Sheila's LiveJournal

This is a review of District 9:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/district_9_review_we_have_met_the_alien_and_he_is_us/

It's an eerie feeling, sitting in a darkened theatre, watching various parts of Rome explode or erupt in flame ("Angels and Demons") when an earthquake hits.

Wow, those Illuminati sure are still powerful!

I liked the movie, but I see several reviewers were disappointed. I thought "Angels and Demons" was a better novel than "The Da Vinci Code." Easier to follow, in any case. I really admired the fact that Dan Brown observed Aristotle's rule (and the movie followed it too): the action should take place in a 24-hour time span; it makes for a tight drama. If nothing else pleases the viewer, then at least the shots of Rome are spectacular, all the more so when you consider that the Vatican wasn't cooperative (surprise!), and a lot of footage was filmed in England.

(And Ewan McGregor is great eye-candy.)

As for the earthquake (which we felt), I arrived home to find a lot of stuff on the floor and pictures hanging crazily on the wall, but no real damage.

If you haven't seen it yet, do so this weekend. The new STAR TREK movie is well worth seeing. The young actors are excellent in their roles, not obviously trying to ape the mannerisms of the original cast but managing to suggest them in subtle ways. We get explanations for all manner of puzzling things in the series -- such as why Kirk calls Dr McCoy "Bones" (not as a nod to the old slang term for doctor: sawbones). The special effects are gorgeous. The plot is exciting. And we have the added pleasure of an appearance by Leonard Nimoy as the later Spock, courtesy of some handwaving rubbery science for which I willingly suspended my disbelief.

But for me the best part was when Uhura declared herself a "xenolinguist" and defined "xenolinguistics!" Since I first coined that term back in a story and an article on alien communication in AMAZING back in 1988 (the online Oxford dictionary of sf terms confirms this), I was quite delighted to have Paramount give it its blessing! Take that, NASA -- which has been playing with the prefix "exo."

I didn't watch the Academy Awards last night, mostly because I've only seen one of the nominees – and that one I didn't like. (See “Dirty Tricks” here). Apart from that one, I've only seen two other movies recently. One was the Hannah Montana concert movie in 3D to which I  took my six year-old granddaughter. (It reminded me of her mother and aunts at that age, crazy about Donny and Marie.) The other one was The Bucket List which was pretty well ignored last night.

I'm not a great fan of movie comedies, but I much prefer them to the current crop of blood and gloom movies that Hollywood has been serving us. I don't think I have an atrophied comedy bone, though the trouble may be that I like old Brit comedies on PBS, Are You Being Served, and Keeping Up Appearances, or Dame Judi Dench in As Time Goes By, and that prejudices me against the simply silly stuff that seems to fill the big screen these days. Roger Ebert didn't like The Bucket List, finding it sentimental, and I usually agree with him 90% of the time. But I wanted something light one afternoon, so I took a chance on Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

I can tell you right away what's wrong with the movie: It's that darned voice-over stuff. As far as I can see, that's a blatant attempt to make the movie “relevant” in some psychological way, and it doesn't work. Take away the solemn pontifications Freeman's character is forced to make, and you have a sweetly funny piece of fluff, a boys' road trip comedy that has its roots in the things Crosby, Hope and Lamour used to do way back in the forties and fifties last century, a genre that has produced many charming movies, including the variation, Thelma and Louise.

The theme of The Bucket List, as I'm sure everybody knows by now, is the things we've always dreamed of doing before we die, but have mostly not got around to doing. And that got me to thinking. What are the things I've always wanted to do but keep on putting off?

I'm pretty good at taking chances and going for the unusual. I've taken flying lessons in a sailplane; I've sailed a twenty-footer single-handed in rough water in the Catalina Channel when my “crew” passed out drunk; I've gone off-roading in the Mojave in a Jeep; I've seen the bats streaming out of the Carlsbad Caverns at twilight; I've taken part in an Ojibwe sweatlodge ceremony in Wisconsin. I've been to the top of the Empire State Building and to Ground Zero; I've walked on the Great Wall of China, and I've explored the Potala in Lhasa; I've petted kangaroos and koala bears in Australia; I've camped across most of Europe; I've ridden a gondola in Venice, taken a steamer through the  Norwegian fjords and the train from London to Paris via the chunnel. I've climbed to the top of a volcano in Hawai'i; I've celebrated Oktoberfest in Munich, walked among the Greek ruins, gone on safari in Kenya and danced with the Masai. I've crossed the Equator and been to the Arctic Circle. I've visited the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Copper Canyon in Mexico. I've seen Michelangelo's David in Florence, and Van Gogh's “Starry Night” in New York. And that's only the things I can name off the top of my head. Not a bad list for someone who could've lost her life in the bombing of London when she was a child!

So what's left on my bucket list? Oh, there are places in the world I'd still like to go: India, for instance, and Egypt. The pyramids in South America attract me too. And I'd love to go up in a hot air balloon. (But no parachute jumps for me!) But the thing I really would love to do is go into space. I won't hold out for a Moon landing – though that would be nice – but a quick trip up to where the sky turns from blue to black and the stars don't twinkle any more and my body becomes weightless, now that's an item that's top of the list!

What's on your bucket list?

Last Sunday, I went to see Atonement;  I'd previously read the book and didn't particularly want to see the movie but my cousin persuaded me into going right after our regular Sunday night dinner out. I'll admit right up front that I didn't care for either the book or the movie. I've read just about everything Ian McEwan has written and I'm definitely a fan (Saturday is one of my favorites), but his latest novel disturbed me – not because of the story but because of the way it was told.

So I've been musing over what causes me to cry “Dirty Trick!” about a book or a movie. Obviously I don't mean a surprise ending if it's properly prepared for. I actually love to be misled by the author and not see the ending coming, especially if I find myself slapping my head and thinking, “I ought to have seen that!” because all the clues were there but I failed to spot them. The best thrillers and detective stories are like that. Sometimes the story is told chaotically or incongruously because that's the character's experience. And sometimes when the author plays a very risky game of telling the reader the ending in advance, and still manages to shock or surprise, well that's just wonderful. Take for example, Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her, which explains how the horrifying murder of the lead character's wife which ends With No One As Witness came to be. In this “prequel” we know the ending without a shadow of doubt, but the story is engrossing anyway. Ruth Rendell has done this sort of thing a time or two also.

And I don't mean varying views of what actually happens, according to the characters. (Rashomon, anyone?) Or events told out of chronological order, as long as that contributes to the reader's pleasure in the story (as in the movie Memento) and isn't done for its own sake or to confuse.  What I don't appreciate in a book is being in a character's head and not being allowed to know what the character knows. That's not fair. I don't buy into the excuse that if I'd known what the character knew there wouldn't be much of a story. Precisely!

Now to my objections to both the book and the movie versions of Atonement. I'll overlook the massive coincidences and/or character stupidities of the young man giving the child an unsealed personal letter to deliver – let alone the unbelievable fact that the letter “just happened to be” the truly unacceptable version which he meant to throw away – or the guest at a dinner party in his honor at an English country estate rushing out and committing rape during the distraction of looking for runaways. And I didn't see the need for the movie's several sequences of the child's view followed by “what really happened” (I think the viewer is smart enough to figure it out without a cheat sheet). What really annoys me in both book and movie is that we're sucked into accepting a sugar-coated ending only to learn it's a “gotcha!” But since the whole story is supposed to be the novel the child-as-adult writes when she grows up (her atonement), then we should've known it wasn't true. Or, we should've just been allowed to experience the novel version. I don't think the author can have it both ways. We're asked to see the story through the child's eyes, but at the same time we're expected to react to the story as if it's the novel she's writing.

Dirty trick, in my book!

[Ishould add that Roger Ebert, whose movie reviews I respect, doesn't agree with me.]