David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (2004)

The film adaptation opens tomorrow and it's unlikely that I'll ever see it.  The trailer makes the film look quite insufferable, Hollywoodizing the novel by inventing a romantic aspect and using a "reincarnation" idea so that the filmmakers can indulge in a bit of stunt casting.  I could be wrong of course but even if those details are off it's hard to imagine the result will be worthwhile in any way at all.

Then again the book is something of a mixed bag.  As you've probably heard it's a series of nestled stories where the first and last are the same, the second and next-to-last another, etc.  Each one has a reference to the previous in some way and there are a few hints of a connection such as a distinctive birthmark that the main characters share.  The stories are also genre pieces such as historical fiction, thriller, SF and so on.

Clever, right?  Well yes and actually written with a knack for the styles that keeps it from getting too tedious.  Except for the SF parts where the book goes completely off the rails and becomes nearly unreadable.  This highlights the main issue (I wouldn't go so far as to call it a problem) that these are really very loosely connected short stories and only a novel in the broadest sense.  This seems to be a small trend recently with other books such as The Imperfectionists and Welcome to the Goon Squad also being fix-ups as old-school SF people used to call this.  In fact Cloud Atlas is similar in many ways to Welcome to the Goon Squad though while Egan made more of a novel out of her subject she was also note remotely skilled enough to pull off what she was trying to do.  (It's also worth noting that Egan has only a mainstream lit-type's understanding of SF - basically that it's only predictions - so her SF section is ridiculous but Mitchell at least uses two distinct and genuine styles of SF.  Quite poorly admittedly but it's an honest attempt.) 

Mitchell seems to be basing his stories on the idea of employer/employee (or master/slave in a couple of cases) relationships which the film seems to have turned into more a romance.  The problem is that I'm actually not quite sure that's what Mitchell was doing or even if he intended for there to be any thematic connection.  Which is another reason that in the end the book is a slapdash affair that pushes some plodding material up against the good stuff.  And when it's good it's good enough that I suspect other Mitchell novels are worth checking out.  (Particularly I like the end of the first part in a way that can only happen in a printed book - an ebook can only hint at how that works.)

Library haul

Typically I end up reading about half of what comes out of the library but they're so tempting....

Dirda - On Conan Doyle
Marchant - Decoding the Heavens
Baker - The Way the World Works
Rosendorfer - The Architect of Ruins
Icks - The Crimes of Elagabalus
Hatfield - The Hand of Fire (Jack Kirby)
Gilmour - The Pursuit of Italy
Sinclair - Lights Out for the Territory
Pekar - Harvey Pekar: Conversations
Heer - Comics Studies Reader

What happened to Warehouse 13?

Warehouse 13 has never been a great show but it's usually lightly done and quite entertaining.  The first season aimed at little more than that - vaguely The X-Files minus the angst, incoherent backstory and, let's face it, some of the smarts.  The second season added a fantastic plot twist that made me laugh and then they built on that with just a tad of quite effective moral ambiguity.

The third season is now streaming on Netflix and the first episodes of the fourth have aired but something is way off.  It's like a key writer or even the show runner left so everybody remaining is falling back on the least imaginative TV writing possible.  For one thing the eps are now mostly solve-the-riddle format, something that's always been there but usually more in the background.  These riddles should be the MacGuffins that drive the story not the actual point of the story - watching characters figure out something that's completely arbitrary and that we have no way of figuring out ourselves is quite pointless. 

Season 3's bad guy similarly shows little thought.  In the earlier seasons the main baddie was driven by understandable motives - greed, anger, revenge.  Plus they had some connection to Warehouse 13 that added texture to the story.  In Season 3 he's doing all these bad things because he's evil.  Seriously, that's it - an artifact turned him evil.  This descends into bottom-of-the-barrel pulp/comics writing.  Oddly the show's creators decided to toy with his identity, very obviously withholding it by keeping him just out of the frame during numerous scenes and building up to a big reveal.  And then we learn that....TAH DAH it's somebody we've never seen before!  This is notably clumsy and almost makes me wonder if in fact they decided to change this person's identity partway through the season - otherwise this makes almost no sense except as incompetence.  (Well to be fair we have met this person before but it was as a child so there's no way anybody could have drawn that connection.)

Then we get to the issue of the cliffhanger.  At the end of Season 3 they take the big step of, gasp, actually destroying the warehouse.  Boom, flames, gone.  This seems like a clever way to push the show in a new direction but alas the start of Season 4 pushes a "reset" button and undoes all that.  Even worse, undoes it in another tedious, connect-the-opaque-dots story.  Hey didn't we mention there's an artifact that resets the entire world to 24 hours earlier?  For no particular reason?  The creators do try to complicate this a bit by stating that the reset will unleash Something Bad but since so far that has remained under wraps there's really no dilemma.

Warehouse 13 has never really bothered to fill out its background so a lot of it doesn't make sense or hold together.  But as long as that wasn't a focus it didn't much matter, sort of how The X-Files worked until they tried to piece together a "mythology" out of unconnected stories until even fans gave up on it.  Warehouse 13 might be headed down that path - we'll have to see how this season plays out.  As a sidenote it's interesting to see how the show tries to position itself as science fiction when it's inarguably fantasy.  But considering how confused the creators seem to be then that's not particularly surprising.

John Cage

It's safe to say that John Cage changed my life though it's safer to say I couldn't really explain how.  My first encounter with Cage came in the Fall of 1980 (or possibly 1981) when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama.  He visited campus and all I knew is that he made strange music, something that immediately drew my attention.  The concert in the student center's auditorium (the spot that ignited my cinephilia though that story is for another time) was packed and consisted of Cage pieces interspersed with Satie.  Of course I had no idea who Satie was but I immediately liked the piano music that almost wasn't music.  The Cage pieces I mainly remember for having the music faculty and grad students parading around tapping on cardboard - they didn't seem very amused but I was.

The following day made perhaps a greater impression.  Cage gave a short lecture and longer Q&A, the main point being that people should be open to more experiences and that academics in particular are far too compartmentalized.  Seems pretty obvious to me even though my exposure to academia at that time was quite slight.  But it wasn't obvious to many, maybe most, of the faculty in the audience who were quite annoyed and didn't hesitate to say Cage was wrong.  Cage wasn't argumentative, in fact wasn't even trying to convince people at least not in the way we're familiar with seeing.  That I now know as typical Cage but this kind of discussion without debate, without attempting to impose your view (possibly even a variation on negative capability) was a revelation.  (And in its own way so was the academics' responses.  I've spent many years working alongside but not in academia and though there's a lot of talk given to crossing disciplines it's no more fluid than it was then.  The odd thing is that most academics I know are quite curious, open-minded people; they just aren't too concerned about what's outside their pastures.)

Since then I've spent a lot of time reading material by and about Cage and of course listening to his music.  He seems to some degree a trickster figure (not a charlatan, a quite different thing), laughing at wayward ideas, strange coincidences and the sheer bounty of thought, sharing beautiful little objects he found, running after some stray sound.  I've always loved that nearly every photo of Cage shows him smiling.  And though some people take him as such I've never found Cage a particularly deep or even revelatory thinker - he was far too taken with ideas instead of systems.  Maybe that's why the music has lasted instead of stuck in the museum alongside other modernist inventions.  He didn't always know what it would sound like at the end but he cared about the end and even more about getting there, not about the method itself.  I think it was Kyle Gann who said Cage inspired countless people but almost no imitators and maybe that's the real point.  We're so concerned with methods and algorithms and results and winners that we have pretty much no vocabulary to describe how we might think about using and enjoying all this (and the failures too! and the stuff that doesn't matter!) in the way that Cage often did.  Or maybe the point is just listening to his prepared piano sonatas, the Europeras, the Imaginary Landscapes, the early string quartets, the number pieces that I can never keep separate and whatever might be floating past as you read this.....

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan 2012)

Spoilers of course.

Just like the Lord of the Rings films, the three in Nolan's Batman trilogy get progressively worse until it's hard not to wonder whether the first one was really that good or it just got the benefit of the doubt because it wasn't a complete botch.  In Nolan's case he definitely focused more on the more ill-considered aspects of the first film, perhaps reading his own press too much.  All the good parts of the first two films basically came out of The Long Halloween but left without the structure he mostly picked and weakened from there Nolan for this film was left to his own devices.

It's hard to argue that The Dark Knight Rises should be 164 minutes especially considering that it's not at all a complex or involved story - bad guys steal a bomb, good guy doesn't think he can take care of business.  Trim all the brooding and elaborate discussions of things nobody should need to talk about ("We need The Batman!" "No, no we don't." "Yes! We do!") and about an hour of useless material would be gone.  Nolan, though, is nothing if not a ponderous filmmaker.  My guess is that he believes he's telling a Hero's Journey but he follows the Lit 101 conception so closely that there's hardly any point.

To have needed years of work, the script is remarkably sloppy.  Its most clever twist is the apparent change to Ras al-Ghul's child - Bane?  Nope, it's Talia after all though it's obvious that we won't be getting a Damian in future films.  I was never quite sure what prompted Bruce's vision of Ras that revealed some of this.  We get one person who figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman simply by looking at him but another trained in observation and critical thinking who doesn't realize this until the end.  (Actually I thought the film was making a point that everybody knew considering how often this is discussed - did none of the thugs who heard Bane say this not talk with anybody else?)  There's a nuclear explosion right offshore that apparently has no negative effects.  Alfred sends some unknown hired help to take dinner to Bruce's quarters (well actually an entire wing but still).  Who on earth would send their entire police force underground?  Why was Bruce sent to The Pit instead of simply being killed?  (Which I think may have been explained but am not quite sure.)  Why did nobody in The Pit mention that The Child was a girl?  The big conflict at the end is pretty tension-free considering that it starts with lots of activity in one day and then everything pauses for five months, clearly so that Batman can find some way to escape The Pit and make his way back from wherever that is located.  This almost seems to be two scripts mashed together which may also explain the length - after cutting large parts of both nobody realized much more still needed to go. (And I can't help wonder if the name of the potential new Robin was deliberate - James/Jim Blake vs Tim Drake.) 

Other parts of the script are pure Hollywood default thinking (the very implausible bomb timer), done for visual reasons (police making a frontal assault on an entrenched position when there are clear options), unnecessary characterization in the mistaken belief that's what serious storytellers do and so forth.  Sure much of this is true of some quite good films but those were either entertaining (which TDKR almost never is) or were in some way grappling with whatever art grapples with (which TDKR completely fails to do).  It doesn't help that motivations are often fairly opaque and not in a nice way.  So Talia and Bane want to destroy Gotham to complete her father's mission?  Which is what?  Urban renewal?  Are we supposed to think they're insane or that there's some actual reason?  And on the other end Bruce Wayne's fiancee dies and he goes on an eight-year pout?  Yeah ok this is actually some form of depression but somebody that out of shape and damaged just can't jump back into the game.  (And while it's cool to see Thomas Lennon in a high-profile film he seems out of place as a doctor.)  What we get of course is Batman saying that really "Batman" is supposed to be an inspiration for anybody, anybody at all, but what are shown is that only billionaires with cool toys can do this. 

Which makes me wonder if the digs on the Occupy movement were deliberate.  No matter how much was in the original script clearly Nolan & co had to decide to leave much of this in, leaving TDKR as Romney's most expensive campaign ad.  The conservative slant of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns has often been noted but Miller created a complex, resonant story while Nolan's borders on propaganda.  The only good news is that he's done with this though an executive producer credit on the upcoming Superman film doesn't bode well.

Prometheus (Ridley Scott 2012)

There are a few moments when you can almost convince yourself that this will turn out to be a decent, perhaps even watchable film but really that’s just hope overriding what’s on the screen.  The whole thing feels like it was written by a high school student and not even a particularly sharp one at that.  Who else would care so much about the Silence of God?  Other than Bergman fans of course.  That’s not how it’s phrased in the film but really that’s the point of questioning the Engineers, especially since for a group of scientists they have remarkably little interest in anything else.  Even what seems to be humanity’s first contact with non-terrestrial intelligence creates less response than a random sitcom viewing. 

And also:

*  The opening creation sequence (geddit?) is quite impossible.  Beings that advanced could surely come up with a more effective method than one involving suicide (or maybe he already knew what it’s like to watch the rest of the film).  But the DNA bit doesn’t work – throwing frog DNA into a pond doesn’t create frogs.  If the point had been that this started the evolutionary process then how could human DNA possibly match the alien’s since the intervening species’ DNA would not?

*  Drawings from pre-literate cultures are the best that these aliens could do?  Cultures who have no interest in or even concept of realism but are still expected to reproduce a dot pattern accurately.  You’d think the aliens would be better off sending a message with, oh I dunno, a black obelisk on the moon.

*  Theron’s entire part has no purpose.  The character could have been completely removed and it wouldn’t have affected the film at all with the one exception of the death she caused which could easily have been assigned to another character.

*  There’s so little else going on that when early scenes mention a lifepod and an automated medical machine you know they will play an important part later on.  Screenwriters might mention the Chekhov principle but really this just indicates scanty background and unimaginative writing.

*  What was the point of having a young actor play an elderly man?  Particularly with such unbelievably ineffective makeup?  There are after all plenty of older actors around.  I was certain there would be a rejuvenation sequence because that’s the only reason this made any sense.

*  I thought the last season of 24 pushed the amount of abuse we’re expected to believe a character can handle and still function but this ups it – woman has major abdominal surgery (competely unmentioned is the damage such a large growth in “ten hours” would have caused) but manages to run around and yell and run around and run some more and then crawl up into a ship and then lower a heavy body down and so on and so forth.

*  What was David the android doing giving the black goo to the scientist anyway?  He acts like there was a purpose but surely there’s no way he could have known any of what would happen.  Either way the film leaves this completely unexplained, apparently more from clumsiness than artistic ambiguity.  Maybe the extended director’s cut (saints preserve us) will re-instert deleted scenes explaining this, explaining everything.

*  Ridley Scott et al also don’t bother to explain any of the major questions driving the story – why did the Engineers do this, why Earth, why the message, etc.  I suspect they were trying for a sort of naturalistic openness but really it comes across more like they never bothered to finish the script. 

*  Why is Ellie surprised that David knows how her father died?  He explains it’s because he watched her dreams but more likely he just read her file.

*  I’m not much bothered by coincidences when they make the story more efficient.  So when the ship first lands on the planet they just happen to find buildings immediately and then just happen to first go into the one that has the elements that will drive the story – ok let’s go with that.  Why spend time showing the ship flying around.  Except that when you realize the point of the film is searching (or Searching) then it would be appropriate to show.  A few dissolves, maybe a title like “five days later” and really any half-way decent director wouldn’t have needed any more screen time but would have deepened the story.

*  And while we’re on coincidences don’t you like how the hologram just happens to show only the specific portions the ship’s crew needed to see?  And in much lower quality than my cell phone?

*  Stories usually break down if pressed too hard, even ones that happened in real life.  (This need to put a fiction-type closure on actual events is what drives conspiracy theorists.)  The poster child for this of course is the chauffeur in The Big Sleep but it's so common that this isn't even really a problem.  Prometheus is a different situation - there's almost nothing but narrative gaps, unmotivated actions, implausible behavior (biologist trying to pet a toothy alien worm anybody?) and just sheer unblinking stupidity.  This is starting to repeat the point but it's hard not to wonder how all these people with all this money managed to create something like this when there was supposedly a high level of creative control. But then you yawn and think it's time for pie.

Sorta found poetry

At work we have a new system that emails a text transcription of voice mail.  Below are two passes with the same text, trying to speak very clearly and distinctly.  The interesting things are that they aren't very close and that the system kept one as a sentence but broke the other into three (I must have paused more that time).  OK, not interesting at all but noted nonetheless.

1

Now is the winter of our discontent make glorious summer bye this some of your and all the cloud Florida put in our house and the deep but some of the ocean buried mail or are brown bound with victorious three used numbers and arm signed up for monuments stern how runs strange tamari meetings are dreadful Marches delightful measures.

 2

Now is the one to rob our discontent thank glorious summer by this I know you're in all the clouds that larder on our house in the deep but some of the ocean buried.

Now our our browse down with Victoria so we.

Are breeze it arms hung up for my name at our stern how're I'm change to marry meetings are dreadful Marches delightful measures.