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SFFH in Film, TV, and other NonTextual Media
Wednesday 25 December 2002
More on Solaris
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As noted below, many mainstream film critics may have liked Steven Soderbergh's version of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, but the film's detractors include, unsurprisingly, Stanislaw Lem, even though he has no intention of seeing it. A Boston Sunday Globe article by Jeet Heer (December 15) quotes Lem:
"I have not seen the film... hence I cannot say anything about the movie itself except for what the reviews reflect, albeit unclearly - like a distorted picture of one's face in ripply water. However, to my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space.... I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of human encounter with something that certainly exists... but cannot be reduced to human concepts, images, or ideas.''
The article goes into detail about SFWA's honorary membership for Lem in 1973 and the subsequent controversy and revocation.
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Nor have audiences warmed to the film, as Dave Kehr explains in last Sunday's New York Times, comparing it to 2001 and changing audience ideas about sci-fi.
"2001," of course, opened at a time when many young Americans were just saying yes to a variety of illegal substances, many of which enhanced appreciation of enigmatic situations and surrealistic imagery — not to mention spectacular light shows. But 1968 was also a time when speculative science fiction in the ambitious, literary mode pioneered by A. E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov in the pages of Astounding Stories was still in vogue. Even George Lucas made a grown-up science-fiction film, "THX 1138," a 1971 parable about an authoritarian future society, before the runaway success of his "Star Wars" transformed the genre, apparently forever.
With his densely imagined world full of big-hearted Wookies, damsels in distress and buzzing light sabers, Mr. Lucas returned science fiction to its adolescent state — to the science fiction of comic strips, pulp magazines and Flash Gordon serials. Speculative elements were set aside in a formula that consciously drew on the ancient, mythical archetypes treated by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero With a Thousand Faces." The genre was no longer about the future, but about the past, a long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away.
What we call science fiction now is really a portmanteau genre, a form that incorporates elements of the western, the swashbuckler, the detective film and assorted other, once distinct, structures into an all-purpose adventure mode. Science fiction in the "Star Wars" mold became the perfect narrative style for the end of the century, one that gathered up the themes and motifs of 100 years of popular culture into one uber-genre, very much conscious of its own derivativeness.
Enough Trek?
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Most critics have been kind to Star Trek: Nemesis, but a few have had enough, notably Roger Ebert:
I've also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I'm thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven't fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.
...
I think it is time for "Star Trek" to make a mighty leap forward another 1,000 years into the future, to a time when starships do not look like rides in a 1970s amusement arcade, when aliens do not look like humans with funny foreheads, and when wonder, astonishment and literacy are permitted back into the series. Star Trek was kind of terrific once, but now it is a copy of a copy of a copy.
He's echoed by Stephen Hunter in Washington Post:
I feel a rant coming on. Sorry, folks, this isn't going to be pretty. You might want to look away, or at least send the children to their rooms. But . . . really, can't they hire a decent costume designer? To my eyes, those double-knit two-tone sweatshirts with their slight shimmer and complete inability to wrinkle or drape like actual clothes, and those little dweeby badges, and all that short hair and all those freshly scrubbed faces . . . I CAN'T STAND IT! MAKE IT GO AWAY, PLEASE!
...
And the sparks. For some reason, dating back to the TV years when special effects were hardly advanced and the budgets minuscule, the "Star Trek" action sequences all involved sparks falling from pipes. That squalid tradition continues, so that in the oh-so-frequent space and phaser battles, rogue phaser blasts and other rays of destruction always bring showers of sparks raining down. It's like the worst kind of sensible suburban Fourth of July.
Then there's the sparseness. For all the size of these big ships, the movie has a small cast and even fewer actual characters. There's no sense of bustle, or teeming activity; it's just a few actors, most of them bad, on big, bad, empty sets. Was the Extras Union on strike or something? There must be seven speaking roles in the whole damned thing.
Monday 2 December 2002
Seeing Solaris
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Mainstream reviews of Solaris have been remarkably positive (in contrast to our own Gary Westfahl's) — see links below. An exception is Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman's review (he gives it a C):
[T]he movie, in its perverse way, fits snugly into the Hollywood bean counter's corrupt view of the universe -- namely, that there are two kinds of movies: big, accessible, popular entertainments and small, ''elite'' films doomed to commercial oblivion. When a celebrated filmmaker begins to think that way, it can be a convoluted form of self-sabotage (and self-glorification). Snail-paced, suavely shot, and steeped in postmodern melancholy, ''Solaris'' is like ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Soderbergh is making a movie, all right, but more than that he’s flaunting his cred, his power as a hip industry player helping to position a quasi-obscure '70s-style art film in the thick of the holiday/Oscar rush. It's as if he wanted us to think, Is this guy a cool industry rebel or what?
Meanwhile, Sunday's Los Angeles Times features this dual interview with Solaris director Steven Soderbergh and producer James Cameron.
Steven, you'd never made a sci-fi film. So what attracted you to this material?
Soderbergh: When I was almost done with the first draft, I was thinking, why did these weird happenstances occur? Why did I pick this title out of anything [Cameron's company] had? Why do I want to write it? I realized that it's about love and about death and clearly something is pulling me to that. I didn't realize until way into the process that I was working through, in some very oblique way, what had happened with my father who died very suddenly and to whom I was very close.
...
One of the great opportunities for a director doing a movie set in the future is, what does the future look like?
Soderbergh: Didn't care. Didn't care.
Taken, In More Ways Than One
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The Steven Spielberg executive-produced miniseries Taken, on the Sci Fi Channel, debuts tonight, to much advance publicity, and decent reviews (e.g., in Los Angeles Times, and Monday's Washington Post which says the series "might even qualify as cable's 'Roots.' "). But why is Spielberg so obsessed by UFOs? Chris Mooney in Slate offers a somewhat cynical explanation.
Suppose that the truth really is "out there," as The X-Files postulated, but not exactly where you might expect. In other words, rather than a vast government conspiracy to conceal proof that aliens have visited Earth, perhaps the real plot lies elsewhere. The entertainment industry, for instance, is constantly putting out films, TV shows, and pseudo-documentaries suggesting that Americans are being visited or even abducted in droves by gray-skinned, strangely kinky spacemen—and that the government wants to keep it all quiet. Dark Skies, Roswell, Fox's Alien Autopsy special … Could the real conspiracy be on the part of the mass media and designed to make people believe in UFOs because it helps ratings?
...
In a recent interview, Taken screenwriter Leslie Bohem noted that Spielberg once said to him of alien abductions, "If this isn't true, then why are all these stories the same?" To which Bohem replied, "Maybe because of your movies?"
Wednesday 27 November 2002
Solaris
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Sunday's New York Times ran this article by John Rockwell about director/writer Steve Soderbergh's approach to Solaris and how that compares (with spoilers) to the previous film, and Stanislaw Lem's book.
Reviews of the new film, opening November 27, are mostly quite favorable:
(Locus Online will post a review by Gary Westfahl this weekend.)
Sunday 10 November 2002
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Holiday seasons films:
Friday 18 October 2002
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Naqoyqatsi, the third collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass, opens today in Los Angeles and Manhattan. Following Koyaanisqatsi ("Life Out of Balance", 1983) and Powaqqatsi ("Life in Transformation", 1988), the conclusion of the "Qatsi" trilogy, whose title is the Hopi term for "war as a way of life", concerns
the most significant event of the last five thousand years: the transition from the natural milieu, old nature, to the "new" nature, the technological milieu.
according to the film's webpage. Stephen Holden reviews the film in today's New York Times:
An overriding theme of the movie is the impersonality of technology and the degree to which its promises of power and perfection have seized the human imagination and begun determining human activity. There is, after all, a part of us that is profoundly attracted to the notion of the body and the mind as perfectible machines and parts of machines. [...]
Both the director and the composer take a cosmic view of the earth and its ills. Even when they are contemplating the mechanics of the human body, their perspective seems closer to that of an extraterrestrial explorer than to a social commentator. If there is a bleeding heart behind it all — and I think deep down that there is — it is largely camouflaged.
Links:
Wednesday 2 October 2002
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A long New York Times Magazine profile of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly creator Joss Whedon...
Audaciously combining two more neglected juvenile genres, westerns and science fiction, the series [Firefly] began as Whedon's most experimental yet...
Yes, it's a space show, but it's also an intellectual drama about nine underdogs struggling in the moral chaos of a postglobalist universe. Adventure and ethical debate are melded in one sexy package. ''It's about the search for meaning,'' he explains. ''And did I mention there's a whore?''
[...]
Atheist though he may be, Joss Whedon has a kind of faith -- in narrative passion, the kind that creates lasting loyalties. ''Every time people say, 'You've transcended the genre,' I'm like: No! I believe in genre.'' For Whedon, fantasy inspires a visceral response that realism can't match.
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Salon: About those Apocalypse movies -- a whole fantastic film genre probably not often screened at SF cons...
The "Apocalypse" films are similar to the hot-selling "Left Behind" novels, and in fact the Lalondes also produced "Left Behind: The Movie," with a straight-to-video sequel due in October. As in "Left Behind," it turns out the United Nations is the ideal framework for Satan's One Nation Earth (ONE) regime. The antichrist wins his throne by promising to end hatred, prejudice and other things of which bleeding-heart liberals are always accusing the folks on TBN.
Another example: "Deceived", in which SETI@Home is "Satan's own peer-to-peer AudioGalaxy network":
When a signal arrives with a suspicious duration of 6.66 seconds, the usual archetypal characters from rapture movies have their own plans for it. Louis Gossett Jr., as a power-mad general, wants to control it. A crackpot New Age radio host -- the kind of comic-relief character only found in Christian entertainment -- begins raving about how the signal will "evolve" humans to a "higher consciousness" (evolution frequently appears in these movies in conjunction with madness.) The eyebrow-cocking "dot-com billionaire" wants to sell it, exclaiming: "It'll be the biggest webcast in history!" And the lusty TV reporter, naturally, wants to corrupt Judd.
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At Midnight Eye -- a site about Japanese cinema -- an interview with Spirited Away writer/director Hayao Miyazaki.
Do you believe in the necessity of fantasy in telling children's stories?
I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldn't stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind and of the imagination. Those things can help us in life. But we have to be cautious in using this word fantasy. In Japan, the word fantasy these days is applied to everything from TV shows to video games, like virtual reality. But virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people. It's a dilemma I struggle with in my work, that balance between imaginary worlds and virtual worlds.
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Seattle Times: all about BloodHag, a band whose four members wear thick glasses, white button-down shirts and ties, and who sing about science fiction writers...
(And check out their website.)
These metal kings sing songs of George Orwell and Isaac Asimov, as well as Franz Kafka and William S. Burroughs. Usually author Octavia Butler would be represented in a set, but her ode has been nixed from tonight's lineup, since they've played it so much.
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Reuters via Yahoo: Hollywood reaches out to NASA (or vice versa)
[Producer Robert] Shapiro said NASA and Hollywood are not such strange bedfellows when one considers that man's quest for knowledge often inspires great art -- and vice versa. In other words, while the meeting might be a small step for those present, it could be a giant leap toward future cooperation.
[...]
"Would we have gone to the moon if Jules Verne hadn't written about it first?" he said. "In a weird way NASA is trying to answer some of the biggest questions in life and sometimes Hollywood is asking those same questions."
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Slate's David Edelstein reviews the restoration of Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis -- "one of the greatest ballets ever put on film".
The movie was directly inspired by the skyline of Manhattan, which the Austrian Lang beheld in 1924 from a ship in New York harbor. He told his wife, Thea von Harbou, that he envisioned a scenario in which the cityscape would be dominated by soaring towers of glass and steel while far below, in cellars and catacombs, the workers whose labor sustained it were physically and spiritually crushed—almost literally turned into machines. There was no middle class: You were literally way up or way, way down.
[...]
It's little wonder that some people had no idea what Lang was trying to say. But that's what has given Metropolis the power to endure. A great artist contains multitudes, and Lang packed a host of contradictory longings into a single allegory. He showed us the horror of "the machine-man," but he also gave us, in Brigitte Helm, the sexiest robot of all time.
Wednesday 28 August 2002
Different Directions
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A New York Times essay by Stephen Holden about M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, Mysticism, Miracles and Mush, reacts to the comparisons of Shyamalan to Hitchock and Spielberg, and ends with a provocative suggestion about how the film might have ended...
The exploitation of magical thinking in mass entertainment — the "touched by an angel" syndrome — triggers an almost allergic reaction in me. It strikes me as a sentimental palliative that encourages people to wallow in passivity and wait for miracles instead of doing for themselves. As much as I admired the craft behind the whopper ending of "The Sixth Sense," that movie left me feeling manipulated by a spiritual huckster. And so does "Signs." [...]
Until this point [when an alien is finally pictured], "Signs" has toyed provocatively with the notion that the alien invasion might be one frightened, isolated family's shared hallucination. How much deeper and more challenging "Signs" might have been had the extraterrestrials been depicted as possibly delusional blips — leaving some doubt as to their actual existence. Had "Signs" resisted putting on the final angelic touch and showing its little green men, it might have offered us a mystery worth contemplating about the relationship between faith and fantasy.
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Move score fans note: MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, PART ONE: A Chronology of Music For Space Travel and Other Worlds, by Scott Bettencourt. This list goes through 1979; a second list is forthcoming.
Saturday 17 August 2002
DVD "Features"...
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Slate's Bryan Curtis is reviewing DVDs, specifically the features that come on them in addition to the theatrically released films. As Jonathan Strahan anticipated 10 days ago, Curtis finds the bonus features on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring DVD, like those on so many other DVDs, a waste of time:
The makers of Fellowship of the Ring, on the other hand, turned a great film into a bad commercial. The disks' bonus features—endless but uninformative documentaries and ads—are built to sell, sell, sell. Sell the official movie guide; the tie-in video game; the theatrical sequel; even the more souped-up Fellowship DVD, which arrives in November. By the time you've waded through the extras, you're positively grooving on the sweet smell of cross-promotion.
Consider Fellowship's three documentaries and 11 short "featurettes," which look like they've been thrown together by the producers of Entertainment Tonight. There's almost no discussion of the making of the film. Instead, the docs, which played on various TV networks before the film hit theaters, offer what amounts to a preview of the film we already own.
In contrast, Shane Ivey at RevolutionSF loves the DVD, rating it 9/10.
The extras include a long collection of previews and commentaries that appeared on TV and the Internet over the two years leading up to the December 2001 release of The Fellowship of the Ring. Truly hardcore fans will have seen this material already, but most of you will find at least a few new items. There are trailers (of course), but there are also interviews with the director, the cast, and effects people, behind-the-scenes footage, and the "Internet previews" that combined film footage with interviews.
Saturday 3 August 2002
Signs Fission
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Not all critics have reacted to M. Night Shyamalan's new film Signs as enthusiastically as Newsweek's David Ansen — or as negatively as Locus Online's Claude Lalumière.
Andrew O'Hehir's review in Salon notes both the film's many skiffy flick antecedents, and its portentous theme.
The wholesale homage to earlier films found in "Signs" is a new and not necessarily welcome development in Shyamalan's work. Those viewers who notice how much of the movie is imported from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Night of the Living Dead," "War of the Worlds," "Poltergeist" and "The Birds" (not to mention "Field of Dreams") may find themselves distracted from the things in it that actually work.
...
All three of Shyamalan's big-budget Hollywood movies (also including "Unbreakable") are tremendous mood pieces that build an intensely creepy atmosphere, winding the audience up to a pitch of near hysterical suspense, and then squander it all in promiscuous geysers of sentimentality and random New Age brain fog. Two things come to mind: One, Shyamalan is a clever craftsman trying to conceal the fact that he has nothing to say. Two, he's scared of God.
Kenneth Turan's review in the Los Angeles Times isn't bothered by the film's theme, just unpersuaded.
There's a strain of quirky, laconic humor here that is unexpected but effective. Less successful is the film's main theme, the power and even the necessity of faith. "Signs" is finally a B picture at heart, and whatever heartfelt messages the Bs convey is never what's memorable about them.
...It's also true that the bromides about faith the film thinks are profound don't end up playing that way.
A.O. Scott, reviewing in the New York Times, is more troubled.
One name for the belief that everything disguises a hidden intention is paranoia, and Mr. Shyamalan, displaying a sense of humor missing from the rigorous solemnity of his other movies, pokes fun at our dark suspicions even as he shamelessly manipulates them. ...
The lesson that "Signs" imparts — have faith! — is ubiquitous in the culture, from the pronouncements of certain politicians to television shows like "Touched by an Angel." (This version might be called "Mauled by an Alien.") The movie's fuzzy pop-spiritualism carries a disturbing implication. Unless you have faith (in something tactfully left unspecified), it says, you are putting the integrity of your family and the very lives of your children at risk, and you no longer deserve to be called father — as if skepticism, or indeed any but the most literal-minded expression of belief, were a form of child abuse.
Closest to Claude Lalumière's view is David Edelstein, writing in Slate beneath the headline "Signs is a hucksterish religious parable":
As a scare picture, Signs is good enough. As a religious parable, it's scarier—and I don't mean that as a compliment. The story of an alien invasion met with faith, its invaders are symbolic of what happens to people—and their children—when they become cynical unbelievers, writing off both the bad and the good as the product of chance. Shyamalan is saying that when you reject God, you kill your kids. The idea that an atheist or agnostic parent could be good parent—could instill values of skepticism and intellectual rigor—is outside this movie's purview.
In contrast to everyone else, Roger Ebert, who awards the film four stars, seems unconcerned by the film's ideas, focusing instead on its style and technique.
The genius of the film, you see, is that it isn't really about crop circles, or the possibility that aliens created them as navigational aids. I will not even say whether aliens appear in the movie, because whether they do or not is beside the point. The purpose of the film is to evoke pure emotion through the use of skilled acting and direction, and particularly through the soundtrack. It is not just what we hear that is frightening. It is the way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard. I cannot think of a movie where silence is scarier, and inaction is more disturbing.
Tuesday 30 July 2002
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Newsweek raves about M. Night Shyamalan and his next film Signs, opening this Friday, to the point of putting him on its August 5th cover, calling him "The Next Spielberg".
Shyamalan is every bit the movie buff that the ’70s auteurs were. His idols are unapologetically pop, though: not Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, but Hitchcock, Lucas and Spielberg. The scares in “Signs” call Hitchcock to mind, but Shyamalan is more akin to the young Spielberg in his careful rippling of the heartstrings, his deft touch with child actors, his fascination with the middle-class American family and his desperate desire to keep pleasing the same demographic over and over: people between the ages of 10 and 100.
David Ansen's review begins:
Director M. Night Shyamalan is a very young man who understands a very old lesson (one most of his peers have forgotten): it’s what you don’t see that makes a scary movie scary.
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Meanwhile, Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article about the making of a movie trailer, with Signs and trailer-editor Art Mondrala as the examples at hand. Some revealing details:
Mondrala doesn't watch movies the way most humans do. In order to distill a feature film into a demographically targeted, two-and-a-half-minute montage, his job is to become obsessed, myopic, perhaps even a little mad. To him, movies aren't sustained narratives that build to a climax. ''I watch purely from the standpoint of single moments,'' he says. ''Someone turning his head quickly, a fast camera sweep, lines with compressed emotion. In my work, I live in fractions of a second; one second is an eternity..."
...
The hardest challenge of trailer cutting, everybody agrees, is paring the thing down to two and a half minutes. That's not an aesthetic choice. It's a limit enforced by the Motion Picture Association of America. Each studio gets one exception every year; the DreamWorks trailer for ''Road to Perdition,'' for example, clocks in at 2:46. (Disney has yet to choose a 2002 exception, but it is not ''Signs.'')
Tuesday 9 July 2002
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Jonathan Lethem reviews Spider-Man for London Review of Books...
As for me, I shed an awkward tear at several points, mourning my own lost innocence as glimpsed through the double lens of the film and the crowd's response to it, and overwhelmed by the simple power of a collective experience you've anticipated for decades, as when your mostly-losing local sports team nails a championship. I was completely beguiled from my cynicism. You may now safely consider me to have overrated the movie.
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Looking forward to this Friday's release of Reign of Fire (about fire-breathing dragons let loose on modern Earth), Lewis Beale in Sunday's New York Times essays on the history of apocalyptic movies, from "Things to Come" to "The Road Warrior", with comments from James Gunn:
"There is a kind of pleasure that people get in seeing familiar things destroyed," Mr. Gunn said. "This represents not a reformist mood but an apprehension mood. What we're dealing with here is that somehow things at various moments in history can fall apart, everything can turn dark and dismal. It appeals to people to see — in that imaginary sense — the world around them going through all this."
Also, Los Angeles Times explores how the special effects guys created the ultimate dragon.
Instead of relying on prior effects-based dragon films, such as "Dragonslayer" and "Dragonheart," they turned to National Geographic TV specials. ...
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The Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) has selected a list of the Top 100 Sci-Fi Films of the Past 100 Years, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Tuesday 2 July 2002
MIB2 Buzz
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The earliest buzz for Men In Black II, opening tomorrow, is not positive. David Edelstein in Slate:
Men in Black II (Columbia) was hatched before 9/11 and doesn't have a thing on its mind except more and bigger squiggly beasties. If it isn't the worst sequel ever made, it's only because it has too much competition: Impersonal and frenetic, it's a landmark Hollywood disgrace.
Minority Links
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Here are links to reviews by several of the major critics:
— Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
— David Edelstein, Slate
— Richard Corliss, Time
Some reviews were accompanied by sidebars about Philip K. Dick, like this long one in Los Angeles Times, though this shorter one in Time is notable for containing, in a mainstream publication, the following remarks about 'sci-fi':
Verne and Vonnegut, Borges and Burgess, Lessing and LeGuin—they all wrote science fiction that was taken seriously during their lives. Philip K. Dick's work, no less serious or searching, was confined to the ghetto of SF (that's the short form, folks—never, ever sci-fi).
LAT also printed this article about Harald Becker, designer of Minority Report's cars.
Edelstein's Slate review offered several associated links:
http://www.precrime.org/: Citizens for a Murder Free America [high bandwidth!]
http://www.lexus.com/minorityreport: Lexus Minority Report
(However this fan site, http://spielberg-dreamworks.com/minorityreport/ appears to be defunct)
More in-depth are a couple essays. Tim Appelo in Slate argues that Spielberg doesn't understand noir.
Spielberg is proudest of the element that most critics have liked least in Minority Report: the plotty whodunit denouement. But Edmund Wilson could've told him: What's good in noir stories is not the puzzle solved—it's the malaise along the way. ... Minority Report has virtuoso grit, but it wipes off with one swipe, like waxy buildup in a commercial. Philip K. Dick's original hero dreads noir betrayal by his dame; Tom Cruise's wound is the morally irreproachable loss of a child. (Cruise says boosting the kid theme was his big script contribution.) Cruise is great, huffing street drugs like the Bad Lieutenant— but his grief lets him off the moral hook. What's his depraved kink? Watching 3-D home movies of his angelic son and his perky ex blushing coyly in a PG negligee.
And Jeremy Lott in Reason notes the film's correspondence with current political events.
But the rooting-out that Spielberg says he supports is, of course, pre-emptive. The Justice Department has detained hundreds of suspects for months on immigration and other charges and stonewalled any requests for details on the identities or whereabouts of said persons. On the international scene, much ink is currently being spilt over the government’s claims to the right of "anticipatory self defense."
Miscellany
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This USA Today article (via Yahoo) summarizes Hollywood's treatment of genetics and DNA, which long ago replaced radiation as the mechanism for creating monsters.
This Los Angeles Times profile of Michael Chabon (pronounced, by the way, SHAY-bin) describes his career and current attempts to write a screenplay of his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Monday 17 June 2002
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The buzz is positive for Minority Report, opening Friday.
- Roger Ebert called it a "masterpiece" in his TV review last weekend; that audio review should be posted soon on the Ebert & Roeper website. His print review will appear on the day the film opens. Meanwhile, his enthusiasm is apparent in an interview/essay already posted.
Talking to Spielberg and his star, Tom Cruise, I found myself not an interviewer but simply a moviegoer, talking the way you do when you walk out of a movie that blindsides you with its brilliance.
On the other hand, you have to wonder about certain remarks...
Spielberg: I went to Scott Frank for the screenplay. He wrote "Get Shorty" and "Out of Sight." I gave him the original short story by Philip K. Dick and he said he didn't know anything about science fiction. I said, "Let me worry about the sci-fi element. Just write a terrific detective yarn. ..."
Also, Spielberg chimes in on Attack of the Clones.
Spielberg: I really love George's "Star Wars: Episode Two." I thought it was operatic--George's most accomplished movie. But I don't think I'll ever go to computer-generated sets like he does. I think when you build a set in the 3-D world and actors walk onto that set, they get stimulated. They get ideas. Tom Cruise got ideas about how to play [his character] John Anderton because we built his house with four walls and a ceiling--every aspect was real. He felt at home there and got ideas about Anderton's behavior. I'm sad for the day when sets will exist in cyberspace and not in real life.
- A feature article by Rick Lyman in Sunday's New York Times contrasts Spielberg's "dark, complex, futuristic whodunit" with the usual summer fare. Again some remarks reveal the filmmakers' experience, such as it is, with the history of SF.
Like H. G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," a science-fiction allegory about colonialism, or his "Time Machine," an allegory about class struggle, "Minority Report" uses science-fiction to try to address, in an indirect way, issues that are the subject of political debate today, Mr. Cruise said.
[...]
Mr. Spielberg also describes "Minority Report" as his first foray into film noir. Although "Minority Report" is set in the future, Mr. Spielberg said, he does not consider the film science-fiction as much as a kind of expressionistic mystery inspired by film noir directors like John Huston and Samuel Fuller.
A sidebar article by David Edelstein recaps the career and film treatment of Philip K. Dick...
To call Philip K. Dick, whose 1954 story "The Minority Report" is the basis for the new Steven Spielberg movie, a science-fiction writer is to the underscore the inadequacy of the label. Dick, who died of a stroke in 1982 at 53, was fascinated by the scientific future largely as a vehicle for examining his own anxieties, longings and unstable perceptions. It would be more accurate to call him one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century.
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The lead feature article in Sunday's NYT, by A.O. Scott, is about recent popularity of movie fantasies, with some basic analysis of their appeal.
Fantasy literature, which in the broadest sense includes modes of storytelling from novels to movies to video games, depends on patterns, motifs and archetypes. It is therefore hardly surprising that the most visible modern variants of the ancient genres of saga, romance and quest narrative are so richly crosspollinated and resemble one another. The central characters show an especially close kinship. They are, following a convention so deep it seems to be encoded in the human storytelling gene, orphans, summoned out of obscurity to undertake a journey into the heart of evil that will also be a voyage of self-discovery.
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Getting back to Attack of the Clones, Roger Kaufman in the Los Angeles Times explains that the film
is actually a breathtaking cinematic achievement. By synthesizing epic archetypal themes with gut-churning special effects and the gay theatrical tradition of high camp, George Lucas has created a potent and disturbing commentary on our own bloated and blind American society.
...
What Turan, Goldstein and many others have failed to understand is that the style of dialogue and acting in "Attack of the Clones" is intentionally campy, a subversive mode of performance that gay people have used for centuries to express their outsider perspective on the dominant culture.
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Salon asks, if you can't trust Hollywood to get the bird songs right, can you trust them for anything else?
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Chris Suellentrop in Slate explains why Spider-Man, and other fantasy movie heroes, seem to have taken vows of celibacy. (With a link to where "science-fiction writer Larry Niven posits an alternative explanation for Superman's celibate lifestyle".)
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The Onion: General Mills' Star Wars: Episode II Cereal Gets It All Wrong.
May Media Refractions
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