This is the first volume of The Complete Peanuts, covering 1950-1952, and I was always curious to see how the strip started out, since I didn’t start reading it until decades later.
Right from 1950 it combines the innocence of small kids with the existential crises of adults, all while never showing an adult. The kids are variously mean, complimentary to each other, helpful, hurtful–often in the same series of strips. Snoopy looks like a real dog! The characters of Lucy, Linus and Schroeder are all introduced as babies, but grow quickly. By 1952 we see Lucy yanking away the football from Charlie Brown for the first time, but Linus doesn’t have his blanket yet, no have we seen Sally, Franklin, Pig Pen or many other characters.
Amidst the bad jokes, clever wordplay and gags, the thing that stands out most is the art itself. Schulz drew the strip with an eye for both economy and detail, the lines crisp and confident, characters expressive in both body language and their faces. Simply put, he was an artist who happened to draw a comic strip, and it showed.
For anyone interested in the comic strip form–not just Peanuts–this is a fascinating look back at the art as it began to evolve over 70 years ago. Highly recommended.
NOTE: I normally have a link to my Goodreads review, but the site is down as I post this. I'll remove this note once it's back up and the links can be put in.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ll be honest, I read this book for two reasons: because it’s short, and I was curious what a more nuts and bolts approach to novel writing would look like (I got it with a big book bundle that I was looking through after finishing my last read). I have read many books about writing novels, so by this point it takes something with a little extra to make my socks really roll up and down.
Structuring Your Novel doesn’t really have that, but it is a perfectly cromulent introduction to novel structure for a new author. The book is divided broadly into three parts:
Breaking down the classic three act structure
Breaking down scene structure, specifically the scene/sequel duo
A final section, curiously, on sentence structure
Initially I found the book overly restrictive in how it demands a novel must be written, but for new writers, this is probably a good thing–learn the rules before setting a blowtorch to them. Weiland even notes that some well-known authors don’t use the three-act structure–but actually do! They just do it without realizing it, because it’s the natural way people tell stories: a beginning, a middle, an end. This seems entirely logical.
The scene/sequel thing is also very fundamental: stuff happens, then the characters react, or more broadly, ACTION and then THOUGHT. Logical!
Really, everything in the first two-thirds of the book is fine, if not revelatory for anyone who has been writing for a while. But I question the necessity of the section at the end on how to write sentences. None of the advice is bad or wrong, but it feels out of place in a book about structuring your novel, as if Weiland cribbed from a book on grammar to make this book a little heftier. It’s easily skipped, and I’d suggest any writer who struggles with grammar might want to read an entire book on the subject before trying to crank out a novel. Rewiring is hard enough without having to correct a bunch of grammatical errors as well.
Overall, this is a perfectly fine book for new writers.
I was trying to remember exactly how it opened, and now I have a newly-refreshed memory of it. Some weird albino dude chugs something weird, and it changes his DNA, and he dies and goes over a waterfall, then his magic DNA spreads out all over or something.
Shortly after, we’re introduced to the spaceship Prometheus (and why did they name the movie after the ship, anyway?) with its crew of 17 human drumsticks. The next few minutes are a sequence wherein the android, played by Michael Fassbender, does quirky android stuff, then the ship approaches some planet and Charlize Thereon wakes up early to do an extremely sweaty workout in her hypersleep skimpies. She asks the android if there are any casualties and he’s confused, so she clarifies and asks if anyone died and he says, “No, mum. Everyone’s fine.” And I thought, “OK, that’s enough quirky android for me.” But then I went back and replayed the bit with closed captions on, and he actually says, “No, ma’am, everyone’s fine.” But it sounds like he is saying “mum” and he’s a quirky android, see? So I think the closed captions are wrong.
Anyway, this was sufficient to sate my need to rewatch Prometheus again. For reference to my first viewing, see here.
I thought I had reviewed Talent is Overrated years ago, when I first read it, but apparently not.
I took this as an opportunity to re-read it, so here is my review, about a decade or so late.
The book, originally based on a Fortune magazine article, presents a simple premise: That people who seem gifted with natural talent aren’t gifted at all–they just practice more and at a level most people would find untenable, allowing them to excel. The first half of the book explains how deliberate practice can make a profound difference in how adept someone is at a given skill, whether it’s playing a musical instrument, throwing a football, or something else. Author Geoff Colvin does note that physical limits can impose obvious constraints on some tasks, but that generally, if someone practices extensively (hours a day), does so in a deliberate manner (always pushing themselves to learn more, rather than getting super proficient at a certain level), they can rise to be at the top of their chosen field or endeavour.
The second half of the book then goes into the why of deliberate practice, and here it’s less about case studies and more speculation on what compels people to go well beyond what most would do in terms of time and energy investment in their chosen hobby or line of work. Colvin also holds out hope for those wanting to try out deliberate practice by saying it can yield benefits even in those older, although it’s obviously better to start younger.
Overall, I like the premise of the book. It’s logical and there’s plenty of evidence to show that smart, hard work is the not-really-secret recipe to success. It’s just such hard work that only a few will ever fully commit to it, and it’s still not entirely clear why some do. Colvin’s prose is not particularly vivid or arresting, but it gets the job done. The book, written in 2008 (I had a “2018 anniversary edition”, though I could not notice any changes from the original text I read) could probably do with an update, as smartphones and other technology were nascent when it was written, and it would be interesting to see how current tech can help or hinder deliberate practice. Still, this is a worthy and very accessible read.
The Between drew me in with something I’m always a sucker for: a portal to another world accessed through something mundane and ordinary. In fact, the previous book I read, Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, has the same hook, where the portal is inside a shed in a backyard. In The Between, the portal is behind a huge iron door buried…in a backyard! Reading these books may make you think backyards are way cooler than they actually are.
For a debut novel, The Between is pretty good. Author Ryan Leslie finds a tone and stays with it fairly consistently throughout–serious, but leavened by the characters reflecting on the unreal situations they find themselves in. The prose moves between macho pants banter between the main characters of Paul and Jay, and descriptions of the bizarre world of The Between and the rules that govern it, with the latter comprising the bulk of the novel. Leslie does a good job in providing enough detail for The Between to make it feel like an authentic place, while teasing details that suggest a lot more than what the reader sees.
But, as is often the case with a debut novel, it’s got a few flaws that bugged me. There are two that stood out. The first is The Between itself felt like a fusion of several different concepts the author had for the realm, and the inclusion of the ASCII computer game version seemed more a bit of a cheat for the author than something that added to the story, in that it allows a character to have a handy notebook/reference for The Between, but adds little else for the reader.
The other main issue I had was with the main character of Paul. He not only disappears for a large chunk of the story in the middle, but never seems to change at all, or have any real kind of arc, despite performing heroic deeds, especially near the story’s conclusion. The tense relationship that is fleshed out early on between Paul and Jay is also never revisited in a meaningful way once they enter The Between. There is some excellent work in showing how taking up artifacts in The Between confers powers and a specific role to the person wielding them, and can transform the person’s personality. This is used to great effect when Jay gets a knife that essentially turns him into an assassin with an insatiable bloodlust, but this never really gets followed up on at story’s end. Sure, there’s plenty of rousing adventure and the set pieces are full of action and derring-do, but if you take the time to create and explore relationships between characters and have them change in significant ways, I think it’s important to explore the consequences after all the gun fights and stabbings. By the end, I didn’t really know where Paul and Jay stood, except that I guess they were still friends.
Still, there’s a lot that works in The Between and I am confident Leslie will take what he has learned from writing it and incorporate it into future stories.
Continuing the trend of bad puns, this time in written form, it’s Star Wars Day. You know, May the 4th be with you, see? It’s funny to everyone except Jedi, and they’re not real, anyway.
Combining Star Wars and lists, here are all the non-animated Star Wars movies, ranked from best to worst, in my very much not humble opinion:
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Star Wars1Purists note: I am going by the original release title (1977)
Return of the Jedi (1983)
Rogue One (2016)
The Force Awakens/The Last Jedi (tie2I will explain the tie below) (2015, 2017)
Revenge of the Sith (2005)
The Phantom Menace (1999)
Solo (2018)
Attack of the Clones (2002)
The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Notes:
The top two picks are non-controversial, though some says Star Wars: A New Hope is the better movie, and I can be swayed by these arguments if I’m in the mood. I still give the edge to Empire because I feel it’s a richer experience, with a more assured director at the helm.
Yes, Return of the Jedi ranks #3, even with the Ewoks. Yub yub! And this is for the original, not the special edition, where all the changes were uniformly awful.
The Force Awakens is a shameless retread of A New Hope, but if you accept that, it’s generally pretty good. I previously ranked The Last Jedi higher, but in retrospect, I think Rian Johnson may have pushed a little too far in subverting expectations for the middle part of a trilogy.
Yes, I really do think Revenge of the Sith is better than four other Star Wars films. That doesn’t mean I think it’s a great movie.
Regarding the above, even my second-worst pick, Attack of the Clones, is still a lot better than the gormless Rise of Skywalker, some of the most ham-handed, graceless “summer blockbuster” film-making ever. The only Star Wars movie where I left the theatre unambiguously disappointed and shaking my head. I am still shaking my head.
Some of these movies I have never seen more than once. If I revisit them, the order above may change.
When I hit a reading slump, as happened when my long commute went away at the start of the pandemic, I often struggle to find a book to get started on. On the one hand, I enjoy giving unknown authors a chance, but this often leads to, if not disappointment, then an underwhelming experience where a book is perfectly decent, but feels like eating a bland meal. It does the job, but nothing more.
In this case, I decided to turn to the author I’ve read more than any other (hardly a novel claim, if you’ll pardon the pun), and tackled Stephen King’s latest, the generically-titled Fairy Tale.
There will be spoilers below. A spoiler-free summation would be: Buy it if you’re a King fan, if you’re not super hardcore about how fantasy worlds should “work”, or if you are a sucker for alternate dimensions/realities–like I am.
The story is divided into two parts. The first third establishes the relationship between Charlie Reade, an athletic 17-year-old high school student, and a reclusive old man named Bowditch, who lives in what is termed a “Psycho house” at the top of a hill on the street where Charlie lives. Charlie hears Bowditch’s cries for help after he has fallen off a ladder while trying to clean the gutters of his house, breaking his leg. Charlie becomes something of a local hero and he and Bowditch form a friendship during Bowditch’s recovery.
After revealing that he has not much time to live, Bowditch tells Charlie about a secret in the locked shed in his backyard, where Charlie had previously heard a strange skittering sound. Describing it as a burden rather than a blessing, Bowditch leaves Charlie his estate, along with some hurried instructions on tape regarding the shed, recorded as Bowditch suffers a fatal heart attack.
Charlie unlocks the shed and enters a tunnel that leads deep down into the earth and eventually emerges into another world with two moons, called Empis.
From here, the story takes on the fairy tale of the name, where the people of Empis, suffer under a curse by a possibly-not-quite-human-anymore king named Elden. The people see Charlie as their saviour prince, which, of course, turns out to be true.
Empis is one of these strange worlds that King likes to write about, mixing high fantasy tropes with anachronistic modern touches, like electric trolleys. King deliberately avoids trying to explain everything. Indeed, Charlie, who narrates the tale, notes this himself, surmising his time in Empis as one with many mysteries left unsolved.
Some might be impatient with the slow burn approach of the story, which spends hundreds of pages in the small town of Sentry’s Rest before moving on to Empis, but in this opening third of the novel King effortlessly makes the mundane not just interesting, but compelling, peppering the story with hints of weirder things to come.
In Empis, the story becomes a retelling of sorts of Rumpelstiltskin, filtered through King’s version of a magical, high fantasy realm where magic exists, both good and dark. There are noble sacrifices, dungeon escapes, gladiatorial games, dubious astronomy, truly evil villains and through it all, King adroitly drops in the kinds of details that make the place and its people feel authentic.
There are also more spiralling staircases in this story than in any other I’ve ever read. If you have an unnatural fear of spiral staircases, be warned!
Overall, I enjoyed Fairy Tale. It may seem trite by now to call any King novel “vintage King” but it fits here. King clearly had a lot of fun creating the world and people of Empis, and fusing it, Dark Tower-style, to our modern one. It even has a happy ending.
Yesterday, I spontaneously decided to start watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on Prime Video. My plan was to split it up over a few days, because even this original, non-extended version, is about three hours long.
I ended up watching the whole thing, of course.
It still holds up. The special effects mostly still hold up, too.
Let me start with a few aspects I didn’t care for, which match my recollection from when the film first came out in 2001 (22 years ago!). Peter Jackson does a great job here, but his strength seems to lay more in the character moments than the giant action set pieces. These set pieces are still well-done, but he has a penchant for showing cuts of slow motion action, which is really hard to pull off without looking hokey. There are times when it just looks hokey.
The score also swells just a bit too much at times, a case where I think less would have been more. But it is still an excellent score, and this is perhaps more something of personal taste.
I’m still somewhat divided over Hugo Weaving’s Elrond. On the one hand, his arch, exaggerated performance does fit with the idea of a thousands-year old elf not exactly being like your regular guy, but it still seems a bit hammy. Just a bit, though.
The cast, in general, though, is outstanding. Jackson knows what he wants from each of them, and he expertly draws great performances from everyone. Ian McKellen provides a definitive performance as Gandalf, and I love that Aragorn is played by Viggo Mortensen, who does not have a typical “hero” voice. Sean Bean dies, of course, but the death scene is both touching and ridiculously over the top. The actors are just fun to watch.
The other two things I’d highlight are the pacing and the writing. The film is a masterclass in moving between quiet, character moments and large (or small) scale action scenes. There is, despite the running time, no flab here, where scenes linger too long, or exist for no reason. The thing moves at just the right speed for nearly three hours.
The writing stays true to the original book (as far as it matters), and the dialogue manages to avoid sounding arch, again mainly due to the great performances of the cast.
Jackson uses the rugged scenery of New Zealand to great effect, of course.
I think I might have an even more favourable view of this movie now because it takes place in an entirely different world with no connection to a larger universe. It’s nice to just soak it in without worrying about how it ties into 500 other LOTR movies, TV shows and whatnot. The characters are not glib, quipping superheroes, which I feel like I’ve seen enough of to last this and several additional lifetimes.
Overall, this was and remains a delight. On a scale of 1 to 10 Gollums Lurking in the Shadows, it rates a 9.
Whitley Strieber returns with another book about the entities he calls the visitors, and while Them is perhaps a bit unfocused and doesn’t tread much new ground, it does allow Strieber to test out some new theories on what the whole visitor experience may mean. The tone is also generally a bit gloomier than it’s been in the past, with less emphasis on the transformative parts of the experience and more placed on the darker aspects–abductions, violent confrontations with civilians and the military, and whether the intentions of the visitors are benign or more sinister.
On the latter, he at least assures the reader that they’re not probably not harvesting us for food, since reports of abductions have dropped off sharply in recent years and if we were a food source, they’d still be ordering take-out, so to speak.
Apart from one late chapter, this book does not cover his own experiences, except mentioning them where relevant to others he discusses.
The first half of the book consists of letters pulled from the 200,000+ Communion letters archive, with each followed up by an analysis. Each case is chosen to help illustrate a particular aspect of the visitor experience, and the overall impression one gets–if the assumption that everyone having these experiences is not simply experiencing these things in their minds–is that the visitors are not a monolithic entity with a single purpose, but rather an assortment of factions, some with more noble goals (help us evolve), others less so (using us as playthings).
A point Strieber drives at repeatedly, is that the visitors themselves are responsible for all the secrecy concerning their presence, and governments and their agencies have been compelled to play into this, creating a system of classification that has perhaps forever insured the full truth of what is happening will never be known. The tremendous amount of money the Pentagon spends that goes unaccounted for is no flight of fancy, and Strieber suggest it may be funding vast projects the public is utterly unaware of.
One of the more interesting aspects of the visitor experience that Strieber has talked about before is how it might relate to death, but while he brings it up multiple times here, he makes no further attempt to better explain or theorize on the connection, steering the reader toward other books of his, such as The Afterlife Revolution. Understandable, perhaps, but still disappointing.
The second part of the book mainly covers how the government and military have helped to cover up what is happening, then ends with a chilling chapter on how Strieber himself has been targeted recently for harassment, via hacking of his website, as well as intrusions into his home that compelled him to journey overseas to finish the book. It ends, as he notes so much of the visitor experience has, without any clear answers.
If you’ve read his other books on this topic, you won’t find a lot that is truly new here, but he still explores the subject in a way I find measured and compelling, never making bold claims about things he does not know, but neither standing back as a supposedly detached observer. As I’ve said before, if this is all an act, it is convincing enough to be indistinguishable from reality.
My biggest complaint is that the book never really pulls together in an overall narrative, it reads as more an overview on several broad aspects of the visitors, UAPs and government secrecy. But it covers these things well, and the book is an easy recommendation for anyone interested in the topic of the visitors or UAPs/UFOs.
(And yes, the title is a direct reference to the 1956 science fiction film about giant ants, Them.)
I have a folder for blog ideas in Obsidian (my latest attempt to unify my note-taking with a platform-agnostic solution) and this is what I wrote for reference:
Jurassic World movies
Marvel movies
Star Wars
16 Avatar sequels
Am I suffering blockbuster fatigue? Let’s find out!
One small pandemic changes everything
Another topic I pondered was how the pandemic cured me of going to the theatre to see movies. In early March 2020 a friend and I went to see Onward, which was a perfectly cromulent second-tier Pixar movie. A week or so later, all theatres shut down and by the end of March Onward was already streaming on Disney+. It would be a long time before theatres opened again.
Before that happened, I got a mirrorless camera (January 2021) and Nic and I substituted birding for going to movies. I find the birding a lot more enjoyable:
More exercise
We get outside
You don’t have to be quiet for multiple hours, which is a weird way to socialize when you think about it
Birds are neat! And real!
I enjoy going out and shooting photos in a general sense
Most stuff ends up on a streaming service or can be rented on-demand just a few months later (or even sooner)
Now that theatres are open again, I have no desire to go back, because birding is better and I’m fine waiting for big releases to come to streaming later (or skipping them entirely). Why is that? Let’s go through my bullet list in order.
Dinosaurs went extinct, dinosaur movies refuse to die
Jurassic World movies
I saw the original Jurassic World in 2015. To me, it felt like a basic retread of the original, albeit with the twist of adding “What if they actually opened the park, THEN everything went wrong?” but with unappealing or uninteresting characters. It also felt a bit mean-spirited and cynical. I had no interest in seeing the sequel Dark Kingdom, and even the usually faithful pull of nostalgia couldn’t convince me to see Dominion, either.
All three movies still made a ton of money. I just didn’t care about them anymore. They felt like product, not actual stories that needed to be told. Maybe I was becoming cynical!
IDK about MCU LOL WTF
Marvel movies
The fact that we have an abbreviation–MCU1Marvel Cinematic Universe to the one caveperson reading this and didn’t know.–to describe Marvel movies says a lot about how they are intended to be consumed: fully and completely. I did my part, watching all the movies as soon as they came out, starting with Iron Man in 1899 and going up to Avengers: Endgame in 2019 (I also saw Spider-Man: Far From Home in theatres, but this felt more like a dénouement to everything that came before). Then the pandemic hit, though the MCU movies still released in theatres, starting with Black Widow in July 2021.
With Disney+ arriving just before the pandemic, the MCU became even more of an obligation if you wanted to keep up on all the continuity. Now you had the movies (Phases 3, 4, 5, 297, etc.), plus Disney+ series that sometimes led directly to movie plots, with TV series WandaVision leading to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness being a prime example. I kept watching the movies (on streaming) and shows (also on streaming) but started to let things slide. I skipped The Eternals entirely. I have not watched Wakanda Forever, and I don’t give a flying fig about the new Ant-Man movie (which is apparently a not-uncommon sentiment).
At an undefined point, the fun of watching started to feel more like an obligation. I don’t want everything to be connected. I just want separate, entertaining stories. I don’t need Easter eggs, I want a self-contained plot that works without having to reference everything that came before it. I get that some people absolutely adore the continuity, but for me, it now feels more like a burden that gets in the way of simply enjoying the movies and shows. Also, it doesn’t help that a lot of the Marvel stuff has become fairly empty CGI spectacle, the formula well-honed and predictable.
I had to look up what the next film is (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) and it’s another that I will get around to watching eventually. Maybe.
I have a bad feeling about this
Star Wars
You could argue that Disney has cranked out too much Star Wars stuff–and there is merit in that argument–but the biggest issue is that after acquiring the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas, they started with a new trilogy of movies with no vision or purpose for being, other than to be more product and sell more merchandise. The first movie (a monster hit, showing the pent-up demand for more Star Wars) was a retread of A New Hope, but had some engaging new characters and held out some promise. The next two movies undid that promise, the first (The Last Jedi) by trying to deconstruct Star Wars a little too much, and the last (The Rise of Skywalker) by being a relentlessly stupid and inept piece of film-making. After that movie, I had no confidence in what Disney might do with Star Wars, so I’ve only dipped my toes in other efforts:
Rogue One. A standalone (!) story that serves as an immediate prequel to A New Hope. Pretty good.
Solo. Completely unnecessary and a mediocre movie. The first real sign that the Star Wars franchise had no firm creative control at the top.
The Mandalorian. Pretty good, actually! Set in the post-Return of the Jedi era, it riffs on the familiar, but has lapses into shameless fan service.
The Book of Boba Fett. Also known as Mandalorian Season 2.5. Just OK, really, and annoying that they tied the ongoing Mandalorian storyline into it (there’s that continuity thing again).
Obi-Wan Kenobi. Not bad, but a downer, despite the fact that I love Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Kenobi.
I’ve yet to watch Andor (which I hear is quite good, but also, understandably, also a downer). Overall, it feels like the TV part of Star Wars has fared better than the vision-free, fan service-heavy movies. Not all hope is lost, here, though I have to admit, I would still be reluctant to see a new Star Wars film in a theatre. I can’t imagine anything at this point that would spark more interest in me than, “hmm, interesting.”
James Cameron’s head in a jar to direct Avatar 17
16 Avatar sequels
I saw an interesting line about how the Avatar sequel, The Way of Water, could gross $2 billion (as of this post it’s just under $2.3 billion worldwide) and still be culturally irrelevant, and I think that’s accurate. People will watch it and its inevitable sequels. They’ll make billions of dollars, but they’ll have no real impact otherwise. They’re just big movies with dazzling effects and technology, telling familiar stories in entertaining and, dare I say–crowd-pleasing–ways. And that’s all fine! But it’s not enough to get me into a theatre because I’m way past “dazzling special effects” being a draw. Good writing may not be something sexy you can market, but it’s a lot more appealing to me now that I’m not a hormone-boosted 15-year-old. But even good writing probably wouldn’t get my butt into a theatre seat.
It might get me to check out a film on streaming, though.
In the meantime, most of my current movie-watching has been a very specific kind of nostalgia, re-watching science fiction movies of varying quality from the 70s through the 90s. I started watching Independence Day again, which in many objective ways, is a bad movie. Heck, the disaster porn doesn’t even start until 45 minutes in (1996 was a simpler time). And yet, I watch because it’s dumb, but easy to digest, with no commitments. It’s anti-MCU.
Technically, this is a re-re-review, because I saw this when it was originally released in 1982, then again in 2009 in anticipation of the sequel, TRON: Legacy, and again just now, in the year 2023.
It holds up! I’ve seen comments about how the plot is nonsensical or difficult to follow, but it’s really not. If you listen to what the characters say, they provide all the details you need. Basically, the programs need to blow up the Master Control Program (MCP) to clear the name of real-world Flynn, and to free all the programs being held under the MCP’s giant virtual thumb, so they can work for their users again. It’s basically a quest to defeat the Evil Wizard, but in a mainframe.
The dialog and exposition can be a bit clunky at time, and the religious references seem a little weird, like an idea not really fleshed out, and you really do need to just give yourself over to the whole system of metaphors they use to depict the inner world of the computer and programs. But if you get past these things, everything else holds up surprisingly well, more than 40 years later.
The good guys are earnest, particularly Bruce Boxleitner’s Tron character. The MCP is a complete bastard right from the start, gleefully blackmailing Dillinger in the real world and literally torturing his counterpart Sark to keep him in line in the virtual one. His dismissive “End of line” when he’s done speaking is awesome.
Jeff Bridges, who was in his early 30s, looks incredibly young and plays Flynn with the breezy goofiness that says this is Jeff Bridges.
The electronic score (with some orchestral parts done at the insistence of Disney) is perfectly pitched at capturing the otherworldly feeling of Tron. Its main theme is one I have been able to recall easily since first hearing it in 1982. The video game-inspired sound effects are also deployed to terrific effect, with buzzes, burbles and blips underscoring how different this world is, yet being perfectly suited to it.
And of course, the visuals. In 1982 CGI was new, expensive and labour-intensive. Stuff that can be rendered on a home computer today in minutes took hours for a single frame back then. And still, two things really stand out for me: The design of the CG world, and especially the vehicles, and how the simplicity of everything is actually a strength rather than a liability. Today, everything could be rendered in far greater detail, but in a way that would take away from the virtual verisimilitude. The simple clean lines and curves of the light cycles, or the minimalist design of the tanks makes them fit into this stark world of lines and shapes, pulsing with light. A denser, more sophisticated look would probably have been distracting. The people behind TRON had limited resources, but used them to great effect.
I saw The Black Hole originally in 1979, when I was 15 years old. I thought it was great. I bought the novel!
I never read the novel.
I wonder if I still have it stuffed in a box somewhere?
Last year, I watched the movie again on Disney+. I think it was the first time I had seen it all the way through since 1979. It’s goofy and weird, very un-Disney in many ways. I suspect it got the green light due to the success of Star Wars, but at its core, it’s actually more of a horror/fantasy film dressed up in science fiction clothes.
Yesterday, I saw a YouTube video about it and thought, “I’ll just watch the opening sequence” and ended up watching the entire movie again and going to bed late. And it’s not even a good movie, really.
This isn’t a review, as such, but I wanted to collect some thoughts on the movie while it was fresh in my mind. This may be a bit scattershot!
The film starts with a black screen while music plays over it for about two minutes. I have no idea why. Are they trying to set the mood? Are they showing just how black a black hole really is?
They obviously had no actual visual reference for a black hole in 1979, but I like to think they could have come up with something better than what appears to be blue water swirling down a kitchen sink drain.
I like that they did some scenes in zero gravity, even if it looks a little goofy. There’s at least a pretense to realism here.
The cast is chock-full of big stars, very unusual for any Disney pic back then.
Maximilian Schell is great. I love his giant mop of hair and intense gaze. I also like that the killer robot also has the same name.
Speaking of the robots, it’s super obvious that none of them are made of metal, though they are obviously supposed to be. Vincent and BOB come off the worst here, each of them looking like painted wooden toys. With lasers.
And speaking of lasers they have this satisfying sound that is like a thunky pew-pew.
The scene with Vincent and BOB playing what amounts to a video game with the menacing former head robot is just weird. I’m not sure why it’s even in the movie. Maybe they felt they built all these cool robots, they were going to use them, dammit!
The Cygnus is an amazing ship design. It’s been described as a cathedral in space. If they ever did a remake, the ships need to be miniature models, not CGI. Get Chris Nolan to direct, he’s totally into that stuff.
The special effects are all over the place in terms of quality. The matte paintings (of which the film had roughly a billion) are for the most part excellent. The meteor tumbling down the interior of the ship could pass for an FX shot made today. But other stuff, notably most of the green screen work, is terrible, like they either ran out of money for those shots, or handed them over to an intern who never got hired on full-time.
The score (by Bond composer John Barry) is as weird as so many other things in this film. During action scenes, the score picks up, but it doesn’t really reflect the action, it’s just bombastic music.
I love how Schell scolds the robot like a misbehaving child after it slices and dices Anthony Perkins’ character. “Maximilian, you shouldn’t have done that!” Maybe this is where J.J. Abrams got the idea to name his company Bad Robot.
I love the initial mystery of discovering a ship that’s been missing for 20 years, hanging out next to a black hole without getting sucked into it. Alien (released the same year!) has the same kind of vibe in its early scenes, but with a lot more swearing.
The ending is still totally bonkers no matter how many times I see it. Schell and Maximilian appear to embrace while floating in space, then, uh, merge? So now Schell is inside Maximilian, his eyes looking about frantically from inside the robot’s visor as it stands on a rocky spire in…hell? Then there’s a long glass hallway (?), an angel (?) and suddenly the surviving members of the Palomino crew are A-OK and heading peacefully toward a shiny planet somewhere on the other side of the black hole. If they do a remake, I’d love to see how they’d handle the ending, though I suspect it would end up being a lot more conventional.
Is The Black Hole a good movie? No. It feels like it wants to be a bunch of different things–a fantasy epic, a horror film, a disaster movie, and the science fiction part is kind of bolted on. It’s an odd, uneven mix.
But the design is fantastic, the effects, though mixed, generally hold up, and the initial mystery is captivating. After that, the film gets a bit thin, and it’s only Schell’s scenery-chewing, the ever-present threat of what will Maximilian do, and Roddy McDowell making pithy remarks that really keeps you interested. And I’ll give a few points to the general destruction of the Cygnus as it drifts to its doom.
Why did I sit through the entire movie again, though? I really can’t say. I will ponder this.
