What are you currently reading?

[Super Blood Moon]

ASHLEY BELL by Dean Koontz. Enjoying it halfway through.

[Daverz]

Moll Flanders. Defoe's language is surprisingly clear and modern for a writer spanning the Baroque in music (1660-1731). The preface said he was one of the fathers of the English novel.

Indeed, very readable prose.  But I found the plot too episodic and gave up about 3/4 through.  The TV production with the very yummy Alex Kingston was fabulous, but avoid the film, which has next to nothing to do with the novel and is crap.

[Artem]

Two books that I finished recently. They were very different, War and War is experimental while Sahota's book is more of a straight forward storytelling, but I enjoyed them equally.

[andolink]

I'm thoroughly enjoying this:

[SimonNZ]

Starting:

[aligreto]

Starting:

I have only seen the film and I really, really liked it....

[aligreto]

Just started "The Guest Cat"....

[Super Blood Moon]

NOTHING!

[Karl Henning]

NOTHING!

You are such a fibber!  How does Roz endure you?   0:)

[Brian]

After watching the movie last month, now reading Laura by Vera Caspary.

[Karl Henning]

After watching the movie last month, now reading Laura by Vera Caspary.

The Preminger movie?

[stingo]

Just started "The Guest Cat"....

I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. I read it a few months ago and liked it.

[Super Blood Moon]

If you've never heard of him, where you been hiding, bro?

[asin]0143107380[/asin]

[NikF]

The 'holiday' book.



Something of a standing joke, where I'm asked "Have you packed the book?" and I reply that I have and will definitely read it this time.  But now I'm admitting defeat and it's my current choice of reading at home.

[Brian]

The Preminger movie?

Indeed! Many details of plot are different, and there are occasional very strange metaphors in Caspary's writing toolbox, but the spirit is very much the same, including Waldo's ambiguous sexuality. Plus, there's a very neat structure where every character (well, almost) gets to narrate for at least part of the novel.

[aligreto]

I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. I read it a few months ago and liked it.

Despite not really liking the first three or four essays/chapters I did eventually grow into it and ended up liking it. Despite being [obviously] about a cat it had a warm, human dimension to it. I would like to read an alternative translation of it though as I felt that is where it fell down a bit for me.

[André]

Henning Mankell, The Chinese Man.

One of his non-Wallander books. I enjoyed the acrobatics of the storyline. The characters are well drawn, although some are by force cardboard-like (the brother and sister duet of Chinese nouveau riche and Party apparatchik). Not fakes, but rather predictably one-dimensional. For Mankell fans.

[Daverz]

I had read the first book in The Expanse some years ago, and had not been moved to continue on by the mashup of solar system space opera, zombies, and Lovecraftian horror.  I decided to reread it again after watching the SyFy production.  The elements of pastiche didn't bother so much this time (these guys do write well), and so continued on to the second book, which is even better than the first.   (It really annoys me that everything SF and Fantasy these days is part of some gigantic series, but that's the way it is.)  I'm now on the 3rd volume, which seems to be the inevitable falling off point, with some "I don't care about this person" type characters.  But hopefully it will improve.

[asin]0316311294[/asin]

[Karl Henning]

I think I do like the movie, and in spite of the fact that, if I had read Ebert's surgical review, I should certainly have seen his points and agreed with them:

"The Thing" is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost. Characters have never been Carpenter's strong point; he says he likes his movies to create emotions in his audiences, and I guess he'd rather see us jump six inches than get involved in the personalities of his characters. This time, though, despite some roughed-out typecasting and a few reliable stereotypes (the drunk, the psycho, the hero), he has populated his ice station with people whose primary purpose in life is to get jumped on from behind. The few scenes that develop characterizations are overwhelmed by the scenes in which the men are just setups for an attack by the Thing.

That leads us to the second problem, plausibility. We know that the Thing likes to wait until a character is alone, and then pounce, digest, and imitate him--by the time you see Doc again, is he still Doc, or is he the Thing? Well, the obvious defense against this problem is a watertight buddy system, but, time and time again, Carpenter allows his characters to wander off alone and come back with silly grins on their faces, until we've lost count of who may have been infected, and who hasn't. That takes the fun away.

"The Thing" is basically, then, just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen. There's nothing wrong with that; I like being scared and I was scared by many scenes in "The Thing." But it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary. Because this material has been done before, and better, especially in the original "The Thing" and in "Alien," there's no need to see this version unless you are interested in what the Thing might look like while starting from anonymous greasy organs extruding giant crab legs and transmuting itself into a dog. Amazingly, I'll bet that thousands, if not millions, of moviegoers are interested in seeing just that.

Yesterday, I watched a 12-minute YouTube video of a fan of the movie discussing fine points of who was infected and when, which right away seems to gainsay Ebert's objection that the fun has been removed.

My point being that, if I had simply read Ebert's review, I should have been impressed that the matter was cut and dried. But, perhaps it is not.  (That said, I love Ebert's zingers like, he has populated his ice station with people whose primary purpose in life is to get jumped on from behind.)

This weekend, perhaps, I shall revisit the movie.

(More great Ebert lines . . . in reviewing Alien Resurrection, he wrote:   In "Alien3" she told this life form: "I've known you so long I can't remember a time when you weren't in my life." I'm telling the aliens the same thing. This is a series whose inspiration has come, gone, and been forgotten. I'm aliened out. And: Like the bugs in "Starship Troopers," these aliens are an example of specialization. They have evolved over the eons into creatures adapted for one purpose only: To star in horror movies.

[Karl Henning]

Yesterday, I watched a YouTube review-comparison of the three movies based on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which the reviewer at one point gives the opinion that Heston in The Omega Man is the best of the lot;  but at the end, he concludes that none of the three does the literary source justice.

Now, even from the clips which the above reviewer provides, I did not find myself inclined to give the 1971 flick a shot.

Furthermore, here is Ebert. (And yes, I know that I found myself happy to disregard his critique w/r/t John Carpenter's The Thing . . .)

If anybody has to be the last man in the world, I suppose it might as well be Charlton Heston. At least we know we're in good hands. He outmaneuvered the apes in "Planet of the Apes" (1968), so why not send him up against the ghouls in "The Omega Man"? They're not a whole lot smarter. Also, if God should decide to start the human race again, Heston could always be Moses. Or God.

The ghouls, by the way, have been produced as a side effect of biological warfare between China and Russia. They can't stand light, they all have nasty bruises over their left eyebrows, and they wear the costumes of medieval monks. Why? Because that's what ghouls wear, I guess.

Heston is immune to the plague, thanks to a vaccine he was working on just before things broke loose. He barricades himself in a Los Angeles penthouse with floodlights outside to scare away the ghouls and puts in a 20-year supply of the best imported Scotch. Prudent of him. Even if biological warfare doesn't break out and leave him marooned with a city full of ghouls, at least he can have a drink while thinking about his close call.

The ghouls, alas, are a little too ridiculous to quite fulfill their function in the movie. They make all the wrong decisions, are incompetent and ill-coordinated, and speak in an elevated "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" sort of English. Wouldn't you like to hear a little slang from a ghoul for a change?

The others in the movie are more interesting, however. Heston is the only truly immune man, but he stumbles across a band of survivors who haven't yet fallen to the plague, and provides them with a serum that will save the human race. This band includes Rosalind Cash, who is engagingly brash and rescues Heston from cremation. Then there's an obligatory motorcycle chase (well done) and a creepy interlude in a ghoul-infested wine cellar before the movie sort of bogs down. Not even a shot of Heston in the obligatory crucifixion pose can quite mend things.

"The Omega Man" is based on an uncredited novel by Richard Matheson. I wonder if it was I Am Legend, a very good work about the last normal man left in a world of vampires. He held them off with mirrors, crosses, and garlic--the usual mixture -- and did very nearly as well as Heston with his spotlights.

Postscript:  So why, and why not?  I guess I don't mind Ken Russell as the hero in the Antarctic, but I find Heston not to my narrative taste.  More importantly, my ear is lured in by the Morricone soundtrack, where watching Heston with a cloned Mod Squad soundtrack sends me packing.

Post postscript:  I think I liked the Will Smith I Am Legend all right, but never need to watch it again.  I liked Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth, but would not necessarily agree with my buddy David Frieze that it is clearly the best movie of the three.