Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

My six-year old daughter doesn’t like to go to movies in theaters. She does like watching them at home when we let her. Since I like going to movies, this seems strange to me. What seems even stranger is her reason: she says that at home she can pause the movie whenever she wants to take a break or just go to the bathroom. In the theater she can’t do that.

I don’t know whether she’ll change her mind as she gets older. If she doesn’t, though, it’s an interesting snapshot of a changing relationship to media. She has always had a lot of control, and she isn’t interested in media where she doesn’t have that control.

Along the same lines, we never watch television or cable programming at home–we just use our television to watch DVDs. My daughter still doesn’t quite grasp the basics of ordinary television when we are at a hotel or a friend’s house–that you have to watch the show when it comes on, and if you want to see the whole show you have to watch it until it ends. You can’t start it or stop it. She sort of understands this when we explain it to her, but she never remembers it.

I don’t care what happens to television, but I do like the movie theater experience, and I hope it doesn’t go away. I guess we’ll have to see.

Jumper, by Steven Gould, is among my favorite SF books. It’s a simple story based on a simple premise: a teenager discovers that he has the power to teleport. The book is both a bildungsroman and a revenge story, as he uses his power to strike back at his enemies (thanks to the one outrageous coincidence permitted to every story, he has some nasty enemies). He reacts plausibly to his power, the characters around him react plausibly, the government gets involved. The book doesn’t hit any false notes, and it’s not too long.

Gould’s second book, Wildside, was also good, though not as good. It was also based on a single simple premise, in this case a doorway to another world, an Earth without humans.

His subsequent books were by-and-large completely forgettable, alas. He did write a sequel to Jumper, Reflex, which was OK. It lost a lot of the charm by introducing another fantastic element, an evil conspiracy which was not really spelled out and led to an ending to the book which I found quite implausible.

Jumper is now being turned into a movie, being released this weekend. It’s always fun but scary to see a favorite book turned into a movie. Unfortunately, based on the previews I’ve seen, this one is going to be a lot more scary than fun. In the movie Davy is not the only person who can teleport. There are fight scenes between teleporters. There seems some to be some kind of organization which works against teleporters. This might all be good fun, if it weren’t for the fact that none of this is in the book, and that it ruins the basic idea which made the book good. The book as written would be filmable; it has good characters and plenty of action and conflict both between and within characters. I guess it just wouldn’t be a spectacular special effects event movie, though.

Who knows? Maybe the movie will be good after all. And presumably Gould will get a small pile of money out of it, not to mention more book sales.

Sweeney Todd actually works better as a movie than on the stage, at least when Johnny Depp is on the screen. The music overcomes the staginess and melodrama of the story. Closeups make Sweeney Todd more tortured and less bombastic. On the other hand, I think that Angela Lansbury (who I’ve only seen in video) did a better job on the Mrs. Lovett role than Helena Bonham Carter.

It’s a pity Tim Burton couldn’t keep the chorus in the movie, though, as that is my favorite song.

I really liked the film Across the Universe. It’s both amusingly clever and an interesting look back at the 60s. Plus it’s a musical. I particularly liked the combination of “nothing’s going to change our world” with “helter skelter”–simple but effective.

I tend to like movies which take a more formal approach, like musicals. By restricting themselves and avoiding naturalism, they force the story to be both good and unusual. Or, of course, terrible–that happens pretty often too, but those movies can be ignored. A completely different example of a formal film would be Memento, with its trick of telling the whole story backward.

A film about the 60s naturally makes me compare that time to today. Many people then really thought society was falling apart or changing radically. The protests were dramatic and certainly changed U.S. society, but they had no real effect on the war. The protests against the Iraq War before it started were very large, though nobody thought they would change society, and they had no effect at all. And seeing that the Iraq protests had no effect caused them to more or less stop after the war started–there are still regular protests, but they are much much smaller than the ones before the war. Of course, the lack of a draft is a key difference.

Even after all these years of war it’s so strange to see men like Bush and Cheney, who were both careful to avoid going to Vietnam, sending other men to fight in Iraq. In a movie it would be simplistic. How does it happen in real life?

I found the movie Polar Express to be a very creepy experience due to the motion capture animation. It was like watching zombies riding a train to visit Santa (not to mention Santa’s entrance was straight from The Triumph of the Will). I think taking any child to see that movie would most likely scare the whole idea of Christmas right out of them.

I recently saw Beowulf, in which director Robert Zemeckis (who also directed Polar Express) makes another try at motion capture. And, I have to say, it is much much better. The character no longer look like zombies, which is really a vast improvement. Now they look like puppets. The main difference is in the eyes–they have evidently improved the technology significantly when it comes to tracking eye motion.

There are some movies where puppets would work fine. I mean, Team America was not a particularly good movie, but it wasn’t because of the puppets. Unfortunately, for Beowulf, which is intended to be a fairly realistic action movie set in a fantasy world, puppets really don’t work at all. The animation was continually distracting. The monsters (Grendel and the dragon) were moderately successful, because we don’t know how such beings should move. But the movements of the human characters were consistently unconvincing. This time around, the facial close-ups worked pretty well–not perfect, but not distracting. But larger movements were really bad. Also the weights of the characters when they walked or ran were all wrong–it looked like they were walking on a trampoline or something, sort of like the characters in Shrek.

I don’t know why Zemeckis is so fond of this technology. The Lord of the Rings movies showed that you can do superb effects with live action filming, and Beowulf didn’t require anything as complicated as Lord of the Rings. Also, plenty of animation movies have showed that you can excellent story-telling without life-like motion. Zemeckis is presumably trying to make entertaining movies, not experiment with animation. It’s not even a tip of the hat to older techniques, like those stop-motion animals at the start of Return of the Jedi. So why does he do it, when he must see that it doesn’t work?

I saw Neil Gaiman speak a few months ago. He mentioned his screenplay for the movie. As I recall, he said that he was talking to Zemeckis about some other project, and Zemeckis mentioned that he was interested in doing Beowulf, but couldn’t see how to transition between Beowulf killing Grendel’s mother and then, 40 years later, facing the dragon. Gaiman said something like, “well, I would handle that transition like this” and described his idea. Zemeckis asked him to turn that into a screenplay, and he did.

And it is an interesting idea, and it could make a good short story, though as a story it would have to be handled sort of experimentally. And maybe it would have made a good movie, too, but unfortunately I guess we’ll never really know.

(Nathan reminded me to write about this when I saw his blog entry about the movie.)