News from the Guardian

Michael Moorcock will write a Dr Who novel and Richard Curtis is writing a script for next season, according to the Guardian. Interesting reactions:

(Moorcock) said he sensed "a suspicion of the 'outsider'" at the news from some Doctor Who fans, which he compared to the response "you used to get when someone with a reputation as a non-SF writer would decide to write an SF novel".

"All I can answer to this is 'wait and see'. I'm certainly not a non-watcher," he said. "Neither am I someone who ascribes a kind of religiosity to an enthusiasm. This phenomenon crops up a lot, these days associated with SF/fantasy, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight and so on. I hate these presumptions of exclusivity either in my own corner of the literary world or elsewhere. Mike Kustow, once director of the Royal Shakespeare Co, described this as 'the anxious ownership syndrome', when faced with his first confrontation with SF fandom in Brighton 1968. He'd found the same sort of expression with Shakespeare fans when someone from 'outside' showed an interest."

Also on this weekend's Guardian/Observer book page: A favorable review of the new Stephen King novel by M. John Harrison, an appreciation of J.G. Ballard by Will Self, one of their bloggers finds George R.R. Martin's Ice and Fire unputdownable (he's right about that), and Kim Stanley Robinson discusses his new time-travelling Galileo novel.

Too many links... Just go here and look around. Wouldn't it be nice if SF were as mainstreamed here as in the UK?

Read More...

Woo Butchered

I believe that US theatrical releases of foreign movies is pretty much a waste of time and money -- small audiences, expensive ads, publicity wasted (because forgotten by the time of the real release of the movie, which is on home video) -- but accept that ego and, to some extent, aesthetics, require that a gesture be made.

This WSJ article about the excision of two and a half hours from John Woo's new film "Red Cliff" is maddening for any number of the usual reasons: philistinism, lost opportunity, commercial and aesthetic suicide.

But in a market dominated by home video, it's not necessary to pander to the short attention spans and historical ignorance of the LA/NY West Siders who constitute the only theatrical audience for subtitled movies. Most of us will watch at home anyway.

Of course, a domestic release of the real movie on DVD is not guaranteed, because the fools who cut the movie in the first place don't understand this.

Dopes.

Luckily you can get an all format player and go here. Thirty bucks.

Read More...

Lacking only Seth Rogan...

...who is currently shooting "Green Hornet" on my block in Koreatown.


Kick-Ass

Trailer Park | MySpace Video

Read More...

A stopped clock

Even the most profoundly unhip occasionally (as the winds of fashion change) hit the right note:

Critic Simon Reynolds writes in the Guardian:

Standing on a subway platform waiting for the L train, I saw a group of young men with that slightly scruffy, indeterminately hip look that screams "Williamsburg". I was struck by the fact that every one of them had a beard. Later that same week, walking down a single block in the East Village, I passed something like a dozen men, all in the 18 to 35 age range and all bearded. A few days after that, watching New York Noise, an alternative rock cable TV show, I saw several videos in a row in which most members of the group sported one form or other of facial foliage, climaxing with Fleet Foxes' hairier-than-thou He Doesn't Know Why.

It was then that it struck me: the beard has become one of the crucial, era-defining signifiers for non-mainstream rock in the noughties.

Read More...

Return of the Repressed

My old Boston Phoenix collegaue David Edelstein on Lars Von Trier's latest:

Should you see Antichrist? It’s good for a few bad laughs, but you have to be up for a castration, a clitoridectomy, and a lot of symbolism. You have to be up for watching Dafoe and Gainsbourg—the latest in a line of masochistic stars to submit to this high priest of cinema and film-festival darling—humiliate themselves. Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn’t even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-’em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives. David Cronenberg explored a similar theme in The Brood, in which a male psychiatrist’s est-like exhortation to a woman to “go all the way through” her trauma produces not inner peace but deformed psychotic babies that hammer people she doesn’t like to death. Now, that’s entertainment!

Read More...

If on a Winter's Night.....

A one line review of the new holiday album by the former lead singer of the Police:

"Oh, Sting, where is thy death?"

Read More...

Glenn and Oprah

What do they have in common? According to the New York Times Glenn Beck is the Oprah of the political thriller....

Vince Flynn and Brad Thor are very happy he is.

Cool quote:

Mr. Beck is quite canny about using novels as a vehicle for talking about issues he cares about. When Mr. Flynn was on Mr. Beck’s Fox News program last month to talk about “Pursuit of Honor,” Mr. Flynn’s latest novel, a thriller about a C.I.A. operative chasing Muslim terrorists who kill 185 people in Washington, Mr. Beck zeroed in on a chapter in which the main character, Mitch Rapp, goes before Congress to defend the C.I.A.’s record of using harsh interrogation tactics with suspects.

“Let me just say, it’s almost conservative porn,” Mr. Beck said.

I hope they use that as a blurb for the paperback.

Read More...

More Boris!

Boris the crime fighter... Is there nothing he can't do? According to the woman he rescued:

"I was texting on my phone so didn't notice the girls until they pushed me against the car, quite hard," Armstrong said. "At first it was quite funny, because they were only about 12. Then I saw that one of them had an iron bar in her hand. It was more than a metre long. It was as big as her.

"Then along came a cyclist. And I thought, 'Good, he's a big bloke,' and shouted, 'Can you help me please?'

"He stopped and turned around and I thought, 'Oh, my God, it's Boris Johnson.'

"He asked the girls what was going on, and at first they didn't move, so I said, 'That's the mayor of London!' and they ran off. They must have thought they were going to get in trouble. One dropped the bar, so Boris picked it up and cycled after them. He returned a few minutes later and walked me home....

Read More...

Too many Tulkinghorn touchstones

Heywood Hill (main room to the left) , which I have long praised here, is sponsoring a Wodehouse exhibit and, in support, is creaking into the 21st century with this viral promotional video: ten friends of the shop reciting favorite Wodehouse lines. There are Mitfords, Guinnesses, Boris!'s father, assorted pretty girls, and Stephen Fry.

Read More...

No comment...

From the gnomes at Amazon:

Dear Associate,

You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you have not earned any referral fees in the past three years in connection with your Amazon Associates Program account and have an account balance that has not been paid. This balance has not been paid because your balance is less than $10. According to the Associates Program Operating Agreement, any account that has not earned referral fees in a three year period is subject to a $10 maintenance fee...

Read More...

Oysters. Hemingway. Back From Boston.

From "A Moveable Feast":

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

Read More...

Stark evidence

Review of the new Ellroy in NYRB suggests the extent to which Westlake/Stark has become a touchstone for the Johnny come lately cognoscenti:

I read the trilogy with a distinct, strong, and rather obscure pleasure, asking myself why, as I went along. I thought at first it must be related to why I like the Parker crime novels by Donald Westlake, which also feature an utterly conscienceless but superbly competent professional thief and killer and are also written in a minimalist style—though nothing like as extreme in its minimalism as Ellroy's novels. I wondered if it must be tonic in some way to slip yourself into the personae of fearless sociopaths and then come out of it. But the Parker novels are short, like spasms, requiring nothing like the commitment that Ellroy demands. And the Parker stories are not concerned with large political questions. Reading Ellroy is not like reading Westlake or anyone else.

Read More...

This makes me very happy

A story that interests the usually disparate Telegraph, Instapundit, and Boing Boing:

A quick-thinking farmer's daughter disarmed a man who broke into her home in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. In a phenomenally bad-ass series of moves worthy of a Tarantino screenplay, 21-year-old Rukhsana Kausar attacked him with an axe, then shot him dead with his own gun.

Read More...

Oh ye of little faith....

"In Our Time" , the Radio 4 series that I have touted before, just did an hour on Aquinas that is a masterpiece of the popular discussion of philosophy and theology. You can listen at the link (or even better, subscribe to the podcast... I'm looking forward to the next program, which is about the Newton/Leibnitz calculus fight -- the second time in two weeks I've thought about the Baroque Trilogy)

Very bracing stuff. Not much of a believer myself, but I know a beautiful idea when I see one.

Read More...

Reflections on Independence

Over the years I've developed a list of top-10 smartest people I've ever worked with. Fluctuates, naturally. At times, it feels difficult to come up with ten.

Bill Mechanic, whom I worked for at Disney and who was a mentor to a number of the other people on my top-10, usually heads the list. He gave a speech this morning about the future of the movies which is reprinted in full at the Thompson blog and it is untypically straightforward -- the usual Mechanic mode being the gnomic and Delphic.

Some cool quotes:

Why he got fired from Fox:

Murdoch didn’t want to wait for ICE AGE to finish production. I didn’t have a foot out of the door before Fox tried to sell off the film. Luckily for them, they couldn’t get a deal done.

At the same time, Peter Chernin thought I was taking too much of a chance with X MEN. He called it my $70mm art film, since everyone knew that not only were comic book movies dead but you certainly couldn’t start one in a concentration camp. That wasn’t comic book fun. Maybe not, but most comic books are dark, so it was a question of being relevant, of being grounded.

Ironically, both films have lasted longer at Fox than I did and are now the most valuable franchises in the history of that studio, throwing off billions of dollars of profit.

But they also were, along with FIGHT CLUB, the leading reasons I was shown the door. My bosses couldn’t deal with the unconventional choices like those and others such as BRAVEHEART and THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY because the films weren’t pre-sold and thus seemed less predictable.

How the studios miss the point:

Admissions are down over the past few years and, perhaps most troubling, the audience that Hollywood spends the majority of time focusing on, the under 25’s, are the ones finding other things to do.

Take a look at this shift over the past decade. While use of the internet and video games have dominated leisure time activities, movie consumption is down or flat over the same period. And, more to the point, you can see that there is a 21% drop in film going amongst the core target audience and a 24% drop in the next key category, 25-39 year olds.

And yes, these charts beg another question: if the audiences are shifting, why isn’t the product shifting as well. Name 5 mainstream films this year that successfully targeted an over-30 year audience.

In that way, Hollywood in the broadest sense of the word is much like Detroit. It’s a manufacturer’s mentality that reigns, seemingly indifferent to the consumers it serves. Ignore whether the consumer likes our product as long as they buy it.

Read More...

"Inferno"

Test footage (I assume) from an unflinished film project by Henri-Georges Clouzot:

Read More...

Dan Brown and his Precursors

I love "The Lost Symbol" despite its manifest flaws.

In a pleasing way, I am reminded of both Crowley's Aegypt and Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy/Cryptonomicon cycle, creating a link between those two that had not occurred to me.

(Take a look a Borges's short essay "Kafka and his Precursors", in this regard.)

More important is Brown's infectious enthusiasm for his own work. He's the furthest thing imaginable from an ironist or a pseud. When a writer interrupts the description of an attack by an insane, tattooed, syringe-wielding giant to tell you that "sincere" means "without wax", you know you're in the hands of someone who just can't help himself...

As often happens, I liked Sarah Weinman on this aspect of Brown and Steig Larsson:

What really links these two authors together, however, is the sheer, unadulterated joy that comes through in their thrillers.... Such fervor can't be faked; readers not only smell the false article a mile away, they put up with a lot -- including frequent turns of cliché -- to get to a taste of the real thing.

Read More...

Stan Robinson denounces the Booker prize

A major screed from a writer (whom I've always found somewhat boring) denouncing the Booker process for ignoring the current amazing quality of British SF. He claims that a novel by Adam Roberts (that I read last month and found disappointing) should have been nominated and should then have won... The Guardian covers the controversy here.

Robinson finds a letter from Virginia Woolf to Olaf Stapeldon, regarding Star Maker:

sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.

He also gives a pretty good list of the current members of the club:

The eight wonderful writers featured here (Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Geoff Ryman, Nicola Griffith, Stephen Baxter, Paul MacAuley, Ian Watson, Justina Robson) are only a representative sampling of a community of artists so strong that it is hard to explain. Add to these Brian Aldiss, Neal Asher, Iain Banks, Christopher Evans, Alasdair Gray, Colin Greenland, John Courtenay Grimwood, Peter Hamilton, Nick Harkaway, M. John Harrison, Robert Holdstock, Gwyneth Jones, Garry Kilworth, Doris Lessing, Ian R. MacLeod, China Miéville, Richard Morgan, Christopher Priest, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Jennifer Rohn, Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Lisa Tuttle - and no doubt others I have forgotten, or am unaware of (sorry) - and one has to ask, how is it that a group of such intellectual power could be working at one time, and our time at that?

Read More...

Dan Brown opinion of the day

From the Guardian:

No one, I am certain, takes a creative writing course with the aim of writing over-wrought, long-winded, critically-reviled thrillers. You take a creative writing course because you want to be a good writer; because you go back to your dorm room and read the great books on your English Lit course syllabus .... and regard the Pulitzer prize shortlist and think, "One day, that could be me." And then you sit down to write with all the best of intentions, and all that comes out is "The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms."

Who hasn't been there? I know I have: when writing my first volume of unabashed commercial non-fiction, every so often I found my mind drifting to the entertaining notion that some insightful critic would read it and say, "Ah, this volume of unabashed commercial non-fiction actually has surprising literary merit!" But I know that I will be waiting for ever.

I would thus be willing to wager all of the income I have ever made from writing fiction (nothing, but the sentiment is there) that sometimes, even as he wallows in his piles of money, Dan Brown wonders why he'll never be able to write exactly as well as he wishes he could; why while being one of the world's most financially successful writers, literary acclaim eludes him; why no one ever says, "actually, there's a sentence on page 344 when Langdon says something rather profound and eloquent". Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we just cannot help the way that we write, and sometimes, it is just a bit crap.

Read More...

Unfair to Humans

Sarah Weinman at work:

For those who care to keep score, I picked up my copy of THE LOST SYMBOL just shy of 4 PM on Monday, had the first 200 pages read by the time I showed up to Gotham Hall for the launch party, finished the book at 9:30 PM, turned in the review at 11 PM and it was done and dusted by 9 AM this morning.

Read More...

Kunming

  Kunming Time

Read More...

Epitafios II

The initiates need no convincing: The second series of the Argentinian police procedural "Epitafios" arrives this Friday on HBO Latino and a few days later on HBO2.... English subtitles, lots of local color, and a great performance (at least in the first series) by Julio Chavez in the lead, ably supported by Almodovar star Cecilia Roth.

Read More...

P. D. James on Rankin

A graceful appreciation from one master to another.... P.D. James reviews the new Ian Rankin novel, which appears to be the first of a new series of Edinburgh-based procedurals. Her review could be a manifesto: why does a certain kind of crime novel appeal?

Sez Lady James:

Rankin is predominantly a crime novelist of realism. He eschews even the convenient convention that a detective does not age and may talk of retiring but seldom does. Each book is set unambiguously in place and time. In The Complaints we are given precise dates at which the narrative moves forward. The story is told chiefly in dialogue which is terse and realistic. We meet Malcolm Fox on Friday 6 February 2009, and part company on Tuesday 24 February. We travel with him through the sinister underground of the city and the haunts of the rich and powerful, knowing the pubs, the offices, the hotels he enters, what he eats when he is alone, where he does his shopping and the food he buys. And always human lives are seen against the thread of history.

Rankin is a master at what, for me, is one of the important aspects of a crime novel: the integration of setting, plot, characters and a theme which, for Rankin, is the moral dimension never far from his writing.

Read More...

Just so you'll know what you're missing...

Opens September 18. Title translation: "My Heart Says Hooray!"

Read More...

More good news

This is the sort of "never too late" story I love more and more as I get older -- and it features in a leading role one of the most beautiful women ever to grace a movie screen.

Admittedly not quite the kind of "pair up" you might be imagining, but nevertheless a valid excuse for posting this:

Read More...