Monthly Archives: May 2020

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I loved Tabitha very much. She was beautiful although so thin, and she would spend hours playing with me. We had a dollhouse that was like our own house, with a living room and a dining room and a big kitchen for the Marthas, and a father’s study with a desk and bookshelves. All the little pretend books on the shelves were blank. I asked why there was nothing inside them—I had a dim feeling that there were supposed to be marks on those pages—and my mother said that books were decorations, like vases of flowers.

I've realised there were a few books I read at the start of the year in the expectation that they would get onto the BSFA or Hugo ballots, so I saved writing them up; and then they didn't, so I never got around to it. One of these was The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. I opened it with some trepidation. It's not at all unusual for a sequel to a great work to fall flat, especially if written no less than thirty-five years later (but only fifteen years later in terms of the internal timeline). I'm glad to say that The Testaments thoroughly worked for me. The story of Gilead, the near-future America where women are thoroughly oppressed and treated as breeding machines for the male rulers, has meanwhile been refreshed by the HBO television series (which I haven't seen) – I understand that The Testaments reflects events from the TV show as well as from the original novel.

Whatever, it worked for me, with several parallel narratives between Gilead and the exiled radicals in Canada telling the story of the infiltration and subsequent escape of a young woman who turns out to be key to the internal mythology of Gilead, and the workings of Aunt Lydia who is crucial to the maintenance of the structure of Gilead's society, but possibly has another agenda. It's a happier story than The Handmaid's Tale, which is just as well as we live in much darker times. I did also like the postscript from a future academic conference trying to work out exactly what the hell was going on with Gilead.

The Testaments won the Man Booker Prize last year jointly with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. It's not quite as good a book, but it is a very good book. I voted for it for both the BSFA and Hugo ballots, alas in vain in both cases. You can get it here.

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was the first thing Jonas noticed as he looked at the newchild peering up curiously from the basket. The pale eyes.

Jonas lives in a future society where all roles are assigned to each citizen for life at the age of twelve; parenting is sort of communal; thought and speech are rigidly controlled; and the dirty secret is euthanasia of the elderly, disabled and misfits. It's quite a short book, in the course of which Jonas allies with a wise old man whose role is to experience and retain painful memories so that the rest of the people won't be bothered; and eventually our hero escapes – but to what?

Somehow this got onto my wishlist (on a recs list backed by ) and I got it for myself with a Christmas book token. It scores very highly on the Goodreads/LibraryThing stats, which suggests that it's a course book for a lot of American schools. I am not sure that I rate it all that highly myself. I don't really see what Lowry is pushing back against, unless it's the general idea of conformity and sameness and a defence of individuality. Living as I do in a country with a relatively liberal euthanasia law, I think that subject can also be treated with more nuance than it gets here. Still, what do I know? It won the Newbery Medal. You can get it here.

This was my top unread sf book, and my top unread book by a woman. Next on both lists is The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Olbreht.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

The French Connection, film (1971) and book by Robin Moore

Posted on by

The French Connection won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1971, and picked up another four – Best Director (William Friedkin), Best Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Tidyman) and Best Film Editing (Gerald B. Greenberg). Roy Scheider lost Best Supporting Actor to Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, and it also lost to Fiddler on the Roof in two other categories.

The other Best Picture nominees were Nicholas and Alexandra and the  Hugo-winning A Clockwork Orange, both of which I have seen, and Fiddler on the Roof and The Last Picture Show, which I haven’t. IMDB users rate it third and fourth for the year on the two systems, with A Clockwork Orange and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory ahead on both counts and Dirty Harry on one. From 1971, I am pretty sure that I have also seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Diamonds are Forever, Bedknob and Broomsticks, the Monty Python compilation And Now for Something Completely Different, and the Dad’s Army film. To be honest I’d rate The French Connection in the middle of that pack.

Here’s a contemporary trailer.

The film is based on the true story of the 1962 police interception of a massive heroin shipment coming into New York from France, smuggled inside the bodywork of a car. Interesting to note that we are experiencing a crime wave in the Oscars at this epoch – the lads in Midnight Cowboy live on the edge of the law, the lads in Oliver! are definitely on the wrong side, In the Heat of the Night is a murder investigation and A Man for All Seasons climaxes with the protagonist’s trial and execution. Looking ahead, we have The Godfather next year, The Sting the year after, and The Godfather Part II the year after that. (Arguably there is criminality also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the following year.)

I’m afraid that The French Connection did not really grab me. I’m putting it two thirds of the way down my table, below My Fair Lady and above another New York film, Going My Way. (Still ahead of last year’s Patton.) It’s an unspohisticated story of two not very interesting policemen biffing the bad guys and occasionally also the good guys with whom they disagree. It does have a couple of really brilliant moments, which I will get to.

There is only one actor returning from a previous Oscar-winning film (and no Hugo or Doctor Who crossovers). It is Bill Hickman, playing FBI agent Mulderig here, fresh from his role as Patton’s driver last year. Hickman of course was best known in his career as a stunt driver, and he got to deploy those skills in The French Connection.

Once again this is a film about white men. The black characters are criminals. The women are arm candy, even if Arlene Farber rather glows in her small part as Angie Boca – on the other hand, Doyle’s girlfriend, whose bottom makes a brief but memorable appearance at 38 minutes in, isn’t even named let alone credited. There is an exception to these sweeping generalisations: an appearance from Fayette Pinkney, Valerie Holiday and Sheila Ferguson, better known as The Three Degrees, performing “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” in the crucial scene in the Copacabana nightcub (which was in fact one of their regular gigs when the film was made in 1971, but not in 1962 when the events of the film took place as they hadn’t been founded yet):

The film has a rather odd intersection with reality. Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the two policemen on whom the protagonists Jimmy Doyle and Buddy Russo, the two central characters, were based, both actually have acting roles in the film, Russo a small part as FBI agent Klein, but Eddie Egan looms rather larger as Doyle’s supervisor Simonson. In one scene, Egan as Simonson comes to blows with Gene Hackman as Doyle, a weird case of someone fighting with their own on-screen portrayal. I can’t get a good screenshot of the tussle, but here’s Hackman as Doyle (left) and Egan as Simonson (right) immediately before.

And here is Grosso as Klein (left) supporting Schneider as Russo (right) towards the end. (Grosso died only a couple of months ago.)

A number of small parts are played by people who actually worked in those roles in real life – most notably, Irving Abrahams, who plays the NYPD mechanic who takes the famous car apart, was in fact the NYPD mechanic who had disassembled the car at the centre of the real drugs case on which the movie is based, so in effect he is playing himself. I cannot think of many other non-celebrity cases like this – the chemist Don Suddaby in Lorenzo’s Oil is the other one that comes to mind.

I will admit that the main actors are very watchable – if anything, I thought Roy Scheider slightly better as Russo than Gene Hackman as Doyle, though Hackman is admittedly given more to do.

Also a shout out to Fernando Rey whose French is not really all that good but rises to the occasion as chief baddie Alain Charnier.

What makes the film is the cinematography. The documentary style of filming gives it all an air of gritty reality, and in particular the action scenes that dominate the second half of the film are very exciting and very well done. Here’s the climax of the famous chase:

It’s also mercifully short – at 104 minutes, shorter than any film we’ve had since Marty in 1955 (and Marty is the shortest of them all), sandwiched between two very long ones (both Patton and The Godfather are over 170 minutes). You can get it here.

I also read the original book by Robin Moore. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Still, it is not easy to get a warrant to tap a phone. There must be sufficient reason to believe, established by precedent and tangible evidence, that the telephones to be wired are used by suspected felons or conspirators and could lead police either to their apprehension or to prevention of additional felonies. It must also be shown that the telephones themselves are used to further illicit enterprises. This last point can be a bit tricky to substantiate, but, depending upon the cirumstances and the applicants, most judges will issue the warrants.

The book purports to be a journalistic account of the original heroin bust of 1962, but is clearly very fictionalised – verbatim dialogue and other incidental details inserted wholesale into the text, plus (perhaps more important) the third of the three detectives who actually solved the case is written out of history. It is very good on the detail of the heroin trade (largely absent from the film). It’s also racist, sexist and homophobic. You can get it here.

Next up: The Godfather.

Oscar winners:

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells

Posted on by

Opening of the third chapter:

I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea of the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it seemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for tea, and on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it! That finishes it! A sort of roller blind!”
“Finishes what?” I asked.
“Space — anywhere! The moon.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mean? Why — it must be a sphere! That’s what I mean!”

One of H.G. Wells' famous novels which I had somehow never read before. There are several interesting points to it.

First, the narrator, Bedford, is thoroughly imperialist and sees the Moon as a new Africa to exploit (and get his name all over it). But he's also clearly a very unpleasant chap, and I don't think it's too much to see Wells mocking imperialism as simply answering the wrong questions, once Bedford and Cavor get to the Moon and discover that it just doesn't really compute.

Second, Cavor is a classic absent-minded scientist, but a rather early example of the type. He is exploited by Bedford and then by the Selenites, having made a great discovery and then not really applied it very practically.

Third, the moon itself is a bit of a disappointment for today's reader; I think Wells was trying for somewhere between alien and incomprehensible, but to be honest it ends up as the prototype of a pulp alien planet (with a bit of preaching about the perfect society). No doubt it seemed fresher to readers in 1901. He would have known perfectly well that the Moon has no atmosphere.

Fourth, Wells is rather disappointing in the way he often reaches for comic yokels – Cavor's assistants in the early chapters, who are seriously injured in an explosion, and the boy who is carried away by the capsule at the end, are simply played for laughs; no empathy is expected of the reader.

Fifth, there are a couple of lovely set-pieces – the initial introduction of the town of Lympne, and the chapter "Mr Bedford in Infinite Space" – which have Wells at his best in terms of vivid writing.

I am not sure how long I'll keep up my reading of Wells – I'm doing them in order of popularity, which probably also means quality – but I'll keep going for now. You can get The First Men in the Moon here.

This was my top unread sf book, and my top book acquired in 2019. Next on those piles respectively are The Giver, by Lois Lowry, and The Overstory, by Richard Powers.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by

  • Thu, 20:09: RT @phanaticbeast: I love how the Dalek looks like he’s looking at his gun arm like he is confused. Genius #TheMetaltron
  • Thu, 20:10: RT @draml: This first scene between the Doctor and the Dalek is possibly Christoper Eccleston’s greatest performance in the whole of Doctor…
  • Thu, 20:10: I am alone in the Universe. Yep. So are you. We are the same. #TheMetaltron
  • Thu, 20:11: RT @tardis_monkey: You can literally feel the anger and the hatred in The Ninth Doctor and that just shows how powerful Eccleston’s acting…
  • Thu, 20:12: Particularly gorgeous performance from Billie Piper in this episode too. #TheMetaltron
  • Thu, 20:13: RT @NicholasPegg: It’s 2012, but this was made in 2004, and that desktop computer does look a little quaint with hindsight. Not an iPad in…
  • Thu, 20:14: RT @donnanoble__: nine was the regeneration burnt by the time war, carrying grief like a second shadow. and rose made him better #TheMeta…
  • Thu, 20:14: RT @BarnabyEdwards: John Schwab, who plays trooper Bywater (he doesn’t live long), is the guy who says ‘Time for Telly Bye Byes’ in the Tel…
  • Thu, 20:15: RT @ShearmanRobert: Julie Gardner really wanted a scene where Chris got his shirt off. Just saying. #TheMetaltron
  • Thu, 20:17: RT @OnFireFading: After watching this again, it makes so much sense that Rose was The Moment. #TheMetaltron
  • Thu, 20:42: RT @04nbod: The cut that killed us all. The best Doctor/Rose hugs and kisses almost always ended on the cutting room floor #TheMetaltron ht…
  • Thu, 20:43: Plus, he’s a bit pretty. I hadn’t noticed… #TheMetaltron
  • Thu, 20:47: In case you wondered what happens to Adam in the end, the answer is here: https://t.co/vozXms2Xcb #TheMetaltron
  • Thu, 20:48: RT @alanbeattie: Today’s Trade Secrets: failing to extend the transition period would be perhaps the maddest single thing the UK has done y…
  • Thu, 20:57: RT @Emily_Rosina: It isn’t common knowledge, but the Daleks were only one of the old monsters under consideration to return to the series f…
  • Thu, 20:57: RT @ShearmanRobert: What an extraordinary thing Doctor Who is. Still so strong. Still so brave. I’m so proud I got to be a part of it. #The…
  • Thu, 21:17: This is pretty glorious, for fans of the Fourth and Ninth Doctors particularly. https://t.co/1zoQFZodXp
  • Thu, 23:19: RT @alfonslopeztena: White armed gunmen storm Michigan’s State House, State police are protecting @GovWhitmer and blocking the gunmen from…
  • Fri, 04:43: RT @DanRather: What happened today in Michigan is an outrage, an affront to government and the rule of law. It has frightining roots in thi…
  • Fri, 10:45: RT @JamesCrisp6: UK and EU ‘met’ today for 1st meeting of Specialised Committee on the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland. EU side’s…

Posted in Uncategorised