No story with this one. Just caught myself singing it so I linked it here.
Tag: Reviews
Apropos of Nuthin’ – Music – Melanie – Brand New Key (1971)
Princess Sack of Potatoes is enjoying her first pair of roller skates and I guess it triggered this memory. I remember when this was a goofy fun song when I was in grammar school. Ah, those were the carefree days.
Plato of Athens, A Life in Philosophy by Robin Waterfield – A Book Review
When I was an undergraduate, I participated in an intensive summer program in Classical Greek language and one of the sections of the course was to read one of Plato’s dialogs (Ion) and sections from the Republic. And that was interesting because after having read a bunch of Plato in translation I always wondered if maybe it lost something in translation. It seemed that the stuff Socrates said was a bunch of nonsense. Maybe if read in the original it would seem less silly. But that summer I was disabused of that hope. Nothing was lost in translation. It was goofy stuff.
All of Socrates intellectual opponents in these dialogs are straw men who are set up to allow Plato to go through his dialectical arguments proving that no one knows anything but Socrates and therefore the world should be ruled by philosopher-kings that have been trained by Plato and his fellow philosophers at the Academy.
Okay, I’m pretty dismissive of the father of Western philosophy. But there really is no other position I can see. But by the same token he is also the man who attracted Aristotle to Athens and thereby brought him to the attention of the world. So, building the first western university did have many positive effects. After all Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s tutor and Alexander is responsible for building Alexandria in Egypt and Alexandria became a great center for learning and science under Ptolemy; one of Alexander’s successors. So, good for you Plato.
Having never systematically studied Plato’s life I read this book to see what incites might be hidden there. Unfortunately, there is not much esoteric knowledge that a scholar can add to the corpus of Plato’s work. Most of what’s there is the common legend and what’s added by conjecture doesn’t really matter to anyone but possibly a specialist who wants to speculate whether the Republic was written in which range of years and before or after some other dialog such as Gorgias.
What I did enjoy was the sections of the book that reviewed the history of Athens and other parts of the Hellenic world in Plato’s time. Plato lived during the end of the Peloponnesian War and the defeat of Athens. He lived under the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. In fact, several of his family members belonged to that regime which he eventually denounced. Of course, the following regime that restored democracy to Athens also condemned his mentor and friend Socrates to death so Plato’s political and partisan feelings were early on buffeted by harsh reality. But the facts of the times are interesting and useful for consideration. Plato’s later dabbling with practical politics when he attempted to convert the notorious tyrant Dionysus II of Syracuse into a philosopher-king is almost farcically unrealistic. The fallout from this attempt should have been enough to single-handedly destroy Plato’s reputation as a practical philosopher but time heals all wounds.
I guess I’m of two minds as to how to recommend this book. If someone is interested in Plato’s work and his philosophical ideas then this book will be of interest. If someone is interested in the very important time period after the end of the Peloponnesian War until right before Alexander the Great there is some interesting insights here. But unless both apply, I think most readers will have to pick and choose through the sections of the book.
For instance, I find Plato’s Theory of Forms utter nonsense. The idea that there is an ideal form of a tree or a shoemaker or a door seems to me the working of the mind of a doofus. Even the idea of the ideal of a geometric shape like a sphere or a cube seems an unnecessary addition to reality. So, the section on this doctrine holds no interest for me. And in fact, I find most of Plato’s philosophical doctrines not very useful for human life. But that’s how I’ve judged most of philosophy. Although Aristotle seemed to have had a more practical view of the world and the things in it. Maybe I should have looked for a new biography of Aristotle. Oh well.
Short Stories of Robert A. Heinlein – A Short Discussion
For some unknown reason today, I was thinking of Heinlein’s short stories. Heinlein was probably as well known for his short stories as for his novels. I guess my first exposure to this part of his work was when I got a copy of the Green Hills of Earth. And even as a dopey kid I could tell that Heinlein’s stories had a more polished and professional feel to them than many of his contemporaries. His stories of the early days of human space flight sounded as if he had been there. Maybe it was his engineering background. He made something like a lunar construction site sound not only plausible but almost mundane. Dealing with the pressure loss from a moonquake (“Gentlemen, Be Seated!”) sounded like something that you would be reading about in a newspaper story someday soon.
One that captured some of the consequences of subjecting humans to the rigors of Heinlein’s “torch ship” technology was “Skylift.” A pilot runs a virtual suicide mission to reach Pluto with medical supplies in time to save the inhabitants of a research station from a plague. Surviving multiple g’s of acceleration for an extended period is highlighted in this adventure story.
Of course, some of his short stories were of an entirely different sort. One somewhat tongue in cheek story (“And He Built a Crooked House”) purports to describe what might happen if an architect built a house in the shape of an unfolded tesseract and then a California earthquake strikes and folds it up. Very ridiculous but I think quite entertaining.
Then there’s one that could have been used for a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode (“They”). A case of paranoid delusion but with a fun twist.
And of course, it wouldn’t be Heinlein without his tribute to robber barons in space, Delos David “D. D.” Harriman and his dream of putting a man on the moon (“The Man Who Sold the Moon“) and then his tragic finale (“Requiem“) when he tried to go there himself. I always thought it was a nice touch using Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph for Harriman.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will!
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
I picked six of the stories I think of as vintage Heinlein. I probably could include another dozen if I wanted to make this post overly long. But I’ve included the list of Heinlein’s stories in case anyone wanted to pick their favorites for the comments section. Enjoy.
| All You Zombies | Elsewhen | Let There Be Light | My Object All Sublime | Solution Unsatisfactory |
| And He Built a Crooked House | Free Men | Life-Line | Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon | Space Jockey |
| A Bathroom of Her Own | Future History | Logic of Empire | Ordeal in Space | A Tenderfoot in Space |
| Beyond Doubt | Gentlemen, Be Seated! | The Long Watch | Our Fair City | They |
| The Black Pits of Luna | Goldfish Bowl | Lost Legacy | Poor Daddy | Waldo |
| Blowups Happen | The Green Hills of Earth | Magic, Inc. | Project Nightmare | Water Is for Washing |
| By His Bootstraps | Gulf | The Man Who Sold the Moon | Requiem | —We Also Walk Dogs |
| Columbus Was a Dope | “If This Goes On—” | The Man Who Traveled in Elephants | The Roads Must Roll | The Year of the Jackpot |
| Coventry (short story) | It’s Great to Be Back! | The Menace from Earth | Searchlight | |
| Delilah and the Space Rigger | Jerry Was a Man | Misfit | Sky Lift |
To Be or Not to Be a Barbarian
Just when I think Leftists can’t get any more un-American they say, “Hold my soy latte” and show us just how miserably wretched they truly are. Up here in New England one of the states (it doesn’t matter which one) is debating a bill to mandate 100% voting turnout for all elections.
Now I don’t know the details. I don’t know how they’ll guarantee that the dying and the late-stage dementia patients are forced to vote. I’m guessing if you don’t show up the ballot gets filled out for you by the Secretary of State. I think they’re calling it the 100% Democracy Bill or something brilliant like that.
This sounds like a joke from our side; just a way to make fun of the leftist tendency to dictate behavior for “people’s own good” but this is actual legislation that’s currently under debate. Actual politicians in this part of the country think this is consistent with the American constitution. Well, all I can say is these people are insane.
But they’re also running the show up here. The insanity is baked deep into everything they think and do. They don’t realize how this looks to people on the outside. This is so close to North Korea and Sadaam’s Iraq where “free elections” end up with the dear leaders garnishing >99% of the vote every single time.
Well, that’s enough about that.
I was thinking today about the definition of literary science fiction. I guess it’s any science fiction that has enough character development and enough verisimilitude to the way real people act and talk and feel to convince “serious” literary critics that your story is literature and not entertainment. I guess it has to be in some sense “real.”
Unfortunately, I understand that what it’s mostly become is racial and sexual grievance screeds very unconvincingly disguised as science fiction. So outside of a specific population of people primarily dedicated to reading such stuff it’s not going to very interesting to most of the human race.
But putting this political sub-genre aside what is the difference between genre fiction like science fiction and fantasy and actual literary fiction?
Well, I think that’s still quite subjective but I get the point of some of the criticism of some genre fiction. The story can be so stereotyped that the action feels cartoonish, the characters are one dimensional and the dialog is completely predictable. I can think of some pulp stuff that seems that way now. But by the same token, there are literary “masterpieces” that have long stretches of boring plot where nothing much happens. And even the most widely hailed protagonists can have whole chapters where the story drags and the dialog is meh.
So, what’s the calculation? Can a pulp story have 95% of the story composed of space opera and still be “literature” if the author gives the hero a scene full of heartbreaking humanity and emotional conflict? Sure, we’re not expecting Conan the Barbarian to break into a Shakespearian soliloquy when one of his comrades is skewered by a neolithic monster. But if you write a story that has an interesting plot surely there is no shame in trying to make, some of the characters at least, recognizably and honestly human.
Now, I’m not thinking about Hamlet showing up in any of my stories. But Macbeth might as well be a medieval urban fantasy story. It has witches and magic and ghosts. Just because it’s in iambic pentameter and has “thou” and “thee” scattered around in it doesn’t make it any less a crime drama. So, who’s to say that a genre novel can’t be legitimate literature?
Just something I was thinking about.
Critical Drinker Discovers Firefly
It’s been over twenty years since Firefly was even a distant memory of a television show. That excellent sci-fi series that struck a decidedly anti-elitist, pro-freedom, anti-“surveillance state” chord with its rag tag crew of space smugglers and other nonconformists in their chronically malfunctioning space ship Serenity.
I’m glad to see that the next generation is coming to recognize what a great show it was and just how much better it was than the current crop of fantasy and science fiction shows that have not a hundredth of its creativity and heart. Kudos to the Crtical Drinker for saying so.
The 400 Blows (1959) – A Movie Review
The 400 Blows is reckoned one of the greatest films ever made. I beg to differ.
I won’t give a spoiler alert because there’s nothing to spoil. Nothing happens. This was François Truffaut’s directorial debut. I don’t know. If I had been around back then I would have gotten in touch with him urging him to stop making movies, for everybody’s sake. Mercifully, the movie is in French so that will warn off most of the unwary. Camera Girl and I decided to watch it tonight after I recorded it from TCM last month during its “Thirty Days of Oscar” celebration of Academy Award winning movies. Which goes to show you that the Oscars have been selecting bad movies for well over sixty-five years at least.
Wikipedia says that all of these famous filmmakers (Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg, Jean Cocteau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Richard Linklater, Tsai Ming Liang, Woody Allen, Richard Lester, P C Sreeram, Norman Jewison, Wes Anderson and Nicolas Cage) think this movie is one of the best movies ever made. Well, that’s too bad.
A 12-year-old boy is bored and gets in trouble at school, runs away from home and gets sent to reform school for trying to steal a typewriter from his father’s office. At the end of the movie, he escapes from the reform school and runs until he finds himself on the beach at Normandy. The End.
When the credits came up at the end Camera Girl looked at me and asked me, “That’s it? What the hell kind of a movie is that?” I said, “It’s abstract!” She was not happy. That will probably be the last French film she will be watching. I think she holds me directly responsible for this movie. I think I’ve lost some stature in her eyes because I recorded it and didn’t warn her off.
While at the reform school the kid gets in trouble and one of the men in charge slaps him in the face brutally hard. So, I was afraid the title was about some horrible beating the boy receives. But that was the only violence in the film. The real violence is against the audience. After watching this film there are ninety-nine minutes I will never get back. It should be called the “The Ninety-Nine Blows.”
I know I’m just a philistine and I don’t understand art for art’s sake. But I contend that a motion picture has to amuse the audience in some way. It can excite or frighten or sadden or confuse or fill the audience with mirth, nostalgia or lust or almost any emotion or intellectual state. But at the very minimum it cannot bore the audience to tears. That’s the one feeling it cannot summon up in the audience. That’s the one unforgiveable sin. The lights cannot come up on an audience that looks at each other and says, “What the hell was that?” That unfortunately was our reaction. If I had seen this in a theater I would have pounded on the manager’s office and demanded our money back. That’s how bad it was.
Maybe it’s the French. Being beaten by the Germans in three major wars over the course of less than a century may have done something terrible to their souls. Maybe this film is a form of revenge on a world that has beaten the snot out of them, physically, psychologically and spiritually. If that is the case, then I think they went overboard. No one, not even the Nazis deserves to watch this film. There are limits to revenge.
Something Revolutionary and Unprecedented; Storytelling
Today I had one of my grandsons over for a visit and after lunch Camera Girl asked if he wanted to watch the movie, “Catch Me if You Can.” And he said sure, so I went looking for it in the DVDs. But mysteriously it was missing. So, she gave me a lot of grief because she said if I had said we didn’t have it she would have rented it at the library. So blah, blah, blah … I said okay let’s watch “Captain America – Civil War.” And he said sure. Well aside from the commercials (I recorded it a couple of days ago) that I had to annoyingly fast forward through it was the typical Marvel Universe CGI extravaganza. Well, mostly. Since it wasn’t billed as an “Avengers” movie it didn’t have the full ensemble; Hulk and Thor were missing. But with all of the minor heroes and the addition of Bucky (aka the Winter Soldier), Black Panther, Ant Man and Spiderman it was pretty damn crowded.
And because the title included the words civil war, what most of the action scenes consisted of was the heroes divided into two opposing factions battling each other. So, Iron Man and his crew were battling Captain America and his backers. Now it’s not a hundred percent clear whether they meant to kill each other. I guess we’re supposed to assume not.
But here’s the thing. The offensive and defensive capabilities of these various characters are woefully mismatched. Even without Thor and Hulk who are basically unkillable, the abilities of the minor characters who are basically normal human beings without any special armor or weapons, are laughably insufficient to either harm the stronger characters or even survive a serious fight with them. Take one obvious feature. How does someone who can’t fly fight with someone who can? And there are plenty of other problems like that. It leads to an absurdity where the weaker characters are just dancing around trying to avoid being squashed flat by the heavy hitters. And this looks ridiculous. It looks like a jar full of hornets buzzing around in a jar, to no particular result. And this is especially egregious with the female characters. Even though somehow Black Widow (basically Scarlett Johansson in tight leather pants) is able to easily fight and kill a half dozen much larger men without effort, it defies all the laws of physics that she can attack a man in an armored suit that’s so heavily built that it allows him to survive anything short of an artillery shell going off in his lap. He shouldn’t even notice her attack and she should basically break every bone in her hands punching him.
Now of course superhero movies are based on the idea of fantasy. So sure, let the girl fight her way through the bad guys. That’s what we expect. But in general, the mixing of unkillable and highly lethal characters with humans whose only superpower is wearing a spandex costume, just doesn’t make very entertaining cinema. The only time these movies make good watching is when two powerful and very evenly matched characters are set against one another. So, in the original Iron Man movie Tony Stark and his former partner; Obadiah Stane have powered suits that at least are in the same ballpark of capability. This allows brains and experience to allow the fight to resolve itself in an interesting way. In the original Captain America film Steve Rogers and Johann Schmidt are both super soldiers (biologically enhanced) and therefore on a relatively level playing field. In the original Thor movie, the antagonists are both immortal Norse gods. This level playing field in each movie makes the conflict less improbable and more interesting as theater.
So, I am not surprised that stacking more and more heroes and villains of completely unequal and confusing capabilities just makes the action scenes an unholy mess with very little tension or enjoyment. And now it seems the audience has grown tired of all this crowded hyperactive choreography. It’s grown stale and annoying. And the numbers are going down at the box office. Maybe it’s time for the Marvel Universe to try something revolutionary and unprecedented; storytelling.
Gene Hackman – A Film Career Retrospective
I guess everyone has heard that Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home under what the police are calling “suspicious” circumstances. The 95-year-old retired actor and his 66-year-old wife were found in different parts of the house deceased and in reportedly advanced decomposition. The news sources hint it may have been a multiple suicide or some other unfortunate situation. Well, we’ll probably get the gruesome and sad details soon enough.
I guess I wish I had written a post on Hackman’s career under happier circumstances. But better late than never. I had a chance to review his career over at IMDB and made a list of the movies that I had seen and either liked or at least considered good.
| 1969 | Marooned |
| 1971 | The French Connection |
| 1974 | The Conversation |
| 1974 | Young Frankenstein |
| 1978 | Superman |
| 1886 | Hoosiers |
| 1992 | Unforgiven |
| 1994 | Wyatt Earp |
| 1995 | Get Shorty |
| 1998 | Enemy of the State |
| 2001 | The Royal Tenenbaums |
It’s a surprisingly broad cross-section of genres. He was equally skilled as a comic actor, an action/adventure star and even a few dramatic roles. What I would say about his talent as an actor was that he would use his considerable acting abilities to take whatever part he was given, no matter how threadbare and make it memorable. You could see this in Young Frankenstein and Get Shorty where he’s playing minor parts and yet he owns the movie while he’s on the screen.
My favorite of his films was “The French Connection.” I was a freshman in high school and my homeroom picked the movie as our class trip. We went into Manhattan and saw it on a big screen on Broadway and riding there on the subway it was surreal just how close to reality the scenes on the subway resembled reality. Graffiti and drunks passed out on the trains were the perfect intro for the movie. And Hackman was the perfect Popeye Doyle. Brutalizing his drug suspects, antagonizing his chain of command and chasing a runaway subway train in a muscle car down the wrong side of the street under the 86th St elevated subway line through my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. It didn’t get better than that. I used to walk past the housing project where Popeye supposedly lived. If he had, he would’ve been the only white man living there at the time. It was a very tough place.
I enjoyed Hackman’s Lex Luthor in the first Superman movie. It might have been the only discernible acting talent in the series but he managed to make it fun. He was good in Unforgiven. He was pretty over the top in the techno-thriller Enemy of the State alongside Will Smith but he gave it his all. I’ve been told by film aficionados that “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a very good movie. Well, I saw it but didn’t really “get it.” But I’m unsophisticated. That was the last movie I saw with Hackman.
Based on his versatility and skill I would say Hackman is one of the best acting talents I ever watched. Maybe Brando or Pacino played more dramatic parts. Robin Williams was a funnier clown. Maybe Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis blew up more stuff than Popeye Doyle. But on balance Gene Hackman was the consummate professional. He made the character real and he always stole the show for me.
Well done, Mr. Hackman.
The Old Man and the Afternoon
So, the tax accountant got back to me today and told me I owed Uncle Sam a couple of thousand dollars and because of that I had to pay some kind of penalty. Well that really sucked and I had to go adjust my deductions on my paycheck and blah, blah blah … it ate up half my morning. So, I was out of sorts today.
Because of all that, I needed to do something fun this afternoon. Camera Girl and I decided to watch a movie we both like and haven’t seen in a long while; Ernest Hemingway’s, “The Old Man and the Sea.” It’s the one with Spencer Tracy as an old Cuban fisherman who catches swordfish. He’s recently become “unlucky.” He hasn’t caught a swordfish in 85 days and the boy who used to help him has been told by his father to find a luckier boat. So, the old man is all alone and he goes out to try his luck one more time. And the story is a folk tale about a three-day odyssey to land and bring home a giant swordfish, bigger than his little sailboat.
In a way it’s a meditation on life and old age and fate. It’s a simple story and mostly takes place between the old man and his mythic prey. Most of the dialogue (or soliloquy) is the old man talking to the fish (or himself). Occasionally he remembers (or dreams about) his past, when he was a valiant man of great strength and skill. And often as the strain of fighting the fish becomes unbearable, he exclaims, “I wish the boy was here.”
And slowly and painfully the story unfolds and the old man finally plays the fish in and kills it with his harpoon. But because of the size of the fish, he must lash it to the outside of his boat and eventually sharks are drawn to the smell of blood. The old man fights them off the fish with his harpoon until it is lost, then a makeshift spear, then the gaffe hook and finally a club. But as his weapons become cruder and less effective the sharks increasingly mutilate his prize until finally all that is left is the head, tail and a naked backbone. When he reaches home on the morning of the fourth day, he is utterly exhausted and defeated and barely crawls back to his hut to sleep.
That morning the other fishermen are astounded at the colossal size of the carcass and remark to the boy how amazing the fish must have been. The boy brings coffee to the old man and tells him that despite his father’s order not to fish with the old man he will defy him and bring his luck to the old man’s boat. So, the story ends with the continuity of life as the torch is passed from the old to the young. But in this case youth partners with the heroic efforts of the past instead of pushing it out of the way to replace it.
It’s a very strange story and plays out as something of a fairy tale. Mercifully, the fish never speaks but the old man treats it as if he wouldn’t be surprised if it did. The old man taught the boy to fish and so they have a mentor/pupil relationship but it appears more like a grandfather/grandson bond between them. And that is the only major character dynamic going on in the story.
There really isn’t that much to this story. Most of it takes place in a boat on the water with only one person present. I really don’t think I could justify why I like this movie that much. Maybe because I like watching it with Camera Girl. Her father was an avid salt water fisherman. And I think the movie is evocative of that connection. Well, anyway it brightened up our day.