Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

The Lord of the Rings

Posted on in Books, Media, Music, My Life, Work.

Saw The Lord of the Rings musical courtesy of work and the producers. It’s not really fair to call it a musical as it barely contains more songs than the books do, though the fight scenes are superbly choreographed to music. The producers prefer the term ‘spectacle’ and it fits that label very well. The design element is superb – Black Riders, Ents, Shelob, the Balrog are all achieved on stage in innovative but effective ways that you probably wouldn’t imagine. The use of crutches and prosthetics to distinguish the orcs may not be very politically correct but it does convey the twisted and deformed nature of their creation.

It’s quite long but still has to compress the story somewhat. The first act follows the first book reasonably closely (no Tom Bombardil, though he does get namechecked at the end, no Barrow Wights, no Glorfindel, and the Nazgul attacks on the Prancing Pony and Weathertop are combined), but after the interval things start to diverge rather more. I was starting to get suspicious when Boromir kept on talking about “The Kingdom of Men” rather than Gondor and it turned out that they had indeed combined Rohan and Gondor – and hence Theoden and Denethor, and Helm’s Deep and Pelennor Fields. Whilst this moved the plot along quite quickly it removed some of the subtlety from the story and a lot of “fan favourite” characters and scenes – no Eomer, no Eowyn, no Faramir, no Palantír, no Wormtongue, no Paths of the Dead, no Witch King. On the plus side they do, briefly, include the Scouring of the Shire.

The performances ranged from the very good to the very camp but even Malcolm Storry as an excellent Gandalf suffers somewhat in comparison with Ian McKellan in the films. In fact the hardest thing to keep in mind when reviewing or just watching the stage version is that it’s an independent adaptation of the book not the film. It aims for a very different feel – more mythic, more rooted in fairy tales, rather than the “realistic” fantasy of the films. In this sense it’s perhaps a little truer to the spirit of Tolkein even if it taks much bigger liberties with his story.

Another Book Meme

Posted on in Books, Memes.

Via just about everyone. The 106 books most often tagged as unread on LibraryThing. Bold the ones you’ve read. Add an asterisk to the ones you’ve read more than once. Italicise the ones you’ve started but not finished. Strikethrough the ones you hated. Underline the ones on your “to read” list.

  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
  • Anna Karenina
  • Crime and Punishment
  • Catch-22
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Wuthering Heights
  • The Silmarillion*
  • Life of Pi: A Novel
  • The Name of the Rose
  • Don Quixote
  • Moby Dick
  • Ulysses
  • Madame Bovary
  • The Odyssey
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • Jane Eyre
  • The Tale of Two Cities
  • The Brothers Karamazov
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies*
  • War and Peace
  • Vanity Fair
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife
  • The Iliad
  • Emma
  • The Blind Assassin
  • The Kite Runner
  • Mrs Dalloway
  • Great Expectations
  • American Gods
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering enius
  • Atlas Shrugged
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
  • Memoirs of a Geisha
  • Middlesex
  • Quicksilver
  • Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
  • The Canterbury Tales
  • The Historian: A Novel
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Brave New World
  • The Fountainhead
  • Foucault’s Pendulum
  • Middlemarch
  • Frankenstein
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Dracula
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Anansi Boys
  • The Once and Future King*
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
  • 1984
  • Angels & Demons
  • The Inferno
  • The Satanic Verses
  • Sense and Sensibility
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Mansfield Park
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  • To the Lighthouse
  • Tess of the D’Urbervilles
  • Oliver Twist
  • Gulliver’s Travels
  • Les Misérables
  • The Corrections
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  • Dune*
  • The Prince
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
  • The God of Small Things
  • A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
  • Cryptonomicon
  • Neverwhere
  • A Confederacy of Dunces
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything
  • Dubliners
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Beloved
  • Slaughterhouse-Five
  • The Scarlet Letter
  • Eats, Shoots & Leaves
  • The Mists of Avalon
  • Oryx and Crake: A Novel
  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
  • Cloud Atlas
  • The Confusion
  • Lolita
  • Persuasion
  • Northanger Abbey
  • The Catcher in the Rye
  • On the Road
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  • Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
  • The Aeneid
  • Watership Down
  • Gravity’s Rainbow
  • The Hobbit*
  • In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
  • White Teeth
  • Treasure Island
  • David Copperfield
  • The Three Musketeers

Conclusions? I’m way behind on my Neal Stephenson reading, and I haven’t read many ‘classics’ but nor have a lot of other people.

Book Meme

Posted on in Books, Doctor Who, Memes, My Life.

I was tagged by Jack on the grounds that I’ve “not done a meme for a while”.

Total Number of Books Owned

According to my LibrayThing profile, 858. I know I have at least one more to add to that list and I’d also need to subtract the 27 tagged as !borrowed or !sold. So 832. Minimum, as there may be more hiding somewhere that I haven’t added yet.

Last Book Bought

A couple of out of print role playing games from eBay. Last ‘real’ book would appear to be Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O’Brian which I found in a bookshop in Amsterdam and made Lettice buy because I’d only just bought something else there and the shop assistant was a bit on the scary side.

Last Book Read

I finished re-reading Human Nature this morning. I’ve been wanting to refresh my memory since the TV version came out. The book is bloodier and does a better job of creating the historical context. However it does have a number of elements that are really superfluous and which the TV version correctly ignored.

Five books that mean a lot to me

In reverse chronological order in my life:

  1. Life by Richard Fortey

    I bought this whilst on holiday in Tennessee visiting and so it reminds me of a great time as well as being a great book. Fortey takes a look at the history of life on Earth from the moment if started to the dawn of human history. Richard Dawkins did the same trip backwards in The Ancestor’s Tale but for me Fortey’s book is more engaging.

  2. Ships of the Star Fleet, Volume One

    Very, very geeky. But as well as being one of the best Treknical fandom works ever it’s also the first book I bought online.

  3. Thieves’ World

    I could have listed several works of fantasy or science fiction that I read during my adolesence – The Lord of the Rings, Dune, the Pern novels and The Colour of Magic prime amongst them, but this collection of low fantasy stories set in a seedy city at the arse end of an empire is the one that stuck in my mind the most.

  4. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

    I was the pefect age for this when it was first published. And from this book sprung my interest in RPGs and wargames. It has a lot to answer for.

  5. Read About Me and the Yellow-Eyed Monster

    A childhood treat – a book with me and my family and my friends in it.

Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme

Tags:

The Dancers at the Heart of Time

Posted on in Doctor Who, Memes.

When you see this post, quote from Doctor Who on your blog/journal.

Points at the top of the page, I have a quote from Doctor Who there all the time, but here’s another one:
“My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters and you don’t like my tie.”

Anyway, The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords — A bulging set of homages to SF/Fantasy – Harry Potter/Wizard of Earthsea; Captain Scarlet; Peter Pan; Flash Gordon; Return of the Jedi.

Harold Saxon, PM seems more based on John Culshaw’s Tony Blair in Dead Ringers than the real thing, and the “Britain, Britain, Britain” opening to one of his speeches was highly reminiscent of Tom Baker’s voice overs for Little Britain.

All of which briefly makes it all seem like some sort of attempt to screw with the minds of the media studies/crossover/slash/post modernism/irony obessessed sectors of fandom. Which actually makes me like it slightly more.


The ninth Doctor said that he didn’t do domestic, but here the Master apparantly does domestic violence, which is terribly petty and human of him. Is this meant to be the point? Without the demi-god socierty of Time Lords the Doctor becomes greater, more God like, whilst the Master becomes less, more mortal? His final choice to die a mortal death rather then be chained like Loki might be a pointer in that direction.

Martha, she’ll be back, but maybe not for much of net year. But even if she leaves now for good, I disagree with the people who think that her character’s been hard done by. Her love for the Doctor, he total faith and trust in him, became the key to defeating the Master (without that trust being manipulated and betrayed) and she decides at the end that “it’s him, not her” and that she is more than good enough, and that somewhere there’s a stubbly paeds doctor who doesn’t yet know what’s going to hit him. It’s not the story arc that a lot of people wanted, but it works and it is a positive thing for Martha.

The Doctor is the loser here. He saves the world but loses his oldest friend/enemy. His companions re-evaluate their place in the lopsided relationship, but he doesn’t. Taking for granted that modern Doctor Who is ‘about’ the relationship between the Doctor and the companion(s) can next year show some sign of growth on the Doctor’s side?

A final observation: In many ways the John Nathan Turner years didn’t happen as far as Russell T Davies is concerned. Most of the references to the Master’s and Doctor’s past came from the Third Doctor era. The depiction of the Time Lords picks up in 60s and 70s aspects and avoids the 80s (not such a bad move). The returning villains (Autons, Daleks, Cybermen (sort of), Macra, The Master) all predate 1975. The way the Daleks and Cybermen are portrayed owes more to their early appearances than their later ones. The Doctor’s lost at least a few decades and probably a few hundred years if he’s ‘only’ 900-odd in the new series. Just how much of his history did the Time War wipe clean away?

Take me to Utopia

Posted on in Doctor Who.

I don’t do squee. I’m male and an old-school fan and sensible and self conscious. But….

How bloody amazing was that?

About ten minutes in I was wondering whether this was a sly remake of the DWM comic strip End of the Line and was expecting a similarly downbeat ending.

Then Derek Jacobi started dropping hints and any thoughts about this episode’s supposed plot went straight out of my head. Instead I was on the edge of my seat pointing at the screen, and maybe, just a little, going …

squee

Ahem. Sorry.

Good TV

Posted on in TV.

Managed to watch some Battlestar Galactica last night. I’m still in the middle of season two (and my brother gave me West Wing season seven last weekend so I’ve got enough DVDs to last a fair while). Anyway, it was the “Resurrection Ship” two parter (which with “The Pegasus” really makes a three parter).

Wow.

Wow.

Let me see if I can explain. In almost any other SF show the battle between the two battlestars and the two basestars would be at the centre of these episodes. But here it’s a background element. We’re treated to a series of brilliant chararcter moments that build and then destroy and rebuild the plot with a few softly spoken words. This is what all television should be like. The closest comparison I can think of is The Sopranos. It’s really that good.

“Frack You!”
“You’re not my type.”
Innuendo in made up curse words. A Farscapeish moment.

But minor niggle… (and this applies to much of the Boomer storyline in season one as well) … are CCTV cameras somehow subject to Cylon infiltration and thus distrusted by the Colonials? Otherwise Baltar should be in a lot of trouble.

And a digression: it’s been said by other people that American fiction is obsessed with father-son relationships in a way that British (and European in general) fiction isn’t. And the Adama family saga certainly fits the bill. But look at cop shows. US cop shows are all about more or less equal partners, but UK cop shows are often about an older detective and his younger sidekick (i.e. a substitute father-son relationship) and I can’t think of many US cop series that fit that model and no UK shows based around equal partners. (Oh, and then there’s CSI where Gil is a clear father figure, but does that make his relationship with Sara substitute-incest?). Thinking about it, this may in part reflect the way police forces are organised in the two countries but seeing as how TV rarely cares that much about realism I think there’s something a bit more to it. Am I seeing made up patterns or is there something here?

Catching up with the Doctor.

Posted on in Doctor Who.

Uh oh, I haven’t been doing weekly reviews of Doctor Who episodes this season. Spoilers below.

“Smith and Jones” – Good intro for Martha. Actual plot a bit of a side show but still more substantial than two years ago. Her family no worse than Jackie and Micky (first episode versions, before they got cool) except for the father and his girlfriend, who were just embarassing for all the right reasons and all the wrong reasons. 7/10

“The Shakespeare Code” – Full of fizzing dialogue and sexual tension. A nice take on the old “magic and science co-existed at the start of the universe, but science beat magic” myth that’s been part of Doctor Who for some time. But if the witches used words as their tools of power, why was there a big string of numbers in the speech they added to the play? 9/10

“Gridlock” – Total continuity-fest. Face of Boe. Macra. Gallifrey. Time War. As bad as anything from the 80s. But because it had a decent emotional core and was very well written, all the continuity seemed natural and worked. Except the Macra, who were just deliberately gratuitous. Really good fun. Boe’s message was exactly as everyone predicted. More interesting was Tennant’s comment in Confidential about how Boe is right but the Doctor isn’t wrong. 8/10

“Daleks in Manhatten” – Should have been brilliant. Looked good (up until the final reveal of the hybrid at least), but somehow feels empty afterwards. Some odd bits. The Doctor was a lot less talkative than usual. The Daleks were behaving like their 1960s versions. Yes, we get that the Doctor and the Daleks are now mirrors of each other, but please can we just exterminate some people and get on with it? 6/10

Meanwhile, I’ve watched “The War Machines” and “Vengeance on Varos” recently.

“The War Machines” is a very odd story, it’s the first story set in the present day (with the possible exception of Planet of the” Giants, but that doesn’t count) and the first to feature the British Army. But unlike all the UNIT stories that follow it feels too short rather than too long. The threat of the War Machines is never really made obvious and the climax is rushed. Also, Dodo gets the worst exit of any companion, and the Doctor is called “Doctor Who” on screen for the only time. It also has a superb performance from William Hartnell and provides agood introduction to Ben and Polly.

“Vengeance on Varos” looks incredibly prescient these days. Reality TV has almost caught up with it, all we need to do is move from mental to physical torture and we’re there. But the plot needed some major tightening – scrap the whole mad scientist / turning Peri into a bird sub plot and there would have been room to come up with a less contrived and rushed solution to Sil’s approaching invasion fleet. Doesn’t Owen Teale (he was the lead cannibal in Torchwood’s “Countrycide”) look young? The sixth Doctor demonstrates his callous streak here and poor old Colin Baker only gets a few bits of decent script with most of the good stuff going to Martin Jarvis and Nabil Shaban, both of whom excel.

Life on Mars

Posted on in TV.

They lied. They said there would be a proper ending. They said they had a clever reason for everything that happened. Bollocks.

Bloody good though, wasn’t it?

Robin the hooded man.

Posted on in My Life, TV.

Lettice and I just watched the first two episodes of Robin of Sherwood. She had never seen it and I hadn’t seen it since it was first broadcast.

As that was over twenty years ago my memories were more than a little rose tinted (to pick one example, back when I was ten, Nasir was the coolest character on telly – he had a studded leather jacket like Avon’s and was like a ninja who hung round with Robin Hood; today I have to ask, doesn’t actually look very saracen does he?)

Comparisons with the recent Robin Hood series are hard to avoid. But I’m going to try. I’ll just say that whilst I enjoyed the new show as mindless entertainment, it doesn’t hold a candle to the old one in terms of storytelling.

We amused ourselves by putting together a dream team of characters.

From Robin of Sherwood:
Robin, Will, Little John.
From Robin Hood:
Gisbourne, Marion, Much.

Why is it still coming up bloomin' Roses?

Posted on in Doctor Who.

Let’s talk about the tenth Doctor’s ongong obsession with Rose. Three episodes post-Rose and we get at least one reference and an anguished expression in every one.

Read the rest of this very true thing…