Some of you have noticed by now that a lot of things are broken around Chez Genji as of late. I'm in the middle of what is turning out to be a very unhappy migration between host accounts — not because of the hosts, per se, but because of my own stupid decisions that I thought would save time in the long run but are turning out to be pains in the tuchis in the short run. Expect to see a lot of things broken for the time being, although commenting and articles themselves should continue to work fine. If they don't, just get on your rooftop and face towards New York and yell. I've got the window open.

I'm still struggling with the workload imposed by About.com, some new-ish freelance gigs, and another opportunity that might turn into something fulltime which I can't talk about quite yet. Hence, again, the lack of new material. That and I have been trying to redirect what spare time I do have into some long-term projects which have languished badly. I've decided that seeking out fun new stuff to talk about is nice, but not nearly as rewarding in the long run as creating fun new stuff. There's plenty of people out there blogging about so many of the things I talk about, but there's only one of me making something that wasn't there before — and so I'd rather give the latter that much more time and attention.

So, there probably won't be a whole lot of me posting about the new Takashi Miike movie or what have you — it isn't that I don't find those things interesting, but that I just feel my time's going to be better served working on stuff that's truly my own. I may still pop up from time to time with something that arrived in the mail, but only if I feel like I have something useful and interesting to say about it. "Check this out, you'll like it" just seems so, well, thin. Hence the capsule format, etc., which was part of a way of clearing out a backlog of stuff I'd meant to say something about but could never find the time — so I just took the 100 or so words that mattered and posted those. And even with that format, I find I have that much less to talk about anyway. C'est étrange. (That's Old Low German for "Who'd'a thunk it?")

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One of SF’s more distinguished names (and son) collaborated on this scattershot but enjoyable set of essays on science fiction in the movies. It’s best for the tone and tenor of the writing, with some nifty snippets of interviews with various creators. Some are well-known to current generations of SF fans — Harlan Ellison, John Dykstra, Ray Bradbury — while others are less-known but still intriguing (Richard Fleischer, director of Fantastic Voyage, among others).

The book is roughly chronological, starting in the silent era and ending at around 1981 or so. Too bad a revised version was never published; so much has happened since then as to make many of the observations in the book downright quaint. The stuff that hasn’t aged a bit is all the details about Hollywood’s greed, waste and silliness: the way Fahrenheit 451 was so cluelessly marketed; the money wasted on getting the SF throwaway Damnation Alley into theaters in the wake of Star Wars's massive success; the chaos of the making of Superman; and so on.

Many anecdotes revolve around the technical difficulties of bringing SF to film (especially in the entirely practical, pre-digital age), although the extra chapters on visual effects feel like they were originally written for a separate book-length production and then chopped down to become an appendix. An entire chapter, laced with great insight and appreciation, is devoted to Stanley Kubrick and his three forays into SF: Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and Clockwork Orange, with only passing mention of The Shining (which was still in production when the book was released). And they also skewer a few movies that only deserve to be called SF by association, like Moonraker or The Black Hole, or the ambitious but utterly confused Zardoz.

The best thing about the book is the way the Pohls talk about their material. They are literate and skilled critics, and their insight comes through best when talking about productions that were troubled, flawed or controversial: the near-pornographic violence of Rollerball (which looks tame now, but is that us or the movie?); the way Slaughterhouse-five failed to make it off the page and onto the screen; the religious implications of Close Encounters of the Third Kind; etc. They also single out George Lucas, both for THX-1138 and the Star Wars films (which was at that point only two installments), and note that the failure of the former at the box office most likely led him to simply try pleasing the audience any way he could. Some of the most enjoyable passages are the ones where Pohl Sr. speaks with candor and wryness about his own experiences: how he turned down writing the novelization of Forbidden Planet and kicked himself all the way home; how he tried to say something about Clockwork Orange and couldn’t in time for a deadline; how bad an idea it was to show unsubtitled episodes of Star Trek to an audience of Russian SF fans.

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Hollywood’s messy love affair with science fiction is documented beautifully in this overview of SF movies which either made it to the screen only after great developmental strife (Dune, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four) or never made it at all (The Tourist, The Stars My Destination, The Six Million Dollar Man). Hughes did his homework for every title listed here, and dug up some fairly astonishing revelations about the life, death, and sometimes rebirth of a broad range of projects: comic book adaptations (Silver Surfer), versions of popular SF novels that remain in limbo (John Carter of Mars), original projects that turned into dead ends or were mangled beyond recognition (Supernova).

In every case there’s examples galore of how the movie industry works as hard as it can at every stage to make things as inefficient and committee-driven as possible; the behind-the-scenes story of the rewrites that just about killed the Outer Limits film is exemplary. Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated attempt to bring Dune to the screen, with H.R. Giger as the art director, remains a favorite of mine; Giger, himself no stranger to having been ripped off repeatedly by moviemakers, sticks in a amused foreword as well. I also read with incredulity the way Stars My Destination, a perennial favorite novel of SF fans (me included) for generations, almost ended up being adapted by a reclusive millionaire beachcomber with a distinctively broken typewriter.

One major omission in my eyes: why no discussion of the many, many attempts to bring to screen Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land? God knows there are stories to be told: in one of them, related via Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold was many of the screenwriters brought on board at various points in an attempt to “lick” the project, and Gerrold swears he was fired for doing it right.But what there is here is so good, so thorough and so heartbreaking in its documentation of disaster that any SF fan reading it might well find themselves pining. 

An animated adaptation of a Serbian graphic novel, very much in the mold of Moebius and Enki Bilal, with plenty of acerbic humor and wit that for a lack of a better word is strongly Eastern European in flavor. Set some decades hence, young Edit resorts to biotechnology to cheat on one of her exams and finds herself becoming a host for an artificial entity that coexists within her flesh. Rather than focus on the somewhat ropey SF plotline, Technotise is more interested in Edit and her relationships with her no-good friends or her perpetually dismayed parents, and that makes it both funnier and more human than the more typical “let’s see what we can blow up this time” approach. The animation’s only okay, but some of the backgrounds and environments are downright dreamy, and the quirky flavor of the whole thing buoys it up past needing to look good in every single shot to be worthwhile. As distinct from anime in its flavor as Western animation is from that; let’s see more productions like this brought out domestically. (No Western distributor exists, but the import DVD has English subtitles.)

IMDB entry

I'm still reeling from the sheer amount of technological catastrophe that decided to visit Chez Genji this past couple of weeks, which apart from work is a big reason why I haven't posted anything.

This wasn't some simple fender-bender or a paint-scrape, mind you. This was a ten-car pileup on a hillside with the victims rolling down and drifting backwards into the bay. (At this point humor is about the only weapon I have left, and while a Bill Cosby reference may not be a BFG-9000 it's better than nothing.)

See if you can follow this. A scorecard may be required.