April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

Fantasy:
Weis, Margaret, and Tracy Hickman: Dragons of the Hourglass Mage
(I read a short review of this that went something to the effect of, "There are good Raistlin books, and bad Raistlin books, and this is one of the bad ones, totally not worth your time." So I immediately requested it from the library, because it's about RAISTLIN MAJERE, dude.

Even at their best, Dragonlance books are never exactly what I would call good, and this is no exception, but I'm not gonna lie: Weis and Hickman's books have, over the years, brought me countless hours of unironic pleasure, and Raistlin Majere is one of those characters I randomly fixated on when I was young, and will never, ever, not love. I read it in one go when I was sick and bedbound the other day, and couldn't concentrate on crossword puzzles).


Romance:

Dunlop, Barbara: Beauty and the Billionaire
(this is the ebook romance I read when I was supposed to be looking at ebook cataloging, and I must say, it was surprisingly decent. The prose was okay, the sexual tension was good, and--in what was a pleasant surprise to me--the heroine was a successful professional whose career and whose dedication to her career path remained relevant for the entire book. Even when she went to Paris for a makeover. Our heroine, Sinclair is a very good PR manager at a cosmetics company who's being upstaged by a less-competant but more fashionable rival in the company, and when she and her billionaire beau boss talk it over, they decided that the best way to fix that was to give her a more stylish image which would better match the company's target demographic, women in Sinclair's age range who dress stylishly. ( Given the nature of the industry and her job, I am okay with this idea. )

--Never has the unlined face of youth seemed so dumb to me.

...

--Donald Sutherland and Timothy Hutton do not look remotely like father and son. Hutton and Moore don't look alike, either. But I can't quibble, because they all act the fuck out of this movie. I keep having these nagging 20th century upper class psychoanalyst film thoughts, but as films about the emotional travails of privileged wealth go, this is pretty heart-rending, and the casting is a big factor in its effectiveness.

Good movies I have seen lately:

I Capture the Castle: omg, this was fantastic. Solidly filmed, lovely material about characters who are quite likable and interesting. Must read the book, now. Hey, Marc Blucas! I used to have a little crush on him when he was on Buffy, which came back for this movie, although he looks less impressively mountainous when he's not standing next to tiny Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Blade Runner (the Final Cut): No, I'd never seen it before. It was pretty fine. Harrison Ford was pretty fine. My friend from Los Angeles, who was sitting next to me, assures me that LA is exactly like that, including the flying cars, and who am I to argue?

The Music Man: I'm tempted to go into detail on this. It's not as good a movie as the others here--it's an okay movie and an okay movie version of an absolutely brilliant musical that I love--and I've seen it before (both this movie, and a high school production of it that I doubt was as good as I remember it being), but it got me to pondering what I like specifically about Marian as a character. Maybe more on that later.

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: Again, no, I'd never seen it before, although I have seen bits and pieces of the second and third Indiana Jones movies. Christ, it's racist, but what a solid and (despite the racism) enjoyable piece of filmmaking that was. Harrison Ford is pretty fine. So's Marion Ravenwood. More heroines should be named Marian; it seems to lead to good things.


Not so good:

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: I gave up halfway through. It was just as racist as the first, and much nastier and darker to boot, requiring me to grit my teeth a lot harder. Harrison Ford is again pretty fine, but there are better, more pleasant movies in which he's fine, and plenty of them. When I read that Spielberg himself later admitted to not liking it (he thought the only good thing about it was that he met his second and present wife while filming it), I stopped trying to finish it. Ehhh.

Suburban Girl: As I described elsewhere.

I'm really going to need to see this: a live action version of Tezuka's MW, starring my adored, the talented and charismatic Hiroshi Tamaki (aka, the swoonworthy Chiaki from the live-action Nodame Cantabile. Hiroshi charmed equally with sex appeal and by his willingness to make the most ridiculous and undignified faces known to man when his character goofed around with the titular Nodame, played by the equally charming Ueno Juri). I think it very likely that Hiroshi will be just as deliciously watchable as a charming, murderous sociopath as he was as a grumpy conducting student haunted by an uncouth piano student. And he'll be wearing sexy glasses and a nice suit! It's Cillian Murphy as the Scarecrow all over again, folks--I'm a lost cause.

Which reminds me, one of these days, I need to get my hands on the Nodame Cantabile live action DVDs, preferably with English subtitles and in a format my DVD player can handle. That series was incomparably fun, and good enough to rewatch.

I'm much too lazy to actually ever write that post titled, You Know, You Guys Care Way Too Much About Getting Comic Books Turned Into Movies that's been eating at my backbrain for a few months, but Tucker Stone hits a few of the highlights that would be in it--namely, "comic book movies don't sell comics, and never have and possibly never will, but that's not necessarily a bad thing." Maybe I could write a follow-up titled, Are You Sure You Want To Become A Franchise? Or, Okay, So You Are Sure You Want To Become A Franchise, That's Cool, Your Life, But Don't Complain If I Don't Follow.

Getting stuff--particularly finished works--made into movies is really, ultimately, not about artistic validation. Right now, and in the foreseeable future, comics and graphic novels are a tiny, money-poor niche in publishing and in the broader American cultural sphere. It's hard to make a living on them. That's going to remain the case for the foreseeable future. Creators who benefit substantially from the occasional comic/GN-inspired movie will be few and far between (one can always live on the hope of that, I suppose; that's what the American dream is all about--letting gross inequalities of wealth and social resource remain standing on the unshakeable, delusional hope of the disenfranchised that they'll someday win the lottery or invent the perpetual motion machine and be welcomed into the Kingdom); creators who benefit artistically from comic books or graphic novels being made into movies will, I think, be even rarer.*

*Creators who benefit artistically from the creative innovations of film are not so rare.

So all that money and name recognition that gets thrown around with movies? Just remember you're not going to end up getting very much out of it, whether you're a reader or a creator of comics. Comics etc is not a money field. Publishing of any stripe is not a big money field. That is a reality all people who are part of book culture need to accept. I'm not saying, "don't hope and work for financial solvency and god willing, even profitability in book publishing or as a creator," but movies are not the holy grail that will make money issues in publishing go away.

We went to see Prince Caspian yesterday, and despite some very significant departures from the plot of the book, it was excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Edmund was badass. They all were, especially Susan (she was really a lot more badass than she should have been, since she's supposed to hate violence, but it was so cool to see her fight on the same level as her brothers than I cannot bring myself to mind) but aside from the fact that Edmund has always been my favorite character, I was just thrilled to see him essentially get in the last and loudest word on a certain key character relationship. My sister and I cheered.

(Thoughts on Edmund and later Eustace: they are particularly dear characters because they have redemption stories. Both of them start out as somewhat warped, unlikable and rather unhappy people, and both of them become better, happier, and fundamentally more decent because of their associations with Narnia. Most of the other human protagonists start out better off than that, so they don't struggle in quite that way.

God, I hope they do make a The Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. I can take or leave the rest of the books, and have no special desire to see them made into movies, but these adaptations have been a lot of fun, and Voyage is all about the fun.)

Prince Caspian is a hunk. I admit to having blinked a bit over the Susan/Caspian vibe, because in Voyage, Caspian flirts with Lucy, who in this movie is about ten, but they didn't push it too hard, and you can't really blame Susan. Caspian's hot! I'd make googly-eyes back at him, too!

Look, can we talk about Peter O'Toole already? I feel like we've been avoiding this conversation far too long as it is. Let's get straight to it: he's an acting god. He certainly seems to spend a fair amount of time playing god, or at least playing egomaniacs, psychotic killers, paranoid schizophrenics, sex gods, acting legends, and war heroes with disturbed personas. (Except for that one movie with Audrey Hepburn, which is entertaining beyond what it has any right to be. The world didn't need another larceny flick, but it's still a better place for O'Toole and Hepburn screwing around being gorgeous and funny, and How to Steal a Million is a clever and well-executed larceny flick.)

The only downside to his having lived this long is that at age seventy-four, he is no longer the most smokingly hot man I have ever laid eyes on. Still, he was kind enough to do his best work when he was beautiful, most especially in Lawrence of Arabia--which incidentally is the best movie ever made, and for about a week after seeing it for the first time, I replaced my standard greeting of "Hey, it's that guy," with, "Hey, have you seen Lawrence of Arabia?" (Disappointingly, no one's gone for the obvious punchline, or even the really clever less obvious punchline.) I'm not in doubt about my heterosexuality, but if I were, Peter O'Toole would clear things up nicely.

(And if you haven't seen Lawrence of Arabia, you should. It's only the best movie ever made, featuring the best performance of one of the world's greatest actors, living or dead, as one of the most complex and interesting men of the 20th century, but I don't want to oversell it or anything.)


So, O'Toole movies--I'm working my way through the canon as fast as the interlibrary loan can provide it for me. Night of the Generals, I'm only part way through, and it is a freaky, freaky movie, totally a treat for Omar Sharif and O'Toole in the same room, and god, why are they so hot as fucking Nazi officers? O'Toole looks good in a uniform, but he's a lot sexier in his Nazi general coat than he was in the British officer's outfit from Lawrence of Arabia, and it is very distracting. He is like a black hole of charisma; all attention is pulled to him when he's in the room, and it's damned difficult to look at anything else. Good thing he's the star.

Amazingly, he's less scary (so far) as Tanz in Night of the Generals than he was as Jack in The Ruling Class. The Ruling Class is a sick, vicious, twisted, hellaciously funny and weird movie, with just a wisp of a sentimental grounding to turn the ending into a heartache. O'Toole is an English Earl who is also a paranoid schizophrenic; he spends most of the movie believing he's God (he has scary blond Jesus hair and wears a white suit, and talks about love) and the rest believing he's Jack the Ripper. It's hard to say which is freakier. Murderous insanity is terrifying, but the verve and unpredictability of his Christ persona is somehow as unsettling as it is funny. O'Toole equally strong in both aspects, and makes them coherently part of the same madness, no mean trick. He's the reason to watch the movie. Again, it's the good thing he's the star. The other performances in this movie are good, but what drives both the story and the satire is the way that different characters react to Jack's loud, colorful insanity--some with frustration, some with amusement, some with ignorance, all with opportunism--which requires O'Toole to pretty much be the center of every scene in which he talks, and a few in which he doesn't, but does chirp like a bird.

By the way, I would rather by far watch Peter O'Toole chirp like a bird while dressed like Jesus in a lounge suit than watch Nicole Kidman in anything.

Regarding How to Steal a Million. It's not important. It is fun. A lot of movies have been made like this, and there's nothing particularly that requires O'Toole to be there; the character type he plays in it has been played creditably by many a lesser actor. That said, it's O'Toole, and he's a delight to watch, and if the role could have been played by a lesser actor, that certainly didn't stop him from turning in a superior performance--not overacting, mind you; he's charmingly understated. And while for some reason, he's brunet here, he is nevertheless still beautiful, and rather cute with Audrey Hepburn.

Whoa! Weird. A little on the expressionistic side, and not in a good way. Overall, beautiful, highly watchable, and an interesting alternate take on the story.

( Spoilers for series and movie within. )