fine whine

We Douglas Adams fans have been waiting a long time for a big-screen Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy adaptation for a long time, and I waited just a bit longer for it to hit the cheap second-run theaters.

Was it worth the wait, and the (reduced) ticket price? More or less.

There will never be a way to fully adapt a book to a film, let alone ones so literarily funny like the Adams oeuvre, but they made a decent attempt. This is a body of work that has appeared as a radio show, a series of books, computer games, a BBC series, and now a movie.

Well, somewhere along the line there was a picture book, but I don't believe that it has been truly accepted as canon even as much as the short story "Young Zaphod plays it safe" has. The visuals here and there looked a little bit like the movie, but that might just be what I'm remembering of the wall-to-wall white decor of the Heart of Gold, the stolen space ship on which much of the action takes place.

For some reason I'd always pictured the Heart of Gold to be, well, a bit pointier. That wasn't the only thing not quite to my expectations. The guns brandished here and there were all smooth and friendly looking, the very opposite of the Kill-o-Zap blasters described in the books as looking evil, with an end in front of which the target clearly and obviously didn't want to be. Either the production designers wimped out or this just fell by the wayside.

A lot of incidental bits fell by the wayside. Never does Ford Prefect (played adequately enough by Mos Def) explain the importance of knowing where one's towel is, nor even why he curses "Belgium" under his breath at one point. The filmmaker's attempt to explain his name (having him attempting to shake hands with what looked like a Mini speeding toward him) and the joke therein (he picked the wrong dominant species, name-wise) was a nice attempt, but a bit lacking in the thought and execution departments.

On the other hand, turning it into something of a love story between Arthur and Trillian was acceptable, given that the books don't lend themselves well to a single narrative that would clock in under four or five hours. I'm thinking that there's a little bit of the puppy-dogged moping and unrequited love/lust to be found in the books (that I just wasn't looking for when I read them) but it was certainly cranked up a notch or two. Bully for them, it basically worked.

I'm going to get into more of the meat of things, so if you don't want things spoiled don't click on the "more" link below. Suffice to say I think I got my money's worth out of this film and will look forward to seeing it again on DVD, provided there are tasty extras. I know the producers hoped for the opportunity to film a sequel, and I for one welcome the opportunity to watch one.

The movie's supposed to be a hundred and four minutes long, but in retrospect it didn't seem like that much to me. The beginning several minutes is consumed by an amusing but altogether too long song and dance number with some dolphins ("So long and thanks for all the fish") that wouldn't be out of place in a Sea World revue, but the joke wore out quickly and I was impatient to get to the real meat of things.

Which started up eventually, and several pages worth of the book (and a number of minutes and inevitable false starts in the computer game) of Arthur Dent (Morgan Freeman, well cast and acted) recovering from a hangover and realizing those yellow things outside are in fact bulldozers poised to knock down his house. This is not to say that the whole 'putting on a dressing gown, searching for buffered aspirin' thing is worth filming, but still, it's been in the other incarnations and I feel just slightly sad it's gone. So Arthur wakes up and is soon laying in front of a bulldozer, discussing matters with Prosser (one of the more fleshed out bit characters in the books, played well enough by one third of the League of gentlemen). I was disappointed that Ford didn't convince Prosser to lie in front of the bulldozer, which is an amusing bit of chicanery, but probably too talky for today's moviegoer. Alas.

I had thought the Vogon constructor fleet ships were yellow, also, but what do I know?

Vogons? Don't get me started about Vogons.

Having been somewhat re-cast (and made more significant) as the villains of the piece, the Vogons seemed to have gotten the bulk of the creative attention, and it shows. Their ship is rife with subtle touches (the green exit signs) and grandiose, ridiculous sets like the towering microphone for the poetry reading. Too bad the people who made everything look interesting forgot to make it sound clear, as much of the poem Jeltz recites sounded to be word-for-word true to the books, but I couldn't make out all of the words. Ford and Arthur are tossed into the airlock much too soon, having skipped over the banter between the two of them and the Vogon guard who was all but absent from the script. As it turns out, the airlock sets a funny scene, albeit one marred (as well as one thereafter) with Nokia's product placement. And then we receive another drawn out, overdone sequence of something in space, which is revealed to be The Guide. Emblazoned across one of its covers is its title, coincidentally the title of the movie, but we'd already seen the titles during the dolphin song. Did somebody miss a memo?

I can't write everything about this movie; I've already skipped a number of flashbacks rife with contrived plot. Such is life. During the overly long 'book in space' bit, though, the music is itself something of a flashback, reminiscent of the music from the radio drama and BBC series. That and the appearance of the BBC Marvin on Vogsphere, Stephen Fry, and probably other bits of homage I didn't notice, show that the creators were in fact aware of what had come before. After all, I was.

Anyway, it wasn't bad. I laughed a lot. I agree with criticisms I've seen pointing out the movie's lack of cohesion and music-video style, but I can't find too much fault with it.

Well, other than that there's only one of it. How about some sequels, guys?

I've been reading lately in part because I enjoy reading and also because the library's doing their summer reading club, whereby I stand the slight chance of winning things in a drawing. Entries are based on the number of books I read.

I recall the reading clubs of my youth, which netted me many a free McDonald's hamburger or Pizza Hut personal pan pizza. Back then I would sometimes play one local library against the other, checking the same book from both and getting credit twice, and other times I'd claim I'd read books I hadn't finished. Guilt aside, the only problem with the latter approach was when the librarian would quiz me on a random book, and occasionally I'd find myself fabricating a book based on the cover image and the rest of my imagination, or another book altogether. I wasn't caught once.

Now, for the adult program, I don't even need to summarize the books or give a report. All I need do to enter the drawing is to write the title, my name and numbers, and throw it in a box. What could be easier?

Now while I am tempted to enter books I'd read before the contest began, or books I have at home, I've been trying to be somewhat honest with this. Every entry records my library card number, and it is probably trivial for the librarians to check if I have, in fact, checked out a book I've claimed to read. In the spirit of total disclosure, though, I've begun checking out books after I've read them, though only one so far: Cory Doctorow's Down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Then again, I read it after the contest began.

I read it online in minutes here and there, in a tiny browser window at the bottom of my screen. It was an easy enough read, and though heavily Disney-otaku-esque (it takes place in the park, after all) it was a fairly enjoyable book/HTML page. I read it in less than a day, and still got my work done. It was a light day.

Cory also offers his other books in free digital formats, and I'd attempted to start Eastern Standard Tribe but wasn't able to focus on it that day and still get my work done.

It did not help that the latter book is not conventionally linear, but two parts of the same story that alternate chapters. In the end it all fits together, but it's difficult to begin, particularly when I'm only able to read one or two lines at at time. Not to worry, I realized, as I had just reserved both novels from the library.

Well, since then I have read EST and it too was enjoyable enough. But that's not what this is about.

In Down and out the concept of 'deadheading' is mentioned, a form of cryogenic sleep or some such preservation of living people over long periods of time. In that book people do it as a form of one-way time travel, waiting around until the timer stops or something interesting triggers them to thaw and rejoin the living and breathing.

Another book I've read, Iron sunset by Charles Stross, mentions 'deadheading' but in a sense more like its current (well, current as of Abagnale's Catch me if you can) airline meaning--namely, a pilot who is a passenger--though only in the sense that it is for travel. Stross's deadheads are passengers on interstellar liners who paid for the economy class and are deep-frozen or otherwise in stasis. The richer passengers get to experience the luxuries of the ship and so on and so forth.

I just found it odd that both authors used the same word. This is by far not the only time two writers have 'coined' the same thing, nor will it be the last. Like I said, it was just odd, particularly since I'd read the books so closely together.

Personally, I'd use the term 'hiber-nauts'. Or, if you're a burgeoning writer, you can. Without the quotes and the hyphen, if you're bold enough. Just drop me a line, okay?

One of these days I might write a story about that sort of thing, and then, well, I'll use it. Which will make me look like the copycat, if the hypothetical burgeoning writer used it first. Such is life.

Well, I knew a little persistence would pay off. Earlier this month I stumbled across an interesting anecdote:

In 1841, England’s greatest daredevil, Samuel Scott, performed stunt acrobatics while hanging by a rope with the noose around his neck from London’s Waterloo Bridge. One day the noose slipped. Scott strangled to death on the bridge while the audience cheered, assuming it was part of the act.

I wanted to know more, and was only intrigued by my inability to find anything about the great Sam Scott on the whole Web. All I found of any note was something about a guy in Philadelphia named Samuel Scott, but his story was revealed to me by the author of Strange Philadelphia, Lou Harry. He found me and wrote:

Saw your posting regarding Samuel Scott and my book Strange Philadelphia.

Scott was a Philadelphian who had a thing for leaping from ships.

Strange Philadelphia is still available from Temple U. press (there are lots of bizarre stories in there). You can also find info about Scott in Ricky Jay's terrific book Learned Men and Fireproof Women.

Be well,

Lou Harry

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I didn't read Lou's message until today.

So I had written about my little mystery, and I was waiting to see what comments rolled in.

The entry and its comments alone did not turn up any conclusive answers, nor did my second mention of the subject (despite its appearance on the low-traffic but high-profile LazyWeb. So I sent out some emails.

The one that mattered went to the kind birds and blokes of the UK's libraries. I stumbled across Ask a librarian and within a day of asking them I had this answer:

Thank you for using Ask A Librarian,

The essentials at least of this story are true. The unfortunate man
died in the manner you describe on January 11th 1841. There seems some
doubt as to the man's nationality. He came to England from the USA,
but claimed to have been born in Deptford (England). A reporter though
was insistent that he was an American, born in Philadelphia. The article
from the Times (see citation below) does not mention a cheering
audience, but it does describe a large crowd (at least 8,000) and how
the poor man was left hanging for several minutes because it was assumed
that he was OK. The detail you have of the cheering audience may well
then be true and is not contradicted in the article.

Source: The Times, Tuesday, Jan 12, 1841; pg. 5; Issue 17565; col E
Please note, this the Times printed in London, England.

Regards,
Ask A Librarian

At last! Closure.

Well, closure of sorts. I am unable to procure a copy of said issue of The Times as their online archives only go all the way back to 1985 and I haven't looked for any microfiche.

I suppose I could book a trip to London someday, but for now I suppose I'm satisfied.

In other news, I am not necessarily smarter than anybody else. After I sent my message to the Page-A-Day folks I received this reply:

DEAR MR. LIETZ: IF THE CALENDAR YOU ARE SPEAKING ABOUT IS TITLED
WELL DUH! , IT IS NOT A WORKMAN CALENDAR. IF IT HAS ANOTHER TITLE,
PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND I WILL SEND IT TO THE AUTHOR.

Boy is my face red. They don't make the calendar, Andrews McMeel does.

D'oh.

In the book Coercion by Doug Rushkoff the idea is presented that spatial relationships matter in the movie-watching experience. In a nutshell (by which I mean I can't remember it correctly) the angle from which you view a movie screen affects how your brain (and you with it) experiences the movie. According to him, according to a source I've forgotten, sitting right of center of the screen forces the eyes upward and to the left, which is something of a primordial cue to the brain to start up the analytical left side. Sitting to the left, looking right, accesses the more creative right side. So Rushkoff recommends to those seeking to love a movie to sit on the left side.

Well, tonight, in order to see the movie (we were watching The Forgotten) but still give Jessica a foot rub (and for her to not move on the sectional) I ended up sitting on the right side of the couch. She had already taken my preferred center seat, and from the beginning I knew my experience would be 'off' as the surround speakers are placed for that seat, not the one I was now in. So it goes. I think that I had the analytic stuff going full tilt, as the film started to roll, off center or otherwise.

Almost immediately I began to notice things about the movie: not things about its story or plot but the actual crafting of the images and sequences. I got distracted playing amateur film geek, as it were.

Speaking of being distracted, today I happened across a puzzling vanity plate: BABE HMR. I was unable to come up with too many words other than "Hammer" or "Hummer" for those latter three letters. Neither seemed quite appropriate for the mid-fifties woman driving the minivan.

Back to the movie, though. As I mentioned, I constantly found myself distracted by what I was watching. One thing that I noticed was that significant plot points happened at very specific timecodes. An important revelation appears just at the fifteenth minute. Julianne's on the run at 00:30. Something really, really big happens at the big 01:00, and the last thirty minutes is clearly Act 3. Everything plugs into the formula.

The cinematographer had a formula, too, though I think I caught a few missteps wherein the camera was shaky when the characters were secure but I'm not positive. I was hyper-aware of the cinematography, though, and the shaking camera and skewed (almost 60s-Batman-esque) angles really took me out of the whole audience experience (apparently this was often a side effect of the long lenses with which they tightened up so many of the shots, as the commentary revealed). So did the editing, with short cuts and quick takes anytime something really distressing's happening. So-called MTV-style editing can work, if done right. This wasn't.

Moreover, the director wanted the shots set in the present (darker, colder times) to be more blue, and shots set in the past (lighter, warmer) to be more golden. That much I noticed, and that much the director explained, but my mind took it a step further. In almost every shot of the 'cold' world few seconds go by without some flash of a warm or hot color somewhere in the frame, be it a red stoplight or taillight, or a fruit stand, or a sign or something else bright. Sometimes the warm color is solely from Julianne's hair.

I may be outthinking them, however. I'm about halfway through reading Learn design with Flash MX which is presented as a story of a class about design and (surprise) Flash MX. I've only gotten about a third of the way through it, enough for the class to have discussed the color wheel and color value schemes. I was taken back to high school art class (the highlight of which was probably my 12 pack box of "Crapple -- made from the worst stuff on earth" being sent to an exhibition of sorts in the local library) but then we hadn't delved to the heart of the matter as this Flash book does: red contrasts very much to blue, in that a tiny bit of red attracts attention even on the biggest expanse of blue (or other colors, since we wouldn't probably need to spot blood smurf-colored-flesh but instead flesh-colored-flesh). I was thinking that the filmmakers were using this effect, but either they didn't reveal it in the commentary or they just happened across it as a happy accident.

It could also be due to the pervasiveness of warm colors and the limited capabilities of post-production to cool them off convincingly. Any way around it I think I was outthinking the movie. That part of it I enjoyed, I think, though I'm sure it annoyed Jessica for me to be pointing out camera angles and colors and whatnot. I'm not sure I really enjoyed the film itself nearly as much as I did the experience of watching it. Generally I rewatch movies for commentary tracks when I enjoyed the film, but in this case I just wanted to hear my ideas voiced by the people I'd thought came up with them first.

I also re-watched it to confirm my theory that Dominic West's (McNulty from The Wire, and he does a great job playing something of the same character) stubble 'grows' in reverse, actually diminishing over the three days of the second two acts, and I think I'm right, though my little DVD player's screen isn't quite up to snuff to really get that detail clear enough and I wasn't going to zoom. It didn't matter quite that much.

Back to the commentary, though, which mentioned something I found interesting: the intensity of an character who never blinks. The director mentions Christopher Plummer not blinking in Dreamscape and Gary Sinise who deliberately did not blink in this film.

It's odd that it took the director explaining that for me to notice, as I am often the first to chime in with the chant of "BLINK!" when a character, well, hasn't for a while. Some of this, I am sure, goes back to Michael Moore's skewering of the unblinking Steve Forbes in The Big One. From now on, I suppose I'll pay even more attention to this, or at least Gary.

Another thing I've noticed about this film is that Julianne's character's name is "Telly". That's a bit obvious, isn't it? She's telling people things the whole time. Telling them! Telly! Get it? Gosh.

Thinking about it now, I suppose that license plate might've been "babe humor" but that doesn't make much sense either.

As much as I like to try and distance myself from the so-called blogosphere (see? I did it just then) I find that I cannot completely abandon it. While I find myself contributing very little to it (this very site is about the extent of it) I nevertheless read an awful lot of what's out there, digital and otherwise. I tend to reserve any book that sounds vaguely interesting that gets mentioned on the internets, and I haven't been too disappointed yet (although The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe wasn't nearly as good as I'd expected. It had great potential but less-than-great execution). I've finished another novel based on a blogger's tip-of-the-hat and I must admit that I liked it a great deal.

The book in question is John Scalzi's Old man's war. It's a SF look at the future of intergalactic competition, war, and old people, with a dash of classic SF homage-ry and sex thrown in here and there. There's enough humor to keep me smiling throughout but few things warrant a guffaw, but that's fine with me. The speculative bits about physics come off as real conversation, not a severe beating with the expository dialogue stick. This is a good thing.

Scalzi's thoughts about the alien cultures is interesting as well, delving into a little more depth than the stock unrationalized bloodlust and all-out thirst for conquest.

To say that I enjoyed Scalzi's book is to admit that Cory Doctorow told me to do so. Well, he was right. So read it, but because I said so, not him.

That said, Cory did manage to get his pullquote atop the back cover. Friends in high places, I suppose...

Thinking now, I would shelve it up with Alan Dean Foster's Codgerspace, which is also an excellent read about old people in the future. That's about the only overlap between the two books. So, read them both, I suppose.

I've got something of an entertainment buzz going. Now that Nano's over and my vacation hold at the library is off (despite only writing four or five days last month I never turned my hold off) the good stuff is just rolling in.

I've been cracking up flipping through Interior desecrations by the very funny Jim Lileks. It's possible that I'm just tired but some of that stuff is side-splitting. Check out this book if you have any sense at all of taste or humour.

Last night I watched Suddenly, a thriller from 1955 that is more known for having Frank Sinatra as a villain than for being a pretty good movie that gives far more screen time to Sterling Hayden than it does to ol' blue eyes. This is not to say that Frankie doesn't turn in a good performance. He turns out to be a pretty decent psycho killer out to make a cool half mil to off the president, but pretty much everybody is good. I haven't seen the other film on the DVD, ostensibly with Frank again as a heroin addict or something like that, but Suddenly is well worth watching. Then again, I like to watch Sterling Hayden. If you have no idea who he is, go out now and track down The killing (one of Stanley Kubrick's forgotten early films about which I have written previously). It's a darn good movie and you shouldn't regret watching it. I don't.

I'm also happy to have finally stumbled across the excellent drama The Wire that HBO's been showing for a couple seasons now. Though it treads on the same turf as Homicide: life on the streets it's a different beast altogether. It's dense, clever, well-written, dark, gritty, and even funny at times, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Altogether I've done well to have waited and had all of these hit me at once.

Harshing the buzz considerably though is the continued stupidity of HBO's DVD people who cannot seem to consistently stick a chapter stop at the end of the opening credits. Why is this so difficult? I cannot be the only person in the world who does not want to sit through the entire theme song every fifty minutes when I'm devouring these shows. I am enjoying this show so much but when I watch five episodes in one night that means I need to fast forward four times (I did want to hear it all the way through, once) and tomorrow night I'll likely need to do it eight more times too if I know the way that I watch these things.

Then again I didn't pay for this (thank you Columbus Metropolitan Library) but I was thinking that I would probably be willing to pay an extra dollar or two (not more than two though) when I do buy discs of a show if it had chapter stops after the opening credits. At least until everybody figures out what the producers of M*A*S*H seem to already know. DVD makers, just put a chapter stop after the opening credits, please, damnit. This just gets to me for some reason.

On the upside, though, now I have a challenge. 'Roundabout the end of episode three ("The buys") I heard a familiar tune, albeit in an unfamiliar fashion. The song was one that I first encountered on the highly underrated soundtrack album for Batman forever called "The hunter gets captured by the game" and as far as I had known until today the song was done first by Tracy Thorn backed up by Massive Attack.

How wrong I was. Though that album is no stranger to cover tunes (Lou Reed's "Passenger" done by INXS's Michael Hutchence comes to mind) I'd never considered this song, one of my favorites of all time, to be one. Well, the one in the show sure didn't sound like Massive Attack and I immediately (and correctly) inferred that the version I knew and loved was likely a cover, but this one could well be also.

So I went out on the web, and I'm still not sure what I heard. Unfortunately "The Wire" is too common to help out on a search, and the HBO forums don't have a good enough search either. I'm pretty sure nobody else has asked about the song on there, and I moved my search over to the good old allmusic guide instead. There I discovered that the song was written by none other than Smokey Robinson and it was probably first performed by the Marvelettes. Unfortunately it's also been done by another five or six artists, too. So now the hunt begins.

I enjoy the hunt.