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Author: Ryan Harvey

Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Excalibur on Blu-ray

Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Excalibur on Blu-ray

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excalibur-blu-ray-cover1Excalibur (1981)
Directed by John Boorman. Starring Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi, Paul Geoffrey, Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne.

One land! One king! 1080 lines of resolution!

Did you know that there is a re-make of Excalibur is in pre-production? Apparently, the lawyers at Legendary Pictures have forgotten that Le Morte d’Arthur and its associated characters are in the public domain and have been since the bleeding Dark Ages. No more about the re-make (for now).

The original, Once and Future Excalibur, is a crowning piece of high fantasy from the 1980s. It is also my favorite film version of the Arthurian legends. (Apologies to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Most movies about King Arthur, especially those before Excalibur upped the ante, are tatty costume dramas lacking magic, either cinematic or literal, and which feel like they were adapted from children’s editions of the story. (Apologies to Howard Pyle.) None of these movies connect to the sensations that the original telling of the legends, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, to Chrétein de Troyes, to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, create in me when I read them. A sense of dark mysticism pervades through the oldest versions of King Arthur’s myth: a mixture of paganism and early Christianity, a connection to Faerie, the eternal struggle between chaos and civilization. Excalibur, ignoring attempts to either look “realistic” or to resemble the generic expectation of a Hollywood costume drama, drives into the spiritual heart of King Arthur and emerges with something fantastic and often breathtaking.

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semicolonNo, the title of this post is not a typo.

I have recently spent some quality time pondering the most misunderstood of all punctuation marks: the semicolon. Specifically, what role should the semicolon play in fiction? If any?

If you cruise around Google a bit, you will find that most fiction writers come down hard on this strange Moreau of colon and comma. The post on this site is one example, and the writer quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s screed against the typographical mark: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

This shows that Mr. Vonnegut had very little faith in high school. You should know how to use a semicolon before you get to college, or else your English teachers have really been taking standing naps at the podium. (This colorful site does a nice rundown on usage.)

Okay, so I get the gist of it from the majority of fiction advisers: semicolon is sorta strange looking, works better in academic and nonfiction work, and writers can get the same grammatical effect by turning those independent clauses into two separate sentences. And there’s always the em dash (which could start up another debate.)

Except, right as I was reading over this advice, I immediately came across two books from major writers with the semicolon putting in a great amount of time — and doing amazing things.

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“Are You Not Still Entertained?”: Gladiator’s 10-Year Oscar Anniversary

“Are You Not Still Entertained?”: Gladiator’s 10-Year Oscar Anniversary

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gladiator-posterAs of Sunday evening, The King’s Speech is the newest Academy Award winner for Best Picture. I am sure a virulent backlash against the English period drama is already underway, but let the record show that I thoroughly enjoyed that movie. It is not my personal pick for the best film of 2010. I would have liked Black Swan, Inception, or True Grit to win, but such was not to be, and The King’s Speech as a winner doesn’t anger me.

However, I prophesy that The King’s Speech will go down in history as one of the Oscar winners with scant staying power. Remember Shakespeare in Love? Chances are you haven’t thought of it much at all. The same can be said for numerous winners since the awards started in 1929: movies that had their moment, and then faded back as the “losers” turned into perennials. No one has much interest in Cavalcade (winner for 1933, the year of King Kong and Duck Soup) or The Great Ziegfield (winner for 1936) today; 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth is the butt of jokes about “Worst Best Picture Ever”; and even the recent A Beautiful Mind has blipped off the pop-culture radar fast, while Crash’s win tends to get people upset.* I can even mount an argument that the massively popular win for Forrest Gump has been overshadowed in the ensuing years by the everlasting popularity of two of its competitors, The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction.

But many Academy wins have lasted. It is amazing to realize that Casablanca was a surprise victory in 1943, upsetting favorite Watch on the Rhine. When was the last time you quoted or heard someone quote Watch on the Rhine? Other enduring winners include The Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, Rocky, Platoon, and from the last twenty years The Silence of the Lambs (this year is its twentieth anniversary as a winner) and Unforgiven.

Which brings me to this year’s tenth-anniversary winner. Where does Ridley Scott’s Roman epic Gladiator stand today, a decade after it received five Oscars at the 73rd Annual Academy Awards?

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How to Support Peter S. Beagle with The Last Unicorn Blu-ray

How to Support Peter S. Beagle with The Last Unicorn Blu-ray

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last-unicorn-blu-rayToday is the street date for the Blu-ray release of The Last Unicorn, the 1982 Rankin/Bass-ITC Entertainment animated film version of Peter S. Beagle’s classic 1968 fantasy novel, for which Beagle also wrote the screenplay. After a poor-quality DVD release in 2004, which came from inadequate masters and was presented pan & scan, Lionsgate Entertainment released an excellent two-disc DVD in 2007 as a 25th Anniversary Edition. Now that version is making the leap to 1080 lines of resolution for the new generation of Hi-Def presentation.

But, if you plan on purchasing either the new Blu-ray disc (which includes a DVD copy) or the still available two-disc DVD, please buy them through Conlan Press, the company owned by Connor Cochran, Peter Beagle’s business manager.

Why? As Conlan Press explains on the page for the 25th Anniversary DVD:

Except for the copies that were purchased through Conlan Press via this website, or at Peter’s sales table at various conventions, none of the other Last Unicorn DVDs have ever paid him a cent. That’s right — at least 1.5 million DVDs have been sold around the world since 1999, and only the 4,000 copies sold here have earned him any money. From all the rest, Peter has gotten absolutely nothing.

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This Just In: Borders Files for Chapter 11

This Just In: Borders Files for Chapter 11

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borders-booksJohn O’Neill has already written about this, but I just got the actual corporate balderdash letter. . . .

I received the email today through the Borders Rewards Program (I live next door to one of the stores, so I have to belong) in which Mike Edwards, the CEO of the Ann Arbor-based, MI chain, discusses the, ahem, “plans” for the future. Those plans are centered on a major announcement made earlier today:

[Fluff, fluff, ongoing mission, enlightenment, blah, blah, blah, but . . .] because of the ongoing impact of the difficulties of the U.S. economy, coupled with the rapidly changing bookselling environment, we must restructure Borders and reposition our business for long-tern success. We determined that the best path for Borders to have the ability to achieve this reorganization is through the Chapter 11 process, which we commenced February 16.

Edwards continues to state that the stores will remain open for business, the Rewards program remains in effect, gift cards will be honored, eBook libraries are perfectly safe. But, still, bankruptcy and all.

A Bloomberg article that can explain this better than I can.

But I’m not afraid for Borders . . . Howard A. Jones’s Desert of Souls will pull up sales! (Except that I bought my copy through Amazon. Uhm, sorry Borders. I see what you mean about “changing bookselling environment.” But I did get it a day before the street date!)

Back to the Ninth Legion . . . Yep, Still Lost: The Eagle

Back to the Ninth Legion . . . Yep, Still Lost: The Eagle

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the_eagle_posterThe Eagle (2011)
Directed by Kevin Macdonald. Starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Bell, Donald Sutherland, Mark Strong, Tahar Rahim.

Less than a year after Centurion was released theatrically on a small number screens, along comes another historical adventure film telling the tale of the vanished Ninth Legion. Except The Eagle got released on many screens. In a just and fair movie world, the situation would be the opposite. But anybody who has every griped about the Academy Awards knows that we live in no such world. (And by the way . . . no Best Score nomination for Daft Punk’s work on TRON Legacy?)

The Eagle is the opposite of Neil Marshall’s incredibly energetic, almost gonzo Centurion. Marshall’s film uses a great cast to flesh out its characters and themes of survival and duty while keeping an insane and glorious momentum. At every turn, Centurion does its damndest to keep audience’s adrenaline high. The Eagle, given greater dramatic space for characters between battle scenes, sketches out complete blanks for protagonists, contains no sense of the Roman frontier, and features poorly shot and edited battle scenes that emit out not single nanowatt of excitement. (Oh, I’ll be generous. Not a single microwatt of excitement.) No wonder Focus Features unceremoniously dumped this film out in early February, during Valentine’s Day weekend, up against a kid’s CGI animated movie and romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler. The Eagle is totally disposable.

And given the subject matter, it’s a shame. I hate to see any movie mess up the wonders that the Roman Empire can deliver in terms of action and spectacle. It takes a tremendous amount of work to make me dislike a film about the empire, but dammit if director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play) and his cast and crew put in overtime to produce a boring film.

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Nerd Empowerment Role-Model: Penny Gadget

Nerd Empowerment Role-Model: Penny Gadget

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inspector-gadget-pennyI wonder if elementary school children today have as inspiring a model on animated television shows as I did when I was ten years old. My hero was Penny Gadget from the syndicated series Inspector Gadget.

Why? Because somebody my age, armed with a computer (a proto-laptop disguised as a book) and an amazing wristwatch (able to fire lasers and tracers and whatever else the plot needed) was stopping a massive global criminal enterprise on a weekly basis while the adults around her achieved nothing except looking like buffoons.

Admittedly, in the long view MAD is an incompetently run Evil Secret Organization, staffed exclusively with dingbats who constantly fail to kill an opponent who can’t tell the difference between his own dog and his own dog wearing a wig. Perhaps MAD’s leader, the Blofeld-in-Steel villain Dr. Claw, has some intelligence — he has a Ph.D., apparently, although maybe it was through a diploma mill — but this “evil genius” regularly sees his world conquest plans collapse because of a ten-year-old. A ten-year-old he occasionally captures but never recognizes. Yeah, I’m going to go with “diploma mill.”

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The Mystical Viking: Valhalla Rising

The Mystical Viking: Valhalla Rising

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valhalla_rising_poster_dkValhalla Rising (2009)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Starring Mads Mikkelson, Jamie Sives, Gary Lewis, Ewan Stewart, Maarten Stevenson.

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn went into his film Valhalla Rising right as he was wrapping up post-production on Bronson, the bizarre biopic about British prisoner Charlie Bronson that turned into his biggest success and pushed star Tom Hardy into the front lines. But Bronson surprised many viewers, going against expectations of what a biopic about Charlie Bronson would be like. In the same way, Valhalla Rising flips around the conceptual idea of “Viking movie” and is unlike anything viewers might expect from an historical epic about skull-crushers like the medieval Norsemen. Valhalla Rising had its festival premiere in 2009 and a theatrical release in mid-2010, but it sits defiantly outside the mainstream. If El Topo is an “Acid Western,” then consider Valhalla Rising an “Acid Viking Movie.”

Although it clocks in at a lean 92 minutes with credits, Refn’s film moves at a slow pace and contains vast silences within a harsh landscape. The first twelve minutes contain only a single line of dialogue, and this sparse style remains consistent throughout the running time. Red-hued violence occasionally breaks out, done with no modern stylization, but there are no “action set-pieces.” This is a movie concerned with its tone and texture, telling an oblique story through implication. And for what it attempts to do, it succeeds: this is a transcendent film that creates an authentic sense of what Nordic life in the eleventh century must have felt like. Its taciturn introspection says an enormous amount about early Christian and late Pagan mysticism.

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Centurion: How Many Times Can I Use “Brutal” in a Review?

Centurion: How Many Times Can I Use “Brutal” in a Review?

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2852-FINAL_CENTURION 70x100op 50 %.inddCenturion (2010)
Directed by Neil Marshall. Starring Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko.

If you did not see Centurion during its U.S. theatrical release, that’s probably because you blinked. The British film ran in only a small number of theaters in August on limited engagements, with a simultaneous release on Video on Demand. It played at the Nuart Theater a few miles from my home for a week, and I was unable to get to it. I regretted it at the time because the trailers got my thrill glands pumping: a bloody historical action movie starring a Roman legion. Now that is my kind of fun! I also had faith in director Neill Marshall; I had enjoyed all of his previous movies, and they more than proved that he could handle violent mayhem.

Now that Centurion is on DVD and Blu-Ray, I’ve been able to see what Mr. Marhsall did with the murky historical legend of the Ninth Legion: he made a bloody historical action movie out of it.

Centurion is as straightforward as they come, something the director admits: “It’s not meant to be historically perfect. I’m picking up on a legend and exploring it . . . it’s an action thriller.” The Ninth Legion, which supposedly vanished on an expedition to Scotland in the second century, serves as a springboard for Marhsall to return to the territory of “soldiers-behind-the-lines” from his first movie, the werewolf thriller Dog Soldiers, and sprinkle it with Xenophon’s Anabasis and various World War II movies featuring tough guys doing what has to be done. It is a stripped-to-the-bone bloodletting, filled with decapitations, throat-slittings, head-crushings, and any other mutilation you care to mention.

Not every movie needs deep psychological character explorations or nuanced drama. Centurion knows what it wants, runs after it, and spikes it gorily to the ground. If you think you might enjoy this film, then you will enjoy it — Marhsall delivers the goods as promised.

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“And the Score at the Text Break Is…” My Favorite Soundtracks for Writing

“And the Score at the Text Break Is…” My Favorite Soundtracks for Writing

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jerry-goldsmith-conductsI always write with music playing. That’s not much of an admission. A few writers prefer to work in silence, but most that I have talked to say that they need to have music in the background while they work at their keyboards or notebooks. Some writers like to listen with headphones on as an extra seal against the rest of the world, but I only do that if I’m working in a public environment. Otherwise, I let my massively stuffed iPod play through the huge speakers in my apartment to surround me with music as I work.

Just as every writer has a different method of writing, so does every writer have difference musical preferences for underscoring his or her work. But “underscore” is the key word, since I have discovered that film music is perhaps the number one choice for music to write by. One reason for this is that film scores usually lack lyrics (at least in English; Latin chanting is a standby, Ave Satani!) that can distract from the author’s own words. Film music, regardless of its style, also inherently has a dramatic feel that parallels how writers often think.

The situation is a bit different for me. I do listen to film scores while writing, but that’s because film music is my favorite form of music. I have listened to film scores more than any other type of music since high school, when I turned into an avid collector of soundtrack albums. My collection is now somewhere in the thousands, and ranges in obscurity from John Williams’s Star Wars scores to films nobody remembers except film score collectors (The Cassandra Crossing). The chronological scope of my collection is just as wide, from silent movie scores to films released a few weeks ago. Film music is one of my deep passions.

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