R.E.M. released 15 studio albums between 1983 and 2011. I tend to group the albums into three eras:
The Early Years. This covers their first four albums from 1983-1986.
The Big Success. This covers their platinum sales era, six albums from 1987-1996.
The Post-Berry Funk. The five albums they were under contract to do after drummer Bill Berry left the band. Covers 1998-2011.
I’ll eventually come back and justify my rankings but for now here are two lists, the first is all 15 albums in chronological order followed by my arbitrary list of best to worst.
Murmur, 1983
Reckoning, 1984
Fables of the Reconstruction, 1985
Lifes Rich Pageant, 1986
Document, 1987
Green, 1988
Out of Time, 1991
Automatic for the People, 1992
Monster, 1994
New Adventures in Hi-fi, 1996
Up, 1998
Reveal, 2001
Around the Sun, 2004
Accelerate, 2008
Collapse Into Now, 2011
My ranking:
Automatic for the People
Lifes Rich Pageant
Monster
Collapse Into Now
Murmur
Reckoning
New Adventures in Hi-fi
Fables of the Reconstruction
Out of Time
Accelerate
Document
Reveal
Green
Up
Around the Sun
It’s a testament to the ultimate resilience and strength of the band that the top five albums encompass their entire 28 year span of releasing albums.
Although I do not listen to it as often these days I still rank Automatic as their best album because it’s a perfectly balanced combination of maturity, experimentation and accessibility. The band went ‘dark’ but lost none of their tunefulness in the process. They also produced some of their most beautiful songs.
Their follow-up Monster nearly matches every strength of Automatic, including having no filler but does so with a completely different sound, as brash, weird and cacophonous as Automatic is quietly majestic. In between the two I’ve placed their final album Collapse Into Now which has the band exiting in fine form with an album that offers a little of everything in an energetic, well-crafted package that recalls their best work while staking out its own identity.
At the bottom of the list is the only R.E.M. album I’d describe as weak. Around the Sun is not a poor effort but much of it has a listlessness that suggests the band was either bored or tired of the whole thing.
Illustrating how whimsically I can change my mind, reference this post in which I ranked the top five R.E.M. albums as follows:
As I love any excuse to make a list this has inspired me to list from best to worst the Pink Floyd albums from 1971 to 1994. I don’t include the pre-1971 material because I am not familiar enough with it to offer up an opinion.
First, here’s the chronological order of the albums:
Meddle, 1971
The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973
Wish You Were Here, 1975
Animals, 1977
The Wall, 1979
The Final Cut, 1983 (minus Rick Wright)
A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987 (minus Roger Waters)
The Division Bell, 1994 (minus Roger Waters)
And here is my ranking, with notes attached:
The Wall. This is a sprawling and at times meandering and indulgent album but when it works it works fantastically well and the shining moments are transcendent ones, from the theatrical opening crescendo and fade to David Gilmour’s soaring guitar that concludes “Comfortably Numb”. The Waters/Gilmour work on this album is consistently strong and the album is the better for it.
Wish You Were Here. More a mood piece than any of the albums on this list, Wish You Were Here is bookended by the long instrumental “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and if you don’t like that song you’re left with all of three others to enjoy. Fortunately even these are terrific. “Welcome to the Machine” is creepily effective, the title track fittingly melancholy, with only “Have a Cigar” being a bit ordinary.
Animals. Bookended by the spare and short acoustic track “Pigs on the Wing” this concept album contains one of the band’s longest songs, “Dogs”, which clocks in at 17+ minutes and it’s on the strength of “Dogs” that I place Animals where I do. The song begins slowly then plays through several movements, using sound effects, reverb and more to capture the feeling of alienation, of drowning in an unhappy world where fairness is a rare commodity and loneliness is in abundance. Not exactly make-out music but a mesmerizing journey.
The Dark Side of the Moon. The biggest problem with this album is that certain parts of it, notably the instrumental “Any Colour You Like” are rather dated, sounding very much of the era they were recorded in. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but you can’t help but imagine people grooving out on the shag carpet while listening to this. The classic tracks here are tight and strong and hold up perfectly 40 (!) years later. Sure, “Money” has been overplayed as much as any other 70s FM hit but even putting it aside you still have “Time”, “Us and Them” and “The Great Gig in the Sky”. More than any of the other albums here, this contains Rick Wright’s strongest contributions.
The Division Bell. This was the last album the band recorded and came seven years after the previous. Much like Dark Side it has moments that firmly tie it to its era, with the ringing guitar of “Take it Back” bringing to mind U2 of all things. At its worst it presents some of the same calculated moves as Momentary Lapse but overall holds together with greater consistency. There are no standout tracks here but Gilmour’s reliable vocals and guitar work, alongside solid contributions from Wright, make this a good effort.
Meddle. An odd album that is the final embrace of psychedelic weirdness before the band would establish its more familiar sound. This is a fairly mellow record, apart from the propulsive opening instrumental “One of These Days”, with most songs feeling like the aural equivalent of a gentle stroll. The oddities come in the form of the bluesy “Seamus” complete with barking dog accompaniment, the breezy confection of “San Tropez” (penned by Waters, of all people) and the mostly instrumental track “Echoes” that comprises the entire second half of the album. Over 23 minutes, “Echoes” drifts from Gilmour’s wistful vocals to strange, even unnerving sound effects and back again. There is no easy way to listen to this album. The shorter tracks and “Echoes” could be from entirely different records. If you’re in the mood for a bit of everything, though, you’re set.
The Final Cut. This is more a Roger Waters solo album than a Pink Floyd effort. Gilmour’s guitar is absent from many songs, he provides only one vocal, and the rest of the tracks are given over to Waters’ overtly political and pessimistic observations of humanity. While there is a consistency in both the music and tone, this is not an easy album to get into, but if you give it time you’ll be rewarded by several standout tracks, from “The Gunner’s Dream” to the now-included “When the Tigers Broke Free” which was previously only found in the film version of The Wall.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Why is this ranked last? It began as a David Gilmour solo effort, and indeed a lot of it sounds like Giilmour’s solo album About Face from three years earlier. I have two major problems with the album. The first is the effort to make it sound like Pink Floyd feels overly calculated, as if the female backing vocals, guitar solos, and themes of alienation were items on a checklist. The other problem is the lyrics. While Waters had his excesses and obsessions, he could craft some nice wordplay. Gilmour, even when helped by others, writes mostly in clichés and catchphrases, tackling ‘big’ ideas with trite phrasing. At best the lyrics stay out of the way, at worst they actively work against the song. “One Slip” is a wonderful sounding track, but the lyrics are awful.
I will, I will she sighed to my request And then she tossed her mane while my resolve was put to the test Then drowned in desire, our souls on fire I lead the way to the funeral pyre And without a thought of the consequence I gave in to my decadence
“Drowned in desire”? “Our souls on fire”? And I’m not even touching the whole “drowned” followed by “on fire” part. This is just bad and emblematic of the album as a whole. There are some fine songs here. I particularly like the opening instrumental “Signs of Life”, the sprawling closer “Sorrow” and “On the Turning Away”, which has a quiet majesty, even if the lyrics are junior high-level simple. Overall, this is easily the slightest of Pink Floyd’s albums and far from essential.
I took advantage of the $15 upgrade for Windows 8 back in October thinking it was cheap enough that if I had any regrets I could just go back to Windows 7 and write off the experience as the equivalent of a lunch in a new restaurant I’d not go back to.
Some four months later I’m willing to say the restaurant wasn’t too bad but the presentation of the menu and dessert could use a little work.
The good things about Windows 8:
I was able to upgrade my existing Windows 7 installation on my SSD quickly and without issue. The whole thing was up and running in less than half an hour.
It works fast and has been extremely stable.
Task Manager is vastly improved and startup items are now easily accessible instead of being tucked away in msconfig.exe.
Some of the Metro* apps are decent, like the PDF reader and weather. Live tiles can be handy especially if you spend a lot of time on the Start screen (or pin apps — see the ‘bad things’ section below for more).
Windows Defender now does everything MS Security Essentials did, so there’s integrated anti-virus right from the start.
The right-click in the bottom-left corner is handy for accessing items like Control Panel, Device Manager and an admin command prompt.
The desktop is pretty much the same as the one we know and love in Win7 but with lots of small refinements in dialogs for common tasks like copying files.
The flat UI is kind of nice in how it gets out of the way.
The bad things about Windows 8:
Some things don’t seem to work right. I never get notified for Windows Updates, despite having set it up to alert me, so I have to look for them myself, even if they are critical security fixes.
File History, which backs up user data, will appear in Action Center when the drive needs to be reconnected but Action Center never makes itself visible, even when it has multiple alerts.
Discoverability is poor. You get shown a few gestures while the OS is installing but after that you are left to bumble around trying to figure out how to access features. A lot of it is not intuitive (try snapping two apps onto the same screen without reading how to do it first–assuming you even knew it was possible to begin with). Much of the potential of Windows 8 is hidden away and items can be difficult to find even if you know they exist.
The Start screen is okay as a replacement for the Start menu but it’s limited in odd ways, probably as a compromise for working with tablets. Re-ordering tiles is possible but not very flexible and tiles only come in two sizes. The All Apps view is a cluttered mess with no easy way to modify it.
Customization in general is poor. A lot of the UI design is ‘like it or lump it’.
I miss the dedicated links to Documents, Pictures, etc. that appeared in the Start menu. In terms of actual clicks it’s still the same but having to go to a different screen feels more cumbersome. You can bring these dedicated folders up by starting File Explorer but it still feels inelegant. I’d at least like to pin shortcuts to these folders on the taskbar but it can only be done on the Start screen. Boo.
You get one choice for window titles: black. If you don’t like it, too bad. If you selected a dark border color for your windows, it’s even worse, as those window titles will now be illegible. I’m not sure why this can’t be customized.
Most of the included apps (mail, photos, etc.) are half-baked and feature-poor.
The store (equivalent to Google Play or Apple’s App Store) has a fairly small selection and is missing some fairly big name apps. On a desktop machine this isn’t as big a deal because if you want Facebook, you can just hit the website. On a tablet this is more of an issue.
I spend nearly all of my time in the desktop away from the Metro* interface (apart from starting programs and occasionally checking the weather or something) and here the experience is so similar to Windows 7 but with (mostly) improvements I don’t regret making the switch to Windows 8. On the other hand if I was forced back to using Windows 7 it wouldn’t feel like a significant downgrade, either, nothing like going back to, say, Windows XP or even Vista.
Microsoft needs to provide a better experience on the Metro* side of things for (desktop) PC users, though. I doubt we’ll see much of that coming for Windows 8 but I am curious to see how Windows 9 will evolve. I suspect it will either better integrate the disparate Metro and desktop elements or further move away from the desktop in favor of a more touch-based experience.
In all I rate Windows 8 a score of 7 out of 10 tiny Bill Gates.
* it’s not officially called Metro anymore but much like Kleenex, that battle has been lost.
I recently finished reading John Dies at the End by David Wong, editor of cracked.com*. This is not a long book but it took nigh-forever to finish reading because every reading session was started just late enough that I’d nod off within 30 minutes. This is not a knock against the book, it would have happened no matter what I was reading at the time.
This is a silly and plot-light tale that began as an Internet thing™ and eventually evolved into an actual book (which I bought via the Internet, thus completing the circle). It follows a pair of dopey guys in their mid-20s as they fight weird-ass (and I use the term literally) demons and other things that threaten to destroy the world as we know it. Apart from an ending that feels a bit like “Uh, how do I wrap this all up?” the journey is fast-paced, absurd and often very funny. The sub-genre of funny horror is ill-served so this is a welcome addition to it.
If you are a humorless monster (and I use the term literally) you may not find this to be a literary masterpiece but that’s okay. There’s already a sequel out for you to froth over. I’m not picking it up yet because it’s still out of my price range but I will eventually. Sorry, Mr. Wong–if that’s your real name (spoiler: it’s not).
* I still can’t decide if Cracked was an excellent alternative to Mad magazine or a shameless ripoff. Probably a little of both. The website is nothing like the magazine of yore, which is not a bad thing. It’s just a web thing.
I read the short story “Throttle” by Joe Hill and Stephen King. It was originally part of a tribute to Richard Matheson called He is Legend (which I’ll likely get to soon) but was recently made available as a standalone ebook. It’s inspired by Matheson’s classic “Duel” (best known as the 1971 Spielberg TV movie) but this variation of the theme, in which a group of bikers led by a father and son are chased by an anonymous trucker through the desert felt a little flat. Unlike the original story, the motivation of the unseen trucker is eventually revealed. Not only is it a huge coincidence but it also makes the story feel a little pat. The father/son conflict among the bikers seemed more to provide a B plot when the truck wasn’t bearing down on them than anything else. It’s not a bad story but it doesn’t really capture the tension of the original. But hey, 99 cents!
A.D. After Disclosure by Richard M. Dolan and Bryce Zabel is one of those speculative books I loved as a kid and still enjoy as a world-weary and skeptical adult. The premise of the book is simple: What if there are intelligent non-humans on the planet right now and their presence is revealed to the world, whether through some undeniable event (a mass sighting of UFOs) or through disclosure (a presidential address in which all the conspiracy stuff of the Majestic 12/Roswell, etc. are all but confirmed)? Through nine chapters the authors explore how disclosure might be handled and what the effects on the world would be. Most scenarios are fairly grim, with long-term social disorder, riots and turmoil as people panic at the thought of an undoubtedly superior species being here alongside us. The book also explores in detail the purpose and motives of the ‘gatekeepers’ who they believe already have confirmation of the ‘others’ as the authors call them and go into detail (and conspiracies!) over how the mass media, working alongside and sometimes taking direction from the government, has stuck to a narrative of ridicule and scorn, to insure the public never takes these ‘little green men’ seriously.
At least we have UFO Hunters on G4.
While the authors clearly believe that the government or some shadowy part of it is concealing the presence of aliens/intelligent non-humans they admit to being uncertain as to who exactly these aliens are and offer speculation that covers everything from time travel to sentient machines. They also believe there is more than one species here and each group may have different purposes or motivations. Some may be here to help, some to harm. Why are they being so secretive? The authors never provide a firm answer but suggest that the repeated sightings and encounters over the last 70 years may be part of a campaign to acclimate us to their presence before the big reveal. They also suggest that our own rapidly advancing technology (singularity by the mid-21st century, baby) may force the hand of the aliens and/or government.
The speculation put forward is interesting, if not revelatory, and fun to think about. The authors get Very Serious regarding secrecy and clearly mistrust government and the media, so if you’re inclined to be a distrustful sort this may resonate with you. I found it a mite overbearing at times but if you assume the authors are being honest, you can understand their conviction because they paint a picture of a government system that has been willfully misleading its people for many decades.
As a popcorn book, I had a decent time with it. Now I must go stare at the sky and ponder.
(This review was originally posted on Broken Forum.)
John Scalzi’s novel Redshirts is pretty close to what you expect from the title, assuming you know the pop culture reference. In the original Star Trek series a group of main characters would go on an away mission and bring along one or two ensigns, typically dressed in red shirts. Often enough for it to be a seeming pattern, these ‘redshirts’ would die in some horrible way. You always knew who was going to die because it was never one of the main characters (killing main characters is incredibly trendy now with TV series,but back in the 1960s it was relatively rare). Redshirts is set in a Star Trek-like universe where a group of ensigns aboard the Universal Union’s flagship Intrepid begin putting the pieces together and realize that they are all in danger of expiring in horrible ways if they don’t do something.
That something comprises the bulk of Redshirts’ story, one told in a fast-paced style with characters volleying witty rejoinders like phaser fire. Although there are some obligatory touching moments, most of the story is played for laughs and succeeds thanks to a consistent stream of absurdities and the ensigns’ collectively deprecating reactions. Naturally there is also time travel and the story ends with a series of codas that wrap things up in a somewhat gimmicky but still effective manner.
It’s a short, light read and just about the perfect summer book to lose yourself in for an evening or two. Recommended.
I am not the fastest reader so it usually takes me a few weeks to plow through a book. In the case of Wildwood Road (Christopher Golden) I was able to finish it in a mere six days. This was a nice change of pace–a novel that tells its story without any real padding. The downside is the experience almost felt too brief and a bit perfunctory.
It tells the tale of a nigh-perfect couple living in Boston and how a few too many drinks at a masquerade party leads to nearly running down a mysterious little girl on a quiet night road. From there things get weird as Michael the guilty husband tries to set things right by taking the girl back to her home, a ramshackle old house on top of a hill that seems to be haunted by…things. These ghosty creatures do a number on Jillian the wife to scare off the husband from pursuing matters further. More to the point they turn her into Ultra Bitch, which is kind of fun to watch. Golden does a good job in making her a wildly unpredictable force and I was actually fooled–whether by design or not–by a scene in which a friend is asked to ‘babysit’ her, the outcome of which I hadn’t predicted. I was less convinced by the depiction of memories as physical things you can pluck from the air as they float by.
Oh, and the little girl, she wore a peasant blouse and blue jeans. I remember this because Golden mentions it approximately five thousand times over the course of the novel.
The story is told with economy but the omniscient voice is perhaps a little too all-seeing as it hops from character to character. There is very little for the reader to work out for himself as everything gets neatly explained in time. In a way it’s nice to not have things remain murky just for the sake of conjuring up an atmosphere of mystery, but a little more subtlety would have worked, too.
Overall this was a fast, enjoyable, but unremarkable read, a novel I would describe as solidly good.
Prometheus is the sort-of prequel to Alien. I say sort of because the events don’t lead directly into Alien but rather lay some of the groundwork for the series. Sort of. Unfortunately that groundwork is a shambles, hobbled by a muddled script and characters that serve as little more than vessels for plot devices. The saving grace, as one might expect of a Ridley Scott film, are the visuals. They are arresting and spectacular but ultimately provide nothing more than a gloss to a rather poorly-made movie.
Starting from the premise of disparate ancient civilizations all producing the same star map, Prometheus goes on to have billionaire Peter Weyland in the year 2093 launch a ‘trillion dollar’ space expedition (so I guess he’s actually a trillionaire) to find the ‘engineers’ that apparently seeded life on Earth and inspired the star maps of all the different ancient civilizations. The expedition features the titular space ship and a crew of 17 whose names are conveniently written across the front of their space helmets so the audience can remember who is who.
They arrive at LV-223, just a hop and skip over from the infamous LV-426, home of face huggers and other bad things but no one on the Prometheus knows anything about aliens with double mouths, acidic blood and a strong desire to kill all humans. They are on a mission of science! Except they actually aren’t because the infirm Weyland, who has faked his death for no apparent reason, is secretly onboard the ship and hopes the engineers will help save him from his old man disease or make him young again or something because if they could make humans, surely they can fix old man disease, right? Right.
Also onboard is Vickers, who is revealed late in the movie to be his daughter, as if it’s supposed to be a shocking moment. Her character is the alleged commander of the mission, though she seems hostile and indifferent to everyone and everything, possibly related to unspoken daddy issues. Her character is completely superfluous and unlikeable as a bonus. That she gets squashed by a rolling space ship would be considered a small payoff if it didn’t come so late in the film.
Naturally there is also an android, this time played by Michael Fassbender. He is the son Weyland never had or some nonsense like that. Mainly it seems like every Alien movie, even a sort-of prequel, needs an android so here is David. David might be described as a paranoid android, as he engages in a lot of quirky and vaguely (and sometimes overtly) menacing behavior. While Fassbender is interesting to watch, the character is a puzzle piece that is never explained, an Ash without motive.
After discovering artificial structures on the surface of LV-226 — by someone literally spotting them through a window on the Prometheus — the movie sets about with the worst science team in the history of forever exploring the mysteries therein. It starts with cool shots of ATVs scooting off of Prometheus and heading to the structures because there seems to be a rule that you can’t park your space ship close enough to just walk over. Maybe they were worried about getting a ticket.
The crack team begins its work. As they enter the structure the doctor guy notes that it has a breathable atmosphere (explanation: none). To prove it he laughs, takes off his helmet then laughs some more. When he doesn’t keel over dead everyone takes off their helmets. This is bad procedure for several reasons. Firstly, without knowing the source of the breathable atmosphere you also don’t know if the unknown source might suddenly cut off, leaving you to die within seconds from the otherwise deadly poisonous air. Secondly, with their helmets off it makes it that much harder to remember the character names.
After finding a room filled with vases that leak black goo that is probably alive, possibly sentient and very bad indeed, the crew returns to the ship. But no one notices that two of the crew have wandered off. One is a geologist who is ‘in it for the money’ and shows his contempt for the mission via a Mohawk haircut and piping weed through his space helmet. But he does have fancy probes that scoot through the alien structure and map its interior. Then he gets lost. The guy with the mapping probes.
Getting lost with him is the biologist. He goes back to the room filled with mysterious and seemingly alive black goo. When the goo resolves itself into a snake-like thing that rises out of the goo, the biologist does what any trained professional would do — he leans forward and tries to pet it like a kitten. He ends up being killed by the snake, which is pretty surprising! Didn’t see that coming.
Meanwhile the android infects a doctor onboard Prometheus with the goo for no given reason. The doctor starts to Go Bad but it’s okay because Vickers is there to ice (er) him with a flamethrower. Also the geologist, who got lost with the biologist, turns into a zombie but he gets taken out, too. Then Vickers sleeps with the ship’s captain. Or maybe that happened before. Anyway, the doctor also sleeps with his wife, whose name is SHAW because that is on her helmet. Shaw becomes pregnant with a babby except it was earlier revealed that she can’t get pregnant but now she is — HOW WEIRD IS THAT? She tears off into a room with an all-purpose medical pod and programs it to REMOVE THE BABBY. Except the medical pod is made for men only, kind of like Dr. Pepper or Irish Spring soap. Shaw is smarter than the machine, though, so she orders it to just cut open her stomach and yoink out whatever is in there (well, not her stomach, obviously, but whatever she might be ‘pregnant’ with). The machine complies and in loving detail pulls out a tentacled something or other that squirms about terrifically in the pincers that hold it. Shaw leaves after getting her stomach stapled and thanks to advanced 21st century drugs seems no worse the wear.
So, the black goo. It apparently is what creates or modifies life. The engineers abandoned the goo moon of LV-226 but left piles of their ships buried beneath its surface for some reason (the ships are the same as the one discovered at the start of Alien). They dress up in suits that explain the look of the famous Space Jockey from Alien. There are weird holographic ‘security camera’ projections that show these guys all fleeing in terror from something then dying somehow in a big pile. Why these holograms show them running but never reveal what they are running from is never explained. Maybe the tell-all hologram got corrupted by black goo. One of the engineers had his head cut off so the crew take this two thousand year old head back to the ship and somehow their medical machinery revives it and it explodes. SCIENCE.
All right, it seems they aren’t getting the answers they want here what with everyone dying and things exploding, but Weyland is not to be deterred. There is a single life sign being picked up by lost dead geologist’s probes and they find out that it’s an engineer in a stasis tube. David the android has been studying their language, which I guess did not evolve in any way over thousands of years, and speaks a few words of greeting to the engineer after they force him to wake up. The engineer rips David’s head off and kills everyone he can get his tremendously large albino hands on. This is what you call waking up in a bad mood. SHAW and VICKERS escape.
Back on the ship, the captain (who is not actually in charge of anything except for flying the ship) and two crew whose names I can’t recall because they never got helmets and only had a few lines each thinks it might be time to leave. The engineer thinks the same thing and jumps into the pilot seat of his Uterean craft. David the android tells Shaw, who escapes the alien ship, that the engineer is going to deliver some goo to Earth. Probably not a good thing for Earth. Shaw tells the captain the alien ship must be stopped but they are a team of SCIENCE , not the military so the best the captain can do is ram the Prometheus into the alien ship as it takes off. Which he does. Shaw and Vickers are scrabbling about on the surface as the alien ship comes crashing down in slow motion. Shaw leaps out of the way but Vickers forgets how physics works and as the alien ship rolls like a giant wheel toward her, she keeps running away from it in a straight line, hoping that somehow she will outrun it. She does not and gets smooshed.
Shaw goes back to the lifeboat/medical pod left behind and oh dear, that tentacled thing is now 50 times its original size and probably hungry. David the android’s head is still functional despite being removed from his body and landed conveniently close enough to a communication device. He contacts Shaw and warns her that the engineer is out and about. Sure enough he shows up and is very mad because they smashed his ride and he’ll show that woman what’s what. Shaw then introduces tentacled thing to the engineer and escapes again. The tentacled thing shoves a tentacle down the engineer’s throat in order to deliver a final shot SURPRISE.
Shaw and David the android’s head decide to commandeer another alien ship (remember, the moon is littered with them) and take off to the engineer’s home planet because, well, because.
THE END.
Okay, looking over this, I realize it’s more a plot summary than a review but in summarizing I am hoping to capture how inane, illogical and plain dumb the plot is. This is a movie trying to be deep, profound and meaningful and failing. And it fails because Alien was a neat horror movie set in space and trying to build it up into more was a bad idea in the first place. It also fails even when you strip away its metaphysical musings and simply take it as a horror/action movie because it is neither scary nor filled with satisfying action.
But yes, the visuals are great.
I give Prometheus 4 out of 10 Uterean ships and one of those is for the visual effects. Maybe two.
I recommend checking out this Broken forum thread on the movie for a rollercoaster ride of anticipation, disappointment, resignation and in a few odd cases, absolute love for what Ridley Scott hath wrought.
I bought The Keep in 1982. It only took me 30 years to get around to reading it. Even better, I read it in a format that was unheard of back then, as I picked up the ebook version on the cheap from kobo.com last year.
This was one of a number of horror novels I bought back in the early 80s after Stephen King (you may have heard of him) ignited my interest in the genre (I had bought other books, notably The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror prior but stuck mainly to science fiction otherwise).
F. Paul Wilson’s writing of the story is utterly clear — this is not a tale filled with ambiguity, though there is a mystery when the story begins in 1941, as Nazi Germany continues its conquest of Europe. After a brief prologue the main characters are introduced — a sympathetic German captain named Woermann, his villainous counterpart, Major Kaempffer, a Jewish professor and his daughter and the two mortal enemies of Glenn and Molasar.
When the Nazis set up a defensive position in a creepy ol’ keep in the Romanian Alps it doesn’t take long for very bad things to begin happening. The treasure hunting adventures of a pair of soldiers unleashes a very ancient evil in the keep and leads to a different soldier being murdered every night. Woermann, appalled by the Nazis but loyal to the German army, sends a wire requesting aid and gets it in the form of a vile SS major and his commandos. The mysterious murders continue and in desperation they turn to the Jewish professor to help uncover what is killing the soldiers and ultimately how to stop whatever is responsible.
The question of ‘why not just leave?’ is addressed early on as Kaempffer rules out leaving because it would make him look weak just prior to him being promoted to running a new death camp in Romania. He sets out a schedule by which they must resolve the matter, after which he’ll blame everything on Woermann before moving on.
Wilson neatly draws all of the players together and the initial series of murders is handled effectively, with whatever force is responsible literally creating darkness around itself before viscously ripping out the throats of its victims. For added fun, it briefly re-animates a pair at one point to go flop on the major as he lay in his bed one night. There are a number of twists that are presented broadly enough that they didn’t surprise me, but it was still fun seeing the characters react to events as they unfolded. There is a certain melodrama to some of the passages, especially those between the daughter Magda and Glenn, the reluctant champion of Order who is tasked with vanquishing the evil force trapped in the keep but the overall tone is as realistic as one might expect in a story about ancient evil mucking about with Nazis.
The ending is satisfying, albeit predictable and I was pleased it did not mine the cliches of being Grim Dark™.
This was a quick and enjoyable read. Wilson has no filler here, just a straight-up and ultimately heroic tale mixed in with some early and effectively creepy scenes.
I finally decided to check out James Herbert, the popular English horror author who has enough cachet (and sales) to warrant his own section in most bookstore horror sections. I didn’t do any real research in picking a title, I just read a few descriptions and grabbed the first one that sounded good.
That turned out to be his 1975 novel The Fog (no relation to the John Carpenter movie of the same name). It’s his second novel and understandably still has some rough edges as befits an early book. It has for the most part aged well — you could easily plop the premise down in present-day England and not have to change much at all. I also like the conciseness of the story. There is little flab here, no long digressions or exposition. While this at times makes the writing and characterizations a bit perfunctory (and Herbert occasionally spells things out a little too explicitly, telling rather than showing) it does result in a snappy narrative.
The plot is science fiction horror, revolving around the accidental release of a biological warfare agent into the English countryside. It emerges as a yellow fog from a crevice and anyone who comes into contact with it is driven batty, some sooner than later. The story revolves around a government team and an unwitting immune individual working to contain and/or destroy the fog before all of England goes as mad as George. Along the way there are numerous colorful vignettes in which it is illustrated just how various people go insane. This usually involves violence, sex or often both! The Fog is very old school in the way it entwines sex and gore together, just like those “make out in the car and die” horror movies from the 1950s. The difference is people don’t get killed for having sex, rather they kill as they are having sex.
The nadir of the novel is probably a comprehensive sex scene between the protagonist and his girlfriend with creepy daddy issues. It’s played straight, so to speak, in that neither character is insane (at the time) but it comes off (ho ho) as second rate softcore porn. I’ve no idea if this is a James Herbert thing or if he was just a horny young man at the time he wrote this (checking, he was 32 at time of publication so perhaps horny youngish man is more apt).
The last third of the novel is essentially a chase sequence following the fog. It’s actually more interesting than it sounds, especially given the double whammy of deadly fog combined with nutty people running around in it.
In the end this is a competent but unremarkable novel. I am uncertain if I will read more Herbert.
Actually, this may be the third time I’ve read The Exorcist but the first time as an adult.
The paperback copy I have dates from January 1974 and I tried re-reading it last year but it’s one of my few books that is falling apart. Fortunately the book has been re-released in a 40th anniversary edition in 2011 and was made available in ebook form for the first time.
While subversive kids a generation before read EC comics late at night I read stuff like The Exorcist. Reading it as a child it scared the living heck out of me and I was curious to see how it would hold up with nearly 40 years of pop culture baggage tied to it, not to mention experiencing the story as an adult.
I’m pleased to find it holds up quite well. The events depicted — the demonic possession and exorcism of a 12 year old girl — are no longer frightening but the story is told with grace and economy. In its more reflective moments William Peter Blatty adopts a lyrical quality, heavy with the use of metaphor. Some passages read almost like poetry. And much as he did in the screen adaptation, Blatty lets the story unwind slowly, ratcheting up the tension nicely.
I’ll be damned if I couldn’t help but see Max Von Sydow as Father Merrin, though. He was perfect for the role.
The story is dated only in a few minor ways. The character Chris MacNeil works on a film that features a student protest scene that has a strong late 60s/early 70s vibe to it and most of the characters smoke like chimneys. There’s also a weird thing with Father Karras viewing psychokinesis as plausible and documented and I’m pretty sure it’s still considered unproven, since I’ve not noticed any real-life Carrie episodes on the news of late.
Overall, this is still an excellent book, highly recommended for any horror buff that has somehow managed to miss it.
