Saw the recent (2002) adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo late last week. What a great movie! Not only does it have Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce as the two main characters (Dantes and Mondego, respectively), but one of the last performances of Richard Harris (English Bob, ‘original’ Dumbledore, among other recent notable roles before he passed away that year).

Of course, this is the classic Dumas story of a deceitful betrayal and revenge story set in Napoleonic France (he’s just been exiled to Elba but escapes back to France midway through the story). Napoleon himself appears at the beginning of the story but otherwise doesn’t really play a role. Each main character is compelling in his own way, whether good or bad, but Guy Pearce (chief bad guy) naturally gets to steal many scenes. There were even a couple last minute plot twists i didn’t anticipate, and it keeps you tense right up until the end, which is well done.

Another interesting thing here is Jim Caviezel later going on to play Number Six in the remake of The Prisoner (seven years later in 2009). Chateau d’if, where his character Dantes is imprisoned – is in many ways not unlike The Village – a prison of no escape, albeit one much harsher than even The Village. It really made me think about how brutal such imprisonment must have been in those times – simply lock them up in a lonely stone tower on a remote part of the French coast, throw them a bowl of gruel once or twice a day and whip them at your leisure. Better to not get in trouble at all – at least they could walk around and play chess in The Village!

Anyway, great movie, definitely worth checking out.

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Saw The Adventures of TinTin last night. While it plays like ‘Indiana Jones meets Wallace and Gromit‘ (with a side dose of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) it’s great fun. The animation is nothing short of amazing – Note to Pixar: the bar has been raised, and for once, not by you. Jamie Bell‘s voice kept making me think he was Elijah Wood (kerewin disagreed) and it was nice to see Andy Serkis get a role for once that wasn’t a weird creature (Gollum) or an ape, or some other character using a CGI overlay from his facial and body acting – he is a great actor, period, and the dual Haddock role shows it.

The other nice thing about this movie is its period setting – there’s enough technology that people aren’t running around completely on horseback (cars, motorboats, etc. all exist) yet there’s still plenty of excitement – that’s definitely the first ‘container crane sword battle’ I’ve ever seen, for sure.

And these stories are tailor-made for Hollywood – If the next one does as well as this one (note to makers, follow the Harry Potter and LOTR franchises for lessons on keeping up the quality) – there should be several more TinTin movies before they’re done….You can’t help wondering though how much Spielberg and Lucas (among others) were influenced by Hergé when they began making movies – TinTin’s adventures predate Indiana Jones by many decades….

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So I finally read the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic this past week, and as I had never seen the movie, thought i’d get that too.  Hmmmm…not so much.  While the short story is set in the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive ‘universe’ of cyberpunk and The Sprawl – the movie just falls flat.  The director and Gibson himself (screenwriter) changed too many elements (IMHO) of the original – apparently Molly Millions was changed to ‘Jane’ due to someone else’s ownership rights, but the whole NAS thing is silly – the short story is just much more taut and effective.  The movie has many sequences that either lack dialog (where it’s needed) or have oddball distractions that don’t add to the plot, and the pacing of the movie isn’t very good, either.  Too many slow parts that could have been edited out, and the action sequences are fairly clumsy, too..

A few interesting things I noticed, however.  The LoTek clan’s hideout is on a burned out suspension bridge from Newark – echoes of his first Bridge Trilogy book Virtual Light (which had come out two years before this movie in 1993, although the ‘bridge’ in that trilogy was the Golden Gate Bridge in SF)?

Also, the look and feel crib (or steal, depending on your perspective) VERY HEAVILY from Max Headroom in a multitude of ways.  Astute cyberpunk fans could say that MH in turn stole from (or was certainly inspired by) Gibson himself, given that his first two cyberpunk books, Neuromancer and Count Zero, appeared before MH debuted.  It’s likely a tossup either way.  The ‘wasteland future’ look here might also have been influenced by the even earlier Escape from New York, too.

Johnny’s overloaded ‘head of data’ – billed as 120GB but ‘stuffed overfull’ at 320 GB – seems quaint at best now, given you can buy a TB-sized USB drive at Fry’s for around $150 these days.

It’s interesting to think that while this movie was a failure, Keanu would be back in cyberspace MUCH more successfully only a few years later as Neo in The Matrix.

Finally – the depiction of ‘The Internet’ as conceptualized by the Neuromancer series was thought for a long time the way we’d browse – sadly didn’t turn out that way, despite similar thinking as seen in say, The Lawnmower Man.

So read the story – skip the movie.

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Well, as the saying goes, all good things (must?) come to an end. And so it is with the ‘Clone’ series of books. I have now read each book in the series at least twice, a couple of the early ones probably three times. (earlier posts on this series are here and here.) Just finished the second reading of the final book: The Clone Redemption, which came out in late Oct. of this year (had been waiting several months for it eagerly). How did it come out? Let’s discuss. I will try to talk about this book in light of past plots and also try not to give things away, but can’t guarantee anything :).

So first and foremost, i was glad to see the Japanese Fleet and SEALs get their due. While this is probably the bleakest book of the entire series for many reasons, the SEALs and Japanese fate was met with strength, dignity and a couple interesting twists (e.g. the encounter with the shipboard Yakuza contingent) that served to bring more humanity to these mysterious characters. In earlier books we had only really seen Master Chief Illych for any significant time, so this gave us a chance to see at least a couple more in a bit more detail, which was nice. And it was also interesting to see the inner workings of the Japanese command staff and its fleet more than before.

The Unified Authority, true to form over the past few books, defies belief in its ability to sink ever ‘lower’, both morally and in the various battles where they show up. While we don’t see anymore of the previous fleet commander(s) that bedeviled Harris (and occasionally Freeman) in the past, their own ‘evil’ boss, Tobias Andropov, head of the planetary Linear Committee, makes his own presence felt by implication several times and then directly at least once.

The scientists Breeze and Sweetwater provide an ultimately bittersweet but necessary ‘conscience’ to the story in some ways, and while they may have ended up being subtle manipulations of the U.A. against Harris and the clones, they help him enormously in spite of this, and that’s definitely a good thing.

Which brings us to Harris and Freeman. I think the former does even more maturing as a person in this book, especially given its increasingly bleak morality play as the plot continues to the end – but he’s still got a ways to go (the interlude(s) with Ava G. and the continued soul-searching around saving natural-borns that otherwise would prefer him and the other clones dead are proof of that) and he knows it. Freeman actually becomes much more of a ‘human’ in this book vs. the past books. Like before, we largely see him through Harris’ eyes and perspective, so aside from his actions and (still very few) words, he’s still very much an enigma, but he lets down his guard (and in some ways, semmingly his will to continue living at all) at points in this story, and it’s a bit weird to consider.

So some quibbles. I liked this book, and very much enjoyed the entire series, but would have liked a bit more of:

1) Avatari back story. We see what happens here (mostly) but if there was a story component even MORE of an enigma than Freeman, it’s the Avatari. Maybe just providing more text from the Morgan Atkins Bible at some point earlier would have been sufficient, I don’t know – but it would surely have been interesting to learn.

2) Did the ‘sleeves’ on the various human colonies persist post-Avatari? If there are other future books, that might be interesting to explore.

3) As noted to the author in an earlier discussion on the SadSamsPalace blog last year – what about that secret Mogat base in DC discussed several books ago? It never comes up here for obvious reasons – but maybe there are more Avatari clues there?

4) Finally – when will Harris have his ‘say’ in front of Congress, the Linear Committee and others who ultimately betrayed humanity via banishing the clones and taking control of the U.A. the way they did – when will the truth come out? I guess this is future book material too?

What might be an interesting next step here – instead of say, another book series or simply another sequel – might be to take an ‘art’ or ‘major events’ timeline approach. I’m thinking here of past Chris Foss-illustrated books like the old Spacecraft, 2000-2100 A.D.: Terran Trade Authority Handbook. Those books were largely a vehicle for putting out an art book – AFAIK, they made up the stories to explain the paintings therein – for the most part it works, although in the later Great Space Battles they get a bit too far afield (the painting of a giant ‘space cereberus’ is simply too silly to take seriously).

But with a pre-written and far more cohesive narrative like the Clone books, this approach could be pretty cool – the author could go back in time across the entire series and fill in/retell details he had to leave out first time around (due to space, editing, deadlines, etc.) – and – you get the chance to enlist some artists to ‘visualize’ some of these events too? Certainly the ‘destruction of the Doctrinaire’ would be a great one, as maybe the first encounter of Morgan Atkins’ science team with the Avatari? I could see a smiling portrait of Sweetwater, Breeze and Freeman presenting to the U.A. command ‘rabble’ during the battle gaps while fighting the Avatari on Terraneau, etc.

Another example of such an ‘external’ book to tell related stories and details would be the (also originally from the 70s) Starfleet Technical Manual describing the Star Trek universe. In any event, there are a lot of possibilities.

To sum up, I liked the series very much, there were a few things I quibbled with here and there, and of course hated waiting months between books (not much you can do about that one – when you write them all at once you can definitely end up with a horrible third story and beyond – ask The Matrix :)). Quality demands time, despite our lack of patience as readers.

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Got the early 70’s Star Trek:The Animated Series on DVD from the library last week. This was an ‘interim’ series done by Filmation from 1973-74, originally intended as a kid’s Saturday am cartoon show but given the hunger at the time for anything/all things Star Trek, actually served to ‘continue on’ the original 60’s series for many fans. I had seen at least a few of these either back then or later in reruns, and had borrowed the set from a friend a few years ago but neglected to watch many of them then.

The show had 22 episodes, which is pretty good considering that the original series only has 79 to begin with (and the third original season had a lot of crappy shows, for that matter). Most of the original cast is here (Kirk/Shatner, Spock/Nimoy, Scotty/Doohan, Uhura/Nichols and Takei/Sulu) save for Chekov/Walter Koenig, who was left out due to budget constraints – but did get to write an episode, The Infinite Vulcan.

One difference (besides being animated instead of live-action) is that the shows are only a half-hour, meaning in practice about 24 min. or so – whereas the original had hour-long episodes. So this constrains the storytelling a bit, but they still did pretty well with what they had. Another is a better variety of weird aliens, architecture and landscapes – animation naturally provides more flexibility in that case, and they used it well.

On balance, the quality is pretty good here. Even though of course Kirk and Spock get the vast majority of the lines – and now after having watched 40+ years of various Star Trek shows enough to think sending the 3-4 most important members of the crew on all the dangerous away missions is STU-PID, guys! – it’s still entertaining. I think besides having most of the original series’ actors, it helped having many of the original writers (or eminently qualified newbies like Larry Niven) handling the scripts, and Dorothy Fontana, one of the key veterans of the original series running the show overall.

Looking at specific episodes, I’d have to say my favorites were the following:

Beyond The Farthest Star – While elements of this plot were used already in an original series 3rd season episode (Day of the Dove) this is better than that one, even if shorter. This story has far more of the sense of wonder and exploration Star Trek is known for, and the alien taking over the Enterprise is more plausible in this story the way it unfolds.

Yesteryear – Here we see some of Spock’s back story and tie in The Guardian from the original series – a great combination.

The Survivor – Despite the increasing proliferation of crew members wearing cheesy handlebar mustaches from this episode onward – the plot is interesting and has a twist or two to boot.

The Magicks of Megas-tu – A favorite recurring theme on Star Trek is ‘ancient aliens visited Earth/other planets of the Federation in primitive times and now we have to deal with how we treated them’ – This idea was also seen in Who Mourns for Adonais? (original series) and even later in the animated series in How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth which throws in the oft-seen ‘Star Trek loves to whip out the Shakespeare’ in its title. I’m not going to go into that one, as anyone who’s watched any amount of Star Trek (TV or movies) will be already familiar with THAT tendency….’Magicks’ is also interesting in that the included DVD commentary notes the network said they couldn’t do an episode with ‘god’ in it – so they chose Lucifer instead

The Slaver Weapon – This is the Larry Niven episode, which includes elements of his own books and stories as a plot foundation (Slavers, Kzinti, etc.) and it definitely works well.

The Jihad – This was one I remembered reading from the books Alan Dean Foster did based on the animated series (Star Trek ‘Logs’) and the animated version is unfortunately not as good, because it leaves out some of the dialog (it’s probable that ADF simply ‘wrote more’ as he did the novellas *after* the series aired) and the sequence with the ‘dune buggy’ they use to escape a molten lava volcano here is pretty silly.

If you don’t want to watch the series on TV – you can always read the books referenced above, which should still be around in paperback somewhere – they came out in the early 80s I think?

All in all, it was good and interesting to revisit these. Several of them are definitely up to the best of the original series for sure, even if their stories aren’t as long timewise due to the shorter format.

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Altogether too rare, but definitely fascinating. As linked by Boing Boing….I will have to read this through a couple more times to truly get the gist but again, fascinating…..

The Paris Review – William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211

I especially like the Blade Runner comment….

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Not sure what prompted it, but the two Frank Miller Batman (The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again) graphic novels recently popped into my head, so got them from the library. I had read the first one (DK Returns) not long after it came out in the late 80’s, but hadn’t read the second one (DK Strikes Again) which came out around the 9/11 timeframe, I think. These were both miniseries in the original comic format, then were condensed into larger ‘graphic novel’ type format by the time I got around to reading them.

Like the recent Dark Knight Batman movies (which were obviously heavily influenced by DK Returns) these comics show a much grittier, far more vigilante side of Batman than say, Superfriends or more vanilla Batman stories (and the first 4 Batman movies only the first of which has *any* merit). I think it’s safe to say that Batman directly appeals to the crusader in all of us – especially men – when you wish you were that offbeat rich scientist guy who could right the world’s wrongs by virtue of your own smarts, kick-ass fighting skills and crazy-good technology. Batman doesn’t care about making money – he inherited it and uses it to his own ends. He uses his own sense of what’s right and is willing to pay for that perspective with everything he has, including his fortune and even his own life.

And these books spell out far more dramatically the tension Batman causes to those around him (who tolerate his ‘activities’ but often barely) while they admire his clarity of purpose. Here Commissioner Gordon is the guy who often has to apologize for Batman’s over the top action – but he not-so-secretly wishes he could be doing the same thing if given the chance.

In DK Returns, Batman ultimately sees the opportunity for one more ‘crusade’ – both against a crazy ‘mutant gang’ trying to take over Gotham, and the rebirth of The Joker. And Mr. Miller takes obvious potshots at the stupid psychotherapist who of course certifies Harvey Dent (Two-Face) and The Joker as clearly sane and ready to rejoin society – the Joker proves him very, very wrong (they don’t really do anything with Two-Face, strangely enough). Of course, Batman wins in the end but at a pretty steep price. I also liked the intro of yet another Robin (a very young teenage female admirer) who is played very straight as simply a novice who wants to help, not some stupid anime-style fantasy chick.

Which leads to the second series, DK Strikes Again. Here we see other DC superheroes enter the picture. In the previous series, Superman made a brief appearance as not much more than a presidential toadie, but here we see The Atom, Wonder Woman (with an interesting small side plot and new character involving Superman) Green Lantern and The Flash appear again too (there are other DC heroes popping up throughout too but these are the major ones). Nearly all take Batman’s side in trying to ‘clean up the country’, excepting Superman, who takes the side of ‘law and order’ and tries to stop them. And an almost unrecognizable Lex Luthor plays the central villain with his henchman Brainiac. Miller even includes some scenes to actually slam the original Robin here again (hinted at in the first series) as mostly a helper Batman had to bail out more often than not when confronted with their deadly opponents.

I have to say I liked the second series far less. On the one hand, the involvement of the other heroes with Batman was well done and likely even inspired stories like The Incredibles (readjustment of superheroes to modern boring society, refusing to go quietly, etc.). But there were far too many distractions (most notably the silly/useless inclusion of ‘The SuperChix’ – some sort of fake superhero team composed of anime-style models who do nothing but get on TV in crazy outfits) and the plot is far too muddled – hard to figure out what’s really going on after the first book? Here it seems like Miller was trying to include too many dystopian touches at the expense of a good story and well-rounded characters – You definitely still see the vendetta aspect of Batman but it’s just not a focused narrative like the first series. I’d advise reading the graphic novel and THEN reading the Wikipedia article (linked above) so you can see what you missed.

On the whole though, definitely worth checking out – and your mileage may vary of course.

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Just finished the first Uplift Trilogy by David Brin. This was a re-read, but it’s been many years. These books are very addicting and haven’t aged badly at all (they were all written in the 80s, although I didn’t read them until after the 90s, pretty sure).

The central theme is that species (alien or human) ‘uplift’ one another into sentience – often through the help of genetic manipulation. In the humans’s case, we were already doing this with chimpanzees and dolphins when our first starships ran into the far greater (and far, far older) Galactic society. Besides becoming immediately controversial (after all, who was Man’s ‘patron’ species? – all the books speculate on this but never provide any answers) and at risk for invasion/takeover (most of the larger Galactic species had been around for thousands if not millions of years), we did gain a few friends along the way, who are revealed over the span of the three books (Sundiver, Startide Rising and The Uplift War). The uniting principle amongst an otherwise uncertain and often dangerous Five Galaxies galactic society is the Library, which serves as an essential repository of nearly all galactic knowledge over time. Each member race has Branch Libraries on their homeworld and colony planets, where they can both learn from and contribute to the knowledge therein over time.

While there are a few quibbles i’d have with the stories now (for example, the books make a big deal about how the humans disdain using the Library while other Galactics rely far, far too heavily on it – If these societies were really thousands-plus years old, I find it hard to believe it would be quite that simplistic) – for the most part they are an entertaining read, with interesting characters and solid attempts at seeing things from other species’ perspective (especially in the latter two books in the case of dolphins and chimps).

It’s off to the second Uplift ‘Storm’ Trilogy for me now! If you are looking for a great way to read a David Brin book without having to commit to an entire series – his Kiln People (2002) book is a very entertaining, one-book-only read? Enjoy!

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Just finished Jack McDevitt’s Odyssey last night. Over the time I spent reading it, I just kept getting more and more drawn in until I simply had to keep reading until finish. This is the fifth book in the ‘Academy‘ series – I read a couple of the earlier books in the series, Chindi and Omega, a couple years ago. All these novels also share the central character of Priscilla Hutchins (‘Hutch’), who is a starship captain and pilot, and ends up as an administrator and sometimes politico in this book (in many ways to her dismay).

Basically the story deals with a galaxy largely devoid of alien life excepting ancient artifacts, when a series of mysterious ‘moonrider’ sightings at several of the human outposts rattle Hutch’s world in more ways than one, and she is forced to take them seriously.

Besides the gradual unfolding of a somewhat twisty-turny plot, there are a few additional nice touches in this novel. One is the additional central character of Gregory MacAllister, a journalist not unlike that of the real Christopher Hitchens (with a dose of H.L. Mencken) – eternal skeptic, strangely a friend to Hutch, muckraker, and despite his cynical/gruff/Frasier-Crane like exterior, something of a softy at heart.

There is also a lot of thinly veiled ecological commentary throughout the book – since the book is set at least a few hundred years in the future, the effects of climate change and global warming are already well on their way – and the human race is still (mostly) arguing about what to do about it, sadly.

I also liked the touch of intrigue – better readers than I may spot the foreshadowing but as noted above, I liked the plot twists and didn’t see them coming for the most part.

All in all, an increasingly good read by the end. I guess i’ll have to now read the first two and last books in the series, dadgum it!

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We watched the Japanese ‘killfest’ Battle Royale a couple nights ago. My wife has been reading The Hunger Games series lately, and this movie is supposed to be similar (I haven’t read the books) in story.

I liked the movie but it is way gory. Kind of a ‘live’ anime in many ways, a sort of “lord of the flies” meets “any dystopian 70s flick” meets “Westworld” with over-the-top Japanese-style violence mixed in (how do those little kids know how to kill so efficiently)?

If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this movie. If you don’t like kids dying within less than 10 minutes of the movie’s start – don’t watch it, your nightmares will begin shortly after you finish.

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