In Theaters: Gravity

I'm writing this review under a bit of a time crunch, partly because I want to jump ahead to Halloween stuff but also because Gravity is a film that needs to be caught while it's in theaters, and while it's playing in 3-D on a good large screen. The movie is a rare event, a roadshow spectacle, and that makes it a little hard to judge. The common thinking that if a movie is so dependent on visual splendor that it needs to be seen in the best circumstances to have its full impact, it can't be that good. But the impact Gravity has is so powerful that it feels unfair to downgrade it for its exclusivity. I of course expected great things when the director of Children of Men tackled science fiction (or something like it) again, but had my doubts as to how to sustain the story of two people lost in the void of space. But the film's conceptual simplicity is its great strength, resulting in a disciplined, tense, and beautiful experience, one which shows just how difficult it can be to cling to our lives.

Frasierquest 5.15: Room Service

Lilith: Stan was a contractor we had hired to extend our master bedroom.  It's ironic, isn't it - no sooner do I get the closet of my dreams than my husband comes out of it.

Three straight classics in a row is rare for any show, even one as good and long-lived as Frasier. "Room Service" is, again, an example of bedroom farce, but not quite as pure a genre riff as "Ski Lodge". Instead it's there to move along some character relationships and get even further mileage out of the story of Lilith Sternin, the one woman Frasier can never keep out of his life. At least here he makes some emotional progress.

For Your Ears Only: Hordes of the Things

Thanks to the rise of nerd and gamer culture (and that can be a mixed blessing, believe you me), fantasy spoofs are pretty easy to find these days. They vary widely both in quality and in approaches to the material, but they all reflect the increasingly mainstream position the genre enjoys in pop culture. So it's interesting to uncover a relatively early attempt at lampooning high fantasy.

Hordes of the Things was broadcast in 1980, in a period of animated Tolkien adaptations, the early Dungeons & Dragons craze, Star Wars and its imitators, and perhaps most significantly, the highly popular, acclaimed science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Hordes is by no means a retread of Douglas Adams' masterpiece, but it's hard to imagine that BBC Radio didn't have it in mind when commissioning this four-part adventure from Andrew Marshall and John Lloyd. (And both were produced by Geoffrey Perkins.) It's not nearly as groundbreaking, but it is a decent collection of jokes deflating the seriousness and pomposity of the millions of epic adventures adorning bookstore shelves then and now.

For Your Ears Only: Doctor Who: Excelis Dawns

Available for download at BigFinish.com

The Doctor Who Big Finish audios most often aim to capture the feeling of the TV show, and that's just fine. In aping the episode structures and traditional story beats Who fans are familiar with, the audio dramas tend to explore the cinematic possibilities of the medium, seeking to convey action and thrills without visual aid, and they often succeed. But Excelis Dawns is a break from the cliffhanger approach. The first part of a three-story triptych covering the history of a planet over three eons and three different Doctors, this Fifth Doctor story takes a somewhat calmer approach, focusing on the audio debut of the previously book-only character Iris Wildthyme as well as the establishment of at least one character who will be key to the entire trilogy. (Hint: it's the familiar face in the armor.) It's not always successful but it does some interesting things with the format, and that's always worth paying attention to.

Random Movie Report: Things to Come

As odd as it seems now, for most of the last century of filmmaking, science fiction was a subject the studios didn't give much attention to. When Alexander Korda produced Things to Come (recently released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Criterion after years of public domain dupes), it was a rare attempt at making an A-level motion picture with the future as its subject, something that had not been attempted since Metropolis ten years ago. As spectacle, Things to Come is just as impressive; however, saddled with the burden of adapting H. G. Wells' didactic future history, it runs into some dramatic shortcomings. But even at its preachiest and most nakedly political, the film is a rich visual symphony, a tour de force for director William Cameron Menzies, and an affirmation of a seemingly naive optimism that is often in too short a supply.

In Theaters: The World's End

It may have taken six years, but Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have finally finished the "Cornetto" trilogy. After red zombie horror/romance and a yellow giallo mystery, we reach blue, which is apparently the color of… well, that would be telling. Well I guess it is sort of melancholy, and The World's End is a film primarily about middle age and the fact that you can never go home again. Though more an ensemble piece than a buddy picture, the film is still dominated by Pegg and Nick Frost, giving performances that flip their normal dynamic, and the results are not only extremely funny but dramatically compelling. It's a film about the inevitability of change and how that can be the most terrifying thing of all.

Why There Were No Posts in August

I hope you will understand.

One thing that happened in the meantime was that my Amazon Associates program was abruptly terminated. There's some foo-fer-ah between Amazon and the state of Missouri, which is now charging sales tax on Amazon transactions, so they've suspended Missouri memberships. This is no great loss, as I only once or twice saw an actual payout. In the meantime I get to make the blog less cluttered. I may attempt some kind of monetization in the future but it's not a priority.