Funk Babblings

I first heard of Arthur C. Clarke as the author of the books on which the movies 2001 and 2010 were based (and yes, heretic that I am, I still enjoy the second one much more than the first). But his novel Rendezvous With Rama was my earliest introduction to "real" science fiction writing (unless you count Daniel Pinkwater's Fat Men From Space).

Starting from Rama, I read as much of Clarke's writing as I could get my hands on. I soon realized that the structures were somewhat formulaic, but the ideas were always fascinating. I even read all the later Rama sequels co-written (and later taken over completely) by Gentry Lee, with interest (ooh, detailed character development!) but gradually increasing disappointment. I especially noticed the later works to lack the optimistic sense of discovery that I'd enjoyed in Clarke's earlier novels.

I think of myself as someone who grew up reading science fiction, but really I grew up reading lots of Clarke, Carl Sagan's lone novel (Contact, which was quite influential on me), and Douglas Adams. In high school I started tracking down Adams' influences (such as Robert Sheckley and Kurt Vonnegut) and reading their books. But Clarke was always the dominant sci-fi writer for me, partly because he was so prolific, and partly because his books were so full of out-of-this-world ideas that ended up so influential.

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka for the past half-century, and in recent years every time I heard about the political unrest there I would immediately think of him. Of course, I also think of him whenever geostationary satellites and space elevators are mentioned.

This one's for chronarchy....

This morning on the radio I heard about a film that will be shown tonight and tomorrow night at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque:
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, three 12 year old friends, Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb, began filming their own shot-by-shot adaptation in the backyards of their Mississippi homes.

Seven years later their film was in the can.

Fourteen years later, in 2003, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin Texas was proud to announce the theatrical world premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.

Apparently copyright and trademark restrictions require that all showings are for non-profits, so you won't find this at your local commercial theater or on DVD. Catch it when and where you can.

See also information at TheIndyExperience.com.

(And why did the WKSU reporter keep skipping the word "Institute" in the venue name this morning?)

Someday I must go to the San Diego Comic-Con. Seems like there's always cool stuff happening there.

It seems that among the things happening there was a string of announcements from J. Michael Straczynski. Let's see, we have Ron Howard slated to direct a movie (Changeling) that JMS wrote. We get a 12-episode SF-comedy radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, The Adventures of Apocalypse Al. We get a new JMS TV series called Borrowed Lives. His excellent Rising Stars comic book series will become a TV series. His Midnight Nation graphic novel may become a film, as may a one-off comic book called Dream Police (hadn't heard of that one). He'll also be doing a new comic book called Bullet Points.

Oh yeah, and some Babylon 5 projects. Sure, a B5 video game is coming, but the big news is Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, a direct-to-DVD collection of 20-minute stories, "stories that I wanted to tell during the B5 series but never had the chance to develop." Unlike the previous B5 spinoff attempts, it will focus on the prominent B5 characters -- at least those played by actors still living. (So no G'Kar or Dr. Franklin, but maybe Delenn and Ivanova!) And it will be released next year.

(Thanks to duriyah for sending the link!)

Saw Clerks II last night. Second Kevin Smith movie I'm aware of with Soul Asylum playing at the end. Now trying to decide whether Kevin Smith's use of Soul Asylum at the end of a movie inspires him to make the whole movie so good, he puts Soul Asylum at the end when he knows he's made a really good movie, or the use of Soul Asylum itself is enough to color my perceptions of the whole movie. But even the opening scene was awesome, not just the end.

The movie was a bit heavy on the Christian references and the... "alternative eroticism" or whatever he called it "interspecies erotica", but otherwise awesome.


I'll have to see it a few times just to catch everything interesting in the credits.

I keep intending to write about all the books I've been reading, but it's inching closer to a year's worth of books, and sadly I don't think I could do any of them justice at this point. I may still try (wading through an 845-page book means the read-books-pile isn't growing so quickly), but it's still getting less likely.

But what I can talk about is comics.

( Read more... )

Last Friday night we saw Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary following three classes of fifth-grade kids in a program in the New York City schools to teach ballroom dancing to inner-city kids, and the kids' path to and through the all-district competition.

It was a really fun film, but a few extra things struck me while watching it....

- I was imagining a huge TV or movie camera in the classrooms filming this thing, but that would never have worked. I had to remind myself that this is the age of digital video, with small unobtrusive cameras that the subjects probably barely noticed.

- A big deal was made about how the program seems to help the kids who do well (e.g. the ones who make it to the final competition), but the ones who didn't do so well seemed forgotten.

- The film does a great job of storytelling, building suspense about how the kids will do in the final competition, which made me think about how much extra video had to be recorded of how many classes in order to piece together a compelling storyline of three classes. In this vein, I noted that one of the first credits to appear at the end (if not the first) was a writer credit.

We went to see Sky High today. Not only was it fun, but it seemed to be aimed at thirtysomethings at least as much as kids. This means I'm squarely in the age group that's assumed to have kids old enough to be going to movies. Besides feeling a bit John Hughes-ish, and having a lot of in-jokes in the adult cast, the soundtrack was entirely covers of 80s songs -- including They Might Be Giants covering Devo, and Bowling For Soup covering Modern English. In this and other respects it reminded me of Grosse Pointe Blank -- though that's emphatically not a kids movie, it was aimed directly at my generation (especially those four years older than me), complete with an 80s soundtrack. And that movie came out eight years ago, long enough for those protagonists to have a kid of their own now going to see Sky High.

I'm among the last people who still haven't seen that movie everybody's talking about (we'll finally go tonight), so instead I'll say a little about my reactions to the OLD movie I finally saw a couple weekends ago....

( Quadrophenia )

Oh, if you watch the movie, watch the first minute or so of it again after it ends, or else you'll totally misunderstand the ending. Though I think that ending is somewhat diminished by the fact that Sting's character is going to be really pissed....

Tonight we finally saw the film I've waited 20 years for.

First, the previews were almost all wrong. All but Revenge of the Sith seem aimed directly at kids, rather than at the SF geeks going to this movie. And no Serenity trailer. The Chicken Little trailer (not the one Apple has) gets cleverness points for parodying the original HHGG teaser.

Anyway, the movie.... I was pleased that it started strong (I annoyed nontacitare by reciting some of the lines as they were said), and was even willing to forgive the cutting short of a few jokes and the occasional English-to-American translation. (It's zed and bypass, not zee and expressway!) I wanted to burst into applause when the first banjo notes of "Journey of the Sorcerer" came along. But it kinda went downhill after that, though I still thought it was fun. The main problem for me was pacing - most of the film felt rushed, while the Vogsphere segment (and pretty much all the Vogon stuff) dragged.

Arthur and Ford worked, though Ford was inexplicably huggy early on. Arthur was too obsessed with Trillian from the start, and Trillian wasn't quite right, though not quite wrong either. I think part of Trillian's problem has always been Adams though; he had trouble getting her believable and consistent from the start.

While Alan Rickman was pretty good as Marvin, there were certain lines that just didn't sound right done by anyone but Stephen Moore.

I liked John Malkovich as Humma Kuvula, but the stuff about election politics didn't really seem to fit. Which brings us to Zaphod....
Zaphod was just plain annoying, not at all the Zaphod I know. But then I realized that he was a George W Bush parody, which at least gave me some reference if not enjoyment of the character. (Anyone else see it, or is it just me?)

Then we got the G'gugvant/Vl'hurg/dog scene alongside the credits at the end (with a justifiably different trigger phrase from Arthur)... and typically, they cut out two lines at the end of it for no readily apparent reason. sigh.

This is the kind of film I'll watch multiple times to catch all the in-jokes and background details. It's just disappointing that those are all that make it worth watching again. On the other hand, I think I enjoyed it a lot more than nontacitare did.

(As seen on Slashdot...)

Douglas Adams biographer M.J. Simpson has seen the new Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that's just peanuts to the Hitchhiker's movie. Listen.

Read the full review, the spoiler-free version, or the missing-good-bits list.