[Actually posted a day late & backdated, Because I'm lazy.]
Movies: The Asphalt Jungle , Appointment With Crime
TV: Avatar : The Last Airbender [2x06-2x13]
Books: Einstein's Dreams , My Boring-Ass Life , A Game of Thrones
The Asphalt Jungle
This is the first of No Doubt a long list of noir movies I will be watching in preparation for the Hideout's noir show. CHTr team in a single conversation. The heist itself takes maybe ten or fifteen minutes of screen time, somewhere around the midpoint of the movie.
Instead, the movie works methodically to set up a network of relationships -- this guy works for that guy, who knows this other guy, who's in debt to this third guy, who's adored by this one girl -- that should be familiar to anybody who's played
Fiasco . It sets up the characters with vices, and weaknesses -- oh, this guy will do anything for a pretty girl; this guy is extremely bullheaded; this guy thinks he can double-cross the rest of the team. In modern movies, the heist is this exquisite mechanism, with bits of technology that all interlock perfectly.\u0026amstudio propriety that everybody in the heist gets done in by the vices described in act one. The stubborn heavy can't be bothered with medical care, because he's going to drive to his childhood home... and that does him in. The womanizer waits a little too long watching a dancing girl at a diner... and the cops nab him. The clever double-crossing lawyer can't quite cover his tracks... and his crimes are exposed. But overall you get the idea that modern film has it all wrong: a heist is simple. It's the people that are complicated. And *that's* where the trouble comes from.
In any case, the cast is busy taking notes on this one for stuff we can rip off for the noir show.
st
Airbender [2x06-2x13] Yup, Another bout of Illness equals Another batch of episodes of Avatar
. Two Things really impressed me about this stretch of book two.
First off, I loved the sheer breadth of stuff that They rip off In These episodes. Again, this show is the brainchild of two guys That really, really love anime - But this is an American team putting together the show , and Apparently it's a team That American watches TV and lifts the stuff that it likes. That's how you get "Zuko Alone", Which Is Essentially structured as a season-one episodes
LOST, with a coming-of Sporadic Japanese Informing flashback-age story's present-day Zuko spaghetti-western showdown. Then after
That, They turn around and do "The Chase" s, which is (as far as I can tell) Their take on
BSG 's
"33"
, with relentless pursuers Surprising Our Heroes over and over and over past the point of exhaustion.
By the time the story settles inside the walls of Ba Sing Se, I wasn't totally surprised to see eerie
1984 nods to start cropping up. A lot of the fun of this show is the sheer Variety of western stories they're willing to transpose Into Their magical wuxia world As They go from episode to episode. Also, I Love That they're Continuing what's Basically a dual storyline. They Regularly switch entre Our Heroes and Our erstwhile villains, Prince Zuko and Uncle Iroh. Remember that Zuko's original purpose was to stand around, be ominous, and basically twirl his nonexistent moustache and sneer, \ing to Terms With Feeling betrayed by everybody Who Was supposed to care about him - except for Iroh, Who Seems to embody the show Believes Everything about Virtue. Which is weird, Since he's one of the bad guys.
In Any case, Zuko's rage, Which WAS taken for granted in book one (as Something That Kept the plot going), is now Picked apart and examine in book two. Can this guy ever chill out, or is he just Permanently broken?
Side note: I Was happy to see Some well-done CGI animation cell in the eponymous machine from "The Drill". I'm always happy to see That technique, Whose first major success as a cost-WAS saving measure in
The Iron Giant, find Productive use elsewhere. In this case, itly, or if memories did not exist.
I ADMIT MOST of the time the book bugged me from a world-building angle. For instance, in The World Without memories, "the butcher has to guess at how to carve cuts of meat."
( I'm paraphrasing, Badly.)
But naturally my brain Responds with, "But Without memories, we Would not Have butchers! Heck, Without memories, we Probably Would not Have Moved Beyond a Small Population of African hunter-gatherers - mammalian evolution May Have Been Completely Derailed for that matter, sincere MOST animals Rely on memory to Some Extent ...."
So INSTEAD of thinking about the Implications of a Different notion of time, I Would INSTEAD kvetch Along the lines of, "But the world Would *work * Like That. "Instead, it works Along the lines of" What if the people of Vienna 1905 woke up to find That Time Worked Differently, and They All Worked Differently Accepted That Time, and They All Thought That It always * Had * Work Like That, But Now They Had to make adjustments to account for it? "
That's dream-logic for you, I suppose. In Any case, it's a tiny little volume, a quick read, and a neat collection of ideas. I WAS amused to see That one of the 'fanciful' chapters WAS Basically just Einsteinian relativity, With Some of the constants altered to make the Relativistic effects more extreme. Wikipedia reports That, in fact-, Several of the chapters work Along Those Lines.
together Clerks 2 . So he's a lot more busy, and we get fewer of the day-to-day minutiae. Instead, we get sporadic posts about interesting stories from various sets. Oh, and he picks a fight with a Sarasota-newspaper film critic who made fun of his fanbase. (Ah, there's that hint of 'taking on the internet' I was looking for.)
It also includes \nging something in how the world works, and then exploring the ramifications of that change. Instead,
Firefly
holds back from 'crazy sci-fi land' -- apart from the technology for exploring a new solar system, things seem fairly grounded. The only real crazy sci-fi stuff exists at the edges, with the Reavers and with River Tam -- but even then: no aliens. No faster-than-light travel. No artificial intelligence.
If it *is* science fiction, it's an example that uses the trappings of the genre to tell a story that's just about people.
In the same way that
Firefly is science fiction that doesn't really *do* the sci-fi thing, A Game of Thrones feels like high * The Things in the World That feel counterintuitive and Changing Them To Be awesome. Dammit, we * should * be Able to shoot bolts of lightning from Wants. There * should * be cryptic prophecies That turn out to be true in Properly Ways We Do not Understand 'til it's too late. And all the cool animals Collectively we've imagined * should * be rumbling around in the wilderness. But
Game of Thrones Does not Play That wish-fulfillment card. Basically, the only deep structural aspect of high fantasy That I see in this book is ITS World-building. (You Could Say the analogous thing about Firefly
.)
Martin FOLLOWS That Are Thousands of characters Thousands apart, and LeveraThat manage to sketch in Entire distinct cultures. We see John Snow, in the harsh world of the Black Brothers of the wall. We see Daenerys learn about the nomadic culture of the Dathraki. We come to see Eddard Stark the brutal Machiavellian world of the king's court.
And All Along the way, Martin employs the "misty mountains" trick. This is a phrase COINED by the guys Who write the
Pirates of the Caribbean films, and it describe a scene where (say) some characters pass Some by misty mountains, and one of Them allude to the mountains in passing, But Actually we never go there. They just exist, momentarily, in the background of the story, That There Are Establishing whole swaths of this fictional world and Thatation of this book coming up, Some TV Critics Have These books Compared to
The Wire
, You Could Argue That is Fundamentally show about Baltimore, Which Depicts it as a huge system that's excellent at Preserving the status quo. Yes, it's a status quo of ITS MOST That Keeps improverished people, uneducated, and Imprisoned, But the system does a perfect job of Preserving That state of affairs. And
woe to the person Who tries to change That. So maybe
A Game of Thrones
is, deep down, about the Opposite sort of scenario: Westeros Where the system is a status quo is untenable. This is a system with a weak king, with rapacious would-be usurpers, and with supernatural ou just Threatsay tuned for book two. Daenerys has her own little storyline Among the Dathraki, and ... never really joins the main story. (Her chapters won an award, When collated as a distinct novella.) So nothing ever really pays off at the end, But It's exciting while it Lasts. And
Especially this audiobook edition is well-read by Roy Dotrice
, Who juggles the Dozens of characters and accents admirably. That Said, I feel not Need to rush off and read the next volume. The series Will not Be Finished for years yet, and I trust Are The Remaining volumes similar in tone: horrible Things Happen to continue to Morally-gray people. There Will Be enough time to catch up on it.
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