Pop culture is such a weird beast. It’s hard to begin to list the places where I might have heard or seen bits of this film. (A print in a catalog? A clip in a PBS documentary?) But somehow Dracula says “Children of the night — what music they make,” and you know it’s a famous line, an iconic delivery. The vampire seductresses come in through the mist in their trailing white gowns and shot is inescapably familiar. I was surprised by how many tiny moments like that the film held.

On the other hand, other things caught me entirely by surprise, despite knowing the book fairly well. Who would guess that Harker and Renfield could be conflated like that? (Anyone, obviously, who’s seen the movie in the seventy-plus years since it was made, yes.) That amused me quite a bit, as it’s a thoroughly pragmatic move. No need for Harker’s long captivity, escape, and illness, and the audience is already clued in to what’s going on with Renfield. On the other hand, it leaves movie-Harker a flimsy, two-dimensional character who has nothing to do but pick fights with Dr. Seward as they try to protect Mina — here, Seward’s daughter, as the Hollywood broom sweeps away subplots and minor characters.

Mina’s transformation from book to movie is even more sweeping. A character Van Helsing praises as the paragon of womanhood becomes a petulant girl who can’t be reasoned with. That was easily my least favorite aspect of the movie, and I’m tempted to tag it as a very early-Hollywood sort of move, but I don’t begin to have the data to support that. I know that the complete lack of incidental music is typical of the period, though. Interesting how that changes the pace of a film! Without it, scenes with little dialogue seem rather slower.

It doesn’t seem fair to make fun of special effects from the ’30s, but I have to admit that we did chuckle at their giant bat flapping on the end of its string. It made me think of the Count’s bats on Sesame Street. One bat! Two bats! Three bats, ah-ah-ah-ah! On the other hand, I love what you can do with mist and shadow on black and white film — so evocative, so pleasantly creepy. Where scenes between the human characters often tended toward high camp, the vampires were fabulous. Vamps belong in a world of black and white, I think.

The Thirteenth Tale is very much a reader’s story, a book for people who love books — and in this case, old books in particular.  It’s the sort of tale in which you know your heroes by how much they love to read.  The narrator, Margaret Lea, lives above the antiquarian bookstore that she and her father run.  An amateur biographer, she is prevailed upon to write the life story of a famous novelist called Vida Winter.

Prisoner of Trebekistan, as the cover makes immediately clear, is about Jeopardy.  And while it includes a range of tips and tricks for memorizing anything from books by Daniel Defoe to Secretaries General of the U.N., it’s more a memoir than anything else.  Bob Harris writes about the role Jeopardy has played in his life and the games he has played on the show.  But in between “Who is Henry James?” and “What is Avignon?” Trebekistan develops into a book about Harris’s life and the people in it, the joy of learning and how full the world is of unexpected connections.

That’s what he means by Trebekistan, actually: a wold view that sees how bits of seeming trivia connect because of a shared location or time in history or an unexpected acquaintance between two famous dead people.  It’s Six Degrees of Separation played with a liberal arts curriculum.  And if that starts to sound a little weighty, let me tell you that Harris is a comedian.  This one I borrowed it from my brother in September and read it on the plane.  It’s been sitting on my desk since then, so inevitably I picked it back up.  I’ve skimmed some of the memory trick paragraphs this time, but otherwise it’s entirely re-readable.  This is a clever, funny, heartwarming book.

Perhaps it was Trebekistan’s light cheerfulness that sent me back to the shelf for The Thirteenth Tale.  With Halloween approaching I felt the need for a book of ghost stories, or perhaps Dad’s collection of classic tales of suspense.  Short of Hamlet and Nearly Headless Nick, I didn’t see any ghosts in our bookcases, but I did remember that The Thirteenth Tale was full of an atmospheric creepiness.  Vida Winter’s bizarre biography contains obsession, madness, and an understaffed Gothic mansion in which a few survivors rattle around — possibly with the company of a ghost.  Intent on proving that the unreliable Miss Winter is telling the truth, Margaret delves into these mysteries while also trying to reconcile her own personal tragedy.  As it takes place in November and December, the setting is very bleak midwinter-y and it made a great read for a quiet Halloween weekend.  Better still, since I’d read it only once, a couple of years ago, I didn’t remember all of the plot twists — but it would have been worth re-reading even if I had, as the prose is just beautiful.

The point of comparison that jumped out after reading these books at the same time was the way they deal with the passage of time, foreshadowing, and generally jumping ahead of the story.  Harris makes an art of jumping from his story to his childhood to his present self, writing in a coffee shop, to a mention of something later in the story.  “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” he says, carefully parceling out just enough to leave a few hints.  He introduces his friends before he meets them, sometimes, noting that they’ll become important later on.  Sometimes an anecdote that happened later the perfect introduction to something the reader ought to know sooner (what to call the buzzer is a particularly good one).  And eventually he lets us know that we’re at last getting very close to meeting his very best friend properly, someone he’s mentioned off and on since page 21.  It’s a handy device for a memoirist to have in his pocket, and Harris is conscious enough of it to turn jokes around it.  It’s fun, and it’s exactly the sort of thing Vida Winter doesn’t want anything to do with in The Thirteenth Tale.

A dying woman haunted by her past, Miss Winter wants to tell her story straight through, from beginning to end.  Margaret agrees, but insists on first getting three facts she can check through public records, something to insure that Miss Winters isn’t giving her the sort of fairy tale biography she gave reporters throughout her career.  And of course it’s in the checking of those facts that Margaret gets the  hints that help her piece together what Vida Winters isn’t telling her, and even what Vida Winter doesn’t know.

And if The Thirteenth Tale is haunted, then Trebekistan contains an Easter Egg hunt — with the slight irony that Harris jokes about being unable to slip a DVD-style Easter Egg into a book, yet after a fashion, that’s exactly what he does.

From her first appearance on page 21, Harris drops hints about the woman he refers to simply as Jane.  Jobs she once held, shows she used to write for.  The Hugo she won.  And when he introduces her properly, Whedon fans will have no trouble figuring out exactly who she is, why I discovered this book through a blog I used to read, and by extension why there’s a blurb from Joss on the back cover.

January — that was Bleak House, although it wasn’t wholly accurate. Lots of the book takes place in summer, on sunny country estates. But then, Arizona Januarys aren’t known for being dark or frigid, and at any rate, Dickens can be counted on to plunge back into the London fog sooner or later.

On Agate Hill gave me a lazy glance and said “August.” I can’t really explain why, to be honest.

Regardless, it’s August now, and the book is fantastic. If you like Civil War-era history, or historical fiction about strong women, or stories told in letters and diary entries, I recommend On Agate Hill.

The book follows the life of Molly Petree, an observant, stubborn, spitfire kind of woman. We meet her as an orphan living on a dying plantation in the middle of Reconstruction. In her young memory, as many of the estate’s inhabitants have died or left Agate Hill as are still living there, and, feeling that she doesn’t really belong anywhere in the picture, she thinks of herself as a sort of ghost, too.

One of the things that comes across in Molly’s diary of this period is how severely the old social system of the South has gotten shaken up. It isn’t something she talks about directly, it’s there all the same. As one example, the marriage of convenience between a working class tenant woman and her Uncle Junius, who owns the plantation, is developed at length and illustrates the point nicely.

When she gets a little older, Molly becomes determined not to be a ghost during her own lifetime, an idea that she carries for the rest of the book. She remains vibrant, a force for life, despite the prevalence of death throughout the book.

Lee Smith is an author I hadn’t been familiar with, but she’s one I’ll look for in future. Her writing is beautiful, and none of her handful of narrators could possibly be mistaken for any of the others. That always impresses me.

Her neatest trick, though, is to present the story as found history, and she’s very deliberate about including only documents that can be accounted for through her frame story. It’s very minimal, as frame stories go, only a handful of short letters, but they account for everything else.

Except, that is, for when they don’t: Lee Smith deliberately leaves holes. What ever happened to Mary White? What darkness lurked in Mariah Snow’s past? What did she write on the page she tore out of her journal? What happened to the Snow children, and who shot the first bullet? The reader learns enough to make guesses, but as with real historical records, some things can’t be proved. Perhaps we don’t have any more letters from Mary White because she died, but perhaps those letters just weren’t saved, or burnt up in the fire, or perhaps, they’re waiting: still hidden in someone’s attic.

What I’m really referring to is Harry’s chat with new Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour, in which he calmly gets to the heart of what Scrimgeour is slyly asking for, responding that he is “Dumbledore’s man, through and through.” (It’s a very adult moment, especially compared to the throes of teenage angst we see in the previous book.)

The gradual development of wizard politics throughout the book is a strength of Rowling’s storytelling. The reader’s understanding of what’s going on outside Hogwarts follows that of Harry and his friends as they begin to pay closer attention to politics — which I think is an honest depiction of being a teenager. But like many subplots, wizard politics don’t show up on the big screen.

Half-Blood Prince sticks to the bare bones of the Dumbledore plot, the Draco acting suspiciously plot, and the romance plot; one we see pretty much in full, one is severely cut, and one is actually expanded past what we get in the book.

Not surprisingly (since it involves a great deal of exposition), Harry and Dumbledore’s exploration of Voldemort’s past gets chopped down to two memories: the one at the orphanage that was in all the previews, and the vital but edited memory of Slughorn’s. I also say “not surprisingly” because many of their other excursions down memory lane serve not to further the plot of this book so much as to set up the next one: what sort of objects would Voldemort turn into Horcruxes? Presumably this knowledge will be hand-wavingly imparted to our protagonists in the next movie.

Occasionally, though, the lack of all that exposition gets the movie into trouble. This is a small example, but there’s a weird bit of business at the point where Harry brings Dumbledore Slughorn’s true memory. After they see it, Dumbledore says, “Horcruxes!” as though it’s a new idea to him rather than a confirmation of his suspicions. Um, what? Gaunt’s ring is sitting there on his desk, and a moment later Dumbledore announces that he knows where to find another Horcrux, so this clearly can’t be news to Dumbledore, not really. I don’t know whether to call it a script problem or to blame Michael Gambon for continuing to futz up one of my favorite characters, but it’s an awkward moment.

In contrast, a favorite who makes the page-to-screen transition with wonderful authenticity is Evanna Lynch’s Luna Lovegood. She’s beautifully batty and I love her to bits. Another of my favorite parts of this book is Harry asking Luna to the Christmas party — which doesn’t quite appear, though there are a couple of moments between them that approximate it, and I appreciate that.

I was also impressed by Tom Felton this time. He’s always been around, but they gave Draco considerably more to do this time than he usually gets — and scenes with things like nuance and ambiguity, to boot. More than just another round of “You think you’re so great, do you, Potter? Well, my father…” and so on. Nice.

…Which is more than I can say for the obligatory romance scenes. Lavender Brown was amusingly over the top, though I could have done without her hysterics in the hospital wing. Vast preference for the book’s way of handling it, in which Harry tells Ron to stop pretending to be asleep when Lavender comes to visit. It’s not as cinematic, I suppose, but that was a laugh and this was a cringe. In the end, I was glad that Ron and Hermione didn’t quite get together, given the awkwardness that was Harry and Ginny. Stilted dialogue and no chemistry whatsoever. Ick.

Worse yet was the burning of the Burrow scene in which everybody runs through the fields. I started to wonder if the movie was so tired of being Half-Blood Prince that it decided to be Signs for a while. It’s not that I mind putting in a scene that isn’t in the book; I mind that there was no set-up and no follow-up for it. One shot of distressed Weasleys watching the fire, then no mention of it ever again. No sign that Ron or Ginny were worried about their family or wondering where they would live, nothing. If taking the scene out of the movie impacts nothing, it doesn’t belong there in the first place.

Draco’s plot had a little problem along those lines, too. He spends the whole year working on that cabinet so that he can bring Death Eaters into the castle… for them to do nothing. He had an entourage. Spiffy. Steve Kloves, there is a little problem with your story logic being missing.

The end of the movie didn’t have the benefit of an epic battle or a grand funeral for Dumbledore — we had to make do with a crowd of grieving students and professors raising their lit wands in tribute. A reasonable move, I thought, given constraints of time and budget. Return of the King earned its half-dozen endings; this one, not so much.

I did appreciate, though, that this movie was allowed to end on a less than cheerful note. I think every one of its predecessors has closed with happy, uplifting music and (often) a cheesy generalization about We’ve always got each other, or Everything’s going to change now. I can’t quote the last line, but in context, I’m going to rule that as a good thing.

Pride and Prejudice
and Zombies

by Jane Austen
and Seth Grahame-Smith

Even the cover design reflects Grahame-Smith’s general method. The copyright page attributes the portrait of a young lady to the Bridgeman Art Library, but also credits the book designer for “cover zombification.”

Clearly, the cut-throat marriage market of Regency England needed more literal throat cutting.

As the book’s first line now reads, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”  And so it goes.  Seth Grahame-Smith (author of several odd-looking books — seriously, check Amazon) has opened Jane Austen’s text and brought in an army of the undead.  Ever wondered why Netherfield was vacant in the first place and ready for Mr. Bingley to move in?  Zombies.  Obviously.

In order to add his zombies, Grahame-Smith has created an alternate England that, by 1815 or thereabouts, has been fighting the undead for some fifty years.  In this England, London is again a walled city, hopeless optimists try to concoct cures for this strange plague, and travelers are often set upon by “unmentionables” (as the more genteel characters tend to say, as though they were Victorians talking about underwear).  A church window that the characters run across depicts “a resurrected Christ returning to slay the last of the unmentionables, Excalibur in hand.”  And prudent parents arrange for their children to be trained in the “deadly arts” — and by masters in China or Japan if at all possible.  (And yes, I am nerd enough to wonder what European imperialism and the Napoleonic Wars look like with this scenario, but that’s too deep a question for this book.)

In a number of places, zombie-related changes turn into very clever explanations.  Why can’t the girls use the carriage at this time?  Damaged by musket-fire in a zombie attack.  Why can’t they just walk there?  Rain has softened the ground, making it easier for zombies to crawl out of their graves.  Why is a regiment of troops quartered in town?  To fight back the zombies.  And so on.

In this version of events, the five Bennet girls are all highly skilled fighters, having trained by a Chinese kung fu master.  Although the characters of Jane, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia remain largely unchanged, Elizabeth is much more rough around the edges.  She’s still independent and spirited, but she’s also a bit brutal.  (Not to worry:  so is Darcy.)

Usually, I enjoy Austen for her subtlety and elegance, but even though lots of the text is verbatim Jane Austen, those are not the qualities to look for in this book.  Although there are still fancy balls and lovely estates, the zombies bring with them all the violence and various bodily fluids that you would expect.  And the text itself has been generally pared down.  I don’t know whether the intention was to keep the length roughly the same or to simplify the prose (to attract readers? to create a sparser tone more fitting for a zombie tale?), but at times it does give the effect of being an Easy Reader version of the story.

On occasion, the characters themselves are less subtle and elegant than their purely Austenian counterparts.  Subtle digs become direct insults, and arguments are likely to involve physical fighting.  Where Austen leaves you to draw your own conclusions, Grahame-Smith hits you over the head — rather as Elizabeth does to Darcy when he first proposes to her.

About a third of the way through the book, the zombies begin to infiltrate the plot more deeply as they claim a character for their own.  I won’t say too much, but it’s really a very clever choice on the part of Grahame-Smith, and it dovetails neatly with what happens to that character in the original.

I do have my nits to pick with Grahame-Smith’s work, but the book also kept me giggling.  One of my favorite passages primarily substituted the word “ninjas” for the word “governess,” and the result is hilarious.  Details like that one kept me reaching for the original to see what exactly the change was — happily that’s easy to do, as the chapter numbering has not been altered.

Judging from her novels, I think Jane Austen had a healthy sense of humor, and I tend to believe that she would be amused by this twist on her novel — though perhaps she would have been shocked at all the mentions of pus and vomit (no, I didn’t just mean blood when I said “bodily fluids”).  But I have to say that I found Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to be the most delightful zombie-slaying comedy of manners I’ve ever read.

Some of Wrede’s earliest books are set in a secondary world called Lyra, and it’s two of these that have been hanging out on my shelf for a few years now:  The Harp of Imach Thyssel and The Raven Ring.  For whatever reason, I hadn’t read them until last week — or at least, I hadn’t read Harp.  I think Elf also has a copy of Ring and let me borrow it once in high school, but I remembered only the barest shadow of the story.  Like the cereal ad used to say, taste it again, for the first time.  (Ahh, brain sludge.)

Although the two books share the same fantasy world, each stands completely on its own, set in different parts of the world and with no characters in common.  They’re also separated by almost ten years of real world time (during which Wrede was writing many of the books we all enjoyed).  If you read them back to back, it’s easy to see how much Wrede improves as a writer between Harp (1985) and Ring (1994).

The Harp of Imach Thyssel isn’t a bad book, certainly, and The Raven Ring isn’t a perfect one.  But Harp’s biggest weakness is that it’s very predictable and takes itself a little too seriously.  The wit that makes many of Wrede’s books so charming is mostly absent, and the plot leans heavily on the usual fantasy genre conventions — to include some fairly strong echos of Lord of the Rings.  To show you what I mean, here’s the teasing description on the front cover (complete with a comma of dubious necessity):

Everyone wanted the legendary harp — except the man who found it, and was wise enough to fear it.

(And on the book, it’s printed in all caps, of course.)

The first chapter could be the beginning of any Dungeons & Dragons campaign ever written:  A minstrel, Emerick, and his buddy, Flindaran, are traveling through the woods.  They stop for the night at an inn, where they run into some Unusual People and they all get attacked.

When they arrive at the castle of Flindaran’s father (a duke), Wrede puts in some nice work on Flindaran’s large and interesting family.  Although some live in the shadows and never make it out of Cliché Land, others pop out and surprise you.  (Happily, Emerick’s love interest is one of the latter.)

On the other hand, the villains of the tale — three schemers and dreamers who each wants the eponymous harp for him- or herself — are an almost ridiculously sinister bunch.  One of them did surprise me when she was first revealed to be a schemer, but her villainy pushed her into melodrama almost immediately.

The harp of the title turns out to be a magical instrument of great power, with tales attached about a price paid by those who use it and its reluctance to change hands.  As a result of the latter, Emerick quickly becomes suspicious and obsessive, and though he never reaches Ring-Bearer levels of possessiveness, echoes of the One Ring are hard to ignore.

I’d be interested to know roughly what percentage of fantasy written in the last fifty years has, as the  cornerstone of its plot, Somebody Goes on a Journey.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with it; fantasy tends to trace a direct lineage to mythology and folklore (also to Tolkein, but that’s another story), which are full of transformative journeys and enlightening journeys and feat-accomplishing journeys.  But there also comes a point when I don’t want to see another scene in which the characters make camp, or the narrator complains about sleeping on tree roots, or blisters, or saddlesores, or what have you.

By contrast, The Raven Ring staunchly refuses to Go on a Journey.  There’s one that happens at the beginning of the book, but the narrative jumps tidily over it, introducing the heroine before she sets out and then fast-forwarding to her arrival, which is where the story really begins.  The capable Eleret spends most of the book wanting to leave for home, and sometimes it seems like she really will, but the story is about what happens to her in the city.  As she is finally forced to realize, her problems are ones that need to be dealt in the city.

In the city, Eleret is a stranger in a strange land, which helps the reader to take a fresh look at a European Renaissance sort of city, while at the same time the things that seem odd and unfamiliar to her tell us a great deal about her and the culture she comes from.  Her people pride themselves on their martial skills, so a great many of her comparisons involve weapons or fighting tactics or tales of great battles.  It makes her frame of reference seem a little one-sided, but since we’re given the impression that the mountain region she comes from has seen more than its share of invasions in recent history, it works well enough.

Despite the foreignness of the city, Eleret acquires an impressive array of fairly powerful allies.  Not powerful in an otherworldly sense — there’s very little of that here — but powerful on a civic level.  The commander of the Imperial Guards is firmly in her corner, as is the headmaster of a magic school.  She also picks up a young nobleman who contributes his swordsmanship and social privilege, and a thief who belongs to a powerful underworld family, which also has its uses.

I’m of two minds about this bunch of very useful people.  As a pragmatist, they make me very happy — and Eleret is a very pragmatic person.  She first goes to see Commander Weziral and Adept Climeral because Weziral is the person she’s here to see and Climeral is her designated welcoming committee.  She returns to them because she has puzzles to solve and each of these men is clearly in a position to help her.  Each of these men has a purpose within the story, and the reader is never left thinking “But if you’d gone to him in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this mess!”  I like Eleret.

The problem here is that Eleret’s allies easily overpower her enemies.  As in Harp, the title object is coveted by an odd assortment of unscrupulous people — here it’s a ring that Eleret has recently inherited from her mother.  But while there are references to nobles, the antagonists we meet are common folk without a great deal of any kind of power.  With her allies’ might and magic backing up her own skills, Eleret seems to find the whole ordeal more of an annoyance than anything else, and it’s hard to blame her.  If it weren’t for a little dark magic introduced fairly late in the game, the bad guys would hardly seem like any kind of challenge for Eleret and company.  Although she does get into more than a few fights, Eleret spends most of the book struggling against a lack of information more than anything else.

Although plot complexity does its share to make this a better book than Harp, its big strengths are in the character department.  Eleret has a depth that Emerick never really achieves.  Her strength is always evident and we see her softer side through her grief over her mother’s death, which she works through gradually in a way that Emerick doesn’t have the opportunity to show when a friend dies in the middle of Harp.  By that point in Harp, there’s too much plot happening to stop for introspection, while Ring is able to take five in a couple of spots to deal with Eleret’s emotions.

And if the villains are underpowered, they make up for it by exhibiting some personality.  My favorites are the nobleman who accuses Eleret in the street of having snatched his bag (when in fact it is her bag, and doesn’t he splutter delightfully when it turns out she can stand up for herself?) and the sneaky Jonystra, who uses every trick she can think of to get close to Eleret and won’t take no for an answer.  I’m not sure what it says about me that I relish the pleasure of slamming doors in Jonystra’s face, but there it is.  Plus, without her we wouldn’t get the tarot scene, which (A) pretty much comes out of nowhere, and (B) actually moves the plot forward in a big way.  Not bad for a day’s work.

It happens near the middle of Ring, after Eleret has taken refuge with her friend the noble swordsman, Daner Vallaniri.  Now, the Vallaniri family includes a trio of sisters and a crabby aunt who would not look out of place in a Jane Austen novel.  Did I say before that this felt like a Renaissance-type city?  Yes, there’s a bit of a tone shift here, but given that it’s a made-up city anyway, and Eleret is still feeling like a fish out of water, it works.  Yes, Reader, you too can feel unsure of what the social niceties are.  And for that matter, perhaps it’s not Austen we’ve wandered into, because Jane Eyre is what the tarot card scene reminds me of.

As you may know, midway through Jane Eyre a bunch of fashionable people come to visit Mr. Rochester, and one day they are entertained by a palm reader who sees the guests one at a time in a separate room.  Likewise, on Eleret’s first evening with the Vallaniris, a member of the family hires a tarot card reader (having one’s fortune read with tarot cards is all the rage, the young ladies tell us), who turns out to be the insidious Jonystra.  Both Jane and Eleret are prevailed upon by the other women to have their fortunes read, and of course in both cases, she is the person the fortune teller is interested in seeing in the first place.  (And for those of you playing along at home, this is where the similarity ends.)

The downside of the tarot scene, to my mind, is that it’s Jonystra’s last scene — and just as I had worked up a good hate for her, she gets injured and begins to be treated by the narrative as a victim rather than a villain.  But all the same, it’s a big turning point for the book as the real villain, and the real importance of the ring begin to be uncovered.

If you’re looking for a recommendation, here it is:  The Raven Ring is a good read.  Eleret is a strong, sensible female protagonist and I thoroughly enjoyed spending a few hundred pages with her.  But it’s okay by me if you give The Harp of Imach Thyssel a miss.  I hope writing it helped Wrede learn a few things about how to write books better (the evidence would say yes), and I hope it brought her some cash when it came out.  But I’m willing to bet that her newest book, Thirteenth Child, which I haven’t read yet, is a safer recommendation than poor old Harp.

By the way, the premise of Thirteenth Child? Magic and the American West.  I’m so there.

For those who may be interested — and if you’re still with me at this point, I can only guess that you probably are — I also noticed (while doing what we might cheritably call “reserach” for this post) that, as of earlier this spring, Wrede herself has a fledgling blog at http://pcwrede.com/blog.

But Pug ran across the theater’s web site earlier this week, and sure enough, they’re a second-run theater, and they play all sorts of things beyond Rocky Horror.  And this week they were playing Watchmen, which we hadn’t seen yet, so we went.

The theater is an empty place on a Tuesday night, the lobby dark and cavernous.  Walls plastered up and down with old movie posters.  You could have a long game of “I spy the poster for such-and-so” in that lobby.  You’d be sitting on fat red sofas and armchairs scattered around the lobby, or maybe perched on the stairs leading up to… the projection rooms, I assume.  I don’t know why the staircase was in the middle of the lobby.  There were signs apologizing for air conditioning problems in some of the theaters — from the fan in the back of ours, we assumed we were in one of the afflicted rooms.  But there were few enough people there, it didn’t even get unpleasant.

And the movie itself?  Read on…

Despite my other geeky tendencies, I don’t really know comics.  Mostly I rely on Liz or Elf to put nifty things like Fables in my hands from time to time.  Movie promotion was the first thing that I really remember hearing about Watchmen, but given the level of interest in the geek quadrants of the internet, I borrowed a copy of the book and read it around March.  Point here being that I’d read the graphic novel recently, but that I’m not a long-time fan with long-held opinions of the characters and the story.

I acknowledge this as my failing, and admit that it’s probably why I didn’t see most of the nitpicks Elf made when she saw the movie a couple months ago.  I agree that I expected a deeper, more resonant voice to come out of Dr. Manhattan, and that they should have cast a second actress to play the older Sally Jupiter.  And Adrian Veidt was simply not at all what he looks like in the comic.  And oh my, what was up with the Pinocchio nose they put on the actor playing Nixon?  But otherwise, I thought the casting and the acting ranged from fine to spot on.

And overall, I thought the film’s tone and sensibility were an admirable translation of the graphic novel.  Dark, gritty, and pessimistic to the core.  I loved being able to notice the way they designed shots to mimic panels from the original.  I was impressed that even the pacing of the movie followed the graphic novel so closely — something I think critics noted, and not always favorably.  Certainly this didn’t move with the speed of most superhero or action movies.  But isn’t part of the point of Watchmen to deconstruct the genre conventions of the superhero story?  It’s not a linear story about how Spiderman defeats Doc Ock; it’s an exploration of the characters’ poor messed up little psyches.  Despite the cuts made for time and The Plot Change (you know, since there was really only one), I felt they were able to layer a lot of that in there.

Speaking of The Great Plot Change, I’m not sure whether it simplified matters or confused them.  Certainly I’m not clear on exactly what caused all those blue glow-y explosions, except that it was supposed to be something only Dr. Manhattan could do, and that they kept talking about tachyons.  On the other hand, I suppose it allowed them to cut out all the backstory of Adrian’s genetics program and the disappearance of all the various artists and slot in the already-established Manhattan. And given that he then decides to leave Earth entirely, framing him for the catastrophe only makes it more reasonable that he would rather just move on.

Overall (and I don’t know if this means it failed, succeeded, or merely that it did a good job of mimicking the book), most of the problems I had with the movie were problems I also had with the book.  Some of them are silly details like Laurie’s hair and shoes — visually striking, yes; perfect for your foe to exploit, hell yes.  And surely some of our merely human superheroes should have been experiencing some exposure problems, being as they were sporting clothes suitable for New York… in Antarctica.  (Laurie and Rorschach, I’m looking at you.)  I liked and disliked the same characters I liked and disliked in the book, and it left me with the same uneasy sense that this is not how it should have to be.

Because yes, the pessimism in Watchmen bothers me more than a little.  Some of it can be chalked up to Rorschach’s narration — poor messed up, mentally twisted Rorschach with his bizarrely Puritanical ideas about sex.  (Can’t stand him.)  And part of it is that Watchmen is so thoroughly a Cold War story — and as an ’80s baby, I don’t remember knowing anything about the Cold War until well after it was over.  I never lived with the impending threat of nuclear annihilation that shadows all the events of Watchmen.  Perhaps that gives me the privilege (unearned by me, but I have it nonetheless) of a certain amount of optimism.  (Which is not to suggest that the political problems in Watchmen have no resonance in the world today.  On the contrary, I wish they didn’t.)

But the narrative doesn’t allow us to write off all of the darkness on nutcases like Rorschach, and it positively insists that turning one or more of the world’s major cities into sacrificial alters would lead to some degree of world peace.  That’s bad enough, but it turns a deep shade of irony when coupled with the assertion made by various characters throughout the film that human nature is what it is, and will never change.  (And I agree, but not quite in the way that they mean it.) Which is to say, what’s the point?  History will cycle around and we’ll be here again.  And then there are the disturbing undertones of that last scene in the newspaper office, complete with the ambiguous splatter of ketchup on the smiley face shirt.  Are we to see this as a better world:  at the beginning of the story, that splatter is blood; now it’s only ketchup?  Or is this an ominous sign, indicating that Rorschach has posthumously re-opened the whole can of worms?  I tend to see the latter — it’s more in keeping with the tone of the story — and I don’t like it.  We didn’t have a nuclear war in the ’80s because (as the song says) the Russians love their children too:  I am not inclined to believe in Veidt’s kind of big, peace-bringing, sacrificial gesture.

And I’d say the Trek community was overdue for a Good One, so thank you, Great Bird of the Galaxy.

My biggest worry about this film was that the characters would seem like strangers.  That it wouldn’t feel like Star Trek and that the whole effect would be laughable.  But while there were a few moments when my suspension of disbelief was stretched a little far (space diving?  magic unfolding sword?), on the whole, I couldn’t be more pleased.

All our old friends were recognizable, despite having new faces, and they acted and spoke the way one expected them to.  Kirk is a reckless adventurer.  Spock is logical, conflicted, and is quickly developing a martyr complex.  McCoy doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with space travel.  And so forth.  The instant – but not unconditional – bond between Kirk and McCoy worked, and the gradual development of their relationship with Spock unfolded well.  None of it, mind you, quite the way I pictured it, but it worked and was consistent with the characters, and I liked it.

And I always love it when the other recurring characters get to come out of the shadows a bit.  Uhura got to show her chops at xenolinguistics.  Chekov has apparently become a boy genius – not too much of a stretch, since in the original series, he sometimes fills in for Spock at the science station.  (Although… I do want to know what a seventeen-year-old who isn’t Wesley Crusher is doing on the bridge of a starship.)  And Simon Pegg’s Scotty was a lot of fun, though I had trouble looking at him and thinking “Scotty” instead of “Simon Pegg.”

Some of the accents were a little… interesting.  Simon Pegg and Anton Yelchin probably had more authentic accents as Scotty and Chekov than their predecessors ever did, and though Chekov’s was a little strong, I thought the effect was charming.  McCoy’s accent seemed to come and go and never sounded quite right to me, but given that Karl Urban is a New Zealander, and was otherwise wonderful, I’m willing to give that a pass.

For those who would prefer to avoid spoilers, I’ll hide everything else behind the cut, but I do recommend reviews of the film from NPR and the New York Times, neither of which give away anything you won’t have gleaned from the trailers already.

Hie thee away spoiler-phobes, ’cause here we go.

In every interview I’ve read with the writers of this film, they’ve been coy about whether to call the movie a “reboot” of the franchise or a “prequel” or what, and now that I’ve seen it, I understand.  It’s neither.  I think what the movie does is to take the original timeline, acknowledge it (through the presence of Nimoy’s Spock), and then present a time travel story in which – shocker here – the aim is not to “fix” the timeline back into what it was before.  The aim is merely to keep the universe in recognizable condition and save as many lives as possible.  So it’s the same Star Trek, but not quite.  When Russell T. Davies brought back Doctor Who in 2005, his twist was that the Doctor now seems to be the last of his people.  J.J. Abrahms has brought back Star Trek, but has wiped out the planet Vulcan, and Amanda Grayson along with it.  New dynamics and new storytelling possibilities are ready to unfold.

So TOS episode “Journey to Babel” couldn’t happen in this universe – no Amanda (!!!), and no 18-year quarrel between Spock and Sarek.  “Balance of Terror,” which first introduced the Romulans, and in which it was a shock to find that they look like Vulcans, is also pretty much kaput.  But in a meta storytelling sense, who would want them to re-do all the old stories?  They all happened – they’re what made Nimoy’s Spock the man he is – we had no indication that changing his past was changing his memories.  They happened, and there’s room for more stories.  That’s good enough for me.

And it’s not that canon and continuity have been thrown out.  Kirk is still attracted to Orion chicks.  Sulu is the man you want in a sword fight.  Of course the guy unlucky enough to space jump in a red suit is the one who doesn’t come back.  Spock quotes Sherlock Holmes, Pike ends up in a wheelchair (though mercifully without becoming a quadriplegic), and all the familiar catchphrases are here, from “I’m a doctor” to “The engines canna take any more!” to “Set your phasers on stun” to “Fascinating.”

Happily, Abrahms and his team have added to the mythology of Star Trek as well as taking away.  It’s eminently fitting for Kirk, who never seems to feel comfortable except in space, to have been born in a shuttlepod, in the midst of the sort of space battle that will come to define his career.  And Spock, who, under the effects of a space virus in “The Naked Time,” wept for his mother, who had a son who could never say he loved her – what was the final straw that led young Spock to pummel the other boy?  Insulting his mother.  And just as we were presented with – have always been presented with – a Kirk and a Spock who are ying and yang, I loved seeing the contrast between the young conflicted Spock and the older Spock who has learned how to live in his skin.

And despite my distress over the fate of planet Vulcan and Amanda Grayson, they got the Vulcans right.  We heard about the control and mastery of emotion, not the absence or purging of it, and we were reminded that they do this in the first place because they know as a people how dangerous their strong emotions have been to them in the long-ago past.  And loss has clearly mellowed Sarek with a quickness:  his quarrel with Spock has either ended earlier in this universe, or it never happened.  I wasn’t crazy about Ben Cross as Sarek – I thought he didn’t have the gravitas Mark Leonard used to convey – but I did think the final scene between Spock and Sarek was lovely.  Controlling emotions never means one doesn’t have them.

Speaking of love, the relationship between Spock and Uhura was a little… weird.  I feel like I shouldn’t be okay with it, but  I think I mostly am.  Mostly, I’m vaguely shocked by the implication that Spock was breaking the usual taboo (and I assume such a rule would be in place at the Academy) about relationships between an instructor and a pupil.  But I’m also more than a little amused that Uhura chose Spock over Kirk (not an uncommon indication of being a geek girl).

It’s not a perfect movie.  There’s plenty of room for nitpicks.  I want to know why McCoy seemed to spend the same three years at Starfleet Academy that Kirk did – clearly, he had already gone to medical school, so was officer training taking three years?  (And if not, why was he still in the red cadet’s uniform?)  Pug wasn’t happy with the portrayal of the science of black holes.  If you want to find all the little holes and faults, you won’t be disappointed.  But I was pleased enough by the tone and feel of the movie, and happy enough that they got the characters right, that I’m willing to handwave some of the details.

The writing was good and the cast were note perfect.  I want them to go make sequels.  Or better yet, a new TV show.  Now, please?

- Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, IV iii

Hope you all had a pleasant Pi Day yesterday!  Real news coming soon-ish someday.

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Pug and I spent Saturday putting wedding invitations together.  Short of making the paper (haha) we’ve done pretty much everything ourselves.  I designed everything (becaue I have InDesign and I know how to use it!), and though we were going to have things printed at Kinko’s, that didn’t pan out.  Their straight-through black and white printers aren’t able to handle half-sheet size paper.  The color printer could, funnily enough, but then you have to pay color prices (i.e., five times as much), when you’re just using black.  Which is ridiculous.

So rather than doing the research to find other print shops, we decided we could handle them ourselves.  The only issue was that, since we don’t have a straight-through printer, the sheets came out with a decided curl, but that’s nothing a bit of ironing can’t solve.  Um, yes, you read that correctly.  We ironed our invitations.  Hey, whatever works, right?  We set up our little assembly line, Pug printed return address labels while I addressed envelopes, and it all got done with a quickness.  They’ll go in the mail on Tuesday.  And after sitting in the envelopes for a couple days, they’re actually lying quite flat.  Ha-ha!

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I’ve decided that the easiest way to handle Poke’s and my allergies with regard to wedding cake is what I call the Two Cake Solution (sort of like the two state solution, but less fighting and more sugar).  We’ll get a big, traditional wedding cake for our guests (Pug gets to be Chief Cake Taster, obviously), and I’m going to make a smaller, allergy-safe cake for those of us who need it (and anyone else who wants to snag a slice). Obviously, this creates the very important decision of finding the right cake recipe.  And obviously, this creates the absolute necessity of trying a variety of recipes.  Which obviously leads to eating cake.  Oh darn. Brides are supposed to obsess about dieting, you say?  Psssh.  Silly you.

Thus far, my two attempts have been tasty, but not winners, but I have high hopes for Number Three.  And if they start coming out pretty, I might even take pictures.  I haven’t yet bought proper cake pans with removable bottoms, so getting the cakes out of the pans has so far been a bit of a mess.

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I’m about three-quarters of the way through Bleak House, and I’ve been enjoying it.  I recommend it so far, but know that it isn’t a book where things happen quickly.  It’s a book that brings you into its world, shows you around, introduces you to a wide variety of people, brings them together in different groupings, and lets you see what happens.  A leisurely, a few chapters here, a few chapters there, a few pages before bed sort of a read.