Notes from a Determined Hermit

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Sharpe's Challenge
Fans of the Sharpe Chronicles will be glad to see Sean Bean return for the first time in 8 years as Richard Sharpe. In 1817, Wellington sends Sharpe, a veteran who has already seen action in India in 1803, back to India to unravel an intrigue. Darragh O'Malley returns as Harper, and the adventure, loosely based on several of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels set in India, is back with lots of action and intrigue. The acting and production are excellent; this one was filmed on location in India. Well worth seeing. If you haven't seen the other 14 filmed adventures, you'll enjoy them too, adapted from Cornwell's twenty novels about Sharpe.
4:22:17 PM

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Doctor's Case
I've just been rereading my copy of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and I came on one of my favorite Holmes stories, 'The Doctor's Case' by Steven King. It's a fine tale, blending originality with staying strictly within the limits established by the canon, it does not imitate any canonical story in terms of type of crime or method of solution (as so many uncanonical Holmes stories seem to), and it gives us glimpses into the characters of Holmes, Watson and Lestrade that are original and yet do not conflict with those we already know.
And if anyone is in doubt that Steven King is a fine author and stylist -- and no, there is no horror or gruesomeness here, it's a pure Holmes story -- this story will be proof.
There are many other fine stories in the book, which is well worth reading and can bear re-reading, as the canonical (I nearly typed conanical) stories do. Besides, if you got hold of a copy, you could read 'The Doctor's Case.'
12:10:33 PM

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Picasso by Patrick O'Brian
I have literally just got done reading O'Brian's Picasso, and I have to say I have found a great book! Not just good, fine, well-written, excellent, brilliant, bravo and adios -- it's all that; but it's great, too. Not so many of those around. I did think as I was reading it that this made O'Brian to biography what Tuchman was to history... taking events from the records, not just hearsay or what someone else wrote, by itself; unafraid to say the plain truth, when the truth was plain; aiming at neither praise nor blame, but clearly full of liking and admiration, without any kind of truckling, worship, or excuse-making, and similarly full of profound respect for the work, the work, the work, that Picasso continued to turn out almost without interruption until almost literally the day he died, some years past 90 (he was born in 1881).
So many biographies, especially of artists, somehow miss the point, the reader feels at the end. After all the stories of love marriage children births deaths bad luck and good luck, friendships made and friendships broken, you quite often feel as though you've had a lot of detail without any real picture of the person -- many leaves without a glimpse of the tree. That is emphatically not the case here. O'Brian is well-acquainted with research using primary documents, interviews and secondary documents, and the problems of sifting evidence and coming to what conclusions one can, and when one can't, saying so in clear terms. Also, while O'Brian knew Picasso slightly (his own term), since O'Brian lived in the Rousillon for so many years, and Picasso spent his summers in various places in the Midi, in no way is this a buddy book or anything like it.
One of the nice things about the book is that, only as far as is justified, O'Brian lets you know as major events happened in the world, if there was or was suspected to be an influence on Picasso's art. Picasso lived in Paris during the Occupation of WWII -- he was in his sixties and the Spain that had originally issued his passport was long gone behind the Spanish Civil War, so he was effectively a stateless alien, quite an unsafe thing to be anywhere let alone in occupied territory in wartime. He didn't truckle, a difficult position to maintain under those threatening and ugly circumstances, and many records and accounts of his life at this time provide evidence for this, not just some boastful statement after the fact. The anecdotes of what happened to him and what he did during the war as various Germans from troops sent to 'search' (even at times when troops had just searched and knew there was nothing to find) up to a visit from the German ambassador himself are recounted in the book, and I won't spoil them here (but a hint: Guernica was still in his Paris studio at the time).
Hardcover copies of the original 1976 edition titled Pablo Ruiz Picasso are available occasionally, and only on the used book market, while a fine paperback edition titled simply Picasso and with a new preface by the author (the only textual difference from the original edition) was brought out some time after 1989 and itself reissued by HarperCollins in 2003.
10:54:26 AM

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001) - dir. John Madden; Nicholas Cage, Penelope Cruz, John Hurt, Christian Bale, Irene Papas Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a love story, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the overwhelming events of World War II. It is based on the novel Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières, which is a novel of the war as it happened devastatingly on Cephalonia, told through the lives of several fictonal characters, but historically accurate in its depiction of the war and its effects. Every movie that attempts to portray a book, or bases itself on a book, especially a long and complex book, is the result of a struggle to deal with all the complexities and events of a much longer tale than a feature-length movie can tell. This is a superb movie, reflecting key events and characters of the novel, and showing and expressing much of what is there, and deepening some aspects, changing, collapsing or deleting whole story threads in order to make a feature-length movie. Captain Corelli's Mandolin does an excellent job of this, sifting and refining,and not losing its focus on the relationship between Pelagia (Penelope Cruz) and Corelli (Nicholas Cage), with Pelagia's father (John Hurt), her fiance Mandras (Christian Bale), and Mandras's mother (Irene Papas) as major supporting players. Both book and movie keep you wondering if Pelagia and Corelli will find a way to get together. Fittingly enough, given their different emphases, the movie answers one way, and the book another. Go see this fine movie.
10:52:46 AM

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Books in Brief
I like books that are intelligent without showing off, well-written so as to be a pleasure to read, cleverly structured enough to be interesting, with characters I actually come to like, love, admire, or be drawn to in some way, and that include some major element of background, field of endeavor, setting, or other factor of some complexity and interest that is unknown or little-known to me. Hence, this list.
3:30:15 PM

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle
Let me start out by saying that Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle is one of my all-time favorite marvelous terrific films, viewable over and over. And I say film, advisedly. It does not fall into any particular genre (anime, animation, fantasy), although it partakes of all of these. It belongs right up there with great feature films of all time. It's not an accident that Miyazaki's earlier Spirited Away won the best animated feature Oscar in its year, 2003. There is no substitute for seeing them yourself, if you haven't, or seeing them again, if you have (they both bear re-watching very well).
I bought the original book of Howl's Moving Castle just because I've approached the movie from every other possible angle, including the Studio Ghibli book on the art of the film, which contains the entire filmscript as well as the pictures.
As one would have to do to translate a book into a feature-length movie (one film contains script/story material of roughly one short story, so a novel of necessity has to be changed, pared down, maybe characters combined or omitted, some scenes ditto, and maybe even new material put into the place of old material which has been deleted), Miyazaki has begun with characters and situations present in the novel (a wizard Howl with a moving castle, a Sophie who is changed into an old lady, the Witch of the Waste casting a spell out of jealousy, Calcifer, the hat shop, the gushing stepmother, the attractive sister Lettie) and lifted them out of the more complex novel (Sophie has two sisters in the novel, and there are many other differences and complications -- including that Markl is a young man of 15 named Michael and a rival at one point with Howl for Lettie's attentions, and Howl has a sister back in 'our world' -- Wales, in fact -- who has a family herself. Howl's name in Wales is Howell Jenkins; and many other differences).
I note that Christian Bale (who does the English-language voice of Howl) is Welsh, although in the featurette about the English-language voiceovers, they chose him (Bale, himself a wizard of a thousand accents, gives Howl's voice as a US voice without any regionalization) as an actor who could present an unusual character (unusual to the US -- a hero without being a he-man, one who calls himself a coward during the film, although he's actually quite brave when confronted, and says his strategy for dealing with problems is to run away) to the US audience convincingly. They picked him, they said, after seeing his success in Batman Begins -- who, I note, is another widely-accepted American 'hero' who overcomes his fears in order to battle fiercely.
My point is: Miyazaki has transformed and streamlined the story to concentrate on Howl and Sophie, with Howl's castle and Calcifer, and changed somewhat the role of the Witch of the Waste, and created the Madam Sulieman character out of other characters, and made the war over the missing Prince a major factor in the film, showing Howl's character development and role as a lone struggler against the war's depredations. If there can be said to be a Miyazaki original 'message' or 'theme' in the film, it's the one about the pointlessness and destructiveness of war, and how the war has no real reason that justifies the war itself. In the book as well as the film Sophie does find a way to set Calcifer free and give back Howl's heart, and Calcifer does return afterwards because he likes them (and because it's starting to rain). And Sophie and Howl do get together.
But let me say this: the book is a much more lightweight confection than the film, shelved in the 'teens' section of the bookstore when I bought my copy, clever and inventive, but not terribly deep, nor intended to be. It's filled with literary allusions and references that are well-handled and integrated into the plot, and also many plot twists and reversals that seem to my eye more busy than substantive, although they all have to do with and lead to the final unravelling of what's been going on. And while Sophie has to solve the basic mystery of the Howl-Calcifer relationship in the book, too, she stumbles along there from minor calamity to minor calamity, not learning much about herself while doing so, until at the end of the book things are cleared up all at once (not without a struggle). By contrast, Miyazaki's film has transformed the materials and characters of this book into a brilliant, moving, beautiful film with amazing depths, the work of a true genius. Beautifully crafted, beautifully produced, both visually and in terms of story and character. Amazing, astounding, incomparable.
Go see it.
8:00:34 AM

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Summer 2006 Reading& Viewing List
A list of links to free updates on how things stand -- some movies, movie trailers and books (your library has the books or can get them for you to read):
Votergate 2004 Watch this film free on the web: Votergate, the movie
Also: check out this book, Fooled Again, by Mark Crispin Miller, (NY: Basic Books, 2005) talks about ALL the ways that an election can be (and was) stolen in 2004.
Q. Why should you care? A. Because, while 'your side' may have come out on top this time, what happens next time when they do something that's outrageous to you, and you want to vote them out?
Global Warming: See the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth -- Documentary of Al Gore's campaign to wake up the American people to the extent of global warming and its dangers, and change what we're doing to cause it before it's too late.
Alternative energy for cars: Watch the trailer for Who Killed The Electric Car?
Politics and protest: Watch the trailer for the movie The U.S. vs. John Lennon -- How the U.S. tried to deport John Lennon
Also: check out this book on the subject, Gimme Some Truth: the John Lennon FBI files by Jon Wiener. Read the Intro here.
Where are we, and how did we get here? Watch the trailer of the movie made by one filmmaker who tried to find out the basis for income tax. America: Freedom to Fascism.
The need for and power of an independent press: Watch the trailer for Good Night and Good Luck.
Fables for Our Time: Watch the trailer for X-Men: The Last Stand (X3). [People widely recognize the underlying theme of prejudice against gays. But also consider this: imagine that the government is going to try to apply a 'cure' to the unruly freedom of its citizens to live their own lives in privacy without being "tracked": an implanted ID chip and/or an ID card with fingeprint or retinal information.]
What's it like in the war? Watch the trailer for The War Tapes.
And what's this about Guantanamo? Watch the trailer for Road to Guantanamo.
9:01:38 AM