Last night, I watched a Japanese/Polish-made SFD film directed by Mamoru Oshii called Avalon. A bit dated, the film was made in 2001, but anyway, it was new to me. I don’t know quite what I think of it: it certainly doesn’t live up to anything like The Matrix in terms of SF-action, but then I don’t think it was supposed to be that kind of a film. As some of the commenters on the IMDB message boards have noted, it’s very Tarkovskian, slow and full of empty silences, beautiful mundanities, and a kind of weaving of “mythic” materials with …
Category: REVIEWS
Neal Stephenson Interview
Here’s an interview with the brilliant novelist Neal Stephenson, over at Reason. One of the more interesting questions and answers: Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy’s recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms—social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, …
And Now, To Conclude My Film Overdose…
… but I swear I won’t rent anything more today. I’m returning my last DVD tonight. In the last few days I’ve seen three films that were all quite different. The best of them all was definitely Donnie Darko, though I must say that they were all interesting. The House of Flying Daggers is a Chinese kung-fu film set towards the collapse of the T’ang Dynasty (though it could well have been any dynasty, if you ask me, and Western viewers are extremely unlikely to care about this bit of the film’s context). Well, if you’ve already seen Hero and …
Banks on The Algebraist and Politics
Here’s Salon’s interview with Iain Banks. I think I nabbed this from Zarq, linked in the last post. If not, sorry.
More Films
It must be some kind of overdose or something. In the last four days, I’ve seen four more films that I want to write about here. The first two were Korean movies I watched with Lime: 오!브fk더스 (Oh! Brothers) was a comedy that was, as Korean comedies go, one of the better ones I’ve seen. It was a kind of goofy version of Rain Man, but the long-lost brother had Progeria, not autism, meaning he was twelve years old but had the body of an adult, and was put to work by his brother collecting money for the mob. I …
Save The Green Planet
… is the name of the last movie I saw (imdb | excellent review). It was a title I’d run across before but never happened to pick for watching, but Lime and I are getting to the point where we’ve seen many of the films we wanted to see at our regular DVD-room house, so we asked the girl running the front desk whether it was a good movie. She replied, enthusiastically, that it is, in her opinion, the best Korean movie ever, and that it was sad that it couldn’t have gotten a little more funding so that it …
Films I’ve Seen of Late
Writing a novel is the kind of work one can do for a few hours at a time, and then one needs a break. For me, it’s a kind of process of letting my own ideas percolate, and they often do that best when I am occupied doing something else. Also, while I’ve been writing this, I’ve had an incredibly hard time getting into reading fiction. Nonfiction has been easy, but I crave storylines and yet fiction simply hasn’t drawn me in. Even the wonderfully funny and tragic novel The Comedians by Graham Greene hasn’t succeeded in drawing me in. …
On Theory
Both Charlotte Street and Word Munger have posted recently on the same topic that Chad Orzel recently touched upon… the place of literary theory in the study of literature. Much has been made of Salman Rushdie’s disdain for literary theories and those who formulate them. Though it’s slightly hidden behind some of her langauge, I think Charlotte Street makes the most important point: What passes as spontaneous insight and theory-free close reading is shot through with the reified or shrivelled remains of earlier theories, which have now become mere second nature and therefore invisible/unconscious. The first task of Theory would …
Written Sex
Again, something interesting via Chad Orzel, who comments on a matter that at one point was the subject of a long discussion over at Making Light. Written sex scenes are very hard to do well, and in many books I cringe at how badly they’re handled. If one skips writing the scene too squeamishly, one gets the sense that the author is somehow invading the narrative, censoring the actions of the characters. The zealous avoider takes something from the narrative. And yet, the all-too-common reaction among younger writers, including those who infest Creative Writing Departments, is to err too far …
Jazz Piper
The blog Honey, Where You Been So Long brings you Rufus Harley, Jazz Bagpiper. I swear I thought I was the only person in the world interested in this guy.