The Invisible Library

This weekend, I picked up the hardback edition of All-Star Superman, collecting the first 6 issues and, speaking as a tenured comic book nerd and a hypercritical lit geek, it’s the best dam superhero comic I’ve read in years, maybe even since Watchmen. Seriously. It’s that good.

Grant Morrison is doing a sort of remix of Superman, picking up some of the crazy ass stuff from the golden age and mixing it in with some genuinely awesome sci-fi mythologizing. This is the Superman story you’ve always wanted to read: mad scientists with amazing toys, time traveling supermen form the distant future, Lex Luthor with a genuine evil plan (rather than the lame plot form Superman Returns, where Lex’s big scheme involves a shady real estate deal and some fucking kryptonite). I’m looking forward to volume 2 to see how it all plays out but it’s hot shit, right here. Frank Quietly’s art is also amazing and the two together are doing some real fine work. Makes me wish more writers were given the freedom to rewire some old characters and see what can be done.

I was very disappointed by the Golden Compass. Inevitably, it will be compared to Lord of the Rings, mostly because the first trailer explicitly tried to tie this to it,like they were conjoined cinematic twins. But The Golden Compass is a far inferior film than any one of the the three LoTR chapters.

It bears repeating (mostly because the hardcore LoTR fanboys won’t shut up about Tom Bombadil not being in the films) but no film can contain everything from the book. Following the book exactly, Lord of the Rings would have been an eighteen hour long musical. But The Golden Compass doesn’t try to follow the book at all.

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It was a movie-filled weekend here for Thanksgiving. We watched a lot of oldies on DVD: The Thing from Another World, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (which my Mom had never seen!), Forbidden Planet, and The Day The Earth Stood Still.*

We also went to see Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, which is as bad as it sounds. How bad? You know all those great whimsical movies like Edward Scissorhands** and Amelie? Well, when writing those, innevitably there’s going to be a few plot threads or scenes that just don’t work. For whatever reason, they may seem like good ideas until you put them on aper. Then you read them and go, “Oh nevermind that’s shit. Scrap that.”

Mr. Magorium is all those leftover scenes that didn’t work in other movies, but filmed. None of it made much sense, the characters all dropped their motivations half way through and then it ended. Which was the best part. Leave whimsy and fairy tales to the experts, please.

My brother-in-law, Miguel saw Beowulf and said it was like Shrek, only with blood and gore. Make of that what you will.

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* Probably the single best Science fiction film ever. I see no reason to remake it, especially with Keanu Reaves as Klaatu.

** Which came out seventeen years ago. There are seniors in High School who were not yet born when that movie came out. Now, get off my lawn!

I couldn’t do it. There’s just no way I can say anything intelligent about In Search of Lost Time without coming off as flippant.  the prose is alternately brilliant and claustrophobic, like you’re wrapped in a blanket and being dunked in your grandmother’s perfume. It’s enjoyable, sort of. There’s just so much memory going on that whatever plot there is gets stretched out nearly to infinity. You’d have to read, at minimum, fifty pages a day to keep up with the plot, which I simply don’t have time to do. I can only read 5 maybe 10 pages at a stretch before the sheer weight of the words knocks me over.

Now, here’s the weird thing: I recommend reading In Search of Lost Time.But don’t expect to plow through it in an evening. If you can manage it, jusyt pick it up from time to time, read a few pages and enjoy the florid prose and then move on, come back to it later. Or maybe you’re one of those people who can just dive in to a 4000 page novel and enjoy it as a whole. To which I say you are a better man than I.

I downloaded Season 3 of Doctor Who a few weeks ago (yippee for Bittorrent!) and have watched the whole thing, so for any American fans who haven’t seen the last episode (scheduled for Friday Night here on the Sci-Fi Channel) you may want to skip this post.

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Picked up the new They Might Be Giants album, The Else* this week and my faith in the Johns is restored. where The Spine was a little disappointing (felt like Left over B-sides from John Henry) the Else has a fun mid 90’s alternative rock edge to it, which is surprising for They Might Be Giants. Also, not at all unappreciated. With the limp pop music of the last few years fluttering all around, sometimes you want to reach back to those high school days when there was some good music still played in public spaces.* And boy is it a sad day for Justin Timberlake when he gets his ass rocked off by They Might be Giants.

I also just got the New Pornographer’s latest, Challengers. Still absorbing it but it’s good. Mellow. Much more so than their previous stuff but more textured as well and still with the ponderous lyrics as always.
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*I say public spaces rather than radio because seriously, who still listens to the radio?

Where did the week go? Seriously, I had grand plans. I was going to rant about the government, pontificate about the Pope and generally chew the scenery. Then Wednesday night we went and saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I’ve been on a nice little buzz ever since and have let the other stuff fall by the wayside (except for my real writing.* News about my novel will be forth coming).

Harry Potter was great! I had some trepidation going in– after all, translating a 900 page novel into a 2 1/2 hour movie means some pretty big ideas are bound to be omitted but all in all, a satisfying movie. Thing’s moved rather fast, Harry wasn’t as whiny as he was, for as long as he was in the book and all the high points of the story were hit and in an effective manner. Any film maker out there wondering how to turn that giant door stop of a novel into a cohesive movie that still maintains the spirit of the author’s intent should use Order of the Phoenix as their model. Sure, I would have liked to have seen a few more character moments but what is there is great. the actors have all grown into these roles and I think that is the key to the success of the picture. Doing so much with so little is not easy and these actors, al of them children, manage to do something other actors twice their age have problems with. Bravo to them!

Now it’s off to play Super Mario Bros. 2 on the Wii get some writing done!

Just saw Transformers and it was everything I expected: big and loud. Cars turned into robots. Things exploded. A good time was had by all.

One question though: What is this?

Update: Phil Plait, the best bad astronomer around, reviews the science of the movie. He too wants to know what’s up with this whole Cloverfield thing.

I don’t often agree with Christopher Hitchens. His midlife flight from Trotskyism has, in many ways, turned him into a cranky reactionary, siding with Neocons when occasion suits him and generally being contrarian for the sake of pissing people off. Which is fine, the world needs it’s contrarians and I don’t have to agree with a man entirely to recognize when he is making sense. Which is why I’m glad he put the gin bottle down long enough to write God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Firstly, you probably won’t discover too many new pieces of information here, though I did learn a few things about how the Koran was edited together that were new to me. But Hitchen’s offers a much needed complementary view to atheism in general and Atheist writing in particular. The unavoidable comparisons to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are made in just about every review of Hitchens’ book I’ve read and they probably will form a sort of unofficial atheist trilogy. Where Harris comes at the problem of faith and belief in god form the point of view of a philosopher and Dawkins tackles it from the perspective of a scientist, Hitchens offers us the much needed insight of a journalist and man of letters.

It’s this literary perspective that is most necessary to help encourage skepticism and disbelief to spread among the general public. Far too often, atheists are seen as cold, calculating rationalists, robot men who have amputated the limb of faith and are lacking in something vital, all in the pursuit of reason. Hitchens does a service in showing that disbelief is not the result of prolonged exposure to rare intellectual isotopes but the natural and organic process of simply living in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Atheism and skepticism has a long and glorious tradition, rooted in Enlightenment values of free thought, unrestrained inquiry and above all imagination. Some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the last three centuries have been men and women without faith. These are not freaks and outsiders, hammering away at the foundation of Western Civilization. They are they architects of our culture. Showing that the Bible is just shoddy literature, with very human (and often bloody) fingerprints all over it will go a long way towards undermining its authority as an unimpeachable resource, one to be eyed with the critics skeptic eye than the true believer’s blind faith.

People just don’t trust pirates. I suppose this is a given, in that they are, after all, pirates. They’ll cut your throat if it gives them the upper hand and rifle through your pockets before you’ve even hit the ground but still, they have an honor about them, and their resilience and tenacity, not to mention their resourcefulness, is never to be underestimated.

Which is all my way of saying that a lot of reviewers don’t know what they’re talking about when they say Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End isn’t as good as the previous films. In a lot of ways it’s better. complaints about the murkiness of the plot are unfounded– certainly, the details can get complicated but it’s only a challenge for those who can’t stomach a little moral ambiguity and don’t get that pirates will change allegiance at the drop of a hat, any hat, and sometimes just for fun.

I have to admit, I was suspicious going in to the theater. Having so recently been burned by Spider man 3 in all its god awfulness, I was hesitant, expecting that perhaps the filmmakers had decided to just cash in and coast on the popularity of the previous films. So I was presently surprised to discover a really fun and satisfying movie. No it’s no Godfather, obviously, but not every movie has to aspire to be the greatest ever. Some should, now and again, but an action adventure movie about Pirates isn’t that movie and to expect it to try and be something it is not is setting oneself up for disappointment (which, by the way is one of the themes of the pirates movies so there are still some greater themes to be had even if none named Corleone is involved). So, no, it wasn’t the Godfather. But even more importantly, it wasn’t the Godfather 3.

Some reviewers have criticised Orlando Bloom’s performance, saying that it was wooden and two dimensional which is plainly unfair. He has the burden of being the Good Guy who has to make tough decisions, which doesn’t exactly leave a lot of wiggle room for camping it up or soul searching. He’s our Errol Flynn, after all. But he does manage to breathe life and depth and genuine emotion into a character that could so easily be just a cardboard cutout. And his ultimate fate adds a few shades of gray to his character that go beyond the stereotypical hero anyway.

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack is, let’s face it, the real reason anyone is going to see this movie. Here is a character for the ages. Morally ambiguous, the rouge with a heart of gold– he’s everything we want Han Solo to be– a scoundrel who stays a scoundrel while also being a hero. And the scenes with him in Davey Jones Locker are just fantastic, a touch of Terry Gilliam that adds so much while seeming to do nothing but fart around. His affectations and antics should by the third movie, be getting on everyone’s nerves but instead, he’s such a lovable scoundrel that you can’t help but enjoy every moment.

Kiera Knightly, the other main reason to see the film, is solid. Elizabeth Swann has progressed so far from where she began in the first film that it’s hard to keep in mind that it’s the same actress and the same character. And it’s really a far more nuanced character than many people give her credit. here’s a pirate who wants to be a damsel but has to go save the boys from themselves. That she succeeds is only part of the tragedy of her character.

One of the most impressive elements of all three of the Pirate’s movies is the internal mythology. It’s built up gradually, with just enough revealed to show you a view of a larger world without the tedious exposition that usually drags down a fantasy film. We don’t need overly long prologues or opening crawl to set the scene. The film makers and the script writers are confident that the audience will be able to pick up the threads of the back story that are dropped in context of the story without needing more information. And when we do need that Little bit of exposition, we have Mr. Gibbs, the story teller, who lays out the legends in the time honored nautical tradition.

This nautical Tall Tale aspect is the key to the success of these stories as they pull in elements of world mythology that will seem familiar but still are changed enough to suit the unique world of the story. It’s perhaps this worldliness of the Pirate Mythology that is puzzling to some critics. We have a tendency to think of the Caribbean Pirates as American, but Pirate lore is world-spanning (as exemplified by the Nine brethren, who are all based on historical pirates from all parts of the world). This is a movie about the world and what stories we tell ourselves about freedom and ht elives we choose that make living in it bearable.