Catching Fire (and a few other film bits)

Earlier this month, I indicated that probably the thing I wanted most for Christmas is time. Our wonderful nanny gave us exactly that last night, as her Christmas present to us was to take our girls for the evening so that Lauren and I could go out.

Date night found us at the local movie theater watching Catching Fire. Back in 2010, after our first daughter was born, we found ourselves driving a lot--in part to show off the first grandchild on both sides--and one of the things we did a lot of was listen to audiobooks together, including the entire Hunger Games series, which kept us so rapt that we would find ourselves sitting out in the driveway after we had arrived somewhere, waiting to finish the chapter.

So how was the film adaptation? Especially given my recent comments denigrating the ability of film as a medium to do book adaptations (vs. the television series format)?

It was really, really good. Really.

I should say that it's been a solid three years or more since I  read this book, which in some ways is probably a good distance from which to view a film version, because my comparison between the two is mediated by the fraying strands of memory. And I haven't seen The Hunger Games since it was on the big screen in... whenever that was. But we both thought the film version of Catching Fire really nailed it.

It worked as an adaptation, hitting all the main points of the book. But it also worked as a film (which in this case is ultimately more important). The writers resisted any urges they may have had to over-write the script, instead managing a perfectly understated script that allowed the actors to act, and with all the talent in this film, they could certainly be relied upon to carry the film, to bring the characters to life and tell the story without any more words than were necessary.

Also, from the previews, another YA dystopian book-into-film series looks like it could be solid, as we saw the preview for Divergent. I've still only read the first two books in that series, but the film looked really good (as much as we can draw any conclusions from a preview!). I, Frankenstein, on the other hand, looked pretty terrible. I could be wrong, and I thought I saw some potential in there, but just based on the preview, it will not be a date-night movie. It will not be seen at the drive-in. And we probably won't rent it. If we hear good things, we might bring ourselves around to watching it on Netflix some day in the far-off future. No promises, though. Pompeii? If you were to say to me "You know nothing, John Sherck," I would have to agree--I have no idea if this movie is going to be rotten or righteous, but I'll bet I would like it better if it was based on the Robert Harris novel Pompeii, which I'm pretty sure it's not.

Orson Scott Card and Ender's Game

There’s been a fair bit of controversy on-line about Card, in the wake of the Ender’s Game film adaptation, focusing on Card’s “anti-gay” comments and his support of the anti-gay-marriage agenda. I guess one question in here is whether Card is really “anti-gay” because he opposes gay marriage. He has said on more than one occasion that he is not "homophobic" or "anti-gay," and that he has a number of gay friends. But he's strongly against gay marriage, and it seems to me that it really is hard to do the mental gymnastics that say that marriage should be reserved to heterosexual couples without in some way denigrating gays. If there isn’t something “wrong” with their relationship, if it isn’t in some way inferior, then why do we have to defend the “traditional” view of marriage (so-called, of course, since a more traditional view would be that marriage is between one man and multiple women, for instance).

I guess I’m going to dodge the issue a bit, by thinking about Card as an artist. Here’s the thing: I think Ender’s Game is a pretty brilliant book. And I think Speaker for the Dead is even better. This is some of his earliest work, and it’s great. There’s some other good stuff he’s written too, but more and more of his more recent stuff just seems flat by comparison. What I see in his earlier work is more of what Keats thought of as Negative Capability, which in fiction sows up as an ability to present vivid characters with relatively complex viewpoints interacting in what seems like a fairly natural way. More and more in his more recent work, Card seems to have axes to grind, points to score, and to my way of thinking that approach is far from brilliant. I suspect that it has a lot to do with his Mormonism. I don’t know if he was more “liberal” in his beliefs when he was younger, or if he was just a better writer, in the sense I’m thinking of it, but he really seemed more agnostic then, and his writing was better for it. Even if he wasn’t agnostic, I think maybe he was more in touch with people who believed differently than he did.

I remember in his forward to Speaker for the Dead, writing about the way that people have different relationships with and behave differently around different people and groups of people; he pointed to the way that as a college student (I think; maybe high school) he would do summer theater while living at home, and with his theater friends he swore like a sailor, while at home he was perfectly inoffensive in his speech. And I just wonder if in his younger days he wasn’t more in touch with a broader life, while as he’s aged he’s tended to be more around people who agree with him—or even who tacitly enforce certain norms on him—as well as living a more unified life. I can even identify, in a sense: as a youth, I was two people—one and home and one among my peers, but now that I’m an adult, I am more or less myself in all circumstances. Does that, perhaps, limit Card in certain ways?

I suspect the answer is yes. He still spins a pretty good story, but I haven't seen anything from him in quite a long time that I would call brilliant. And, returning to his stance on gay marriage, I suspect this, too, is a case of living in the echo chamber of his own religion and its implicit or explicit enforcement of moral norms. But I don't know Card personally and I recognize what a joke it is to think that I can psychoanalyze him from a distance and have any hope of being "right" about what moves him to say/write/do anything in particular. But part of being human, I think, is that we all have a right to our own opinions, no matter how tenuously based in actual knowledge they may be.

Oh, speaking of opinions and returning to the film: it was good for what it is--a film. It looked good, and it was close enough to the original, but it sorely lacks the depth of the novel (or of Ender's Shadow). It reinforces my belief that any book that's worth anything, if it's going to be translated to the screen it should probably become a television series. A Game of Thrones and its sequels, The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End: they've all been better than any film adaptation could have been (the exception just might be The Hobbit, which should have just been one film, not three; two, tops).

It did make me want to go back and re-read the book, which I suppose is a positive for the film.

Film Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I am one of the approximately dozen Americans who has not read either this novel or its sequels. Thanks to my in-laws babysitting for us, I have see the film, and Lauren and I both quite enjoyed it. (Wrote this review back in 2011).

I haven't read the novel, but something about this film gave me the distinct impression that it's awfully hard to transpose a mystery novel to the big screen. I read a writer once who claimed that a film is about a 120-page novel--meaning that anything longer than that had to be edited down. Certainly, we're all familiar with that tendency to pare a novel down to the bone to get it to a reasonable film length. The problem in the context of a mystery is that mysteries thrive when we have a slew of characters all with plausible motives for the murder in question and at the same time we have more than enough information to find the killer (which is to say, we have evidence of the actual killer and red herrings that lead us to suspect others). In a novel, a writer has a lot of space to do that; in a film, not so much. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, although we had a large enough cast of potential killers, it didn't seem like we ever saw enough of any of them--or their possible motivations--to have any idea which of them did it, much less why or how. And that takes away some of the pleasure of a good mystery. I have a suspicion that the best film mysteries are the ones that were written for the screen in the first place, because they are written to fit the form. In adapting a novel, there are so many other things to do, as the writers decide what to keep and what to lose, how to balance the needs of the fans of the book with the needs of the film-only audience.

From the standpoint of writing a film mystery, it doesn't help to develop the characters as much as they were here, but of course, that's also one of the compensations we get--the fact that our characters have a real sense of depth to them, which takes time to develop (and I suspect that this, too, may have been short-changed from the book to the movie, because such things almost always are, but it was here).

Another thing really helped: the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The did a fantastic job of building tension through the notes they played--and the ones they didn't. As Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) are putting together the pieces of the mystery, the score is ratcheting up the tension, and then in the following scenes, as the stakes are getting higher and higher, there's no music. It isn't needed. They've already done their job, putting us on edge, and now the action can speak for itself. Masterfully done, and that's just a representative example.

Okay, from here on out, be prepared for all sorts of spoilers.

My initial reaction to both the fact of and the speed of the sexual relationship between Mikael and Salander was disbelief. After being violated by lawyer Nils Bjurman (spot-on creepiness by Yorick van Wageningen), I was surprised that she would want to have a sexual relationship with any man... but then, we have seen her jump quickly into a casual hookup with another woman, and in both cases a key component of the encounter seems to be the fact that she is the initiator, she is the one who sets the terms. Similarly, it seemed to me a signal of how troubled she is, that she jumps into what Mikael acknowledges to be "probably a bad idea." And, at the same time, it's telling that she so clearly misreads the situation. When it ends badly for her by the end, it shouldn't have been a surprise: although he's a decent man in so many of the essentials, several facts are incontrovertible: he cheated on his wife to start this relationship with his co-editor, and has still had an on-going relationship with her when he went north to investigate. It's not surprising that he would be willing to have sex with another woman, nor is it surprising that he might do so casually. Recall that we're told his wife left him as a result of the affair--not the other way around. He's a cheater, but not necessarily a leaver.

In a number of ways, the story explores the theme of vengeance. We have Lisbeth taking vengeance on Bjurman; Blomkvist seeks vengeance on Wennerström (and, in a sense, so does Henrik, though his primary interest is in vengeance against whoever killed Harriet. We the audience are tacitly pulled into this, too, because while Lisbeth may make us squirm as she tortures and forces Bjurman to act for her, I suspect that most of us also continue to feel a measure of sympathy for her; we like her even though she's the kind of person who could, rather coldly, extract the full measure of vengeance. And isn't this because we can't help but feel like that bastard Bjurman is, in some essential respect, merely getting what he deserves? He is a horror, particularly as he combines the indifferent cruelty of the bureaucrat with the personal cruelty of the rapist and abuser. But doesn't our culture generally tell us that the right thing to do with such people is to let the proper authorities deal with justice rather than "stooping" to vigilante vengeance? Yet when Lisbeth does it, we the audience tend to want to cheer her on--or at least forgive her entirely. When she later approaches the trapped Martin, we know that she has asked--and received--permission from Mikael to kill him, and we have little doubt that she will do it, probably with no qualms. Fate intervenes and the car blows up, saving her from legal culpability and a moral dilemma which we have to doubt would have been any dilemma for her at all. None of this, though, has caused us to turn against her though, has it? For all that, we're meant to feel sympathy for her at the end when Mikael implicitly rejects her by returning to Berger, and I suspect we do. What does that say about us?

Anyway, I'm rambling. Ultimately, this was a film that we enjoyed watching and that stuck with us after we left the theater. It was also enough to convince me that I should read these novels.

Review: True Grit (2010)

At the risk of offending some, I will say up front that I think the Coen brothers’ re-make of True Grit is, in virtually every way, superior to the original.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration I can give is a comparison of the opening scenes of each. In the original, we start with a cheesy musical theme followed by an opening scene at the Ross farm, where we see a capable young girl handling the family’s finances, we see her loving father, and we see the latter leave with the hired man, Tom Chaney, who will soon kill him. Our heroine Mattie Ross voices her distrust of Chaney as they ride off. Then we see a scene in a bar—Chaney is drunk and losing at cards, he starts making violent accusations of cheating, but Mr. Ross pulls him away from the table and outside before violence can erupt. After a brief confrontation, it does, with Chaney shooting Ross, stealing some money from him, and making his escape as men come out of the bar, drawn by gunshots.

True Grit (2010) begins in silence and darkness, the camera not quite focusing on some small source of light near the middle of the screen. As we come into focus, we hear Mattie Ross narrating what will ultimately be a slightly more concise version of what I’ve just related. What we finally see are two lights on the outside of a bar and the dead body of her father on the ground. Finally, Tom Chaney gallops by, though except for his legs, the horse’s legs, and some of its back, Chaney is out of the frame, unseen.

What we have in the comparison is a darker, starker world in the latter film, a bit more mystery and menace from our villain who is never seen, and Mattie Ross has been established from the beginning as our narrator and protagonist. And what a protagonist she is! Hailee Steinfeld just has that much more intensity, intelligence and grit than her predecessor. In a real sense, the original was John Wayne’s movie—this is Hailee Steinfeld’s movie, and that’s no small feat sharing the screen with Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon (and, for that matter, a number of other talented actors). All of which brings me to a second point of comparison: I think that the overall level of acting is higher in the new version, where every bit part and supporting player is more or less perfect. When I say that this is Hailee Steinfeld’s movie, I acknowledge that these other actors gave it to her—not because their own performances are sub-par, but because it’s her story and it’s supposed to be that way.Although it's a slightly different flavor, Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn is just as good as Wayne's, and Matt Damon improves the role of Le Boeuf considerably. JohThe supporting players, too, were uniformly excellent.

 

Another element that the remake offers that the original didn’t is a pervasive—usually dark—humor. There were quite a few very funny moments in the film, though they didn’t detract or distract from the film’s dark seriousness—if anything, they enhanced it. It felt more real, which I think is also a mark of the evolution of the film Western. 

All in all, an excellent movie and an excellent re-make.

Making a List

When I was writing yesterday's entry or, for that matter, when I was talking to the young man in question, I also had kicking around in my head a passage from a short story that I once read on a DVD. The movie was Memento, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and the short story was called "Memento mori," written by his brother Jonathan. They had come up with the basic premise on which both the story and the film were based (if you haven't seen the film, you're missing out). Anyway, this passage stood out for me because I think it's on to something.

     Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

     "This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

     "But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

     "The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.
It's like a letter you write to yourself. A master plan, drafted by the guy who can see the light, made with steps simple enough for the rest of the idiots to understand. Follow steps one through one hundred. Repeat as necessary."

I would just add that this is also essentially when we do when we condition ourselves into habits that we want for ourselves--setting aside time to write, going to the gym, whatever it is.