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Via Hacker News, an interesting article by Linda Holmes, pointing out that there isn’t enough time in the world to see all the works of literature and art:

“After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you’d otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, ‘All genre fiction is trash.’ You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you’ve thrown out so much at once.

The same goes for throwing out foreign films, documentaries, classical music, fantasy novels, soap operas, humor, or westerns. I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don’t talk about rap; it’s not important. Don’t talk about anyone famous; it isn’t important. And by the way, don’t tell me it is important, because that would mean I’m ignoring something important, and that’s … uncomfortable. That’s surrender.” [Italics hers.]

I understand this. For example, I listen to almost no currently popular music and I watch very little television. I also see few new movies, preferring to watch classic old movies instead.

This is not because I assume all the new things to be worthless, however. I go by the rule of thumb that much of the currently popular stuff is awful, some of it is mildly enjoyable, and a very small portion of it is destined for immortality as great Art.* It seems probable, at any rate. Besides, I’m not absolutist about not seeing or hearing anything new. It’s a general policy, not an iron law.

But why do I choose to spend less time on “current” art and more time on older stuff, and not the other way round? The reason is that I believe it sort of helps you be less susceptible to fads in general. It’s similar to the phenomenon Paul Graham wrote about in his essay “Taste for Makers”:

“Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition change with time, so if you can make something that will still look good far into the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion.

Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations. It’s hard to guess what the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions.”

Obviously, the major (but not only) exception to my avoidance of current art is the video game thing. Part of it is simply that I like games and that’s that, but another part of it is that most people don’t think of them as “Art” yet, and I’m hoping to be slightly ahead of the pack on this.

Having said that, I can think of lots of reasons one might choose to ignore old Art and focus on the new. There are pros and cons to both.

*This is why I’m sensitive about people condemning video games as unintelligent, immature, juvenile entertainment. It is true that most video games are just that, but not all of them. Some are truly brilliant, and I don’t like to see them condemned.

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I’ve blogged several times in the last few months about the Atlas Shrugged movie. It might seem like I’m really fascinated by it, so I’ll try to stop. But first, I’d just like to say that this review of it by P.J. O’Rourke–a conservative who is somewhat sympathetic to Ayn Rand–is pretty funny. However, it also perpetuates some Republican talking points, as in:

“Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative… It’s the plain folks, not a Taggart/Rearden elite, whose prospects and opportunities are stolen by corrupt school systems, health-care rationing, public employee union extortions, carbon-emissions payola and deficit-debt burden graft. Today’s collectivists are going after malefactors of moderate means.”

But Ayn Rand didn’t like “plain folks”. Atlas Shrugged is very deliberately about romanticizing the rich. O’Rourke calls for an “update” to make the story favor the “plain folks”, but that is antithetical to Rand’s philosophy.

Sometimes I almost feel like I understand this book better than a lot of the people who say they agree with it.

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I watched the 2008 film adaptation of the book The Thirty-Nine Steps last week. I’ve never read the book, or seen the classic Hitchcock film, but this version was quite enjoyable, being well-paced and fairly well-acted. From what I have read, however, it bore little resemblance to the novel.

But one thing that irritated me was the film’s use of a rather tired trope. The film’s hero and heroine meet while the hero is being chased by German spies. As they are trying to flee their pursuers by car, they are trading petty insults back and forth, even as the spies are closing in on them.

Ultimately, of course, they end up falling in love.

This sort of thing seems to be very common in film nowadays. Personally, I’m tired of it, and it wasn’t all that good to begin with. I’m all for injecting wit into even serious films; but the fact is that most people will not be coming up with clever insults while being pursued by armed enemy forces.

Moreover; I don’t know who decided every movie couple has to start off being annoyed by and arguing with each other. From what I have heard, I was under the impression it was more regular for a couple to like one another at first, and only over the course of years of knowing one another do they start fighting. But that’s quite cynical, I admit.

One of the reasons I hold the Star Wars prequels superior to the original trilogy is that they managed to almost entirely avoid this kind of thing. Whereas Han Solo and Princess Leia fight with each other almost constantly throughout A New Hope and the first half of The Empire Strikes Back, in the prequels Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala are actually shown to be in love first, before they run into… difficulties in their relationship.

I am not arguing for the Star Wars prequel love story as some kind of model for cinema romance. It is rather shabbily written, no doubt. But as a concept, it stands out from contemporary film romances. (Admittedly, this is partly because it is willing to embrace even older tropes that have lately fallen so far out of fashion they seem more original.)

The essence of drama, the saying tells us, is conflict. Therefore, in order to create drama, the lazy writer simply creates conflict wherever he can, even if it doesn’t make sense for the characters and story.

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[Warning! This post contains spoilers for H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness.]

Via Ross Douthat, an interesting piece in The New Yorker about filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, which among other things documents his efforts to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness for the big screen. One line that made me hopeful:

“[O]ne of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecraft’s novella is that the explorers are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production.”  

That is exactly the sort of style one should seek in adaptation of Madness, in my opinion, so I’m glad to hear that. On the other hand, del Toro also seems to take particular delight in making the monsters of the story especially horrifying and grotesque. This is a fine thing by itself, and there is a distinct art to creating compelling creatures that follows a long cinema tradition.

But, in my opinion, the monsters are not of primary importance in Madness, or in Lovecraft’s work generally. Lovecraft did describe his monsters in great detail, it’s true, but this was part and parcel of his literary style overall. The feeling of oppressive “cosmic horror” is what’s key–the precise nature of the monsters is not important.

For me, the truly terrifying part of Madness is contained in these lines, perhaps the most fascinating lines in all of Lovecraft’s work, in which the protagonist muses over the alien “Old Ones”, killed by their creations:

 “Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!” [Emphasis mine]

All of the evocative setting, and all of Lovecraft’s meticulous descriptions, build to this moment, where sinister parallels are drawn between the fate of the bygone civilization and humanity in a disturbing, and (by Lovecraft standards) emotionally powerful revelation.

I disagree with the title of the New Yorker article. Personally, if I were adapting it, the Shoggoths–like whatever the assistant sees at the novel’s end–would be left entirely to the imagination of the viewer, though I would carry it a step further than even Lovecraft did, and make it so the Shoggoth was never even seen by the protagonist, only by his assistant. Though I can see, whether he would want to or not, that del Toro would never be able to sell this idea.

And, I mean to say, it’s del Toro’s film. I’ve never seen his other work, but I hear he’s good. He’s made more award-winning movies than I ever have. I’m not trying to attack him or say I don’t think his movie will be good. I’m saying he has a good idea to make the movie, but if he gets to do it, it needs to be done right if it is to avoid being the typical horror film.

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I posted about the trailer for the movie Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 a few weeks ago. Well, now it seems the film’s producer has revealed he’s thinking of doing Part 3 of the trilogy as a musical. No, really.

Oh, I think making it a musical is an excellent idea, though probably not for reasons Objectivists would like. For some reason, I can see very clearly in my mind’s eye John Galt singing a lightly altered version of “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man to an assembled crowd of industrialists.

Honestly, though, I think this must be a joke. But on the other hand, if it is true, I will admit that my prediction that they would be too faithful to Rand’s novel would be quite wrong.

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I’ve only seen one of the movies that is nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, and that is Toy Story 3.

Last year, I saw both Avatar and The Hurt Locker, neither of which I liked very much. Toy Story 3 is a better film than both, in my opinion.

I don’t really see new movies in the theater very much; I think I average about one per year over the past ten years. (It’s more if you count seeing the last two Star Wars prequels twice.) I usually wait a few years and watch them on DVD.

It’s odd, too, because I enjoy movies. And what I really like about them is analyzing them, not just watching them. So, logically, I probably should care which movies win what awards; but such ceremonies are too heavy on  pageantry and light on analysis for my own tastes.

So, I’ve never watched one of these ceremonies, and I probably won’t again this year.

I hope Natalie Portman wins, though.

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The trailer for part 1 of the upcoming movie Atlas Shrugged is out, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I was watching the trailer for a James Bond flick.

The look of everything in that trailer is altogether too nice for the Dystopian feel of Ayn Rand’s novel. Particularly, the lighting on everything is too warm and appealing; it ought to look colder and bleaker.

Leaving aside all my disagreements with the book’s philosophy itself, it seems to me that if you’re going to adapt it for screen, you may as well do it properly.

Oh, well, it should at least be funny, at all events. And it did sound like they’ve improved on Rand’s rather poor dialogue.

All that said, I predict that what’s going to kill this movie is: failure to trim enough of the text. The cult of Ayn Rand (as brilliantly mocked by Murray Rothbard in his play Mozart was a Red) is still going on and might very well have already convinced the filmmakers that they are adapting a sacred text, and must change as little as possible.

To be fair, most adaptations of books to movies make that mistake. (And most of the rest ignore the text completely and become a disaster) A story that first appeared as a book is optimized for book form. If you make it a film, it will likely suffer, unless (and this often just isn’t possible) you are able to tell a similar story and optimize it for film.

But most movies don’t do that. They just try to stuff  in as much of the popular stuff from the book as they can.

(Hat Tip for the trailer to the Conservative film site Big Hollywood)

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I just read a rather interesting post by Ross Douthat, made in responding to Michael Lind’s criticism of Star Wars as “primitivism”. Douthat argues that the prequels were more like Lind’s preferred Star Trek, writing:

“…the lost Old Republic that the rebels fight to restore in the original films was revealed to be , well, ‘a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN,’ with the Jedi Knights as its peacekeeping force and the lightsaber as the equivalent of the blue helmet.

For Lind, then, I can only assume that watching the prequels was an immensely gratifying experience. And for the rest of us, the knowledge that Lind’s prescription for “Star Wars” helped produce three of the most disappointing science-fiction blockbusters ever made should be reason enough to reject his prescription for America.”

I agree with Douthat’s analysis, though not his conclusion. Because, you see, I thought the prequels were better than the originals. No–that’s not quite true. I thought A New Hope and The Phantom Menace were about equally good. Other than that, the prequels were better.

Someday, I’ll have to write a post about that.

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Jackson Bentley: “What attracts you personally to the desert?”
T.E. Lawrence: “It’s clean.”–Lawrence of Arabia, 1962.

One of the many remarkable features of that film, David Lean‘s masterpiece, is the fact that there are many long scenes of people on camels trekking through the desert, and yet it never gets boring. The harsh wasteland in which T.E. Lawrence leads the Arabs in revolt against the Turks is so haunting and intriguing as to almost become a character in its own right.
It probably isn’t quite as hard to accomplish that effect in a video game, because interactivity makes the process of walking through a desert less dull, and thus there is less need for artistry in the landscape. Still, to manage to achieve the same in a video game is no small feat.

I mention this because, of late, I’ve seen a lot of complaining in the blogosphere about Obsidian and Bethesda’s game Fallout: New Vegas. And not from people looking to bash a game for no reason, but from people of good taste and intelligence like Wil Shipley and Simon Burdett.
Now, I will concede that both of them make good arguments as to the game’s flaws, and there are only a few points where I can actually say I disagree with them. But for me, all the valid criticisms I’ve heard for F:NV are utterly outmatched by its many virtues. 

The brilliance of New Vegas is really in the area surrounding the city of New Vegas. The story is obviously very good, and the writing is quite well-done, but where the game truly shines is in small moments as you explore the wasteland, especially once they are contrasted with the goings-on in the city.

New Vegas is yet another installment in Obsidian’s growing line of games that simply are literature. The land itself seems to become a character, its haunted desolation providing the tone of the whole story. The irony, however, is in the open, melancholy beauty of the Mojave contrasted with the crime-filled and ugly city. It serves well the game’s dark take on human nature: the sinister implication that humanity grows more corrupted and ugly as it rebuilds from the war.

This sense of escape, the feeling of exploring a vast expanse of land, also plays on the interactivity factor. It feels more like a world to be shaped and explored, than a pile of rubble to struggle over.

Fallout: New Vegas has its flaws, its bugs, its weak scenes and its missed opportunities. But I think of none of these when I think of playing it. I think instead about the feeling of adventure of standing out in a ruined abode in the desert, watching the sun go down behind the Mojave outpost as Marty Robbins‘ “Big Iron” plays in the background, wondering where I want to go next.

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I saw it last night on DVD. I was quite impressed by it, frankly. For a film that is intended to be for children and adults, I’d say they managed to balance things for the two audiences quite effectively. And there are a lot of well-done prison break movie references that I found quite enjoyable.

I’d also have to say it was one of the more emotionally mature of all recently-made movies I’ve seen. I’ve heard that some people even cried at the end of it. I can’t see that. (It’s about dolls, after all.)

Nonetheless, it’s definitely true that the people at Pixar take these things more seriously and think them through more than most film directors nowadays are likely to do.

Lastly–and I know I’ll sound silly for saying this–I’ve always thought it interesting that the toys in these movies seem to look more “alive” than the human characters. Presumably, this is because they are the “stars” of the movie, and therefore more effort is put into working on them. However, it does create something of an interesting “the-toys-are-more-human” effect in the viewer’s mind. (Sort of like how HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey has more personality than the human characters.)

This is an interesting effect; but I think in Toy Story 3 it actually hurts the movie, because the human characters play a larger role in it than in the previous two, and for the first time they are somewhat relevant as characters, not just as plot devices.

But perhaps that is simply over-analyzing what is, after all, an entertaining children’s flick.