Usually when I write about books I put the author's name in the title of the post along with the title of the book. But in a few cases it seems superfluous. Doesn't everybody know that Frank Herbert wrote Dune? Or is the fact that I think so only a manifestation of my own insularity? 

Anyway, he did, and the claim I've seen that it's the most famous of all science-fiction novels is probably correct. Also the greatest? I don't know about that, but I'm not really in a position to judge.

Last February I saw the 2021 Denis Villeneuve movie which dramatizes the first half (roughly) of the novel. The second film was to be released this fall, and I made up my mind to read the book again before then. I was in the midst of doing so when I saw an announcement that the film will be delayed until March of next year. Oh well--maybe I won't have forgotten it completely by then. 

I said "again," and there is a little bit of mystery about that for me. I definitely read it around 1976, for what I think was the first time. But when I was in high school in the mid-'60s I was a science-fiction fanatic, and subscribed to Analog magazine, in which Dune was serialized at the time. As best I can tell from Wikipedia, this was done under two different titles, two years apart. The first, called Dune World, appeared in 1963, in two installments; the second, Prophet of Dune, in 1965, in five (!) installments. I'm pretty certain that was during the period when I subscribed. I even seem to remember this cover:

Yet I have no memory of reading it. If I didn't read it, why not? If I did, why don't I have at least some fragments of memory about it? Is it possible that I found it too complicated and slow-moving and gave up after reading only a little? I won't say that's probable, but it is certainly possible. There is, obviously, no way to answer that question, but it bothers me.

The book is indeed by science-fiction standards, at least those of the early 1960s, complicated and relatively slow-moving. I conjectured in my post about the film that it probably spent more time on spectacular action than the book. That was an understatement. There is in fact not a great deal of action in the cinematic sense in the book. The attack on the Atriedes family, which occupies a significant portion of the film is and is indeed spectacular, happens mostly offstage in the book. There are other such instances. Perhaps this is something of a Star Wars effect. But Dune is definitely not space opera ("a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures, relationships, and chivalric romance"), which Star Wars is.

The emphasis in the book is not on action but on a complex web of political intrigue, family and dynastic relationships, religion, ecology, and a sort of psychological mysticism. I won't bother with any further summary. Most people who are at all interested already know the basics of the plot, characters, and fictional world; anyone who doesn't can get plenty from Wikipedia.

That fictional world is a pretty impressive achievement. I don't think Dune is in the same literary class as The Lord of the Rings, but it bears comparison in the complexity and thoroughness of its imaginary world. When I say "bears comparison" I don't mean "is equal to"--on a 1-10 scale, if LOTR is a 10, then Dune is a 7 or 8. As far as I know Frank Herbert did not go so far as to create entire languages (which in Tolkien actually preceded the stories to some extent), nor is the history developed in as much detail, though I would guess that more of it is filled in by the many sequels.

The treatment of religion is also an interesting comparison. As all literarily-minded Christians know, religion does not exist in The Lord of the Rings, and yet the book is profoundly Christian. In Dune, on the other hand, religion is very explicitly everywhere. Yet it is in a sense not religious at all, but a sort of cultural tool, half-manufactured by worldly powers, especially the order of women called the Bene Gesserit who have a plan, implemented over centuries if not millennia, for producing a messiah-sort-of-person by directed breeding. And it's relevant to the book only through its effects on culture, and on behavior in general. Any notion of a transcendent spiritual reality is left very vague and very far in the background.

I recall that when I read the book in 1976 I scoffed a bit at the obvious way much of the culture of its Fremen, inhabitants of a desert planet, was drawn from Arabian culture, or others of the Middle Eastern deserts. That was unfair, and a result of my own ignorance. In those days I did not recognize such words as "jihad"; if I had, I would have realized that the Fremen are not copied from Arab-Muslim cultures, but rather are explicitly descended from them.

Dune takes place thousands of years in the future, when humanity has developed interstellar travel and populated many planets, but all of them began with ours. There are no "aliens" in the universe of Dune; every person is homo sapiens, though some have mental powers developed to a superhuman degree. The interstellar human society has reverted to a basic and ancient tripartite pattern: emperor, nobility ("houses"), and everybody else.

What it does have, which I don't think other science fiction of the time had, is psychedelic drugs, or rather drug: the substance called "spice" which is the foundation of the entire economic and political order. Frank Herbert had obviously had some experience along those lines--or if not, he knew people who did. There is a strong hint here of what would soon become known as the human potential movement. In that respect, as well as in its ecological focus, this strikes me as a very "Sixties" work. If I remember correctly, I first encountered the word "ecology" in Analog or some other sci-fi context. (Why do I remember that, but not whether I read Dune? Memory is a very hit-and-miss thing.)

In spite of what I said about the well-constructed world, I was left disappointed in my curiosity about certain things. In order for an interstellar empire to exist, there must be, one way or another, faster-than-light travel. Most science-fiction at least does a bit of hand-waving to explain this, usually one of the many variants of the "warp drive." Dune does not. The whole economic and political structure of the empire rests on the mysterious drug called "spice" which enables the powers of the monopolistic guild of navigators who alone can pilot interstellar craft. What's involved in that navigation, and how does the spice enable it? The book offers only the suggestion that it has something to do with the perception of possible future events. I suppose it's asking too much to want more information about that, just as it's asking too much to want to know how a warp drive works (though that doesn't stop people from trying).  

And about the famous sandworms: it was only a passing remark in an appendix that answered one question that kept occurring to me as I read, which was "what do they eat?" Answer: "sand plankton." Really? There's enough of that to support creatures that may be a quarter of a mile long and a hundred yards in breadth? Well, okay. But then why do they need all those extremely long sharp teeth? How and why does a plankton-eating creature attack and swallow anything that moves with single-minded intensity? How and why does it swallow a mobile factory or a spacecraft? How does it move at speeds which seem to be at least thirty or forty miles an hour while completely buried in sand?

Maybe I missed some of these answers. Maybe they're answered in the sequels, of which, as I mentioned, there are a lot. Herbert himself wrote five, and his son Brian has co-written, with Kevin J. Anderson, a number of others. I'm not sure what that number is; over a dozen, I think.

All in all, my reaction to Dune is much the same as it was 45 years ago: yes, it's impressive; yes, I enjoyed it; no, I'm not a devotee. I don't rule out reading the first sequel, Dune Messiah, but it's doubtful. 

About halfway through Kurosawa's Ikiru I thought, with a touch of cynicism: This is going to be a story of a staid and gloomy old man facing death, given a new appreciation of life by a vivacious young woman. I wondered if perhaps this was the first film to portray that sort of encounter and awakening, which strikes me as a little trite now. (Why do I think that? In fact can't think of a single specific film that follows the pattern, but I know I've encountered it enough to feel a little impatient with it.)

But that was only the first half (roughly) of a fairly lengthy film, and the rest of the story plays out somewhat differently. 

The protagonist, Kanji Watanabe (played by Takashi Shimura), is an official in what is portrayed as a turgid city bureaucracy, indifferent to everything but its own machinery. Watanabe's job, as far as we see it, appears to consist mainly of looking at pieces of paper from the very large stacks that threaten to crowd out everything else in the office, looming over the staff in a very concrete representation of the phrase "overwhelmed by paperwork," and stamping them, presumably with a yes-no, approved-disapproved verdict. And one can't help thinking that most are disapproved, judging by the evasive not-our-responsibility behavior of the staff when they're approached by a group of women who want a sewage leak near their homes cleaned up.

Watanabe has not been feeling well, and he goes to a doctor who tells him nothing is seriously wrong with him. But the doctor is lying--a rather odd thing from a contemporary American perspective, but which appears to be standard procedure in the Japan of that time. Watanabe has been warned, though, by another patient: if the doctor thinks you have a fatal stomach cancer and not very long to live, he will tell you this, that, and the other--certain specific things--and those are in fact the very things the doctor says to him. Watanabe goes home believing he hasn't much longer to live, and we are not left wondering whether it could be a false alarm because we have been told in an opening voiceover that it is not. And the doctor admits it to an assistant after Watanabe is gone.

Watanabe is a widower and has been since his only child, a son, was very young. He has raised the boy alone, sticking with his dreary job for the child's sake. Now, in several painful scenes, he realizes that his son and daughter-in-law don't much care about him, apart from the pension he will eventually receive. He turns back to the job: did it, does it, really have to be so futile?

"Ikiru" means "to live," and the film suggests that the word is part of a question: what does it mean to live? On the basis of my very limited knowledge, I suspect the Japanese character does not go in as much for the big cosmic answer as some other cultures do. Kurosawa may have intended Ikiru to be almost as much a criticism of bureaucracy as an exploration of meaning, and it certainly works that way, but the title makes it clear that the deeper and more permanent concern is primary. The resolution arrived at is modest, hardly triumphant, not satisfying as a cosmic answer (at least not to me), but quite moving. If it is not a solution, it is certainly a consolation. There are a couple of scenes toward the end that I want to watch repeatedly, one in particular which involves falling snow.

When I watch these movies it takes me a little while to adjust to the acting style. Shimura's portrayal of Watanabe's terror strikes me as peculiar and overdone. I found it helpful to think of it not as an unsuccessful sort of naturalism but as the use of the face as a kind of tragic mask. With that adjustment, it works. 

This seems to be the original trailer. It's almost four minutes long.

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All I know of Japanese cinema is the most famous of Kurosawa's work (Rashomon et. al.), and a few of Ozu's. Unlike the former, which are set in the pre-modern past, this one is then-contemporary postwar Japan. And on the basis of it and the Ozu films, I wonder whether the situation of old people whose children don't really want to be bothered with them is a widespread concern in Japan, or at least was in the 1950s. Or does the presence of the question in these films mean that the  behavior was a new and deeply shocking thing? And does that have any connection to the news reports I keep reading that the Japanese birth rate is so low as to place the culture's survival in doubt? All or most industrialized nations seem to be tending toward very low birth rates, but Japan's seems to be worse: Japan births fall to record low as population crisis deepens (CNN) 

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The reason I watched Ikiru at just this time was that I was intrigued by Rob G's recommendation of Living, a recent English film which is a remake of Ikiru. (See comments on this post.) I basically dislike the whole idea of remakes. I dislike the idea so much that I can't even justify my prejudice by pointing to some examples, because I don't watch them. (For that matter I haven't seen most of the originals.) I think my prejudice began in 1978 when someone remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I had only recently seen the original and thought it was great, and didn't see the point of remaking it. (I'm asking myself now: how did I see it in the late '70s? I don't know. Home video had barely gotten started, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a VCR until the early '80s. And when the original came out in 1956 I was eight years old and certainly didn't see it then.)

The argument for a remake of Ikiru is stronger than most, because the original is not only relatively obscure but presents language and culture obstacles for the Western audience. 

Anyway: Living serves as an example of doing it right. One way of doing it wrong would be to change too little, to make a slavish imitation, with whatever updates are necessary to bring it into a different time, place, and, possibly culture. In that case one might think "Why bother?" The other, which I think is probably what happens more frequently, is to trash it: to turn it into something else, as if the re-maker didn't really like the original, or, worse, to make it "contemporary" by sensationalizing it: more sex, more violence, cruder language, and maybe some (or a lot) of fashionable politics. (As I write this I suddenly remember some reviews of remakes which no doubt reinforced my prejudice: one, for instance, a remake of Cape Fear which made the villain into some sort of Christian.)

Living strikes exactly the right balance of homage and innovation. I suppose some critics, especially the trendier sort, might find it too close to the original, not "innovative" etc.; if so I disagree. I wondered, when I saw an ad for it, why the main character, a county official named Williams (Bill Nighy), is wearing a bowler: surely London office workers don't do that anymore? But the story is set in the 1950s, a more plausible time for a government official to mirror the rigid rule-following super-conventional type of his Japanese contemporary Watanabe. The result is a near-perfect transmutation. One would never suppose, if not otherwise informed, that it is not a wholly English original. 

There are a few changes to the story and to the characters. They strike me as not necessarily necessary but justifiable. Some are perhaps calculated to make best use of the English milieu, which in any case the film very much does. The one I noticed most is a change in the relationship between Wilson and his son and daughter-in-law. In Kurosawa's original, the latter are about equally at fault in their treatment of the old man. In this one, the son is only weak, and his wife is pretty close to actively malicious, pushing her husband (not very successfully) to make demands on his father with the broad goal of getting him out of their lives. And the son is, at the end, remorseful, which in the original he is not. 

Whether or not you've seen Ikiru, this movie is very much worth your while. I notice that it received a number of awards. Good; it deserves them. The screenplay, by the way, is by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, among many others, who is Japanese by birth but has lived in England (mostly) since he was a child. I didn't recognize the name of the director, Oliver Hermanus, or any of his other work. 

Here's the trailer, which, you'll notice, is less than half as long as the Ikiru trailer. Attention spans are shorter than they once were, I think.

Another question I'm asking myself: why is Bill Nighy so familiar to me? I've seen almost none of the movies and TV shows listed in his filmography. Yet when Rob mentioned his name I knew immediately who he was.

I don't have any idea at all where I got the mp3 of this song, or rather track--it's not exactly a song, but a combination of droning and mechanical sounds and percussion. I found it haunting. And I don't remember how I figured out that the voice might or must be that of Robert Oppenheimer, as it does not include the famous "I am become death" line, but somehow I did.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. 

I haven't seen Oppenheimer, but it strikes me that this would be an effective soundtrack for the credits, if not for Oppenheimer then another on a similar subject. 

After not hearing this for some years, I thought of it a few months ago and went looking for it among my mp3s. It took me a long time to find it, which is not surprising: I have thousands of mp3s, and the name of the artist is Scar Tissue; the name of the track is "Lazsik"; the name of the album is Form/Alkaline. 

Here is Oppenheimer himself.

I don't know what I thought the actual content of a Barbie movie might be. Well, that's a little misleading right off the bat, because I didn't think about it at all. If I had, I suppose I would have expected a sort of Barbie cartoon, with a negligible story, no more substantial than an episode of The Smurfs. And that the feminists and other media women writing about it were just using the movie as an occasion to muse, positively or negatively, about the significance of the famous doll, musings that would have about as much substance as the little mannequin itself. 

But then I started coming across commentaries from serious-minded women who were finding some significance in the movie. Clearly there's more to it than just a lot of glib pop culture fluff and/or feminist cliches. I linked to several of these in comments on the previous post, but they deserve more attention than that, so here are links and a few quotes.

From Amy Welborn at Catholic World Report:

What emerges is that the actual world of actual women is difficult. The hints begin when Stereotypical Barbie—[played by Margot] Robbie—begins to experience limits and flaws, culminating in a startling admission that she’s starting to think about…dying. Off she goes, guided by the advice from Weird Barbie (the one whose chopped hair and markered-up face points to other ways Barbies are played with)—that she must find the girl who plays with her, whose angst is clearly filtering down into her up-to-now light-filled life....

Barbie might have begun her life inspiring little girls to reject real life and their unique way of being in the world, but at the end of this part of the journey, Barbie embraces that same way of being, of womanhood that is definitely not plastic, definitely not smooth and definitely not without mystery and pain—and embraces it with joy.

From Nina Power at Compact:

Gerwig’s Barbie points instead to a dialectical exit: Women can be mothers or not; they can take up any number of roles, or none; they can conform to femininity or look weird. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. But there are limits: We are past the moment of the free-floating signifier, of womanhood as a mere “identity.” The doll is born into suffering. To have a male or female body is to suffer and feel in different ways: We forget this if we reduce each other to mere signs. To be human is also to have to choose—an existential Barbie can hide this possibility from herself for a while, but facing every maiden is death, behind every Barbie, an Oppenheimer.

From Helen Andrews at The American Conservative:

Barbie is a symbol of youth, beauty, and possibility. She can be anything, and everyone is drawn to her. But it’s all meaningless because the reason she’s so beautiful and perfect is that nothing has ever happened to Barbie. All the meaning in life comes from the things that give you wrinkles.

When she comes to the real world, Barbie finds herself on a bench at a bus stop next to a grandmotherly looking old lady. She has never seen an elderly woman before. No one ages in Barbie Land. Barbie gazes at her face and says, “You’re so beautiful.” The woman smiles and says, “I know it.”

According to Gerwig, studio executives wanted her to cut the scene, because it doesn’t move the plot along. She told them, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”

I like the last line of that first paragraph.

From Carmel Richardson, also at The American Conservative:

The world [Barbie creator Ruth] Handler envisioned is, in many ways, the world we live in today. Like Barbie, American women have achieved high-level career success, especially in higher education, where their performance has notably surpassed that of American men. Like Barbie, American girls from a very young age have learned to flaunt their bodies and to call this empowerment. And like Barbie, Ken is only an accessory to female success today....

Unfortunately for those women who have followed the Barbie model, many now find themselves childless and unsatisfied. Emasculated men, apparently, don’t father many children.

Apart from commentary on the movie itself, these remarks revealed to me that I had a completely mistaken idea about how the Barbie doll came to be and what it meant. I had always assumed that it was the creation of a man or men. That was mainly because of the ridiculous and anatomically impossible (I think) physique. I imagined a male thought process something like Babies are boring. Let's make a sexy doll. And give her fun things to do. And I was always a little bit surprised that women put up with it--the sexy part, at least. 

Wrong. Well, that description of the thought process is more or less accurate, but Barbie was the creation of a woman, a proto-feminist and a pretty hard-headed businesswoman who wanted her daughter Barbie to have a doll that would give her aspirations to a more exciting life than that of a mother and homemaker. Now the whole Barbie phenomenon--the doll, not the movie--makes sense in a way that it didn't before. Especially the role played by very consciously and skillfully contrived marketing. (The physique of the doll, however, did begin in the imagination of a man: it was suggested by a sex doll.) 

Another thing I've learned over the past few days is how much my wife hates Barbie. I knew she had never played with or wanted a Barbie doll when she was little, but I had not realized that the feeling went far beyond indifference. Every time I've brought this movie up to her with remarks along the lines of what I've posted here--"You know, actually this movie sounds kind of interesting"--the response has been brief: "I hate Barbie." And that's pretty much that. 

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About Oppenheimer: not surprisingly, it has kicked off a new round of arguments about the morality of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or rather, as far as what I've seen is concerned, a new round of justifications for it. Oppenheimer developed grave reservations about what he had done, and I gather the movie is sympathetic to those reservations. Moreover, he and many others with similar reservations were leftists, which tends to make those on the right suspicious and skeptical toward their ethical arguments. 

At any rate, whenever the question comes up, American conservatives can be counted on to defend the morality of the bombing. A post by Rich Lowry at National Review, occasioned by the film, is pretty typical. The headline:  

Oppenheimer Had Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

The subhead:

Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right call. 

There's no need to go into detail about the text. It's the justification that's always used: that the use of the bomb was necessary to end the war and in fact saved millions of lives. That's a reasonable argument, and if I'd been in Truman's place I might have done the same thing. (As is also usual, Lowry notes that the atomic bomb was really no worse than the fire bombing of cities--which is probably true, but is a bizarre line of reasoning: "It's ok that we killed these civilians, because we had already killed those other ones.")

What it doesn't address, though, is the moral principle, if formulated in an elemental way, without reference to the particular situation: is it morally permissible to deliberately kill innocent people? 

If the answer to that is yes, then it's a pragmatic, utilitarian matter. It's purely a cost-benefit analysis. X people will die if we do this. X+Y people will die if we don't. Therefore we do it.

If the answer is no, then the bombings were objectively wrong, however powerful the reasons for resorting to them were. 

What most conservatives, including most of those who oppose abortion, don't see is that if the answer is yes, then there is no argument against abortion (and many other things) in principle. 

In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the practical calculation is very powerful, and I don't see any reason to doubt that it's correct as far as the number of casualties and the general horror are concerned. I don't dismiss it. Under the right threat we would probably all accede to things that we know to be wrong. But when, in the cold light of day, we say that it is, in principle, permissible to deliberately kill the innocent, we make a grave error. There's no good excuse for Catholics to make that mistake, because the Catechism is perfectly clear:

"Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons - to commit such crimes. (2314)

I wrote about this at more length back in 2005: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Purification of Memory. One of my better efforts, I think, and one that I considered worth including in my book.

Ivan to Alyosha, in The Brothers Karamazov:

“Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.”

“No, I would not agree,” Alyosha said softly.

I have now, as I mentioned a week or two ago that I was planning to do, seen Dune, the recent one directed by Denis Villeneuve. I enjoyed it, enough that when someone suggested watching it again I was quite willing. It's very impressive visually, and I don't mean by that to suggest mere spectacle, though it has plenty of that. It's rich and often beautiful in the same way that many scenes in Villeneuve's Arrival are (and sometimes horrifying, which Arrival never is), and I was reminded of Arrival almost immediately in the opening scene of Dune. Villeneuve likes to make his alien technology mysterious, curvy and vague rather than angular and coldly mechanical, as in Star Wars. 

Taken entirely on its own terms, as a film, it's very successful. Even at two-and-a-half hours it didn't seem too long. Compared to something like Star Wars or one of the Marvel movies, it's slow. But it's still full of action, perhaps to a fault; I say that because I'm pretty sure that it glosses over the complexity of the book in favor of action--battles and such.

Before I say more I should say that I read the book more than forty years ago, in the mid- or late '70s, and don't remember it in any detail. But I do remember that it's a big novel with a lot of detail about its invented cultures and peoples. And there's not much of that detail in the movie. I noticed especially the one-sentence explanation of the importance of "spice," a drug necessary to the whole economy of the empire depicted in the book: that it helps spaceship pilots "to find a safe path between the stars" or something like that. Well, I remember enough of the book to know that that hardly begins to touch the nature of the stuff, which gives its users very extraordinary mental powers. I won't attempt to say more because I don't remember much more, but it's an extremely important part of the story. 

We all know that it's more or less intrinsically impossible to do real justice to a big novel in a movie, even a two-and-a-half hour one, or even a five-hour one--this is only the first of two planned movies. So I don't say that this is really a fair or valid complaint, only that there is a lot missing, and, as with the Lord of the Rings movies, what's missing is important, and can only be gotten by reading the book. Which I plan to do in the fairly near future, at least before Part Two is released, currently meant to happen this fall. In fact I think the desire to (re)read the book is the strongest effect that the movie had on me.

What should I say about the actors and, given the strangeness of the world depicted in the movie, the combined ability of the actors, the director, the cinematographer, and the costumers and others to make the characters believable? Well, they all worked, though I thought some worked better than others. For at least the first half of the film I thought Timothée Chalamett seemed too frail, even weak, to be Paul Atreides, the central character. But that may have been deliberate, as he began to grow and strengthen throughout the film. I must say I was reminded of the generally disliked portrayal of the young Anakin Skywalker in the generally disliked film (whichever one it was) where he grows into Darth Vader. I hope that impression won't continue in the second half. 

I'll mention one actress and character who struck me as especially good: Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Paul's mother. Her full name is Rebecca Louisa Ferguson Sundström, and she's a mixture of Swedish and British ancestry. As Paul's mother, she is appropriately warm and empathetic. As a member of the mysterious and powerful quasi-religious Bene Gesserit, she is, when the occasion calls for it, fierce and hard, bordering on scary. I suppose she has some Viking ancestry. She would make a good Kristin Lavransdatter.

Oh, and Stellan Skarsgård is completely unrecognizable as the evil, repulsive, and Jabba-the-Hutt-level obese Baron Harkonnen.

It occurs to me that Villeneuve also directed Blade Runner 2049, which I have also seen, and I wonder now why I never thought of it while watching Dune. I found it disappointing, but that was mainly for reasons having to do with the way it developed the original story. Maybe it would be worthwhile to see it again, focusing on the visuals. 

I wonder, not for the first time, why science fiction depictions of the far future seem almost instinctively to turn to empires, emperors, nobles and noble families, knights and ladies, and swordfights. Is it because there is something archetypal in them? Or are they just a cultural memory that keeps coming back because it offers dramatic possibilities that democratic thinking does not?

And it's a little curious that Frank Herbert (author of the book(s)) incorporated so much of Arab/Islamic culture into the native peoples of Arrakis, the desert planet of the title. His biography at Wikipedia doesn't mention any acquaintance with them, but I remember noticing it when I read the book, and it's certainly present in the movie. And in the score, by Hans Zimmer, full of drums and ululations. It struck me as good but a little overdone. It's probably just as well that I didn't hear it in a theater, at the over-the-top volume levels which have become normal there.

This is, obviously, not on Arrakis, where most of the story takes place, but on Caladan, the home planet of the Atreides clan.

My wife thought the ornithopters were really cool. 

Dixon, as you will have guessed, is Franklin W. Dixon, the author's name on the cover of the Hardy Boys books. He did not actually exist, at least not as the author of those books, which were a group effort, and not always the same group. Usually there was at minimum an outline written by one person and a manuscript produced from the outline by another. You can read an overview of the various people involved here, and details of who did what in each book here. It was all done at the direction of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Knowing that, you won't be surprised that the same company produced the Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and other similar books. Goodbye to Carolyn Keene.

All of that suggests something less than a sincere creative effort on the part of a Mr. Dixon, and I'm glad I didn't know that when I was ten or twelve years old and discovered the books.

I used to spend the night sometimes at the home of my maternal grandparents, and the little room I slept in had a bookshelf which held a number of books belonging to my uncle Al. He was the youngest of three, and only a dozen or so years older than me. I had been sleeping in that room for a while but apparently had not thought the grown-up-looking books would be of interest to me until one day I picked up one with the intriguing title of What Happened At Midnight. I was quickly hooked, and eventually read all of the two dozen or so on the shelves in that room. As best I can remember in consultation with a chronological list of the books, I read every title from the first, The Tower Treasure, published in 1927, through The Sign of the Crooked Arrow, published in 1949 (though of course I had no idea of their order of publication, or interest in it, but just picked up another when I finished one). 

It seems there were at least two that I took home and never returned: The Disappearing Floor (1940) and The Clue of the Broken Blade (1942). How they managed to stay with me from my late teens  until now is a mystery. Perhaps they didn't stay with me; perhaps they just stayed at my parents' house for over thirty years and I appropriated them when they moved in 2000.

A few weeks ago, partly because those two books had surfaced even though most of our books are still in boxes after moving (awaiting final determination of bookshelf placement), and partly with the thought that it might be a pleasant exercise in nostalgia, I decided to read one of them and picked up The Clue of the Broken Blade.

What a disappointment. The book is colorless and lifeless. Frank, Joe, and their father are blanks. The prose is not just wooden but ill-made, like furniture banged together crudely from the pieces of a shipping pallet. The plot seems barely coherent but that may be partly my fault, as I chose to read one chapter a night in bed, when my mind is pretty sluggish at best. I could not find in my reaction any trace of the enjoyment I had at twelve or so, or even a perception of the reasons for it, even though if no longer operative, as might happen with an old episode of Gunsmoke. I must have thought the story was exciting and suspenseful, and I know I liked what Frank and Joe represented, and wanted to be like them. Maybe, just maybe, if I had not been reading when drowsy, I would still have felt some sense of the mere what's-going-to-happen appeal of the plot. But the best I can do is assume that I must have felt it at the time. 

The most I can say in favor of the book is that the simplicity, naivete, sincerity (by which I mean the absence of irony), and absence of vulgarity were mildly refreshing in contrast to much or most of what's offered to, or pushed at, young people today. But it's so very unreal--and maybe that sheds some light on what's happened over the past half-century. 

*

At the opposite extreme: two unrelated incidents caused me to watch a 1980 BBC production of The Winter's Tale. First, a recent issue of The New Criterion includes an article on that play by Anthony Daniels. He's always an interesting writer, but although I had read the play some years ago (twenty or so, maybe?) I didn't remember it very clearly, and I didn't want to read the article without better knowledge of the play. And my Shakespeare is still packed away in one of a dozen or so large heavy boxes stacked in a hallway, and I don't know which one. 

Second, a comment on some post somewhere online informed me that subscribers to the BBC's streaming service, BritBox, have access to the BBC Television Shakespeare, which includes essentially all the plays--thirty-seven of them, and I say "essentially" because there is apparently still some scholarly disagreement about a couple of them. I had not known that the series even existed, much less that I had access to it. 

So I immediately looked for, and found, and watched, The Winter's Tale. I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed it. I was almost rapturous. The marvelous Mozart-like flow of language was a non-stop pleasure. It was just as well that I didn't have the text handy, with notes, because I would have been constantly stopping and starting the film to figure out some knotty figure or to explain an unknown or obsolete word or usage. After twenty minutes or so I decided to just let those go by, since I could follow well enough without them, and surrender to the flow. 

And the story: this is a late play, and it seems to share with The Tempest a sort of mellowness, neither tragedy nor comedy, and it ends with events described by that term Tolkien gave us, eucatastrophe. The "catastrophe" part of that, as we commonly use the word, is applicable: it could almost be termed violent in its reversal of what came before. And a critic could fairly call it dramatically unconvincing, or worse. 

Moreover, the play is oddly constructed, and fairly criticized for that. It's in two parts, and the first part is a sort of mini-Othello story, the second part a sequel which takes place some years later, and redeems the tragic first part. This makes for something of a stitched-together quality, and it can't be considered one of Shakespeare's best. But I was greatly moved by it, and will certainly turn to it again. I guess I'm something of a pushover for a story which has that general arc. I like to think that's because it is fundamentally true to...well, I shouldn't say "true to life," because in general use that  phrase implicitly refers to earthly life, but true to the deepest realities. At any rate I was greatly moved, and will certainly turn to this play again. 

And I hope this video will continue to be available so that I can turn to it. A list of the play's productions (on Wikipedia, I think) called this one "orthodox." That's probably not meant to be a compliment, but it's fair enough: there is nothing gimmicky about the production, nothing that smacks of someone trying to put his own personal stamp on the work, or to render it somehow more fitting or engaging or palatable to a contemporary audience. In this case "orthodox" means excellent acting and appropriate, fairly simple, stylized but unobtrusive staging. I could quibble with this or that detail of either, but it would be just that, quibbling. 

Somewhere online in the past day or two I saw an advertisement for a Shakespeare in modern language. Well, it's true enough that in many cases the plot alone of many of the plays, and the plain matter of much of the dialog, has plenty of appeal. Still, that seems like Raphael in monochrome. 

Lat week when I wanted to check certain details about The Summerhouse Trilogy but didn't have access to the book, I looked around on the web a bit for reviews or summaries which might help. I didn't find any, but I ended up looking through all the reader comments at Goodreads. Most were positive, and at least one reader says that she reads the book every year. But the negatives...well, they say much more about the reviewer than the reviewed.

Some seem not to have paid very close attention, as the full story is not "retold" in the three sections, but rather revealed gradually and cumulatively. Unless my memory is wrong, which it could be, or I missed something, the most startling bit is not revealed until the third section. But these folks didn't get it. Or maybe they're just that jaded:

I could have done without the third re-telling of the story.

I had hoped this final chapter would shed some light on things, but it really didn't. I wish I had given up after the first chapter spent time with a book I enjoyed.

And these two people, especially the second, seem to be the sort for whom anything not of the present day and culture is for precisely that reason dull and irrelevant:

Depressing first section in a supposedly funny British satire on trite callous middle class values.

Gah. This book did not age well at all. It was awful and prehistoric.

I don't see exactly how "callous" comes into it. I do have some sympathy for those who found the book dull, as much of it is subtle and without visible drama. Several readers complained about Margaret, the miserable girl of the first section--"a dishrag," one said. That's not unjustified, but it's an aspect of Margaret's problem. Still, these three apparently would have preferred a romance or thriller: 

A perfectly adequate, well written, thoroughly dull book. Not even hashish, sex and suicide could save this book from the monotony of the characters.

I am still reading this book, which is a book club nomination. It is awful! The characters are extremely unlikeable (except for Aunt Lily, and that is only because she is intoxicated most of the time and wears garish clothes). Even the dog has no name. It is the most uninspiring, slow moving, non-interesting book I have read.

Blecchhhh! I can't believe I finished reading this book, or that anyone would think it was interesting enough to make a movie out of! I hated it to the very last page.

At least that last one did push through every hated page.

This one I rather liked, and would suggest to the reader that she keep thinking about the book:

The author is an English Catholic whose work I’ve seen compared to that of Flannery O'Connor. She does not provide a nice, tidy, Christian ending or even tidy Christian answers. If I had read this book in my youth, I think I might even have interpreted it as anti-Christian.

*

Detour is an excellent example of the noir genre, apparently considered one of the classics. It has a pretty simple plot, which makes it different from many of its type. A famous story has it that William Faulkner and another writer working on the script for The Big Sleep were puzzled by a plot point and asked Raymond Chandler for clarification--and he didn't know, either. 

A young man and a young woman are working together as a night club act in New York. They plan to be married, but the young woman leaves for Hollywood, hoping to become a star, and the young man stays behind. (It isn't entirely clear to me why he didn't go with her, but never mind.) Later he decides to follow her after all, and begins hitchhiking across the country. He gets as far as Arizona when he gets a ride from a man in a big expensive car. Thus begins the detour. 

It's a low budget movie, starring people I hadn't heard of before (Tom Neal and Ann Savage), and it's not much more than an hour long, but it really works. 

*

I'm often struck in these older films by little things indicative of the degree to which many things have changed since the films were made. Many big things are striking, too, of course, but I mean the almost trivial ones. When was the last time you heard someone say "Give me change for a dime"? Or one which I think I may have heard as a child or a teenager, but which has disappeared for very good reason: "That's white of you." I mean that it's disappeared as a compliment. You may still hear it today, but if you do it will be  as an insult. 

Before the young man leaves for California, he calls his girlfriend. Remember long-distance calls? His brief New York-Los Angeles call costs him five dollars. That's eighty-two dollars in today's money, according to this site, which says that the dollar has lost 94% of its value since 1945. That sounds like a catastrophe, doesn't it? 

Another phrase you don't hear anymore: "sound as a dollar."

I'm going to be more brief than this book deserves, because it's been several months since I read it and I want to refresh my memory about certain things, but I've just moved to a new house and almost all my books are still in boxes awaiting the resolution of questions about bookshelves. And I have no idea which box this book is in.

I think it was Charlotte Bronte who said of her sister Emily's creation, Heathcliff, that she was not sure that the creation of such a being was morally justified. I had a somewhat similar thought about Lili, the central character in this book. When I say that she is central I don't mean that she is what we usually call "the protagonist," that it is her fate which mostly concerns and engages the reader. But she is central in that she is the agent whose powers of action cause so much else to happen, or, more importantly in this case, not to happen: this is the story of a wedding that does not take place. And she is in a sense more than the others: not only her human self, but the expression, at least, of a powerful, mysterious, and fundamentally unholy force. If "strong female character" is one of your criteria for value in fiction, you'll certainly get your money's worth from this novel. 

In fact it is effectively an all-female cast of characters, though not all are strong. There are men present, but they're more or less stupid, unfortunate necessities. The book is not so much a trilogy as a trio of novellas (or three very long chapters) telling one basic story from the point of view of three different women. The three narrators are all very much a part of each other's lives, and the contrast between what each sees and assumes about the others, and the others' inner life, is striking--as striking as it probably would be in life. It's a technical tour de force, the points of contact among the narratives polished and precisely fitted. I recall one brief incident in particular, involving a dog's attention to a woman's foot, which is very different and rather more significant when seen for the second time and from a different point of view. 

The first section, The Clothes in the Wardrobe, takes us into the mind of Margaret, a young woman who is about to be married. The marriage would be against her will except that she doesn't seem to have much of a will. She has suffered a romantic and religious trauma which has sent her into despair, including the specifically theological sense of that word, resigned and indifferent to the pressures exerted by her mother and the suitor, a boorish older man, Syl. Significantly, Margaret's narration begins with a description of Lili. 

The second book, The Skeleton in the Closet, is the viewpoint of Syl's mother, Mrs. Munro, a somewhat embittered older woman who doesn't think a great deal more of Syl than does Margaret. Alice Thomas Ellis is not the only novelist to give us strikingly different views of a character from outside and inside, but the movement from the first section to this one is a particularly effective turn. Margaret has had much to say about her future mother-in-law, most of it negative and also inaccurate, and we are a little surprised--well, at least I was--to find her so different, and so much more sympathetic. She thinks Margaret is making a mistake. But she is as weary of and resigned toward the troubles of others as she is of her own.

The Fly in the Ointment gives us Lili as she really is and not as we have been seeing her through the eyes of Margaret and Mrs. Munro. She is among other things the sort of person who is often described, with a touch of envy, as a free spirit, or, with a touch of dread, as a force of nature. She is also more or less amoral in many ways. But it is she who not only sees the disaster into which Margaret is sleepwalking but acts to prevent it. I think I can promise you that you won't forget what she does.

When I finished this book I made this comment in an email to a couple of friends:

My reaction is a kind of astonishment, not 100% positive. I read the last paragraph, closed the book, and said "Golly, what a book." Not "golly" but "gah-LEE," the "golly" of someone coming out of a storm shelter after a tornado and taking a look around. 

This was a reaction not only to the closing incident but to the whole thing, superbly executed by an intelligence that sometimes seems a little malicious. The atmosphere is so full of feminine resentment, suspicion, and struggle that I found myself wondering if this sort of thing is what goes on in the minds of most women most of the time. There is an almost cold, almost merciless quality about Ellis's intelligence and wit (there is a fair amount of humor here). I keep the word "almost" because there is more than cold clinical skill at work. The quality which makes me think "merciless" is an unflinching willingness to see these people as they truly are, to let them, so to speak, get away with nothing. And in the end there is mercy, though it comes in such a manner as to lead one to the old question about good coming from evil. This is a religiously grounded work, but, like Flannery O'Connor's and in some ways even more so, hardly comforting. At least two reviews that I came across used the words "witch" and "witchy" of the author, and I can see why. 

*

For various reasons, none especially good but some better than others, I've gotten almost entirely out of the habit of watching serious movies. My Criterion Channel subscription has gone mostly unused for months, and I've wondered whether I should keep it. But they're calling this month "Noir November" and are running a number of noir titles which piqued my interest. 

The 1942 adaption of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key is a good one, starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. I admit that I have a thing for Veronica Lake. After watching it I would have immediately picked up the novel, because I want to know whether the somewhat happy ending is Hammett's or not; I suspect not. But that book is also packed away.

The plot is complex, as one expects of Hammett, and the film is more genuinely dark than some of its kindred, especially in the sequence where the hero, Ed Beaumont, is held captive and beaten repeatedly by thugs. It's rare in these movies to see a depiction of the effects of violence that's remotely plausible. Beaumont is beaten almost to death, and we believe it. Far from bouncing back with a band-aid or two on his face, he spends a significant amount of time in the hospital. I have a vague childhood memory of William Bendix as a likeable cloddish sort of guy in a TV series called The Life of Riley, so it was a bit of a surprise to see him as a malicious brute. 

I also watched Call Northside 777 and This Gun for Hire. The former is not really noir, but it features Jimmy Stewart as a reporter trying to exonerate a man convicted of a murder he didn't commit. The latter stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake again, so is automatically appealing to me. It's based on a Graham Greene novel, modified for an American audience in the midst of World War II, and maybe a notch below The Glass Key as a film--less plausible on the whole, for one thing--but still very worthwhile for those who like this sort of thing. And anyway, Veronica Lake. 

Image swiped from this site which sells prints. I'm not usually drawn to the Hollywood Blonde types, but there is something about her that charms me. 

There was some discussion of this HBO series in comments on this post, in which all agreed that the show is very good and that Kate Winslet's performance is extremely good. When I last commented there I hadn't seen all seven episodes, but I have now, and so can make my concurrence final.

It's a crime drama, and the production as a whole is worthy of comparison to the best contemporary work in that line: Broadchurch, for instance. "Mare" in the title is the name of the principal character. As far as I noticed, the odd name is not explained until well into the series, and then only in passing: it's short for Marianne (Maryanne, Mary Ann...whatever). She's played by Winslet, and is a middle-aged, divorced, working-class woman living in a small Pennsylvania town, where she's a detective on the local police force, like her father before her. 

In addition to being a good and well-told story, the series is a realistic portrait of a failing culture: broken families, drugs, aimless young people, and all that. But there are a fair number of film and television productions that do that well. What really sets this one apart for me is Kate Winslet's performance. She is absolutely convincing, and the fact that she's English makes that astonishing.  The accent is a very impressive part of that effect, but not the whole thing. If I hadn't known otherwise I would have assumed that the actress playing Mare is a native of the area, because she seems so entirely a part of it. 

I don't see all that many movies, and as far as I can remember have not seen Winslet in anything else. I was aware of her as a famous actress, and I knew she was English and had been in Titanic, but that was about all. I figured the person who played the romantic lead in Titanic was probably a glamour girl, possibly not the greatest actress. Well, if she is or was ever a glamour girl, she certainly does not mind stepping into the persona of decidedly un-glamorous women. 

There was a time--and although it was a long time ago I was probably an adult--when I thought the craft of acting was over-rated. I think that was partly an impression from the big movie stars of my childhood and youth, who played pretty much the same character in every film, or at least were always instantly identifiable: as John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and even those of a later generation, like Jack Nicholson. I tended to assume that their one basic character was essentially the person him/herself, and so it seemed that acting was mainly a matter of memorizing one's lines and simulating the emotions of the role, and I thought of the latter as a fairly direct and broad thing. 

Of course "simulating the emotions" of the role is not an easy thing to do, even if you're more or less being yourself. But to become, in some not entirely figurative sense, another person altogether, and to speak and behave, down to the most subtle movements of the face, as that person...well, I can't imagine being able to do it. And as I've increasingly understood that, I've increasingly understood that acting is a very difficult art, and most impressive when, as with any performing art, the difficulty is perfectly masked by skill, so that you aren't conscious that you're watching something difficult. 

Here's the trailer for Mare of Easttown:

Some months ago I picked up Humphrey Carpenter's biography of W.H. Auden from the discard shelf at the local library. That it was there is a sad state of affairs, and I almost made it sadder when, after a few months of seeing it on the shelf and leaving it alone, and under a self-imposed mandate to get rid of books that I'm pretty sure I will never read, I decided that I probably didn't really want to read five hundred or so pages about Auden's life. I'm generally unenthusiastic about biographies of artists, and Auden is not my at the top of my list of favorite poets (high, but not at the top), though several of his poems are near the top of that list. So I decided to throw it back into the library's giveaway pile and hope someone else would give it a good home.

But before doing that I leafed through it, read a few bits and pieces here and there, and decided it seemed interesting after all, and that if nothing else I'd like to read about Auden's conversion to Christianity. That required getting some of the background, so in the end I decided to keep the book at least long enough to read the whole thing. 

I'm glad I did. I'm less than halfway through it, and am finding it quite interesting for the most part, though like most biographies it occasionally frequently goes into more detail than I care to follow. 

For six months or so in 1935-36, when Auden was in his late twenties, he worked in the Film Unit of England's postal service. I know, that sounds very strange--why did the post office have a film unit? But it did, and it made a documentary called Night Mail about the train that made a nightly mail run from London to several cities in Scotland. Auden wrote some verse for part of it, and Benjamin Britten provided music.

On YouTube there are several clips of the few minutes that include Auden's poem:

Several of the YouTube commenters say that it's an early form of rap. They sort of have a point.

I'd really like to see the whole film, which is less than half an hour long and which, on the basis of that clip, is very poetic in a very 20th century inter-war period way. But the only place I can find it is at the British Film Institute's streaming service, and I don't want to see it badly enough to subscribe. 

"Inter-war period." What a ghastly thing to say, but it really is a reasonable way to describe the 1920s and '30s. 

I'm about two thirds of the way through this three-part Netflix documentary on the 1999 attempt by some of the original Woodstock promoters to revive, twenty-five years later, the glory that was Woodstock in 1969. I was vaguely aware of the 1999 festival, saw news reports that it had not gone very well, and that was about the extent of my notice of it. But apparently it was much worse than I had realized. 

I have a pretty jaundiced view of the original, and am of the opinion that Woodstock was not really Woodstock until the movie and the soundtrack album came out. My college roommate at the time had attended, and had no particular illusions about it: "A lot of people doing drugs in the mud and listening to music coming from a distant stage." According to him, it was not the hippie bands that got the most enthusiastic reception, but the good-time funk of Sly and the Family Stone. The movie made the myth. But though it may not have been the dawning of the Age of Aquarius (or maybe it was, and maybe that's not necessarily a great thing) it was not a trainwreck. 

The further I get from the '60s counter-culture, the more negative my view of it has become. How dense did one have to be to believe that peace and love are the natural and probably inevitable result of  turning people loose to do what they really feel like doing? The film features interviews with promoters, employees, and attendees who emphasize that the whole thing was badly planned from the beginning. And I have no doubt that it was. But the explanation for the fact that things turned so dark has to take into account the change in American culture, particularly in pop music, over the thirty years between the two Woodstocks. 

It seems to me that this is a much meaner country than it was in the late '60s. I won't explore that question in detail at the moment, but I think it's a valid generalization to say that although there was certainly plenty of meanness prior to 1970, it was not as generally diffused and intense as it is now. The political and cultural polarization which are so much a part of life now was just taking shape at the end of the '60s. And there is no question that by 1999 there was a whole lot of violent rage in popular music that was not there in 1969. 

In 1999 various forms of extremely angry metal or metal-influenced music were quite popular--nu-metal bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit. If you've never heard these bands, or, even more convincing, seen them perform, watch this clip of Limp Bizkit's Woodstock '99 performance. You won't be the least bit surprised that the festival ended in violence. This was the only the second day. Things would get worse. 

There is no pleasure to be had from watching this documentary, but as a cultural artifact it's fascinating. I don't think the particular kind of rage on exhibit here is still as much a part of pop music as it was then, but from what I occasionally hear it doesn't look as though the change represents anything I would call progress.

There never was much chance that I would want to see this. As I've said before, probably to the point of tedium, in the end I was more negative than positive toward the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings, in spite of there being many good things about it. I won't bother to go into all that again. And I didn't even see the Hobbit movies, which seem to have been a fundamentally terrible idea, no matter how they were executed. And even if there were no other reason to avoid this new thing, I don't want a Hollywood spectacle burning its Tolkien-based imagery permanently into my brain.

The new series is based on stories mentioned in the appendices of LOTR and told in more detail in The Silmarillion. Within broad parameters, the writers are free to make things up. That's okay, but a year or so ago word got out that Amazon was advertising for an "intimacy coordinator" for the series, so that seemed to be pretty much the end of the matter.

Still, I can't help following the story. A few days ago this piece appeared at National Review. It in turn is based on an article in Vanity Fair which reveals more than had previously been known about the plans for the series. The NR writer thinks it gives cause for both hope and alarm. I don't see a whole lot of the first.

Then, while watching the Super Bowl (or rather the last half of it), I saw Amazon's "teaser trailer," and all detailed considerations about fidelity to Tolkien and so forth went out the window. It appears to be a big, loud, action movie, seasoned with cuteness and sentimentality, and that's enough to know about it.

Still, I add the "probably." It's unlikely, but I won't totally rule out the possibility that I might give in to the temptation to check it out. A well-imagined and constructed Numenor, for instance, might be a grand sight....

This article at Crisis is a pretty good appraisal: negative, but judicious and reasonable. 

A question for anyone who's more familiar with The Silmarillion than I am: is the portrayal of Galadriel as a warrior justified? I don't remember anything in The Lord of the Rings that would warrant it, but perhaps in earlier ages she took part in physical combat. I only read The Silmarillion once, and it was several decades ago. 

It's been twenty years since the release of the first film in his adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. A youngster named Jack Butler, writing at National Review, gives what I think is a fairly good appraisal of the whole effort. I say that even though my own view is somewhat more negative than his. I think the article is subscriber-only, so I'll quote liberally from it:

It is widely acknowledged that there are many serious differences between Jackson’s adaptation and Tolkien’s novel. Answers vary, however, to the question whether Jackson’s work maintains Tolkien’s spirit or ruins it. Ian McKellen, who plays the noble wizard Gandalf, has remarked that “the enthusiasts who have read the novels over and over may notice every change but in doing so they will miss the point.” On the other hand, Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son and literary executor, complained that Jackson and his crew had “eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25.”

Who is right? Both — and neither. Some of Jackson’s innovations do make sense, at least when considered in light of the exigencies of filmmaking..... Other of Jackson’s changes are blatant concessions to Hollywood blockbuster sensibilities..... 

There are also some fairly egregious changes to certain characters....

Even more notable is the mutation of Aragorn. Jackson’s version is unsure whether he is worthy of assuming his kingly destiny. His story becomes much more a standard hero’s journey. Tolkien gives Aragorn the occasional stumble, but he is largely intent on his destiny from the moment we meet him. Jackson’s alteration of Aragorn partly recenters the movies on him and his internal conflict, somewhat shortchanging Frodo and the hobbits in their respective journeys.

Bradley J. Birzer, a Tolkien scholar and professor of history at Hillsdale College, believes that Tolkien would not have approved of the films. “They’re too violent and have too much action with not enough focus on the philosophical elements of the books,” Birzer has said. There is some truth to that observation, too. Some of the thematic depth of The Lord of the Rings, such as what Tolkien called its “fundamentally religious” (Catholic) nature, is mostly (though not entirely) subdued in Jackson’s trilogy.

Whatever the flaws of Jackson’s films, they captured Tolkien’s spirit and much of the work’s philosophical core. As [Tolkien scholar Tom] Shippey put it, they preserve some of Tolkien’s more important themes, such as “the need for pity as well as courage, the vulnerability of the good, the true cost of evil.”

Even an imperfect representation of that essence puts Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy leagues above much of the dreck that Hollywood produces today.... But whatever complaints one may have about it, the deserved and enduring popularity of his original trilogy will continue to point new generations of readers to Tolkien’s work. And that will remain a virtue in itself.

I'm sure I've said this before, but it's probably been a while, so: I found that the further I got from the films the less highly I thought of them. My view now is closer to Christopher Tolkien's and Bradley Birzer's, though I still acknowledge that the films have their virtues and are considerably "above much of the dreck that Hollywood produces today." And I've never wanted to see them again, not so much because I disliked them as because I didn't want Jackson's often misguided imagery to take over my mind completely. I've only been partly successful in that effort.

There's a line in one of John Berryman's Dream Songs in which "Ol' Possum," presumably T. S. Eliot, says that he seldom goes to the cinema, because it's too powerful--or words to that effect. I have no idea which of the several hundred Dream Songs that occurs in and don't want to look for it, though it's most likely in 77 Dream Songs which was once and probably still is his most popular book. ("Popular" of course is a much more limited thing in modern poetry than in, say, film. Or even in literary fiction.) I understand Eliot's reservation, though I indulge to excess in moving pictures on the much smaller screen in my house. The visual impact and persistence of cinematic images is extremely strong and often unwelcome.

I think Peter Jackson's conception of Aragorn, for instance, is seriously flawed, not only for the reasons given above but simply visually. And I suppose that's partly the fault of the actor. But at any rate I still have it in my head. And I'm still annoyed by that stubble which looks like about a week's worth of beard, and neither grows nor disappears. When I see a celebrity going around like that (it seems still fashionable) I want to say "Either grow a beard or shave, dammit."

At the turn of the year this blog will be eighteen years old. The very first post, January 4, 2004, was a brief review of the third film in Jackson's Lord of the Rings. I more or less agree with what I said there, though as I say I'm a little more negative now than I was then. I still think this is probably true:

...it surely is the best possible screen treatment of the book. I do not mean that in a philosophical Panglossian but rather in a very straightforward sense: it is the best for which we could reasonably have hoped.

I could have added, for clarity, "considering the nature of the movie industry."

*

Amazon, as you may have heard, is producing some kind of Tolkien-based film project. As you may also have heard, they advertised for an "intimacy coordinator" to work on it. It will be surprising if whatever they produce doesn't justify another sentence from that 2004 post:

I fully expected that the movie industry could not touch such a work without soiling it.

A fantasy series called The Wheel of Time is currently being released, one episode per week, on Amazon. Because of a general weakness for fantasy, I've watched the first couple of them. I don't recommend it to anyone who doesn't really like fantasy, and only with reservations there. And I don't want to bother saying anything more about it than that it's well-produced and socially conscious entertainment. The first of those is a compliment, the second is not.

Extremely idle question to which a very brief search did not yield an answer: when did movies stop saying "The End" at the end? 

Or maybe some of them still do, but I don't think I've seen it for a long time. 

...but haven't, and/or if you like film noir, you might want to consider subscribing now. See this for their November new arrivals, which feature a lot of noir, including many with Robert Mitchum, who's the star (along with Jane Greer) of my favorite in this genre, Out of the Past. I wrote about it in the 52 Movies series.

Also among the new arrivals is Thunder Road, which appeared to be available on Netflix back when I first subscribed, when it was all or mostly DVDs by mail. I put on my list but it soon went into the "Saved" category, from which few titles seem to return. I've been wanting to see it again for years. I thought it was great when I was about twelve.

When I watched the series I was so struck by this segment that I went looking for the soundtrack. It's called "New Queen," with apparently semi-ironic intent, since it occurs at the end of Series 3, Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee.

I absolutely love that piece. I just wish it went on longer. There are other good things in the soundtrack but nothing grabbed me as much as this.

Here's the whole scene. I take it for granted that the series gives a picture in some ways false, but whatever might be said along that line, Olivia Colman's performance as Elizabeth is outstanding:

(Relatively minor SPOILERS)

When I learned, some time ago, that there is a movie based on Hemingway's short story "The Killers," I wanted to see it out of sheer curiosity. There really isn't very much to the story, and almost nothing happens. Two menacing men arrive in a small town. They menace people in a diner. They're in town to kill "the Swede." Nick Adams (this is one of the Nick Adams stories) goes to warn the Swede. The Swede says there's nothing he can do about it and waits for the men to come and kill him.

That's it, as far as the plot goes. There's a good deal more to the story, of course, but it's all character and atmosphere. There's not enough there to fill an hour or two of film time, so the movie, made in 1946 and starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, makes Hemingway's narrative a prelude to an entirely invented backstory. The Hemingway story is gotten out of the way in twenty minutes or so, and is really quite a good adaptation. By "good" I mean both that it's faithful to the original and that it's powerful in itself. 

The Swede (Lancaster) is done in as expected. Then it turns out that he left an insurance policy, and an investigator from the company is assigned the task of locating the beneficiary. In the course of that investigation he uncovers the complicated reasons for the killing. Not surprisingly, they involves gangsters and a femme fatale. 

It's classic film noir, so much so that when I checked In the Dark, a book about noir, to see if the movie is listed, I discovered that in fact it provides the cover photo. And if you like noir this is one you definitely need to see. It didn't displace Out of the Past as my favorite, but it's well up there in the ranks. I didn't recognize the names of the director and screenwriter, Robert Siodmak and Anthony Veiller, reportedly with some uncredited help from John Huston. It was the first big success for both Lancaster and Gardner. I can't offhand remember having seen the latter in anything else, and now I know why she was a major sex symbol. 

Having located the 1946 film on Netflix (DVD only), I was surprised to discover that there is a second version, made in 1964, and starring John Cassavetes and Angie Dickinson. Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager play the menacing gunmen. To my taste it's not nearly as good, but I found it interesting as a contrast and an indication of the way film sensibilities were changing. The cinematography is flashier and more elaborate. The violence starts almost immediately. There's much more spectacle: the hero is not a boxer, as in the 1946 film, but a racecar driver, which provides lots of opportunity for noisy action. There's more emphasis on the killers themselves, who are given a psychopathic edge. And Angie Dickinson is a beautiful woman but she doesn't have the smoldering allure of Ava Gardner. It's in color, which the 1946 one is not, and although I certainly have a great love for black-and-white I don't think color is the reason, or not the main reason, for the lack of atmosphere, for the movie seeming flat compared to the earlier one. 

There is one remarkable thing about it: Ronald Reagan plays the bad guy, and he's surprisingly effective. It was his last film role; two years later he would be governor of California. I'm surprised that more wasn't made of his portrayal of this evil character when he was president, considering that he was as deeply loathed as Donald Trump by the same sorts of people. But then in the 1980s we didn't have ready access to old movies.

Both films are available as a set from Criterion, and Netflix, as noted, has the set. Here are the trailers. 

(Spoilers!)

It's hard for me to believe that it's been over three years since I finished Twin Peaks: The Return and stated my intention to re-watch the original series and Fire Walk With Me. Here's what I said at the time: "fascinating but disappointing."

So I finally got back to this plan a month or two ago, accepting the fact that I would have to "buy" the series on Amazon if I wanted to stream it rather than spend a lot of time waiting for Netflix DVDs to travel back and forth. I made it through the episode in season 2 where the identity of the murderer is revealed, then watched Fire Walk With Me (on DVD).

I still love the TV series, though I will admit, with a little sadness, that some of the bloom is off the rose now. I suppose part of the delight of my first viewing was the unexpectedness of so much of it--the juxtaposition of the normal and two kinds of strange, the dark and the silly. Even the darker parts have an element of...not exactly silly, but of parody or caricature, as in the decor and atmosphere of One Eyed Jack's, and for that matter even the Black Lodge, with its "modern" furniture. Obviously startling juxtapositions can't continue to startle, though they certainly still amuse. Why were all those people in uniform--Navy, I think?--bouncing balls all over the Great Northern?

The movie, on the other hand, seems even better than I remember, but it is quite different from the series. The DVD that Netflix sent includes a thirty-minute documentary made in 2000 in which most of the major actors are interviewed. Several of them, most strongly Peggy Lipton (Norma), weren't happy with the film's seriousness and darkness, the absence of the comic-but-respectful treatment of what she refers to as "small-town values" in the series.

And whether one approves or disapproves, she's right about the difference. The movie is unlike the series in that it's almost entirely serious and dark. There's not much of the whimsy of the series, less depiction of young romance, more of sex. I don't recall anything comparable to, for instance, the video of Laura and Donna larking girlishly on their outing with James, early in the original series. There's a lot more of what we think of as normal-for-Lynch weirdness, like the mysterious boy wearing a bird mask, and the Black Lodge. There's no old-fashioned wise Major Briggs, and Agent Cooper is a more straightforwardly serious character, whom we see less of than in the series (partly because Kyle McLachlan was concerned about being typecast). And it gets pretty violent, close to horror movie territory at times. It's just not lovable in the way the series is.

But this is a movie, with a time limit of a couple of hours or so, necessarily focused pretty tightly, unless it's to be just another episode in a long and wandering story. A number of the plot threads from the series are either missing or only lightly alluded to. It delves deeply into Laura's character and the things which torment her, including the entity called Bob, and succeeds, which is not a fun ride. Laura is more clearly a lost soul here, in the sense that she is further gone in corruption than we saw in the series. But she's not so lost that she doesn't know it, as witnessed by her outraged intervention when Donna attempts to follow her path. And if I understand it correctly part of the reason for her death wish is that she wants to prevent Bob from taking possession of her.

There's a lot of interesting information in the Wikipedia article on the film. I was especially interested in the critical reception, which was initially quite bad but has grown more positive over the years. Count me on the positive side. I think it's powerful and profound, and although I haven't seen all of Lynch's work, of what I have seen I would only rank Mulholland Drive higher--maybe. I admit to being a little bit annoyed about a few things that I couldn't make sense of. What exactly does it mean in the last scene that Mike demands Leland's "pain and suffering"? I thought Mike had renounced the murder and spiritual cannibalism he had practiced with Bob. Or is it really Mike? I'm generally confused about Mike and The Man From Another Place. 

I had entirely forgotten a great deal from my last viewing of Fire Walk. Two especially powerful moments stand out: Ronette's prayer in the train car, and this exchange between Laura and James not long before her murder:

James: What's wrong with us? We have everything.
Laura: Everything but everything.

That seems a fitting summary of what's happened to Western civilization over the past century or so. And particularly so for Americans of Lynch's generation, and mine. I've wondered if Lynch's work will always appeal more to those of us who recall the pre-sexual-revolution, pre-Sixties culture of the U.S. But I do know of at least one person born in the '70s who likes it as much as I do.

I noticed two very small things that are very interesting in light of Twin Peaks: The Return. In an early scene, when the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie with a bad southern accent) appears and delivers a strange rant, he says "I'm not going to talk about Judy." And one of the young people, maybe Donna, says "Laura's mother is kind of spooky," or something like that. Did Lynch already have in mind that there was an evil entity called Judy associated with Laura's mother, or did he develop that idea after the fact, and take the name from that seemingly insignificant bit in the movie?

I guess I'll finish out the second series, though I agree with what seems to be the nearly universal view that the show deteriorates. And watch The Return again?...I don't know...I guess. What I'd really like to see is Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, ninety minutes worth of footage that didn't make it into Fire Walk. But it doesn't seem to be available at the moment, either on DVD or streaming. 

John Darnielle, as you may know, is the principal in The Mountain Goats. In effect, he is the mountain goat, as the band seems to be (or at least to have been for some time), essentially a one-man project consisting of Darnielle and various accompanists. He's a brilliant (and astonishingly prolific) songwriter, and the great strength of his songwriting is in the lyrics. This is his second novel; I have not read the first, Wolf In White Van.

When a friend passed this book along to me after having read it himself and, if I understood him, not expecting to read it again, I wasn't sure that I would ever read it. Why not? Well, contemporary fiction is not my great interest, and I had low expectations, including the impression (of unknown origin) that it would be a whimsical, ironic, and gently humorous look at small and mundane things, somewhat along the lines of Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone stories. I enjoyed those at the time, but the time was decades ago now, and I have not wanted to revisit them, and have no particular desire to read anything else of the sort. And--the strongest reason, I guess--the ability to write a good song is not necessarily accompanied by the ability to put words on a page effectively.

And I might well not have read Universal Harvester if the recent release of a new Mountain Goats album, Dark In Here, which I haven't heard, had not been the occasion of a conversation which resulted in my lending the book to someone else, and his reaction causing me to have a look at it myself.

I was not altogether mistaken in expecting something Keillor-esque. The story takes place in small towns in Iowa (their placement is significant, and a map is helpful). And the characters are small people, mostly young, limited in the scope of their knowledge and ambition. Set in the late '90s, it begins in a video rental store (the Video Hut) with a young man named Jeremy who is one of the two clerks who are the only staff apart from the owner. Jeremy is twenty-two years old and still suffering from the loss of his mother in an auto accident when he was sixteen. He lives with his still-grieving father; they get by, not knowing quite what to do with themselves. Jeremy is getting a little old to be working in a video store.

Much of the novel might be said with reasonable accuracy to be in Keillor mode. The people are portrayed with charm and a little irony, the ways of the place observed keenly, with a bit of humor and a distinct melancholy but no unkindness. But then it switches into another mode, a much darker one. Into the Video Hut one morning comes a girl named Stephanie, returning a tape, and hesitatingly, vaguely, telling Jeremy that something is wrong with it.

She didn't set her tape down; instead, she held it in her hand, chest-high, a little away from her body.

"There's something on this one" she said.

Jeremy thinks she's complaining about the movie (Targets, a 1968 movie in which Boris Karloff appeared, shortly before his death).

Stephanie looked a little blankly at Jeremy, measuring him, then said, "No, it's a great movie. I've seen it before.".... "It's the tape, there's something on it."

"I can credit your account," said Jeremy.

Stephanie put on her measuring face again and seemed to decide Jeremy wasn't going to understand. "No, it's fine," she said. "Never mind. Maybe tell Sarah Jane about it, though, OK?"

(Sarah Jane is the store's owner.) Jeremy puts the tape aside and forgets about it. A few days later another customer brings in another tape, with a similar complaint. Some days go by before anyone looks into the problem, but eventually Jeremy, Stephanie, and Sarah Jane have watched two of the tapes, separately or together, and what they find disturbs them. Spliced into the movies are bits of home video shot in what seems to be a barn or shed. In one case it's several minutes of nothing, just the empty place. Others involve mild violence, or near-violence: a hooded and silent figure doing odd, slightly demeaning things; a person or persons hidden under a tarp, seeming to struggle, and receiving several kicks.

More similarly modified tapes are discovered. Most of the interpolations aren't actually violent, but they're menacing, not only in their content but in their apparently random appearances in apparently random movies. Jeremy, Stephanie, and Sarah Jane begin to search for their source. Mixed with the deftly rendered personal stories and situations of these characters now is an element of dread: these scenes are real, and they do not seem to be staged, and they seem filled with dread, though nothing very dreadful actually happens in them.

So perhaps this is going to be a horror story, or a thriller. Then the tricksy stuff begins: the narrator intrudes on a scene to say that there is another version of it, in which this happens instead of that. Repeatedly the story walks up to what promises to be a revelation, then veers away to something else. There's a great deal--too much for my taste--of shifting around in time: something is about to happen, the scene shifts, and sometime later we learn something about the thing that was about to happen. All very cinematic--consciously so, I would guess, since movies are central to the story.

Eighty-four pages in, Part Two begins, and we are in the story of a woman who, a few days after Christmas in 1972, abandons her husband and young daughter to join a Christian cult. You'll note that there are now two instances of a lost mother.

The stories do come together, and I guess most of this back-and-forth, up-and-back movement lies in the general area of modern fictional technique. (Or is it post-modern?--I'm not competent to say.) But it becomes frustrating, in spite of the charm of the details, because (in addition to there being too much of it) too many questions remain unanswered. Or at least seem to. When I closed the book I felt annoyed that I still didn't know exactly what had happened. And then I wondered whether anything at all had happened: had I just experienced a far more sophisticated execution of the "it was all just a dream" trick that has always seemed to me a cheap one? I am not a fan of The Wizard of Oz.

Having pondered it a bit more, I think I do know what happened, though I'm not certain, and even if I'm right about the big picture there are still a good many puzzling details that I'm not pleased not to see cleared up. Moreover, I think one could construct an argument that is at least plausible that almost none of the narrative actually occurred. Ambiguity and subtlety are good things, but I think Universal Harvester may go a bit too far in those directions.

Still, I give it a qualified recommendation. There is much to enjoy, and a fair amount that is strongly moving. And perhaps you will catch on more quickly than I did; I was long ago forced to recognize that I can be somewhat thick. I'll give you one bit of advice: pay very close attention when the narrator says "I", or otherwise refers to him/her self.

In any case, there's no doubt that John Darnielle's gifts as a writer extend to fiction.

I finished Kristin Lavransdatter last week and have a half-written post about it, but have had unexpected demands on my time this week and haven't been able to finish it. In the meantime, just a quick note about this film.

What a magnificent epic! I really didn't know what to expect. I only knew that it's  considered one of Kurosawa's most important works, and that its plot is based loosely on King Lear. According to Wikipedia, Kurosawa was already working on the story when he first encountered Lear, and that for him it originated with a Japanese story about a king who had three sons. In any case there are a lot of clear parallels with Lear, but it's not simply a retelling of the story in a medieval Japanese setting. 

I'll restrain myself from going further, and also from gushing, and just say that if you like Kurosawa's work at all and haven't seen this one, you must. Apparently he had a huge budget to work with, and obviously a great deal of money and time went into it, as it features several large and complex battle scenes. Among other things it's an enthralling visual spectacle, not only in the big scenes but in smaller and intimate ones as well. 

The title, by the way, puzzled me a bit, as it isn't the name of any character. Again according to Wikipedia:

The complex and variant etymology for the word Ran used as the title has been variously translated as "chaos", "rebellion", or "revolt"; or to mean "disturbed" or "confused".

Theater poster, from Wikimedia: Fair Use, Link

That's in italics because it's the name of the movie. I read this very intriguing review this morning, and may even go so far as to check local theaters to see if it shows here, which is probably unlikely.

In 75 concise minutes (as long as any movie needs to be), About Endlessness is completely provocative and satisfying. Each sketch dramatizes a random incident in a Scandinavian city. These scenes, stylizing the real and the imaginary, are light as air — capriccios that go to the heart of human experience.

It's by a Swedish director, Roy Andersson, whose name I don't recall having seen before, but based on the review I think I might like his other work in addition to this one. Of course it helps that the reviewer invokes the near-sacred name of Ingmar Bergman.

I wouldn't agree that 75 minutes is enough for any movie, but it strikes me as a reasonable target for most.

Here's the trailer:

As I expected, I liked it more this time. Such a simple story: a widower and his daughter, who's getting on into her twenties. He wants her to get married--or does he? She doesn't want to get married--or does she? The resolution of the situation is fairly straightforward, and deeply poignant. 

Knowing that the film was released in 1949 made me wonder about the conditions under which it was made--I mean both the physical and psychological conditions, the war having ended only four years earlier and the country still under occupation. There is no direct reference to the war or the occupation, which seemed puzzling. According to Wikipedia, filmmakers--and everyone, I suppose--were subject to a certain amount of censorship by the Allies, which explains this curious absence. A few images like this one are implicit references to the occupation:

You'll notice that the sign is in English. A bit after this moment the two bicyclists pass a sign giving the load limit of the road, also in English. 

I very much liked the two Ozu films I've seen, Late Spring and Tokyo Story, in spite of some difficulty in adjusting to the mannerisms, especially the vocal mannerisms, of a language and culture so different from mine. As I said when writing about Late Spring back in 2011, it's

a difficulty I've had with other Japanese films made prior to 1960 or so: the facial and vocal expressions are just culturally different enough for me to feel that I'm not quite sure what's going on underneath, not quite connecting as I should.

It's hard to explain, but there often seems to be a disconnect between the sounds I hear and what they seem to mean based on what the character is saying and the expression in the voice. 

I've seen Tokyo Story twice, which is at least part of the reason why, after the second viewing, I decided that I like it a little better. But I want to see Late Spring again. Ozu made several films with similar seasonal titles, and I'm working my way through those I haven't seen, which now leaves Early Summer, Early Spring, Late Autumn, and An Autumn Afternoon. That list is in chronological order: Late Spring was made in 1949, An Autumn Afternoon in 1962. 

I'm not sure why I picked End of Summer as my next one. Like the other two I've seen, it's a very low-key family drama involving partings of some sort. It seems that Ozu has produced a series of delicate and subtle variations on a modest theme. There is not much "drama" here, using the word in the colloquial half-slang sense that's developed in recent years: no shouting, no weeping, no accusing and demanding. These three films at least are centered on generational connections and their dissolution. This is not violent rebellion, as has been typical of American and European art since at least the '60s, but the quiet relinquishing of ties as time and especially the changing times push or pull families apart. It seems more than likely to me that the changing times are more important than they may seem at an outsider's glance. It's never given more than passing mention, but it seems present in things like the juxtaposition of traditional and modern dress, of street signs and advertisements in Japanese and English ("Drink Coca-Cola!"), of urban and pastoral imagery, and in the rarely-mentioned but significant awareness of the war.

As for the specific film that I sat down to write about: well, for the first half of The End of Summer I didn't like it as well as the other two. That's in great part because I wasn't sure what was going on. The family relationships are more complex, involving more people, and I had trouble keeping track of who was who and exactly how they were related. As far as I noticed, none of this was ever directly explicated. I'll admit that there was an element here of the Westerner sometimes having trouble distinguishing Asian features when they are somewhat similar: I had that problem with two of the three young women, sisters and a sister-in-law, who, to my eyes, looked rather like each other. This is not quite as ethnocentric as it sounds, as I sometimes have the same problem with Euro-American films where there are two characters of the same sex, age, and coloring. (The third young woman was played by Setsuko Haro, whose face is pretty distinctive and memorable.) 

Noriko, Akkiko (Setsuko Hara), Fumiko (l-r). I don't have any trouble telling Noriko and Fumiko apart when they're together. 

The plot involves the misbehavior of the family patriarch (no problem recognizing him) and is mildly comic--only mildly to me, anyway--through the first two thirds of the film. But all around this man's foolish renewal of a past romance with an old flame who's grown cynical (if she was ever otherwise) there is that air of puzzled melancholy as the younger generation wonders what to do with him and with themselves.

Whatever disappointment I felt in that first hour or so was compensated for by the fact that the film is in color. The characteristic long still interior shots are just as they are in the other two works: taken from a couple of feet off the floor, looking down a hallway with people coming and going at the other end, looking from one room into another, looking through a door to outside, from ten or fifteen feet away so the visible area is very small. These views of the characters from a certain distance could have the effect of making theme seem isolated, but they don't work that way for me. Instead, by giving the interiors so much space, the effect is of people very much enclosed and protected within a receptive home. And the color makes one aware of the richness of the houses and furnishings--there's a lot of warm wood--in a way that black and white can't. And as for the exterior scenes--well, the landscapes made me want to visit Japan.

Towards the end I was very much won over. The final twenty minutes or so are as powerful as anything in the other two films, and perhaps even more beautiful. I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't seen it and might do so, so I won't say any more. I will certainly be seeing this one again. 

I had about decided to cancel my Criterion Collection subscription, as I had gone many months without using it at all. There just didn't seem to be all that much there that I wanted to see, and the app or site or whatever you call it is obsessed with...well, let's just say cultural trends which don't interest me. But recently I made an effort to search out directors like Ozu, and found enough to make the service worthwhile for another few months anyway. 

I can't find a trailer online, but YouTube seems to have several copies of the whole film. Must be some sort of copyright gap.

I can't remember whether the previous Guy Ritchie film I saw was Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch. I do remember that it was very cleverly plotted, well-acted, quick-witted and quick-moving, and at least half-funny in its depiction of the British underworld. The Gentlemen is very much the same, and I enjoyed it. But there is something not quite right in treating rather vicious criminals as witty and glamorous, and imparting a light-hearted quality to acts of violence. It's all done with an ironic wink, which I guess is better than doing it seriously, but still, it seems unhealthy. 

This is a fairly low-budget sci-fi movie which as far as I know is available only on Amazon. Set in the late '50s in a small town in New Mexico, it's presented as an episode of a television show modeled on The Twilight Zone, complete with an introduction in Rod Serling's voice and prose style. I found it enchanting, so much so that I watched it a second time. It's basically a straightforward UFO story, in many ways typical: it could be an episode of The X-Files without Mulder and Scully, but it's done with such skill and atmosphere that it gives new life to what have become the conventions of UFO mythology.

I really enjoyed it this time. (See this post from a week and a half ago for background.)

It's been over ten years since my first viewing of it. Wondering now about my mostly negative reaction then, I vaguely recall that we (my wife and I) were watching it at night and I was sleepy long before the end of its nearly three hours. Also, at the time we had an old CRT television, not especially big and of the old nearly square proportions. So the wide-screen picture, formatted for CinemaScope or whatever it was, was squeezed into a smallish rectangle in the middle of the screen. And the layout of the room was such that I was relatively far away. We finally made the switch to a flat-screen a few years ago, and although it isn't very large, my favored chair is very close to it. And I have a halfway decent sound bar setup  for the audio, and as we all know the score is an important part of this film.

So on this viewing I got something much, much closer to the visual experience of seeing it in a theater, and it did draw me in immediately in a way that it certainly did not before.

I still have some reservations--Tuco's almost comic villain laugh, for instance. And Eastwood's strong silent narrow-eyed menace is laid on too heavily. And I can certainly understand the revulsion of some contemporary critics at its violence. It's not really an improvement in our culture that we've now seen so much worse. It veers pretty close to nihilism, pulled back from that brink by the minimal but solid ethical code of Blondie ("the Good"). The treatment of the Civil War as a more or less meaningless struggle between more or less interchangeable forces is very much of its time, and of time since. I'm sure a great deal has been said by critics about the interplay of American Western and 20th century European sensibilities and culture in that vision. 

It's not among my favorite films, but I see its appeal and its strengths now. And I want to see the two Leone-Eastwood predecessors in the "Dollars" trilogy. 

No doubt avid readers of this blog will recall that eleven years ago I wrote about being disappointed in the Sergio Leone westerns ("I Have Failed to Become A Sergio Leone Fan"). The topic came up in the recent discussion about Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and I started thinking I might give Leone another try. I didn't really expect that to happen anytime soon, though, as it was only available on DVD, my wife isn't interested in seeing it again, and our Netflix DVD list is very long.

So along comes this commentary on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Kyle Smith at National Review. (The review contains spoilers, by the way, though I guess that's not very important for a fifty-year-old work.) Besides being interesting, it mentions that the movie is now available for streaming on Netflix. So more or less out of curiosity, I watched the first few minutes of it last night, and was very much drawn in. I will report when I've finished it.

I must say that the very and justifiably famous opening title music is almost ruined for me by the silly-sounding "wah WAH wah," which sounds like a comedian imitating a trombone. I'm sure there are recordings of it that use some instrument there instead. 

Kyle Smith, by the way, is a critic whom I consider interesting and worth reading but not entirely trustworthy. That's because he disrespected Bergman a while back. 

This is not the sort of movie that I usually go out of my way to see. As far as I can remember I don't think I've ever seen an entire Quentin Tarentino film, just parts of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, more of the former than the latter. Nothing that I've read about his work has made me think I'd like it, though I did find much of what I did see of Pulp Fiction enjoyable. What made me seek this one out was a review which said it was a great picture of Los Angeles in the late '60s.

Not that I was anywhere near Los Angeles in the late '60s. But I certainly have a weak spot for pictures of that period, and by "pictures" I mean pictures--photographs and films taken at the time. So I thought I might enjoy this movie for that reason if no other. I've been much preoccupied lately with the way the passing of people who have lived in a particular time and place means that it is truly lost to memory, and I find myself enjoying those memories. Yes, it's nostalgia, but there's also an irrational sense that by refreshing and expanding my own memories I'm somehow keeping that world real and alive.

Anyway: there are two things to note about the title of this movie. First, the allusion to the Sergio Leone Western, Once Upon A Time in the West. The protagonist, or one of them, of the Tarentino film is an aging Hollywood star who's being offered a chance to revive his career by acting in spaghetti Westerns. Second, "once upon a time" is, as everyone over a certain age knows (I fear the young do not), the way to begin a fairy tale, and this is in a sense a fairy tale.

The aging star, Rick Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth, played by Leonardo di Caprio and Brad Pitt, respectively, are buddies, though the relationship is also master-and-servant to some degree. They are old-time movie and TV people, most well-known for a TV series called Bounty Law. But the series has been cancelled for some years, and Dalton is more or less a has-been. 

He's still rich, though. It's 1969 and he lives on Cielo Drive. If that rings a bell, it's because it was the street on which Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate lived when the latter and several others were murdered by the Manson gang. Dalton lives next door to them, and yes, that is vitally important to the plot. 

I was a little hesitant about seeing this movie, knowing that it involved the Manson murders, which have always been especially disturbing to me because of their association with the counter-culture and its favored drugs, and knowing Tarentino's reputation for depicting violence. And without giving away too much I will say that there are some five to ten minutes of pretty graphic violence, but will also direct your attention again to the title. By far most of the film's 2 hours and 40 minutes are spent on the doings of Dalton and Booth, the trials of the former trying to revive his career and the latter simply trying to get a job and to do what he can as a friend to Rick--and, importantly, to George Spahn, owner of the Spahn Movie Ranch, which is home to the Manson family.

A good bit of time is spent on the two of them, or some other combination of people, driving around Los Angeles in Dalton's Cadillac while the radio plays various well-known and not-so-well-known songs from the time. (I would be surprised to learn that Buffy Saint-Marie's version of "The Circle Game" was on AM radio. Not in Alabama it wasn't. According to Wikipedia, it reached #109 on the Billboard charts, so maybe it got played a bit in California.)

Booth pays a memorable visit to the Manson family. And Sharon Tate goes to the movies. I think that scene is what I'm going to remember most about this movie. On a shopping errand she passes a theater which is showing a junk movie in which she appears (The Wrecking Crew: Dean Martin as Matt Helm, secret agent). Delighted to see her name and picture on the advertisements, she coaxes the theater staff into giving her free admission (as though she could not afford it), and watches the movie with effervescent childlike delight, like a little girl thrilled at seeing herself in a home movie. It's a sweet, silly, poignant moment, and I hope Sharon Tate really was something like that. 

I gather that a typical culture wars sort of argument has taken place over Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Dalton and Booth are the good guys here, and they're also pretty reactionary, griping about the damn hippies. Some liberals took offense at this, some conservatives applauded it. I didn't really see it that way. I mean, it's there, but for one thing, the Manson family surely was as creepy, frightening, and disgusting as they are portrayed here. And for another, Dalton and Booth certainly look good and admirable in comparison to homicidal maniacs, but they are drunken hedonists, not exactly Knights of the West riding against the Dark Lord. 

Sorry if this is a little disjointed. I've been trying to get to it for a couple of days and may not have another chance for another couple of days. Final word: I greatly enjoyed this film; it did not seem too long at all (which I rather expected it would); I want to see it again.

Several years ago (more than several, actually) I had the notion of watching the old-time Westerns that are considered classics. I went through several of them--The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and maybe a couple of others. I was somewhat disappointed, especially as I loved Western stuff when I was a kid, and didn't go any further. 

The other day something reminded me of another film that's usually ranked with those others, 3:10 To Yuma, from 1957. I found it on the Criterion Channel, which I have not used very much and am wondering whether I should cancel, and watched it, in two roughly 45-minute sessions.

I really liked it, and it's definitely my favorite of its type at this point. It's a good story, pretty convincing for the most part in spite of the conventions of the time. It's about a rancher who ends up, more or less against his will, solely responsible for getting a captured outlaw on that 3:10 train, with the outlaw's gang trying to stop him. Glenn Ford, atypically, plays the outlaw, and is very effective--genial and charming with just a hint of menace. 

But what I really love about it is the photography. It's very crisp black-and-white, and full of the Western scenery that I love. The story is set in southern Arizona, and I think it may have been shot there, or perhaps in some part of southern California where the landscape is similar. You can get a sense of the quality in this Criterion Collection trailer:

The song, by the way, has nothing at all to do with the plot, except for the title reference. 

The movie is based on an Elmore Leonard story by the same name. Being an admirer of Leonard, I was curious about the original story, and found it at the local library in a collection called The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. I suppose I have to say that I was disappointed in the story. It's pretty slight, its action including only roughly the last half of the movie. It's a case where you could argue that the movie is better than the story, though I don't really trust my judgment there, since I encountered the movie first. Some of the other stories in the collection are really good, though. And they have a sort of potato-chip, can't-eat-just-one appeal. I think I've read half of them now, and I only got the book a couple of days ago, with no intention of reading more than the one story.

There's a 2007 remake of the movie which apparently got pretty good reviews. I may watch it sometime. My interest was dampened a bit by a clip which I saw on YouTube, thinking it was just sort of a trailer, which gave away the very different ending.

Many years ago in college I had a Southern Lit teacher who had a very old-style  genteel southern accent, and who once, when whispering and giggling broke out in class, said to the culprits "I fail to see the humor." Only in his accent it came out as "I fail to see the Yuma."  It's unfortunate for me that I still remember that after almost fifty years.