Die Zauberflöte (2003)

This is very much a filmed record of a stage production, so we don't experience the cinematic freedom of the Queen of the Night singing while riding atop a tank by moonlight or smoking beneath the No Smoking sign during intermission as we do in the Branagh and Bergman films.

But it is an excellent stage performance, with sets that draw the link between Sarastro's temple and the Enlightenment with robed savants, books, blackboards, an astronomical globe and an homage to Joseph Wright's A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery. Scenes of magic make apt use of masks and puppetry. And Diana Damrau was a wonderful Queen of the Night, her naturally sweet face made frightening by artful makeup and a Eddie Munster widow's peak. Her voice and acting in the role were splendid. When she winds up one of the queen's Teutonic rants I start worrying that she's about to invade Czechoslovakia.

The mallard decorations on Papageno's sweater were a nice touch, as was his duck hat.

Interstellar

It was excellent, but flawed. I was glad I saw it in a theatre, in IMAX.

It was one of a small class of excellent science fiction movies where the science is important to the story and mostly actual science.

Mostly.

It repeatedly pays tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the few films in the same category. But in 2001 the first and last parts of the movie are about alien science so advanced that they are, for us, indistinguishable from magic. And for the last, so incomprehensible that you can't understand what's going on without buying the book.

The middle third of 2001 does not violate science, except when it does. The moonbus follows a very  unlikely trajectory because that is easier to film.  If such a craft existed, it would have been launched in a ballistic trajectory from launch to destination, with no effort to maintain constant altitude.

According to the book, it was a surface vehicle, with very limited ability to launch over obstacles. Also not easy to film.

Discovery had no radiators because the director thought the audience would mistake them for wings.

Doing good cinema and good science at the same time is hard. I count Contact in this select group, but still  its wormhole opening technology was close to magic.

My biggest complaint about Interstellar is that at times it was hard to understand important words spoken.

There are some plot holes, but fewer than some people think. The ice that astronauts walk on on the second planet is probably unreasonably strong. Keeping the secret space program secret would be difficult if all the launches came from the base used for the final launch, but perhaps there were other, more remote launch sites.

Some have complained that if the Ranger spacecraft can reach orbit with a single reusable stage, why do they need a big two stage chemical rocket to get it into Earth orbit?

It seems that according to the film's site, the landers use both chemical and plasma rockets, and NASA has fusion reactors as a power source. If the reactor uses He-3, the limited supply would explain the two stage chemical rocket to reach Earth orbit.

Warm Bodies

R and Julie are remarkably less stupid than their Shakespearean prototypes although R is a lot less articulate. Still, the road to true love is not smooth.

Gravity

Gravity is visually stunning and believable, dramatic, and I like the characters. If you can enjoy 3-D, this is a movie that really benefits from being seen of the big screen in 3-D. As I write this, it's being pushed aside by newer releases, so if you haven't seen it and think you might like it, see it soon.

A few non-spoiler observations. It's set in the near future: there's a substantial Chinese space station in orbit. That puts it around 2020, based on China's current plans.

But it isn't our future. In the movie timeline, Space Shuttles are still operational. The Shuttle mission at the beginning of the movie is STS-157: in our timeline the last was STS-135 in 2011. And there never was an operational orbiter called Explorer.

So if you're the kind of spaceflight geek that knows how hard it is to get from our Hubble to our ISS because  of their different orbital inclinations, remember that this an alternative future. So maybe sometime between 2013 and 2020 there was a mission to change Hubble's orbital inclination to match that of ISS using an unmanned spacecraft with solar electric propulsion. Such missions have been proposed in our timeline.

I would have enjoyed hearing:

Stone: Look: behind and below: ISS.
Kowalski: Beautiful. Glad they completed the Hubble Inclination Change Mission. It's good to have options.

SPOILERS














Bullock's astronaut makes it to an abandoned ISS with a damaged Soyuz spacecraft still docked, incapable of reentry but otherwise usable if she can get it loose. How can this be? Easy. When disaster struck, the ISS had a crew of six, and two Soyuz to provide emergency escape. Fortunately, there was a Dragon cargo spacecraft docked at the time which escaped damage. Three of the crew rode down on one Soyuz, and the other three took the Dragon. It has proved that it can survive reentry four times by 2013 in our timeline, and by the time of the movie it could have been even more proven. Even if not yet certified for human passengers, it beats a Soyuz without usable parachutes or waiting in terror on ISS for the next debris strike.

For dramatic reasons the Kessler Syndrome of cascading collisions spreads far too quickly, affects too many altitudes simultaneously, and hits far too frequently.

Spielberg's Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones turned in powerful performances as usual. The last four months of Lincoln's life provided the ingredients for a great drama that mostly respects the actual facts: enormous stakes and moral issues, a narrow margin of victory and great characters.

Tommy Lee Jones gave me a new appreciation of Thaddeus Stevens and his moral clarity and genius for invective. But we were fortunate that we had Lincoln as president, with his lovability and recognition of politics as the art of the possible, his lawyerly precision in his promises and his willingness to bend on everything but the most important thing.

We are lucky to have had the leaders we had in our greatest crises, and in this one more than any.

Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing

Fred and Wesley meet cute.

Hunger Games Barbie

Because nobody says dystopian like Barbie. She's like a reverse Perky Pat.

"Bloodbaths are hard."

"All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain..."

Mozart's sister-in-law,  Josepha Hofer, was the first Queen of the Night in the Magic Flute. Apparently she was very successful in the demanding role, until she retired from it at age 43. I understand and can well believe it is a taxing role best suited to the stamina of youth. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians says: "According to contemporary reports, she commanded a very high tessitura but had a rough edge to her voice and lacked stage presence." So we know something about how she sounded, but if you can re-imagine her voice from that you have a better imagination than I do. For practical purposes her voice is gone, like tears in the rain.

The magnificent Diana Damrau made her debut as the Queen of the Night in 1998: she retired the role in 2007, although she still sings other parts. Queens of the Night have short careers, like the professional athletes they are. But thanks to exciting new Human time-binding technology, we can not only record sight and sound, but also distribute and enjoy it with increasing ease.

I can still remember a time, not so long ago, when if you wanted to see a film or video of an opera that had happened in the past, you had to wait until your local movie theater or television decided to run it, and then you had to watch it before it went away, and these opportunities could be decades apart.

"These are the days of miracle and wonder."

The Shipping News: Sarastro and the Queen of the Night

Shipping, thought to derive from "relationshipper" is something that happens when a fan looks at a work of fiction and sees a relationship, almost always romantic or potentially romantic, that isn't explicitly present in the original work.

I first encountered The Magic Flute in Bergman's 1975 film version, in which Pamina is spirited away from her vengeful and imperious mother, the Queen of the Night, by her father, the kindly Sarastro.

It's a wonderful, magical production.

I only recently discovered that almost none of this back story was in the original libretto. Pamina was abducted by Sarastro, but there was no indication that he was her father, or that, as follows from that implication, that he and the Queen of the Night once had a history together. In the original libretto Sarastro explicitly isn't her father. At least, he isn't her father according to the Queen of the Night, who is a knife-crazy vengeful psychomom and not necessarily a reliable narrator.

So Bergman the Mozart fan shipped Sarastro and the Queen of the Night. And it works, dramatically, better than canon.

In the original, Sarastro simply abducts Pamina because her mother, a powerful sovereign, is an unfit parent. And she wants Pamina to kill Sarastro because he was given a magical MacGuffin, a sun-disk amulet, by Pamina's father, and she needs it very badly. It is, in the original libretto, the reason why, having gotten into the same room with Pamina, she doesn't just take her with her when she leaves.

Writing that reminds me again why Schikaneder's mad librettist skills are usually mentioned last in his list of lifetime achievements.

Branagh bought into the same idea. Sarastro and the Queen of the Night were once, well, more than friends.

As emotionally and dramatically effective shipping goes, it ranks with James Goldman's shipping Robin Hood with the Pryoresse of Kyrkely.

The Magic Flute (2006)

Now I have another film adaption of The Magic Flute to love, and I've loved Bergman's 1975 version since its first release in the US. (How can you not love a movie originally titled as Trollflöjten?)

Branagh's version is set in an alternate universe Great War. The overture shows us a meticulously recreation of a trench system, but the blue uniforms worn by the soldiers were worn by no European army in our timeline.

An attack is launched, and biplanes fly overhead. The blazing blue stars on their fuselage were worn by no air force in our reality. It is, we will deduce later if we are paying attention, the insignia of the Empire of the Night.

At this point, we are barely 2/3 of our way through the overture.

Shortly afterwards, plucky officer and gentleman Tamino is rescued from certain death by three ladies who serve the Queen of the Night, kitted out as magical sexy steampunk nurses, descending from the sky, magically.

The Magic Flute is about magic. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Branagh took liberties with the original libretto, written not by Mozart but by Emanuel Schikaneder, who history records as an impresario, dramatist, actor, singer and composer and librettist for The Magic Flute. In that order.

That's OK. The original libretto was not particularly awesome.

Branagh dials up the magic. Good choice. "Queen of the Night" is not a mundane job description. Likewise her ladies.

Also, the three child-spirits seem unconstrained by mortal laws. If they need to advise, they'll be there, regardless.

Apparently, the uniform of Papegeno's unit of the Nightian Chemical Warfare Branch, Bird Division, required wearing a stuffed bird on top of your helmet.

Branagh's version does a better job than Bergman's of showing rather than telling of Sarastro's charity and forgiveness, and presenting the sexual advances of Monastos to Pamina as a real threat that shocks even his servants.

The Masonic symbolism of the original libretto becomes masonic in Branagh's production. Sarastro's fortress, scarred by war when we first see it, is rebuilt as gleaming architectural expression of reason, wisdom and measure.

Branagh's Queen of the Night is a bit more human and tragic than Bergman's, majestic and imperious, but still a crazed and deeply damaged psychomom.

In the end, Sarastro, Tamino and Pamina win, but:

...only because of the magic flute and bells, gifts of the Queen of the Night's realm of moonlight and meteors and magic, and:

...enlightenment also has false servants like Monastos, and:

...at the end, the Queen of the Night and her three ladies fall into the outer darkness, although they sang so sweetly, but:

...we never see them hit the ground, and, in Branagh's telling:

...they can fly.

The Great Buster Keaton

I love his elegantly economical deadpan grace.

Also, It's fascinating to see his depiction of that distant, foreign country in which my grandparents lived, the 1920s.

The Aliens from Alien Explain

First of all, let us start by offering our sincere apologies for the unfortunate Nostromo incident, and our profound condolences to the relatives of the dead humans involved.

But please listen in charity as we try to put the incident in context.

It is true that we evolved from ancestors whose young needed to gestate in a living host of another species, just as you evolved from ancestors not unlike the bone-swinging tapir-clubbing meat-eating primates at the beginning of 2001*. But we are what we are, not what we were. Just as some of you eat no meat products at all for ethical reasons, we now carefully breed our host animals for certified non-sentience and a high pain threshold. Frankly, it's a wonder they remember to breath. In fact, in late stage gestation our government requires an attendant to be standing by to deliver a merciful killing bolt to the host at the first sign of chest-bursting.

In our home culture our young are rigorously trained from infancy to control our ancestral instinct to leap and devour, and taught that secondary mandible drooling, although natural, is rude, and unpleasantly disturbing to non-predatory sentients.

So, when we learned that your Nostromo's crew had encountered a ship full of illicit and unsupervised eggs and unwittingly released an unsocialized larva, we were just as horrified as you would have been if the sentient crew of Pigs in Space had landed on that island in Lord of the Flies with equally unfortunate results.

Again, we offer our profound apologies and condolences, and hope that our species can put the late unpleasantness behind us.

*2001 is a real credit to your species, from the bit where they start playing the Blue Danube waltz, up to the point where Bowman flies the EVA pod into the Stargate. And some us liked some of the scenes after that, and some of us even liked the "hotel" scenes, in a kind of enigmatic way, but we really liked the middle part of the movie better. And please don't take this as rude, but did Kubrick by any chance outsource the beginning and end of the movie to a completely different species?

We understand that there may be species specific cultural cues that we non-primates just don't get. If so, please accept that if your species understands and enjoys the end of 2001, that's something we do not presume to judge or value for better or worse.

(We also understand that there's a species of sapient tapiroids that find the beginning of the movie completely unwatchable, for obvious reasons. And we can also understand that the end of the movie doesn't yank at your suspension of disbelief nearly as hard if the audience hasn't personally experienced significant subjective time dilation.)

What's Wrong with the Star Wars Prequels, Continued

In the original movies, particularly the first, Lucas borrowed a lot from Kurosawa, who in turn borrowed liberally from John Ford and Dashiell Hammet.

In the prequels, Lucas borrowed much less, and his work was correspondingly poorer.

Suggested Viewing Sequence for the Star Wars Saga

Machete Order. Search your feelings, you know it to be true!

Alternate Universe Shakespeare

A friend has described Anonymous as an Alternate Universe FanFic, and right good fun if you take it in that spirit.

And here's the thing. Shakespeare's Histories were also set in an alternate universe from our own. He ruthlessly fudged chronology and character when it made a better story. He used biased sources for his background research.

And as Poul Anderson noted and built a novel around, the past of Shakespeare's Histories was more technologically advanced than our own. In Shakespeare, the Rome of Julius Caesar had mechanical clocks and the knights that fought at Shrewsbury in 1403 were armed with pistols as well as swords.

Explicit alternate history can be a very appropriate and effective way to present Shakespeare's histories. Ian McKellen's 1995 Richard III, set in an alternate history 1930s England, is an excellent example of how well this can work.

My Pitches for a Less Stupid Edward de Vere Movie

#1: Edward de Vere wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Also, he's a vampire.

#2: Edward de Vere wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare as part of an unspeakable Dalek plot to unravel the very fabric of time and space itself if not reversed with much running and exclamations of "Don't you see? Marlowe has had his throat cut! The Christopher Marlowe of our continuum was stabbed above the right eye and died instantly six years ago!" and "Who are you and what have you done with the real Queen Elizabeth?" followed by more running.

Anonymous: Zombie Edward de Vere Wrote Macbeth and The Tempest

After his death in 1604.

"Tomorrrrrrrow and tomorrrrrrow and tomorrrrrrow.....rrrrr.......brrrrains....."

The Viking

This 1928 film is a festival of anachronism and overacting, from the distinctly not 10th century castle to Sigurd's Bronze Age armor to the low cut corselet that shows off Helga's creamy decolletage. Also, there are a lot of amazingly badly tailored furs.

Young Alwin Skywalker is so brooding and pouty that you can just know that he's going to to eventually turn to the dark side, call himself Lord Veidr, and start wearing black armor, cape and Sutton Hoo helmet.

Richard Alexander, who played Sigurd, went on to wear other silly helmets, possibly from the same prop closet, as Prince Barin in the Flash Gordon serials.

The film was made at an interesting point of technological transition: a full length film with early technicolor and a soundtrack but no recorded dialog.

More Bronze Age viking goodness:

Leif Erikson has something of a Derek Smalls look going on here.




Helga nearly puts Leif Erikson's eye out with one of her horns at about 9:28

The Walt Disney Feature Animation Canon

Loving reviews of every film in the Disney feature animation canon. Written with tough love, in the case of some of the more disappointing films.

Robin Hood (2010)

Steve Muhlberger's review pretty much agrees with my own impressions. The recreated world seems very real and richly detailed even though an informed viewer can spot anachronisms. A lot of the action is set against sweeping panoramas of medieval landscape and seascape. This is a movie that benefits from a big screen.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, William Marshal and Richard are portrayed well and with reasonable fidelity to their historical character. It's great to see the Marshal finally get a major role on the big screen. (His portrayal in Lion in Winter was spot on in showing his competence and value to the crown, but he didn't get a lot of lines) Bad King John is complexly bad. Isabella of Angoulême, John's hot jailbait second queen, has a more interesting role than I expected.

I can forgive most of the anachronisms as driven by dramatic or practical reasons rather than carelessness. The visored or open faced sallets sometimes worn are from a later era, but convey knightly status and allow characters' faces to be revealed or concealed as needed. Glazed windows are anachronistic, but it looks like Ridley Scott found an existing building to shoot in, and removing the windows for the shoot would have been an expensive process.

Although ramped landing ships were used in this era, the landing craft in the film look too much like WWII Higgins boats. Recreating the big galleys actually used would have been tremendously costly, let alone training the extras to carry out the difficult stern first beaching.

The anachronisms and ahistorical moments were not intrusive enough to stop me from enjoying the film a great deal.