IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 34 minutes (Whew!), rated by 6.6 by 137,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Indy.
DNA: adventure with a body count.
Verdict: Nostalgia.
Tagline: You never know when Doric Greek will come in handy.
It starts with a bang and then ramps up! Among the exotic locales like the Bronx, Mid-Town, the Alps, Tangiers, Casablanca, insular Syracuse, and more. There is some superb acting from the three leads (and briefly from the hotel bellman and the Greek sponge fisherman) nearly lost in the rush.
Most of the action is comic book, but fun anyway.
Mads is a mutant Werner von Braun with a couple of Bama good ole boys licensed for mayhem. I found the plot hard to follow with the man on crutches who seemed to have wandered in from another film. I cringed at the early classroom scene which was all too realistic. (Though wheeling in a television screen was not. It could not be on, but had to be unplugged and plugged in, turned off and turned on, and the tuned in without a rooftop antenna.)
The meeting of the time travellers is superbly played.
It is way too long, but well, it’s Indy and he has earned some tolerance, true, but no, not this much.
Pedant’s corner. There are many liberties with history, despite the considerable effort at verisimilitude. The German 2-cm anti-aircraft cannon was not a Bohors pom-pom gun. In August of 1939 there was no V-rocket program. Then there is all the falderal about the tomb of Archimedes, which does not exist, and probably never did.
Warning from Space (1954) Uchûjin Tôkyô ni arawaru
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 4.7 by 1,200 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Faster then.
Tagline: The End is Nigh. (See above.)
Instead of using WhatsAPP the aliens arrive in person to deliver the bad news — The end of the world is coming. Arriving straight from a costume party, each alien is dressed in kites that give them the shape of starfish. This look puts the Japanese they meet off sushi. A national crisis follows.
These aliens have a Plan Nine and keep trying to warn humanity that a catastrophe looms. However, most of humanity is busy killing each over which end of an egg to break first, the big or little end. Both sides claim a divine commandment. This religious conflict over eggs is more important than planetary destruction. This latter part certainly seems realistic, an endless, bloody war over nothing.
The aliens come from a planet in the Solar System we never see because it always behind the Sun in a mirror orbit. That trope has been used in several other films. like Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1959) and Another Earth (2011). (Ahem, anyone who did high school science knows that a concealed counter-orbit makes no sense. ‘Gravity, Baby.’ Gravity would reveal another planet’s existence. Got that?)
Aliens in conference.
Japan is once again victimised by both the aliens and the rest of the world, but it perseveres, and finally there is global unity long enough to set all clocks to Tokyo standard time, and fire a barrage of missiles at the threat. Others have also dealt with this threat: When Worlds Collide (1951), The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), Meteor (1979), and Armageddon (1988). So far their combined efforts have been enough.
Whew. There follows another lecture on world peace, a mere nine years after the blood soaked epoch 1937-1945 led by Japan, then as now a victim. As if.
GoodReads meta-data is 540 pages rated 4.21 by 3,566 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Period.
DNA: Old Blighty.
Verdict: Ugh!
Tagline: Wheels within wheels.
The perennial exile Giordano Bruno is on the case again, accompanying Sir Phillip Sidney to Plymouth in the year of 1585.
There they meet Sir Francis Drake, and a great many other old and new salts. A death occurs on Drake’s ship while at anchor in port. Was it suicide or murder? He wants to find out before setting out to kill more Spaniards.
Sidney pushes Bruno into investigating as a favour to Drake.
As if murder is not enough to motivate Bruno, there is also a missing book of the New Testament, an old nemesis, and assorted other villains.
I needed a scorecard to keep track of the red herrings, and just about everyone is a crook of one kind or another, including our hero. As usual the forlorn Bruno is dead sexy to a beautiful woman in the usual way. Murder and mayhem ensues.
The author
There is a perplexing cast of character submerged into elaborately described detail of the time and place: sights and smells, hygiene (lack of) and disease (much of), and so on, and on, and on, and on. And on. It seems the author strove for 600-pages but succumbed to exhaustion. I know I did.The detail is piled high mistaking altitude for entertainment.
IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 6.1 by 1,800 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Respect their cultural ways.
Tagline: Asylum seekers unite.
Relaxing after the rigours of World War II, a lot of Japanese actors are disporting when…! Yep, the aliens strike first, kind of like the Japanese in World War II, not to mention Port Arthur earlier. No sooner do they set an alien foot on Japan than their mechanical mole burrows through the earth to cause earthquakes. (Yes, I know scientists will object to this but let ‘em!) Above ground this mole follows the maxim of Japanese General Yasuji Okamura in China: ‘Kill all! Burn all! Destroy all!’
Turns out that was just an opening gambit like the Bird Opening in Chess. Bam, game on! After showing what they can do the Mysterians politely introduce themselves. They are asylum seekers avant le mot.
Yes, you guessed it the Mysterians under those biker helmets and inside those colour-coded capes are from Mysterious, a planet that was between Jupiter and Mars. (There go those scientists again!) They trashed the place and had to leave, so they need a place to stay, one square kilometre will do, says the dubber. Ah, and one other thing, in the haste of departure it seems they left the women behind to clean the place up, and they now they need more so they ask for access to Japanese women. Once again the aliens are after our women! (Cf. Blood Beast from Outer Space [1965], Mars Needs Women [1968], and Lobster Man from Mars [1989].)
They ask but even as they ask some Mysterians have already lined up dates. Sort of, but it is more like abductions, but maybe that is their cultural ways which we must respect. Several women are clonked, gassed, and otherwise rendered insensible and whisked away to hovering light blobs in the sky.
Well, the aliens did ask, but then they didn’t wait for the answer just did it. Speaking of cultural ways, at no time do either the Mysterians or the Japanese negotiators ask women about their reaction to this request.
Game on! None of the war surplus gear the Japanese have does any damage to the dome under which the Mysterians watch the fireworks. The United Nations supplies some heavy duty mumbo-jumbo that makes the Mysterians stop laughing; even so, it is not enough. Uncle Sam comes to the party by lending the Japanese, as if in 1957, some r-e-a-l-l-y big rockets which the Japanese pilot. Meanwhile, a scientist, son of Tokyo Rose, who earlier went over the Mysterians has a change of heart and sabotages the dome from within while the really big rockets hammer it from without. This double bammy does the trick. Cracks appear in the indestructible dome.
Ka-boom! Colour-code capes and all, the Mysterians scoot.
End, followed by heartfelt high school valedictorian speeches about cooperation and world peace.
There are things to like about it. The models are well done and the action sequences are good, for the time. The plot has enough twists and turns to keep attention, but way too much of the run time is ka-boom, and more ka-boom. Moreover, you’d need a short memory in 1957 to be lectured on world peace by these people after the decade 1937-1945.
Oh, I did see a resemblance between the mechanical mole and the aliens at the start of the Fifth Element (1997), but this 1957 film takes itself far more seriously than that more recent one.
I watched a poor quality specimen which had been cut down for television, so maybe in its cinema version there is more dramatic sense than I got. I’ll never know, but you might. Decide for yourself. No need to inform me.
‘What’s on my mind,’ Facebook asks? Now and again on my patrol of Newtown streets between the Ack-comedy and home, I see a die or even a pair of coloured dice stuck to the top of a street electricity circuit capsule. The Diceman cometh and goeth.
In the very building where the Ack-comedy nestles Diceman has left a mark. There is a single yellow die glued to the top of the switch box in the hallway along from the door. The lighting being what it is in the hallway, some people might not even notice it. Downstairs in the front door lobby of the building there is large glassed-in noticeboard in a metal frame, and for some time there was a green die glued to the top of this structure, but lately it has disappeared.
On top hall fuse box well above eye level.
I did once mention these oddities to a neighbour in the building who dismissed the subject as human idiocy. A conclusion that is hard to argue, but still….well, not specific enough to be the last word.
Then the other day [… drum roll] while getting a take-away coffee from the local human charging station, I noticed the nearby electricity capsule, which has not had a dome on it for years, festooned with a number of dice.
Diceman returneth, I thought, and wondered what was next. Little did I know, again.
Then today, back at the charging station I noticed that the dice had been removed, that is, broken off the top of the capsule, leaving behind small coloured hints of glue. Ouch! But the dome has not been replaced.
How will Diceman react to that? Is it a challenge from Anti-Diceman? Are these two super duper antagonists from another space-time dimension who have carried their dicey conflict into ours? How will the next roll fall? Will crap or craps be the result?
GoodReads meta-data is 148 pages rated 3.78 by 608 litizens.
Genre: Memoir.
DNA: Bibliomania.
Verdict: Engaging.
Tagline: Indophile.
Roberto Calasso is himself a story teller with many books to his credit, however he is also a publisher of books by others. Between these covers he has collected essays reflecting on his long career as a publisher, a vocation that combines a circus ringmaster with a bazaar stall holder on his telling. After an apprenticeship in other publishing houses, in the 1960s he started Adelphi to bring to Italy high quality works the big publishers, for reasons of their own, were not translating or publishing, e.g., George Simenon’s novels, apart from the Maigret titles.
To establish Adelphi press, Calasso strove to make an Adelphi book whole, by that he means making every aspect of each book from the cover, to the blurb, to the advertising, the front and back flaps, the paper on which it was printed, the font, the spine to be all of a piece with the words of the book itself.
He also broke with a long tradition in Italian publishing, he says, of treating readers as children. Before Adelphi, foreign books in translation for Italian readers always had a forward explaining the book to readers. Adelphi omitted such condescending expositions. Indeed, in one case when translators admitted they could not render a certain German writer into serviceable Italian, he published the book in its original German in the Adelphi collection for the Italian market. Was that the incomprehensible Heidegger?
Few readers like me spare a thought to publishers, but perhaps we should especially in this age of transition from analogue on paper to digital in pixels. He dissects one passionate defence of digital books in a series of brilliant strokes. The expositor went on and on about how digital books mean we read together as a community because we can know who else is reading this book, how far they have gotten, and the very passages which they have underlined and the annotations they have entered. This approach undermines the very essence of reading, per Calasso, namely a silent and solitary communion between author and reader, not among readers, not with crowd noise, alone and yet in company. Amen, Brother Roberto. Willa Cather said the meaning of a book is a chemical suspension in the air between reader and page. John Williams in Stoner (2006) has a moving passage on this communion at the end of this neglected masterpiece.
Digression warning: Speaking of underlining or highlighting texts, as a student I bought used textbooks. The crush and confusion of the beginning of semester in the bookstore taught me how to select quickly from the used copies. One that had many passages underlined in the first chapter or two, was a prospect. The more underlining in those chapters the better, because it meant the underliner had no idea what was important, using a net when a line was needed. Invariably in later chapters there was no underlining because the over-underliner (I couldn’t resist that) had dropped the course and sold back the book. Every time I applied this algorithm, it worked: a heavily marked up first chapter meant clean pages to come. Detour is complete.
Does a reader of William Faulkner’s Sound and Fury really want to see what everyone else, or even a selection of them, have underlined while reading this demanding but memorable story? Does it add anything to our relationship to the bewildered Benjy?
Moreover, I harbour the suspicion that in the whole world every line of every book has been underlined by someone, and so…. Yes, what is the point? Good question, Mortimer.
Roberto Calasso
In Calasso’s essays there is much insider talk of Italian authors, editors, publishers, translators that would mean more to someone versed in Italian Twentieth Century literature than it does to me. But Calasso has some perfect turns of the phrase to hold even my jaded attention.
The tagline ‘Indophile’ above comes from his repeated references to Indian mystics, the Hindu vedas, which did not make much headway for me. It comes across as faint echo of tie-dying, dope smoking, incense burning Westerners who went to India to find the perfect curry.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour 44 minutes and rated 6.9 by 266,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Brit.
Verdict: Chapeaux!
Tagline: It’s evolution, Baby!
Two birthright nerds drive around southwestern USA to visit UFO sites: The Black Mail Box, Area 51, Devil’s Tower, Marfa Lights, Roswell, Cayuga, NM, and so on. They don’t blend in very well but…. Then they meet Paul. Only one of them faints.
Paul is indeed one of his kind.
It’s one for Sy Fyians with many references, bows, names, players, and references to other films in the genre, like The Big Guy, the men in black, and more. The plot ties everything up twice over. Grand!
A self-deprecating homage to the science fiction genre that zips right by unlike that dreadful A for Andromeda, which I cannot dislodge from my memory banks.
The Stainless Steel Rat (1957 as a short story and 1962 fleshed out as a novel) by Harry Harrison.
Good Reads meta-data is 208 pages each rated 3.93 by 15,404 litizens. There are twelve titles in the sequence.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: Bring on the maze. This rat will beat it.
Tagline: Where there’s money, there’s the Stainless Steel Rat
Meet James Bolivar di Griz who goes by so many names he has lost track, but those who know him prefer Slippery Jim, those who don’t, call him Rat. He is occasionally charming and always a rouge, even on his wedding day. He is a fast-talking code hero who steals from rich, again and again. ‘Code hero?’ Look it up, Mortimer.
He is a rat because he gets into and out of places up to no good, and stainless steel because his world is made of steel and glass, not wood or cement with cracks and crevasses, but even so he finds interstices in the steel and glass at the joins. The rat is something of a thinker when he has a few minutes off from being an action man.
His ambition has long been to be the biggest criminal of them all and he is well on his way to that achievement when in the course of a one-man heist he cleverly takes refuge in an empty office, only to find the head of the ultra-secret Special Corps sitting there waiting with a complete file on him and a phalanx of heavily armed guards. Gulp! Until that moment the Rat had not really believed that the Corps existed and he had certainly not believed anyone could outmanoeuvre him. Those two truths were hard to swallow but swallow he must.
In the subsequent negotiations, the Rat is licensed to continue his larceny but only as directed by the Corps. It turns out there are many targets the Corps would like brought low and the Rat is the man to do it. Doing the Corps’ bidding, he travels through time and space to steal to his heart’s content, while compiling data for blackmail, destroying forged bonds, freeing hostages, sabotaging weapons, all in day’s work. A victim of the Everest Syndrome, he steals because it is there to be stolen. (Pretty much how I deal with eating chocolate.) While doing so he falls in love, marries, sires children and continues with his galactic crime spree through twelve novels in all. The stories are set in the far future, so far that the origins of humanity on Earth are unknown to humankind who are spread far and wide in the galaxy. One blogger nerd estimates the Rat was born of woman, if he was, in the 346th Century.
His first assignment with the Special Corps is, single-handedly, to overthrow a militarily aggressive world that is conquering its neighbours. Such long range invasions had long been impossible due to time and distance and their combined impact on logistics. No D-Days in the 346th Century, not until now! His mission is to find out how they do it and then scuttle it.
He finds that the Aggressors play a long game, and undermine the worlds to conquer by financial support for dissidents within. Sound familiar? It is Putin’s Moscow game plan, with agents of influence like Murdoch and The Other Guy (whose name never passes my lips or keyword). When the dissidents rise up, then the Aggressors move in as though aiding them, and then wallop everyone and takeover. See, I said he was a thinker.
He foils them by….means fantastic.
Harry Harrison
This rat is not the Chinese democracy campaigner, Liu Di, who used ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ as a nom de guerre. She has been in the slammer since 2002 for her troubles. If only Slippery Jim could get her out with a little time travel.
I read a few of these in a teenage science fiction phase and stumbled across one the other night trawling for Kindle reading, and once I started, well, I kept going. But one is enough.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hr 24 m, rated 6.9 by 40,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Confused.
DNA: Wanker.
Verdict: I wish I hadn’t.
Tagline: So what?
An introduction to the world of debt collectors, sub-species auto repossession, is a promise not delivered. If the word ‘f**k’ were deleted this would be a silent movie. Mercifully.
Regrettably, no such mercy was shown. The result is an adolescent effort to shock, one that achieves boredom in the first 20 minutes of repetition of the one-word dialogue. The Sy Fy twist is an aside that neither defines plot nor character, just bookends the pointless vulgarity.
I know, I know that IMDb rating is high. Worse, I know, Roger Ebert rated it highly, but, well, I don’t.
Good Reads meta-data is 352 pages rated 4.16 by 185 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction (though some of the stories belie that).
DNA: Bibliomania.
Verdict: Snappy!
Tagline: Occam did it.
The world beyond wherein are produced those tantalising paragraphs on the back of books, those lures cast on book-selling web sites, the too-good-to-be-true hooks in advertisements. These are the blurbs. Who hasn’t bit on one of those baits…and read to regret it?
They run to a hundred words plus or minus, one. The discipline is strict and stern in this sweatshop. T. S. Eliot’s day job was to do just that, write blurbs for Faber and Faber. No wonder he went cryptic with his poetry at end of a day. He wrote 5000 published blurbs, and countless drafts (some of which were probably better than the copy used, but excellence does not always prevail).
Within those one hundred words a copywriter summarises the book honestly but in such a way as to market it to a buyer. It’s like introducing someone at a party, emphasis on the positive, on the common ground, on the best side…. No comment on the negatives. Don’t mention the short-temper, the habitual tardiness, the slovenly home, the relentless egotism, the jail time, the snobbery, the cheating at cards, the nose picking, the carelessness in driving a car….
It is best if the blurb reflects the nature and manner of the text within the book. No high fluting terminology for a down and dirty book, nor vice versa. Last, but not least, the blurb must satisfy its first reader, the author, or failing that, the even higher authority of the publishing editor. Few authors insist on writing their own blurbs and still fewer publishers let them, because the marketing department knows best.
Here’s a bet. Next time you are fondling a new book, read the blurb and see if you can tell who wrote it, the author or a hack copywriter? Those by authors use – shutter – adjectives, while hacks stick to the facts of the text. (Pssst, authors have even been known to use, ahem, adverbs.) If the story is set in Berlin, a hack will say ‘Berlin,’ while an author will embellish that as ‘wintry Berlin.’ See the difference. Authors seldom resist backstories, hacks have taken the oath to do so. The hack writes ‘Berlin. Joe had to…’ The author wants more, so ‘Tall and elegant Joe found himself in very wintry Berlin to…’ The one hundred word guillotine falls on the author’s blurb before it gets to a punchline. A hack is tempted to put the punchline first to get attention and then backfill.
Authors are prone to describing the book, in superlatives: ‘outstanding,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘amazing.’ These terms are used for everything these days and so have been emptied of significance, but they persist like semantic ghosts to offer a substitute for meaning. Indeed some book-covers are so crowded with such empty calories of praise that there is no room for a few words for what the book is about. By Gresham’s Law, cheap words drive out valuable ones.
Louise Wilder
The hack blurb writer sometimes has to start with a draft blurb from the author, and applies Occam’s razor. Slash!
Blurbs have always been with us but they have changed over time. Once they were more like tables of contents, then for a while they were displaced by quotations from other writers and critics praising the book with adjectives and adverbs as above! These Masonic salutations tended to zero credibility and now appear, if at all, as supplements.
However, it is a baleful truth that publishers have lately began to mimic the promotional pitches for movies, with such meaningless remarks as ‘in the tradition of [last year’s box office success],’ which means derivative, ‘based on a true story,’ which means it isn’t, and ‘if you liked [ … ], you will like this.’ I may have liked one but find that to be quite enough, no more thanks. (Buy a toilet seat from Amazon, and you’ll see. Thereafter you will be followed to your grave by Amazon’s suggestions of other toilet seats you might like!) Commercial algorithms assume consumers are single-track obsessives.
The prose is spritely, the insights sharp, the chapters short. What’s not to like.
Aside on discipline. I recently had to write a synopsis of a book in 300 characters, and a space counted as a character. It took me two weeks of editing to get something adequate.
