Just read Stephen King’s It will be turned into a 2-part film by director Carey Fukunaga of True Detective fame.
There was an early 1990’s made for TV version. I recall being scared crapless by it. I’d probably laugh at it now. It did star the late great John Ritter aka Jack Tripper.
Many of you recently noted under one of my posts that you rank this as one of your favorite novels. What do you think. Will Hollywood do It justice?
Ha, see what I did there? I’m so witty…
SPOILERS AHEAD.
“Cheryl Strayed.” That’s not only the name of the author of the book Wild, on which the recent movie is based, but it is also the synopsis of the story.
Cheryl was no stranger to hardship. As a child, she and her mother suffered at the hands of an abusive alcoholic father. But Cheryl’s mother moved her family away to a farm, where they set up an idyllic life. At the start of the film, Cheryl and her mother are attending college together – Cheryl doing so after high school while her mother decides to go for her degree later in life.
Alas, the best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans. At age 45, Cheryl’s mother is stricken with cancer and dies. Cheryl is left to make her own way and does not adjust to the change well. She cheats on her husband with any man who asks, and turns to hard drugs, even going so far as to inject heroin. She’s out of control.
An unexpected pregnancy (and though the movie is unclear on it, I assume an abortion), followed by her fed up husband seeking a divorce, prompts Cheryl to go on a quest to clear her mind- to hike the 1,000 mile Pacific Coast Trail.
Needless to say, it’s no easy task. She starts out with an enormous pack that is heavier than she is, learning along the way to abandon things she doesn’t need. She loses her boots and duct tapes her feet until she can get some more. She runs out of water and has to scoop up some from a fly infested puddle and treat it with iodine pills. One catastrophe after another occurs, but she refuses to stray off the path until she’s reached the end of the trail.
Overall, she finishes the journey having learned a good lesson – don’t stray from a good path and eventually your reward will come.
I’ve heard some comparisons to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love – but the differences are clear, the biggest one being that Gilbert had money, while Strayed was operating on the last of her savings, had nothing by the end of the trip, and often had to beg the kindness of strangers just to get by.
I don’t want to veer (or stray) too far off the path to criticize Gilbert. (I mean, to each their own, but a man would never be able to pull of a book about how freeing it was to abandon his wife and travel the world). Personally, in my mind anyway, Strayed’s downfall, spurred by the death of her mother, was a bit more understandable and her quest to get to the point where she could stop beating herself up for past mistakes and rebuild her life was inspiring.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead.
Life – it’s all a matter of perspective.
The next time I pour a bowl of cereal and feel a fit coming on when I realize there’s no more milk, I’ll take a deep breathe and remember the choice Louis Zamperini had – jump out of his life raft and into water infested with hungry sharks, or stay in and risk being shot by a Japanese aircraft doing a strafing run overhead.
When you think about a situation like that, it kind of makes the little, everyday nuisances that we allow to drive us crazy seem trivial, doesn’t it?
How about when Louis, after spending so much time drifting in a raft at sea, only to be thrown in a brutal POW camp where he’s tortured and beaten, suddenly gets an offer from the Japanese government – read an anti-American statement over the radio and you’ll be allowed to live out the rest of the war in nice accommodations, with all the food and luxuries you want.
Naturally, we all say, “No, I’d never take that deal.” As a mere, humble book blogger, I’ll never find myself in such a situation, but I’d like to think I’d tell my captors where they could stick such a deal. Do any of us really know how we’d respond to such an offer until we find ourselves in that position? Heroically, Louis refuses the deal.
Overall, it is a movie about choices – forks in the road where Louis could have gone in one direction or the other. In his youth, he was an angry little punk who was a menace to his town until his older brother convinced him to channel his energy into joining the track team.
He becomes an amazing runner, good enough to go all the way to the pre-World War II Olympics (which, ironically, were held in Germany), leading to an eerie scene where American, German, and Japanese athletes are all standing around like friends – who knew at the time that would be the last time they’d be doing that for awhile. He’d hoped to return to the next Olympic Games, which had been scheduled to be held in Tokyo of all places, but we all know how that turned out.
It’s hard to find a more class act than Louis. His fellow POW’s are ordered to punch him in the face. He’s more worried about telling them it is ok and to not feel bad about it than he is about, well, his face.
I could go on and on, but you get the drift. The next time I’m late for work and ready to fling myself off a cliff because I can’t find my keys, I will think about brave Louis defying the Japanese POW camp Sgt. and lifting the beam over his head, and realize that I am a major wuss in comparison.
The movie is based on author Laura Hillenbrand’s non-fiction book of the same name. You might remember her as the author of another non-fiction work turned movie, Seabiscuit.
I’ve never read either book and unfortunately, I have a bad habit of never reading a book once they’ve made a movie about it. If you’ve read either one, or just want to commiserate about how Louis makes us all look like pansies when compared to his saint-like bravery, feel free to do so in the comment section.
WARNING: There are spoilers in this post that stretch the boundaries of space and time. For every hour you spend reading this, you may actually be receiving seven years of spoilers!
THE BOOKSHELF FROM THE INTERSTELLAR MOVIE
As promised, I’m back with a review of the film Interstellar starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. Here’s a fun anonomaly: the other day I posted the text of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight” by Dylan Thomas, a poem that features prominently in that film.
There’s a scene at the end that involves messages being sent through space in time via a bookshelf and well, because this blog’s name is “Bookshelf Battle” and I had a post about Interstellar, I saw a surge in web traffic from people googling things like “bookshelf and interstellar” or “what’s the deal with the bookshelf in interstellar?” or similar searches. Totally coincidental. I would never purposely try to move traffic to my site by mentioning “bookshelf” and “interstellar” a bunch of times on my site because honestly, what would be the point of going on all day about the bookshelf from the Interstellar movie? Frankly, it would be ridiculous to keep going on and on about the bookshelf in the Interstellar and to mention the bookshelf from the Interstellar movie would just be a sad attempt to drive up web hits – so believe you me this will be the last time that I’ll mention the bookshelf from the Interstellar movie.
Bookshelf. Bookshelf. Bookshelf. Interstellar. Interstellar. Interstellar.
A CONCEIVABLE FUTURE
I’ve noticed a trend in modern science fiction – namely, to introduce inventions that aren’t around today but to do so in a conceivable manner. The science fiction of the past dreamed of a day with flying cars and people walking around in funny looking aluminum suits. For some reason, people in the 1950’s thought that aluminum clothing would be very popular by now.
Interstellar presents technology that we don’t have yet, but said technology is relatable given the way it is presented. For example, the film features robots with artificial intelligence, but they look like walking/talking ATM machines, not metallic humanoids ala Terminator.
Meanwhile, the ship used looks essentially like a larger version of the Space Shuttle rather than the U.S.S. Enterprise.
The premise of the film? The Earth is on the way out. Centuries of abuse and excess have withered the planet’s resources, caused widespread blight and famine, and ruined the economy. McConaughey plays Cooper, a former engineer and NASA test pilot who only briefly dipped his toe into a space exploration career when the world went into a decline. His community is relatively stable and he eeks out a living as a farmer, living with his two kids, Murph and Tom, and his father-in-law. His wife died from an ailment that normally would have been treated in better times.
Cooper isn’t a big fan of the farm life – he regrets never having had the chance to explore space and laments that civilization collapsed before he could do so. Cooper’s father-in-law, played by John Lithgow, is the yin to Cooper’s yang, lecturing him about how “the world is not enough for him” and how that kind of thinking led to the downfall of the human race – i.e. so many people on a planet with a limited supply of resources and each person is never happy with what they have – they always want more.
There’s probably a lesson for world leaders to think about when considering how to best protect and care for the environment. Also, Cooper training for a career that he never got to have is certainly a problem that many of today’s college graduates can relate to.
A timeframe of when the movie takes place is not provided, though I got the impression it takes places at a time when today’s millenials have become the grandparents, so maybe 2050-2060 or so? Just a guess.
THE SCIENCE OF SPACE EXPLORATION
Long story short, Dr. Brand, played by Michael Caine, recruits Cooper to use his underutilized pilot skills to go on a desperate mission – fly through a recently discovered wormhole and find a new, habitable planet for the human race. The humans will probably be good to the new planet for a year or two then proceed to mine and drill the crap out of it all in the name of cheaper iPads and dollar discount Wal-Mart merchandise but that goes beyond the parameters of the film.
He teams up with Anne Hathaway, Dr. Brand’s daughter, who is, herself, another Dr. Brand. Also, there are two miscellaneous astronauts whose names I neglected to learn because they buy the farm early in the film.
If you’re a nerd such as myself, you’ve probably thought a lot about space travel. Though we often think about space travel beyond the moon as being impossible, it isn’t so much impossible as it is improbable. In a myriad of science fiction movies, Hollywood has portrayed two different ways. Let’s discuss them along with why they are unlikely:
Rather than focus on warp speed or hypersleep technologies, Interstellar takes a look at another means of space travel that has heretofore been unused by Hollywood – the wormhole. As the film explains, scientists believe that worm holes have the possibly to bend points in space such that a tunnel can be created between them. (At one point, a character draws a line between two points on a piece of paper, then bends the paper so that the two points meet to illustrate how a worm hole makes it possible to go from one point to another without travelling the long distance of the “straight line” in between.
All of this is theoretical but the movie’s allure is taking all of these highly theoretical concepts and imagining – what if someone actually managed to physically follow through with them?
I applaud the film’s producers for taking all of these hard-boiled, difficult to grasp concepts, typically the stuff that makes the average high school student’s eyes glaze over and fall asleep in science class, and portray them in a very real and tangible manner.
SPACE AND TIME
Also at issue in the film is the concept of differences in the passage of time – i.e. that it is possible for time to move differently at one point than it does at another. Cooper struggles with making the ultimate sacrifice – namely, that while he is in space, his children are aging and may eventually even surpass him. At one point, the crew reaches a planet and Cooper is faced with the difficult realization that for every hour he spends on the surface, seven years will pass on Earth. True to form, at the start of a brief mission to a water logged planet, Murph is just a kid but after the mission, she’s all grown up and played by Jessica Chastain. Talk about the cat being in the cradle.
INTERSTELLAR AND THE BOOKSHELF AT THE END
I said I wouldn’t mention Interstellar and the bookshelf at the end of the movie and well, I’m not going to, not only to not utilize a cheap method of driving up my web traffic but also because I haven’t decided if this was the film’s “jump the shark” moment or if it was highly creative and imaginative. You watch. You decide for yourself.
PARTING THOUGHTS
I’m a big supporter of space exploration but I am a lowly nerd with a book blog so really, my opinion doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. For me, it was sad to see the Space Shuttle program scrapped in recent years and it boggles my mind that we are paying the Russians millions of dollars to launch our American astronauts into space, especially at a time when the Russians haven’t exactly been playing nice with their neighbors lately.
I think there’s a lot that could be learned from not only localized space exploration (i.e. around the Moon and just above Earth’s orbit) but also deep exploration – i.e. let’s go to Mars! Hell, if we’re willing to spend the money and are able to find astronauts willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, a mission to fly for ten or twenty years out into space to report findings back to Earth is not impossible. Improbable, yes but not impossible.
I do get it – the economy is terrible, people can’t find jobs, there are all kinds of wars and turmoil going on in the world and in light of all that it seems selfish to toy around with space. But as Cooper points out in the film, space exploration technology also usually gives rise to technology that helps out everyday life on Earth, such as the MRI machine. Perhaps there are discoveries to be made by exploration of planets within our own solar system that could improve the quality of our life.
Or, perhaps Stephen Hawking has a point, namely that maybe there is alien life out there, but maybe we don’t want to know them. Maybe there are nice aliens who will share all their technology with us and make our lives better. Or maybe they’ll invade our planet and make us their slaves.
Who knows? All I know is the film filled me with a sense of wonder about all the possibilities that space exploration has to offer. Brilliant and uplifting, there was only one part of it that made me sad – that in the future, there will be so many amazing inventions and discoveries and alas, they’ll probably arrive long after I’m gone and I won’t be able to see any of them.
Oh well. People in 1801 would have marvelled at the iPad, so at least we’ve got that going for us.
Long time no see, blogarinos. What can I say? I have been busy. I wish I could say that I have been busy with something worthwhile, but alas, it has been mostly with an onslaught of fabulous Fall TV. Why, oh why must they put all my favorite shows on at the same time?
I’ve been hearing for quite some time now that Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is an amazing read, and though sadly I never got around to it, I am pleased to say that I did recently take in the film version starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.
SPOILER WARNING – If you do not want the surprises to be as gone as the girl, then stop reading.
In no particular order, a list of reasons why I found this film entertaining:
1) Rosamund Pike deserves an Oscar nomination. She has always been a decent actress but up until now, has never quite found her niche role. Honestly, this movie made me learn her name. Previously, she’d just been that blonde woman who has been in a lot of stuff.
2) Someone involved in the movie must have had a penchant for all grown up former adolescent nerd TV stars. Patrick Fugit, aka the aspiring Rolling Stone reporter from Almost Famous and Lee Norris, aka Minkus on Boy Meets World both have cameos as police officers. I mean honestly, in real life, I would not want either of these poindexters kicking down doors and/or being responsible for public safety but for movie purposes, it was fun to see them in action.
3) Actually, add to that former nerd TV star list Neil Patrick Harris (who once upon a time played Doogie Howser, M.D.) – I suppose I gave him a pass as a “former TV nerd” since his career had a comeback with How I Met Your Mother.
4) It is an excellent mystery movie that will keep you guessing.
5) Sadly, it reinforces what we all know to be true but no one wants to admit – a woman can say anything – anything at all – and people will believe it.
So pick your future brides to be carefully, fellas, because well, you might end up like Ben Affleck’s defeated protagonist.
BONUS: Tyler Perry was in this movie and a) he did not dress up like an outrageous overweight granny and b) did not suck.
All week long, I have wanted to write something about Robin Williams. With his zany, madcap energy and mile-a-minute comedic riffs, he was the very last person you would expect to check himself out early, wasn’t he? Much has been speculated on as everyone tries to figure out the why of it all – depression, drugs, a Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis. Truth be told, only he knew why and he didn’t choose to share with us the reason.
And that’s ok. He shared with us so much else.
For several months now, I’ve been trying to figure out my own voice on this blog. It is primarily a book blog, to share with you my thoughts on the latest novels I have been reading. Alas, life often gets in the way, weeks go by and I find that before I know it, much time has passed and the next book I planned to read and talk to you about is just sitting there on my shelf, growing dusty. Work, family commitments, general duties of taking care of myself and others – the business of life, it more often than not comes first.
For as long as I can remember, I have always dreamed of being a published author. Double Alas, it has yet to happen. Such is life. I find myself often wishing that I could go back in time – back to the days when I was picking a college major – and become an English teacher. That way, at the end of my life, if my dream of getting published never pans out, I could at least say that I spent my time on this planet being involved with something I love – reading books and talking to people about them. Maybe in a smaller way, that’s what I’m doing here.
Robin, you were an alien, a genie, a wacky doctor, an unconventional President, a down on his luck shrink, a DJ in Vietnam, and yes, you were even a divorced man who had to stoop to the level of dressing up like an old British nanny just to see his kids. But for the purposes of our little online community of literature lovers, your stint as an English teacher is what I’ll leave my readers with today:
The “What Will Your Verse Be?” Speech from Dead Poets Society (1989)
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love – these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life!…of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless..of cities filled with the foolish, what good amid these, O me, O life?’ Answer: that you are here; that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
As always, fellow Bookshelf Battlers, thank you for reading. I wish you the best of luck in finding your verse.
You may have noticed by now, that I’m a pretty kind reviewer. If I don’t like a book, movie, tv show, etc. I generally keep it to myself. After all, I haven’t produced a book, movie, tv show, etc. so who am I to criticize someone who has managed to turn their vision into a consumer product for a mass audience? If I like something, I’ll share it. If I hate it, I’ll keep it to myself.
But where I have to break that rule is with the movie, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. It’s on my mind right now because I’m watching the Indiana Jones Marathon on SpikeTV. SpikeTV, I doubt anyone from your network will ever read this, but if someone does, please remove Crystal Skull from any future Indy marathons. That film is a red hot pile of smelly garbage. Indy purists such as myself prefer to believe that it never happened.
In fact, rather than believe that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to haphazardly slap together a pile of crap to cash in on the name brand of a long beloved film franchise, I instead prefer to believe either:
A) That this movie was the result of Lucas and Spielberg having simultaneous strokes, causing them to produce unintelligible rubbish.
B) That Shia LaBeouf had some kind of dirt on them
C) That the film was made not to entertain but to somehow subtely communicate coded messages about aliens to the world
D) That it was produced by a group of adults who had suffered through having to pay for their dumb kids to go to archaeology school because they saw Indiana Jones and thought that becoming an archaeologist would lead to untold adventures and world travels only to discover that it only leads to a career at Burger King and so they wanted to make the archeology profession look uncool.
I could go on all day about why this movie stinks worse than a pile of day old carp, but here are my big:
1) Aliens – I always enjoyed the Indy movies because of their supernatural elements. Yet, I did not like that aliens were such a big part of Crystal Skull. “But there was all kinds of unbelievable stuff in the first three Indy movies that were just as unbelievable as the idea that aliens exist!” you might argue.
True! And in fact, a topic for another time is that, while to date unproven, the idea of the existence of alien life on other planets is not all the unbelievable. However, in the first three films, there was the idea that if a man were to explore the deepest, darkest parts of the Earth, to study ancient books, tests, puzzles, etc. that he could uncover all kinds of supernatural mysteries. Believable or not, the first three movies are based on ancient cultural and religious ideas. In other words, finding a Holy Grail that grants the drinker holy life is about as believable (or unbelievable) as the existence of aliens, but hey, at least as kids many of us are indoctrinated into believing the bible, religion, etc. so the idea that an archaeologist could study old religious artifacts and legends and so on and unravel supernatural doings just seems awesome whereas having said archaeologist encounter aliens just seems like cheesy science fiction.
2) Failure to Take Itself Seriously – The Nazis provided the perfect villains for the earlier movies but, well, in case you fell asleep in history class, they were removed from power by the 1950’s so another source of villainy had to be found. Naturally, the Russians make for the perfect villains in a cold war era based movie, but the Russians in this movie just failed to be as scary as the Nazis of the other films.
On top of that, there was the scene where Indy gets launched out of a nuclear blast inside a fridge. Enough said.
3) Shia LaBeouf – Hey, he was great in the Transformers but I like to thing the offspring of Indy and Marion Ravenwood would be about 90 percent more awesome.
In conclusion, Indy 4 never happened. Indy 1-3 are the only Indy films that I recognize. There will never be a copy of Indy 4 on my shelf.
Bookshelf Battle 