Multi-Media Reviews
1. Book: Altered Carbon (2003) by Richard K. Morgan.
A thoroughly enjoyable page-turner hard-boiled action adventure, set in a futuristic San Francisco ("Bay City"), cut from the wholecloth of Dashiell Hammet's (and Raymond Chandler's) Bay Area private eye stories.
Richard K. Morgan borrows from these authors' universe of violence, sex, and mystery - and amps up the results with nano-testosterone of the future. Takeshi Kovacs, special ops Envoy from Harlan's World has his "cortical stack" of digitized personality, identity, and training "needlecasted" back to Earth to be "resleeved" into an available chemically-enhanced body to fulfill his contract. Kovacs has been hired, at great expense, by the powerful & influential Laurens Bancroft, a "Methuselah" who has lived aeons by continually "resleeving" into cloned bodies, to solve a mystery - who murdered him? Through Takeshi Kovacs's pursuit of the answers, Richard Morgan takes the reader through a slightly dystopian future that differentiates between 'organic damage' and permanent death, of religious opposition to the technology, of crime syndicates, of immortality politics, of sexual identity, all in the flashing lights of shootouts with nerve-shocking stun blasters and bone-disintegrating shardgun expulsions.
I may well have to check out the other two books (Broken Angels, Woken Furies) - are they any good?
2. Film: The Call of Cthulhu (2005), "The Celebrated Story of H.P. Lovecraft Brought at Last to the Silver Screen with a RICH SYMPHONIC Score in MYTHOSCOPE."
What a fun film! Lovingly crafted (hehe) in the style of old B&W Silent Movies with Intertitles, classic Lovecraftian adjectives and phrasing, caked-on makeup, and overly expressive acting - this fandom-inspired production captures the mythos wonderfully! All in a mere 47 minutes, and very good music. :-) Indeed, I felt this film borrowed rather nicely from Ufa Studio classics.
I could give away the story, or if you've read any H.P. Lovecraft, you can guess at it quite accurately, so I'll end this review by using their promo, "See CTHULHU as it was MEANT to be seen!"
Note: The Intertitles are available in 24 languages: Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Euskera, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish & Welsh.
3. Film: The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) - just in time for Earth Day, I watched this Academy Award winner for best animated film. What a lovely allegorical tale of a simple French peasant whose lifelong silent passion lead to full-on ecological recovery in the mountain wastelands of the French Alps. Altogether nice premise of the power of individuals and their passion to help others, and an emotionally-intelligent ecological sense tying together people, the land, and the health of both.
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I also watched Casino Royale on DVD, and it interests me to note this bit of BA censorship. I can't say I noticed Richard Branson on the DVD. What I do recall from seeing this Bond film on the last BA flight I was on, was the complete excising of the Bond torture scene.
A thoroughly enjoyable page-turner hard-boiled action adventure, set in a futuristic San Francisco ("Bay City"), cut from the wholecloth of Dashiell Hammet's (and Raymond Chandler's) Bay Area private eye stories.
Richard K. Morgan borrows from these authors' universe of violence, sex, and mystery - and amps up the results with nano-testosterone of the future. Takeshi Kovacs, special ops Envoy from Harlan's World has his "cortical stack" of digitized personality, identity, and training "needlecasted" back to Earth to be "resleeved" into an available chemically-enhanced body to fulfill his contract. Kovacs has been hired, at great expense, by the powerful & influential Laurens Bancroft, a "Methuselah" who has lived aeons by continually "resleeving" into cloned bodies, to solve a mystery - who murdered him? Through Takeshi Kovacs's pursuit of the answers, Richard Morgan takes the reader through a slightly dystopian future that differentiates between 'organic damage' and permanent death, of religious opposition to the technology, of crime syndicates, of immortality politics, of sexual identity, all in the flashing lights of shootouts with nerve-shocking stun blasters and bone-disintegrating shardgun expulsions.
I may well have to check out the other two books (Broken Angels, Woken Furies) - are they any good?
2. Film: The Call of Cthulhu (2005), "The Celebrated Story of H.P. Lovecraft Brought at Last to the Silver Screen with a RICH SYMPHONIC Score in MYTHOSCOPE."
What a fun film! Lovingly crafted (hehe) in the style of old B&W Silent Movies with Intertitles, classic Lovecraftian adjectives and phrasing, caked-on makeup, and overly expressive acting - this fandom-inspired production captures the mythos wonderfully! All in a mere 47 minutes, and very good music. :-) Indeed, I felt this film borrowed rather nicely from Ufa Studio classics.
I could give away the story, or if you've read any H.P. Lovecraft, you can guess at it quite accurately, so I'll end this review by using their promo, "See CTHULHU as it was MEANT to be seen!"
Note: The Intertitles are available in 24 languages: Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Euskera, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish & Welsh.
3. Film: The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) - just in time for Earth Day, I watched this Academy Award winner for best animated film. What a lovely allegorical tale of a simple French peasant whose lifelong silent passion lead to full-on ecological recovery in the mountain wastelands of the French Alps. Altogether nice premise of the power of individuals and their passion to help others, and an emotionally-intelligent ecological sense tying together people, the land, and the health of both.
---
I also watched Casino Royale on DVD, and it interests me to note this bit of BA censorship. I can't say I noticed Richard Branson on the DVD. What I do recall from seeing this Bond film on the last BA flight I was on, was the complete excising of the Bond torture scene.