One Into Two Into Three

I had heard filmmaker Peter Jackson was turning The Hobbit into a two-part film epic. Since when was it upshifted into a trilogy? Was it the lure of more money, more profits for corporations? It’s not as if JRR Tolkien didn’t pen other great Middle Earth stories that could be filmed.

It’s become a tough choice for me. I can do my part to resist the lemming lure and plunk down an admission or two (or three) to bolster corporate profits. The Tolkien family has refused to sell film rights to other works, so maybe I should have no fear that a single Middle Earth character from the First Age will be developed into a Bond-like franchise.

 

Vatican on History

My wife was feeling unwell most of yesterday, so while I was online in the living room she was catching the History channel’s Secret Access: The Vatican. I was wondering if we would see one of the players in the Vatileaks scandal. I noticed chefs, that Msgr Georg dude, cars, and documents in calligraphy. But no butler. The narration seemed rather hyped to me: information with a somewhat sexy subcurrent. But no background shots of people filching parchment off the Holy Father’s desk.

I perked up when internet commentator and filming consultant David Gibson appeared the first time.

I really perked up with Brother Guy Consolmagno and the Vatican Observatory.

They also mentioned the Borgia popes. I see there’s a reform2 movement afoot for the infamous family. Is that like trying to suggest that once in a while, one of them went to confession, then said Mass, and it was a very good day, in contrast? No doubt the stained reputation of scandal takes on its own life after the centuries and a pay-tv miniseries. Like the Tudors, and many others. What draws us to such viewing? That we will see a public slip? Hence the popularity of unscripted programming, be it game shows or so-called reality tv.

I suppose my consolation prize for semi-distracted tv viewing was not Paolo Gabriele but the Orange Fanta on the pope’s dinner table. I would have thought him a juice man.

 

Rock Musician At The Keyboard

Indie rock musician finds himself in a church gig in Australia. I was thinking about that scene in The Commitments when a little Procol Harum breaks out at practice. The folks at St Kevin’s, Bangalow have that covered:

Shortly after taking up residence in the church refectory, a residential space for artists, parishioners asked if he would consider playing the organ as the church had been without an organist for some time.

After agreeing to the gig, he was told to always remember he was playing to a congregation and not an audience and with this in mind the experience has been both humbling and illuminating.

James Cruickshank:

The first time I was terrified.

I can relate

But when everyone is getting into it…I have had some beautiful musical moments.

I’ll take that assessment as a positive sign and expression. Church musicians, when they truly put themselves into a posture of service, can and do know moments of beauty and ”inexplicable lightness.”

In my first parish assignment, the pastor introduced me to the inactive Catholic husband of a catechumen. He had been a gigging rock guitarist for over a decade in the Chicago area. But he played the piano quite well and settled in quickly to his new role in a different kind of band. I respected my friend Manny as a musician, a family man, and as a seeker. Getting ready for his first Mass, it was eleven pieces of music to learn. Mass number two switched out six of those. He said his band might have thirty songs down pat. I told him our active repertoire was at least four times that: about a hundred songs, twenty psalms, and three or four Mass settings. But he was up for it every week for well over a year.

My respect for Manny increased when he announced he was taking a leave from the group for several weeks. A few things, as I remember. Sitting with his kids at Mass (his wife now sang in our group). But he found his perfectionism and desire for good performance was overshadowing the real reason he went to Mass. After a few months off, he came back refreshed musically and spiritually.

Parishes can do very well receiving gigging secular musicians into their music ministries. The best singers and musicians are eminently adaptable, and I’ve enjoyed so many good experiences over the years: getting to know some fine people, seeing them get drawn closer to Christ. And making fine music.

 

Detective Television: Driven, Sweet, and Dreamy

My wife loves mysteries on tv and in print. I find I’m drawn into the tv stuff kicking and screaming. But I’m occasionally impressed.

My wife has been following Sherlock on PBS, and I have to admit I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen–the last three episodes. This is riveting stuff: complex and attractive and almost breathless in its pace. I stumbled across Jana Riess’s review at RNS, critical of Holmes as 21st century antihero. And it got me thinking about how derivative and unoriginal this production is. I read most of the Sherlock Holmes stories in college. But that was a long time ago, and I’m not sure I have all the particulars still in my head. Ms Riess is right that Benedict Cumberbatch plays the 21st century incarnation as something of a CSI: Greg House. (Naturally, House himself is a medical derivative of the Baker Street detective.) Or maybe he’s just written that way. Probably something of both. And it’s all based on the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, so of course it’s derivative. And the scarf, but no hat for the tousled hair: just like the Doctor. Can a derivation be good? It can certainly engage. The end of series II last night was certainly psychotic. Yes, that’s the word. I’ll have to catch the earlier episodes, I think.

Sleepless the other night, I caught two Honey West reruns at 2am. A decade before Charlie’s Angels, Aaron Spelling gave it an early try. Anne Francis was sparkling with kicking butt and mobile phones and tear gas that doesn’t water the eyes. But that wasn’t enough to float another derivation from James Bond and Emma Peel. The network rendered judgment: cancelled after one season. Still, if this series were resurrected, with good writing and an actor who could pull it off like Anne Francis, I’d watch it. And that snappy jazz theme: you sure don’t hear that on tv anymore. But a half-hour show to solve a case? With the intrusion of our corporate masters into the television waves, that’s enough for a set-up, but not much more.

My favorite of all this year’s tv is Awake. (But admittedly, I don’t catch much.) Unlike the others, this series is almost totally original–only the detective character is derivative. But really, who can they cast to give such an interesting pair of lives: a doctor? a superhero? a singer? I’ve been catching the episodes “on demand,” which is another innovation of which I approve. I’m up to episode eleven, and as the conspiracy reveals, I’m finding it a bit too predictable.

Still, Jason Isaacs is a brilliant actor. The whole cast is great. The writing lags a bit behind the ideas. As a science fiction fan I love great ideas, and this is a great idea, of a police detective who wakes in alternate realities: one in which an accident kills his son, and the other in which his wife is dead. After six months of fictional time, the guy’s not REM-deprived, so he’s dreaming effectively somewhen. Overall, I’d say A on concept, A on casting and acting, a solid B on writing. And that writing grade would probably be an A-plus on tv’s curve.

Episode eleven was a little too transparent, but Mr Isaacs delivered a tour-de-force acting performance. This guy can do just about anything well: grim and hard-boiled cop, emotional crash, a smile for his son.

I hear the network is cancelling the series. Ah well, whoever said television was any good anyway? Just when I was thinking that maybe there was something good on tv, even detective stuff, maybe I’ll just go back to reading books. Corporate can’t cancel great fiction.

 

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen pops up into my attention every so often. I loved a few of his movies in the 80′s. His exploration of addiction and faith in Hannah and Her Sisters is a favorite. The movie bank of cable channels has been hammering away with Midnight in Paris for the past few weeks. My wife and I have wanted to catch that film from start to end for awhile. I first caught Owen Wilson talking like Woody Allen when someone was channel-surfing. This was interesting, I thought. You can still tell a Woody Allen movie from dialogue and camera like you can pick Philip Glass out of a crowd.

I think Mr Allen does fantasy quite well. In Midnight, he follows my “Rule,” take one fantastic idea and pursue it to where it leads. In this film, Owen Wilson catches a cab at midnight and finds himself dialed back ninety years to Paris where he encounters writers and artists from what he believes is a golden age of sorts.

Sometimes Woody Allen can be self-indulgent. Forty-some films made. It can be like best-selling authors: they get into a groove (some say rut) and close themselves off to better input from others who can make the work better. With true artists, it’s about the work. Not the self. When it’s about the self, the work decays from art to celebrity and narcissism.

That’s not to say that Mr Allen isn’t dogged by narcissism. I never liked his first swell of award-winning movies from the seventies all that much.

The material in Midnight in Paris–the cinematography, acting, and script, and especially the premise really overshadow the filmmaker. Which is how it’s supposed to be. The resolution of the plot isn’t terribly complicated. We wonder all through the film why Gil and Inez are together. And it gets resolved. We wonder why Gil doesn’t get off the stick and really write–and he does. And at the end, he doesn’t indulge his trip to the past. He finds inspiration and affirmation from the great artists of the twenties, and then he moves on in the present. Simple stuff, really. But impeccably done. And I loved the send-up Gil gives the “Pedantic One” when talking about the Picasso. Just the right amount of indulgence there.

 

Foundation On Screen

It’s been a curious things the past few days. I had a thought to reread Asimov’s Foundation books–at least the “trilogy” (actually nine separately published short tales assembled into books around 1950). But I’ve been feeling ornery around rereading stuff. There’s just too much good writing around to “waste” book time on a rerun. But I’m glad I did.

I woke up a few mornings ago with a whole Foundation idea in my consciousness. There’s not a prayer it will ever be done the way I would imagine it, but here’s a try …

The “heroic” age of the Foundation (ca. 100-300 F.E.) would be the early struggles to maintain control of a sphere of influence on the edge of the galaxy. That is where I would see the anchor or the beginning of a long-lived series. I think a series would be of the most appeal to fans. It gives a certain quantity of material, and a large palette on which to explore the abiding Asimov themes. I see three important ones …

First is the place of the individual in the galaxy-wide spread of humanity, and especially in the thousand-year span of the Seldon Plan to restore civilization to the Milky Way. People struggle against the Foundation, and in all the centuries, only one mutant manages to conquer it. Otherwise, ordinary people function in the Plan. Do they lack free will? Or are they able to flourish and be honored as Foundation heroes only to the extent they cooperate with the system, and put their own intelligence and cunning to work to further the Foundation’s goals. This one piece has huge implications for drama, and for individuals who love the Foundation above all else, or who resent it, or who work within or outside the Plan for their own ends.

Another theme is Asimov’s use of religion as a pacifying and civilizing force within the early Foundation Era. Asimov was Jewish by upbringing, but considered himself a non-believer. Very telling is this statement from his 1995 memoirs:

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

I don’t think the religion aspects of the Foundation come off very well. Asimov paints less a picture of authentic religion than a set of superstitions based on the perception of magic and an arbitrary galactic spirit. But perhaps there is more to explore in the idea of religion as a tool to conquer barbarism. Certainly the idea of trimming 29,000 years off a Dark Age is a highly moral undertaking. No doubt, religious practitioners in the Foundation would be across the spectrum–those who would lead virtuous lives and those who patterned their words to impress, and naturally, those in between.

Asimov does think very highly of the clever. And it is illustrative that a random act of mutation almost levels the Foundation. A gesture of great sacrifice eventually puts the Plan back on track in Second Foundation. In a way, the original three books establish a trilogy of human expression. The clever are triumphant at the end of Foundation. In Foundation and Empire, the Plan is nearly demolished by a mutant, an unforeseen glitch in the sweep of history. The Plan is restored in the final book of the original trilogy by a singularly sacrificial act. Intelligence, individuality, and selflessness: not a bad trio to explore.

If a thousand-year stretch of history is impossible to explore in a film (two hours) or a series of movies (ten to twenty), it would be easier to do it justice in a television series (say about 100 hours). Just because Asimov was less skilled in characterization, doesn’t mean an adaptation of Foundation couldn’t or shouldn’t explore that. There was also a surprising lack of wonder in the setting of the Foundation. If you’re going to throw this story up on a screen of any size, you really need eye candy to make it appealing. Give the characters a universe worth saving, worth living and dying for, and it will be more convincing than mere conversation about it.

My thinking would be to establish the story in the second or third centuries of the Foundation Era more from the perspective of the Foundation’s traders and explorers. Introduce the elements of Hari Seldon and the early Mayors through flashback. Then leap forward to tell the concluding narratives in the final ten hours of the filming. I would even consider going off-book, and introducing wholly original characters who will experience the themes of economics, politics, religion as well as the human struggles with individuality, sacrifice, and the search for meaning. That said, the couple Toran and Bayta Darell provide something of a human center to the whole series. They would be a fascinating lens through which to tell the “history” of the Foundation’s three centuries, plus the scope of the Mule Crisis.

Isaac Asimov’s great gift was his ideas. It would be cool to see those ideas explored on a larger canvas than a simple film, however much money it would be liable to amass for our corporate masters.

 

The Adjustment Bureau

When most of the people had left the staff Christmas party last night, our host cracked out last year’s well-regarded The Adjustment Bureau.

I thought it started off pretty well. One fantasy/science fiction premise from Philip K. Dick is nicely developed: a mysterious team “adjusts” things when the world is close to going off the plan. So far so good: the key to great science fiction or fantasy is to find a good twist and ride it for all its worth. What’s the plan? Who knows, but I can be patient for it to get sorted out. I thought this movie rode fast and hard for the first hour.

The adjusters struck me as interfering aliens who seem menacing at first, but clue in David (Matt Damon) and convince him to go along with their plan. Nice twist, I thought. No merciless bad guys. clone of The Matrix. He plays along, but he’s still on the lookout for the beautiful, tart, and intriguing Elise (Emily Blunt). These two shouldn’t get together, according to the bureau, but we don’t know why. I was looking forward to finding out. This romance seems a good and inspiring thing for a politician and a modern art dancer.

I thought the film ran off the rails in the final third. When David presses too much, he’s told that Elise will end up teaching six-year-olds instead of being a world-renowned dancer. The bureau “adjusts” with setting her up for a sprained ankle during a performance. We’re then expected to believe that David goes with the plan for almost a year till he sees a wedding announcement. These dudes sprain his girlfriend’s ankle, and they’re not capable of lying? Too much glad-handing with corporations: this guy is way too trusting. Then suddenly he goes rogue, snatches up Elise minutes before her appearance before a judge and leads the mysterious men in black on a chase through a series of “doorways” that open into different places in New York.

I was fine with the happy ending for the romance. All couples in love should end up together in the end.

I was less okay with how the filmmakers got there. This is a weaker movie than The Lake House because it takes a second f/sf to resolve the story–the mysterious doors. Third, if you count the layered notion that water impedes the aliens’ ability to communicate and manipulate events. The doors are a cool idea, but two or three ideas to resolve one narrative dilemma is lazy writing.

Elise”s best destiny is not teaching children how to dance? When they were setting up this conundrum in the film, I thought, “Cool. One of her students will become the world-renowned artist.” But no. According to the filmmakers, individual personal destiny/stardom/the cult of celebrity wins out over a selfless good.

One of the movie characters (I forget who) suggests the agents are like angels. And they wonder if the “chairman” is God. I prefer the interpretation of interfering aliens. God doesn’t send angels to prevent love’s fruition and manipulate life. Authentic love enriches people who are near the lovers. My pastor frequently preaches at weddings that sacramental marriage reveals God’s love, and that a graced marriage draws and welcomes people: children, guests, friends, the poor.

To be a great film, this one needed some adjustments. I agree with Roger Ebert that this is …

a smart and good movie that could have been a great one if it had a little more daring. I suspect the filmmakers were reluctant to follow its implications too far. What David and Elise signify by their adventures, I think, is that we’re all in this together, and we’re all on our own. If you follow that through, the implications are treacherous to some, not all, religions. In the short term, however, the movie is a sorta heartwarming entertainment.

Mr Ebert’s three stars are generous. I would say 2 1/2. It’s sorta good science fiction. If it’s meant to touch on religion, it misses sacramental Christianity by a mile. The adjusters, if they’re really out for humanity’s better interests, should be spending time thwarting drug deals and wars and corporate raids.

 

The Lake House

My wife has her third round with the flu. With tonight’s descent of bitter winter on central Iowa, we enjoyed a movie we picked up a few weeks ago and hadn’t gotten around to seeing: The Lake House.

The young miss has determined Sandra Bullock is one of her favorite actors, so it sort of supplements one of her Christmas gifts–a movie four-pack of comedies. Tonight’s film, however, is definitely not a comedy.

My wife warned me that this had better not be a sad movie. Honestly, I wasn’t sure. I had heard very little about it before pressing the play button. I knew the premise: two people correspond despite being separated by two years in time. It plays out fairly well in the beginning. It keeps a logical flow throughout. It takes one premise outside the realm of the known, namely that two people can correspond though separated by two years in time. It doesn’t clutter up that notion with any other fantastic ideas; it only explores the consequences of just the one.

The Rotten Tomatoes people didn’t get it. But I’m not as cynical as most movie reviewers, especially when I’m watching a romantic film with my wife. That said, I also viewed it with a science fiction eye, and I’m going to offer some dissent from the groupthink of the sf world as it addresses so-called time paradoxes.

There is no such thing as a time paradox. Let me say it again:

There is no such thing as a time paradox.

If it were possible to go back in time and change the future, a time traveler could do it. There is no magic wall around “what was supposed to happen” and if an architect wants to plant a tree for a woman, it’s darn well going to appear over her when she needs it. Case closed.

I was distracted by the “conversation” between the two correspondents until I remembered that there is an early scene in which they banter back and forth through the lake house’s mailbox. Problem solved. The screenwriter and the director carry it off well. They’re not going to sit Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in front of a mailbox when all of architectural Chicago beckons. The conversations were filmed the way they needed to be filmed. What’s important is to show (not tell) the lovers communicated, and they did. Case closed.

That reminds me: the cinematography was excellent.

Roger Ebert nails my sense of it all:

Enough of the plot and its paradoxes. What I respond to in the movie is its fundamental romantic impulse. It makes us hope these two people will somehow meet.

Of course. One science fiction idea: communication through time. Two people in love. Case closed.

My science fiction mind would probably discredit this movie as sf. It’s really a fantasy. Same genre as It’s A Wonderful Life. More playing with time: what if a person had never been born. I don’t think audiences and critics got that film at first, either.

As for this movie, I enjoyed it as a romance. No problem with the science fiction fantasy aspect, either. It made perfect sense to me. As a film it was enjoyably filmed and soundtracked. Solid recommendation, especially with the one you love.

 

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen

This film was at the library yesterday, so the family enjoyed viewing tonight.

My wife mentioned that she was always afraid of her. Stern. Powerful. All-knowing. This film seemed to soften that view. This is good, as her birthday is the saint’s feast.

The young miss: “It’s okay.” But she was glued to the tv like the rest of us.

My only wish was to see more of Hildegard as musician and composer, but the one scene from Ordo Virtutum was impressive. The young miss commented that the “devil” would get dizzy and fall after being bound up by the virtues.

 

Putting the Romance Into Christmas

Perhaps it is a matter of being a middle-aged guy, and have something dawn on me for the first time. Or maybe it’s the relentless barrage of 21st century Christmas movies on cable. But I’m having a hard time thinking of a recent Christmas movie that doesn’t have romance as the reason for the season, if not a major sub-plot in the affair. And even in the so-called Golden Age of black & white …

Crystal posted 0n one of my favorite Christmas movies, The Bishop’s Wife. The romance, of course, involves an angel flirting with the divine Loretta Young, who finds a renewal of sorts in her own marriage as her clerical husband recovers his priorities.

I really can’t think of any Christmas film done in the past decade or two that doesn’t involve romance. There are some pretty good tv ones, like A Boyfriend for Christmas, which I found rather decent. And of course, Elf, the newest one to get the round-the-clock (it seems) treatment recently reserved for A Christmas Story. Maybe that latter one was the last holiday movie made without the suspense of courting, kisses, and who ends up with whom.

As Christmas gets dragged into its annual war over secularism, greed, religion, nobody seems too bothered by the simple girl-meets-boy overshadowing the manger. Maybe mistletoe’s in the air.

 

In The Moon

Nice story from Reuters on Russian plans to colonize lunar lava caves. They would likely provide significant shielding from the sleet of solar radiation that pummels these airless (or nearly airless) bodies. All explorers need do is seal them up with a skylight, and they’re good to colonize.

The Universe Today site had a post on lunar caves last year. Above is an oblique view (image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University) in the Marius Hills, which would likely have been an Apollo 18, 19 or 20 landing site had the program not halted with the 17th mission. Wouldn’t that have been amazing for 1973? Discovering a lava cave on the moon.

H. G. Wells wrote all about it over a century ago. We should’ve been listening to him, though I doubt we’ll find lunar life in those caves. Probably a lot of very fascinating geology.

When I was a boy, I loved this film adaptation.

C. S. Lewis was impressed with his countryman’s original.

Getting back to the caves, it might be fascinating to explore these. Possible that water (or ice) might be found in the depths of the moon. A lunar base, let alone a colony, would be a massive undertaking. But finding resources in the caves that could sustain human life would be a big plus.

 

Mel and the Maccabees

Mel Gibson is a rich, headstrong filmmaker. If he wants to make a movie about a Jewish hero, I don’t think there’s anybody who can stop him, right? Even if they protest loudly and in all the right media outlets.

Why would Mr Gibson want to make this film? I suspect it has something to do with his fetish for brutality.

It’s probably no consolation, but he’s likely to harm himself more than his adversaries on this. On the good side, a story gets told. On the bad, well, I leave it for the imagination.

 

Inception

Like this reviewer, I had my doubts about this film when I first heard about it. The big box office didn’t help it, either. The young miss got Avatar from Santa in ’09. And that movie, while decent, lacked the sf screenplay chops to match its visuals.

My wife was really p***ed off I used my birthday gift card to buy Christmas presents. (Hey, what can I say? Money is tight these days.) So we had about $25 left on a rebate card and I picked up Inception the other day.

Best science fiction movie I’ve seen since The Incredibles. I can’t remember a genre movie that stuck with me and let me stick with it like this one. Complexity plus fx eye candy and good acting to boot.

My wife said she was going to have to view it another few times to absorb the small details. But neither of us found it difficult to follow. Unlike the decent flick Alice in Wonderland, I wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep for fifteen minutes in the middle of it and wake up to rejoin the story in progress. Or was it all a dream?

Somebody said they need to get Christopher Nolan to direct Foundation. Don’t they ever.

 

Separation

My wife had an opportunity to visit a friend back in Kansas City, and assist in the care of some pets. She’s been gone the whole week. It sure will be good to have her home again Monday.

Meanwhile the young miss enjoyed her last week of seventh grade. This whole week pretty much made up for the snow days of this past winter of fond memory. I guess you can’t have a field trip in a local park or walk to the bowling alley in the driving, blinding snow. Watching movies in science class seems to go better when the air conditioning is cranking and the temps have hit 90.

Another parents and I were talking about this. There seemed to be a mad scramble to make up these snow days and squeeze them all in by this Friday. If the last week of school was to be taken up with parties and parks and perks, we had to ask: why bother? I know, I know: the required number of education days.

If only the state were more flexible. I have this excellent dvd for viewing at home. We could have enjoyed it with popcorn and bathroom breaks as needed. But of course we live in an oppressive, socialist regime now: obey the state and don’t ask questions.

This is my wife’s first extended trip away from the two of us. We’re doing okay with food. We can make a few things Anita doesn’t care to eat. Spaghetti. Beans. It’s been pretty sane fare this week though: pizza one night (a recipe my wife likes) and pork chops last night (another favorite–but not mine).

Last night I also assembled (I hesitate to say “cooked”) rice cereal treats. Sometimes I add cocoa to the marshmallow/butter glue. Last night the young miss suggested cinnamon just after I sprinkled in some cardamom. Nuts are also a good additive: cashews or almonds. I had almonds, but forgot where I stored them.

This weekend is moderately busy: a trip to the library today and a gig at a friend’s church later this afternoon. I’ll mostly be playing my fretless electric bass for that one. I’m barely a competent bass player–I much prefer the piano. They’ll let me play a little of that on the psalm and Communion song.

Tomorrow I have a rare seat at the 8:30AM piano. Surprisingly the young miss consented to that Mass instead of tonight’s.

And after all that, it will be Monday. Thank goodness. The house isn’t the same without a wife and mother.

And that image above, may be the most flattering shot of the two of us: fifteen years ago and with much less gray.

 

Hindi Cinema

When I started bringing home Bollywood dvd’s from the public library several weeks ago, the young miss mostly turned her nose up at watching movies with subtitles. We watched Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge last night. “That was the best Indian movie yet,” she said, before going to bed.

Maybe it was because she got to stay up a bit past bedtime.

So far my favorite has been Lagaan, set during the British occupation late 19th century.

I don’t know why I find these movies so appealing. The music and dance sequences that pop out of nowhere are just insanely fun. I’ve gotten used to timber in women’s singing voices. The tunes are quite catchy.

Any favorites out there among my readers? Are there any good Hindi science fiction films?