News and Commentary on Space
Despite all the hype about it being the Best Movie Ever Made! and The Ultimate Entertainment Experience! and whatnot, it looks like Avatar lost the Best Picture Oscar to Hurt Locker, a movie I hadn’t even heard of until about two weeks ago.
Heh. I think I just schadenfreuded.
Looks like the Disney-Pixar live-action/animation version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars will be filmed in and around Moab, Utah, instead of Colorado.
Increasing taxes and a hostile attitude towards business from our Democrat overlords would seem to have consequences…
“Film production now is driven by incentives, and right now, Colorado is toward the bottom of that list,” said Kevin Shand, executive director of the Colorado Film Commission, explaining why Colorado lost out on the production.
“It’s the only reason films are coming to Utah,” confirmed Marshall Moore, director of Utah’s film commission.
Along with iconic desert landscapes, Utah offers a menu of tax and rebate incentives for film producers that includes a 20 percent post-production rebate or tax credit and tax rebates and exemptions on everything from film equipment to lodging. That incentive was bumped up from 15 percent last year.
Colorado has some smaller, more complicated, incentives that include up to a 10 percent rebate for out-of- state production companies that spend at least $1 million in Colorado, including at least 75 percent of payroll and 75 percent of nonpayroll expenses.
Looks like Colorado will have to make do with the Mars Science Lab and the Mars Society as its connections to the Red Planet.
Okay, so it’s only a subset of major movies and TV shows, but this visualization of fictional time travel timelines is pretty interesting nonetheless – especially the path-crossings by unrelated time travelers and the amusing crossover movies/episodes one can imagine resulting from these “paradoxes”.
Practice makes perfect, I guess – behold Roland Emmerich’s latest end-of-the-world apocacataclysmageddovaganza:
Vatican City? That’s innovative. Even Godzilla didn’t wreck Vatican City! And while everyone jokes about an earthquake sending California sliding off into the sea, has anyone actually showed it before? Nice.
I hadn’t realized from previous info that the film had “ships” of some sort in it – it isn’t clear whether these ships are spacecraft intended to flee the planet, or if they are (as hinted in glimpses) simply modern-day Noah’s Arks waiting out the catastrophe at sea. Either way, the premise one can glean from Emmerich’s trailer is vaguely similar to Martin Caidin’s 1987 SF novel Exit Earth, in which a looming planetary catastrophe triggers a similar response. Oddly enough, my copy from back in the day proclaims in bold type on the front cover, “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!”. I’m glad in a way that “soon” wasn’t - the special effects in 1987 would have been pretty lame.
Some of the scenes are also reminiscent of the old classic, When Worlds Collide, specifically the panicked mobs rushing up the ramp onto one of the aforementioned ships - perhaps it’s Emmerich’s nod to George Pal. There was some talk a couple of years back about a remake of WWC, which makes me curious as to whether this instead was the project in question. Too bad, if so - having read the book WWC was based on, I was really looking forward to a faithful new adaptation…not least because the novel’s escape spacecraft were constructed in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. (While the movie is considered a classic, beyond some of the effects it’s honestly pretty awful, especially given the potential of the book and its sequel.)
UPDATE: Well, it turns out a remake of When Worlds Collide is in fact in the works. Spielberg is producing it, and at least judging by the writing credits at IMDB, the source material appears to be the book rather than the George Pal movie.
For those of you who know about the book: it made it into the top 100, but Labyrinth of Night didn’t make the cut to the final three.
Ah well. Back to looking for an agent the old-fashioned way.
Someone at SciFi has been doing their homework as regards spacecraft metal fatigue — last night’s episode, No Exit, features character Galen Tyrol performing, of all things, a dye penetrant inspection of Galactica’s major structures.
I have a hunch that that is the first time an authentic non-destructive inspection technique has figured in a science fiction television series. I’m impressed. If it had been Star Trek, they would have just made up some BS technobabble.
It is a little strange, though, that it’s a Cylon doing it.
You know times are tough when even Trekkies are forced to set aside their noble post-economic ideals and rob banks with goofy fictional weapons:
Witnesses told police that a man wearing a black mask, black jacket and blue jeans entered the stores carrying a sword described as a “bat’leth.” The armed robber took an undisclosed amount of cash and fled on foot from both stores, police said. Officers searched the area but didn’t find the robber or the weapon
Hey, gotta pay for the con tickets somehow…
Post-apocalypse stories have a certain appeal to me, probably stemming from being a child of the malaise-ridden, nuclear-winter-threatened, cold-war-dominated 1970s-1980s. So, when I discovered that there was a like-themed movie coming out this fall called The Road, and that it was based on a novel, well, naturally I bought the book.
And jeebus…that’s four wasted hours that I’ll never get back.
I’d heard the name Cormac McCarthy before, but only in the context of fawning book reviews and Oprah book club recommendations. An Oprah recommendation alone is ordinarily enough to torpedo any interest I might have in reading a book, but I figured if it was a post-apocalypse story, I’d give it a shot. One expects her approved reading list to include hairsplitting sob stories, victim-canonizations, deeply-moving dramas of emotional catharsis, and messages of merit-divorced self-esteemifying and personal-improvementization — but a book said to contain depictions of cannibalism and other uncivilized behavior is different enough to warrant a deeper look. I should have trusted my instincts.
McCarthy’s use of language approximates that of an imitative ten-year-old who has read way too much Hemingway and memorized a thesaurus. He writes in a broken grammar “style” which may get him rave reviews among the literati but would have earned him an “F” in basic composition. It’s a tedious chore to sort through page-long runs of unmarked dialogue, trying to follow who says what to whom (quotation marks are completely absent, and only rarely is one given a cue by which to decipher who is speaking when). Until I looked up McCarthy’s bio, I assumed from the book’s language that he was an Irishman who had never visited the United States, attempting unsuccessfully to speak in an “authentic American voice”. Throw in laughably clumsy attempts at poetic turns of phrase (some of which hinge embarrassingly on an incorrect homophone), and the whole thing comes off as a pretentious hack job worthy of a Bulwer-Lytton award rather than a Pulitzer.
Story-wise, The Road is less a novel than a treatment for one. There is no plot. The story consists entirely of a man and his young son trudging over what appear to be the Appalachians, heading across the dead land to the similarly dead ocean, running into bad guys, and looking for food. It’s a sequence of travel, starve, find food at last minute while dodging bad guys, move on — lather, rinse, repeat. There is no meaningful goal before them — there is no rescue waiting for them at the shore, no enclave of civilization they are trying to reach, in fact no indication at all of why the ocean is their destination beyond it being warmer to the south. What central mystery there is — the nature of the world-ending apocalypse — is never explored beyond a couple of vague throwaway lines in flashbacks. If the point of the story is to show that the characters are lost and are just moving along for its own sake with no idea where they’re going and no idea how they got there, I’ll give McCarthy credit for at least getting that across to the reader.
The story abruptly ends with the father dying from some never-clarified ailment (he coughed a lot), and the boy being taken in on the last page by a family which comes out of nowhere and appears to be surviving the unspecified world-ending calamity quite successfully. How this is possible is never explained, and little is said about them other than that they’re “good guys” and they “carry the fire”. It amounts to a deus ex machina, which I admit I hardly found surprising after slogging through the rest of this turd of a book.
It also fails as a disturbing depiction of human depravity after all order has broken down – which is how it was described in some of the reviews I read before buying it. I’ve seen things vastly more unsettling in most episodes of The X-Files than what was described in this book. McCarthy couldn’t even manage to make a basement filled with sex slaves/human shawarma shocking or (worse) significant to the story.
One might counter that there isn’t supposed to be a plot (quelle post-modern!), that the book is really about the characters and their interactions with each other. The Amazon reviews gush about the book illustrating the power of love and the will to survive, and the Christian themes embedded in the story. Okay, I can see that. But it’s still lousy storytelling to cheat the reader of a full understanding of how the characters came to be in the situation where their love and will to survive for each other is tested — it divorces their interactions from their full context, abstracting them to the point of meaninglessness.
Suffice to say I didn’t like The Road as a book, and I’m not at all clear how they’ll turn it into a movie without completely rewriting it as was done with The Postman. The latter adaptation was godawful, but given the material they have to work with even a bad adaptation of The Road couldn’t help but be an improvement over the novel. Lesson learned: I should have stuck with my instincts regarding Oprah reviews.
Since Tim has asked a couple of times now, here’s a link to the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial.
Looks interesting. The prominent participation of Spider and Jeanne Robinson is a little off-putting, though — hasn’t Spider done enough damage to Heinlein?
