angels UP demons

Up.  Seen Tuesday evening May 19, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen 17.  2.5 Slithy Toads

Angels & Demons.  Seen Tuesday evening May 19, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen 6.  3.5 Slithy Toads

So I'm sitting at home on a Sunday night with The Firm on as background noise; it's a TNT Free Movie On Demand, and hearing that Dave Grusin score...

It inspires me to write about movies.

Up is Wall-E redux.  It starts out with some wonderful stuff that nobody but Pixar does in an animated film, a music-and-pictures sequence that tells the life story of the lead character from youth to old age, for richer and poorer and sickness and health with the woman he meets at a young age, marries, and eventually survives.  There's another very nice scene not long thereafter when he snaps at the pressure of a development going up around the house he's holding on to, providing an opportunity for evil developer to get his way.  

[where is Gene Hackman.  I just hear his voice in The Firm and wish he were ageless.]

So if you've read anything about Up, you kind of know what happens.  The house floats away on a sea of balloons, there's a boy-scout-like boy stowed away, and they go to South American and have an adventure.

Sadly, all of the inspiration in the movie must have been left behind when the house lifted off, because there ain't a darned thing in the South Africa section that really makes any sense.  You've got a valuable bird, but why?  Dogs that talk, but why?  The old explorer the lead-as-boy once idolized is still alive even though he's got to be fifteen or twenty years older, and he's the dog master and bird hunter, but why?  So to me, Up ends up having the same second act troubles that seriously deflated Wall-E for me.  All that effort to start up the concept for a story, all the creativity and genius, but I don't think anyone knew what to do leading off from the idea. 

At their best, these movies show Pixar doing animation for adults that's serious and refreshing and at the same time accessible, and I'd rather see Pixar trying to do something than see the Dreamworks Animation formula being trotted out once more.  But to be honest, Pixar's starting to get credit like French films, just for being French or being Pixar.

The quality of the animation is often excellent.

The best part of the movie is the music by Michael Giacchino.  Jerry Goldsmith is gone.  John Barry and John Williams aren't gone but also aren't working much any more.  I've been wondering if there's anyone who might lay the claim to being a real go-to guy for film music.  There's this temptation for me to say its James Newton Howard who has some excellent work in Defiance and The Village, but I can't to that far in his favor.  Well, after listing to his work on both Star Trek and Up, I think we've found it, that his name is Michael Giacchino, and that it's a good thing maybe Lost is ending because perhaps if his work on that show is over he'll find time to do more movie music.  The score in Up is wonderful.  Yes, Giacchino is channeling Randy Newman something big, but there are worse things to do.  His music helps make the wordless sequences sing.  Great job.

Angels and Demons is this summer's Wanted, or perhaps the closest thing I've seen to the movie equivalent of Simon R. Green.  Like Wanted, it's not "great" movie-making, but it's just a helluva lot of fun.  I was rapt from beginning to end, never checking my watch for a 2+ hour movie (not even tempted until very near the end, and I said "no, it's close to the end, let it ride..."), enjoying myself thoroughly for the duration.  I'd mention Simon R. Green because Simon is a writer I've represented for 20 years whose work is often wonderful (and to give a plug, I think the book Daemons Are Forever which comes out in paperback this week may be the best book he's ever written with the prior Man With The Golden Torc very close behind) but whom I can't use as a good how to example.  Simon's sheer energy and verve and voice and all allow him to get away with being very "tell-y" sometimes when writers are supposed to show, not tell.  It's kind of like that with Angels and Demons.  You really shouldn't have Tom Hanks running around Rome stopping constantly to give little lessons in art history, geography, theology, and more.  You totally shouldn't.  But yet he does, and the movie's all the more endearing for enthusiastically charging ahead to do things you're not supposed to do.

This is better than DaVinci Code.  The formula might be the same, but the geography and time scale of Angels and Demons are much more compressed, so there's a ticking clock vibrancy that was lacking in the earlier move.   A lot of fun, Angels and Demons is, and the summer's off to a blessed good start to have it and Star Trek bringing joy and life and fun to the multiplex.

And I want to give some special mention to Ron Howard.  I haven't seen all of his movies, and some like Night Shift I really should have.  But The Grinch is the only Ron Howard movie in a long career that I wouldn't want to see.  Ron Howard hasn't made a great all-time classic movie like Martin Scorcese with Goodfellas, but neither has Howard made a turd like The Last Temptation of Christ.  Apollo 13 might be his best movie, and it was fun in Angels and Demons for me to see Howard channeling his inner Apollo 13 in the CERN sequences.  In Backdraft he almost pulled off the feat of making a good movie from a decidedly bad script.  He's made many different types of movies in many different genres and usually made them entertainingly.  

JTK meets IPH

Star Trek.  Seen Sunday evening May 10, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen #6.  3 slithy toads.

This is the Star Trek meets Star Wars movie that we've all been waiting for, the one where James T. Kirk lands on the Ice Planet of Hoth, is attacked by a Tauntaun, gets rescued by Obi Wan, but somehow misses the Imperial Walkers.

Or is it the movie where Sar-Ek saves his son Spo-ck from the destruction of his home planet Vulton (Kyrpcan?) by putting him into a rocket ship?

I'm kidding some, but only some.  A large part of the pleasure from this very pleasurable re-boot of the Star Trek movie franchise is in finding all of the lifts not just from the Star Trek series but from any other sf movie franchise that starts with an "S" that's been around over the past 30 or 40 years.  

I was never a huge fan of the Star Trek TV show.  It's not that I disliked it, but I wasn't part of the cult that surrounded it.  But I faithfully saw all of the Star Trek movies, from ST:TMP at the Cate Plaza Twin in Middletown, to the classic Wrath of Khan at the RKO Stanley Warner Route 4 Paramus Quad, then Star Trek 3 and Star Trek 4 at the old Loews State Twin in Times Square.  After that closed, it was off to the Loews 34th St. Showplace for Star Trek 5, then to the Loews Orpheum for Star Trek 6.  The first movie I saw at the Loews Lincoln Square was Star Trek 7, and then I was very happy when the series returned to Times Square in grand style for the next few movies at my much beloved Loews Astor Plaza.  With the exception of Star Trek 2, I can't say I was thrilled with any of them, but the sf geek part of me always compelled me to the theatre, and always on the nicest screen I could think to go to.

So yeah, goosed by the excellent coming attraction and the attractive young cast, Star Trek is the first movie in a while I was heavily anticipating, and I saw it at the biggest non-Imax screen at the AMC Empire, and I had a really good time.

It's a very energetic movie, a lot of fun, the casting is excellent pretty much all the way around, it's got good action, good humor, nice eye candy.  I liked the depictions of all of the young characters, and don't have favorites or an "I liked all of them but..." reaction.  The special effects might be expensive but they're human scaled.  The move to warp speed wasn't so hot; I don't know if there will ever be a match to watching them go to warp in Star Trek 2 on the gigantic screen at the Paramus Quad with then state-of-the-art 70mm 6-track sound bringing it to life, but that's about the only aspect of the movie that left me feeling at all flattened by what JJ Abrams had wrought.  And the villain is no Khan, but Khan was the one and only...

I don't know if it's a great movie, or if it's something I'll want to see over and over again.  But paired as it was with the coming attractions for some pretty dismal summer stuff to follow like the new Transformers movie or Land of the Lost.  Land of the Lost looks truly totally dreadful on any level.

It's fun.  And not overblown fun.  I like that in a movie.

credit where due

I've knocked on the Kindle a bit, but I should give Amazon some praise for having made some improvements in the Kindle operating system between my original Kindle that had something like 1.15y98y98u on it and the replacement in January with 1.2 (299870016) on it.  Still the first generation Kindle, but a slightly more developed version of the OS.

The first Kindle crashed just often enough that I kept thinking how nice it would be to travel with a toothpick to hit the reset button, not daily or even weekly, but at least once every month or two.  And then usually one crash would be followed closely by a second crash before it would then be good for a stretch.  So far, 3 months and counting, the replacement Kindle with the slightly updated OS hasn't needed a reset.

The first Kindle, every so often you'd put on the wireless and wait and wait for the Kindle to talk to Amazon and for the newspaper to download, and sometimes I'd have to give up, turn off the wireless, and try again.  3 months and counting, so far the replacement Kindle has checked in and quickly downloaded whatever there is to download in 60 seconds or so just like advertised.

Lynxswift commented asking me about the news reports  of a new bigger screen Kindle and other e-readers that might be more suited to a newspaper.

I would love this.  I'm very glad to be able to subscribe to the Washington Post and the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle.  Along with the NY Times which I get home-delivered they are the only good newspapers left in the country.  But the Kindle is not great for reading newspapers.  The content is all there, but I miss the ads and feel kind of guilty that I might be giving the Washington Post some part of the $9.99 Kindle subscription fee but not eyeballing the few ads that are left.  It's a lot of page turns and back and forth to read the paper.  Even on the 1st generation Kindle there's a little more aggresiveness particularly with the Wall St. Journal to put in charts, but they are often shrunk and take up an entire page.  And any page with a photo takes longer to draw on the screen thus slower to refresh thus adding time.  If the Kindle or some other company could come up with something that would give me more of the newspaper experience I've grown up with along with my newspaper, I would probably buy it in an instant.

In fact -- and it shocks even Luddite me to admit this --  I would even consider foregoing a printed NY Times subscription in favor of the electronic version so long as I could still have free access or very small add-on access to the web site (currently a Kindle WSJ subscription gives no access to their web site, which is probably reasonable when they get but pennies from Amazon on the $9.99 I'm paying) in order to print out the Sunday magazine crossword puzzle or something like that.  Yes, today we all have free access to the NYT website, but when they had their Times Select section blocked off I did get access for my home delivery $$.  The paid web site is coming back, someway somehow, and I would not want to have to pay for a Kindle subscription and then pay again for that.  

Or to put it simply in less detail, the Kindle is still inferior enough for reading newspapers that I'm sometimes happy to pay $1.50 for a Times in print instead of $.75 for a Kindle version when I am traveling.  Make the experience just a little better, and maybe I'm totally there.

Of course today it was nice in a drizzle on the way to Pathmark to buy Diet 7-Up and Ben & Jerry's that were on sale to read a printed NYT that holds up to a drizzle.  It's been very rainy in NYC the past week so the Kindle utility hasn't been great.  Maybe they can come up with a waterproof cold-weather friendly version with a little Kindle umbrella...

a pint by any other size

A pint of Haagen Dazs is now 14oz, in the latest instance of stealth price increases.  I don't know if a Ben & Jerry's pint is still a pint or not, but they have started to sell more aggresively a 4oz container of ice cream that can go on sale for $1, instead of the 2/$6 pricing that's been more common on the pints, and which doesn't inspire ice cream purchases.  Wednesday was 31¢ scoop night at Baskin-Robbins, and I had my full 3 scoop allotment, 2 World Class Chocolate and one Oreo Cookies 'n' Cream.  But I did not walk from the Baskin-Robbins at 42nd St. to the Baskin-Robbins at 46th St. so I could have six scoops.

The Google Settlement

Many of you have maybe read about the Google settlement.  In the "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" kind of way, Google went to many big college libraries, got their OK to start digitizing their entire collections, and then the publishers and authors go to Google and say maybe you should have spoken to us before you started to do this.  The upshot is that Google has already scanned the books and the settlement would allow Google to do pretty much as it pleases with them with authors having the right to opt out and with Google forking over around 2/3 of the money it gets to publishers and/or authors as the case may be for the money it makes.  Some people have objected to this very strongly.  In order to determine who gets the money, the masters of the Book Registry the settlement establishes may have to look at contracts to see who has electronic rights, so it starts up a new Big Brother with rights to peer into all of our agreements.  The court sets Google up with a monopoly that will last forever.  I'm not as opposed to this as that.  Many countries have things like photocopying funds or lending library money where a library might chip in 3 cents every time a book circulates and then maybe you get $62.89 based on random sampling of library loaning records.  It's money that shows up more easily that way than if every author in Canada has to go after it himself.  Here in the US, we have the courts do what the other branches of government won't with heavy private sector involvement.  It works for me to do it that way.  But my big quibble is that if Google's gone to all this bother to scan my old out of print book from 1972, wouldn't it be nice for them just to give me a copy of it?  So that I don't as an individual author have to butcher my only copy left at considerable personal expense to have for my own book what Google already took the liberty of taking for itself?  The Book Registry big brother might still have to look to see that the rights were reverted to my 1972 book or if I or the publisher have electronic rights under the 1970 contract for my unreverted 1972 book, but at least I have a copy to do with as I please.  This greatly reduces but does not eliminate the objections about the government-sponsored monopoly.  So I did up my letter to suggest this today.  Some powerful estates like Steinbeck and PKDick have banded together and gotten 4 more months from an original May 5 deadline to object or opt out of the settlement, which is a good thing.  If you have a stake in this and want to use some of my language to communicate yourself, you need to send mail to the address below with e-mail copy to the attorneys for Google, the publishers and the authors at the e-mail addy bookclaims@bonizack.com bookclaims@debevoise.com bookclaims@kvn.com.  This as I said is my opinion, and a lot of people hate this settlement vehemently and a lot think it's just fine; the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publisher were the main parties sitting down with Google to hammer this out.

Office of the Clerk

J. Michael McMahon

US District Court for the Southern District of New York

500 Pearl St.

New York, NY  10007

re: Google Book Settlement

Dear Sir:

I am a literary agent with 23 years experience.   The Google Book Settlement will effect virtually all of my clients.

I feel very strongly that the 3.11 Hosted Version for Rightsholders aspect of the Settlement is insufficient, and that Google should also be obliged upon request to provide any Author covered under the Settlement with an electronic version of their work in Word, RTF, PDF or similar common format.

It is very difficult for authors, on an individual basis, to duplicate Google’s efforts in scanning and digitizing these works.  Since Google has already done so with the expectation of benefit to it, which benefit is enshrined in the entirety of the Settlement, these individual authors should not have to duplicate that effort or be entirely dependent on Google’s hosted version in order to gain benefit from the digitization of their work.  This could benefit the authors even in ways that do not compete with Google Book Search.  As an example, it might become easier for authors to market translation rights to their work if they could provide copies electronically for submission and translation instead of having to buy copies (in some instances expensive used copies of older books) which must then be mailed physically at great expense.  If certain fixed costs like typesetting can be reduced, it may make it easier for both publishers and authors to bring more books back into print.

Were this additional requirement added to the Settlement, it would offer clear benefits to the Author Sub-Class and possible benefit to the Publisher Sub-Class without harming Google in a substantial way.  The Settlement would still give court imprimatur to a large, already existing database of digitized work under Google’s control with global terms regarding the use of the database and payment for those usages.  As such, any possible competitor still faces significant barriers of entry in having to go author-by-author in order to compete with what the Settlement would establish.  In undercutting some of the objections that have been made to the Settlement, it would increase acceptance from all stakeholders, and this would ultimately benefit Google and every party to the Settlement.  It would make it seem just a little less like the courts are establishing a Google monopoly now and forever, which is a common thread in many objections I’ve read about to the Settlement.  As such, I urge that 3.11 be broadened to provide Authors with an actual electronic copy of their work and not just a Hosted Version.

cc:  bookclaims@bonizack.com bookclaims@debevoise.com bookclaims@kvn.com

AmEx AmScum

So I'm looking over a change in account terms for my AmEx card and see some new language on telephone communication.

If I call AmEx from any # for any reason, they want to consider this to be permission to inundate that phone # with "special marketing offers."  It can be my land line.  Or my cell line.  It can be a friend's phone # or a relative's phone # if I'm traveling and my card stops working while I'm visiting John-Boy Bilmes.  "any number you give us or from which you call us, including mobile phones."  They can call.  They can send me text messages.  They make it very clear that I "agree to pay any fees or charges you incur for incoming calls or text messages without reimbursement."

Furthermore, I can't ask them if they call to remove me from their calling list.  Oh no, the only way to do this is to go and log on to their web site.  That way, I can stop getting phone calls only if I give them my e-mail address.  Then they can send marketing to that.

And I've gotten marketing e-mails from them.  Reputable e-mailers have a clear easy "unsubscribe" link.  AmEx does not.  You can go to a page to contact customer service, you can click thru to their privacy policy, you can't just click and unsubscribe.

So what AmEx is saying is that they don't care about my time, my privacy, my phone #, my e-mail, anything, other than that they want to do anything and everything they can to circumvent federal law regarding Do Not Call lists and e-mail marketing, and they want to bother me as much as they can and make it as hard as they can for me to get it to stop.

If you don't like this, if you have an AmEx card, please do as I've just done and write to

Kenneth I. Chenault

American Express Co.

World Financial Center

200 Vesey St.

New York, NY  10285

or call 212-640-2000 and ask to speak to Kenneth.

This is the kind of thing that we never notice, because who reads the fine print of their credit card agreement or of the frequent Notice of Changes they hide on page 8 of the bill.  It's the kind of thing reputable companies shouldn't do.  It's the kind of thing that maybe they won't do if enough people complain.

A Real Live Castle

I had a great time last year taking the high road, so I wanted to do another English Country Walk on this year's trip to London.  The ruler of the walk David Wenk was kind enough to swap the scheduled walks for the weekend so that I would be able to do my preferred walk to Bodiam Castle onthe Saturday.

We met up at the London Bridge station to take the train out to Robertsbridge.  It's also possible to take that train from Charing Cross or Waterloo East, but this gives a few extra minutes.  David and I were joined by a Czech and a Slovak who David knew.  When we detrained at Robertsbride I did an extra side walk to recycle some newspapers at this beautiful bin.

We then headed off into Robertsbridge proper where we stopped in at a small used bookstore on the high street, and then we headed off into the countryside.  Passing along the site of an abandoned rail right of way which some 

volunteers are hoping to return to service for a tourist steam train I snapped this nice picture of a pillbox which would have guarded the line during World War II.  We then proceeded into Salehurst for our first visit of the day, stopping to admire the 13th Century Church of St. Mary the Virgin, seen here 

in a back view (center), and then we left Salehurst for the moment to begin some serious walking over to Bodiam Castle. We had good appetites all of us by the time we arrived at the City Inn pub across from the Castle grounds for lunch, and this was quite nice.  I had some potato and wild garlic soup with baked camembert, David got a nice warm burger, and everyone else fish and chips, and while we ate a steam train

 started off on an excursion across the field.

Bodiam Castle itself is just a wonderful, wonderful place to visit, and probably a must for

 anyone wanting to write a fantasy novel with a castle in it.

Wikipedia questions since the walls are not very thick if it was much in the way of a genuine war toy, but in outward appearance it is the classic medieval moated castle and looks really quite gorgeous and also quite foreboding across the moat.  Built in the 14th century and allowed to fall into decay starting in the 17th it's been moderately restored, and it's possible to climb up some of of the towers.  These are views 

looking up from inside the castle, looking across from inside, of the vineyard stretching up the adjacent hillside from one of the towers, and then looking across from that tower to more of the adjoining countryside.

There are bigger castles and smaller, of course.  This one is kind of small, while Windsor Castle which we got to see from the air both coming and going into Heathrow is quite big. But even at Windsor Castle, the tallest tower is only so tall.  And certainly at Bodiam Castle climbing the towers is no easy task.  The stone spiral stairs are narrow and bendy and an old or arthritic body is no match for their treachery, and even the fleetest of foot will be hard-pressed to go charging up and down these stairs.  Maybe the bigger Windsor Castle with so much pageantry gives a little more space to the staircases, but your garden variety castle...???  I kind of think not, and the next time I read a novel that talks about the old wizard's room being at the top of some eight-story high castle tower well apart from everyone I'm going to suggest the author do a little more research.  Does the elderly wizard teleport?  Did he have a knee replacement?  Are these castle owners very very rich to build a tower so so high?  

The trip back to Salehurst from a different direction took us along some paths less traveled through the hills of Sussex.  This is hops country, not as much now as it used to be, but here we traveled next to one hops field where the hops may just be starting to grow at ground level and then climb the stakes kind of tomato like over the course of the growing season and then in the

next picture the two gleaming white dots in the distance would be two of the three that dot the roof of the oast houses which are used to dry the hops before the brewing process.

We stopped back in Salehurst, visiting the pub round the corner for some early evening refreshment.  David Wenk took a picture of Wonder Woman coming by for some private function at the pub, but he can post that on his blog if he wants.  We were running a bit late and made our way back from Salehurst to Robertsbridge by road instead of by country path, and had around twenty minutes at a train-side pub before getting a 20:10 back to London.

Two final pictures.

One is of a stile, the joy of the English Country Walk, which must be surmounted crossing from field to field along the way, designed to keep the footpaths open ony to dedicated walkers and not to motorcycles or snowmobiles or lambs or cows or nags or anything or anyone that can't go up and down one of these.  This walk included one recently rebuilt cadillac of stiles, and then some on a little used footpath that are in such major disarray as to make the walk virtually impassable. We also got to cross a roman road at one point, now rebuilt for cars that go zipping along the ancient byway at such a good rate of speed that the great frogger himself would heartily approve of our scurrying.

Last year's River Towns of Essex walk had a more diverse set of walking experiences which allowed me to see more different kinds of things, but the centerpiece of the Bodiam Castle walk was truly exceptional, and there's much better shopping at the Castle gift shop than at any stop along the River Towns walk.  In fact, I got some of the gifts of chocolate for my table at the London Book Fair from the Bodiam Castle walk.  The fudge hand-made in Kent was a little disappointing, but one of the visitors at the Fair who selected the Kendall Mint Cakes was kind enough to share one with Eddie and I, and that was a sublime mint cake experience that I would happily have again.  There were other varieties of foodstuffs made locally in the UK at or near National Trust sights to go along with some of the usual gift shop items.

I'd recommend either walk, and I hope I'll be able to try another English Country Walk the next time I am in the UK.  And I'll say as I did last year, that if you are going to be in London at any point in the near future you really should check out the calendar and experience one of these walks for yourself.