Saalon Muyo

Ian Tregillis’ debut novel Bitter Seeds was not what I hoped it would be.  It has a cool idea, and the praise from George R. R. Martin made me hopeful that this would be my kind of SF yarn.  Unfortunately, the novel has some fundamental problems that undercut my enjoyment early on, and I was never able to get past them.

Bitter Seeds is an alternate history take on World War II.  Germany has developed a new weapon, one that might change the course of history and lead to the Third Reich’s domination of Europe.  A group of children have been turned into technologically enhanced supermen, capable of incredible feats of power.  Pyromancy, invisibility, telekinesis and precognition have been drawn out of these children through Nazi experimentation.  Against them, England turns to the only power it can find that match Germany’s new weapons: warlocks.

English warlocks vs. Nazi supermen, all wrapped in the package of a spy novel? A premise like that should give an author plenty to do, even if the idea is a little silly on its face.  If you wanted to write something fun, you could get that, or if you wanted something dark and terrifying, you could go there, too.  While Bitter Seeds tries its hand at both of these things, it doesn’t actually succeed at either.

Of the three main characters – Marsh, the spy; Will, the warlock; and Klaus, one of the Nazi super soldiers – only Will comes across as close to a fully developed character.  Marsh’s motivations are clear, but he’s so defined by his role as a Spy Who Gets the Job Done that he never quite gels as a sympathetic lead.  And I never was able to figure out what drove Klaus to do anything.  He’s painted as wanting to please the Nazi doctor who is their tormentor and leader, but the story never gives us any reason why.

A lot of this may have been due to the other significant problem I had with Bitter Seeds: Gretel, the precognitive Nazi super soldier with questionable loyalty to her masters.  Gretel never, ever becomes a character.  She’s a plot device, and a frustrating one at that.  Her abilities are both faultless and limitless.  She knows when everything is going to happen, how it will happen and what specific consequences will arise.  So the entire story, and every character within, is basically a puppet under Gretel’s control.  It’s impossible for anyone to do anything that she doesn’t know about, and there isn’t anything she knows about that she doesn’t subvert.

It’s difficult to stay invested in characters that have no agency, that are at the mercy of some omniscient, manipulative child who is a poorly developed character in her own right.  It’s not that the idea of the story isn’t interesting, it’s that the story never grows organically out of those ideas.  I have logical problems with how much damage five super powered children are able to do in a war that involved millions of men, and the fact that they all seem invulnerable to everything except when Gretel wants one of them to die strains credulity.

What could have been a tense and enjoyable alternate history spy novel never allowed itself to build up momentum. Bitter Seeds is apparently the first book in a series, but I doubt I’ll read beyond this one.  I have some suspicions of what kinds of things we’ll see in the second novel, and I don’t know that I’m interested in them.  At the very least, I stopped caring what happened to the characters halfway though the first book, and that’s not something easily won back.

Cyberpunk via Federico Fellini.

I don’t know where that thought leads.

I didn’t do an update post or May because I thought I hadn’t seen enough to make it worth it, and decided I’d just wrap it into the next months’ post.  Looking back, I saw 3 Education films, which is as good as some months; the follies of memory.  Ah well.  Here we go.

Sleeper

Woody Allen in his earlier, more slapstick period.  There’s lot of sped up running around and pratfalls and people acting all crazy because they just came out of goofy sci-fi machinery, but there’s enough of Allen’s quieter, sarcastic wit to make the film work.  I wouldn’t call this one of Allen’s best films by any measure, and I don’t even know if I’d recommend it outside of hardcore Woody Allen fans.  But it’s a pleasant film with a couple of really awesome gags.  Especially the robotic dog that repeats, “Woof!  Woof!  Woof! Hello! I’m Rags!” over and over again.

Je Tu Il Elle

I was taken enough by Chantal Akerman’s experimental films to pick up another one, this one starring the director herself.  Like her earlier films Hotel Monterey and News From Home , this one is not one to recommend lightly.  There are long moments of complete silence and stillness, especially as the main character sits, depressed and eating sugar from the bag, in her apartment.  There is little plot, but it works as a portrait of loneliness and desperate attempts to reach back out into the world.  I could describe the individual vignettes, but I think this is a film you do your best to experience or just ignore; an explanation would do nothing to describe what the film is.  All that said, I’m a fan.

Come Drink With Me

One of two Shaw Brothers kung fu films I watched over the past 2 months.  Of the two, this was the lesser of them.  A bandit company kidnaps the governor’s son and demands ransom, so the governor sends out his daughter Golden Swallow to rescue him and defeat the bandits.  The plot is a muddle, and the kung fu is only intermittently good.  There’s a fun character, the Drunken Cat, who of course has Backstory that ties into the plot, and a few cool moments, but its notable more for the groundbreaking use of a female lead in a kung fu flick than anything else.

The French Connection

William Friedkin’s memorable film about cops going after international drug dealers, this film holds up pretty well as a tight, suspenseful police thriller that doesn’t overplay its hand.  Gene Hackman is, of course, fantastic, as the lead police detective.  I don’t know that it’s classic, but it’s very good and has a impressively ambiguous final shot.  As American films of the 1970′s go – an era I admire far less than most film lovers – it was pretty good.   I dunno.  I guess I wished I was going to have more to say about it.

Raging Bull

Yeah, yeah, add it to the list of films it’s shocking I didn’t see until now.  I love Scorsese, I love DiNiro, so I don’t know why I never got here until now.  Now that I have?  Man, what a film.  A lot of movies that decide they want to use black and white photography for ARTISTIC PURPOSES!! just shoot the film as if it were color.  Not this.  The boxing scenes, especially, create an incredible feeling of isolation and distance within the ring; the clouds of cigarette smoke and reflected light surrounding the fighters like a wall is a subtle but impressive effect. I realized watching this that what I miss most in color versus black and white is the incredible solidity and texture smoke takes in b&w photography.  As for the film itself, that I haven’t bothered talking about?  Amazing, sad and painful; Jake LaMotta’s self destruction, his inability to overcome anger and jealousy and his own self-hatred is one of the post powerful takes on the subject.  And it’s probably the best performance you’ll ever see from Joe Pesci.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

Shaw Brothers film number 2.  This one?  Way, way, better.  In fact, it’s the best old school Kung Fu film I’ve ever seen, and possibly the best Kung Fu training you’re likely to see.  The plot is only muddled in the beginning and the end (as opposed to, y’know, all the time like in most other SB films), and the entire middle as the main character fights his way from chamber to chamber, learning excellent Kung Fu lessons as he goes is just awesome.  Gordon Liu, who you  may have seen as the sadistic Pai Mei in Kill Bill, is awesome as the lead.  If you see one Shaw Brothers film, see this.

Husbands and Wives

Now here’s a fantastic and classic Woody Allen film.  We follow two couples, both married for some time.  When one of the couples decides to call it quits, it leads the other to question whether there might be something wrong in their marriage as well.  Most of Allen’s films are about the way in which relationships come together and fall apart, but this might be his most mature examination of marriage itself, and what trying to stay with a person for the rest of your life means.  Judy Davis is especially fantastic.

Wild Strawberries

The first Ingmar Bergman film I’ve seen (and, at present, the only).  Wild Strawberries follows a retired professor as he travels back to his old school to be honored.  This basic plot structure is used, in its own way, in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, but pointing out parallels between Allen and Bergman is sort of an easy game, isn’t it?  I enjoyed the quiet, reflective way this film meandered through the professor’s memories, but I also had the same problem with it that I do with much of the French New Wave: something about the morose, straight ahead way they deal with human sadness seems inartful and simplistic.  I appreciate Woody Allen’s love of Bergman and how it inspired him, but the way Allen finds humor in the same sources of pain makes him a far more interesting filmmaker.

Three Days of the Condor

Man, remember when Robert Redford used to be awesome?  I know, if your still can’t shake the memory of The Horse Whisperer it can be hard, but trust me here.  And if you don’t want to trust me, watch this movie.  I love that this is a spy thriller involving a bookworm employee of the CIA, someone with no field training and no idea how to deal with life and death peril.  When his entire office is murdered, Redford goes on the run, trying to figure out why people in his own organization seem to want him dead.  Especially awesome is Max von Sydow as a cold, meticulous assassin.  Definitely worth your time.

M. Hulot’s Holiday

A breezy, affable film about a strange, but amusing man on holiday in a beach resort in France.  The film spends 20 minutes just setting up the rhythms of people arriving at the resort and beginning their stay before truly introducing M. Hulot, the main character.  There’s no plot to speak of, nor is it a laugh out loud kind of comedy.  But it earns your affection the longer it runs, becoming a kind of silly, fun portrait of silly, fun things happening at a seaside resort.  But never fear: the concluding scene involving fireworks going off is funny enough to call this film a comedy, if laughs are what you need.

Red Heat

It’s Arnold!  As a Russian!  Fighting drug dealers in America!  With a comedian playing a cop!  Ok, ok, this film is fluff, but it’s directed by Walter Hill, who’s really good at shooting action (wait, you haven’t seen The Warriors?!) .  The film is hardly an action classic, but it’s a good time, and it’s smarter than it has to be.  Possibly worth it for the kind of insane cast it has, but probably not worth going out of your way to see.  If you want this type of film, go for 48 Hours instead, by the same director and much, much better.

I’m playing around with verse, which I’ve avoided writing most of my life.  I’m starting with the Japanese tanka, which has a 5-7-5-7-7 line structure.  Nice, short and a little restrictive.

Anyway, it’s no good if you keep it hidden, so here’s my first.  More to come, I hope.

Has the rain begun?
Its drops are invisible.
They fall without sound.
I see you walking alone,
an umbrella in your hand.

I wonder how many books will be written on the failure of network television.  Endless missteps combined with rapid changes in the technology of media have left it a hollow shell of itself.  The analysis will be nearly as endless, and probably as unsuccessful at keeping people in the future from making the same mistakes.  Sadly, I think the mistakes are hardwired into the genetic makeup of the people who end up running big media conglomerates.

Many, though not all, of the problems of network television can be chalked up to an egotistical competitive streak shared by all of the networks.  It’s never enough to do well.  You have to do well in relation to your competition.  Profit?  Yeah, that’s nice, but it’s only comforting if your profit is bigger than their profit.  In fact, it’s not even all that satisfying if they’re making a profit at all; winning means them losing.

It’s Upfronts week, and that means the networks are all releasing their new schedules.  One of my favorite shows, Community, will continue to hang out at 8PM on Thursday.  It’s been successful there, and that’s good news for viewers; Community is the best new sitcom in years, and anything that keeps the show on the air is good by me.  Meanwhile, over at CBS, they’ve got their own successful, newish sitcom: Big Bang Theory.  It’s been showing on Monday until now, but as of next season, they’ll be moving it to Thursdays at 8PM, where it can compete for roughly the same audience as Community.

So rather than pick a time slot where it can compete against different shows, CBS has decided that its best strategy is to fracture that audience between two similar shows.  What’s the rational here?  Even if Big Bang Theory wins, which seems to be the prediction, what’s been gained here? The best case scenarios is, what, killing off a competitor’s success, hopefully at minimal expense of your own?  How is this better than putting a different show against Community, servicing an audience that show is not, and putting Big Bang Theory elsewhere, against, say, a Law and Order clone?

Because it’s a zero sum game, I suppose, and if NBC is having success with an audience that you also target, even if you’re doing so on a different day, well that shit can not stand, man.

The reality is, people who watch both shows will continue to do so, you just increase the likelihood that people will do so on DVR.  Heck, there’s a good chance you might convince a few people who hadn’t DVRed either show to this point to start doing it with one or both of them.  And you increase audiences overall frustration with a television model designed more to enable arm wrestling matches between few ambitious media executives than be financially successful by putting out successful shows.

So when HBO or TNT or AMC puts out another show that they air fifteen times in a week and put instantly on On Demand, doing everything they can so that you can catch their show regardless of what other shows you watch, you lose a little bit more. You lose audience who doesn’t trust you to do what you can to help a show succeed.  You lose writers and directors who are sick of seeing their shows become pieces on a chessboard.

And you continue lose money.  The supposed purpose of the whole enterprise.

All because a few people at a few companies can’t stand to see someone else succeed along with them.

Look, let’s just get it out there.  I like Lady Gaga.  She’s good pop.  Good pop is hard to find.  Clear?  Cool.

That said, Telephone is a really horrible video.

I don’t have a problem, in theory, with a 10 minute short film masquerading as a music video. I’m sure there are a lot of directors trying to make their way into film through music videos. If they can snatch a budget big enough to do something more than shoot a couple of girls against a backdrop of fake smoke, I can’t blame them for going for it. But whatever it is you’re hoping for your career, you’ve got to, at the very least, still make sure there’s a music video buried in there somewhere.

There are a lot of things wrong with Telephone. It’s an exploitation film parody by someone who seems to be parodying other exploitation film parodies. If Jonas Acklund, the director of Telephone, is actually a fan of the films this is supposedly paying homage to, it doesn’t show. It’s also full of nonsensical, stylistic ticks that are, at best, distracting. It straight out steals the Pussy Wagon gag from Kill Bill, too, and it has so little to do with anything that I can’t really write it off as homage. Apparently the truck is owned by Quentin himself, so I can only hope that he at least got some cash for it. Either way, as a piece of film, it’s a hot mess.

None of that is really the problem.

The problem is that, unlike, say, Thriller, the “film” part of the video interrupts the song at the end of every verse. Just when the song is getting going, we get another pointless exploitation “homage” sequence. Yes, I think the film parts are bad. Maybe you think they’re good. But I’d bet money we both turned the video on to see a music video, not Jonas Acklund’s short film about Lady Gaga and Beyonce going on a costume party crime spree.

Thriller interrupts the song once, in the middle, but otherwise it’s a straight ahead showcase of a great pop song and awesome dancing. Yes, it’s also just a better shot piece of film. Yes, it’s directed by John Landis, who’s a fantastic filmmaker. But even if you hate the werewolf movie parts, you can get to the song part and run with it without being interrupted every 45 seconds with nonsense.

If you want to make a self indulgent piece of crap, go for it, but at least make a self indulgent piece of crap music video.

And sorry for making you watch Telephone. Here, I’ll make it up to you with Thriller.

Bullitt

You’ve probably heard of this film because of its classic car chase and little else.  That’s because the car chase is literally the only reason to see this movie.  It’s a brilliant scene wrapped in an utterly pedestrian police procedural.  There’s a mystery, but it’s nothing to write home about.  Or even write about, for that matter.  Fast forward to the car chase, then hit stop.

Play Misty For Me

The daddy of modern “I dated a woman and O Noes she’s psycho” films.  It’s also Clint Eastwood’s first film behind the camera.  He plays a radio DJ who’s getting calls every night from a woman who wants him to – see if you can guess – play Misty for her.  Then one day he runs into her in a bar, and the dating and sex begins.  Only the woman is unstable, and when Clint tries to break off the relationship, the stalking and terror begins.  Unlike later films in the genre, the film never hops the rails of reality and keeps its characters mostly plausible.  Also, it’s got a great sequence at the Monterey Jazz Festival.  Worth seeing for education reasons, but it’s not exactly a classic film.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

On the other hand, this is definitely a classic.  Deservedly so.  There were a lot of science fiction films in the 50′s, but most of them were cheesy horror romps made for quick double feature business.  The Day the Earth Stood Still is an exception. Directed by Robert Wise, with an honest to god SF story at its core, the film is a must see.  An alien and his robot come to Earth to deliver a message: Stop your warlike ways, or we will destroy you for the good of the galaxy if you try to leave your own planet.  It never becomes a mindless action film, but instead stays a quiet, contemplative film about a peaceful alien here on a mission of necessity.  Also: Klaatu Barada Nikto!

The Mouse That Roared

I was so impressed by Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove that I decided to grab another one of his films as soon as possible.  Why The Mouse That Roared? I think someone mentioned it once and it stuck in my head. So, no reason, basically.  It’s about a miniscule nation in Europe whose entire economy is based on selling wine to the United States.  When California wineries start making a cheap knockoff, the nation devises a plan to save the economy.  They’ll go to war with the US, lose, and in surrender will be economically rehabilitated by the nation on which their economy depends.  Hijinks ensue.  Not brilliant, but funny and cute, and it’s got Jean Seberg, for whom I crush hard.

La Chambre / Hotel Monterey / News from Home

I’m lumping these all together because they all came on the same DVD and I watched them all at once.  All three films are directed by Chantal Akerman, a Belgian director who moved to the States in the 70′s.  All three films are semi-experimental (ok, some of them are full out experimental) works made during that period.  La Chambre is a 10 minute pan around a single room.  Hotel Monterey is an hour of mostly silent shots of an old hotel in NYC, from the people moving through its lobby, to its rising and falling elevators and finally out the windows as the sun rises.  It’s amazing how, by the end of the film, the hotel has become a real, tangible place.  Finally there’s News From Home, in which the director reads letters from her mother over shots of NYC.  Since we never hear Akerman’s responses, just her mother’s letters, we can only speculate at how her time far away from home is affecting her.  If you’ve ever moved far away, there’s a lot in this film to recognize.  Its final shot, shot from a ferry of Manhattan slowly receding into the mist, has stayed with me since seeing it.

High and Low

Akira Kurasawa is best known for his period films, but his modern pieces are easily as strong as his best known Samurai epics.  High and Low plays almost as two films, linked by the same central plot.  The first half tells the story of Gondo, a business executive who’s staked his entire fortune on a bid to take of his employer.  But when kidnappers mistakenly abduct his chauffeur’s child, he’s forced to choose: does he pay the ransom and ruin himself, or deny responsibility for the kidnapping even when his own child was the target?  The second half of the film follows the police as they attempt to find the kidnapper.  The first half is the more compelling, but the second is a detailed and effective procedural investigation that gets downright intense by the time the police descend into the underworld of Tokyo.  Especially effective is the horror of Junkie Alley, which plays more as a vision of the underworld than a real place.  Like Ikiru, it’s a film with a challenging structure but is a brilliant film because of it.

You: Our current code is completely uncommented. Do you comment your code?

Them: Yes, we comment.

You: Excellent, commented code is very important to us.

Later…

You: This code has no comments.

Them: We will comment after things are done.

You: …really?

Finally…

You: Wait, we’re all finished, where are the comments?

Them: Allow us to explain our methodology of why code comments are actually unneeded and cumbersome.

You: …

* Regardless of the relative merits of comments vs. clean code that describes itself, it’s hilarious that anyone takes this particular kabuki dance seriously.**
** I could have probably titled this “Every talk with a programmer ever, Re: Commenting.”  Ah well.

A hit or miss month for my movie education.  Let’s dive in.

Drums Along the Mohawk

Once again, I take a run at a John Ford film and bounce right off.  When I heard the description of this film – a newlywed couple moves to update New York and is besieged by attacking natives – it at least sounded like nice, tense setup.  But what I got was slow, disjointed and kind of boring.  If I’m going to get Old Hollywood racism, I’d at least like it wrapped in an enjoyable film.  This one really tried my patience.

Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom

Not everything in the Movie Education list is high art.  Or, even art at all, I suppose.  This is one of the most noted entries in the 1970′s Japanese “Pinku” genre.  That basically means it’s a Japanese exploitation film, in case you don’t feel like following the link.  A bunch of tough, gang girls are forced to go to a reform school run by corrupt vice principal and ruled over by a disciplinary club made up of the cruelest girls in the school.  What plays out is kind of a women in prison revenge film that’s really fun if you can get into that kind of thing.  Like Lady Snowblood, you can tell this was a big influence on Tarrantino, especially with Kill Bill. Worth it just for the strange dueling challenge where two women crouch and extend one hand to the side while reciting a formal greeting.  But remember: it’s exploitation, so if gratuitous sex and nudity are a problem for you, this isn’t the film for you.

The Breakfast Club

No, I’d never seen it before.  Let’s just assume if it’s an 80′s teen comedy, I missed it, ok?  This is only the second John Hughes movie of his classic era that I’ve seen, the first being Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I have to be honest, too.  I never liked Bueller that much.  But I figured it was my duty to finally catch up on The Breakfast Club, since its kind of a thing with people of my generation.  Like Bueller, I thought it was overrated and filled with unrealistic teen stereotypes.  Unlike Bueller, there were things I liked about the film despite that.  Ally Sheedy was both adorable and excellent in the role of the Weird Girl, and Anthony Michael Hall made a badly written geek part enjoyable.  The Breakfast Club proved to me that I was right to assume Hughes’ teen comedy traded more in cliche than insight, but this was a good film despite that.  I’ll be saying “I taped his buns together” on a daily basis.

Grand Illusion

I liked The Rules of the Game so much that I pushed the other major Renoir film I knew of to the top of my list.  It’s an quiet and deliberately paced story told about the impending breakdown of Europe’s class system in the First World War.  Well, it’s not really about that, but it’s the undercurrent for many of the film’s best scenes.  Two French officers – one an aristocrat, the other a working class engineer – are shot down over Germany and spend the film moved from officer’s camp to officer’s camp, waiting for their chance to escape.  It’s interesting that the film isn’t so much about class tensions as it is the way men of different social station relate to each other in a war that has leveled those differences.  There isn’t really one thing the film is saying, but each scene paints a picture of a changing world, a change that is coming whether these men can accept it or not.  It’s not quite the film that Rules of the Game is, in my mind, but it’s still fantastic.

The General

I really wanted to like this.  I’ve never seen a Buster Keaton film and everyone talks so highly about it.  To his credit, Keaton is every bit the genius at staging sequences everyone says he is.  Everything from the camerawork to his own stunts are top notch, and it’s worth seeing the film just to realize what a difference there is between Charlie Chaplin twirling a cane and Keaton’s ability to continue to perform while riding on the front of a train.  That doesn’t make The General an enjoyable film, though.  At least, it didn’t for me.  The plot was incoherent and characters nonexistent.  I’m also a little unsure what the make of the hero of the film being a Confederate soldier stopping a Union attack.  I’m glad I saw it, but I didn’t enjoy watching it.

Heat

I remember when Michael Mann’s Heat came out and the big draw was that Al Pacino and Robert Dinero would finally have a scene together.  You know, because they were in Godfather II together without sharing a scene, so that’s the big thing the moviegoing public needed from a film.  Unfortunately, they only share one scene together, so there was a bit of  backlash over the film that had nothing to do with whether or not it was any good.  And you know what?  It’s really good.  It builds slowly towards a big bank heist, and when it arrives and the balls-out action begins you realize that you’ve still got a full hour of movie to go, leaving you to guess at what the last act of the movie will bring.  I’ve said before how much I love that structure, where you point to a big moment as your climax, but hit it early and destroy expectations for the rest of the film, and it really works in Heat.  I’m dissatisfied with the very, very ending of the film, but that aside, it’s a classic.  Even if you hate the rest of the film, the mid-point bank heist is such a perfect tension build-and-release that it’s worth every single minute of film that surrounds it.

The health care reform bill that passed the House of Representatives last night has taken a lot of fire, largely over things unrelated to the actual policy it enacts.  Now that it’s passed, the papers are doing legitimate policy analysis on what the bill does, not on the process that led to its passage.

What was clear to be before passage is now even clearer: This is a very good bill, if one with a lot of room for improvement.  People’s lives will be made better because of this bill, starting almost immediately (well, six months from now).  The New York Times has a great chart on it that’s worth looking over.  So does the L.A. Times and the Washington Post.