I’m only about 25% through this book and I’ve had it for two weeks. It’s just breaking my heart! I know from experience with Baxter and, well, the publishing industry that bleakness doesn’t sell books and so the tone has to pick up soon. After all, the jacket copy gives away the fact that this team of misfits makes it to Titan, “where the story really begins.” But the pessimistic places Baxter takes us before the launch are really distressing for anyone who dreams of space, colonies, humanity’s having a future beyond the life cycle of our sun. Our space program has always been fragile, but seems more so every day (as at least two of the three presidential candidates have gone on the record as basically saying manned missions are to be on the chopping block if they’re elected; not sure about McCain on that score), even without another shuttle disaster as posited in the opening chapters of this book.

Baxter does this a lot. His Evolution is as much about DEvolution as evolution as I’ve pointed out elsewhere; humanity in that book reaches the acme of its development in our own time only to fail to rise above a natural disaster and become, in his words “just another animal on the planet” without language or culture or memory. His idee fixe is a real one, that everything we do as a species is pointless if we don’t find a way to spread beyond our home planet.

Will we? Reading these first chapters, I despair.

Hope it gets better. His Manifold series presuppose that we find a way (though it’s not the way we do things now, no no no!)...

Not since Tim Burton’s Ed Wood have I seen such a wonderful depiction of the joy of filmmaking. It’s worth watching just for the daffy recreations of, e.g., Rush Hour 2 and Ghostbusters, but focusing solely on those would be a crying shame.

It’s when the film shifts gears into a story of a neighborhood pulling together to make up a load of bull and make it into a funky, retro-fied, low budget masterpiece of a film that it REALLY gets good. And moving. And sweet.

Here’s hoping it inspires a whole new generation of “Sweders.” Or at least guys who aren’t afraid to make crap just for the love of it.

Don’t forget to dive into the companion book, which shares lots more stories about the artists, the art and Schama’s own interactions with them. The interview with Schama on the last DVD touches a bit on, for instance, his getting to hold the very key that Caravaggio painted dangling from the warder’s belt in The Beheading of St. John the Baptist but there’s a lot more, and very moving, detail in the book about this.

But nothing can surpass the high def cinematography that gives us a view of Bernini’s exquiste sculptures the way no one will ever get to see them again. One almost feels sorry for the people who make the trip to see, e.g., the Ecstasy of St. Theresa in situ; it’s up high, you have to pay money to light it up, and you see none of the amazing detail we get to see in this series.

Some of the dramatizations are a bit silly but not overly so; they’re not recreations and many feature no dialog at all. I was, however, very impressed with the parade of faces and voices assembled for the Bernini episode; the extras dressed as cardinals, the actor who played the gossipy biographer, had some of the most interesting, appealing and downright amazing faces I’ve seen in a long, long time. I found myself pausing just to take them in, like the sculptures they were there to help celebrate.

Bravo!

Also, as an aside, it’s pretty cool seeing someone finally call out David for the ass he obviously was!

Neil Gaiman is a strange man, with strange obsessions and a strange talent for bringing disparate story elements together. This time we have an Afro-Caribbean spider god who dies and leaves behind two children who may or may not have inherited all of his powers and problems, the wickedly charismatic Spider and the bumblingly less so Fat Charlie, who meet after the funeral and proceed to permanently mess up each others’ lives in wild and entertaining ways. There’s quite a lot of Gaiman’s silliness mixed in with the darkness, as always, but I found myself laughing at the prose more than usual—in a very good way!

Very sorry to have finished this so soon. Thanks again, Neil!

Wes Anderson is out with another chronicle of poor little rich boys who never got the message that they’re grownups now. Off-the-hook luxurious props and set decoration, check. Messed up family dynamics, check. Jason Schwartzmann, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, etc., check. Mannered, repetitive tropes and scene framings, check. Honestly, it’s a real eyeball-roller from beginning to end.

And yet…

What saves it is the sumptuous gorgeousness of the movie itself. Anderson and brother Eric always dote on the minutiae of props and sets, and they went over the top this time, engaging a local Indian artist to painstakingly decorate almost every inch of the eponymous train with ornate paintings of elephants and a mural that basically is one giant plot spoiler now that you can slow it down and take it in bit by bit on DVD, and creating a ridiculously pretty set of Louis Vuitton baggage that isn’t just metaphorical after all—if it wasn’t your dad’s baggage, you’d still want to keep it for its sheer utility, prettiness and uniqueness.

And then there’s India. We don’t see any of it that we haven’t seen in far better films, American, British or Bollywood, but still, it’s good to have it there.

The acting is fine. I think anyone in an Anderson movie should get an award just for being able to deliver his absurdist dialog with a straight face. “I love you too, but I’m going to mace you in the face!”

And then there’s the score. Oh, the score. I’m still humming it long after taking this movie in.

So yes, you will be annoyed; you will also be entertained.

And that’s what you go to a Wes Anderson film for in the first place, neh?

I’ve got about 100 pages to go and my co-workers (I’m one of those fortunate souls for whom it’s actually OK to read at work, if nothing else is going on) keep asking me what’s so damned funny), and it’s SO difficult to describe this book!

But here’s a shot:

This is like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita with a few knobs tweaked. Turn down the satanic/devll aspects, turn up the surrealism, crank the date forward about 100 years and make all the contemporary references English instead of Russian…

I’m delighted to have found it, even if my co-workers are now convinced I’m barking mad. They already thought so as I plowed through Gentlemen of the Road.

I put off watching this after taking a gander at the trailer, which made this look like it was going to be a very difficult film to absorb, incoherent and arty. Thank goodness I’d already learned to trust Teshigahara and to know that the worst thing about his films are the trailers.

This is another Teshigahara/Kobo Abe GEM. The cinematography is first rate, the design very surreal and cool (especially the clinic where our hero gets his new face, all metal and glass and Langdon lines and strange angles).

The story is also very cool and pleasantly disturbing. A man has lost his face in an industrial accident. He is seeing a combination psychiatrist/prophylactics maker who has developed a way of manufacturing an artificial face for him on the condition that he keep the doctor apprised of his plans and experiences, which are every bit as creepy as the clinic’s setting suggests they will be.

This narrative parallels another of a young woman whose radiation burns give her a dual appearance—she’s a “knock-out” on one side and a monster on another, a victim of the A-bomb that hit Nagasaki.

This is some gorgeous black and white filmmaking and a magnificently unsettling story. Great stuff!

I took up this book out of duty more than for pleasure, but I was pleasantly surprised. Jeffrey Toobin not only did his homework, but he composed an elegant and coherent narrative on how much the Rehnquist Court managed to PROTECT us from the extreme right, even though it’s been called a conservative court.

In other words, yes, this is written from a certain, but subtle, point of view, and ends on a somewhat fearful note, as we go into our first full year with John Roberts as Chief and Samuel Alito as the new associate justice. This court as now constituted, Toobin hints, will NOT protect us from the extreme right, is likely to aid and abet them in furthering their long-term goals, overturning Roe v. Wade, expanding government authority into the private choices of citizens, and collaborating with the current administration’s maltreatment of Gitmo and other detainees. Yikes.

But since this is from a certain point of view, I’m off to look more closely into other material. I’m starting with a biography of David Souter, who sounds sorta like my kinda guy. We’ll see!

I have been wanting to see this ever since I saw the mention in the credits for 12 Monkeys that director Terry Gilliam was inspired by this film. Indeed, the whole strange loop plot thread in which the juvenile Cole witnesses his on death as a time-traveling adult is lifted straight from this montage (it’s not really a motion picture; it’s a series of narrated stills with the exception of one brief shot when the heroine wakes from sleep and blinks for a few frames. Weirdly compelling.

This is a charming little book, though it seems to try too hard to be coy about who the detective is. My only real complaint was that it was over too soon!!!