Yesterday, I caught an NPR segment on children’s fantasy literature. It was a really good segment — Neil Gaiman is always a seemingly effortlessly good interviewee — but a comment by Christopher Paolini, the whiz kid whose first novel was written when he was 15 years old, made a comment that I fundementally disagreed with. He said — and you can listen to the segment online yourself and hear his wording — that J.R.R. Tolkien’s works weren’t really concerned with people going away and returning home, grown up.
If you consider Lord of the Rings to be a single novel (as Tolkien did), I think it’s hard to find a fantasy novel of his that isn’t about this. In The Hobbit, Bilbo is fundementally changed when he’s roused out of his comfortable home and taken out into the wide world, which is much more complex, much darker but more wonderful than he imagined back in Hobbiton. In Lord of the Rings, the book ends with the hobbits returning home to the Shire, not as child-like innocents who have to be protected by non-hobbits every step of the way, but as heroes capable of routing Sauruman from their homeland all on their own. Even Farmer Giles of Ham features a character going away on what he thinks is a simple journey but ending up becoming someone he never expected as a result.
Anyway, an otherwise great piece, especially the talk about Narnia (I had no idea that Gaiman had written a sequel in the Flights anthology).
Although it lacks the flair and power of Spielberg’s masterpiece, Open Water
stands up well against the classic Jaws. Like the older movie, Open Water’s tension comes more from the little moments and the all-too-human reactions to a terrifying situation.
But if it doesn’t have Spielberg’s masterful touch, Open Water does have far more plausibility to it than Jaws ever did. (I’ve been left behind, briefly, by a dive boat myself, although they never got out of sight.) The terror of realizing how alone, how exposed and how vulnerable they are is where the icy horror of this movie comes from. It’s not a thriller in the traditional sense, and is more disturbing than actually scary.
Definitely worth viewing for fans of Jaws, divers and those afraid to dive …
Although it won’t make anyone forget Prof. Indiana Jones and his father, the somewhat derivative National Treasure is still a fair amount of fun in the same vein.
Blending conspiracy theory with a whirlwind tour of Revolutionary War cities, the movie puts Nicholas Cage on the trail of the ancient treasure of the Knights Templar using clues hidden in plain sight by Founding Father Freemasons.
All of the elements are there: The slightly obsessive lover of history, the beautiful girl who takes herself more seriously than he takes himself and the disapproving father who has an adventurous past of his own. The villains never rise above the level of greedy fortune-hunters (as opposed to the “it belongs in a museum!” motivation that is as close to altruistic as this breed of hero gets), which is one of the flaws in the film, but everyone executes their roles well, including a very grounded Harvey Keitel as a down-to-earth FBI agent pursuing Nicholas Cage and company as they scamper up and down the east coast.
Definitely worth a rental for fans of Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone and the like.
I just heard that Peter’s song, “Christmas in Victorville,” was played this afternoon on the Barb Stanton show on Talk 960. I missed it myself — it’s been a crazy, crazy day — but I don’t know if the full story of the song, which is not a complimentary one, was explained. Peter wrote the song years ago, when he was in the midst of his divorce and not feeling a lot of warm feelings for his life or his home in Victorville. All of the things he sings about — the drug lab next door with the guns, for example — were real, but he simply mentally edited out all the positive stuff in his life at the time, as people are wont to do in that situation.
Raise your glass high
And curse the desert sky!
Christmas in Victorville:
Why, why, oh why?
You can hear an MP3 of the song at his blog.
(This isn’t the first time a Peter Day song has been heard on Barb’s show, of course. After his appearance on her show on January 12 this year, he decided to knock out a theme song for her, and she uses it midway through her show pretty much every day. Yes, it’s Peter wailing on the guitar and singing “Baaaaaaarb Stanton, she talks the talk, she talks the talk!”)
Well, I was wrong. The show’s not more interesting, now that it’s down to the last few people. I find these folks fairly uninteresting, although I do like Danni and Rafe enough as people to hope that one or both of them make it to the final two.
At this point, I have 2,291 points in the Survivor Fantasy League, which isn’t where I want to be, but it ain’t bad. Our team, Ellis Truss, is on the national leader board last time I looked.
Two Sundays from now is the finale, including the big party at Chez Ellis. Hopefully next season will be back at a beach locale. We need more guys fighting sharks on the beach.
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