fine whine

I realize I'm a little late to the party in bashing Jumper, but I felt (uncharacteristically as of late) like writing, and hadn't dissed the movie thoroughly enough when last I mentioned it. It's not a good movie.

When I described it to my friend yesterday I detailed the first twenty minutes being passable, if not faithful to the book, and those twenty minutes being let down by the ensuing hour or so of crap.

I should point out that I have not recently read the book sharing a title and a few moments with this movie, but I recall liking it enough to be unhappy this movie is so bad. I can't remember it in enough detail to really criticize the film for accuracy, but from what I do recall, and what reviewers have written, there's not much left of the original idea.

Spoilers abound ahead - for the last few of you who ever intend to watch the movie despite my warnings (Don't watch it!) you may want to look elsewhere*

The movie begins with what is probably a common occurrence for the protagonist, David (played by some kid other than Hayden Christensen): he's trying to give a cute girl a snow globe, and a bully thwarts his plan and humiliates him. The globe gets chucked onto a frozen river, through the ice of which David soon plunges. Panic ensues, but nobody could anticipate what happens next: swept along by the river current under the otherwise intact ice, he doesn't drown but finds himself (and a large puddle) suddenly appearing amidst the stacks of his local library. Several books (shelves worth of them, really) are likely destroyed, in what can only be seen as a literal attack on literature, namely the source novel.

In that one scene (or perhaps the later one where he drops an entire house on said library) pretty much every suspicion I had about what the movie's producers thought should be done with Gould's novel should've been confirmed, but I kept going.

And it only got worse. Sam Jackson appears, stabbing some random flickering kid (another jumper?!) in a jungle somewhere. And he's got white hair, which I could see as an unsubtle nod to the fake albino antagonist of The Da Vinci code, which I have neither seen nor read. Regardless, from that point on the movie is more or less a cliched chase action movie.

Now, there's the element of the chase to the novel, too, but it's surrounded by the story of a kid coming to grips with learning to use his power, and to become a well-rounded, decent human being at the same time.

The movie dispenses with the former in a quick montage, and never gets around to doing the latter. David, as played by Hayden Christensen, is a brooding, spoiled brat who finds fit to steal lots of money, but leave childishly-scrawled IOUs in the vaults, to pay for all the toys with which he fills his massive apartment. Davy in the book preferred a cave out west along with the amenities of his childhood house, but the idea of a lair like that only shows up in the movie when we find Griffin, another jumper (and star of Gould's tie-in prequel) who has apparently taken over a small cavern system based on how much space he seems to have.

Key to several plot points is a new jumping mechanic in the movie: so-called "jump scars", a residue left after a jump that allows other jumpers, and Sam Jackson with advanced technology, to follow the first jumper around. Why the screenwriter found fit to add that, and the whole Paladin/jumper war, and all the rest is beyond me inasmuch as the book was pretty good on its own without any of those elements. Davy in the novel also grows up considerably over the arc of the book, whereas even late in the film David's talking about comic books and whining and overall acting like a petulant toddler.

There was a sequel to the book (Reflex) that tends to get shelved with the grown up books (not in Young Adult as Jumper, and it's a good read. From what I've heard a sequel to the movie is also planned, and as David, after half-befriending, teaming up with, fighting, and abandoning Griffin and marooning Sam Jackson somewhere out west, gets the girl and learns the shocking truth about his mother, stands, girl in arm and wistful gaze in his eyes looking vacant at the end, such is not an impossible thing. But it's going to need to be a lot better for me to consider watching it. And re-casting David wouldn't hurt.

* Which, frankly, is sound advice ("look elsewhere") to those people when faced with the movie, but I suppose I'm repeating myself. Don't watch it!

Recently I alluded to a large stacks of books awaiting me. The library's annual summer reading club ended recently, and I'd long since read my required ten books for my slim chance at winning something or other.

I must admit, I miss the summer reading clubs the libraries did when I was a kid, where every book counted toward more gift certificates and free fast food. We'd participate in two different libraries' programs, and to be honest, I can't recall if I'd try to get credit for the same books from both or if I did, in fact, read separate books from each place. Neither possibility would surprise me too much - I read a lot of books as a kid.

Which is not to say that I don't read much now. For years I'd probably averaged reading a book every other week, or so, and even now I've kept that pace, more or less*. Being able to reserve thirty books at a time from the library has helped this considerably - it's been quite some time since I've physically browsed the shelves looking for books to read, time better spent reading.

This month I decided to finally reserve Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone, since for all intents and purposes J.K. Rowling has finished that series. I really dislike reading trilogies or longer series while they are being written because when I've finished reading something I enjoy, and know there's more to read but I just can't quite get my hands on it, well, that bugs me.

Had I know David Wellington's (excellent) Monster island was merely the beginning of a trilogy, I may well have waited until this year to read them - I finally secured my (library) copy of Monster planet and can't wait to read it. The first two (the middle book is Monster nation) were fun reads, and up there with Max Brooks's World War Z for recent good zombie books.

On a tip from Scott I started Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels, and though I'm not really that enamored with classical British literature I found The Eyre affair engaging and a promising debut, and I've got another three or four books to read before I run out of those. To my knowledge Jasper's not planning any sort of structure or arc for his books, so I can get away with reading them as they appear, if ever I run out.

But back to Harry. I'd naively figured I was just about the last person who had neither read the books nor seen the movies, but it turns out that over three hundred people were ahead of me in the library queue, and that's just for the first book. If I'm smart about it, I'll reserve the first two or three, since typing those words above about two weeks ago (some drafts take longer than others) I've finished the second Thursday Next novel (Lost in a good book), read the second "Holmes on the range" western/mystery book by Steve Hockensmith (On the wrong track), and polished off a graphic novel or two. I also finished off Wellington's zombie last zombie novel (Monster planet mentioned above) but wasn't so impressed with it.

It's funny - in the same span of time that it takes me to read fiver or six novels I can barely write that many paragraphs about them. I don't usually write much about the books I read, only making sure to mark down that I've read them. I've long tracked the books I read on AllConsuming, and recently (from Carina's invite) also listed them on Goodreads. Goodreads makes me rate the books, but there's a big difference from giving a 1-to-5-star rating to a book, to actually writing something about it, but it's a start, I suppose.

* Even if I don't count the comic books, er, graphic novels that I also get from the library. Those are fast reads - I can knock out two or three in a night, except that the ones I read are ongoing serials, and I end up waiting months for an hour of reading. So it goes.

Natalya received two important cards this week, one from the federal government and one from the city library. Though she doesn't have a wallet at the moment, she's never supposed to carry the first card in it, and probably won't need to carry the latter one either, even though she'll probably be using it considerably more*.

I've already begun using her number to reserve more movies, as well as children's music, which I will duly file away to hopefully never need to use as a disciplinary measure.

* It is my hope that she picks up my propensity for memorizing several-digit numbers. I've got two of my credit card numbers, all three of our social security numbers and now all three of our credit cards, as well as a random smattering of phone numbers, available at a moment's thought. But ask me how old I am, and I'm stumped for several seconds.

Permit me to again point you toward All Consuming. While it allows members to designate books, albums, and movies as "worth consuming" or "not worth consuming" (or, neither, though that's not the way it's supposed to work), but that two -state system (well, three) isn't enough for my tastes. Some stuff is not not worth consuming, in my opinion, but I'm not so fond of it to actually claim it to be actually worth consuming.

I'm not willing to commit, I guess.

But some stuff I watch and read and hear is, in fact, well worth watching or reading or hearing, and I'm not afraid to say so. So that's when I use the easy-to-use tagging capabilities of the site, and have tagged such master works "fantastic". That link leads to a list of some twenty or so of them, and I'm working on a way to find all of the others. I've added Batman begins to the list (so bowled over by it as I was by it), and it's just one among a good many other movies and books that I've enjoyed consuming recently.

So I'm still not playing favorites, but I'm willing to show some favor and shower the superlatives. I may yet develop a heirarchy, from "crap"* to "adequate" and so on, up to "excellent" and with "fantastic" or perhaps something superior at the top. But not today. I'm willing to pick just the topmost for now.

* And you can find a list of the ones I deem to be "crap" in a similar, easy fashion. Like clicking "crap" in the previous sentence, or this one.

Not as a matter of a New Year's resolution or anything (namely since I was doing it mid-December), but I seem to be doing more reading lately. Fiction, even.

Once I started messing around with 43 Things and 43 People it was only a matter of time before I stumbled upon, and likewise began using, All Consuming, also currently run by the same people, the so-called Robot Co-op. The site had existed in some other form before* but in its current incarnation it is connected to the 43 whatevers sites. What matters to me is that it is a simple method of
keeping track of the books I've read and music I've heard (and the DVDs I watch, though those I record elsewhere already).

But that alone doesn't lead me to any more reading. It's effort enough trying to remember the books I've already read. The reason I am reading more books is that it is easy to see what the other members have read recently. At times it's easy to see how a commonly-read book spreads through everyone's lists, and the less common ones that pop up now and then.

But back to that part about seeing what others have read. I can look at which people who have read the books I've read and then the other books they have read, and enjoyed, and sometimes find interesting things to read.

That's how I stumbled across The time-traveler's wife, one of the best books I read last year. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend it.

In adding to my list I thought back to the other books I've enjoyed this year, including Michael Kun's You poor monster, though I cannot recall how I'd found that one, unless I grabbed it because of the interesting cover image (a guy in a suit, underwater). It's a good read, and in remembering it I decided to seek out Kun's other books, and have already enjoyed his My wife, and my dead wife and look forward to reading The Linklater letters, the book that seems to pop up as the book he's also authored (you know, as in 'by Michael Kun, author of The Linklater letters).

Back to the other people, though, I've read some of Stephen Fry's books as well, though those are more hit or miss. In that The Hippopotamus isn't so much a hit as much as Making history is. And Revenge is somewhere in between.

Even the books that aren't so great are still mostly worth reading. And I do so enjoy reading, and having found a way to find decent books and moreover to keep track of them is all the better.

* To which I undoubtedly belonged, at one point or other. Being a sucker for signing up for interesting free communities as I am, of course.

We Douglas Adams fans have been waiting a long time for a big-screen Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy adaptation for a long time, and I waited just a bit longer for it to hit the cheap second-run theaters.

Was it worth the wait, and the (reduced) ticket price? More or less.

There will never be a way to fully adapt a book to a film, let alone ones so literarily funny like the Adams oeuvre, but they made a decent attempt. This is a body of work that has appeared as a radio show, a series of books, computer games, a BBC series, and now a movie.

Well, somewhere along the line there was a picture book, but I don't believe that it has been truly accepted as canon even as much as the short story "Young Zaphod plays it safe" has. The visuals here and there looked a little bit like the movie, but that might just be what I'm remembering of the wall-to-wall white decor of the Heart of Gold, the stolen space ship on which much of the action takes place.

For some reason I'd always pictured the Heart of Gold to be, well, a bit pointier. That wasn't the only thing not quite to my expectations. The guns brandished here and there were all smooth and friendly looking, the very opposite of the Kill-o-Zap blasters described in the books as looking evil, with an end in front of which the target clearly and obviously didn't want to be. Either the production designers wimped out or this just fell by the wayside.

A lot of incidental bits fell by the wayside. Never does Ford Prefect (played adequately enough by Mos Def) explain the importance of knowing where one's towel is, nor even why he curses "Belgium" under his breath at one point. The filmmaker's attempt to explain his name (having him attempting to shake hands with what looked like a Mini speeding toward him) and the joke therein (he picked the wrong dominant species, name-wise) was a nice attempt, but a bit lacking in the thought and execution departments.

On the other hand, turning it into something of a love story between Arthur and Trillian was acceptable, given that the books don't lend themselves well to a single narrative that would clock in under four or five hours. I'm thinking that there's a little bit of the puppy-dogged moping and unrequited love/lust to be found in the books (that I just wasn't looking for when I read them) but it was certainly cranked up a notch or two. Bully for them, it basically worked.

I'm going to get into more of the meat of things, so if you don't want things spoiled don't click on the "more" link below. Suffice to say I think I got my money's worth out of this film and will look forward to seeing it again on DVD, provided there are tasty extras. I know the producers hoped for the opportunity to film a sequel, and I for one welcome the opportunity to watch one.

The movie's supposed to be a hundred and four minutes long, but in retrospect it didn't seem like that much to me. The beginning several minutes is consumed by an amusing but altogether too long song and dance number with some dolphins ("So long and thanks for all the fish") that wouldn't be out of place in a Sea World revue, but the joke wore out quickly and I was impatient to get to the real meat of things.

Which started up eventually, and several pages worth of the book (and a number of minutes and inevitable false starts in the computer game) of Arthur Dent (Morgan Freeman, well cast and acted) recovering from a hangover and realizing those yellow things outside are in fact bulldozers poised to knock down his house. This is not to say that the whole 'putting on a dressing gown, searching for buffered aspirin' thing is worth filming, but still, it's been in the other incarnations and I feel just slightly sad it's gone. So Arthur wakes up and is soon laying in front of a bulldozer, discussing matters with Prosser (one of the more fleshed out bit characters in the books, played well enough by one third of the League of gentlemen). I was disappointed that Ford didn't convince Prosser to lie in front of the bulldozer, which is an amusing bit of chicanery, but probably too talky for today's moviegoer. Alas.

I had thought the Vogon constructor fleet ships were yellow, also, but what do I know?

Vogons? Don't get me started about Vogons.

Having been somewhat re-cast (and made more significant) as the villains of the piece, the Vogons seemed to have gotten the bulk of the creative attention, and it shows. Their ship is rife with subtle touches (the green exit signs) and grandiose, ridiculous sets like the towering microphone for the poetry reading. Too bad the people who made everything look interesting forgot to make it sound clear, as much of the poem Jeltz recites sounded to be word-for-word true to the books, but I couldn't make out all of the words. Ford and Arthur are tossed into the airlock much too soon, having skipped over the banter between the two of them and the Vogon guard who was all but absent from the script. As it turns out, the airlock sets a funny scene, albeit one marred (as well as one thereafter) with Nokia's product placement. And then we receive another drawn out, overdone sequence of something in space, which is revealed to be The Guide. Emblazoned across one of its covers is its title, coincidentally the title of the movie, but we'd already seen the titles during the dolphin song. Did somebody miss a memo?

I can't write everything about this movie; I've already skipped a number of flashbacks rife with contrived plot. Such is life. During the overly long 'book in space' bit, though, the music is itself something of a flashback, reminiscent of the music from the radio drama and BBC series. That and the appearance of the BBC Marvin on Vogsphere, Stephen Fry, and probably other bits of homage I didn't notice, show that the creators were in fact aware of what had come before. After all, I was.

Anyway, it wasn't bad. I laughed a lot. I agree with criticisms I've seen pointing out the movie's lack of cohesion and music-video style, but I can't find too much fault with it.

Well, other than that there's only one of it. How about some sequels, guys?