APROPOS OF NOTHING, ANYTHING GOES

Just because this is awesome. Y'know, Temple of Doom is fucking great until the plane takes off . . .

THE GEORGE WASHINGTON OF MT. NERDMORE, OR "IS THERE SUCH A THING AS THE FUTURE?"

The time has come to talk of Steven Spielberg. Of the many celebrated directors to launch or hit stride in their careers during the 1970s, Spielberg has been the most consistent, enduring, and by far the most successful. He was never one of the cool kids—while friends with Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, et al, he was regarded with polite amusement for his Middle American mannerisms and gently mocked for preferring Claude Lelouch to Jean-Luc Godard—but as happens in high school, the nerds so frequently go on to bigger and better things, while the pretty and cool are all too often left to mourn their lost youth. Steven Spielberg is, with all due respect and reverence, a nerd. He is our George Washington.

Obviously, the whole Mt. Nerdmore thing is inexact, the chronology doesn't line up, the Rushmore face Spielberg's making a movie about is Lincoln, blah blah blah. But I'm determined to come up with four nerdy visages to carve into a fuckin mountain, and none of your common sense or logic is going to stop me. Seriously, of American nerd movie directors, who else is going to be George Washington than Spielberg? George Lucas is Alexander Hamilton, the guy who counts the money. Peter Jackson's a goddamn foreigner. We'll figure out Jefferson and Lincoln some other time. For now, back to Spielberg.

Since Jaws dropped in 1975, damn near every picture Spielberg has directed has made an assload of money, and nearly every single one of them has been really good. He's directed a couple lousy pictures, but his successes far outweigh his failures, both numerically and in aggregate fucking awesomeness. Behold:

Duel
Jaws
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Raiders of the Lost Ark

That's all before he turned 35. Yeah. Badass. He kept on with it, and even though he'd occasionally make a bad picture, they were never boring. Spielberg is very much an American, in the sense of being uncomplicated, optimistic, and a touch sentimental, and given that perspective he's been ambitious in terms of tackling different subjects and genres. Despite that sentimentality leading to criticism from many, and an image as a big ol' softie, Spielberg's always had a bit of a dark side. The four above-mentioned pictures have quite a few genuinely dark and scary moments. E.T. is a hell of a lot darker than most people remember. His WWII movies (Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan) are hardly sunshine and flowers. Until the brainfart at the end when the velociraptors forgot to guard the helicopter pad, and about fifteen minutes too little of dinosaurs eating people, Jurassic Park was solid.

Because I can't let my retarded and irrelevant George Washington parallel go, dig this: the 70s were like Spielberg's French and Indian War, wherein he showed precocious talent but the establishment (Euro-worshipping film nerds/British army) wouldn't let him in. But the early 00s were his Revolution. Washington became the commander in chief of the rebel army against England, and Spielberg finally started directing movies that were set in the future. Sure, that analogy holds as much water as a paper colander, but Steven fuckin Spielberg directing movies set in the future. This is motherfucking win.

The first one, A.I., sat a little weird with me. The online game that started a couple months before the movie came out was massive cool, and I nerded out with my bird out for weeks on that joint. Going to all the fake websites, “decoding” them to get the clues, calling the fake voice-mails, getting the clues there, working out just who killed the fictional scientist, mmm mmm mmm, good times. Then the movie came out and I was like “Huh, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the game at all. This is an SF remake of Pinocchio; while Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law fucking rock, the picture never quite satisfies. The aftertaste, that this is a pale shadow of Kubrick, leaves one, while respectful of the clearly loving homage paid by Spielberg to his late friend, hoping that Stanley had lived to make the picture himself.” (Ed. Note: sigh . . .) When I saw A.I. again I realized it wasn't as bad as I'd originally thought, and that it's actually a pretty good SF movie. And Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law were both still ridiculously awesome. But it's Spielberg's second future picture, the main topic of the rest of this post, that makes me curl up and purr.


Minority Report is one of my very favorite pictures Steven Spielberg has ever done, for many reasons. It's based on a Philip K. Dick story, as are Blade Runner and Total Recall, two very special pictures for me. There's a lot of “there” there with Philip K. Dick; he poses questions that make for good movies, A Scanner Darkly also among them (the shitstorms that were Paycheck and Next were not Phil's fault). Minority Report is not content to merely be an SF story set in the future, it is about the meaning of the future, and whether such a thing even exists. Mmmm, delicious existential philosophical questions. Seconds, please.

For his table work, Steven Spielberg took advantage of being a billionaire and did what might be the coolest thing in the history of pre-production: he threw himself a conference on futurism, and brought in a whole bunch of scientists, architects, philosophers, SF writers, advertising dudes, and Douglas Coupland to shoot the shit about what they thought the year 2054 would look like while a staff nerd or two took notes. This would seem to fly in the face of the story's point about the inherently unknowable future, but bear with me here. Spielberg's nerds happily yakked away and came up with all kinds of cool shit like maglev expressways, jetpacks for cops, guns that fire soundwaves, newspapers that update in real time while you read them, ads that use retinal scanning to get you to greet you by name to convince you to buy shit, and computers that you wear a Nintendo Power Glove to operate by making hand movements that look like conducting a symphony. Now, it's tempting to giggle a bit about the fact that Tom Cruise's computer was taller than he was (Ed. Note: that is not a joke about Tom Cruise being short) and that everything both it and those newspapers (Ed. Note: no one except old people will remember what a newspaper is in 2054, sorry) can do was being done on a portable telephone five years after the movie came out, not fifty. This still misses the point. The future being inherently unknowable and always subject to change guarantees that everything in the movie was going to be bullshit, giving Spielberg the best excuse in the history of SF if something in his movie (like the hypertrophic computer and those anachronistic “newspaper” thingies) ended up being dated. But rather than not give a fuck, Steven Spielberg said, “Ya know what? Let's make shit look really cool.” Because he's Steven Spielberg, and that's one of the many things so awesome about him: his appreciation for cool-looking shit.

Among the cool-looking things in Minority Report is its lead actor, Tom Cruise. Before his 2005 mushroom cloud of batshit, Tom Cruise was a mighty (albeit secretive and strange) cinematic force. He got $25 mil a picture and a quarter of first dollar gross because he was fucking worth it. Sure, not everything he was in was good, but it all made pots and pots of money. Tom Cruise himself was mostly responsible for that success, too: while some of his acting choices were twitchy, gesture-y, and flat-out weird, 85% of his performance was guaranteed to be pure, focused intensity. Sure, Far and Away sucked but if you thought Ron Howard trying to direct a Western and being fucking stupid enough to cast Tom Cruise as an Irish guy was gonna work, you deserve to have wasted every dollar watching that fucktardery that you did. It's not Tom Cruise's fault. Opie paid him a lot of money to do that shit.

Eyes Wide Shut? I'm perfectly happy being the one guy in the world who liked Tom Cruise's performance in that movie. That scene in Sydney Pollack's billiards room, where Sydney Pollack casually rules ass (“Okay Bill, let's cut the bullshit, alright? You've been way out of your depth for the last 24 hours! You want the truth? You want to know what kind of charade? I'll tell you exactly what kind. That whole play-acted, "take me" sacrifice that you've been jerking off with had nothing to do with her real death. The truth is, nothing happened to her after you left that hadn't happened to her before. She got her brains fucked out. Period!”)? Tom Cruise holds it down pretty good in that scene. It's Nicole Kidman who sucks in Eyes Wide Shut, not Tom Cruise, and that was Stanley Kubrick's fault. And Magnolia, well, Magnolia was special.

In Minority Report, Tom Cruise doesn't play his usual focused, intense superhero, he plays a cop tortured by the disappearance—and all but certain death—of his young son. His wife has left him and now all he has are his holographic home movies of them, and his future space asthma inhaler kazoos full of drugs. Giving Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise—two guys who've never gotten high on anything stronger than Ovaltine their whole lives—the benefit of the doubt, it would appear that future drugs are pretty well-designed, because this “Clarity” shit gets Tom Cruise smacked out of his motherfucking mind for about five seconds, he nods off, and then he wakes up with no hangover or nothing, is never visibly jonesing, and later in the movie when he stops getting high you never see him going cold turkey or anything. I'm not going to say Spielberg should have invited Hunter Thompson to his futurist conclave or anything, but either those boys don't know shit about getting high or there really is no downside whatsoever to being a junkie in the future, if kicking is just a matter of getting distracted by cops chasing you. Having a cold turkey car chase in a movie would be kind of fucking rad actually: vision cutting in and out when you're not hallucinating, thus just making turns that avert certain death, ralphing out the window of the car and maybe even nailing a gun-toting bad guy with the spray with the speed and everything. Our junkie hero could nod out, crash the car, and then be woken up when the car flips, just in time to start driving again. (Ed. Note: when the author directs Minority Report 2: Smack Into Traffic, remember this post).

The title Minority Report refers to something that officially doesn't exist. Tom Cruise is the commanding officer of the “precrime” unit, which prevents murders from happening before they do, and safely ensconcing the “murderers” in the set of a Daft Punk video with Tim Blake Nelson riding around a wheelchair braying in a Boston accent (Ed. Note: punitive surrealism actually WILL be the law of the land in 2054, put that in the bank). Precrime is entirely dependent on three “precognitives,” or “precogs,” who can see the future, but only murders, for reasons that are never adequately explained, but which I'm perfectly willing to write off to cosmic perversity. The precogs, collectively, form a hivemind that projects all the details of the murder into Tom Cruise's computer, which etches the name of the victim(s) and perp(s) into a unique, can't-be-faked piece of wood. (Crimes of passion, in a fun subtle nod to IRL DC/Bawlmer po-lice, are etched into red wood and called “red balls”). They are, we are constantly told, “never wrong,” but as Lois Smith—who invented precrime—tells Tom Cruise after he sees something he shouldn't and gets framed for murdering someone he's never even met, the precogs “sometimes . . . do disagree.” The two males, Arthur and Dashiell, will see one thing, but Agatha, the dominant of the three, will see something else, making her take on shit the “minority report.”

Tom Cruise isn't aware of any of this at the outset. All he knows is, his boss (Max von Sydow) has a Swedish accent even though his name is Lamar Burgess, and there's this young slickster (Colin Farrell) from the Justice Department poking around implying that precrime might be something other than perfect; he's convinced that human error could fuck everything up (if that's the sound of you nodding sagely in response to his very wise insight, continue to do so). And since we know Tom Cruise does all that future space crack that he buys from an eyeless Peter Stormare in the middle of the ghetto at 1 in the morning, we suspect that Tom Cruise will be Colin Farrell's first target.

We see the precrime unit bust some limpdick whose wife is cheating on him, because the precogs insisted in their passive aggressive non-linear video footage fashion that limpdick was about to dispense absolute justice. He's hauled off yelling “But I didn't do anything!” Colin Farrell raises the same point to Tom Cruise, who makes an analogy with a rolling ball of wood that Colin Farrell catches as it falls off the table, saying the murder is like that ball of wood. Trademark snappy Spielberg visual explanation, if a tad simplistic. Colin Farrell is a sharp one in this picture (his accent and his suit are on pace with his mind; it's really a fucking good performance by the lad) and isn't buying that shit. He keeps digging, seemingly obsessed with Tom Cruise (which is supposed to make us think he's the bad guy, except Tom Cruise is a junkie working for a totalitarian police force, he fucking should be worried about Tom Cruise). Then the precogs start uploading footage from a premeditated murder, and it looks like Tom Cruise is the one lighting up a scruffy Mike Binder, sending him crashing through a high rise building. Tom Cruise shits a brick, and starts running.

Cue long, elaborate, amazing chase sequence. Some condescending jerkoff once called Steven Spielberg “the greatest second unit director in America,” and while that description omits so much of what's great about Spielberg, it's still factually accurate. The action sequences in his pictures are awe-inspiring. You can always see who's doing what to whom, who's going where, the choreography is inspired, the attention to detail exacting, and there are moments of dark humor made hilarious by the sheer tension established by Spielberg's nonpareil technical mastery.

What makes this chase sequence so interesting is that, like a later sequence where Tom Cruise is hiding from some of the coolest robots ever devised (they'll get their due in a minute), there are all these brief tableaus of people and groups of people in the apartment building through which either Tom Cruise, cops, or robots, are hauling ass. These sequences are a little puzzling, as these people are treated as extras and punchlines, yet they constitute a very important part of the environment created by the movie. They go a long way toward the future seeming less constructed of ideas to prove a point (like a lot of intellectual SF) than constructed of people, like an actual world. It's a nice subtle, very Spielberg touch; one of the things that makes him great is that people (even if a lot of the time they're just archetypes) matter to him, even if all that matters is the simple fact of their existence.

When Tom Cruise manages to elude the bad guys, he makes his way to eccentric genius Lois Smith's place, since she invented precrime and can presumably tell him how he's been set up, even if the why will have to wait. She fills him in on what a minority report is, which makes Tom Cruise think, hey, all I gotta do is kidnap the female precog and I'll clear my name. Good ol' Lois Smith totally gets to kiss Tom Cruise at the end of the scene too, which makes no sense, but if Lois Smith wants to kiss Tom Cruise, she gets to kiss Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise then looks up Peter Stormare, who in a very creepy scene, removes Tom Cruise's eyeballs and gives him new ones under horribly unsanitary conditions. With Big Brother keeping track of people by retinal scanning—and the movie's running visual theme of “what is sight?” and lots of closeup shots of eyes—it's a necessary step if he's going to lay low. But for personal reasons, people having their eyes fucked with deeply bothers me (I was in the process of going blind before having Lasik surgery at 21, which has made me even more sensitive about my eyes) so this sequence always fucks with me. It's a mark of Spielberg's restraint and non-sensationalism, though, that I'm able to re-watch Minority Report and only cringe rather than having to turn the fuckin movie off.

So there's Tom Cruise alone with bandages over his eyes, Peter Stormare and his lovely assistant with the ball-bearing mole on her face having fucked off. And here come the pigs. Tom Cruise's colleagues, still annoyed with him for the first chase sequence, happen upon the rundown apartment complex where Tom's waiting for the time to elapse so he can un-bandage his eyes without going blind. The level of suspense in the sequence is already astronomical—as it always is when the protagonist is trapped and can't go anywhere—but the future fuzz ups the stakes . . . with spiders.


To say that the spiders are the coolest thing in Minority Report should not minimize how good the rest of the movie is. It's just holy fucking shit these things are cool. They're small, efficient, they shoot electricity, they display amazing teamwork . . . and they're fucking smart. The last thing I ever want looking for me when I'm hiding in a bathtub full of ice to mask my body temperature while holding my breath underwater are these damn things, meaning I wouldn't trade places with Tom Cruise in this scene for all the first-dollar gross points in Hollywood. Fortunately, they do catch him, they do lift up his bandage so they can scan his eye, but it comes up “Not Tom Cruise” and he doesn't go blind.

Once he can see properly with his new eyes, Tom Cruise breaks into precrime HQ and kidnaps precog Agatha. Once he does so, that disables the precognitive abilities of the hivemind trio, thus meaning people can kill each other again with no advance warning. Dum dum dum DUMMMM . . . After all that, when Tom Cruise brings Agatha to his hacker buddy to get the minority report that he assumes will clear him . . . there isn't one. He's gonna kill Mike Binder.

The cops show up again, and another chase sequence ensues, this one notable for Agatha being around to see the future (and she can, conveniently, now see things other than murder, apparently) and directing Tom Cruise through a shopping mall, starting with a non sequitur instruction to grab an umbrella, which, in a great moment, becomes necessary when they get outside and it's raining and everyone has umbrellas, so the cops can't tell which one is Tom Cruise plus precog.

It's a half hour til murder time, and Tom Cruise has conveniently ended up right by the scene of the “crime.” He does a bit of fairly schmancy detective work and ends up in Mike Binder's room, where there are photographs of kids all over the place, including Tom Cruise's missing son. Deciding that Mike Binder is the murderer of his son, Tom Cruise beats the shit out of Mike Binder when he gets back, causing Agatha to beg him, in tears, not to kill him, that he has a choice because he's seen his future, it's not set anymore. Tom Cruise, in a moment of heavy drama and Serious Acting, declines to kill Mike Binder, placing him under whispered, intense arrest.

At this point Mike Binder reveals that he's a desperate convict who agreed to pretend he killed Cruise fils in order that his family would be looked after by some shadowy benefactor. Tom Cruise is confused—he has been set up after all—and Mike Binder grabs his gun and offs himself for the sake of his family, leaving Agatha sobbing.

Colin Farrell, arriving on the scene, immediately sees something fishy, because he's really fucking smart in this movie, and, in a surprise twist revealed in this scene, is one of the good guys. Now that he realizes Tom Cruise has been set up, he goes back and looks at this mysterious bit of precog footage—seized from the hacker's place earlier—that Agatha has been trying to get Tom Cruise to pay attention to for the whole movie, of a woman being drowned. Comparing Agatha's footage with Arthur and Dashiell's footage, Colin Farrell sees that it's of two different murders of the same victim, one fake, one real. The real footage was discarded, as it looks virtually identical to the faked.

Armed with this new mystery, Colin Farrell brings his evidence to Max von Sydow . . . who shoots Colin Farrell in the chest and then, as Colin Farrell gives him this “I never trusted you motherfucker, you got to keep your real accent in this movie, I shoulda known you were the bad guy” look, discreetly follows it up with a headshot.

Tom Cruise then does something really dumb. With all the future cops in the goddamn galaxy hot on his trail, he brings Agatha to his ex-wife's house in the country, which is dumb in and of itself, but then they have this big weepy emotional scene about the missing/dead son, which of course results in the future cops showing up and busting Tom Cruise.

Without Colin Farrell around to be smart—and boy are we talking about a singular achievement in cinema if Colin Farrell is the alpha intellect up in this piece—everyone starts going full retard, as master villain Max von Sydow makes a really stupid slip of the tongue that confesses his villainy to Tom Cruise's ex-wife (the lady from Cold Case). Armed with this knowledge that her (once-again) beloved hubby is innocent, she goes to the Tim Blake Nelson prison and pulls heat on Tim Blake Nelson, politely asking that he free Tom Cruise.

The conclusion is a big dramatic showdown wherein a newly head-shaven Tom Cruise lays out Max von Sydow's paradox to him over Bluetooth. Max von Sydow had the woman in Agatha's footage killed because she was Agatha's mother and wanted to take Agatha away from the precrime program and raise her as an ordinary kid. So now, with Max von Sydow having decided to red ball Tom Cruise for being a smartass, he has the quandary: kill Tom Cruise and prove that precrime works, but go to jail forever for murder, or spare Tom Cruise and prove that precrime doesn't work. Max von Sydow, to whom precrime means so much he's compromised his own soul and killed for its sake, looks behind door number 3 and puts a bullet through his own heart.

In light of this fiasco, the powers that be decide to scrap precrime and send the precogs out to an idyllic cabin in the woods where they can read peacefully. The fact that it's now safe to murder people without being pre-emptively ratted out by the precogs is a broken egg in the service of the omelette that is not employing a flawed system to imprison people who are guilty only in thought.

Spielberg caught a little shit for playing up the “oh, isn't it nice that the precogs are now free” angle rather than “crime has returned to mid-21st century DC.” But it's not like it's not the fucking future and they don't have other future shit to catch criminals with. Shit's not going to go Mogadishu just cuz the space triplets aren't uploading grainy black and white pre-visualizations to the police computers anymore. So let Spielberg have his happy ending. The same people bitching at him for ending this picture too sappily would be on his dick if he ended it on a darker, more ambiguous note, too: “Well, Steven Spielberg is obviously trying to be a Real Filmmaker by giving his picture an unhappy ending, but he just as obviously doesn't have the feel for such Artistry.” Such is life, and fortunately for him, with his net worth of $3 billion, if you bust Steven Spielberg's balls, he can hit you with his wallet and that's you done for.

While it's true that the movie takes a slight dip after Colin Farrell gets killed, that's primarily due to how great his performance is, as well as the fact that all the action happens before then, and we're left with a simplified, heavily altered version of Philip K. Dick's original story with nothing to distract from it. However, the fact that it's imperfect doesn't mean it isn't pretty good SF, and there's still that amazing, noir-inflected cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, with almost all the color taken out of the image except for that one, random thing that still has color, that your eyes are immediately drawn to (a subtler version of the girl in the red coat in Schindler's List).

In the end, Minority Report lives up to every bit of promise the description “Steven Spielberg directing an SF noir picture” holds. It may not be perfect, but it manages to ask some Big Questions while simultaneously providing a visual feast, and Tom Cruise does some fairly decent thesping. He'd go on to be pretty damn good in War of the Worlds, too, even though that picture had massive problems. That's a post for another day, though, and it doesn't change the fact that the leftmost, prominent face on Mt. Nerdmore is, indisputably, Steven Spielberg's.

BOOK TO FILM: MICHAEL CRICHTON

(Ed. Note: This one's really fucking long. Sorry.)

Back in my high school days, I read a lot and had a hard time relating to people. The two were not unrelated: I was reading people like Dostoevsky, Proust, Zola, and Kerouac, with light reading consisting mainly of either classic hard-boiled cats like Hammett, Chandler, Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, or bizarre shit like Howard Waldrop and Mark Leyner, or swashbuckling Dumas. There were, however, two writers I could share with my classmates—with the girls it was mainly Anne Rice, who is not relevant for our purposes here because the only good movie made from one of her books was Interview With the Vampire, and I can only properly channel how I feel about that movie on Oscar Wilde's birthday (so that's gonna have to wait til October 16th). With the guys, it was Michael Crichton.

Michael Crichton's most popular books were an entertaining hybrid of SF, thriller, and out-of-the-box politics. Later in life people gave him a hard time for being right-wing, but I think of him less as a rightist than as a smart guy with low tolerance for fuzzy-headed bullshit. A prevailing theme in his work is the struggle against shitheads with an improper ability to deal with money and power. Related is the frequent Frankenstein theme that keeps popping up, of people doing things because they can and then getting their fucking asses kicked by the consequences. Whether it's wiring a mentally ill man with electrodes that boost his intelligence and ruthlessness (The Terminal Man), creating dinosaurs with the intent of having them be theme park/zoo attractions (Jurassic Park, The Lost World), letting Japanese people (Rising Sun) and women (Disclosure) run corporations, or sending 20th century academics to medieval France (Timeline), people who aren't as smart as they think they are do dumb stuff in Michael Crichton books that Only One Man can fix. That one man is usually a smart guy with a doctorate in a narrative-relevant science, fitting Michael Crichton's background as an MD.

Crichton's prose style is to-the-point, and his dialogue—when not lapsing into “as you know” expository laziness or author surrogate soapboxing—is mostly utilitarian and kinda square. But his stories are page-turners, and his facility with Everyman protagonists unmatched, making his books naturals for cinematic adaptation. Not to mention, there's usually cool shit like gorillas and dinosaurs wreaking havoc, providing the opportunity for lots of flashy FX. As a result, most of Crichton's novels have been turned into movies, most of them pretty successfully. Here, then, an overview (only the ones he put out under his own name):


The Andromeda Strain

Book—1969
Movie—1971 (dir. Robert Wise)

Both Crichton's first book and first movie adaptation are kinda cool. Both are paced a little weird for modern audiences, but the antagonist—a deadly bacteria FROM OUTER SPACE—is badass. It kills, baby, and it kills fast and disgusting. The movie is a pretty good example of post-2001, pre-Star Wars SF, though it's a little long and clunky as fuck to people used to modern FX, but still, it's pretty good.


The Terminal Man

Book—1972
Movie—1974 (dir. Mike Hodges)

A much better book, this one about a guy named Harry Benson who has epileptic seizures that cause blackouts, during which he behaves violently and erratically. So, some smartass decides to treat the epilepsy with strategically placed electrodes, controlled by a tiny computer in his chest.

Here, the One Man who can Stop Things is a woman psychiatrist, Janet Ross (Michael Crichton loves the surname Ross and uses it all the goddamn time, including George Clooney on ER). Ross warns the surgeons (typical God complex big swinging dick types) that Harry might be psychotic. He doesn't differentiate between Man and Machine, and Ross thinks if they hook Harry up to a computer that it might exacerbate his psychosis. The surgeons are like, “oh, you're just a woman, what do you know” and go ahead and do it anyway. And whaddaya know, Harry escapes from the hospital, having attained some degree of control over the computer and making it cause seizures more frequently, turning him into a sex-crazed violent—and very happy—psycho. So Harry breaks into the hospital to shut down the mainframe computer (because the computers are going to kill us all; this is the clearest indication of his psychosis, sane people know that it's not computers but evil white guys in suits who are going to kill us all) and Ross, terribly upset, gets a gun and lights Harry up before he can fuck anything up too badly. Great fuckin' book, just the right hybrid of intelligent and retarded.

The movie, part of Mike Hodges' post-Get Carter, pre-Croupier two-decade fugue (that also included Flash Gordon) is kind of all right. Casting George Segal (the poor man's George Hamilton) as Harry was a stroke of genius, and for once even better than casting George Hamilton because George Segal is just sleazy enough to pull something like this off (and it's not only illegal to kill George Hamilton at the end of the movie, it constitutes division by zero and will cause the universe to turn inside out and cease to exist). Actually, in a weird way, this is one that can benefit from a remake, because the technology actually exists nowadays and we know how to shoot stupid climaxes where the girl shrink (pretty good Charlize Theron comeback part, actually) shoots the bad guy with her mascara running decoratively better now.


The Great Train Robbery

Book—1975
Movie—1979 (dir. Crichton himself)

A change of pace, The Great Train Robbery is a fictionalized take on a real-life ginormous gold heist in Victorian England. It's a little slower than most of his books, and Crichton gets a little too bogged down in trying to write Victorian, but it's a pretty cool read, even if the heist goes blooey and no one gets the gold.

The movie, however, is awesome, primarily because Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery are in it, secondarily because Lesley-Anne Down is decorative, and tertiarily (or whatever the fuck the adverb form is; if you still read this damn blog you don't care either) because Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery get away at the end. I mean, it's not gonna change your life, but it's a fun flick.


Eaters of the Dead

Book—1976
Movie—1999 (re-titled The 13th Warrior, dir. John McTiernan)

Crichton's second historical novel is pretty goddamn fantastic, in a couple different senses, the first being it rules, the second being, it's a metafictional riff on Beowulf where an Arab ambassador sent to establish contact with the Vikings ends up tagging along on a journey to go fuck up Grendel, whose hordes Crichton coyly implies might be a lost tribe of Neanderthals. Can I get a hell yes?

The book is presented as a scientific commentary on a found text, the account of a man named Ahmad ibn Fadlan who is tasked by the Caliph of Baghdad to go to what's now Russia and go talk to those crazy tall white people; ibn Fadlan jumps on the opportunity (he needs to get the hell out of town after tripping on his dick kind of epically) and heads north. After a whole bunch of fairly-well-written culture clash, ibn Fadlan joins up with this stone badass named Buliwyf (hmm . . . something very familiar about that name) and bonds with the one guy in Buliwyf's group who can speak Latin (Arabic being too much to ask for in 10th century). They then go in and do battle with the Monsters of the Mist, the Eaters of the Dead, who are so badass they scare Vikings.

(Take a second, I know that shit's deep)

Narratively, that's pretty much it. They go in and kick ass, and most of them get killed, except our hero and his buddy. Intriguingly, when ibn Fadlan finally says goodbye and goes home to file his report with the Caliph, the manuscript abruptly ends, and Commentary Guy comes back to explain that the manuscript was randomly found somewhere along ibn Fadlan's travels with pages missing or something, implying that he went on to further adventures. The best part about Eaters of the Dead being only about 160 pages is that when that happens, you're like “I wanna know what happens to ibn Fadlan next, now that he's loosened up, gotten fucked in half on mead, and banged white chicks!” Commentary Guy then goes on to advance the Neanderthal theory, which is a tasty idea. Commentary Guy's footnotes throughout the book give a whole lot of flavor and academic context, making this the perfect book for someone like me: the academic paper as thriller.

The movie is pretty special, even if it has a slightly different feel than the book. I have a lot of affection for the movie for its value in helping me talk movies with civilians, because civilians fucking love this movie. The 13th Warrior is to civilians what Nicholas Ray pictures are to French semio-Marxists, they fucking freak out. And it's easy to see why, I mean, cammmmmaaannnnnn, Antonio Banderas rides a fucking horse and fucking has a fucking sword, man. And fucking Omar Sharif is in it (another nerd/civilian bond, nerds are like, “Well, it's Omar Sharif for crissakes,” and civilians are like, “OMG LAWRENCE OF ARABIA” and nerds are like “Lawrence of Arabia fucking rules!” and much hugging and coming-together ensues and eventually Doctor Zhivago gets brought up and there's more hugging). Sure, there aren't any footnotes or Neanderthal theories, but who needs that when you've got a movie that fucking kicks ass.

Sadly, it wasn't much of a hit, because for some goddamn reason John McTiernan thought it'd be a good idea to go so far over budget (the check at the end of the night was $80 mil) that the studio would have to fire him and bring in Crichton to finish shooting, and Crichton hadn't even directed a movie since he torpedoed Tom Selleck's career in the 80s (in fairness, Michael Crichton did direct one balls-out classic in his untercareer as film director, Westworld, where Yul Brynner was deployed masterfully). But the fact that it lost $20 million in theaters is of concern only to Disney, and they'll make that $20 mil back by the tears of dying children, like they always do.


Congo

Book—1980
Movie—1995

This is the first book where the style and a lot of the tropes normally associated with Michael Crichton today are on display. There's a sinister corporation, looking to corner the market on a particular kind of boron-infused diamond that will in turn allow them to control the nascent Information Age. Cuz ya know, if you're going to be a grown-ass-man sinister corporation, world domination is the entry level position. There's an Everyman scientist, in this case a gorilla researcher who accompanies his “talking” gorilla Amy to the titular jungle because the sinister corporation has apparently had an expedition wiped out in spectacularly bloody fashion by gorillas (even though Everyman scientist guy is like, they look and act weird, there's More To This). There's rampant fucking political incorrectness, in many highly entertaining personifications—a white hunter type who on the page oozes with Sean Connery and is a little less than reverent about Africa and Africans, a good-natured, superstitious bunch of Kikuyu who actually come off kind of all right if you're not feeling too cynical (“good-natured” and “superstitious” are kinda code words), in which case they vibe a little meh, but last but not least . . . a malicious tribe of cannibals! Hell yeah, baby, Crichton's not fuckin around, he is very old school here, he even has the balls to throw in an aside about how cannibalism actually exists and so fuck you if you find it racist. So there. Take that, sensitive people. (Seriously, he totally could have cut all the cannibalism stuff and the book would have been juuuuuuust fine, though I guess when you're paying homage to H. Rider Haggard you're paying homage to H. Rider Haggard . . .)

It transpires that there's this lost city in the middle of the jungle that was always assumed to be mythical, but the talking gorilla dreams and finger-paints a dead-on match for an artist's rendition of the lost city (that was in a book the gorilla had not read). So the sinister corporation has her tag along on their follow-up expedition, and they get on a gigantic, peril-fraught adventure (economically written, well-paced, kick-ass) on their way there. When they get there they figure out that the dudes who built the city were fuckin stupid rich off the diamonds they had there—they barely even had to dig mines, the fuckin things were just laying around, practically—until the volcano that was the reason there were so many diamonds there farted, and the super-gorillas they had bred to be security guards went apeshit (zing!) and killed everyone and had been pretty much hanging around that section of jungle killing everything in sight ever since. AND THEY'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE . . .

The people go “Damn, we're in a tight spot!” but get distracted by the blue diamonds (the sinister corporation's avatar, one Dr. Ross, an emotionally remote blonde the feminists probably had a word with Crichton about) and the new species of gorilla (the Everyman scientist guy, who's kind of a whiny dipshit) and the super-gorillas kill a bunch of the Kikuyu before Dr. Ross accidentally makes the volcano erupt, which makes the super-gorillas (who are more competent and have a better sense of focus and purpose than the people) fuck off and gives our flawed heroes a chance to escape. So they do, no diamonds for the sinister corporation, no proof of the new species of gorilla for the Everyman scientist . . . sigh. The only one who has a semi-happy ending is Sean Connery Guy, who managed to pocket some diamonds on the sly.

Now. Having hopefully established that the book—some queasiness over Crichton's blend of modern and retro Africa aside—kicks ass, it would appear as though making a movie should be no problem. Well, provided that you have a good gorilla wrangler or some good FX nerds to fake one. And also provided that you're not a fucking dumbass and don't make changes for no apparent reason. And provided that you realize that in order to do it right you gotta spend a little money because a cheap, half-ass jungle movie is going to look like shit.

Well. Looks like someone at Paramount took their stupid pills, because the movie version of Congo was a larger, stinkier piece of shit, in a more spectacular shade of brown, than cinema has often seen. It's not the director's fault; Frank Marshall is a buddy of Steven Spielberg's, and he made Arachnophobia and Alive before this, but I guess he can only direct movies that start with the letter A, because wow. The cast is like either the casting director lost a bet and did pin the tail on the headshot, or checked into rehab the day after casting this movie, or some such other explanation. Deliberate sabotage? I don't know. Laura Linney's great, but she's miscast here (and she's too short, which isn't her fault, it's the goddamn casting people). Dylan Walsh is one of those generic guys who does fine on TV but doesn't have the charisma to be in a movie. Casting Ernie Hudson in the Sean Connery role gets credit for sense of humor, but Ernie Hudson's so awesome he's actually okay in spite of his not being Sean Connery. And Mr. Eko/Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is in it in a very early role but they even fucked THAT up because he's too tall to be the head Kikuyu guy, and he's also from the fuckin wrong part of Africa, dude, Yoruba and Kikuyu ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same fuckin' sport (speaking of a good movie people in 1995 were watching).

The next thing is more the writer's fault—and I hate saying this, since I met the guy once and he was really nice—but John Patrick Shanley fuuuuuuuuuuuuucked up, and one of the worst ways he fucked up is writing in the Tim Curry part. Tim Curry's cool, but he's not known for underplaying, and he's one of those cats who gets in a shitty movie and starts overacting like hell. Now, when people are making a shitty movie they don't usually realize they're making a shitty movie, and so they don't think stuff like, “okay, let's get actors who won't make our shitty movie shittier by overacting” and end up casting Tim Curry. (Ed. Note: see what I did there, with that meta reference to the bit in the book where the gorilla calling the scientist “shitty” over and over again in sign language? People, I know what I'm doing).

So yeah, not gonna dwell, but fucking goddamn it the movie of Congo sucks.


Sphere

Book—1987
Movie—1998 (dir. Barry Levinson)

In a world . . . where Michael Crichton has not yet whipped it out and written straight up SF . . .

One man . . . named Michael Crichton . . .

IS ABOUT TO BREAK EM OFF SOME!



Sphere.

So yeah. I first read Sphere in one sitting—which considering that it's like 400 pages long and contains several seismic mindfucks, probably explains a lot of my severe mental and emotional problems—back in like 1993 or 4 or something. It was one of those things where you pick up the book, read the book jacket, the book jacket says it's about a spaceship that crashed in the ocean 300 years ago, you go, “Tell me more,” and next thing you know it's 7 am, ya gotta be at school in an hour, you haven't slept and spend the whole day babbling about voluntary psychological lacunae and everyone gets mad at you for spoiling the ending. Oh wait, that's just me? DAMN IT.

Sphere is really kind of half-ass SF. Actual SF writers could have pulled it off better, but Michael Crichton's still Michael Crichton so it's A Michael Crichton SF Novel, which is better than nothing by damn sight. The plot starts off with The Everyman Scientist, in this case a shrink—an interesting wrinkle—being flown in by chopper to this random Navy flotilla in the middle of the South Pacific, where there's been a plane crash (not, sadly, Oceanic Flight 815). The shrink counsels plane crash survivors as part of what he does, so he's like, okay, this'll be fun.
But the Navy guy running things is like, nope, this ain't no plane crash. What this is . . . is a spaceship crash. And it crashed at least 300 years ago (maybe even 1000). Duh duh duhhhhhh. One of the other things the shrink did was write a report on the psychological effects of first contact with aliens, and the Navy guy assembled the first contact team the shrink recommended. The shrink has this “oh shit, I wrote that report to pay for a house moment” (familiar to Michael Crichton from all those pieces of shit he wrote to pay rent under the name John Lange) and goes to meet the team.

There's a bubbly astrophysicist who I mentally cast as Ron Howard (you can trust me on this shit, I'm good at casting), a moody mathematician I mentally cast as Samuel L. (and this is before Pulp Fiction, mind you), a workout-mad, tense biologist (Sharon Stone, no other options possible), and one random seasick dude they end up not bringing with them. To round out the Bowes cast, I had James Caan as the shrink and Scott Glenn as the Navy guy. In case you care.

So they go down to the bottom of the ocean to this “exotic-gas” habitat and get acclimated. They check out the spaceship, and there's a lot of bubbling from the astrophysicist about first contact . . . then they get a better look at the instrument panel by the door . . . and it's in English. Fuck! Man, that knocked me on my ass first time through.

The astrophysicist and the mathematician, who've been bitching at each other because the mathematician is grouchy and kind of playing this “I know everything three steps ahead” game, end up accidentally figuring out that the spaceship must have traveled in time, mid-bitchfest. They scribble equations and figure stuff out. Then everyone goes to explore the ship.

Most of what they find is kind of what they expected—future stuff—but they find this weird sphere. There are markings on it, and the mathematician figures out they're hiding a door. There's something inside. FUCK oh man oh man *flips pages*

After much trying to figure out how to open it up, the mathematician just does it without warning anyone. And then Weird Shit Starts Happening. People get killed (including the poor astrophysicist). Mucho drama. The “alien” from inside the sphere starts talking to them through the computer, and after a while they figure out that the mathematician is causing all the Weird Shit, so the shrink and the biologist overpower him and knock him into dreamless sleep so all the Weird Shit will stop.

But then the biologist goes into the sphere and Different, Weirder Weird Shit starts happening. The shrink soon finds himself facing mortal peril, and runs away to the spaceship and himself tries to enter the sphere. But he can't. Until he surrenders and just mentally pictures it open. Voila. Into the sphere.

Some of the worst writing of Michael Crichton's career ensues, like someone who's never done drugs trying to describe tripping and totally getting it wrong. But eventually, the shrink Figures It Out. The sphere causes one's wildest dreams to be manifested, and because the shrink is psychologically well-adjusted, no Weird Shit will happen when he comes out of the sphere. EXCEPT . . . he starts to make a run for it, abandoning the mathematician and the biologist. Whoops. He realizes his mistake, goes back to rescue them, and yay they all escape!

They get rescued by the Navy, and put their heads together to figure out what to do next. They all agree, even the “well-adjusted” shrink, that none of them handled the power granted to them by the sphere well. They don't even know what the sphere is, since as the mathematician points out, it could have some purpose that has nothing to do with granting human beings the capacity to manifest their subconscious. So they decide, as one, to forget the sphere, thus paradoxically erasing it from existence. OR DOES IT????? Shit, now you see what the fuck I had to deal with that day at school?

When the movie adaptation of Sphere was announced, I was very excited, because of all the Michael Crichton I'd yet read—and I'd read it all—Sphere always was the most cinematic of his novels to me. With a little second-act tightening, I thought it would kick ass left and right and leave bodies in its wake. When I heard who was going to be in it, I got real stoked, because I'd called Samuel L. and Sharon Stone like five years before. Dustin Hoffman? Hey, sure, not exactly what I'd pictured. Liev Schreiber? Wow, not Ron Howard. Okay, I guess. Okay, who's directing . . . Barry Levinson? For real? What the fuck are they gonna do, talk to the aliens about the fucking Baltimore Colts? Man . . . okay, okay, I'll give him a shot. But if Roy Hobbs comes out of the sphere I'm gonna be pissed.

Release date comes along. Nervous. Watch the movie. About ten minutes in, I just started going “Man, fuck you.” About halfway through, I was saying “Man, fuck you” like the Vietnamese guy in Robocop. By the time the movie ended, I just just pissed. This movie is the reason why I understand when people want to firebomb the studios, this shit was just fucking lazy. They threw $80 million bucks at it and went to the golf course. It's not even marginally redeemable due to camp value like Congo, which if you catch someone who doesn't really love the book and stick a joint in their mouth, they could have a decent time. It was this movie that made me realize if you could meet Samuel L.'s rate, he would literally do any movie, no matter how bad. And it only got worse . . .


Jurassic Park

Book—1990
Movie—1993 (dir. Steven Spielberg)

Like a lot of people, I'm sure, this was my introduction to Michael Crichton. My junior-high science teacher was raving about this book one day, and I read it, knowing I was going to be the only kid in class who would, and I figured, hey, maybe he'll think I'm less of a dipshit if I mention, hey, I read Jurassic Park too. Tried that, failed fucking miserably, he thought I was more of a dipshit for my complete lack of ass-kissing dexterity. Win some, lose some. So some junior-high science teacher who's long since forgotten me thought I was a dipshit . . . but I got to read a really fuckin good book about dinosaurs eating people.

Let's pause for a moment, and reflect on the beauty of this premise. You have man. Frail, fallible, fallacious man. Tortured by his own self-awareness, torn between his wants and his ability to obtain them, constantly reminded of his own mortality. Then, you have dinosaur. Dinosaurs kill shit. Dinosaurs kill, and then they eat, and then they kill some more, just to show mahfuckas who's gangsta. Two dominant life forms enter . . . one dominant life form leaves. Welcome to Thunderdome, motherfucker.

Jurassic Park is just fuckin perfect. It's got the poker-faced Michael Crichton fake “this is a true story” prologue, a couple chapters where he teases you with dinosaurs but doesn't call them dinosaurs. Eventually, after the Everyman Dinosaur Scientist is introduced along with his comely young assistant, the genius mathematician who Actually Knows What's Up (who fortunately has more of a sense of humor than the iteration of same in Sphere), and the eccentric billionaire who's Up To Something are all introduced, everybody heads to an island in Costa Rica. Where there are fucking dinosaurs.

Look, fucking dinosaurs fucking eat people in this fucking book. No plot recap. Fuck that. The mathematician tells the eccentric billionaire building a zoo/theme park with dinosaurs in it is a dumb idea. Wow, I hope you didn't sprain your wrist pulling that idea out your ass, doc. Of course it's a dumb idea to genetically engineer dinosaurs. You'd have to be fucking retarded to genetically engineer dinosaurs. They will fucking eat you. That is what they do. If it wasn't for that comet or whatever extinction level event that wiped them all out, dinosaurs would still be killing and eating everything. Which they do plenty of in this book, boy. And at the end, after the Everyman Scientist gets the billionaire's grandkids off the island, some dude comes up to him and basically tells him, “Dude, there are dinosaurs in Costa Rica. I don't mean that politically, like the rest of Central America, we're actually hip here. Actual fucking dinosaurs are fucking running loose. WE ARE FUCKED.” YES!

Now. I love Steven Spielberg. I don't “Armond White love” Steven Spielberg, because Charles Nelson Reilly and Liberace giving lapdances to Rock Hudson and Cary Grant with the DJ playing Judy Garland isn't that fucking gay. But I'm a big Steven Spielberg fan. Make no mistake. And I thought he was the perfect guy to make a movie of Jurassic Park, because he's just about the only guy who was around at the time who could make the dinosaurs look cool enough. But part of me always wondered . . . is Steven Spielberg really going to show as many shots of dinosaurs eating people as I require? Keep in mind, I'm the worst fucking candidate in the universe to have directed this movie: I would have made Tampopo with the dinosaurs as the truck drivers and the people as the noodles. I would have made Big Night, with Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub showing the dinosaurs into the restaurant and give them plates and plates of people to nosh on. (The ultimate fate of Messrs. Tucci and Shalhoub would have been a plot hole: wouldn't the dinosaurs eat them too . . .?)

Anyway, yeah, my problems with this movie are entirely due to my own monomaniacally misanthropic bliss at the notion of human beings being noisily and bloodily reduced to their basic elements in the large, powerful jaws of dinosaurs. Spielberg made a hell of a movie. Sure, Sam Neill was a dork, but fuck, if a scientist isn't allowed to be a dork, who is? Samuel L. was cool (and gets eaten by a dinosaur . . . SCORE ONE FOR THE OLD SCHOOL!) and Jeff Goldlbum was fun, and the only thing really wrong with this movie is that the ending is a little abrupt and convenient—suddenly there are no dinosaurs between the main building and the helipad? Meh, whatever. The rest of the movie fucking rules, even if the whole PG-13 thing meant all the people getting eaten by dinosaurs happens off-screen. But that makes it like a sex scene in a Code movie, you have to imagine it, which makes it better. And, no, I refuse to be self-conscious about the fact that I just compared dinosaurs eating people to sex.


Rising Sun

Book—1992
Movie—1993 (dir. Philip Kaufman)

Aaaaaaand we have Michael Crichton's political phase. Oh boy. The basic premise of this novel is that Japanese people are sociopathic, racist maniacs who are going to buy America and then kill us all. (Fundamental flaw, Mike, how many fucking times do I have to tell you it's evil white guys in suits who are going to kill us all . . .) Everybody in the fucking book bellyaches about “the Japanese” for pages apiece. There's kind of a cool who-done-it hidden underneath all that shit that becomes a how-done-it but Crichton pisses all that away by having the guy who actually killed the blonde white chick be a fucking Japanese guy, in full inscrutable glory.

It'd be one thing if, like he one-loved H. Rider Haggard in Congo, he was giving Sax Rohmer a scratch behind the ears here, but this isn't a self-conscious Yellow Peril homage, it's just a fucking rant about Japan buying up America. Now, in the aftermath of the skullfucking we got from Reagan, the American economy was in shitty enough shape that foreign investors came in and bought a lot of stuff for cheap, and a lot of those foreign investors were Japanese. They had money, we had shit to sell. That's global capitalism. But back in the early 90s, people were fucking losing it over this. Michael Crichton tapped into it, wrote Rising Sun, got a shitload of press, sold a lot of books, got rich(er).

Rising Sun sold enough books they decided to make a movie ASAP, giving Rising Sun Crichton's quickest turnover from book to film yet. Fortunately, Philip Kaufman is a reasonable man. He got the gig, he decided, all right, all the racist shit, bloop, gone. He cast Wesley Snipes as the protagonist, who wasn't really much of a character in the book, but as played by Wesley Snipes he was suddenly interesting (it also meant, thankfully, that the cringe-inducing line in the book where the Sean Connery character tells him, of living in Japan, “I felt like a nigger,” was cut). Sean Connery was a layup—Michael Crichton decided to make it so fucking obvious in this book, calling him John Connor, that to cast anyone else would just be tarded—and he rules, as redundant as that is to say. The killer's identity is changed; in the movie it's a white guy, proving that Philip Kaufman is a wise man indeed (need I even mention he wears a suit? Didn't think so).

The main thing the movie Rising Sun has is Eddie Sakamura. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, to me, became Eddie Sakamura after this movie, to the point where all I ever call him is Eddie Sakamura. He figures centrally in one of the funniest opening scenes ever; he's singing “Don't Fence Me In” in a karaoke bar with four Yakuza dudes with shades on and cigarettes hangin out the side as his backup singers. Eddie Sakamura is cool enough in this scene, but fuckin' hell his backup singers are awesome. They've got the perfect balance between bored cool and “hey, he's the boss, when the boss sings Don't Fence Me In, we fucking sing backup, BECAUSE THIS IS HOW MEN DO THINGS.”

Actually, if you don't have a whole lot of time, just watch the first scene. That scene alone is worth the price of admission; and the serviceable murder mystery plot that follows is okay, I mean, I have seen the movie like five times, but without all the racism there isn't a whole lot left.


Disclosure

Book—1994
Movie—1994 (dir. Barry Levinson)

Oh, so that's how Barry Levinson ended up directing Sphere. Reinforces my point about laziness, huh? Anyway, Disclosure. Disclosure is a nifty bait-and-switch; you think it's going to do for feminism what Rising Sun did for Japanese-American relations with the central premise that a guy gets sexually harassed by his female boss who then accuses him of sexually harassing her, and the boss character is enough of a raging, one-note bitch that it sure looks like Crichton wants us to think “yeah, once you start letting women out of the kitchen and into the vice-president's chair you're bound to have problems, unless she's in the chair cuz she's fuckin im! Amirite? Eh?” until you realize a ways into the book that the Everyman protagonist is being framed so his intel about his company fucking something up in Malaysia will be discredited. Problem is, the bad guys are so stupid, Everyman doesn't even realize what the damaging information is until he does some digging, so they basically went to all the trouble to have his boss sexually harass him and then sue him for sexual harassment for nothing. And, in the end, the female boss is the one who has to fall on the grenade. So, in a weird, awkward way, it's almost a statement about how women get shafted. Except she's too one-dimensional a character for you to really give a shit.

Anyway, the movie's better than the book, just because all the political horseshit everyone monologues about in the book is basically cut out, leaving a not-half-bad corporate espionage thriller, marred only by Demi Moore being, as always, godawful. Swap her out for someone who can actually act and you've got a rock-solid picture.


The Lost World

Book—1995
Movie—1997 (dir. Steven Spielberg . . . hey, shit happens)

Sequel to Jurassic Park. Piece of shit. Boring. If the sequel had picked up where the first one left off, that would have been great. Instead, there's a second island? For real? Fuck you, man.

The movie, naturally, sucks too, and is notable only for giving Vince Vaughn a (presumably) nice paycheck post-Swingers.


Timeline

Book—1999
Movie—2003 (dir. Richard Donner)

Good premise (quantum-physics based time travel), nice atmosphere (they travel to a well-researched and vividly realized medieval France), stupid fucking characters. The only memorable ones are Marek, who's there to dispense facts about the High Middle Ages and while impressively knowledgeable and adept at coping with the culture shock when they end up back in France, is kind of a dork, and Doniger, the bad guy, who's mainly memorable because he's so pointlessly assoholic to everybody. Well, there's the medieval chick Marek ends up wooing chivalrously, she's cool, she plays both sides against the middle in this really subtle way that's archaic in our day and age. And the lines in Middle English are cool. I mean, it's a good read if you've got a plane/train ride. But nothing earthshattering, and definitely not up to Crichton's previous standard.

The movie's fucking worthless. If you absolutely must see Gerry Butler in something because you just fapped that hard to 300, sure, check him out as a much-more-retarded-than-in-the-book Marek. Paul Walker shows up with his dazzling thespian skills as one of the most annoying characters in the history of literature, who in Paul Walker's hands actually becomes much less annoying, so good job, Paul. Guess those blue eyes and that modest charisma you got works in something other than a Fast and the Furious movie. If you could film a fart, you'd get Timeline.


As for Airframe, Prey, State of Fear, Next, Pirate Latitudes, and the untitled posthumous one, go to a book review site. If someone didn't film 'em, I don't give a fuck.

VICTUS PRO SENTENTIA

Occasionally, every writer comes across a piece of writing so unique that it humbles him. Some Olympii are unclimbable. This article on Steven Spielberg, for me, is one of those.