Thursday, September 18, 2008
The Standbys
What 5 series/books/movies can you rewatch/reread time and again?
Batman: The Animated Series. The pinnacle of human animation. The first three seasons were among the last cartoons to be fully non-computerized, and they're beautiful. The last season is cleaner, sharper...but it lacks something. Beautiful, Art Deco animation and set designs aside, this show is awesome. Kevin Conroy is the voice of Batman, the reason Christian Bale's attempts never quite ring true. He inhabits the role entirely. Mark Hamill (yes, Luke Skywalker) is the best Joker voice ever. The whole series is brooding, dark, thoughtful, at times utterly heartbreaking.
Galaxy Quest. Fresca reports that David Mamet declares Galaxy Quest "a perfect movie," and I agree. It sets out to tell a simple tale of humor and heroism, hits every mark along the way, and concludes sweetly and completely. The washed-up actors from an old science fiction show find out their show has been mistaken for the truth by sweet and gullible aliens who now need "them" (their characters) to save them from a terrible warlord. The show is generally taken as a spoof of Star Trek, but there are perhaps even more references to Blake's 7, and the save at the end is very clearly a bittersweet attempt to fix the end of that series.
My favorite moment: at the beginning there's a teen-aged fan who the star of the show chews out for being a clueless fanboy and basically tells to get a life. At the climax the hero contacts him on the phone to ask for help, and the boy cuts him off and says "I just want you to know, I know it's just a show. I know it's not real." "But it is real," says the captain, "It is and I need your help." With no transition at all the kid leaps from his chair: "I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT WAS ALL REAL!" he cries.
Ah, the fannish soul.
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The whole series if I could, but the Silmarillion at all costs. As majestic as the Bible without the pesky religion parts, The Silmarillion is crammed full of characters at the heroic scale--Luthien and Beren, the lovers of whom Arwen and Aragorn are just echoes; Turin Turambar the doomed, Feanor the cursed and prideful crafter, the hidden city of Gondolin (of which Gondor is but an echo). I don't think I realized until I was reading The Silmarillion that Middle Earth is meant to be our own world in an earlier time, and the shock of surprise and joy I felt on realizing the constellations were the same was immense.
Star Wars (the first trilogy). Okay, I doze off during the Ewoks, but every movie has something in that I love: the sheer massive scale and sweep of the first movie, the romance of the second (the only Lucas movie to ever have a convincing romance, mostly because he wrote none of it and the director had the good sense to overrule his attempted changes to Han and Leia's dialogue), and redemption of Anakin in the third.
The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddings. Written in 1926, Eddings' novel is epic fantasy with the dial set to 11. An envoy from the nation of Witchland arrives at the palace of the Demons and sets in motion a massive war between the two nations. Both sides are populated by characters larger than life, magnificent, glorious and terrible in their grandeur. Quests are achieved, impossible summits scaled, vile treachery and gallant deads accomplished, and in the end the Witches are defeated utterly. And then the Demons discover they're hideously bored and use their one precious wish from the gods to start the whole thing again: the book ends with the announcement of an envoy from Witchland. Eddings is desperately in love with the sound of language, and I'll pick up this book or one of his others at times just to remind myself what amazing effects can be achieved with it. He builds tapestries of words, rich and opaque and glowing. A totally random sample:
They stood at a cave's mouth on a beach of sand white and clean, that was lapped by the ripples of a sapphire lake: a great lake, sown with islets craggy and luxuriant with trees and flowering growths. Many-armed was the lake, winding everywhere in secret reaches behind promontories that were spurs of the mountains that held it in their bosom: some wooded or green with lush flower-spangled turf to the water's edge, some with bare rocks abrupt from the water, some crowned with rugged lines of crag that sent down scree-slopes into the lake below. It was mid-afternoon, sweet-aired, a day of dappled cloud-shadows and changing lights. White birds circled above the lake, and now and then a kingfisher flashed by like a streak of azure flame.
Runners-Up: The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Tick, Much Ado About Nothing (the movie), The Oz series by L. Frank Baum, Tonari no Totoro.
Batman: The Animated Series. The pinnacle of human animation. The first three seasons were among the last cartoons to be fully non-computerized, and they're beautiful. The last season is cleaner, sharper...but it lacks something. Beautiful, Art Deco animation and set designs aside, this show is awesome. Kevin Conroy is the voice of Batman, the reason Christian Bale's attempts never quite ring true. He inhabits the role entirely. Mark Hamill (yes, Luke Skywalker) is the best Joker voice ever. The whole series is brooding, dark, thoughtful, at times utterly heartbreaking.
Galaxy Quest. Fresca reports that David Mamet declares Galaxy Quest "a perfect movie," and I agree. It sets out to tell a simple tale of humor and heroism, hits every mark along the way, and concludes sweetly and completely. The washed-up actors from an old science fiction show find out their show has been mistaken for the truth by sweet and gullible aliens who now need "them" (their characters) to save them from a terrible warlord. The show is generally taken as a spoof of Star Trek, but there are perhaps even more references to Blake's 7, and the save at the end is very clearly a bittersweet attempt to fix the end of that series.
My favorite moment: at the beginning there's a teen-aged fan who the star of the show chews out for being a clueless fanboy and basically tells to get a life. At the climax the hero contacts him on the phone to ask for help, and the boy cuts him off and says "I just want you to know, I know it's just a show. I know it's not real." "But it is real," says the captain, "It is and I need your help." With no transition at all the kid leaps from his chair: "I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT WAS ALL REAL!" he cries.
Ah, the fannish soul.
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The whole series if I could, but the Silmarillion at all costs. As majestic as the Bible without the pesky religion parts, The Silmarillion is crammed full of characters at the heroic scale--Luthien and Beren, the lovers of whom Arwen and Aragorn are just echoes; Turin Turambar the doomed, Feanor the cursed and prideful crafter, the hidden city of Gondolin (of which Gondor is but an echo). I don't think I realized until I was reading The Silmarillion that Middle Earth is meant to be our own world in an earlier time, and the shock of surprise and joy I felt on realizing the constellations were the same was immense.
Star Wars (the first trilogy). Okay, I doze off during the Ewoks, but every movie has something in that I love: the sheer massive scale and sweep of the first movie, the romance of the second (the only Lucas movie to ever have a convincing romance, mostly because he wrote none of it and the director had the good sense to overrule his attempted changes to Han and Leia's dialogue), and redemption of Anakin in the third.
The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddings. Written in 1926, Eddings' novel is epic fantasy with the dial set to 11. An envoy from the nation of Witchland arrives at the palace of the Demons and sets in motion a massive war between the two nations. Both sides are populated by characters larger than life, magnificent, glorious and terrible in their grandeur. Quests are achieved, impossible summits scaled, vile treachery and gallant deads accomplished, and in the end the Witches are defeated utterly. And then the Demons discover they're hideously bored and use their one precious wish from the gods to start the whole thing again: the book ends with the announcement of an envoy from Witchland. Eddings is desperately in love with the sound of language, and I'll pick up this book or one of his others at times just to remind myself what amazing effects can be achieved with it. He builds tapestries of words, rich and opaque and glowing. A totally random sample:
They stood at a cave's mouth on a beach of sand white and clean, that was lapped by the ripples of a sapphire lake: a great lake, sown with islets craggy and luxuriant with trees and flowering growths. Many-armed was the lake, winding everywhere in secret reaches behind promontories that were spurs of the mountains that held it in their bosom: some wooded or green with lush flower-spangled turf to the water's edge, some with bare rocks abrupt from the water, some crowned with rugged lines of crag that sent down scree-slopes into the lake below. It was mid-afternoon, sweet-aired, a day of dappled cloud-shadows and changing lights. White birds circled above the lake, and now and then a kingfisher flashed by like a streak of azure flame.
Runners-Up: The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Tick, Much Ado About Nothing (the movie), The Oz series by L. Frank Baum, Tonari no Totoro.
// posted by Jennifer @ 9:46 PM 
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