A good point and another reason I like steampunk

So there's this blog I recently found out about called Xerposa, where they gather all kinds of wonderful steampunk things together for your reading pleasure. For example, they have a list of steampunk bands (I only knew about Abney Park, Unextraordinary Gentlemen, Prof. Elemental, and Vernian Process), a continuing debate about hydrogen versus helium in airships (obviously in a steampunk setting hydrogen is best, but some people can't be reasoned with - I mean, helium wasn't even discovered until 1903!) and short articles on various crafts/fashions/items to lust after (including cufflinks made by yours truly! I feel so famous!) They even gathered up a few handy steampunk-looking fonts. They're so helpful.

There are also articles about steampunk itself, as a subculture, and as a literary movement. I like this one especially. It's about time. And I have found this to be the case in a lot of steampunk writing - I think it's because they are trying to tell the story of a world and the setting and characters are detailed enough that they are pretty realistic. Also, steampunks tend to be geeks, and so are their characters, and they have too much cool shiny explody stuff to tell you about to waste time moping about abuse in their backstories.

Diesel Punk. Meh.

I really don't know how I feel about diesel punk. I suppose all on it's own I like it. It's the future that steampunk becomes, followed by raygun gothic. I love the Rocketeer, and Tale Spin. I love heavier-than-air flying machines as much or more than aerostats. But something about it leaves me cold.

I think there are two things about it. The first one is that's it's 20th Century. Sometimes steampunk depresses me a little, because those people in their shiny goggles and lovely clothes and expressions of wonderment are going to have to get to the 20th Century eventually, with its WWI, and its International Style architecture. The 70s happen.... I'm not a fan of alternate history, so there's no help for it.

Still, I find WWI fascinating, and not just because of the aviators. Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series is a really cool fictionalization/steam/dieselpunkification of it. It has a bunch of the bad stuff in it, but it still retains a sense of worth-whileness and optimism and honor that most WWI stories don't manage. It was a human endeavor, fought with new machines and on a huge scale (although, honestly, hasn't anyone ever heard of the Seven-Years-War? That was really the first World War). Poetry came out of WWI.

Then there were the 20s and 30s. The golden age of aviation, an amazing era of exploration and prosperity (well, the 20s) and just a pretty cool time in general, unless you lived in the Weimar Republic... Strangely, there's not a lot of diesel punk in this era (Talespin and Rocketeer being notable exceptions, although the Rocketeer edges into WWII)

Freaking WWII. Now, I also, find WWII terribly interesting, but overdone. The History Channel, back when they showed history programs, knew of no other wars, and neither do game designers. Or diesel punk fans. My other problem with diesel punk is the fans. They are far more nitpicky than your typical steampunk, going on and on about this and that uniform and tank and gun and whatever. That's all well and good (I will geek out about military hardware all day long) but they ought to be nice about it, like steampunks. Where a steampunk will say "Ooh! What's that? That's awesome! Did you make it up? It's REAL? To wikipedia!" a diesel punk will be more like "They didn't have that yet."



That's the whole point of whatever punk! You cram cool shiny things together and try to figure out how they would work. It's supposed to be fun.

With some very well-done exceptions (most of which are not WWII settings), it seems like a lot of diesel punk is just WWII with more metal, a darker setting O_O and less human spirit. Where steampunk magnifies the heroic and creative person in an era that stood a chance of overshadowing people, diesel punk grinds and mechanizes the individual, rather than telling their stories.

It's all this:



and none of this.

No climbing Pointe du Hoc, no Audie Murphy, no Battle of Britain. Just CG models of extra big tanks, guys in gas masks, and hot SS dominatrices. Now, I know the SS had the snazziest uniforms in the war, and we all know how I feel about jodhpurs, but come on! Poetry came out of WWII too, but I'll save that for later.

Here's the example of nitpicking that prompted this post, a comment on my Talespin AMV, which I had described offhandedly as "baby's first steampunk". The comment was this (caps in the original):

Talespin is DIESEL PUNK as its defined using 30s era equivalent technology, clothing, and terminology. Most notable are Internal Combustion engines and Vacuum tube based electronic technology.

Sure, technically that's true. But who cares? Apparently I do, since I was annoyed enough to write a whole post about it. Anyway, "baby's first diesel punk" doesn't sound as good, and is not as understandable to most people. Maybe that's why diesel punk fans have a chip on their shoulder. They want to get out from under a genre that is all mushy and vague and anything-goes.

While we're over analyzing a cartoon, I might point out that Don Karnage's airship is like the one in Master of the World, which is Jules Verne. At 0:18 in the video you can see the steam engines on the side propellers, and they never specify what powers the upward-pointing rotors. I always figured it was either a later edition he added using piston engines, or else they run off the steam engines too, either using an electric turbine, or a simple belt drive. In the show, the Iron Vulture doesn't even make a typical airship noise (droning propellers) but rather the chugging of a steam engine. Many of his crew also wear older clothes - top hats, for example. He's a bit of a throwback in the setting of the story. The awesome level of detail Disney put into the show means you actually can tell how the tech works, and the pirates, at least, are still a little steampunk.

Is that the point of my video? No. the point is that Talespin is awesome, and Abney Park is awesome.

Architectural Abomination!!!!!!

or, the planned Eisenhower Memorial, or, a perfect illustration of what I was on about in my last post.


They are planning to put a memorial to President Eisenhower in Washington DC, right in the middle of all the beautiful classical buildings and monuments, but the planned design is anything but beautiful. The design they chose was by postmodern "artist" Frank Gehry, and it consists of huge, 80 foot tall metal posts with screens stuck up on them. Right in the middle of DC. Blocking the view of the Capitol Building. The only image of Eisenhower will be a statue of him as a barefoot farmboy in Kansas. It says nothing about the great leader he became, nothing about the world he protected in WWII, and helped to forge in the early days of the Cold War. It erases the idea of virtue and the ideals that human beings should be inspired to when they see monuments to great men. Call your congressmen and senators today!

There is an alternative - the National Civic Art Society has hosted their own contest to design a better memorial, and they have stunning results. Any one of these monuments would be a wonderful addition to the scenery of Washington DC, and be a fitting tribute to a president who shaped America's greatness in the 20th Century perhaps more than any other until Reagan. So, again, call your congressmen, email them, do whatever it takes.



Now, there is more going on here than just an aesthetic abomination that should never get zoning approval in an historic location, and never would in a civilized part of America. There are ideas at play, and it must have Ike spinning in his grave. See, the style of the proposed monument is postmodern, and shows a lot of the international style (i.e. Marxism). It is not suitable for a Cold Warrior and should not be built.

Modern Architecture

So, I was asked to rant about "form follows function" on the comments on Bad Catholic, a superlative blog that I follow, and I did. Apologies to everyone who had to scroll past my unexpectedly long post. I wanted to include pictures, so I will write about it here, mostly from cutting and pasting my comment and embellishing it. It is, after all, in my time period of choice.

Form follows function.

The phrase was coined by Louis Sullivan, considered the father of modern architecture. Before you judge the man too harshly, know that he didn't design what we consider "modern" architecture, but rather, a new type of building based on the ability of steel beams to soar, with exterior decorations added to emphasize height, and the function of the building, rather than following the old style of stone courses for each story from when the bricks actually did the work of holding up the building.

He was quite the rebel in 1890s Chicago, and the most (in)famous student of his style is Frank Lloyd Wright. Despite his abrasive personality, he made some gorgeous buildings, far more ornately decorated than the traditional buildings he moved away from. It really looked like art deco and art nouveau, only forty years early. All the decorations framed functional aspects - receding arches and solar patterns around doors, marble everything on banks, vertical courses of stone zooming up between the windows of skyscrapers. My favorite thing he did was take classical elements, like a doric column, and used its form and proportions on the entire building, with a sturdy base, "fluted" sides, and a course of decorative stone on top.

Observe the vertical lines of this building, and the column design.


In this detail, you can really see the way the surface looks like a steel skyscraper frame, only carved. The lines draw the eyes upward.


And capping off the building, look at this cornice!


One of his most famous buildings was the Transportation Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. He refused to follow the beaux arts style that the architects agreed upon, and designed what basically looks like an art deco train station. Apparently it was painted with reds and golds radiating out from the arch - it must have been glorious.


Not that beaux arts isn't awesome as well. In fact, it is one of my favorite styles. An example of beaux arts construction from the fair was the Fine Arts Building, which happens to be the only building still standing today (in order to get insurance for all the art, they had to build a real building, not a temporary facade). It is now the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and words cannot express how much I want to go there! Note the classical proportions and features. Truly beautiful.


Speaking of which, beaux arts also has its skyscrapers. The Flatiron Building in NYC is a nice example. It looks like a blade of awesome thrust into the city. Note how the courses of stonework run horizontally under the windows. That is just a facade of stone, not part of the floor, but it is a holdover from Renaissance architecture. Sullivan thought leaving it on there stopped the eye in its upward journey, so he changed his stonework to vertical. Again, a facade, but one that follows the building's skeleton, and makes the skyscraper look taller. I like them both, but this clearly illustrates "form follows function".


Sullivan was very into using the Golden Ratio and form, unity, harmony (both within the design and with its surroundings), and decoration - all that stuff that architects forgot soon after that...

Enter communism. The internationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were trying to find a style of architecture with no national flavor. Many of Sullivan's students and adherents were into that too, so they started stripping off aesthetic elements to achieve some kind of stylistic unity. This nonsense reached its peak in the 1930-60s, with old buildings being demolished and replaced by monolithic cement and glass skyscrapers. They believed that form was secondary to function, that once you got a building to do what a building does (hold furniture and people, keep out the weather) you can stop, no matter how it looks. Decorating it was aspirational and terribly bourgeois. Some of them went so far as to leave all the "functional" elements, like ductwork, exposed, claiming that as an aesthetic. The really ironic thing is that exposed ductwork is hard to keep clean, huge glass walls bleed heat and rack up huge heating and cooling bills, and flat roofs leak. These buildings are not functional at all - their very banality actually hinders their function. So much for integrity. By any measure of beauty, these modern buildings failed, because the ideal behind them was to erase humanity, not to uplift it.

In this one, you can see how it resembles Sullivan skyscraper, only plain. It actually looks older, because it has the reek of dingy bureaucracy about it.


For a more egregious example, check this out:


Need that flavor out of your mouth? Here's an image search of Sullivan's work. And here's some beaux arts. And what the hey - a little art nouveau and art deco. Enjoy

Wikipedia is dead to me.....

....and it's quite sad (and probably temporary - what can I say? I'm an addict). I was trying to look up various hats in order to comment on my brother's blog post. I needed to make sure that my instinct about the appropriate hat to wear with tweeds in the country was correct. I thought it was probably a fedora or a trilby but I wasn't sure if a homburg was actually the one I meant (but homburgs are more formal - like a banker or prime minister might wear). This may not seem very important, but there is always the possibility that some chappish troll might challenge my choice of lid, and an ugly incident like this might occur (ridiculous argument in those comments - akubra my foot. It's obviously a fedora).

Anyway, where does wikipedia come into this story? Well, naturally I looked there first. I searched men's hats, as I have done many times in the past, and eventually came to this "list of headgear". Well, it was a start. I found the hats I wanted, read the pitifully short articles, and then found the answers I needed on artofmanliness.com.

The problem is this: Look at the headings for the list of hats. It starts out by showing all the kinds of hats that aren't worn anymore, then a bit of a list of hats, then more hats that aren't worn anymore (which is a trend that needs to stop). Then it goes into specialty hats. But this is not how wikipedia used to handle hats. Before they had, in almost every entry on men's hats, a discussion of how formal they were, giving good, meaningful comparisons across class, era, setting, and time of day. It was very helpful to know that a homburg is between a top hat and a fedora, but top hats are rarely worn during the day except at weddings and Ascot (morning dress occasions). It was helpful to me to know Morning Dress is the equivalent of White Tie, and Stroller is the equivalaent of Black Tie. But what if one is in the country? In the daytime? The evening? What would one go Bunburying off to a country manor in, while driving a Bentley and guzzling Grey Poupon? (It is awesome that it accepts "Bunburying" as a word without underlining it in red)

Wikipedia used to run down every possible combo. It was lovely, as a writer who likes dandyish characters, to be able to pinpoint the exact level of rakishness I needed. Now it's all dumbed down. Lame. The article for Stroller style still has a bit of what I was looking for.

Hmm. It occurs to me that a tweed flat cap might not be amiss...... What would the 11th Doctor wear? No, never mind - that would be a fez.

Whooooo HOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

So JK Rowling is finally - FINALLY! - releasing all the Harry Potter books as ebooks. She was one of the most vocal opponents of digital publishing, because it's cool if wizard books have changing pages and pictures, but it's not cool if muggles get ideas above their station. It would be lovely to be a wizard and have all your stuff look like it's the 19th century but magically have all the advantages of the 21st century, but some of us embrace technology (and then steampunk it so it looks like the 19th century). Ahem. Anyway, this is awesome, and it will make my customers very very happy in NOOKland.

Now for a touch of irony. Those of you hang on my every post will recall that I said Amazon's insistence on a proprietary format for the Kindle was not at all the Coming Thing. Well now they've met with a dose of their own medicine, since Rowling is releasing the books solely through a website of her own called Pottermore, which will apparently offer content beyond just downloading the books. Here's the kicker - it may just have them available as epub. I'm chuckling. My guess is that she may give in and offer Amazon's ridiculous format, but I hope not. It's about time Amazon got into the real ereader market. If they think they can't make a profit selling hardware and using convenience to incentivize customers to shop their ebook store, then that's their tough luck. You don't see Barnes and Noble complaining about NOOK customers buying books through Google and Gutenberg. One of the NOOK's biggest selling points is the fact you can get ebooks from the library for free. That's the Coming Thing.

I just thought I'd share. Proprietary formats get my dander up. If you can't keep your customers by giving the best product and service, then you probably don't deserve them.

Newfangledness Versus the Coming Thing

So I was thinking about newfangledness, mostly because I really like the word. I also think a lot of things are newfangled, but that is not always such a terrible thing. However, I don't think every departure from old ways and tech is newfangled. Sometimes it's the Coming Thing.

I think the difference is why the thing is new. If it is new just for the sake of having something new, I think it's newfangled. Sometimes I like it though, and I think newfangledness is somewhat subjective. Take Mountain Dew flavors. Every year they have a contest where you can vote on which of their new flavors they will keep, although most of these seem to be a flash in the pan. Some of them are very gross, but some are good, like "Game Fuel". All of them are newfangled. Things like dark chocolate KitKats and Reeses Cups are, I think, a worse kind of newfangled, because the normal variety used milk chocolate to go better with peanut butter. Dark chocolate actually makes these things worse. Consider why Mounds bars have dark chocolate and Almond Joy have milk chocolate. These classic candy bars were painstakingly designed, and the newfangled versions with some swapped ingredients just mess it up.

I think the Coming Thing is new because there was a need to fill, or a real chance of doing something either better, or perhaps for the first time. Automobiles, computers, and the like are good examples, but they make it seem like the difference is one of scale or importance. It's not. The Take 5 bar is a good example of a candy bar that was a new type, and was designed with ingredients that match and contrast perfectly. It could become a new classic.

Another way to think of it is like the 1920s, one of my favorite time periods. We think of the twenties as a free-for-all, full of crazy kids doing crazy things. Flagpole sitting, bobbed hair, the Charleston - all these things were fads, and were newfangled (but occasionally awesome). Also in that decade, however, with the increase in real wages and record low unemployment, middle class families could finally get their hands on refrigerators, radios, cars, phones, fans, and the electricity to run them. That was the coming thing, and it lasted.

Some things are both. I previously said that I think the 3DS is a coming thing, and I still think so, although they better get some good games soon. It's also a newfangled contraption though. There's not really a need for 3D games (although, done right it could be fantastic), but the technological development of a glasses-free 3D screen is amazing, and it will be used for more than toys.

Anyway, yeah, this was supposed to be an a post about eReaders, some of which are the coming thing.... but I got hungry.

Who the heck are these people?!?!

So my brother has this writing style analyzer on his blog, and let's just say I got a bit carried away......

The problem is, it says I write like a bunch of people I've never heard of. It's not that this offends my ego (for real!), it's just that I have no frame of reference, so I don't know what to think of the results. It's quite annoying. I did get some famous authors, one of which made sense, and the other did not.

I pasted this story I did for a class, and it said I write like Ray Bradbury. I guess I can see that. But how about this: I pasted in my review of one of the Ideal Husband movies from this blog, and it said I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Now, I'd love to believe that's true, but I just don't see it in that review. I guess it has really long sentences.....?

Then I pasted in the prologue from a story I'm working on and it said I write like David Foster Wallace. Who is that? Apparently he's some kind of vaguely comedic well-reviewed person. One or two of his titles on Amazon look familiar.....

Most of my reviews from this blog came up as Cory Doctorow. I guess he writes sci-fi...? No idea. I assume the program just looks at sentence structure, maybe some word choices. Obviously not content.

Oh, well. I'll be going with this one:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Chap Hop! Ukuleles! WAR!

This is kind of weird.... so, I've meaning to write a post for a while about ukuleles. No, really. I find it is impossible to feel sad when someone is playing a ukulele, particularly if it is 20s-ish music. For example, this is a delightful song I stumbled across on youtube.

Then I was reading The Chap, one of my favorite magazines of all time (on their website), and they mentioned Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer, who is performing at this year's ball. I remembered him because of the Chap Manifesto, which he set to rap in honor of the publication's tenth birthday. Anyway, here is one of his videos:

I think his banjolele is quite catchy, but apparently there is already a king of chap hop, and he is Professor Elemental. Here is what he has to say:

And the response? I think it's a response....?

Apparently some of the fans are pretty die-hard, but I like them both. Although, Prof. E. does have an album called Indifference Engine, so that gets him brownie points. Anyway, there is one thing we can all agree on:

Some Reviews

I just read what may be the best fantasy story I've seen in years! It's called "Nine Pound Hammer", and it's the first book in the Clockwork Dark Trilogy, by John Claude Bemis. Yes, "clockwork dark" is as cool as it sounds! The author is a musician from the south, so he naturally knows about John Henry, and decided to turn the story into epic fantasy, using all kinds of American folklore, and steampunkish flair. The main character is a boy named Ray, who was is headed south on a train with many other orphans, following the pull of his father's mysterious Lodestone. When he sleeps with the stone, he has dreams about being chased by a monstrous clockwork hound. He runs away and joins a traveling medicine show, where he learns some very interesting things. There are some very cool twists and the characters are all awesome. I couldn't put this book down, and I can't wait to read "The Wolf Tree"!

On to games! I played Red Dead Redemption a while back, and I really liked it, with a couple of reservations. First, the bad, then the good, then the ugly:

The minor complaint I had about this game was the lack of depth. Heresy, they'll say! It's a huge sprawling sandbox style game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sandbox style games tend to be very repetitive, and this was no exception. Sure, the different environments looked different and had different animals (freakin' mountain lions!) but you pretty much do the same things all the time. I wanted more control over the story - since morality is a big feature of the story, it would have been nice to be able to make a few choices, pick out who your allies are, that sort of thing. They managed it in Steambot Chronicle (not that that wasn't repetitive).

Also, while they do an excellent job establishing time and place, it manages to feel very static. A major feature of the setting is the end of the wild west, the spread of the railroad, the introduction of the car! And yet, I never got a sense of the tension, excitement, or melancholy that should go along with this change, outside of a couple of scenes where it was specifically mentioned.

My more overarching problem was a typical one for Rockstar. Although it seems like their hearts are starting to be in the right place, they still have the puerile tendency to substitute the sordid for the mature. This doesn't make it any edgier, and it certainly doesn't make it any deeper. I would have liked for even one of the Stranger subquests to have a happy ending.

Now for the good: This game is beautiful! Sure, all kinds of games are pretty to look at, and all kinds of games use it as an excuse for lousy gameplay. But this is different - it is like being drawn into the pages of Arizona Highways! It makes the game so immersive and engaging, you can almost smell the greasewood and pinetrees, and feel the gritty wind shift from hot to cold when a monsoon blows in. The graphics and sound design really make a difference here.

I love the story too! The premise is your character used to be an outlaw, and he tried to settle down and be a rancher with his wife and son, but federal agents kidnapped them in order to force you to hunt down your old gang. You have a whole bunch of missions where you do just that, with a few twists and obstacles thrown in. It's all tons of fun, and there's enough variety to keep it interesting - everything to storming forts to herding cattle, from robbing trains to dueling in the streets! There are sidequests too, which start off fun, but after a whole bunch of them ending badly, I started to dread them popping up. Your actions determine both your fame and honor ratings, which change how the random characters and especially law enforcement interact with you. It's way easier if you behave yourself (Hint: if you see a guy running and screaming, make sure the guys chasing him aren't wearing silver stars before you shoot at them.) If things get too hot you can pay off your bounty.

~ Spoiler alert! Highlight to keep reading ~

I really like the last few missions, where you finally find the last bad guy. And then the game keeps going! You go home to your ranch, and do missions for your wife, and teach your boy to shoot and rope, and bring supplies to the neighboring ranch! You start to build a real life, and offer your son more than you had. He wants to be a writer, and is enchanted with novels of the wild west. Or he wants to be a rich industrialist. You tell him he be whatever he wants, but he has to bring the cattle in first. I actually thought this was the most enjoyable part of the game. Of course, the g-men won't just leave you alone, and they come after you. You get your family to safety and a Butch and Sundance style stand-off, and get killed. Your family comes back, and the credits play as they bury you, and the soundtrack is "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie". I cried. It was a great ending.

Or was it?

The ugly: They had to go and ruin the ending. After the credits, four years have passed, your wife has died, and your son has become a gunslinger. You play as him now. You hunt down the retired agent who set you up and murder him in cold blood. Then you ride around and do nothing - no more missions, no more story, no nothing. What the hell did this guy's father fight and die for?!?! It is the worst possible ending they could possibly have had. It pretty much ruined the game for me.

Not the Coming Thing

or, For Science!

~ a short rant ~

I was looking at light bulbs last night, pondering stocking up on a few more incandescent bulbs before they become illegal. But I was also looking at compact fluorescent bulbs, because I do use them in most of my lights, especially the ones I use for extended periods.

I couldn't find any that were the right color, only the hideous bright blue ones, or "Daylight". I prefer "soft white" whereas in incandescent bulbs I prefer "soft white", "Edison", or "reveal", although only in my living room, because it's already purple and looks lovely with the slightly purple light.

All these names are, frankly, ridiculous, with the exception of "soft white", which is pretty understandable. Another point of confusion is brightness. We are used to measuring brightness in watts (this hurts me) despite the fact that the coating on white light bulbs slightly affects the brightness. Watts are a measure of how much power they draw, which is different for fluorescent lamps. At least they tell you what wattage of normal light bulb they look like. LED lights are hopeless in this regard, and they will never ever be able to force me to buy one. They'll have to kill me first.

The proper measure of brightness is lumens, or, alternatively, foot candles. We have a standard, folks, why not use it?

But my biggest problem with all these different bulbs is the color and quality of light. LEDs are out of the question because the quality of light is just not there - it has a weird focus because of the shape of the plastic bubble, and this gives it hideous shadows that I find distracting. The color is also quite ugly - the white light from LEDs is just too blue for my taste, for most applications.

Fluorescent bulbs are ok in terms of quality of light - the shadows are a little murky, but I'll live. My problem with fluorescent bulbs is the color. Not all of them are hideous - they do come in a soft white that looks pretty good to the eye. However, usually they have a horrible green or yellow tinge to them that you can see on film or even in digital photos. It's why most photos taken indoors look yellower than they used to, unless your camera has a specific white balance setting for fluorescent.

One of the settings where they'll have to pry the incandescent bulbs out of my cold dead hands is the bathroom mirror. Fluorescent bulbs make me even paler, the circles under my eyes even bluer, and various blotches even redder. It also makes my makeup look gray and dull. The ladies room at my church has overhead fluorescents, which is a problem because that's where brides get ready. They are nervous enough without looking in the mirror and seeing a Tim Burton character!

But there is a solution, offered to us by science! Colors of light can be expressed in numbers! Any photographer knows this. It's called color temperature. Sunlight is 5600K, and incandescent light is 3200K. It's the reason why shooting indoor film outside gives you bluish pictures, and outdoor film will give you orange pictures if you use it inside. There are filters to correct this. Why aren't light bulb colors expressed this way.

Or maybe they are. As I was looking at light bulbs, I saw that some of them did in fact have the color temperature written on the box. The "Daylight" compact fluorescents had "6500K" written down the side. The only problem is, that's 900K bluer than daylight, which I can attest to, having accidentally bought two of the hideous things. One actually worked quite well up inside the ductwork in my former mad science lab. But I have no place where the other doesn't offend the eye. There is no bulb that looks like daylight, except those ones that plants like, and they're too hot to use. Now, color temperature is hardly common knowledge, but you would think that someone involved in the manufacture of light bulbs would have studied lighting at some point.

So, nice try, but until somebody puts a real measure of both brightness and color temperature on light bulbs, I don't think everyone should be forced to make the switch. It's just one example of ecomentalists making our lives smaller, meaner, and less beautiful. That and Sunchip bags.

The Coming Thing!

...or, Steampunk and Technological Optimism.

There are a couple of reasons I like steampunk more than other subcultures, particularly the ones that are based on aesthetics, music and clothing (music was actually a late comer to mainstream steampunk, if there is such a thing, but now with Abney Park and some other bands, there is definitely that force in the subculture). Also, as far as trends based on literature are concerned, it's less horrifying than most. The first is just the cool style and the fun of it, obviously, the fun coming largely from going "hm, how would you power that with steam?"The other is the optimism. Steampunk takes place in a past with a bright future.

In the nineteenth century, there was the feeling that science would ease the labor of mankind, and free us up for pursuits of art and intellect. We will forget for now that the intellectual movements in the nineteenth century led to slaughter on a scale never before imagined. Anyway, that was the feeling, as demonstrated in the Universal Expositions and Worlds Fairs. Good steampunk reflects this - technology makes the world better, not worse. Our ability to imagine and create is a great strength. New worlds of discovery were being opened up all the time. Even though the technology in steampunk is primitive by today's standards, because it is alternate history, it is forward-looking, and it also keeps alive the idea that the things we make should be beautiful (look at an iPod and try to stay awake). Besides, the stories are usually more about people than machines, which is another nice thing about the genre. Not all steampunk is optimistic, however, and I think it suffers.

Some examples of both types:

The original steampunk (no, not Difference Engine, which I haven't read) - I mean, of course, Jules Verne! As a good science fiction writer, he dreamed up all kinds of new technology, as well as better and more useful versions of existing tech, and portrayed them as wondrous. He also had a number of mad scientist characters. Consider "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". Captain Nemo is crazy! He's kind of a bad dude! It's interesting that he is a pacifist and believes that society must be controlled through force to protect all the stupid, dangerous people - did Verne recognize something about 19th c. society and science that others, like Wells, did not? Hold that thought. Anyway, the Nautilus itself, and the underwater paradise that Nemo would like to retreat to when he's not terrorizing the seas, is marvelous and good, and who wouldn't want one? It's how Nemo uses it that's wrong, not the science itself. I think, though this is sort of a generalization, that the technological advancements in the 19th c. were good for the world, while the social science was disastrous. Science can't perfect society, or people, but it is worth pursuing . . . FOR SCIENCE!!!

For another, ultimately frustrating, take on that, let's consider "Steamboy". Now, this film is cool-looking. It has some really neat steam machines, and cool action sequences. The animation is very smooth and expensive. It's fun to watch, for the first half of it. The story is just lame. Basically, this kid's father and grandfather are scientists. They invent a magic steam valve that apparently can concentrate steam at low temperatures . . .or something? Anyway, the experiment blows up in the dad's face, boiling him alive and leaving only a damp skeleton covered in pulp- I mean, causing mild skin irritation. They secretly send the valve to the kid and bad guys come after it, until he gets it back to them at the Crystal Palace Exposition. . . and hilarity ensues. Really boring eye-rolling hilarity, until the explosions start. And don't stop. For like an hour. It is Katsuhiro Otomo, after all.

There's some rubbish about what science should be used for, and the characters, who are just stand-ins for cliched concepts, talk about it for ages. On the one hand, science should never, ever, ever be used for war. On the other hand, when dewy-eyed scientists try to use it for peace, the government, or actually the military, will corrupt it for war. But on the other hand, or C, it's kinda fun, for amusement park rides, and barrel organs, and other sundries. And that's pretty much the conclusion we're left with. Science as an amusing sideshow!?!? What kind of steampunk is this?

I think the steampunk work that best sums up the spirit of the times is Brisco County Junior, from which the title of this post is taken. Brisco is a bounty hunter, drifting around the west, looking for the Coming Thing. He doesn't know what it is, but he can feel it. After all, it's almost a new century. Throughout the show, he and his friends discover many coming things, clever, often hilarious, steampunk versions of all kinds of modern items. Sometimes they are devices the bad guys are using, other times they are made by the good guys and help our heroes out. Usually though, they are just the hard work of regular people that Brisco encounters. He's pleased to see what their dreams are, and how the future is being made. It's the spirit of the west. It's a pretty Shonen Jump-like philosophy for a show that's really just meant to be fun, and is certainly not scientifically rigorous. I guess you could say it's steam-pulp.

They also have the Orb, a magically powerful device that can do many things to advance the plot. It's also kind of like science, and in fact at one point is described simply as "potential". When the bad guys get ahold of it, it is terribly dangerous, and ultimately self-destructive, but it helps the good guys a lot, while tempting and leading astray some of the minor characters. It's not actually deep, per se, it's just a handy plot device, used to reveal things about the characters.

That's my lengthy two cents.

What's with the Lafayette Escadrille movies?

So now I have seen (I think) all the World War I flying movies there are, at least on video and DVD. I saved the ones that are actually about the Lafayette Escadrille for last. And I gotta say, meh.

First, I rented "Lafayette Escadrille". I had high hopes for this one, since it was directed by William Wellman ("Wings"), who was actually one of the pilots who was in the real thing. I was a little suspicious of the fact that it was made in 1958, which is a little close to the 60s for my taste. The problem with this film wasn't that it seemed like a sixties movie, because it didn't. The problem was that it seemed like the first act of a bigger movie, and the Lafayette Escadrille was barely in it. In fact, it had very little flying at all. I suppose saying "I wanted more" isn't exactly a bad review, but when there isn't any more, it does mean the film is disappointing.

First, though, the good parts. Even more than "Wings", this film shows how the pilots lived, and how they were trained. It showed them trying to steer "penguins", basically plane bodies with stubby wings, and trying to follow orders and instructions in French. It also had the characters briefly meeting such awesome figures as Lufbery and Guynemer. The story was engaging, until it ended, and I was left going "Wait, where's the rest of the movie?" I was pretty into it, but it just wasn't satisfying. I'm not going to do a summary, since none of the issues I have are with the aviation-related parts, which were OK, but no "Hell's Angels" (curse, you, Howard Hughes - all dogfighting films are boring now!!!)

The best thing about "Lafayette Escadrille" is how it shows the reasons why they did what they did. Partly, they were young and seeking adventure, and fighting in the air force was the ultimate way to do that, but mostly they felt they should do something in the war, and they were angry the U.S. wasn't getting involved. That's not usually portrayed in movies.

Speaking of movies that miss the point, after several weeks I finally worked up the courage to rent "Flyboys". In those weeks I read the Red Baron's book, Eddie Rickenbacker's book - Fighting the Flying Circius, and James Norman Hall's series of magazine articles, in order to form a perfect picture in my mind, a picture that could withstand the thrashing that film would inevitably give it.

It actually wasn't as bad as I expected (not that it could have been). It was nice-looking, and the dogfighting bits were fun. Not good, but fun. Let us bear in mind that it was made by the guy who did "Independence Day" and "The Patriot", so yeah... The characters ranged from meh to lame, the acting was kind of appalling, and the story was totally predictable, except where it was surprisingly absurd.

The characters would have been OK if they had actually been developed. They basically had the usual mix of guys you have in a war film - the hotheaded guy, the religious guy, the nerdy skinny kid, the black guy, you know. They also had a rich snobby guy, a clumsy guy, and a guy whose family were all soldiers and he was eager to go carry on the family tradition... he was kinda weird. They had a leader, and he was distant and disillusioned - more on him later. The main character was pretty likable, but I hear he was inspired by Frank Luke. Let's just say he's no Frank Luke. This is mostly a personal pet peeve, but he should have been a miner from Arizona, not a rancher from Texas. What can I say - the Arizona Balloon Buster has a special place in my heart. The leader of their squadron was quite wanksty and needed to grow up and get over it. He was all "all my friends are dead and I only keep doing this for revenge and (the usual speech) no one even knows why we're in this war. You'll be dead in a few weeks too." Mr. Morale. None of the other characters were anything to write home about except some of them had some very strange (stupid) things happen to them. I did like their instructor, who was played by Jean Reno. My biggest problem with characters was that they each had their own personal reason for joining the Escadrille, each of which was all right, but not a single one was there for the actual reasons why most the real guys were, like doing the right thing for your country even when it hasn't figured out what the right thing is. It seemed very shallow.

I'm not even getting into the story. I do recommend watching this film though - it's worth a few laughs, and I would hate to spoil any spit-take worthy surprises. Seriously. Watch this movie.

Now for the technical things. First, the good parts. They show some training stuff that's not in the other films, and they have a pet lion, which is, strangely, almost historically accurate (there should have been two pet lions). Also, they have a very exciting attack on an airship. It's not quite as cool as the one in "Hell's Angels", but some parts were kind of interesting, such as how it's actually harder than it sounds to blow one up, even with incendiary bullets (basically because you can't get near it). What you have to do is upload a virus from your Mac to the German dirigible. I personally wish they would have shown some actual balloon busting, sticking with the whole Frank Luke thing. They also explain why Fokker triplanes were so formidable.

It's a good thing they do explain that, since the entire German air force apparently consisted of bright red triplanes, because, you know, the Red Baron wasn't special or anything. The main bad guy had a black one at least. They shouldn't have been using triplanes at all. But whatever - they did it on purpose to make it easier to tell the planes apart during the action sequences. I'm sure they could have found another way to do that. Like editing. Or painting big black crosses on some of the planes and red, white, and blue circles on the others...

The dogfighting scenes were fast-paced, but not really chaotic enough. They did try to show some tactics, like to get in a good firing position before shooting, using the sun and clouds, and things like that. There were some nice visuals, like when a bunch of planes come out of the sun, and when all the planes are fighting around the airship. A lot of the maneuvers they do are kind of stupid. For example, one time an American has a Fokker on his tail, maybe ten yards behind (and somehow unable to shoot him?) He does some kind of airbrake thing (not invented yet), pulls up, and uses his wheels to tear the triplane's top wing off. Uh-huh. Also, after making a big deal about how agile the triplanes are, and how fast they climb, the Americans proceed to fly circles around them, sometimes literally, in their Nieuports. Two or three times they do a move where they basically flip upside-down, let the triplane go under them (over their heads) and then finish the roll to drop onto the German's tail. It's shown in this video about Werner Voss, at 4:30. Except notice that in real life, Voss did the move in the triplane. That's the point of a triplane, and Voss was one of the most daring pilots when it came to the maneuvers he would do. He seems to have been a showboating rival character for the Red Baron.

It's a small detail, but there are parts where the propellers are spinning but the cylinders on the rotary engines are still. That's just an animation problem, but it's kind of lame. They should have grouped the engine to the propeller on the models, just like they were attached in real life. What's not a small detail is the way they show them flying through Archie, the German anti-aircraft guns. There's a funny part in Rickenbacker's book about what it's like to fly through artillery, and how it basically makes a bunch of shockwaves in the air. From as far as fifty yards one of those shells could knock a plane out of the sky. In the film they come considerably closer. It does make it more exciting, visually, and I would have done *almost* the same thing. What I would not do is have a shell burst right under the wheels of a plane, and the plane be OK.

My biggest problem with the dogfight scenes was the editing. They were done with computers, so there is nothing - NOTHING - they could not and should not show, and yet, they held back. It's not as though they had to put eighty planes in the sky with twenty-six cameras strapped to them and shoot miles and miles of film while endangering dozens of men's lives or anything. The usual (non-Howard Hughes) way of showing a plane getting shot down would be to do a couple of close-ups of guns and bullet holes, whatever intimacy with pilot death you feel your audience needs to see, the plane starts smoking and spinning down, you cut to it going behind a hill and cut to an explosion. The cuts are in there to protect the stuntmen, save the expensive real plane, and disguise your model. If you have an invincible digital model with an immortal digital pilot, you slam that plane into the ground and blow it up for all to see! Every maneuver should be shown in its entirety, since you don't need match-on-action cutting to construct the right moves, and you don't need clever angles to make the bad guys look closer than they actually are. The reason I love animation is that if you can imagine something, you can show it. It seems to me that the storyboarders, choreographers, and director weren't imaginative enough. They copied a bunch of dogfighting sequences from films with real-life limitations, instead of starting from scratch and showing us something we'd never seen before. Actually, there is a scene in "The Aviator", where Howard Hughes is shooting the big dogfight for "Hell's Angels", that has almost the perfect feeling of speed and stomach-churning acrobatics, and shots you could only get with animation. It seems somewhat ironic. Actually, the proper feeling in a dogfight scene might also be similar to the Quidditch games in the Harry Potter movies - truly dizzying action!

To me the "Flyboys" fights seemed detached, but that might just be the predictability of the story combined with the uninteresting characters, and I was the one who was detached. I just think a dogfight scene should be visceral and chaotic, but not like a Bourne movie. You should be in the pilot's head. You should be able to tell what's happening, but it should be blazing fast, and it should be scary!

Despite its sub-video game graphics and lack of any closeups of the pilots, History Channel's Dogfights series actually comes closest to this feeling, with the exception of "Hell's Angels". The dogfights in "Hell's Angels" are actually scary. They are some of the most intense and realistic portrayals of aerial combat - they show how unforgiving it is, how hard and frantic the most graceful movements are from the pilots' point of view, and how fragile those machines and the men who flew them really were. They used editing, not to disguise cuts between real planes and models (because there were no models), but to establish pacing and mood. Probably the longest shots were when a plane was going down, and they would show the pilot in the cockpit, dead or dying, or alive for the entire 15000 foot drop, with the shadow from his wings sweeping over him faster and faster as his plane went out of control. That, I think, is what made those scenes scary - death in a dogfight was lonely, and could come at any second, and even if you didn't make a mistake, you might just have rotten luck.

I, for one, am in awe of the people who fought in the air, and the ones who still do it to this day. (And it's not just because I kind of have a thing for airmen.)

This concludes what accidentally turned into a series about World War I films. Next up, Easter eggs (a month late).

Are the oldies the only goodies?

So, after watching almost every World War I flyer movie I could find (this week I'm going to rent "Lafayette Escadrille", and then finally bite the bullet and watch "Flyboys" *shudder*, and that will be pretty much all of them), I think the farther we get from history, the more people try to mess with it to suit their agendas, or just plain tell whatever story pops into their heads.

I watched "The Blue Max" (1966), which I thought was going to be good, since it has James Mason. I suppose it wasn't entirely awful - it started all right, and it had two good characters. The problem was the main character. From about thirty-five minutes into the film, I was rooting for someone to kill him. The other problem was the costumes on the leading "lady" *cough(hussy)cough*. Like many (most?) period films from the sixties, the men are in fairly accurate costumes, but the women have sixties eyeliner and that weird hair that's like a beehive or a bouffant on top but hangs down in the back. I almost can't watch movies like that. The really weird thing about this film in particular is that the women who are extras are all dressed in appropriately Edwardian-looking clothing and hair.

It also had bad dogfight scenes. Not only are they dull and don't show off any nice maneuvers or wide shots of the action, they also don't make a lot of sense. Basically, the main guy, and many other pilots whose POV we get to see, will fly towards a tiny speck, and begin blasting away (always the same shot too - looking through the propeller at his face with a lit-up machine on either side - a nice shot, but should be used sparingly). Anyway, not to sound picky, but Oswald Boelcke must spinning in his grave. The guns back then only had about ninety seconds of sustained fire, and were so inaccurate that the Dicta Boelcke and Mannock's Rules both say you should hold your fire until you're about a hundred yards away, if not closer, and preferably only from behind. Now, I might not be so picky (actually, yes, yes I would) if they didn't bring up this very issue right there in the movie itself. In one scene the main jerk character's armorer says that his guns had jammed after firing only forty rounds, or about two three-second bursts. It's kind of like in Star Trek when they are standing there in the transporter room talking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - The audience was with you until you went and brought it up!!!

On a better note, I next rented "Wings" from 1927. It was the first movie to receive the academy award for best picture, and it truly is a great film! It also won for Best Engineering Effects. Also, the director, William Wellman, was actually in the Lafayette Flying Corps (not the Lafayette Escadrille), and apparently many of his films are about aviation and adventure, including "Lafayette Escadrille". (He also directed "The Story of G.I. Joe", which is an incredibly good film, based a real guy.) He's in the movie as well, according to this site, which has tons of info and pictures.

What a difference! Just like "Hell's Angels" which I wrote about earlier, this film actually gets to the point of World War I (which is sort like the point of World War II, oddly enough). Besides that, it's just a well-done movie. It's got great characters and fine acting (more subtle than many silent films), and an awesome combination of action, romance, suspense, and pathos, all thrown together in a melodramatic way that still had me actually jumping off the couch and crying, occasionally at the same time. I don't know what it is, but I get really into silent movies, and I think part of it is how you have to use your imagination, and you can go ahead and talk and yell and laugh and do whatever. Catharsis? I'm sure I learned this in film school.

But enough about that. What really set this film apart, for me, was the technical stuff! It shows how pilots were trained back then, and how they lived. It's very interesting. Then, when they actually get into some fights, it's just fantastic. The fights are cut in a way that makes them very intense, and shows off the actual dogfighting. The airmen who worked on those scenes must have been very good, because they do all the moves a geek like me would like to see in a dogfight, and you gotta figure multiple takes, flying with big running cameras on board, etc. They generally use four types of shots - looking at the front of the pilot with a view of the sky (and planes) behind him, looking from his POV past his guns, medium shot of the whole plane, and a wide shot of two or more planes with room to maneuver. Each shot of course had variations, being tighter or wider as the action demanded, and sometimes closeups of other angles, like instrument panels being shattered by bullets, or guns jamming.

My personal favorite thing about the dogfighting scenes was the title cards - yes title cards! Aside from showing the action in a very realistic fashion, they pop cards in to let you know what the pilots are thinking, what tactical use their artful movements serve, and how the fight is going (helpful since a German plane and a French plane look very similar from a distance and in black and white). It's especially cool that the director actually did those things himself. The language on the cards is very nice and poetic as well, throughout the film. I believe silent movies are their own medium, and the cards narrate in a way that is different from just showing the action, or even from spoken narration.

If you can find a video store that has "Hell's Angels" and "Wings" you should absolutely watch them both. It seems that after 1930, World War I aviation movies just weren't the same. Hopefully "Lafayette Escadrille" will be good, even though it's a talkie. (OK, Hell's Angels is a talkie too, but it was originally shot silent, then reshot with sound, so it counts!)

World War I Films, or, Why are they all Viet Nam films?

So I was trying to find some good World War I films that showed off the aircraft they used back then. Aside from the fact that there really weren't that many made, most of the ones I found were just so whiny! Now I should say that there are several very good WWI films, whiny or not, like Lawrence of Arabia, the Dawn Patrol, Galipoli, and Hell's Angels. And there are also a bunch of non-whiny ones that barely qualify as war films at all, focusing mainly on romance between girls and handsome pilots (not that I mind watching handsome WWI pilots).

I will not talk about the ultimate achievement in the art of whining and missing the point that is both versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, nor will I go into the WWII movies-disguised-as-WWI movies, like Sergeant York, which was a deliberate propaganda piece to get Americans to think about entering WWII (as well as being a great film). It's like how MASH was really about Viet Nam even though it's set in Korea, but with the opposite message.

I'm talking about the early 30s WWI films here, and unfortunately I must limit it to the ones that are available to rent (*sniff* I want to see Dirigible. . .) Once again heading to my favorite video store (the one that still rents tapes) I picked up The Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn. It's a very good movie, despite the fact that tension issues on this particular tape made it look as though the whole thing was filmed under water. It's got great characters and fine acting, and it's quite exciting. Flynn plays the leader of a squadron of British flyers in France. They are on their last legs, surviving only because they get new replacements every day for the men who are killed. Of course the replacements are basically cannon fodder for the far more battle-hardened German aces. During the film, Flynn's character makes the usual speech, looking off into the distance, about how they keep sending these boys up to die, and no one remembers what it's all for. Very "Bridge Too Far". I recall reading about another situation where it was all Britain could do to keep planes in the air, most of them piloted by young men who were lucky if they'd flown more than 10 hours. It's called the Battle of Britain, and of course their officers probably felt horrible sending them up knowing they had almost no chance of coming back. But they didn't pretend to have forgotten why they did it. Germany was trying to invade them.

So I took that tape back, after finally watching the whole thing, despite having to fast-forward it all the way to the end and then back to where I left off every time it got too hard to see. The guy at the store gave me a free rental. I was looking in the war films for 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (wrong war, but it's just so good, and Robert Mitchum is in it) when what should I see on the shelf but Hell's Angels!

Hell's Angels was directed and produced by Howard Hughes, and in 1930 was the the most expensive movie ever made. It's easy to see why. It has everything, including a long color sequence. It had the usual tinted blue-for-night, red-for-awesome-airship-crash bits, but this color sequence was actually in color. Other strains to the budget included a scene in an airship, which burns up and crashes spectacularly, much better than the one in the Rocketeer, and a dogfighting scene with countless planes on screen at once. When they filmed it they actually used something like 80 planes, which makes for some really really exciting dogfights, some of which are quite gruesome. The first time I saw it I was trying so hard to figure out how they could possibly have made it look so realistic, like did they use rear-projection? Did they use miniatures? Did they build cockpits and put them on moving stands? Turns out it was the obvious (and yet unbelievable) answer - they put a bunch of cameras on a bunch of planes and had themselves a dogfight! They reshot it a bunch and also had to wait around for months and months until they could get some clouds in the background. It has the Red Baron's Flying Circus (Jasta 11, which I was so impressed to see shown still using biplanes, the famous red triplane appearing only late in the war) and excellent special effects throughout. Basically Howard Hughes was one hell of a film-maker (it helps to be crazy).

But what makes Hell's Angels the best movie about WWI? They are fighting because Germany was stealing other countries. Imagine that. The final dramatic bombing mission in the film is to take out a munitions factory and supply lines so that when the infantry goes over the top to advance the next day, they won't get quite so slaughtered. It's quite clear, the lives lost are not shown as wasted, and it actually felt like the war it was made about, not like Viet Nam, which in real life wasn't even like "Viet Nam" as it's shown in movies.

An Ideal Husband Part 3, or "A happy ending after all"

You may recall that the movie version of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" is a terrible adaptation, apart from the costumes. Not satisfied, and trying to get the taste out my mouth, I found an old tape of the 1947 version at a marvelous video store that has that sort of thing (tapes, I mean). Even with the poor image quality, muddy sound, and occasional suspenseful moments where it looked like the tape might break, it was a much better viewing experience, because it was a much better movie.

Basically, it was the play. They moved a few scenes and greatly condensed most of the ending, but it held up well. Lord Goring was charming, Mrs. Cheveley was slimy, and the other characters were quite good as well. I liked Miss Mabel, and unlike in the other version, they left her a funny, clever, and minor character. I hate when screenwriters feel the need to make minor female characters show up all over the story and take over (Arwen). But I digress.

I only had a couple of problems with it. There are spoilers in here, so go read the play. I've turned them a parchmenty yellow color, so you can highlight them and read if you want. First, the tremendous condensation of the ending left almost no time for the charming scenes between Lord Goring and Mabel. Her impatience to get Goring to propose to her, and her scolding of him, is so funny in the play, and it was largely left out. I suppose that's minor, but still...

The other problem is also pretty minor, but I find it annoying. Here's a bunch of spoilers. In the play, Lady Chiltern sends Goring a letter asking his help, which Mrs. Cheveley finds, and being a bad person herself, assumes meant she was having an affair with him. After Goring makes Mrs. Cheveley give him the other letter she has, she reveals she has pocketed Lady Chiltern's letter, and runs off. The ending is rather suspenseful because just when Sir Chiltern decides to stick to his guns, and Lord Goring has succeeded in keeping his past a secret, Mrs. Cheveley is scheming away to ruin the Chilterns' marriage again. In both movies, they have Mrs. Cheveley keep Lady Chiltern's letter a secret, and tell Lord Goring she has it after they all go to watch Sir Chiltern give his speech to Parliament (not in the play). While this is a more simple "good guys think they're safe but then the villain has one last trick" twist, I like the extra suspense of knowing her scheme the whole time, and hoping their success won't be ruined, and wondering how they'll get out of it. It works OK either way, but I like the play better. Also, showing the speech in Parliament is boring! It works fine in the play where it cuts to them back at home talking about what a great speech it was, while the audience knows the trouble that the letter could still bring.

Overall, though, it's a pretty good adaptation, and a pretty good movie.

An Ideal Husband Part 2

A few posts ago I wrote about Oscar Wilde's play "An Ideal Husband", which is one of my favorite plays, although I have never seen it performed, because it's not that famous. I wanted to see it fleshed out somehow.

So I finally bit the bullet and rented the DVD of "An Ideal Husband", the one with Rupert Everett. I was reluctant to check out this version because I read so many bad reviews of it, but someone told me she liked Rupert Everett's performance as Lord Goring, and that it was a good movie. I suppose it was an OK movie, as long you have not read the play. I suppose Rupert Everett was good, as long as you don't know about Lord Goring. I suppose I should start at the beginning.

There were some good things about this film. The costumes were beautiful, as were the sets. As a production designer and a fan of Victorian fashion, this was a real treat. Some of the performances were very good, especially Kate Blanchett, but then again, she's always good.

Rupert Everett was good too, just as a performance, but not necessarily the way I picture Lord Goring. I liked a couple of parts where he gets philosophical and passionate, and yet still tries to maintain his airhead dandyish facade, even though it's painful, and he needs his friends to listen to him. However, other than that, I think he was miscast. For one thing, Lord Goring is supposed to possess an easy grace and disarming wit that is effortless, and it's pleasantly surprising and sort of thrilling when he turns he turns out to be intelligent and morally upright. It seemed more like he was trying too hard to seem frivolous, and he was sort of brooding. It's hard to put my finger on it, but he didn't seem very Lord Goring-like.

The biggest problem was simply the adaptation. Half the play wasn't in the movie, which is typical, but half the movie wasn't in the play, which is far worse! During the entire second half of the film, one thought kept going through my mind: "Not in the play!" If you took a drink every time a line of dialogue (or even an entire conversation) was not in the play, you wouldn't last halfway through the film, and the first half was relatively faithful. Not only was it annoying to not see most of my favorite lines and exchanges, but some of the changes were to actual themes and plot, and to the characters' motivations. I won't give any spoilers, but let's just say it was very shallow compared to the play, and many of the plot twists toward the end were over-explained, showing the screenwriters' apparent contempt for the audience's intelligence, or else rewritten, showing their apparent contempt for Oscar Wilde.