5 Thoughts on Atlas Shrugged

1) It's...adequate.  Rather like my reaction to the book - a blend of truly exciting woman against the world and mystery thriller with the most excruciatingly black and white philosophizing for well over half the word count.

2) The acting is okay - I was hoping for something a bit more commanding from Dagny, but I'm not sure what performance I think might have worked - and the actors weren't helped by the rather less than sparkly dialogue (very reminiscent, again, to that of the book).

3) While the cinematography is not brilliant, it is very colorful and enjoyable, with some nice compositions and lighting.  Also not too much handheld indulgence.  Helps the film avoid showing its budget.  And the vistas, enhanced I assume with CGI trains and bridges, are quite engaging.

4) Unsurprisingly, they made the sex scenes, which really seem to indicate a sort of fetishizing of sex as assault (however mutually enjoyable) basically just the same romantic, slow, emphasizing kissing and PG-13 head framed shots.  Part of me is relieved - the sex scenes were very annoying in the book - but it does seem kind of cynical to make it so tame.

5) For all my annoyance with the characters who play on emotions with equal parts earnest speechifying and cynical stock tropes, the ending was quite exciting and moving.  My complaints about Dagny's acting were lessened considerably by her performance in the final scene.

Makes me wonder about the next two planned films.  The media surrounding the film has been bizzarely polarized around politics.  No, the film's no masterpiece.  But it's also no worse than many other films which are critically acclaimed - and a good sight better than most blockbusters with 10 times its budget.  The cast and crew have been very quiet - perhaps because they're not getting paid a lot to do publicity.  I hope they all come back and do the other parts - it is an exciting story, and since they cut a lot of the speechifying (as annoying as the bits they left in are, it's quite admirable how they've trimmed), the other bits should be just as engaging...though I'm not necessarily looking forward to the final speech by the mysterious hero...

Not as enjoyable as Source Code (my favorite film of the past two months, I think), but I liked it.  Despite disagreeing with the politics.

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On spilt interests

Valley Of The Shadow by The London Symphony Orchestra Listen on Posterous

My interests tend to go in phases, lasting anywhere from a year to a couple of days, but mostly (if I follow my own patterns correctly, which is actually not very likely) about two weeks to a month.  Usually they are serial, one following the other in neat lines of obsession.  But every now and then they run parallel.

Now is one of those times.

I am currently following up an interest sparked by one of my classes in Little Women, listening to the lovely soundtrack by Thomas Newman from the 1994 film, buying all three books and aforementioned film, going through my collection of movies to check up on how many of the filmmakers I have in there, investigating women-directed film and literary projects, enjoying musicals based on Little Women, The Secret Garden, and Jane Eyre (which is a holdover from my earlier interest in Jane Eyre springing up around the movie release), and generally enjoying a gentle, complex, pretty world of writers and family.

And simultaneously I am following the Game of Thrones television series by HBO, creating a surge of Tolkien rereads, blog hunts, and general interest in high fantasy and its deconstructors.

It's very confusing, to be listening to the ethereally beautiful brass and strings of Little Women while reading about the twisted relationships and violent deaths of imaginary lands.

Odd, said the duck.  Very odd.

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Two telefilmic things coming on Sunday

So, A Game of Thrones episode one and The Fall of Sam Axe are coming out Sunday.  I will probably have to find them some other way than watching them on TV, since a) I have no TV, and if I did I'd be highly unlikely to even pay for USA, let alone HBO.  But I am quite excited about both.

A Game of Thrones is based on a book series that is trying, as far as I can tell without reading them (which I have committed not to do, reasons to follow) to be the anti-Tolkien in all but two ways.  Full of unheroic protagonists, plot-dependent narrator character deaths, oh, and a lot of really bizzare sex ranging from incestual to underage and all the in betweens, Martin loves being a pain in all those heroic epic fantasy lovers' sides - especially since a) he's writing heroic epic fantasy - just look at the scope and actions that happen within his stories, and tell me otherwise, and b) he's really bad about finishing things.

While I have a magnetic pull to read the books (I do adore epic heroic fantasy, after all), I have avoided them for three main reasons: 1) no one really talks about prose quality, which doesn't seem to bode well; 2) I don't particularly enjoy that kind of content in such quantities; 3) I don't want to get engaged in a series with no definite conclusion (or would take too long to reach that conclusion - see also, Wheel of Time, Lost, etc).  However, I may change my mind about 3 if Martin ever finishes his dratted books (7 years is a bit steep for finishing one book, though I think he's been working on other things, so it's probably not as bad as the more annoying fans say it is), and if he upholds his promise to provide a satisfying ending (if his given definition of satisfying is anything close to mine, which, admittedly, is unlikely).

But the series looks like it could be cool.  Hopefully they've avoided the kind of ridiculously stupid writing that plagues this kind of cable series (sorry, but Pillars of the Earth was just very, very poorly written, and the bits I've seen of The Tudors, The Borgias, and Spartacus don't dissuade me).  The acting talent they've gotten is extremely impressive, though they've probably dropped the ball in casting Sean Bean as the main protagonist...not because he can't do it (he definitely can) but because everyone know that when Sean Bean is cast, one of two things happen to him: 1) he's evil; or 2) he dies.  Flightplan doesn't count.  Cause it was bad and stupid.

Also, the TV series will hopefully keep things moving faster than they seem to be moving in the later books - again, I've not read them, but I find that when I read summaries of the first two or three books, I get the sense of densely plotted, intelligent, exciting narratives.  The last two books seem much more like "and then we raped people and then we used the bathroom and then we killed people and then we slept and then we woke up" kind of stuff that gets praised as "gritty" because of the rape and bathrooms but no one seems to notice that they are as badly written as this run on sentence.

Anyway.

Sam Axe, eh?

Bruce Campbell is a big part of why I'm such a fan of Burn Notice (well, that and the extremely sharp writing, which hasn't dropped in quality like so many of the shows I used to love, like Chuck or Castle).  I am extremely excited to see him get a whole movie exploring the character and backstory of his fabulously funny but admirable character.  And hope it's good.  Cause I just bought the first two seasons, and I don't want to have bought another series that goes significantly down in quality (Veronica Mars doesn't count, cause I knew I wasn't going to buy the second or third seasons when I got the first one).

So, Sunday should be fun.  For those who have DVR and cable.

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I have bought a pink book

Orchard House (Main Title) by Thomas Newman Listen on Posterous

Yup.  I now own all three Little Women books.  A nice fat pink Little Women in Puffin edition from 2008 with plenty of helps and stuff, the Signet Classics Little Men I got for last weeks' class, and Jo's Boys in the help-free Puffin Classics from the 1980s.

And the movie is so very darling and sweet.  And written by the writer/director of the superb The Jane Austen Book Club.  Have some musics!

(Other books recently acquired: Return of the Dapper Men, a decoupage comic book by Jim McCann and Janet Lee, The Host by Stephenie Meyer - actually quite nice, significantly improved from Twilight, a C. P. Snow novel - was interested and it was cheap and pretty, T. S. Eliot's hilarious poetry in Jellicle's Book of Practical Cats, Tolkien's Alan Lee illustrated The Children of Hurin - the story is dreadful, but the pictures are to die for, and two childhood favorites, Detectives in Togas and The Pushcart War.  Books are good.)

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I want my Gmail Paper!

Dear Google,

Thank you for your hard efforts in the areas of kinetic electronic communication (http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html).  But you promised a long time ago that you would print out my emails and send them to people (http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html).  Where's my hard copies!

Sincerely,

Me

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