stoutfellow

I just went on an end-of-year shopping spree, for books, music, and movies.

E-books: Ted Chiang, "Stories of Your Life and Others"; Molly Brooks, "Sanity and Tallulah"; Nnedi Okorafor, "Binti"; James Alan Gardner, "They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded"; Nalo Hopkinson, "Brown Girl in the Ring"; Lionel Casson, "Libraries in the Ancient World"; Tom Gjelten, "A Nation of Nations".

Dead Trees: Bill Willingham, "The Dark Ages"; Nicholas Riasanovsky, "A History of Russia"

CDs: Gerry Rafferty, "City to City"; Jimmy Buffett, "Songs You Know By Heart"; Sara Bareilles, "Kaleidoscope Heart"; Kinks, "The Essential Kinks"; Adele, "25"

DVDs: "Thor", "Iron Man 2"

I've only read one story by Chiang, "The Life Cycle of Software Objects", which I believe won a Hugo. The movie "Arrival" was based on another of his stories, and he seems to be considered one of the current masters of the SF short story. Molly Brooks is the author of the now-complete webcomic "Power Ballad", which I recommended a while back. The Gardner is the sequel to "All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault". I've been meaning to read some Hopkinson and Okorafor for a while, and these are their most famous books. "The Dark Ages" is the next installment of "Fables". The nonfiction - Casson, Gjelten, Riasanovsky - have been recommended to me in various places.

No comment on the music, except that I love Sara Bareilles' music, and the others have been on my to-get list for a while. As for the DVDs, I'm still working on collecting the MCU movies.

Some of them are already here; the rest should arrive in the next week, week and a half. (I'm still waiting for that Joan Jett album; they're telling me it will arrive in the same time frame as today's purchases.)

Well, as promised, I paid a visit to Amazon today. The haul:

E-books: Larry Sabato's A More Perfect Constitution; David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here (about DNA studies and prehistory); Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow; Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet; James Alan Gardner's All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault; and the second, third, and second books in the Expanse (James Corey), Kitty Norville (Carrie Vaughn), and The Great Way (Harry Connolly) series respectively.

Dead tree books: Sarah Murray, The Semantics of Evidentials (linguistics); Bill Willingham, War and Pieces (continuing the Fables series); Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (I have his books on the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union).

Music: Joan Jett, "Greatest Hits"; Woody Guthrie, "100th Anniversary Collection"; Chad & Jeremy, "Yesterday's Gone"

DVD: "The Incredible Hulk (2008)". I'm gathering as much of the MCU as I can. Maybe a marathon Thanksgiving week.

Well, I'm home. A few vacation and post-vacation notes:

1. The dogs have finally settled down from their daddyshome frenzy. It only took about twenty hours.

2. Reading glasses, once they become necessary, are a godsend.

3. One of my great-nephews has emerged as a history buff. At the family Christmas party, he gave me a lengthy and mostly correct, if somewhat disorganized, description of the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate. I remember, when I was about his age, reading a number of biographies-for-kids; Alexander the Great and Marie Curie are the only ones I specifically remember, but I'm sure there were more. I might poke around and see if I can get some of them, or the equivalent, for him - if that's OK with his mother!

4. I did get a fair amount of reading done - a dozen e-books, all fiction except for a history of ancient Rome (up to the Gaulish invasion). Two each by Bujold and Patricia Briggs, singletons by Carrie Vaughn, Ben Aaronovitch, Eric Flint, and N. K. Jemisin, plus older works by Edgar Pangborn ("West of the Sun"), Samuel Delany ("The Jewels of Aptor"), and for a change of pace Tennyson's "Idylls of the King".

5. "The Darkest Hour" was entertaining; it's too bad that several scenes, including the best one, were ahistorical. Churchill was in many respects a sonuvabitch, but you only have to do the right thing once to achieve greatness.

6. I hope I can get the motor revving by Monday. I have no energy at the moment, though I have put in motion a couple of things necessary for this semester's classes.

Over on tor.com, there's a thread about "the first movie that scared you". Most of the movies that have been named are genuine horror movies: "Child's Play", "Nightmare on Elm Street", and the like.

I've never really been into horror movies, and I certainly wasn't allowed to watch them as a child. My two nominees - I'm not sure which I saw first - are "Pinocchio" (for the Monstro scenes) and "Old Yeller" (I had nightmares about rabid wolves for some years after seeing that one).

Come to think of it, I still haven't seen any horror movies. No, wait: I saw "The Blair Witch Project", which I found pretty meh. (One or two scary scenes, but not enough to get through the amateurism of the rest.)

You?

I am not, as yet, moved to comment on the early days of the new administration. Instead, further on my late vacation:

I rarely go to movies in the theater; by far most of my theater visits occur during the holidays - D and I see them together. This year, I nominated two movies and D one, which we saw on three successive days.

D's nominee was Rogue One. I thought it was a decent actioner, but it abruptly gained points with me when I realized how things were going to end - and I'm not talking about the very last scene.

My first choice was Arrival. I had not, and have not, read the short story it was based on (and I do, now, feel the need to buy a Chiang collection or two). I enjoyed it quite a bit, as an amateur linguist (the handling of the "kangaroo" story tickled me), but the kick in the gut that came when I realized what the scenes with the young girl were about - that made the movie for me. The political denouement seemed a bit weak to me, but the scene in which the protagonist made her choice, what to do with the knowledge she had gained, made for a strong ending.

My second choice was Moana, and I loved it. Among Disney movies, I'll put it about on a par with Mulan - maybe a bit higher, since the "comic relief" was considerably less annoying. The climax was a poor man's Patricia McKillip - not as boggling as some of PMcK's endings, but clearly of the same ilk. Good flick; I'll have to buy a copy.

Over at tor.com, there's a wonderful review of the classic Young Frankenstein, in a memorial of the career of Gene Wilder. One of the commenters pointed out something I had never noticed before.

The tragedy of Frankenstein was the scientist's refusal to take responsibility for what he had done: rejecting his "child", causing the creature to become the monster we all remember. The creature was good-hearted, incredibly smart, and lonely; that it became a mass murderer can be laid at its creator's feet. In Young Frankenstein, Frederick gets it right. He approaches the creature (admittedly under duress and after several false starts) with love, and eventually makes it what the original monster should have been.

I never thought of that before. That film, incredibly enough, has just gone further up in my esteem.

(Oh, by the way, Mel Brooks wanted to cut the "Puttin' on the Ritz" scene! Fortunately, Wilder talked him out of it. Good grief, Mel!)

My niece M is the youngest of my five niblings. She and I hadn't had much to do with one another until a couple of years ago, when chance gave us an opportunity for a longish conversation. Last year, at Christmastime, we got into a discussion of movies; she told me that she liked old-style black and white movies, and I offered to give her some recommendations. I finally had time to draw them up a couple of weeks ago, and sent her (in two installments) a list of twenty-five of my favorite movies from the thirties and forties. (I said "my favorites"; I'm not sure I was entirely accurate in that - there were several late deletions and replacements - but they're certainly among my favorites.) For whoever's interested, the list is under the cut, in chronological order.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
The Thin Man (1934)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
Stage Door (1937)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Ninotchka (1939)
The Great Dictator (1940)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Fantasia (1940)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Ball of Fire (1941)
The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941)
To Be or Not to Be (1942)
Casablanca (1942)
Double Indemnity (1944)
To Have and Have Not (1944)
The Big Sleep (1946)
Notorious (1946)
Key Largo (1948)
North by Northwest (1949)
White Heat (1949)
Adam's Rib (1949)

The alert might claim an excess of Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant; I reject the very concept.

ETA: Apparently I can't distinguish the "cut" button from the "blockquote" button, if I'm not paying enough attention.

Madeleine Lebeau, the last surviving cast member of Casablanca, has died. Hers was a minor but memorable role, as Rick's ex-girlfriend; the moment when the camera focuses on her, during the singing of the Marseillaise, is the point where I always lose it - she's turned away from the German officer she was flirting with, singing and crying, and at the last it is she who calls out "Vive la France!"

Rest in peace, Ms. Lebeau.

(I think I'll watch that movie tomorrow evening.)

This short video is freaking hilarious. Take a look.

As of this morning, I've seen four of the five nominees in this category (i.e., movies), and I don't expect to be able to see the fifth. Without further ado, my rankings:

#4: The Lego Movie. OK, it was fun, and there were some nice Easter eggs in it, but it really wasn't substantial enough to merit a Hugo, in my judgment.

#3: The Winter Soldier. I'm trying to catch up on all of the recent spate of Marvel (non-X-Man) movies; I saw The Dark World this morning too. I haven't seen the first Captain America movie, except in bits and snatches, but this one stood pretty well on its own. I was partly spoiled, in that I knew who the Winter Soldier was (from non-cinematic discussions), but I still rate this as a solid actioner. Some of the fight scenes were a bit confusing, I'm afraid, and I never did succeed in identifying one of the good-guy characters - the other dark-haired SHIELD agent who switched sides and freed Steve, Sam, and Natasha. At any rate, a solid actioner, but really not much more than that.

#2: Interstellar. It was pretty downbeat during most of the scenes on Earth at the beginning, but believably so - it could have served as a reasonable prequel to The Nitrogen Fix, to mention a classic of hard SF - and the later part tried a little too hard for a 2001ish flavor. I enjoyed it, but there was a bit too much technobabble for a film with Kip Thorne as an adviser. Not quite good enough for the top rank.

#1: I've got to go with Guardians of the Galaxy. Just a fun romp; like most everyone, I particularly enjoyed Rocket and Groot. Starlord grew on me over the course of the movie, too. Drax and Gamora, being characters I more-or-less knew already, offered no surprises, but also no major disappointments - though I still don't buy Gamora in a short skirt, as in one of the late scenes!

Feel free to comment on the movies or on my choices. (Do not feel free to discuss Puppies, of any ilk.)