went to kindergarten, I know that much; my parents have often told the tale of how my kindergarten teacher was kind of dumb and didn’t even realize how it was that I was apparently shouting out the directions to the assignments before she could read them to us. I have no memory of doing that.

2. What do you find most challenging to read?

Academic writing, the real dry and scholarly stuff. Especially books that are doctoral theses reworking into book-form. From my college years, I loved my philosophy courses, but I had a terrible time with Existentialism; every one of the texts we read had me thinking, “Ye Gods, somebody open a window!”

3. What are your library habits?

Thursday night is Library night. We go there, get books and a movie or two and maybe a few magazines, and then stop at 7-11 on the way home for Big Gulps and a Slurpee.

4. Have your library habits changed since you were younger?

I have become more and more militant about the value of libraries. To reiterate something I often say in this space, I can’t understand people who refuse to use libraries because “they like to own their books”. Even before the price of gas started shooting through the roof, the notion that my reading should be limited by my paycheck or credit limit bugged the hell out of me.

5. How has blogging changed your reading life?

Well, there’s the standard “Hey, I should check that out” when some blogger I read strongly recommends a book. Here’s a recent example of such; I have that book waiting for me at the library. There is also the “Hey, this blogger I read has written a book!” factor; Alex Ross is a prime example of that.

Setting aside specific titles, I do find that a lot of times I read the blogs that I frequent most often and come away thinking, “Wow, I wish I was as well-read as that blogger.” This has the effect of fueling my desire to read more.

6. What percentage of your books do you get from: New book stores, second hand book stores, the library, online exchange sites, online retailers, other?

Hard to say. I don’t read everything I check out of the library, since a lot of it comes due before I can get to it. As noted above, money’s always an issue, so I have to be pretty careful about what I buy. I don’t use Amazon as much as I used to, although I do buy from them several times a year. For used books, I like eBay, although there are several used bookstores around the Southtowns region that I really need to scope out one of these days. And there’s always the quarterly library used book sale, which is always a source of treasure.

7. How often do you read a book and NOT review it in your blog?

I don’t know, really — maybe ten percent of books I read don’t get mentioned here, for whatever reasons may apply. It sometimes takes me a while to write about a book I read. (There are also the reviews I write for GMR.)

8. What are your pet peeves about ways people abuse books? Dog-earing pages? Reading in the bath?

If they buy the book, they can do whatever they want with it! As media go, paper is pretty forgiving, much moreso than any e-gadget invented yet, which is why I have no great fear that paper books are going away anytime soon.

But I can’t abide people who write or underline or highlight in library books, or people who rip articles or recipes they want out of the magazines, and the like. If it’s not your book, treat it like it’s not your book.

Ultimately, the worst abuse a book can receive is to go unread. I’ve got shelves upon shelves of books being mistreated thusly myself, so I can’t cast the first stone on that basis.

9. Do you ever read for pleasure at work?

Yes, at breaks and at lunch. Never while I’m “on the clock”. When I’m on the clock, I’m the very model of a productive maintenance guy. Yesiree Bob!

10. When you give people books as gifts, how do you decide what to give them?

I think of what they’ve told me they like in the past, and if I identify a book that I think may line up with their tastes as I know them, I give it as a gift. I tend to only give books that I have personally read; it kind of seems rude to me to give someone a copy of a book that may or may not be Teh Suck. Now, an exception to this might be if I find some kind of unique or special edition of a book by a friend’s favorite author; that I might give them, regardless of whether I’ve read them or not.

What I don’t do, regarding books as gifts, is hector my friends after I’ve given them the book as to whether they read it or if they liked it or if they want to talk about their favorite characters. That seems rude to me, and I don’t do it. I’d love to hear a friend tell me that the book I gave them is the best thing ever, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll like it, and really, nobody likes to be hectored over their opinion of a gift.

This is a tag-free quiz, by the way. Grab and go!

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Sentential Links #124

And away we go:

:: Which, of course, is exactly what Jonah does in the book: set up a fallacious opposing argument, demolish it, then turn around and assert exactly the same sort of argument from the opposite direction. (I’m really surprised; when I want intellectual honesty, the first place I look is Jonah Goldberg!)

:: Someone said that the cost of THE GOLDEN COMPASS is more than all the revenue the WGA would receive if the AMPTP accepts our offer. And yet somehow our offer is irresponsible and would cause complete financial ruin to the industry.

:: When we hear “abandoned graveyard,” I think most of us might be tempted to think that they simply stopped burying people there, and leave it at that. But for reasons I can’t yet fathom, this particular graveyard was not only discontinued, but left to return to a state of nature.

:: Don’t wait for inspiration. Just get to work. (Agreed. Something like that is my mantra for 2008 and beyond.)

:: Getting my photo taken with Peter S. Beagle, author of (among other things) The Last Unicorn. (Gaaaahhhh! I’m jealous.)

:: Now that I have a longer commute, I get to experience all the different types of bad drivers even more often than before. It’s time to start calling them out. (Driving rants are always fun.)

:: Mindfulness is the key. Every individual moment is important.

:: There’s something very wonderful that occurs as ones brain gets a little dizzier with each solar rotation. We learn what’s important and what’s less so at any given moment, and yes, we finally learn to edit.

All for now. Tune in again next week!

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One Hundred Movies!!! (31 through 40)

Zounds! More than a month has gone by…yeesh. So anyhow, when last we left this series, we’d explored 60 of my favorite movies. Let’s bump that up to 70 movies now, shall we?

40. The Crimson Pirate

A different kind of pirate flick, existing in its own kind of world, neither an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckler nor a Pirates of the Caribbean-style epic. This film is executed in fairly tongue-in-cheek manner, with Burt Lancaster as the pirate captain who finds himself involved in some derring-do, as all pirates do, I suppose. What makes this one different is the way the thrills take place: Lancaster employs some spectacular gymnastic ability in some pretty wild action sequences, some of which are downright hilarious. If you think pirate movies mostly involve crossed swords and blazing cannons, check this out. Sure, swords are crossed and cannons blaze here as well, but they’re not the focus they are in other films.

Signature moment: The Captain’s escape from certain drowning.

39. My Neighbor Totoro

This is a children’s film, quiet and contemplative, by Hayao Miyazaki, and it’s one of his very best. Two young girls move with their father to a new house in the country while their mother recovers from an unspecified illness at a hospital. While exploring their new neighborhood, the younger of the two girls discovers that the giant camphor tree outside their house is actually the dwelling of a great magical being called Totoro and his two smaller brothers, or mates, or friends, or something like that. Their adventures with Totoro involve planting magical seeds, flying through the air by midnight, and going for a ride on a giant bus that is shaped like a cat. It’s all pretty indescribable, but that makes it even more special.

Signature moment: Totoro discovers the pleasures of umbrellas.

38. Lethal Weapon

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in one of my favorite action movies, with Glover playing the aging cop (Roger Murtaugh) who’s only looking to play it safe until retirement and Gibson as the suicidally depressed younger cop (Martin Riggs) who’s been deemed too dangerous for just about anything. The crime they’re called to solve is pretty pedestrian; the pleasure of the film is in the witty screenplay and the winning chemistry between Glover and Gibson, chemistry that would serve them well for three sequels (the first two of which are also, in my opinion, pretty good).

Signature moment: When Martin Riggs goes to a roof to talk down a jumper, with unorthodox results.

37. Jaws

I didn’t see this movie in full until I was sixteen years old, and I watched it on TBS on a Sunday afternoon, in its pan-and-scan, edited-for-television version, and I still jumped when the shark rose from the water in front of Roy Scheider. Now that‘s effective movie-making. The movie never really falters in its pacing, and though its much-cited masterstroke of keeping the shark relatively unseen until late in the film was mainly due to the fact that the mechanical shark they built didn’t work, the movie’s a masterwork of mood. It also features the first truly great score by John Williams (who, I might add, did not steal the theme from Dvorak).

Signature moment: “Smile, you son-of-a-bitch!”

36. The Man Without a Face

This was the first movie Mel Gibson directed, and for some reason it never did all that well, which has always bothered me because it’s very well-made, and it’s a far better meditation on the relationship between good teacher and curious student than the stunningly overrated Dead Poets Society. By the way, whatever became of Gaby Hoffman? I thought she was a very promising child actor. I wonder what she’s doing now.

Signature moment: Gibson and his young charge act out The Merchant of Venice in Gibson’s living room.

35. Stand By Me

I made a number of attempts to read Stephen King when I was in high school, and I never much got into him. This, coupled with the fact that just about all of the movies they made from his books for a long time were crap, led me to conclude that King is a hack. I started to wonder if I’d misjudged him when I saw Stand By Me, based on a King novella. It’s a solid, solid piece of storytelling, and highly insightful in its treatment of the dynamic between childhood friends who will inevitably drift apart in the end. I love the movie’s elegiac tone, and the only fault I’ve ever felt with it is in the bookending bits with Richard Dreyfuss; I’m not sure that learning Chris’s ultimate fate is really necessary.

Signature moment: It’s a small moment, easy to overlook, but the shopkeep who speaks to Wil Wheaton as if a life without football is incomprehensible always stands out in my mind when I think of this movie.

34. Flash Gordon

What a cheerfully, deliriously fun movie this is! Seriously, it’s just a blast. I recently bought the DVD and watched it with some trepidation, thinking it couldn’t possibly live up to the hoot I’d had in the theater seeing it when I was nine, but no, it was just about as much fun as I remembered, if not moreso. Unbelievably goofy costume design, the two most wooden lead actors I’ve ever seen, some of the gonzoest action sequences ever filmed (that football fight especially), and production design that creates a look completely distinct from the reigning Star Wars and Star Trek look of SF films of the period. Oh, and the music by Queen? How can anyone not love it?

Signature moment: “Flash! I love you, but we only have eight more hours to save the Earth!”

33. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg’s tale of the Indiana electrical worker who finds himself having visions of unearthly origin, ultimately leading him and others to a rendezvous with earthbound aliens, has been a favorite film of mine for years. What’s so great about this movie, as with Jaws, is the way Spielberg blends his mystery with the mundane, so that ordinary things take on ominous tones, such as when little Barry Guiler’s toys all start lighting up and moving for no reason. The John Williams score makes a fascinating progression from atonal mystery toward tonal glory at the end, and the visuals are as stunning as anything Spielberg or George Lucas have filmed since. It’s an amazing movie.

Signature moment: The abduction of Barry Guiler is one of the most unnerving film sequences I know. I’ve never been able to hear Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are” without feeling a sense of dread, thanks to this one scene.

32. 2001: A Space Odyssey

I saw 2001 when I was only nine years old. It was screened at a science fiction convention that my sister and I attended in Portland, OR. I didn’t get it. At all. I didn’t understand the movie to save my life. I’m a young kid who’s all hopped up on Star Wars, and here’s this movie supposedly about space starting off with a bunch of apes in the beginning. Then we’re in space, but there’s this tall black thing on the moon…and then there’s a computer that goes nuts…and then the movie gets really trippy. No, I didn’t understand this movie at all. But what was weird was that I wanted to understand it; I didn’t hate it or feel bored. I’m still not sure I totally understand it, but I do think it’s one of the finest films of all time.

Signature moment: The waltz of the space ships, over “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”. There are a lot of film music fans who genuinely believe that the film would work better had Stanley Kubrick actually used the Alex North score that he rejected in favor of his classical music temp track, but I’ve never agreed.

31. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Well, I don’t know what I can possibly say about this movie other than to just note its place on the list and leave it at that. So that’s what I’m doing.

Signature moment: All of ’em. Picking a favorite moment from this movie is like picking the prettiest flower from a field full of poppies. Can’t do it.

And that’s all for this entry. Still no space-based swashbuckler movies! How long can this go on?!

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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