Links and a review
The rest of you might already have seen them, but in case you, like me, haven't: there are two shiny new promos for season two of The Sarah Connor Chronicles out there:
here and here. I'm so looking forward to it, and pleased that the promo puts such a strong focus on the female character (I liked Derek Reese as much as the next fangirl, but I ( Read more... )
here and here. I'm so looking forward to it, and pleased that the promo puts such a strong focus on the female character (I liked Derek Reese as much as the next fangirl, but I ( Read more... )
Which is interesting, considering that I see all the reasons for suicide for Charmian, but regarded it as an unnecessary tragedy in Masada.
Peter O'Toole is marvelous, of course. And it did get me fascinated with Roman seige engineering. In fact I think I started lobbying to take Latin the next year as a result. (In my school, you were only supposed to take one foreign language until Junior year, and I was already in the French program. So I had to cut the required study period to take Latin. I was not disappointed. We started on day one with Caesar.)
Incidently, the sequel Ernest K. Gann wrote, The Triumph, is an absolute example of authors at the beck and call of their characters. In which it seems that Silva has gone on strike, and Gann must write a book in which he is happy or he'll never write anything else again. OMG it's terrible. I generally like Gann's books, and I love The Antagonists (but not as much as the movie) but OMG The Triumph is the worst book about Rome ever, for all that it's meticulously historical. Just no. Also way over the top Domitian.
Have you read Gann's The Aviator? Also made into a movie with Chris Reeve, but the movie is nowhere as good as the book. It's about a mail plane crashing in the Rockies in the late 1920s, with no survivors but the pilot, a scarred WWI vet who has withdrawn from the world, and a twelve year old girl who breaks her leg in the crash. It's a struggle for survival, and also a love story, though nothing physical happens. At the end he has returned to life, saved by her as much as she is by him, and it's clear he will wait for her. In the movie they made her 20, which was no doubt designed to minimize squick, but took the edge off entirely.
Other Gann worth reading -- Gentlemen of Adventure, about knights of the air. I've read six or seven of his others, which are always good solid reads. The Magistrate is a Cold War thriller, with a main character who really is Silva in a suit!
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I thought about this as well when rewatching. I think the difference is in scale and individuality. Charmian, Iras and Cleopatra choose suicide for themselves, but no one else. They most certainly do not choose it for their children. Would you see Cleopatra in the same way if she had poisoned Caesarion, the twins and her youngest son (and maybe Antyllus as well) before killing herself? (Especially give that in such a scenario you would have no way of knowing what Octavian would have done with them.) And if she had insisted everyone in the palace kill themselves well? I think not.
No, I haven't read anything else by Gann yet. And I'll keep away from The Triumph!
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The Triumph is almost funny it's so bad in places. I had no idea one could make such a muddle while being so well researched and generally up to his usual standard. It's the characters. And the ranting and raving Domitian is just.... Made me run for a good bodice ripping romance about Titus and Berenice, it did!
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Feuchtwanger's trilogy, which consists of "Der jüdische Krieg" (in English: Josephus, "Die Söhne" (The Jew of Rome), and "Der Tag wird kommen" (Josephus and the Emperor - ah,English titles, you are so inventive), has at its central character Joseph ben Matthias, aka Flavius Josephus, and Feuchtwanger excels at shades of grey. As a Jewish writer himself, the question of assimilation, cosmopolitism versus nationalism was something that occupied him all his life, and he wrote this trilogy during last year of the Weimar Republic and his first decade in exile during the Third Reich, which you can see reflected in his changing attitude towards the question as to whether or not there is a need for a Jewish state), but nonetheless never goes simplistic. For example, the Romans are never stand-ins for the Nazis. The first novel covers the prelude to the first Roman-Jewish war and the war itself (which is the German title), during which Josephus famously switched sides to survive, and how he deals with this; the second book covers the reign of Titus;and the third book Domitian.
Now Feuchtwanger attempted a Hitler portrait twice, once in "Erfolg" ("Success" - first novel ever to deal with the Nazis, got published in 1930, three years BEFORE they came to power) where it's a brilliant satire, and once in "Der falsche Nero" written in 1935, where it's a less successful satire. By contrast, his version of Domitian is not an attempt at a Hitler portrait, or for that matter a satire, with the result that it's a truly chilling portrait of a dictator and far more efficient because you can believe this to be Domitian, not a Hitler allegory.
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It really sounds fascinating. I first read Josephus soon after I saw Masada -- went and checked it out of the library on the theory that I should go get the original source, and I wondered what he had thought and how he had felt about it. I will indeed have to keep looking.
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