Recently in Media Category

So Azure and I saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last week. ‘Twasn’t perfect, but at least I can review it in a fitting fashion, like so:

“Mostly Harmless.”*

…and glean some satisfaction in that. And, I suppose, there’s some reassurance in knowing that this film adaptation won’t be regarded as the definitive Hitchhiker’s. Because in my book, that honor is reserved for the Infocom game. What else?

About a month ago, I finished Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”, though I didn’t really put the book to rest for three weeks after. It’s a massive tome; I wasn’t about to re-read it from the start, but the book demanded immediate re-visits, first a page here, then a passage there. And so it stayed atop my nightstand, getting better and better.

It’s a hard book to describe: the 19th-century atmosphere feels as cold as a lake in winter, and a gothic kind of melancholy hangs on every page. The tangled plot grows like a vine, not a flower; the story doesn’t discretely blossom before the reader, so much as it entwines itself around one’s ankles. And then, of course, there’s the magic – this is a book about magic – which feels inarguably historic, resolutely English, and dangerously fey.

Whatever it is, this book is not your run-of-the-mill fantasy.

There’s joy in it, too, but that’s mostly found in Clarke’s language, not the story itself. Her publisher has been aggressively hawking this book as ‘Harry Potter for Adults’, but where J.K. Rowling channels the warm and infectious spirit of Roald Dahl, Clarke delivers a piercing, Victorian wit and humor that’s better compared to Austen or Dickens. And while her book deals with the dire, fantastical and otherworldly, the needling jokes are usually sourced closer to home – like the following, where Stephen Black is unwillingly whisked to a chilling setting by a malevolent fairy king:

The light was watery, dim and imcomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

“This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?” he said.

“My kingdoms?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprise. “Oh, no! This is Scotland!”

And so forth. Anyhow, the book gets a big thumbs-up, from me and Az both. (And we’re not just saying that because the author lives here in Cambridge, too.)

I steeled myself for my upcoming capitalist indoctrination (B-school starts next week) by watching ‘Battleship Potemkin’ on Sunday. The movie, in true socialist form, was free for the masses - it played in a drizzly Trafalgar Square, and featured a thumpin’ new soundtrack composed and performed live by the Pet Shop Boys.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t so much a big spectacle, as a good show. I’d expected a double-dose of high camp; that the synthetic techno bombast of Mssrs. Tenant and Lowe would serve only to make Potemkin seem anachronistic and crude by comparison, probably send the whole thing up as a terribly naïve work — technologically, artistically, politically, historically, whatever.

Instead, it was engaging. The music was surprisingly complementary, at times almost natural, and if anything, made the film seem more contemporary, not less. Given, I actually like the music of the Pet Shop Boys (hence my trek from Cambridge to London), so my opinion is undoubtedly suspect to some, but I’d call it a success, and an artistic one at that.

No, it wasn’t perfect: some passages veered too far to the club sound (IMO, the words “Da!” and “Nyet” do not a natural bass line make), some slower strains went on just a bit (like Phillip Glass pumped full of Red Bull). But pacing, I suppose, is something the revisionist soundtrack composer can’t completely control, and one of the more obvious aspects where early cinema shows its age.

Standing in the rain surrounded by umbrellas wasn’t the best screening venue, but it was memorable. The best seats in the house, alas, were on a red double-decker bus snarled in Trafalgar’s traffic - we watched passengers wind their way to the top deck, sitting high and dry, until a traffic cop finally cleared ‘em out.

came across a truly strange artifact on tv last night, while taking a breather from the war coverage on RAI: the ‘whacketts’ episode of max headroom, a now-quaint cyberpunk TV series from ‘87 which lasted a whole 12 episodes.

in retrospect, Max Headroom’s dystopian production design is unmistakeable from that of ‘Dark Angel’, and while it may have been a ripoff of Blade Runner (hell, what isn’t, these days?), i think it’s now safe to say the series was way ahead of its time.

yet as for why it’s still in rotation, in a somewhat decent timelsot (11ish), on a non-cable network, some 16 years after its cancellation in the U.S., i can’t say. though the italian dub is remarkably well done — as they always are.