Good Reads meta-data is 560 pages, rated 2.84 by 87 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Period (Medieval).
DNA: Italian.
Verdict: Suffocating detail.
Tagline: Spoiler: she Pope.
October 1301 the Florentine Council sends Dante (Durante) Alighieri to Rome to assess and, if possible, negotiate with Pope Boniface, who was busy redefining papal corruption. An uneasy peace exits in Florence between the Little-enders and the Big-enders, while Rome is seething. While he waits for an audience Dante falls into company of an affable, wealthy Senator with a comely daughter. Dante often has trouble keeping it in his robe.
In this heady atmosphere, strange things emerge. Very strange. That a representative of the Inquisition wants to hush things up, stimulates Dante to find out more with a great deal of to’ing and fro’ing in ruined Rome. Much. Too much.
A fantastic plot is slowly revealed.
Giulio Leoni
This is the third and final instalment of the English translation of this series. There remain several untranslated titles in the original Italian.
IMDb is a runtime of 2h and 8m, rated 5.9 by 1,001 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: More, please! (And less.)
Tagline: Ripped from today’s headlines!
In the near future of 2019 (!) the book burners are masked, armed, and dangerous. Welcome to Florida!
Why?
Villains read books. (Do they?) To eliminate villains, eliminate books, because it is too hard to eliminate villains. Blaming books for what readers do is an old, sad song we are hearing again today. (It is only a matter of time before this logic leads to eliminating authors, as one character observes.)
Over-reach soon follows as the masked thugs enjoy creating mayhem, and in response a political compromise emerges that makes public libraries an asylum for all books. Bookstores on the other hand are not protected and they become the battleground of the thugees. The line between bookstores and libraries is blurred by both sides, and to ensure that exception libraries recruit a defence force. The inevitable happens when boys play with guns: innocent bystanders get killed, and each side blames the other. Check the headlines today for proof.
In this maelstrom we have a candy-coating of a romantic comedy. Believe it or not, Mortimer. The players are charming, the situations far-fetched and yet…well, watch the television news tonight. Maybe not that far fetched.
One of the web sites that guides my viewing, completely missed the point on this film. This blogger devoted most of his comments to the unlikely proposition that municipal libraries would have the funds to create an armed force or that the national government would permit it. ‘Hello! It is fiction.’ But even short of that realm, political compromises are often contradictory. The National Guard may confront local police forces. It has happened before, and now it is again in the offing.
This film has spawned sequels which I may pursue. But this one was attenuated with way too much shoot ‘em up. Way too much. So less of that, please, and more about the books, and why they are important.
Though there were many nice touches salted away. I liked the comment that the Book Burners wanted to censor the history of censorship to conceal it. But there were also loose ends, like who was the murderer influenced by reading and what was in the archive that had to be rescued. Maybe I blinked.
Of course I thought of Fahrenheit 451 and also the more obscure short but powerful Phoenix – A Science Fiction Short Film (2014) from Warnuts Entertainment, 19 August 2016 on You Tube. I commented on the latter elsewhere on this blog. Click on.
IMDb meta-data is a long runtime of 2h 16m, rated 6.5 by 30,001 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: High octane.
Tagline: Slam, bam, wham. Reset. Repeat. Redo.
In 2092 rocket powered bin divers stumble onto a treasure in the debris and try to profit from it, but they encounter a clone Elon Musk – vacuous, soulless, mindless, destructive, and solipsistic. There is the usual corporate corruption, the usual political connivance, and the usual general stupidity. All the lazy scriptwriters’ crutches.
One chase after another follows, each loud and colourful, but the pace is slowed by too many back stories. It seems everyone has one, except the villain-in-chief and his endless robotic minions.
The multi-lingual international characters are cartoon cardboard. About one hour too long for the story.
What did W. C. Fields say about working with children? Don’t!
I opted for peace and quiet and turned it off.
Much similarity to Cosmic Rescue (2003) reviewed earlier.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 30m, rated 6.6 by 553 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; drama.
DNA; Québécois.
Verdict: Odd.
Tagline: Another ‘film without a gun’ from Stéphane Lafleur.*
She is trapped in a loveless marriage while her brother cannot grow up. The inertia in their lives is manifested in a backhoe à vendre sitting on the snow-covered lawn. We never do learn how they came to possess this totem.
An accident at the paper factory where she works jars her from somnambulance, while her drifting brother is likewise disturbed by a brief conversation with a man who claims to come from the future. Both are freed, perhaps only briefly, from the inertia that has governed them. Together sister and brother embark on a road trip into the eternal north of Québec and change the future.
It is that man who claims to be from the future that triggers the label Sy Fy, and that claim is never developed, but it stimulates the brother to action. Though he might as well have had a premonition, and stirred himself to act on it.
All in all it is laconic in a genre of Québec films that focus on the working stiffs, usually absent from Hollywood, and combines that with a soupçon of wintry magic realism. The cinematography of winter tells a good part of the story of these hibernating people.
Oh, and no, I can’t explain the title. Let me know if you got it.
Stéphane Lafleur
*You either get it or you don’t. There is no explanation here.
Good Reads meta-data is 230 pages, rated 3.90 by 2481 litizens.
Genre: Fiction.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: More Jay, please.
Tagline: Murphy explains it all.
The unwilling and unwelcome chair of the English Department of Payne State University, Jay, backs into another unwanted assignment. He is to escort a dozen Payne undergraduates on a three-week study tour of England. It’s only three weeks: what can go wrong, so he consoles himself.
Then the sea of troubles – personal, institutional, and international – strike, one after another. There is no respite. Will Jay never learn?
One of the students did not read the brochure beyond the word ‘British,’ and thought the tour was to the British Cayman Islands. Yeah no one else can understand how that worked, but he showed up at the airport in shorts with diving gear for a January trip to London, the one in England. He now considers suing the University for false advertising.
Another participant does not like to talk about his sealed police record, and so he brings it up repeatedly. When, as a result, others begin to avoid him, he expects Jay to overcome this ostracism or he will give him a bad rating.
The identical twins are, well, identical and inseparable, though separate. Jay can’t tell them apart, and he gradually realizes they, being well aware of that, exploit it to confuse him further, albeit he starts pretty confused.
Then there is DB who apparently missed the flight and yet appeared, briefly, at the London residence, only to disappear again. Oh, and no one knows what ‘DB’ stands for.
Another student has never before been away from home, and her cat, and pines for the latter every minute. She believes in sharing this pining with Jay.
Then there is Boadicea who approaches everything as Armageddon. She categorically refuses to comply with any of Jay’s few and lax requirements mainly because ‘all requirements are gendered.’ Patriarchy must be denied!
But the peculiarities of these students pales into insignificance when the remainder of the party is considered.
Although the dozen students all signed up for the excursion and paid for it, none of them intend to follow the prescribed program, still less write the reports Jay set, and that is fine since he had little interest in reading them. Every step of the way it is a test of wills, and at sixty years of age Jay’s will has been eroded by the tests that have gone before it. Most recently with the Provost to get a budget for his department, which has been on death row for some time. Few of its members will survive the killing fields of the next budget round. But like deer in hunting season, most of his colleagues are unaware of the calendar. He hopes, no doubt vainly, that taking this assignment will earn his department a stay of execution for another budget cycle. Rumour has it that the Provost has negotiated a new contract with a salary greater than the combined salaries of all sixteen members of the English Department. Hmmm.
If you don’t know Jay, start with Dear Committee Member, the first of the three novels chronicling his woes. Then continue with the Shakespeare Requirement, before getting to this one.
Some readers of these books might think them satirical, but I can assure such readers that they have a core of verisimilitude. This conclusion is contrary to some of the more sanctimonious reviews on Good Reads.
Cosmic Rescue: The Moonlight Generations (2003) (コスミック・レスキュー ザ・ムーンライト・ジェネレーションズ)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 24m, rated 5.7 by 25 cinematizens.
DNA: Japan.
Genre: SyFy.
Verdict: Stop the music!
Tagline: Non-stop.
The boring routine and madcap adventures of a 2053 NRMA space road rescue patrol number 89. It is composed of three mop-tops who read comics, chew gum, spend hours on a coiffure while sweeping up debris. They cannot even rescue themselves from boredom, and then…!
Another corporate conspiracy is at work, but all’s well that…, well, ends.
It moves so fast, there is no time to count the plot holes and character contradictions.
It has inspired me to try to find the director’s The Library Wars to get an update on Florida’s war on knowledge where library proscriptions will soon be enforced by masked, armed thugs recruited from jails.
Internet Movie Data base meta-data is a runtime of 1h 48m rated 6.5 by 4,400 cinemazitens.
Genre: War.
DNA: Norsk.
Verdict: Makes its point.
Tagline: Waiting is hard.
After mid-1941 much of the Battle of the Atlantic was fought in the far north, including the Arctic Ocean. That latter was the lifeline for the Soviet Union. This is the story of one lone Norwegian cargo vessel bound for Murmansk.
‘Norwegian?’ Yes, Mortimer (he’s back!). In April 1940 Norway had the fourth largest merchant marine and many of them had the most modern equipment (cranes, elevators, radar, and radios). The Norwegian Government in exile with King Hakkon directed its ships to make for British ports, and nearly one thousand did so. By fiat this government declared their crews ‘war sailors,’ conscripted for the duration of the war. They numbered about 30,000. The ships and men were incorporated as Nortraship which became the largest mercantile shipping company at the time.
I said 30,000 men above, but let it be note that more than 200 women were included on the ships, radio operators, doctors, or navigators. The presence of a woman in the crew in this film has driven a few opinionators ballistic on the IMDb reviews, but it is true to life as five minutes of internet investigation revealed. (The tired Hollywood trope of men fighting over her is completely absent. Fear does dampen the libido.)
The tankers of the Norwegian fleet had earlier fuelled the Spitfires during the Battle of Britain as they crossed the North Atlantic with Texas oil. Later its ships stood off Normandy with supplies and evacuated wounded and prisoners.
The price was high: More than 10% of the sailors died, i.e., 3,700 including 25 women. When an oil tanker blows up, everyone dies.
In this story a series of mishaps (faulty intelligence, disrupted communication, equipment failure) heighten the latent personality conflicts within the crew of one ship. The ‘Convoy’ of the title is scattered and we follow one crew of about twenty. When the British escort is withdrawn (in anticipation of attacking German surface ships that in fact did not materialise) tension among the crew increases and increases, because they are now even more vulnerable to German U-Boats and aircraft.
The Captain is determined to complete the mission to help win the war, while the first officer (and the engineer) would like to retreat against the impossible odds they will now face alone. Dissension follows. No one ever says the obvious, even if the ship reverses course to Iceland, the Germans may still attack.
An air attack follows and damages the ship and wounds the captain, the weather worsens which is good (keeps the German planes down and the ice floes deter submarines) and is bad (ice threatens the ship). One crewman is killed in an attack, and another dies avoiding floating mines.
None of the characters is Hollywood cardboard. Each has reasons that make some sense, as even the Captain admits at the end.
The outstanding performance is by the bug-eyed Swede (the only volunteer in the crew) as the gunner on the lone anti-aircraft weapon on the ship. But the fear and trepidation among the crew is palpable, and, indeed, hard to watch.
Good Reads meta-data is a listening time of 17h and 3m, rated 4.4 out of 5 by 18 audiblistas.
I read the Inferno, Part I of the Commedia, as an undergraduate and it made an impression on me. One for Dr Sarah Gardner. But I aways wondered about the remaining two parts. I finally scratched that itch by listening to an Audible version of the whole over the last few weeks on daily patrols of Newtown.
Hmmm…. I found Purgatory boring, all too much like listening to conference presentations: one after another, each successive one less interesting than the one before.
However, it proved more bearable than Paradise which was so saccharine that I gave up on it with more than two hours of empty rhetorical calories to follow.
Conclusion? Machiavelli was right, the people in Hell are more interesting than those in Heaven. He wrote something like this: In hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in heaven are only beggars, monks and apostles. Certainly Dante’s Hell is far more entertaining than his Purgatory or Paradise.
Further reading: Maurice Joly, The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) adds to the fun. See also Sebastien de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (1989), sanctimonious though it is. But first try Machiavelli’s own short story, Belfagor.
Good Reads meta-data is 323 pages, rated 3.55 by 16,526 litizens.
Genre: Thriller diller.
DNA: Switzerland.
Verdict: Gulp!
Tagline: The AI did it!
It all began when Rich Brain received a book fin the mail, a first edition of Chuck Darwin’s Origin of Species. Nice. It will add to his collection of first editions that he never looks at among the other luxury goods stuffed into his vast Geneva mansion. (Thereafter passages from Darwin are chapter epigrams. Neat.)
Trouble is, who would give churlish, reclusive Rich Brain anything? He rings up the seller at 2 am, because he is Rich Brain and time means nothing to this titan, to ask who bought the book. The groggy seller says, ‘You did.’ Huh! That threw Big Brain but Seller read out the details, including the bank account, which is later checked and found to be one of his many stashes, this one is not in a Cayman Islands tax shelter. The mystery begins!
(I have occasionally received a book delivered in the mail and forgotten both that I ordered it and why I wanted it. But I knew who to blame. The dog!)
Rich Brain is a mathematical genius, just ask him. Wait! Don’t he will simply sneer at you for asking about the obvious. While Brain disdains money, he disdains even more those without it. He seems to characterise those around him from the outside in. Think Jay Gatsby. A man wearing a cheap suit must be a cheap (= stupid) man, and so on, thus reasons this Croesus. Although it is true that he disdains just about everyone else, too. He is an equal opportunity despiser of one and all.
This genius has devised an Artificial Intelligence program, call it Vix, capable of learning to trade stocks and he has been minting money from it. Trades of a billion US dollars is all in a day’s work. Overnight he makes millions, each and every night. Oh hum.
Well the Darwin book is one thing but an intruder into his fortress home who seems to have walked in through the front door, politely leaving his shoes at the mat, despite the Maginot Line security, is quite another. The plot thickens. In what follows there is much to’ing and fro’ing in Geneva that I liked. I spent a day there once including a homage to Rousseau.
He is now caught between two men in cheap suits, a weary police officer and the intruder. Though his coincidental sightings of the later stretch credulity.
Is Rich Brain having a schizophrenic nervous breakdown? Is someone out to get him? Are both true, or neither? He goes off the rails, but was he pushed or did he jump? Then again, he was never quite on the rails to begin with. Meanwhile, what is Vix doing? Well quite a lot, and that is scary, too. I thought of the Forbin Project (1970). Reviewed elsewhere on the Blog.
Vix is determined to survive per Darwin.
Great ride; no finish. Why did Vix gaslight Brain (book) and then try to get him killed (intruder)? Was it an Oedipus complex? Will Brain be tried for murdering the German? Does Vix have yet a third location? Why did Gabby latch onto Brain in the first place, and second why did she stick with him? Will Inspector Weary make it to retirement?
P.S. I classed it as a ‘thriller’ above but it is not written in the frenetic, confused, jump-cut style which leaves it to the reader to fit the jigsaw puzzle of words together. A mercy that.
Good Reads meta-data is 25 pages rated 3.95 by 213 litizens.
Genre: SciFi; Species: First Contact.
DNA: USA
Verdict: A landmark.
Tagline: Mirror, mirror.
Interstellar space flight is routine, and Earth ship Llanvabon is on a research mission to study a double star in the Crab Nebula. This is such an unusual astronomical opportunity that, whoa, it has attracted another, alien ship.
First problem is to identify it. Definitely not from Earth. Yikes! Aliens. This is the first contact of any kind with an alien species after decades of interstellar flight.
Second problem how to establish peaceful contact. Many tentative steps are taken by each side.
Third, now that rapprochement seems to have been established the next problem to solve is how to communicate. Fortunately, Ensign Apple whipped up a translator app on his iPhone. [Sure he did.]
Fourth, the aliens are humanoid in the same way MAGAs are. They do not talk but use a radio wave telepathy.
Fifth, the ships swap two crew members to get acquainted. Still things are volatile. Why? Each ship has armaments intended to blast meteors that they are could use on each other and back track to the home world for invasion!
Six, it is a stalemate. Neither captain wants to attack if this is a good opportunity for cooperation, but neither wants to reveal their origin in case the other has hostile intentions. Indeed, they – both captains and both crews – begin to realise they are thinking nearly exactly alike.
Murray Leinster
Spoiler ahead!
The resolution is to swap ships, each denuded of any revealing information about origins as a kind of technology transfer of good will. Each leaves for its homeward with alien ship.
