Originally Posted on December 16, 2013.
Last March I considered some of the factors that have kept the long-anticipated Wonder Woman film in development hell[REPLACE OLD LINK WITH CURRENT WHEN GOES UP]. D.C.'s troubled track record with adaptations (in the past decade, only Batman really an unqualified success); the perceived hokiness and flatness of the material ("silly" super powers, a lack of interesting villains and other supporting players, the "unrelatability" of Golden Age heroes like the Justice League Big Three, etc.); and the complicated gender dynamics of the female-centered action movie (particularly acute here, because of Wonder Woman's costuming, background on Paradise Island and so on); have overdetermined this outcome.
My thought, accordingly, was that the surest road to a DC movie starring Wonder Woman--and for that matter, viable movies about other major DC characters like Aquaman--would be the reverse of Marvel's course with the Avengers. Instead of creating multiple franchises and then bringing them together in one film, it seemed that DC might do best to start with a Justice League film, from which it would spin off new franchises. The highly publicized inclusion of Batman in Man of Steel 2 hinted at a step in this direction. Now the casting of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in the same movie suggests the next Superman will be a "backdoor" Justice League movie.
It seems an intelligent move, but it is not without its risks. The first Man of Steel movie, after all, made a fair amount of money, but left a lot of viewers unsatisfied, making audience enthusiasm shaky. At the same time the field seems likely to grow ever more crowded with superhero movies. If, as is possible, the sequel performs badly as a result, this could do that much more to set back the cinematic prospects of Wonder Woman and other League characters.
The alternative, however, is that the inclusion of these other characters will make those who didn't warm to the first film give the franchise another shot, boosting the new Superman series while building up a platform for the launch of a slew of other DC superhero films.
For the time being, the latter seems somewhat more likely than the former.
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Review: Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown
New York: Pocket Star, 2001, pp. 608.
Originally Posted September 29, 2010.
I didn't think I'd bother to read another of Dan Brown's novels after suffering through the lousy Deception Point four years ago. Not only was the prose painfully bad (yes, painfully), and the characters one-dimensional, but the real draw--the plot--was ludicrous. (Yes, there certainly is the enmity of many "space cadets" to NASA, but an American presidential election hinging on the fate of the space program? In 1998? And oh, the lameness of his D.C. hijinks . . .)
Nonetheless, I ended up picking up the book he published right after that (incidentally, I didn't happen to catch last year's film), and so here I am. In this one Brown's recurring protagonist, symbologist Robert Langdon (in this his first appearance) is enlisted by the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Maximillian Kohler, to assist an investigation into a brutal murder at the lab's headquarters that may be the work of the Illuminati (on which Langdon is an expert). This leads Langdon into an elaborate plot by the secret society to strike back at the Catholic Church in retaliation for its persecution of science, centered on a quantity of antimatter stolen from CERN. Compounding the mess, this is all happening at the very moment of the Conclave, the college of cardinals' meeting in which they select the next Pope.
It goes without saying that the treatment of antimatter seen here has no relationship with reality, but one may be willing to suspend disbelief on that one point, given its admitted symbolic value. And anyway, unlike his previous two, more technologically-oriented books, this is really a historical mystery more than a technological thriller. However, for a story founded on an intricate historical mystery, it gets a lot of easy (and often, unnecessary) bits wrong--as in its claim that Copernicus was murdered by the Church (he had a stroke, and so far as I have been able to determine foul play has never even been alleged), or that Winston Churchill was a "lifelong Catholic" (a description that not only Churchill, but no PM in British history, fits), or the labeling of the "Rio Plata" as an Old World river (when it's actually in South America). It is all too telling that Brown, who boasts of having taught Shakespeare at Exeter, repeatedly confuses a couplet with an iamb (a mistake made, incidentally, at a crucial point in the unfolding of the mystery)--an error which would be embarrassing for anyone who has ever studied literature, let alone taught it at an "elite" institution.
Given how many others have taken Brown to task for his scientific, historical, geographical and other errors (many of which will immediately jump out at the culturally literate), it's not worth my while to go on about this much more, and in any case, one could be forgiving toward these (in spite of Brown's considerable, financially profitable pretensions to factuality) if his storytelling proved up to par.1 And silly as his premise sounds, with its preposterous implication of scientists skulking around in dark rooms for centuries planning a catastrophic attack on the Vatican in retaliation for old grievances, it did indeed have some potential for excitement.
Now, I admit that Brown has a knack for the kind of pacing that keeps a reader turning the pages--assuming they also turn off their brains. (And while the prose of Angels & Demons is certainly not graceful, elegant, stylish or anything else of the kind, but it isn't painfully bad in the way of Deception Point.) Still, there's a good deal here that jars. In his hands, the conventions creak, and the demands he makes on our willing suspension of disbelief are not only frequent and large, but unsupported by the kind of talent that compels a reader to take incredible coincidences in stride--to knowingly enjoy how over the top the situations are rather than scoff at them (though admittedly Brown's aforementioned pretensions make this much harder).
This is the case from the opening chapters on. I get that Brown wanted to impress us with the sheer high-tech, futuristic feel of the world Langdon steps into when he gets involved with CERN, and perhaps to offer a contrast between that world and the Baroque-era Rome in which most of the story is set. However, the bit with the space plane that ferries Langdon from Massachusetts to Switzerland (sent by CERN's director at his own discretion, on a moment's notice, just because Langdon's was the name he found when he did an Internet search about the Illuminati) was a wildly implausible bit of overkill. There were much easier and more plausible ways of getting Langdon to Europe in time to get him involved in the intrigue. (He could, for instance, have been in Switzerland or a neighboring country on a fellowship or a research grant.)
Brown's characterizations are also just as atrocious as they were in Deception Point, even if he lavishes more ink on them. His protagonist Langdon, whose Harris tweed is referenced at least fifteen times in the novel, isn't a real, believable character who happens to be a professor, but the tweedy cliché that people who have never actually been to college (or perhaps spent their whole time there never going to class) imagine college professors to be. The kind we so often see in bad movies and bad TV shows magisterially addressing a darkened lecture hall, invariably attended wherever he goes by the kind of Prestigious School Name-Dropping hacks use to awe the unsophisticated. (Langdon teaches at--where else?--Harvard, and never lets us forget it. I counted no fewer than eighteen separate references to this little factoid.)
The rest of the dramatis personae aren't much better drawn (Brown seems incapable of thinking in anything but such clichés, a failing evident in the dismaying shallowness and triteness of the dialogue where his dramatis personae discuss Big Ideas), while the villainous hit man would seem particularly worthy of mention. I didn't see what was gained by making him a Hashashin, except to throw the name of yet another secret society (this one even deader than the rest) into the mix, but Brown does absolutely nothing with it. (Indeed, I wonder if Brown wasn't exploiting popular prejudice as a way of lending this particularly flat character an additional touch of menace.)
Perhaps worst of all where this novel is concerned as a thriller pure and simple the mystery seemed diminished considerably after the revelation of a crucial twist in the last act (which makes the whole thing seem even sillier), and diminished further still by the cover-up in which Langdon and Vittoria Vetra become complicit. That could have been a bold move on the writer's part at the end of a dramatic moment of decision, but it doesn't play that way here. The character drama, the political teeth that could make this work--they just aren't there. It seems like a cop-out, and a significant missed possibility--at the end of a long train of them. Brown's themes--the clash between science and religion, the misuse and abuse of power by religious institutions--are worthwhile, but he was simply not up to their challenge. Unfortunately, given his success, it seems that no writer who actually is that will be able to command attention comparable to that which he receives.
I didn't think I'd bother to read another of Dan Brown's novels after suffering through the lousy Deception Point four years ago. Not only was the prose painfully bad (yes, painfully), and the characters one-dimensional, but the real draw--the plot--was ludicrous. (Yes, there certainly is the enmity of many "space cadets" to NASA, but an American presidential election hinging on the fate of the space program? In 1998? And oh, the lameness of his D.C. hijinks . . .)
Nonetheless, I ended up picking up the book he published right after that (incidentally, I didn't happen to catch last year's film), and so here I am. In this one Brown's recurring protagonist, symbologist Robert Langdon (in this his first appearance) is enlisted by the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Maximillian Kohler, to assist an investigation into a brutal murder at the lab's headquarters that may be the work of the Illuminati (on which Langdon is an expert). This leads Langdon into an elaborate plot by the secret society to strike back at the Catholic Church in retaliation for its persecution of science, centered on a quantity of antimatter stolen from CERN. Compounding the mess, this is all happening at the very moment of the Conclave, the college of cardinals' meeting in which they select the next Pope.
It goes without saying that the treatment of antimatter seen here has no relationship with reality, but one may be willing to suspend disbelief on that one point, given its admitted symbolic value. And anyway, unlike his previous two, more technologically-oriented books, this is really a historical mystery more than a technological thriller. However, for a story founded on an intricate historical mystery, it gets a lot of easy (and often, unnecessary) bits wrong--as in its claim that Copernicus was murdered by the Church (he had a stroke, and so far as I have been able to determine foul play has never even been alleged), or that Winston Churchill was a "lifelong Catholic" (a description that not only Churchill, but no PM in British history, fits), or the labeling of the "Rio Plata" as an Old World river (when it's actually in South America). It is all too telling that Brown, who boasts of having taught Shakespeare at Exeter, repeatedly confuses a couplet with an iamb (a mistake made, incidentally, at a crucial point in the unfolding of the mystery)--an error which would be embarrassing for anyone who has ever studied literature, let alone taught it at an "elite" institution.
Given how many others have taken Brown to task for his scientific, historical, geographical and other errors (many of which will immediately jump out at the culturally literate), it's not worth my while to go on about this much more, and in any case, one could be forgiving toward these (in spite of Brown's considerable, financially profitable pretensions to factuality) if his storytelling proved up to par.1 And silly as his premise sounds, with its preposterous implication of scientists skulking around in dark rooms for centuries planning a catastrophic attack on the Vatican in retaliation for old grievances, it did indeed have some potential for excitement.
Now, I admit that Brown has a knack for the kind of pacing that keeps a reader turning the pages--assuming they also turn off their brains. (And while the prose of Angels & Demons is certainly not graceful, elegant, stylish or anything else of the kind, but it isn't painfully bad in the way of Deception Point.) Still, there's a good deal here that jars. In his hands, the conventions creak, and the demands he makes on our willing suspension of disbelief are not only frequent and large, but unsupported by the kind of talent that compels a reader to take incredible coincidences in stride--to knowingly enjoy how over the top the situations are rather than scoff at them (though admittedly Brown's aforementioned pretensions make this much harder).
This is the case from the opening chapters on. I get that Brown wanted to impress us with the sheer high-tech, futuristic feel of the world Langdon steps into when he gets involved with CERN, and perhaps to offer a contrast between that world and the Baroque-era Rome in which most of the story is set. However, the bit with the space plane that ferries Langdon from Massachusetts to Switzerland (sent by CERN's director at his own discretion, on a moment's notice, just because Langdon's was the name he found when he did an Internet search about the Illuminati) was a wildly implausible bit of overkill. There were much easier and more plausible ways of getting Langdon to Europe in time to get him involved in the intrigue. (He could, for instance, have been in Switzerland or a neighboring country on a fellowship or a research grant.)
Brown's characterizations are also just as atrocious as they were in Deception Point, even if he lavishes more ink on them. His protagonist Langdon, whose Harris tweed is referenced at least fifteen times in the novel, isn't a real, believable character who happens to be a professor, but the tweedy cliché that people who have never actually been to college (or perhaps spent their whole time there never going to class) imagine college professors to be. The kind we so often see in bad movies and bad TV shows magisterially addressing a darkened lecture hall, invariably attended wherever he goes by the kind of Prestigious School Name-Dropping hacks use to awe the unsophisticated. (Langdon teaches at--where else?--Harvard, and never lets us forget it. I counted no fewer than eighteen separate references to this little factoid.)
The rest of the dramatis personae aren't much better drawn (Brown seems incapable of thinking in anything but such clichés, a failing evident in the dismaying shallowness and triteness of the dialogue where his dramatis personae discuss Big Ideas), while the villainous hit man would seem particularly worthy of mention. I didn't see what was gained by making him a Hashashin, except to throw the name of yet another secret society (this one even deader than the rest) into the mix, but Brown does absolutely nothing with it. (Indeed, I wonder if Brown wasn't exploiting popular prejudice as a way of lending this particularly flat character an additional touch of menace.)
Perhaps worst of all where this novel is concerned as a thriller pure and simple the mystery seemed diminished considerably after the revelation of a crucial twist in the last act (which makes the whole thing seem even sillier), and diminished further still by the cover-up in which Langdon and Vittoria Vetra become complicit. That could have been a bold move on the writer's part at the end of a dramatic moment of decision, but it doesn't play that way here. The character drama, the political teeth that could make this work--they just aren't there. It seems like a cop-out, and a significant missed possibility--at the end of a long train of them. Brown's themes--the clash between science and religion, the misuse and abuse of power by religious institutions--are worthwhile, but he was simply not up to their challenge. Unfortunately, given his success, it seems that no writer who actually is that will be able to command attention comparable to that which he receives.
Sam Raimi's World War 3 and the History of Science Fiction
Originally posted on March 5, 2016.
Recently I wrote about the possibility that science fiction--real, hardcore, idea-based science fiction, science fiction as H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell knew it, rather than science fiction as just some fuzzy category containing anything that smells even slightly speculative--was in decline, and that this was in part because its place in contemporary culture was being taken up by other things that performed the task as well--or in respects, even better.
These included pop science, pop technology and of course pop futurology. The last of these seems of particular importance. Today someone looking to speculate about the future, to provide a scenario in which the world is different, not only has the option of doing so by way of nonfiction (one not around when, for example, Edward Bellamy was writing, or Wells was starting out, and still comparatively limited in Campbell's heyday), but can perhaps do so more fully and effectively in that way than if they were obliged to work their ideas into a work of fiction. They can devote their full attention to working out what tomorrow might be like, in the large and the small, and how it came to be that way, rather than their trying to force it all into the background of some character's narrative (and being scorned by ever more literature-minded critics for the extent to which they raised such non-Jamesian matters at all).
That a director of Sam Raimi's stature has thought it commercially viable to take a work of futurology and make a major feature film out of it--in this case, George Friedman's The Next 100 Years (reviewed here)--would seem to be suggestive of the long-running trend. The actual film, of course, can be expected to be a work of fiction, with characters and so on, but the point is that rather than taking some novel and adapting that, the starting point has been a work of futurology.
Recently I wrote about the possibility that science fiction--real, hardcore, idea-based science fiction, science fiction as H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell knew it, rather than science fiction as just some fuzzy category containing anything that smells even slightly speculative--was in decline, and that this was in part because its place in contemporary culture was being taken up by other things that performed the task as well--or in respects, even better.
These included pop science, pop technology and of course pop futurology. The last of these seems of particular importance. Today someone looking to speculate about the future, to provide a scenario in which the world is different, not only has the option of doing so by way of nonfiction (one not around when, for example, Edward Bellamy was writing, or Wells was starting out, and still comparatively limited in Campbell's heyday), but can perhaps do so more fully and effectively in that way than if they were obliged to work their ideas into a work of fiction. They can devote their full attention to working out what tomorrow might be like, in the large and the small, and how it came to be that way, rather than their trying to force it all into the background of some character's narrative (and being scorned by ever more literature-minded critics for the extent to which they raised such non-Jamesian matters at all).
That a director of Sam Raimi's stature has thought it commercially viable to take a work of futurology and make a major feature film out of it--in this case, George Friedman's The Next 100 Years (reviewed here)--would seem to be suggestive of the long-running trend. The actual film, of course, can be expected to be a work of fiction, with characters and so on, but the point is that rather than taking some novel and adapting that, the starting point has been a work of futurology.
Sam Raimi's World War 3: Thoughts on the Source Material
Originally Posted on March 5, 2016.
I was surprised by the recent news that Sam Raimi will be directing a movie titled World War 3, based on George Friedman's book The Next 100 Years.
This was all the more so because I have followed Friedman's work for a very long time, even reviewing his last two books--The Next Decade, and of course, The Next 100 Years.
You can also check my revisitation of Friedman's predictions back in July (here).
Personally I have to admit to being underwhelmed by the work. Friedman's forecast is of obvious interest precisely because it is a detailed book-length forecast full of surprising predictions. However, as I noted in my reviews of his work, it also seemed to me to be based on some faulty assumptions.
By and large they are a grab-bag of biases common among strategic thinkers of a particular political persuasion.
In Friedman's vision the world economy will go on chugging along much as it has with neoliberalism somehow not a barrier to the development of "emerging markets," Russia and China will simply fail, Europe is always decadent or hostile or both, and neither global warming nor energy scarcities will exist as a meaningful factor for decades to come.
Oh, and somehow large-scale great power can be counted on not to escalate to the nuclear level.
In some cases, he even seems to be trying to salvage bad predictions from past decades, such as that communicated by the title of his 1991 The Coming War With Japan.
Indeed, after writing my review I found myself writing my own vision of the next hundred years (also reposted here), while today some of his newer guesses already seem as badly dated as that one. (Already in The Next Decade he was backing away slightly from his optimism about fossil fuels.)
At a time when events are unfolding along a far less conventional path than Friedman imagines--and perhaps of more immediate concern international, great power war is seeming an ever more plausible and frightening possibility--the idea of making this very questionable conception of the future a movie seems to me . . . well, very questionable.
I was surprised by the recent news that Sam Raimi will be directing a movie titled World War 3, based on George Friedman's book The Next 100 Years.
This was all the more so because I have followed Friedman's work for a very long time, even reviewing his last two books--The Next Decade, and of course, The Next 100 Years.
You can also check my revisitation of Friedman's predictions back in July (here).
Personally I have to admit to being underwhelmed by the work. Friedman's forecast is of obvious interest precisely because it is a detailed book-length forecast full of surprising predictions. However, as I noted in my reviews of his work, it also seemed to me to be based on some faulty assumptions.
By and large they are a grab-bag of biases common among strategic thinkers of a particular political persuasion.
In Friedman's vision the world economy will go on chugging along much as it has with neoliberalism somehow not a barrier to the development of "emerging markets," Russia and China will simply fail, Europe is always decadent or hostile or both, and neither global warming nor energy scarcities will exist as a meaningful factor for decades to come.
Oh, and somehow large-scale great power can be counted on not to escalate to the nuclear level.
In some cases, he even seems to be trying to salvage bad predictions from past decades, such as that communicated by the title of his 1991 The Coming War With Japan.
Indeed, after writing my review I found myself writing my own vision of the next hundred years (also reposted here), while today some of his newer guesses already seem as badly dated as that one. (Already in The Next Decade he was backing away slightly from his optimism about fossil fuels.)
At a time when events are unfolding along a far less conventional path than Friedman imagines--and perhaps of more immediate concern international, great power war is seeming an ever more plausible and frightening possibility--the idea of making this very questionable conception of the future a movie seems to me . . . well, very questionable.
John Gardner's James Bond and the Bestseller List
Originally Posted on May 3, 2017.
During the 1980s, John Gardner's James Bond continuation novels, while not enjoying the sales of Ian Fleming at his peak, were still regulars on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list. The second book, For Special Services, was the stand-out in that respect, staying on the list for fifteen weeks, during which it rose as high as the #6 position. However, during the '80s each release lasted at least four weeks, and most broke the top ten.
By contrast, Gardner's books stopped making the list in the 1990s. To be fair, the list does show a general declining trend, the later books lasting for shorter periods, and peaking at lower ranks.1 In the view of many (myself included) this reflected his contributions' weakening as the years progressed, with Gardner either repeating himself or serving up less compelling new ideas, and the handling generally becoming more anemic. However, in fairness, lots and lots and lots of bestselling authors survive all that. Moreover, the abruptness of the drop-off, and the fact that not even the novelty of a new author (Raymond Benson) raised enough interest to put the books back on it for so much as a single week, suggests that it was not just the weakness of the later entries that was responsible.
It was also a matter of the changing times--the sharp drop in the sales of novels about spies and international affairs generally after the Cold War's end.2 Thrillers remained popular, but fans instead favored tales of ordinary domestic crime --legal thrillers (Scott Turow and John Grisham), forensic thrillers (Patricia Cornwell), psych-profiling serial killer thrillers (Thomas Harris and James Patterson). Indeed, looking back a quarter of a century later it can seem like an era had come to end.
1. 1983's Icebreaker did less well than For Special, 1984's Role of Honor less well than that--managing just four weeks, in which it failed to break the top ten. Nobody Lives Forever and No Deals, Mr. Bond each did a bit better--making the #9 position, with No Deals lasting seven weeks altogether. Still, after that 1988's Scorpio lasted just six weeks, 1989's Win, Lose or Die just four, and neither got past the #11 spot.
2. I've been going over the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly lists systematically for an upcoming book, and it looks like, save for Tom Clancy, who also did less well after the '80s, just about everyone involved really suffered, commercial giants like le Carre and Ludlum knocked out of the top spots, and newcomers appearing only rarely and briefly--Daniel Silva's sales, a far cry from what earlier newcomers scored, about as good as this seemed to get during that decade.
During the 1980s, John Gardner's James Bond continuation novels, while not enjoying the sales of Ian Fleming at his peak, were still regulars on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list. The second book, For Special Services, was the stand-out in that respect, staying on the list for fifteen weeks, during which it rose as high as the #6 position. However, during the '80s each release lasted at least four weeks, and most broke the top ten.
By contrast, Gardner's books stopped making the list in the 1990s. To be fair, the list does show a general declining trend, the later books lasting for shorter periods, and peaking at lower ranks.1 In the view of many (myself included) this reflected his contributions' weakening as the years progressed, with Gardner either repeating himself or serving up less compelling new ideas, and the handling generally becoming more anemic. However, in fairness, lots and lots and lots of bestselling authors survive all that. Moreover, the abruptness of the drop-off, and the fact that not even the novelty of a new author (Raymond Benson) raised enough interest to put the books back on it for so much as a single week, suggests that it was not just the weakness of the later entries that was responsible.
It was also a matter of the changing times--the sharp drop in the sales of novels about spies and international affairs generally after the Cold War's end.2 Thrillers remained popular, but fans instead favored tales of ordinary domestic crime --legal thrillers (Scott Turow and John Grisham), forensic thrillers (Patricia Cornwell), psych-profiling serial killer thrillers (Thomas Harris and James Patterson). Indeed, looking back a quarter of a century later it can seem like an era had come to end.
1. 1983's Icebreaker did less well than For Special, 1984's Role of Honor less well than that--managing just four weeks, in which it failed to break the top ten. Nobody Lives Forever and No Deals, Mr. Bond each did a bit better--making the #9 position, with No Deals lasting seven weeks altogether. Still, after that 1988's Scorpio lasted just six weeks, 1989's Win, Lose or Die just four, and neither got past the #11 spot.
2. I've been going over the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly lists systematically for an upcoming book, and it looks like, save for Tom Clancy, who also did less well after the '80s, just about everyone involved really suffered, commercial giants like le Carre and Ludlum knocked out of the top spots, and newcomers appearing only rarely and briefly--Daniel Silva's sales, a far cry from what earlier newcomers scored, about as good as this seemed to get during that decade.
John Gardner's James Bond Novels
Originally Posted on October 11, 2015.
By and large, the continuations of the James Bond series written by Ian Fleming's successors get very short shrift, often rating no more than a few pages in studies of the series--like those by Jeremy Black, or Simon Winder.
And some writers get shorter shrift than others, John Gardner in particular seeming neglected, relative to his contributions.
This is partly a matter of timing. Gardner was neither the first (like Kingsley Amis), nor, of course, has he been the last (in the nineteen years since Gardner's last, five different writers have tackled the series, often in sharply different ways), which by itself makes him more easily forgotten.1
Additionally, in contrast with the prestige some of those authors enjoyed due to their more "literary" work (Amis in particular), Gardner was seen as principally a genre writer.
However, some of this has to do with more than timing and bias. Gardner's enthusiasm for the books has been open to question. His career as a novelist began with a self-described "piss-take" on Bond in the very funny parody Boysie Oakes novel The Liquidator, and he later admitted in an interview that he never really cared much for the character. And those cognizant of his other work may be all the more dismayed when comparing even his better Bond books with the sheer verve Gardner displayed in writing a book like The Liquidator, or what were by his admission his favorite novels, the books of the Moriarty series (in which he displayed more verve continuing an entirely different character).
It does not help that it was not a case of a writer growing into a task and going out strong, but rather the reverse. (Licence Renewed, for example, was at its best a deft blend of Ian Fleming with the cinematic Bond, which made for one of the overall series' most satisfying action-adventures--but he went in other directions with later installments, and the last entries show clear signs of exhaustion.)
Still, if the overall quality of the output was not all that might have been hoped for, many entries did have their pleasures, and even those books that drew more ambivalent responses enjoy the interest of novelty--like the Bond-meets-Top Gun of Win, Lose or Die. And even if they are apocrypha rather than canon, sheer mass lends them an additional significance. No one, not even Fleming himself, spent more time on the series or produced as many books in it as Gardner, who in sixteen years published fourteen original novels (and two novelizations of Bond films, those of Licence to Kill and Goldeneye respectively).
A really complete appreciation of the series requires that one take all this into account, and indeed, in my two recent books--The Forgotten James Bond and James Bond's Evolution--I have made a point of doing just that.
By and large, the continuations of the James Bond series written by Ian Fleming's successors get very short shrift, often rating no more than a few pages in studies of the series--like those by Jeremy Black, or Simon Winder.
And some writers get shorter shrift than others, John Gardner in particular seeming neglected, relative to his contributions.
This is partly a matter of timing. Gardner was neither the first (like Kingsley Amis), nor, of course, has he been the last (in the nineteen years since Gardner's last, five different writers have tackled the series, often in sharply different ways), which by itself makes him more easily forgotten.1
Additionally, in contrast with the prestige some of those authors enjoyed due to their more "literary" work (Amis in particular), Gardner was seen as principally a genre writer.
However, some of this has to do with more than timing and bias. Gardner's enthusiasm for the books has been open to question. His career as a novelist began with a self-described "piss-take" on Bond in the very funny parody Boysie Oakes novel The Liquidator, and he later admitted in an interview that he never really cared much for the character. And those cognizant of his other work may be all the more dismayed when comparing even his better Bond books with the sheer verve Gardner displayed in writing a book like The Liquidator, or what were by his admission his favorite novels, the books of the Moriarty series (in which he displayed more verve continuing an entirely different character).
It does not help that it was not a case of a writer growing into a task and going out strong, but rather the reverse. (Licence Renewed, for example, was at its best a deft blend of Ian Fleming with the cinematic Bond, which made for one of the overall series' most satisfying action-adventures--but he went in other directions with later installments, and the last entries show clear signs of exhaustion.)
Still, if the overall quality of the output was not all that might have been hoped for, many entries did have their pleasures, and even those books that drew more ambivalent responses enjoy the interest of novelty--like the Bond-meets-Top Gun of Win, Lose or Die. And even if they are apocrypha rather than canon, sheer mass lends them an additional significance. No one, not even Fleming himself, spent more time on the series or produced as many books in it as Gardner, who in sixteen years published fourteen original novels (and two novelizations of Bond films, those of Licence to Kill and Goldeneye respectively).
A really complete appreciation of the series requires that one take all this into account, and indeed, in my two recent books--The Forgotten James Bond and James Bond's Evolution--I have made a point of doing just that.
Raymond Benson's the Union Saga (Extended James Bond Series)
Originally Posted on December 11, 2016.
When I first read Raymond Benson's Bond novels I actually found them rather more to my taste than the Fleming originals. They were more accessibly written--Benson not writing Bond as if he were writing Emma Bovary. (The "indirect glance," as Umberto called it, the nonlinearity that made the books rougher going than I expected, are absent here.) Benson's novels also--for the most part--dispensed with the less appealing bits of the characterization. (Bond is getting on in years--but much less the grouchy old Edwardian Tory civil servant overdue for a trip to Shrublands.)
The books were, I might add, more cinematic in their pacing (the overlong mah jongg game in Zero Minus Ten apart), and in their action. (Rarely on a par with the Clive Cussler novels that then set the standard for me, but satisfying nonetheless--with Never Dream of Dying almost everything one can ask for on that score.)
For much the same reason, I also preferred Benson to John Gardner.
Of course, in the years since I have become more appreciative of Fleming's strengths (and Gardner's)--and of the weaknesses of the Benson novels (apart from the obvious purists' complaint that they are just not like Fleming's, as they could not have been in a different age and market).
Still, the Benson novels have their pleasures. And of course, they are a significant part of the franchise. This is partly a question of sheer volume--there being six of them, plus three movie tie-in novels (of the last three Pierce Brosnan films).
They are interesting, too, because of their being the last literary expression of the franchise before the much-touted 2006 reboot of the Bond films in Casino Royale. Since that time the franchise has had its successes (not least the billion-dollar gross of Skyfall), but the series has been less prolific, and in its identity much less stable. In fourteen years we have had just four Bond novels--as compared with the years when Bond novels came along annually--with the series zigzagging wildly in respect of setting, premise, tone. So far no author has written more than one, while each did wildly different things with their books--Faulks and Boyd trying to pick things up just where Fleming left off in the '60s; Horowitz retreating even farther into the '50s to write a Goldfinger sequel; and Deaver attempting a radical update.
The result is that Benson offers the last real continuity with the older books, and the older conception.
And it might be added, the books are interesting for having been written by a man who came to the series out of its fandom--Benson's first public association with the franchise his authorship of the James Bond Bedside Companion.
All this makes his contributions well worth a look. To that end I review the three novels of Benson's "Union" trilogy depicting Bond's battle with a new, SPECTRE-like criminal organization--High Time to Kill, DoubleShot and Never Dream of Dying.
Also just reviewed is the follow-up, and final Benson novel, which continued one of Never's plot threads, The Man with the Red Tattoo.
When I first read Raymond Benson's Bond novels I actually found them rather more to my taste than the Fleming originals. They were more accessibly written--Benson not writing Bond as if he were writing Emma Bovary. (The "indirect glance," as Umberto called it, the nonlinearity that made the books rougher going than I expected, are absent here.) Benson's novels also--for the most part--dispensed with the less appealing bits of the characterization. (Bond is getting on in years--but much less the grouchy old Edwardian Tory civil servant overdue for a trip to Shrublands.)
The books were, I might add, more cinematic in their pacing (the overlong mah jongg game in Zero Minus Ten apart), and in their action. (Rarely on a par with the Clive Cussler novels that then set the standard for me, but satisfying nonetheless--with Never Dream of Dying almost everything one can ask for on that score.)
For much the same reason, I also preferred Benson to John Gardner.
Of course, in the years since I have become more appreciative of Fleming's strengths (and Gardner's)--and of the weaknesses of the Benson novels (apart from the obvious purists' complaint that they are just not like Fleming's, as they could not have been in a different age and market).
Still, the Benson novels have their pleasures. And of course, they are a significant part of the franchise. This is partly a question of sheer volume--there being six of them, plus three movie tie-in novels (of the last three Pierce Brosnan films).
They are interesting, too, because of their being the last literary expression of the franchise before the much-touted 2006 reboot of the Bond films in Casino Royale. Since that time the franchise has had its successes (not least the billion-dollar gross of Skyfall), but the series has been less prolific, and in its identity much less stable. In fourteen years we have had just four Bond novels--as compared with the years when Bond novels came along annually--with the series zigzagging wildly in respect of setting, premise, tone. So far no author has written more than one, while each did wildly different things with their books--Faulks and Boyd trying to pick things up just where Fleming left off in the '60s; Horowitz retreating even farther into the '50s to write a Goldfinger sequel; and Deaver attempting a radical update.
The result is that Benson offers the last real continuity with the older books, and the older conception.
And it might be added, the books are interesting for having been written by a man who came to the series out of its fandom--Benson's first public association with the franchise his authorship of the James Bond Bedside Companion.
All this makes his contributions well worth a look. To that end I review the three novels of Benson's "Union" trilogy depicting Bond's battle with a new, SPECTRE-like criminal organization--High Time to Kill, DoubleShot and Never Dream of Dying.
Also just reviewed is the follow-up, and final Benson novel, which continued one of Never's plot threads, The Man with the Red Tattoo.
After Spectre: A Prediction
Originally posted on December 18, 2015.
As I noted in a previous post, Spectre has not been the triumph hoped for by the producers or the fans--but, as it adds to an already $800 million global gross, it is also no flop.
Of course, neither was Die Another Day, or Moonraker, or Quantum of Solace a flop for that matter. But in each of those cases a decision was taken to follow a very different path with the next Bond movie, and it does not seem impossible that this will be the case here.
What direction might that be? Nothing so radical as the retro approach that the various novelists Glidrose has commissioned to write new James Bond novels (which reached a new peak with Horowitz's '50s-era Trigger Mortis, set just after the events of Goldfinger).
Rather I think that we will see the filmmakers back off to some extent from the course they established in Skyfall, and continued in Spectre--a more "mythic" approach to Bond, which not incidentally makes much more of his personal history. I suspect also that, just as happened after Quantum of Solace, they will hesitate to go with a political plot (which, somehow, always leads to exaggerated criticisms in big, popular movies). Instead we are apt to get a shorter, brisker Bond movie, with less aspiration to be epic, but more emphasis on simple fun--which will also leave the filmmakers more hard-pressed to make the twenty-fifth installment in the series headed our way in the next few years somehow feel like more than just "another" Bond movie, itself now just another example of the would-be blockbusters that have come to saturate the multiplex year-round.
As I noted in a previous post, Spectre has not been the triumph hoped for by the producers or the fans--but, as it adds to an already $800 million global gross, it is also no flop.
Of course, neither was Die Another Day, or Moonraker, or Quantum of Solace a flop for that matter. But in each of those cases a decision was taken to follow a very different path with the next Bond movie, and it does not seem impossible that this will be the case here.
What direction might that be? Nothing so radical as the retro approach that the various novelists Glidrose has commissioned to write new James Bond novels (which reached a new peak with Horowitz's '50s-era Trigger Mortis, set just after the events of Goldfinger).
Rather I think that we will see the filmmakers back off to some extent from the course they established in Skyfall, and continued in Spectre--a more "mythic" approach to Bond, which not incidentally makes much more of his personal history. I suspect also that, just as happened after Quantum of Solace, they will hesitate to go with a political plot (which, somehow, always leads to exaggerated criticisms in big, popular movies). Instead we are apt to get a shorter, brisker Bond movie, with less aspiration to be epic, but more emphasis on simple fun--which will also leave the filmmakers more hard-pressed to make the twenty-fifth installment in the series headed our way in the next few years somehow feel like more than just "another" Bond movie, itself now just another example of the would-be blockbusters that have come to saturate the multiplex year-round.
Bond and America and Spectre
Originally Posted on November 10, 2015.
It does not seem to have just been my imagination that when American reviewers got their two cents in and suddenly the criticism of the series appeared a whole lot more brutal. The Australian took notice of the tendency too.
The article is mostly a round-up of the less complimentary things American critics have said, but it does offer a reminder that the United States has always been a less friendly market for the franchise than its native Britain--because of factors ranging from the U.S. being disinclined to import its pop culture (and especially its action heroes), a sneering attitude toward the films as bespeaking a perceived British "self-importance" (i.e. Britain still being a "world power" when this has long ceased to be the case), or the frankly unflattering things Ian Fleming often had to say about the country (especially in his later books).
One result is that they may be less forgiving of the weaknesses that pretty much everyone admits on both sides of the ocean.
It does not seem to have just been my imagination that when American reviewers got their two cents in and suddenly the criticism of the series appeared a whole lot more brutal. The Australian took notice of the tendency too.
The article is mostly a round-up of the less complimentary things American critics have said, but it does offer a reminder that the United States has always been a less friendly market for the franchise than its native Britain--because of factors ranging from the U.S. being disinclined to import its pop culture (and especially its action heroes), a sneering attitude toward the films as bespeaking a perceived British "self-importance" (i.e. Britain still being a "world power" when this has long ceased to be the case), or the frankly unflattering things Ian Fleming often had to say about the country (especially in his later books).
One result is that they may be less forgiving of the weaknesses that pretty much everyone admits on both sides of the ocean.
Spectre's North American Opening
Originally Posted on November 8, 2015.
It's Sunday afternoon, which means the estimates are in regarding Spectre's opening weekend performance.
Alas, no big surprises. The take was $73 million, close to the high end of the range of estimates given out, which was about what most people (myself included) expected it to be.
Especially given that, as the weaker reviews hint, there is less likely to be the kind of good word-of-mouth that keeps people coming in over the following weeks--it seems that reviews of the film keep getting more critical ("worst Bond movie in years" the one from Vox says in its title)--it's hard to picture the movie doing much more than tripling its take. Again, my guess is that we will see it finish up in the $200-250 million range in America, while improvements in earnings elsewhere will offset its weaker earnings in this market.
Still, I suspect that, where the success of Skyfall encouraged the producers to continue in the same direction, the darker spots in the film's international performance, and the sense that the shine is off the reboot, the nearly certain fifth Daniel Craig Bond film is likely to see yet another round of modifications to the character.
It's Sunday afternoon, which means the estimates are in regarding Spectre's opening weekend performance.
Alas, no big surprises. The take was $73 million, close to the high end of the range of estimates given out, which was about what most people (myself included) expected it to be.
Especially given that, as the weaker reviews hint, there is less likely to be the kind of good word-of-mouth that keeps people coming in over the following weeks--it seems that reviews of the film keep getting more critical ("worst Bond movie in years" the one from Vox says in its title)--it's hard to picture the movie doing much more than tripling its take. Again, my guess is that we will see it finish up in the $200-250 million range in America, while improvements in earnings elsewhere will offset its weaker earnings in this market.
Still, I suspect that, where the success of Skyfall encouraged the producers to continue in the same direction, the darker spots in the film's international performance, and the sense that the shine is off the reboot, the nearly certain fifth Daniel Craig Bond film is likely to see yet another round of modifications to the character.
Spectre: A Box Office Prediction
Originally Posted on November 5, 2015.
The release of Spectre is finally upon us in the U.S..
Thus far critics have (predictably) been more ambivalent about the latest Bond film than its predecessor. To go by my decidedly unscientific sampling of the published reviews, praise for the action sequences seems universal, while the visual style more generally has been remarked. However, the film has (unsurprisingly given the Sony leaks from last year) been criticized for its plotting, which to go by the more caustic, has been loose and illogical even by Bondian standards. The movie's length and "crowdedness" seem to be taking their toll, with the backstory especially falling flat. And as a whole, the novelty of the reboot seems to be fading.
None of this prevented Spectre from enjoying a sensational first week at the British box office, during which it earned a record $67 million. Of course, more screens and IMAX did their part as Deadline's Nancy Tartaglione notes--and so, one might imagine, did inflation--but all the same, given how big Skyfall was, topping its debut on just about any terms bodes very well for it. Spectre also seems to have done the same in the Netherlands, and across Scandinavia.
Still, other markets are tougher, not least that of the United States, where nothing like a record weekend is expected. Indeed, Spectre is expected to pull in some $65-75 million in its first three days, healthy for a movie of this kind, but a far cry from the $200 million openings enjoyed by Jurassic World and Avengers earlier this year, or even the $90 million that Skyfall scored three years ago. And there is little reason to think the movie will have exceptional legs at the American box office.
That still leaves a North American gross of $250 million plausible, and anything under $200 million unlikely/. Admittedly that makes the drop from last time's $304 million take too large to overlook. Still, it is easy to see any diminution of the movie's American earnings being offset by the higher revenue already coming in from elsewhere, and also likely to come in the weeks ahead--like China, where Spectre's significantly bettering the $59 million take Skyfall enjoyed in that country is easily pictured. Consequently, when the last receipts have been counted, I expect that even if the new movie misses the billion-dollar mark, it will not be by much.
The release of Spectre is finally upon us in the U.S..
Thus far critics have (predictably) been more ambivalent about the latest Bond film than its predecessor. To go by my decidedly unscientific sampling of the published reviews, praise for the action sequences seems universal, while the visual style more generally has been remarked. However, the film has (unsurprisingly given the Sony leaks from last year) been criticized for its plotting, which to go by the more caustic, has been loose and illogical even by Bondian standards. The movie's length and "crowdedness" seem to be taking their toll, with the backstory especially falling flat. And as a whole, the novelty of the reboot seems to be fading.
None of this prevented Spectre from enjoying a sensational first week at the British box office, during which it earned a record $67 million. Of course, more screens and IMAX did their part as Deadline's Nancy Tartaglione notes--and so, one might imagine, did inflation--but all the same, given how big Skyfall was, topping its debut on just about any terms bodes very well for it. Spectre also seems to have done the same in the Netherlands, and across Scandinavia.
Still, other markets are tougher, not least that of the United States, where nothing like a record weekend is expected. Indeed, Spectre is expected to pull in some $65-75 million in its first three days, healthy for a movie of this kind, but a far cry from the $200 million openings enjoyed by Jurassic World and Avengers earlier this year, or even the $90 million that Skyfall scored three years ago. And there is little reason to think the movie will have exceptional legs at the American box office.
That still leaves a North American gross of $250 million plausible, and anything under $200 million unlikely/. Admittedly that makes the drop from last time's $304 million take too large to overlook. Still, it is easy to see any diminution of the movie's American earnings being offset by the higher revenue already coming in from elsewhere, and also likely to come in the weeks ahead--like China, where Spectre's significantly bettering the $59 million take Skyfall enjoyed in that country is easily pictured. Consequently, when the last receipts have been counted, I expect that even if the new movie misses the billion-dollar mark, it will not be by much.
The Last Daniel Craig Bond Film?
Originally Posted on October 22, 2015.
As is well known, Daniel Craig sounded aghast at the thought of doing another Bond film in a recent interview, and much of the press made a lot of the fact, as they always do when an actor deviates from the achingly bland routine of film promotion.
The reality is that while nothing is so important for an actor's career as having a franchise (so much so that anyone getting one should count themselves very, very lucky), actually having that franchise, and playing the same role again and again and again, makes them restless. This is all the more the case when it is a franchise of big-budget ($250 million!) with a great deal of location work, and long, post-production publicity tours. And of course, it's one thing to endure the grueling routine (with which few non-Bond films compare) at twenty-seven, another to do it at forty-seven.
In fact, there's a long tradition of Bonds getting fed up with just this aspect of the series, going back at least to Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice.
There is, too, the problem of lengthy association with the franchise. One can do only so many movies--and then what? In contrast with a good many other roles, the role is not identified with the actor, but the actor with the role, and especially if they stick with it for too long, what comes afterward is apt to be an anti-climax. (Take, for example, Roger Moore's long career of William Shatner-like self-parody in movies like Spice World. Indeed, even Sean Connery had a hard time moving past it, even if he did ultimately succeed.)
And again, Craig's age matters. By the time the next Bond film comes out, he could be fifty--and while in this post-Expendables age being a fiftysomething action hero is less implausible than it used to be (Vin Diesel's still playing Dom Toretto is actually much more bizarre given the youth orientation of the Fast and Furious series), the audience has a very fixed idea of Bond as eternally thirtysomething which makes it more of a problem. And it can understandably seem better not to overstay one's welcome (and spare oneself the kind of brutal press Moore was getting by the time of A View to a Kill).
Still, even the spontaneous remarks of the publicity tour are often as "unscripted" as a reality show. Craig might have been blowing off some genuine steam--but it could also have been a trial balloon, one which achieved the predictable effect, eliciting both expressions of stupid shock, and speculation about who might succeed Craig in the role.
Shea Serrano, at least, managed to be interesting as he went about the old game, making a case for Groot getting the job--which actually would be something worth writing about.
As is well known, Daniel Craig sounded aghast at the thought of doing another Bond film in a recent interview, and much of the press made a lot of the fact, as they always do when an actor deviates from the achingly bland routine of film promotion.
The reality is that while nothing is so important for an actor's career as having a franchise (so much so that anyone getting one should count themselves very, very lucky), actually having that franchise, and playing the same role again and again and again, makes them restless. This is all the more the case when it is a franchise of big-budget ($250 million!) with a great deal of location work, and long, post-production publicity tours. And of course, it's one thing to endure the grueling routine (with which few non-Bond films compare) at twenty-seven, another to do it at forty-seven.
In fact, there's a long tradition of Bonds getting fed up with just this aspect of the series, going back at least to Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice.
There is, too, the problem of lengthy association with the franchise. One can do only so many movies--and then what? In contrast with a good many other roles, the role is not identified with the actor, but the actor with the role, and especially if they stick with it for too long, what comes afterward is apt to be an anti-climax. (Take, for example, Roger Moore's long career of William Shatner-like self-parody in movies like Spice World. Indeed, even Sean Connery had a hard time moving past it, even if he did ultimately succeed.)
And again, Craig's age matters. By the time the next Bond film comes out, he could be fifty--and while in this post-Expendables age being a fiftysomething action hero is less implausible than it used to be (Vin Diesel's still playing Dom Toretto is actually much more bizarre given the youth orientation of the Fast and Furious series), the audience has a very fixed idea of Bond as eternally thirtysomething which makes it more of a problem. And it can understandably seem better not to overstay one's welcome (and spare oneself the kind of brutal press Moore was getting by the time of A View to a Kill).
Still, even the spontaneous remarks of the publicity tour are often as "unscripted" as a reality show. Craig might have been blowing off some genuine steam--but it could also have been a trial balloon, one which achieved the predictable effect, eliciting both expressions of stupid shock, and speculation about who might succeed Craig in the role.
Shea Serrano, at least, managed to be interesting as he went about the old game, making a case for Groot getting the job--which actually would be something worth writing about.
Too Many Spies?
Originally posted on September 29, 2015.
This past year has been surprisingly crowded with adventures featuring '60's-style spies. Most obviously there has been this spring's hit Kingsman, and then this summer's Spy, Mission: Impossible 5 and The Man From U.N.C.L.E..
One might add, too, that the Fast and Furious franchise has moved into 007 territory--as Roman Pearce quipped pungently in the sixth film (and stayed there in its hit seventh film)--and that the SHIELD organization of the Avengers franchise also was born out of Marvel's jumping on the "spymania" bandwagon back in the '60s.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. apart, all of these films were considerable hits, and that movie's comparative failure at the box office can easily be thought a matter of the original franchise's obscurity, and the tough sell of its atompunk approach, rather than the market's having been over-saturated.
Still, one wonders if this has not been a factor--and what it will bode for the biggest of this year's spy movies, the new Bond film Spectre, when it hits theaters.
My expectation is that this won't make much difference. Just as the public has soaked up the superheroes for nearly two decades, the signs all suggest that a couple of months hence they will be ready to see yet another film derived from a '60s-era spy franchise--the good will the Bond brand picked up with Skyfall, which does not seem to have suffered after the revelations regarding the hacking of Sony, likely to survive this too.
Rather it seems more worthwhile to consider wonder whether the film will match Skyfall's record earnings back in 2012--greater than any prior Bond film, even after inflation.
What do you think? Any predictions?
This past year has been surprisingly crowded with adventures featuring '60's-style spies. Most obviously there has been this spring's hit Kingsman, and then this summer's Spy, Mission: Impossible 5 and The Man From U.N.C.L.E..
One might add, too, that the Fast and Furious franchise has moved into 007 territory--as Roman Pearce quipped pungently in the sixth film (and stayed there in its hit seventh film)--and that the SHIELD organization of the Avengers franchise also was born out of Marvel's jumping on the "spymania" bandwagon back in the '60s.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. apart, all of these films were considerable hits, and that movie's comparative failure at the box office can easily be thought a matter of the original franchise's obscurity, and the tough sell of its atompunk approach, rather than the market's having been over-saturated.
Still, one wonders if this has not been a factor--and what it will bode for the biggest of this year's spy movies, the new Bond film Spectre, when it hits theaters.
My expectation is that this won't make much difference. Just as the public has soaked up the superheroes for nearly two decades, the signs all suggest that a couple of months hence they will be ready to see yet another film derived from a '60s-era spy franchise--the good will the Bond brand picked up with Skyfall, which does not seem to have suffered after the revelations regarding the hacking of Sony, likely to survive this too.
Rather it seems more worthwhile to consider wonder whether the film will match Skyfall's record earnings back in 2012--greater than any prior Bond film, even after inflation.
What do you think? Any predictions?
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: Trailer and Story
Originally Posted on August 6, 2013.
Seeing the trailer for Ben Stiller's upcoming The Secret Life of Walter Mitty set me thinking about the original short story again (you can read it here), and the ways in which that film diverges from it.
Such a divergence was perhaps inevitable, the original tale not lending itself well to a two-hour movie. A mere two thousand words in length, it is essentially a slice-of-life vignette about a hapless and "henpecked" older man who drives into town with his wife to run a few errands and is constantly distracted from his tasks by his tendency to daydream, much to the inconvenience and irritation of everyone around him.
This is sufficient material for a sitcom episode, not a feature film.
Quantity aside, a day in the life of this particular couple is not exactly the stuff of high-concept comedy--and indeed, decades before the term "high-concept" was in use, the film made the protagonist younger, made him single, transferred the overbearing behavior of the wife to other characters (mother, boss). They also tossed in a real-life adventure to provide a plot that leads to a happy ending when the man who only daydreamed himself a hero actually becomes one.
The trailer for the upcoming version, of course, is rather thin on detail (the absence of dialogue has been repeatedly noted in the entertainment press), and so even as trailers go it offers little basis for judging the film. Still, it follows the previous film in many of these respects, down to Mitty's job in publishing (big shock, that)--while hinting at some significant differences, which set it that much further apart from the original.
One is the way in which the film will handle the daydream sequences. In Thurber's story, Daydream Mitty, in stark contrast with Real Mitty, was in command of every situation that presented itself and always recognized for it, everyone about him a fawning admirer of his exceptional courage and skill--and manly self-assertion--as they cringed before the same challenges. Those situations were typically martial (Navy "hydroplane" captain, bomber pilot) or at least involved weapons and violence (Mitty as gunman, Mitty before a firing squad).1 In the trailer for the new film we do see Daydream Mitty in archetypally heroic situations (he seems to be an Arctic explorer at one point, an astronaut in another), but the emphasis on war, weaponry and violence has been left out. Indeed, the old-fashioned machismo--both Mitty's anxiety about his real-life lack of it, and his conspicuous display of it in his daydreams--seem unlikely to be a part of the big-screen version. (If anything, to go by Mitty's longing look at Cheryl, I expect the accent will be on Mitty as Sensitive Man rather than merely timid.)
More significant still is the likelihood that we will see Mitty less put upon (especially by overbearing women, another concept Hollywood has become less comfortable with treating in a critical fashion), while the extent to which he has contributed to his unhappy situation seems likely to be played up. Indeed, it all looks rather "Walter Mitty, Self-Help Book Hero," and I expect that how one feels about that will depend in large part on how one feels about self-help culture.
Love it or hate it, though, there is no denying that that culture tends to play up individual autonomy, and play down the practical and other constraints on one's freedom of choice; that it tends toward a simplistic, complacent solipsism. As I saw it, Thurber's story was about the distance between the man Mitty would have liked to be (the kind of man he has been told he should be), and the kind of man he actually was, or even could be--and the ways in which the external world he had to deal with kept reminding him of the fact, making him retreat inside his own head (as arguably, we all do to varying degrees). A "Self-Help"-themed version of the story seems prone to deny the importance, or even existence, of the external world altogether, a fundamentally different way of approaching the same subject than Thurber offered, and a rather more conventional one contrary to the spirit of Thurber's work.
But all this will likely stand Stiller's film in good stead at Oscar time.
1. Only the scene where "Dr." Mitty performs surgery on a high-profile patient is an exception to that pattern.
Seeing the trailer for Ben Stiller's upcoming The Secret Life of Walter Mitty set me thinking about the original short story again (you can read it here), and the ways in which that film diverges from it.
Such a divergence was perhaps inevitable, the original tale not lending itself well to a two-hour movie. A mere two thousand words in length, it is essentially a slice-of-life vignette about a hapless and "henpecked" older man who drives into town with his wife to run a few errands and is constantly distracted from his tasks by his tendency to daydream, much to the inconvenience and irritation of everyone around him.
This is sufficient material for a sitcom episode, not a feature film.
Quantity aside, a day in the life of this particular couple is not exactly the stuff of high-concept comedy--and indeed, decades before the term "high-concept" was in use, the film made the protagonist younger, made him single, transferred the overbearing behavior of the wife to other characters (mother, boss). They also tossed in a real-life adventure to provide a plot that leads to a happy ending when the man who only daydreamed himself a hero actually becomes one.
The trailer for the upcoming version, of course, is rather thin on detail (the absence of dialogue has been repeatedly noted in the entertainment press), and so even as trailers go it offers little basis for judging the film. Still, it follows the previous film in many of these respects, down to Mitty's job in publishing (big shock, that)--while hinting at some significant differences, which set it that much further apart from the original.
One is the way in which the film will handle the daydream sequences. In Thurber's story, Daydream Mitty, in stark contrast with Real Mitty, was in command of every situation that presented itself and always recognized for it, everyone about him a fawning admirer of his exceptional courage and skill--and manly self-assertion--as they cringed before the same challenges. Those situations were typically martial (Navy "hydroplane" captain, bomber pilot) or at least involved weapons and violence (Mitty as gunman, Mitty before a firing squad).1 In the trailer for the new film we do see Daydream Mitty in archetypally heroic situations (he seems to be an Arctic explorer at one point, an astronaut in another), but the emphasis on war, weaponry and violence has been left out. Indeed, the old-fashioned machismo--both Mitty's anxiety about his real-life lack of it, and his conspicuous display of it in his daydreams--seem unlikely to be a part of the big-screen version. (If anything, to go by Mitty's longing look at Cheryl, I expect the accent will be on Mitty as Sensitive Man rather than merely timid.)
More significant still is the likelihood that we will see Mitty less put upon (especially by overbearing women, another concept Hollywood has become less comfortable with treating in a critical fashion), while the extent to which he has contributed to his unhappy situation seems likely to be played up. Indeed, it all looks rather "Walter Mitty, Self-Help Book Hero," and I expect that how one feels about that will depend in large part on how one feels about self-help culture.
Love it or hate it, though, there is no denying that that culture tends to play up individual autonomy, and play down the practical and other constraints on one's freedom of choice; that it tends toward a simplistic, complacent solipsism. As I saw it, Thurber's story was about the distance between the man Mitty would have liked to be (the kind of man he has been told he should be), and the kind of man he actually was, or even could be--and the ways in which the external world he had to deal with kept reminding him of the fact, making him retreat inside his own head (as arguably, we all do to varying degrees). A "Self-Help"-themed version of the story seems prone to deny the importance, or even existence, of the external world altogether, a fundamentally different way of approaching the same subject than Thurber offered, and a rather more conventional one contrary to the spirit of Thurber's work.
But all this will likely stand Stiller's film in good stead at Oscar time.
1. Only the scene where "Dr." Mitty performs surgery on a high-profile patient is an exception to that pattern.
Star Wars: Another Marvel Movie Machine
Originally Posted on July 19, 2015.
Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens is due out this December.
In comparison with both the original trilogy, and the prequels, the current plan has the films coming out more rapidly--another movie every two years rather than every three.
And in the off-years, it seems, there will be non-trilogy Star Wars films. Rogue One is expected out next year, and two more untitled projects--one about Han Solo (due out 2018), another about Boba Fett (date unannounced, but somehow I don't think they're leaving it to the 2020s).
Assuming all the projects materialize, this could mean a half dozen live-action Star Wars films in the next four and a half years or so.
It seemed that what happened with Marvel Studios--the transformation of its intellectual property into a growing number of inter-linked franchises making up mega-franchises like the Avengers--is happening also with the Star Wars franchise (with the declaration of the Expanded Universe non-canonical "Legends" helping to clear the path for this course of action).
Audiences have been happy to go along with the massive output of Marvel movies so far, the popularity of movies about Big Name Marvel superheroes (and superheroes in general) enduring without break far, far longer than I ever imagined it would. It is fifteen years this month since X-Men came out in 2000--which means that there are now adults who literally have no memory of a time when X-Men movies with Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman and company weren't a semi-annual event, an idea that seems to me more bizarre than anything I've actually seen in an X-Men movie. And the executives clearly expect it to go strong for a few years more, longer in fact than any previous action movie trend of the last half century (James Bond-style spies, disaster movies, loose cannon cops, shark movies, space movies, Rambo-style commandos).
However, will there be an audience for so much not just of space opera (toward which viewers have been so much more fickle), but specifically this one franchise?
Despite having been proven wrong about moviegoers' appetite for superhero movies I have to admit I'm doubtful about this.
What do you think?
Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens is due out this December.
In comparison with both the original trilogy, and the prequels, the current plan has the films coming out more rapidly--another movie every two years rather than every three.
And in the off-years, it seems, there will be non-trilogy Star Wars films. Rogue One is expected out next year, and two more untitled projects--one about Han Solo (due out 2018), another about Boba Fett (date unannounced, but somehow I don't think they're leaving it to the 2020s).
Assuming all the projects materialize, this could mean a half dozen live-action Star Wars films in the next four and a half years or so.
It seemed that what happened with Marvel Studios--the transformation of its intellectual property into a growing number of inter-linked franchises making up mega-franchises like the Avengers--is happening also with the Star Wars franchise (with the declaration of the Expanded Universe non-canonical "Legends" helping to clear the path for this course of action).
Audiences have been happy to go along with the massive output of Marvel movies so far, the popularity of movies about Big Name Marvel superheroes (and superheroes in general) enduring without break far, far longer than I ever imagined it would. It is fifteen years this month since X-Men came out in 2000--which means that there are now adults who literally have no memory of a time when X-Men movies with Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman and company weren't a semi-annual event, an idea that seems to me more bizarre than anything I've actually seen in an X-Men movie. And the executives clearly expect it to go strong for a few years more, longer in fact than any previous action movie trend of the last half century (James Bond-style spies, disaster movies, loose cannon cops, shark movies, space movies, Rambo-style commandos).
However, will there be an audience for so much not just of space opera (toward which viewers have been so much more fickle), but specifically this one franchise?
Despite having been proven wrong about moviegoers' appetite for superhero movies I have to admit I'm doubtful about this.
What do you think?
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