Yeah, speaking of things that need re-working, this Wagner thing could have used some editing. I won’t hash over all the details, but at the end of act II of Götterdämmerung (“The Twilight of the Gods”)there’s a part where Brünnhilde, Hagen and Gunther are planning to eliminate Siegfried. You’d think you could show them deciding on this in a minute or two, but they just go on and on repeating the how and why of it over and over again! The acting and singing is marvelous, but gotterdammerung, we heard you the first hundred times!
I think I understand why it’s like this, mind you. Wagner’s operas were written for live audiences sitting in fancy clothes in uncomfortable seats, not television viewers, as there was no such thing as television. The opera seems to be five hours long, and though there are periodic intermissions, I think they needed to give audience members a chance to get up now and again. You could go out for a stroll, come back, and you haven’t missed any new developments. This was probably necessary for the 19th-century opera-goer.
But I am a 21st-century television viewer. I can sit and watch TV for hours, as long as something new is happening fairly frequently. This was roughly five-hours long and I wasn’t even terribly interested in the outcome, and yet I still watched it. So it can be done.
My take on this whole production is that the stage was cool, the actors/singers were all excellent–but the thing was just too long and repetitive for television. They should have gone ahead and done the live performance, and then used the same cast and filmed a miniseries for PBS to show instead. Maybe that’s too much strain on the singers, though, I don’t know.
They can’t make them as good as they are in our memories, but they go on doing them and each time it’s a disaster. Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures – I’d love another shot at ‘Roots of Heaven’ – and make them good?
Huston said it–they should do remakes of lousy movies, books and games. Not necessarily the worst of the worst, but the ones that had potential and fell flat. The gameDaikatana was actually a good concept, it just didn’t work out. They should take another try at it. Alfred Hitchcock remade his own film The Man Who Knew Too Much. And I think many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories could have benefited from a reworking, especially The Shadow Out of Time.
Oh, well. I guess it makes economic sense that only popular things get remade, but it makes no artistic sense.
The first time I saw Robert Wise’s 1963 movie The Haunting, I was pretty young and I didn’t like it much. Too boring, I thought. But upon subsequent viewings I have come to think it’s actually a pretty effective horror film, because it does not rely on the grotesque and horrible to instill fear, but rather on subtle psychological manipulation.
In brief, the story concerns a paranormal researcher’s study of a reputedly haunted house. The film focuses on one participant, Eleanor Lance, who is apparently sensitive to the supernatural. Gradually, it begins to seem that the unexplainable phenomena of the “haunting” is directed at her.
What makes the movie interesting is that it’s hard to tell whether Eleanor is truly being haunted by anything or if she is just going insane. The ambiguity makes for a good “let the viewer decide” puzzle, which I like very much. I suppose the closing narration does tip the balance somewhat in favor of a supernatural explanation, but still, it’s very good.
One weakness in the movie is that Eleanor herself is not very sympathetic. I think the viewer is supposed to pity her, and I guess I kind of did, but to an extent it made her seem so vulnerable that it doesn’t seem that surprising that the house would cause her such distress.
The other problem I have isn’t so much with this movie in particular as it is with the whole “Haunted House” genre, which is that haunted houses aren’t especially scary unless you go inside them. Apparently, as the opening narration makes clear, “Hill House has stood for 90 years”, and hasn’t hurt anybody except those who decided to live in it during that time. This isn’t really that scary, because you know that as long as you don’t go in the place, you will be okay. It may pose a threat to sensitive souls like Eleanor, but not to the world at large.
To me, that isn’t frightening in the way that Lovecraftian monsters or even creatures like the Wolf Man and such are, because those things are autonomous and can go all around spreading terror. While haunted houses just sit there, being haunted.
However, with that said, it’s still very effective; the House itself looks very sinister, and the cinematography does a great job conveying unseen threat. If the “Haunted House” concept isn’t all that frightening upon reflection, it certainly is easy to forget that while watching the movie.
I know they remade the movie in 1999. I haven’t seen the remake, but I have heard it was much less subtle than the original, and made the supernatural much more explicit. I won’t judge without seeing it, but seems plausible. Horror movies have declined a great deal since the ’60s.
My blogger friend Thingy mentioned reading and enjoying Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 awhile back. I’d never read any books by him, so I decided to give it a try. I’ll try not to spoil it here, but it’s about time-travel and the unintended side-effects thereof.
It’s quite good, all in all. You can tell he made an effort to research the styles and vernacular of the 1960s, and he also does a pretty good job of presenting both the good and the bad aspects of that era. There was also a lot of the hint-don’t-tell kind of cosmic horror in certain parts that I really liked.
The ending was a bit weaker though still good. Again, without giving away too much, there was a part of it that reminded of the book A Clockwork Orange, and that felt kind of cliched. The ending was… I guess, “bittersweet” is probably the best word for it.
I might analyze it more in-depth later, but for now, I just want to recommend reading it.
I know I’m in the minority on this, but me and a friend happened to be talking about our disappointment with the Harry Potter series. I think talking about J.K. Rowling’s new book was what started it. We agree that 6/7 of the series is quite good. But the last 1/7 is a different story.
The series starts out magnificently, the first 60% or so being among some of the finest adventure epics I’ve ever read. In the second half, it gets weaker, but still very, very good. But it culminates in an inexplicable and unforeseeable disaster that tarnishes the whole thing. It is the 2007 New England Patriots of Y.A. fiction.
The first four books combine adventure, humor, horror and mystery into an excellent package. The climactic scene in the fourth book where Voldemort rises again gives me chills every time I read it. The next two books are not as good—they have more pointless teenage angst, and seem less tightly-plotted and well-edited than the previous ones. But they’re still quite good.
And then, alas, we come to book seven. The best thing about it is the cover. (In fact, the quality of Harry Potter books is inversely proportional to the quality of their cover art.)
This book is a mess. There is no gentler way of putting it. Early on we have the inexplicable alteration in Remus Lupin’s personality. Why he would suddenly become so reckless makes really no sense for the character, except, I guess, to set up a tearjerker fate for him and Tonks. It doesn’t work for me; it feels like the character just wildly altered his personality for no reason.
Then there is there is the posthumous destruction of Albus Dumbledore’s character. Now, I like the idea of a seemingly generic, stock character (kind, wise teacher) turning out to be more unique and interesting. Theoretically, it sounds like a good idea. But it doesn’t work with Dumbledore, because it comes too late in the story, and moreover it takes too much time away from developing other characters. Which leads me to my next point…
The marginalization of Severus Snape is another weird error, compounded by the fact that he got all the advance hype, and yet was barely in the book save for one flashback chapter. Snape is by far the most interesting and complicated character in the series, but he gets largely ignored and instead we get “The Dirty Life and Times of Albus Dumbledore”, or whatever it was.
This is all pretty bad so far, but I might have liked the book despite it all. What ruins it for me are the following catastrophic things.
First and foremost: The pointless introduction of the Deathly Hallows, which just confuse everything and add even more MacGuffins on top of the already hard-to-keep-track-of Horcruxes. The first six books were spent setting up the Horcrux plot thread; the Deathly Hallows just show up out of left field. They are a magical device too far.
This is closely related to the problem that the Deathly Hallows, particularly the Elder Wand, are governed by a set of byzantine laws that seem designed arbitrarily for dramatic effect. And even for dramatic effect, they fall short. The entire book hinges on Dumbledore’s “final plan” going awry, Voldemort not studying his Wizarding law, and Potter just happeningto disarm Malfoy at the right moment. Not on Potter learning something, or having courage; it’s just sheer luck. Realistic, I guess, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of the series. (Jenny Sawyer wrote a review when the book came out that addresses this in a bit more detail.)
Finally, in the atrocious epilogue, I don’t understand how it is that no one seems to have learned that Slytherin house creates vastly more problems than it solves, and that it really should be abolished. Here they are, with the old rivalries still maintained, despite the fact that Slytherin’s Founder buried a giant monster under the school, his “heir” tried to conquer the world, and all but two of the people who are known to have attended Slytherin have been evil. (Even Snape and Slughorn aren’t exactly model citizens, but they keep it from being uniformly bad.)
But no, nobody cares, and they are still admitting people into Slytherin, effectively sorting all the little maniacs into one isolated group, cut off from the rest of the school. I would have tweaked the Sorting Hat’s algorithm to distribute the evildoers into the other houses, where they might be reformed, or at least restrained.
There are other flaws as well–the extremely dull camping trip (and the attendant return of pointless teenage angst), the comical ineptitude of Voldemort and his minions, the unbelievable ease and speed with which the entire Ministry of Magic converts from being a liberal democracy into an authoritarian regime. (Did all Ministry of Magic employees get a memo “You’re all going to be Nazis now”?) but these could be overlooked, if not for all the major flaws mentioned above.
All this adds up to a disaster. The characters are inconsistent, which makes them hard to care about. The MacGuffins and plot devices pop up everywhere, and are not really connected to each other in a meaningful way. The climactic battle between Potter and Voldemort is resolved by a quirk of wizard law, an ending which would be very well in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, but not so good in an epic high-fantasy novel.
Star Wars fans moan endlessly about how “the prequels ruined Star Wars“. Putting aside that I like the prequels, I never understood how the creation of a new movie could somehow retroactively ruin previous ones. But I can sort of feel that way with Harry Potter thanks to Book Seven. It sort of dulls the appeal of the whole series for me. It probably shouldn’t, because I can still go back and read the brilliant Chamber of Secrets and it is every bit the tightly-plotted magical thriller that it was before Deathly Hallows was even written. But, the fact remains, I have not bothered to revisit any of the other Potter books since Hallows, and I suspect my lack of motivation to do so is because of the awful finale.
When you criticize something popular, people usually respond with: “could you do better?” Fortunately, I don’t have to. The good people at “How It Should Have Ended” have already supplied an answer to that question:
I did something new yesterday. I watched almost all of an episode of a “reality TV” show. I’ve really never watched any in the past–save for a few minutes of a “Wipeout” course that looked kind of neat–because “reality TV” shows strike me as stupid, which is a little unfair to think given that I’ve never seen one, but I have seen commercials for them during football games and they don’t look very interesting.
But it transpired I had some time to waste, and there was nothing on PBS that I hadn’t seen, and so I flipped over to the show “Stars Earn Stripes” on NBC. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a show in which various celebrities run missions “based on” military training exercises. The only celebrity on it who I had heard of before was Sarah Palin’s husband, so I’m not sure they’re actually “stars”.
I think the words “based on” are highly significant here. I have never served in the military, but I am highly skeptical of whether they would have a training exercise like the one on last night’s episode, where the contestants had to shoot (with a pistol) at stationary, dinner-plate sized targets on the ground from a parked humvee. Seems pointless, unless they are expecting to fight a ground war against an army of dinner plates. If any veterans read this and have seen the show, I’d love to hear from them about it.
Their was also some sort of “elimination round” between two of the contestants. It seemed more realistic, in that it was some kind of competition to clear a confined area of targets. It looked like shows I’ve seen on S.W.A.T. training where they practice fighting through a building that has been taken over by criminals.
A lot of people, including Nobel Peace Prize Winners, say the show glorifies war. I guess it does, but it mostly glorifies training for war, which may or may not be the same thing. It’s not as egregious about it as, for example, the super-popular Call of Dutygames or many popular action movies, but at the same time it definitely plays like a military recruiting commercial, especially with the awkward presence of General Wesley Clark as co-host.
Is that bad? I don’t know; the military has been trying to figure out ways of recruiting more people through P.R. stunts ever since the draft ended. Maybe it was because of my expectations, but it struck me as no different than those ads you see during football games for the various branches of the service. And those, I feel, are about as likely to succeed as other commercials.
It’s the Act of Valor issue all over again: sure, it’s recruiting film, but that still doesn’t answer whether it’s a bad thing or a good thing. Personally, I think it’s kind of weird to show the celebrities doing stuff “based on” military training. Seeing them try to get through an exact re-creation of Army Ranger training would probably be more exciting viewing, but then, I don’t think many celebrities would sign on for that. And I doubt many viewers would say “looks like fun.”
Like I said, I haven’t seen much reality TV, but I get the impression the big draw is seeing the emotional disputes and inter-personal drama between the contestants. There was none of that here. I’m guessing that NBC wanted an emotionally stable cast, since they are giving them access to real weapons and live ammunition. (Shades of “You can’t fight in here, this is the war room!”) It makes practical and ethical sense, but probably makes for worse TV.
Lastly, I did feel a little weird watching the show. Maybe I am cynical but it–along with most reality shows and sporting events–remind me a little too much of the Ancient Roman Gladiator Games. While it’s obviously much safer for the contestants, there’s still something a bit unsettling about it as a viewer.
“Pollice Verso” by Jean-Léon Gérôme. 1872 artist’s conception of gladiatorial games.
In general, I have never been a huge fan of the “average guy who is secretly a super crime-fighter” trope. As a general rule, stories where characters have to lead secret double-lives a la Batman and Superman strike me as illogical. But there was one such character who I always thought was pretty awesome: Doctor Syn, or more properly, his alter-ego, the Scarecrow.
There are lots of stories about him, beginning with the series of pulpy novels by Russell Thorndike. I’ve never read those; they look to be on the along the lines of the Zorro stories. I’ve only watched the Disney movie version of the story with Patrick McGoohan, one of my favorite actors, playing the lead. That was enough for me to decide he was a pretty cool character.
By day, he is Doctor Christopher Syn, a humble vicar in a small, 18th-Century English village. But at night, Doctor Syn dons this awesome mask–more on that later–and becomes “the Scarecrow”. He’s tough to describe–what he does is basically the standard Robin Hood, steal-from-rich, give-to-poor act, but the character himself is more of a Batman-like figure. He has no supernatural powers; he is just a very skilled fighter and horseback rider. He is also quite sinister looking, even though he is the hero. His costume puts every other super-hero outfit I’ve seen to shame. And McGoohan does a great job with the role.
What really makes the series so eerie is the setting. The evocative cinematography is surprisingly good. The splendid England coast atmosphere is wonderfully spooky. It is especially fun to watch around Halloween. I think what I like most about the series is the historical setting.
I should mention that the Scarecrow is, for a Disney movie anyway, a pretty edgy hero. He’s not an anti-hero, but he does some pretty devious stuff nonetheless. (I get the impression that he’s an even darker, more outright anti-hero kind of character in the books.)
Back to the Scarecrow’s mask: the thing is brilliantly designed, part of it is mask and part of it is painted, and it really looks convincing. It has to be one of the coolest props made in that era. On the 2008 edition DVD release, there’s a little feature on how they made it. Even to fairly critical eyes, it holds up pretty well against the best C.G.I. tricks of modern film-making. I’d post a picture, but stills don’t do it justice. You have to see it in motion.
P.M. Prescott’s comment on this post reminded me of an issue I’ve wanted to write about on here for a while: TV commercials. Are they worth it?
I almost always mute commercials when they come on, unless they’re for something I am already interested in. I can’t think of any time in my life when I’ve decided to buy something just because I saw a commercial for it. I generally research any major purchases first.
And then there are the commercials for small things, like soft drinks. Maybe other people are different, but I don’t see those commercials and go “well, I’ve just got to go buy a [X soft drink] right now.” My soft drink purchase decisions are made purely on the basis of what’s most convenient; I don’t care about brands enough to spend extra time hunting down a particular drink.
Some say that commercials work subliminally. Well, maybe. But how effective can the ads be when they produce no noticeable change in my behavior? Even if it’s subliminal, I would notice that I suddenly had a desire to go out and buy particular things.
Especially interesting to me are political ads. (With which we are about to be deluged, incidentally) Is anybody really going to vote based on what a TV ad said? I just assume that all political ads are telling half-truths at best, and so I tune them out automatically.
Given all that, I have to think that companies are overpaying for ads. The return on it can’t be that much, can it? I think a company gets more benefit from announcing at the beginning of a program that they are sponsoring the whole thing without commercial interruption than they do from advertising during it. Because, in general, commercials annoy the viewer who is just trying to watch something.
I touched on this with my last post about the movie Rudy: it can be fun to come up with alternative interpretations of movies that the directors and writers didn’t think of. With Rudy, I was saying that I found the hero character’s fixation on football to be an unhealthy obsession, rather than the inspirational determination it is presented as being.
Some movies have much more elaborate alternative interpretations. Take the Star Wars movies for example: most people assumed that the Empire is evil just because the opening crawl said so. But, in Phantom Menace, it’s pretty clear that what Palpatine says about the Old Republic being “mired” by “bureaucrats” is true. They can’t even get it together to go do something when one of their planets gets invaded and occupied. If nothing else, the Empire runs a more efficient operation.
If I know politics, a few years after ROTJ, there would be a massive campaign to rehabilitate Palpatine’s image.
This does not even take into account the Jedi, who claim to be good–although the only people who really seem to feel this way are the Jedi themselves–but who are shown to brainwash people from a young age to indoctrinate them into their cult. They say the Sith are evil, but in the movies, at least, the Sith wait until you’re an adult before asking you to join. Count Dooku was a former Jedi and an aristocrat of some sort before he opted to try his hand at Sith Lording in his retirement.
Also, of course, there’s the fact that everything the Jedi do turns out to be an abysmal failure. The Sith are clearly the only ones capable of creating a plan and seeing it through to the end in that galaxy. Even at the end, in Return of the Jedi, all the Jedi stuff Luke had been taught goes by the boards, and the Emperor is overthrown not by him, but by the actions of a renegade Sith.
George Lucas probably didn’t intend any of these interpretations (and the “Expanded Universe” contradicts a lot of them), but I think the movies can definitely be viewed that way. Personally, I think it makes more sense in some ways.
Or take Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. It was controversial for its promotion of conspiracy theories. I have a different take on it: I think Kevin Costner’s character is an unreliable narrator (he’s not really the narrator, but the film is very much from his perspective) who has this weird obsession with conspiracies. Donald Sutherland’s character “X” is a figment of his imagination, whom he created to fulfill his dreams of uncovering a massive plot. Try watching JFK and then A Beautiful Mind and see if you don’t agree.
Saw the movie Rudy on TV the other day. It was about what I always expect sports movies to be. Totally predictable, and thus somewhat dull, even though the acting, cinematography and music were all pretty good. It’s based on a true story, and to its credit remained relatively true to the actual events. You can see film of the actual play by Daniel Ruettiger here.
What surprised me a little about the movie was the extent to which it is a giant ad for the University of Notre Dame. That, and the fact that Rudy, as depicted in the film, seemed a little unhinged in his obsession with playing football for them. I don’t know if the real guy was like that–probably not–but the character as shown in the movie seems overly fixated on it to me.
I’m not saying a person shouldn’t want to play football for their favorite team, and I am totally behind the “don’t give up on your dreams” message, but still, there’s a difference between “never giving up” and “obsessing to the point of madness”. It made it difficult for me to relate to the character.
