Saturday, February 25, 2012

I can speak Russian, in Japanese

I'm not sure I really understood what was the point of Kurosawa's The Lower Depths. It was a well-made movie. The characters were well-drawn and distinguished clearly from each other. The movie was also clearly an adaptation from a play, but that isn't necessarily a strike against it. Even though all the action took place within two small buildings and the space between and around them that wasn't any part of why I didn't understand the movie. There are plenty of Shakespeare adaptations that don't cause this problem, and Rope is one of my favourite Hitchcock films. More details after the jump.

Theme song

I've thought for a long time that it would be cool to have a theme song. Life is not like the movies; we don't get to have musicians play awesome music for us when we walk into a room or do something awesome.

Also for a long time I thought that this song would be the song I'd choose for my theme song. You know, the one that plays when you're introduced or walk into a room. (The first 28 seconds are okay too, but it starts a bit slow and it might be too much to expect to have your theme song start half a minute before you even show up. I'm not quite that cool.)

As awesome as the theme from Yojimbo is, I've changed my mind. I think I'd rather have Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder as my theme. Yeah. Smooth. Though, it just now occurs to me that this would be even more apropos for Veronica Lake.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

I don't like public speaking.

Unfortunately, a number of people seem to think that I'm good enough at it that they want me to keep doing it. I spent this past weekend off at a camp for a youth rally/retreat/whatever with the teens from my church and some other churches in the area. My church's youth minister apparently thought it would be a good idea for me to talk about the progression of my spiritual life up to this point. Instructive for the kids or something. I survived, but I did have the shakes for a good 10 minutes afterward.

I was remiss not to read this sooner.

I finally finished Gene Wolfe's Short Sun series. I read the vast majority of it last year, but ended up having to return the final book to the library unread. Then, somehow, -inexplicably- I forgot to check it out again and finish it. So I've finally finished my Return to the Whorl. Gene Wolfe is not only the best SF writers around, but he's one of the best writers I've read in a long time, full stop.

If you haven't read any of his books before, this will certainly not be the one you want to start with. This is the concluding book in a trilogy that comes after another series (Long Sun) and relies heavily on the reader being familiar with characters that were introduced six books previously. Not only that, but he ties it in with his New Sun series which is either 3 or 5 books depending on how you count them. (Initially written as a series of four (short by today's standards) novels, these were later combined into a pair of longer novels and then he wrote another book that kinda is tacked on at the end.)

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Not a Nullity

On the recommendation of John C. Wright I read The World of Null-A recently. It wasn't bad, I suppose. I guess I can kinda see how it would be like watching Citizen Kane. It was ground-breaking at the time, but now that everyone has stolen the techniques, it doesn't stand out like it did when it first appeared. I was kept intrigued by the way a bit of a mystery element was woven in and I enjoyed the plot that dealt with a man being manipulated to behave in a certain way that used even his own knowledge of the manipulation to successfully manipulate him. (Had to read that sentence twice to make sure it came out correctly.)

I'm not sure I'll read another book in the same world, but I am interested enough by the quality of the writing to look into Slan, which is another SF novel by AE Van Vogt. I'd only recommend this one to others who are looking to expand their reading in the area of classic SF.

Oh. My. Goodness.

A couple nights ago I watched a Kurosawa film I hadn't seen before and I was quite impressed. I don't want to spoil the ending, but The Bad Sleep Well was not at all what I was expecting. A very young Toshiro Mifune makes a play for revenge on the men who drove his father to his death. It has elements of Hamlet and (more strongly, I think) The Count of Monte Cristo, though it doesn't end up like either of them really.

The movie also features the amazing Takashi Shimura, though he is a bit under-used in a supporting role along with a lot of other famous Japanese actors (though, "famous" for Japanese actors from 50 or 60 years ago is a relative thing). The acting is uniformly good and the tension builds well to a brilliant and gut-wrenching ending.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Games!

My daughter decided she wanted to play Chutes and Ladders with me today. Which is fine, one doesn't have to feel too competitive about a game that is entirely based on luck. I mean, I always kind of feel that we might as well just flip a coin and be done with it, but it's not too onerous to take the time so she'll be happy.

This game of Chutes and Ladders, however, is branded by Disney and so all the pieces are princesses. Usually I choose Snow White since the choices are between her, Belle, Sleeping Beauty (Aurora) and Cinderella. So then we... what's that? Why Snow White? Really? Clearly, she is the most attractive. Anyway... today I thought I'd take it in a little bit of a different direction.

Who is that dashing man? Jump for a closer look.

Such Gracious Condescension

It seems only just that we should take note of the similarly named Egotist's Club after they have deigned to not only notice our existence, but chosen to refrain from declaring us anathema. I'm glad they approve in large measure of what we do and say here and I think I can safely say the feeling is mutual. At least, if my slacker brother ever bothered to post, then it might be. Until then, semi-mutual? Quasi-mutual? Certainly not unmutual.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Classic Pulp Novels

I've been reading some of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs lately. They're certainly not great art or great books or even great writing, but they certainly are great stories. Tarzan and John Carter keep you turning the pages to see what's going to happen next. I'd read some of the Tarzan novels here and there before this, but I'd never tried the Barsoomian novels.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Masters of the Glove

I finished reading Wizardry a few days ago and it's not a D&D manual for aspiring Dungeon Masters. It is, in fact, a book in which a man tries to formulate a system for evaluating the defensive capabilities of baseball players. So it's just as obscure and only of interest to a small and similarly obsessed set of people. I'm not sure how good it is because I really ought to go back and work through the math a bit more, but it seems plausible on the face. He doesn't have too many revolutionary judgements, but that would seem to be a point in his favour. There are a few surprises though; some of the magnitude of differences is interesting as well as some of the judgements he makes about just how costly some of these players are in the field.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Two Movies

I've watched a couple new movies this week. Well, "new" in the sense that I had not seen them before, not that they were recently produced and released. The first one was the third installment of the Mummy series starring Brendan Fraser. The second was Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal. Talk about your dissimilar movies. Possible spoilers after the jump.

On the TeeVee

So I've stopped posting every time I watched a Star Trek episode. It was getting boring and a lot of the episodes in the first season are much of a piece. The only ones of any note in the last few were probably the one with Khan (and everybody knows about Khan) and the season-ending episode with the time-travel that was written by Harlan Ellison. (About whom a great deal of what I know comes from his minor spat with the boys at Penny Arcade. Caution: vulgarities abound at those links.)