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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
November 15, 2009
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Cirque, Acrostics, eGames, Ringworld
There is only one thing that could have dragged me to a vampire movie, and
that was the solemn assurance from my fifteen-year-old that this vampire
movie (a) had actual characters, (b) did not sexualize vampirism, and ( c) was
not the same old nonsense.
With those promises firmly in place, my wife and I docilely followed our
daughter to see Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, with the firm
expectation that (a) I would hate it and (b) my wife would sleep through it.
Neither happened. To our surprise, it was entertaining from beginning to end.
It mocked many of the old vampire clichés, and had an interesting storyline
with a plethora of quirky characters -- including the two teenage boys who,
best friends at the start (and perhaps still), find themselves "destined" by Mr.
Tiny, manipulator extraordinaire, to have a battle to the death in some later
sequel.
Based on a series of Young Adult novels, The Vampire's Assistant takes liberties
with the plots of the books -- but this is not a bad thing. While some diehard
fans of the books will be (and have been) outraged, the fact is that the book
series grew like Topsy.
Screenwriters Brian Helgeland and Paul Weitz (who also directed) took an
unmanageable series of books and drew from several to create a very good
script for the first movie.
The character of Larten Crepsley -- the Merlin/Obi-wan/Dumbledore of this
story -- is given a wonderful, contradictory personality, and as played by John
C. Reilly may be the single element that makes this movie soar.
Ken Watanabe as Mr. Tall, Salma Hayek as Madame Truska, Ray Stevenson as
the villain Murlaugh, and Michael Cerveris as Mr. Tiny all give strong
performances, and Willem Dafoe is very good as the underused Gavner Purl.
But the show absolutely depends on the actors playing teenagers -- newcomer
Chris Massoglia is real as the down-to-earth hero, Darren, and Josh
Hutcherson (Zathura, Bridge to Terabithia, Journey to the Center of the Earth) is
superb as his best friend/nemesis Steve.
Add to their performances Patrick (Almost Famous) Fugit's sympathetic turn
as Evra the Snake Boy and Jessica Carlson's sweet depiction of Rebecca the
Monkey Girl, and you have as strong an ensemble of teenage characters as I've
seen.
The only mistake is that Darren's family is treated like the Dursleys in the
Harry Potter movies -- foolish caricatures who subtract from the reality of the
story.
The movie is almost gone from Greensboro -- after all, I'm not going to go to a
vampire movie on the first weekend -- but it will soon be out on DVD and is
well worth watching -- and, I think, owning.
Unfortunately, with a $70 million budget and a worldwide gross so far of $22.7
million, the movie looks like a disastrous failure, financially -- which suggests
that it's unlikely that any sequels will be made. What a shame. Because this
movie's quality is head-and-shoulders above Twilight, which violates all my
rules about what makes vampire movies tolerable.
Ironically, I'll bet some people stayed away from Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's
Assistant because they assumed it was just a rip-off of Twilight -- though the
Cirque du Freak books have been out far longer than the Twilight books, and I
wouldn't be surprised if Stephenie Meyer had been influenced by them.
Writer-Director Paul Weitz can't be blamed for the financial failure of this
movie, certainly. But perhaps he can be, when you consider that his metier is
subtlety -- as in About a Boy and In Good Company. And "blame" should be
shared by Brian Helgeland, who, after all, is merely the author of L.A.
Confidential, A Knight's Tale, and Mystic River.
No, it's all my fault. If I had reviewed Vampire's Assistant earlier, then millions
of people, seeing that it had my approval, would have bought tickets and made
it a smash hit.
I hope this movie hits so big on DVD that a sequel gets made after all.
Meanwhile, though, if this first movie is the only one ever made, it is still a fully
satisfying entertainment.
*
I like most kinds of crossword puzzles. Cryptics, for example (the usual kind in
Britain), add a layer of decoding and doublechecking that makes the player feel
much smarter for solving each clue.
And these days, hardly anybody bothers to make regular crossword puzzles
that don't have some kind of gimmick or motif that adds more satisfaction.
My favorite kind of crossword, though, isn't technically a crossword at all.
Acrostics consist of rows of blanks and spaces that, when solved, spell out a
quotation. You fill in the blanks by answering word and trivia questions below,
and matching up the numbered letters in the answers and the quotation.
I think part of my pleasure in acrostics comes from the fact that the quotation
is actual language -- not just words, but words in context. So much of the
process of solving comes from knowing how language works -- knowing what is
grammatically and orthographically possible or likely.
But the best thing is that when you're done, you not only have a filled-in grid,
you also have the quotation itself, which can be amusing, informative, or
thought-provoking. In short, you actually get a prize at the end, in addition to
the satisfaction of having filled it all in.
Acrostics are generally not as hard as cryptics, though in truth all crossword-type puzzles depend, for their difficulty, entirely on the clues. As Games
magazine proves with the last puzzle in every issue, you can take the exact
same grid and make it either easy or hard, depending on which set of clues you
decide to work from.
MENSA, the high-IQ club, helps support itself and its activities by publishing
Official MENSA Puzzle Books, and their series of MENSA Big Book of
Acrostics are the best acrostic books I've seen.
Author Michael Ashley does a superb job of choosing quotations, and if he
tends to rely on books of anecdotes and witticisms, as well as Dave Barry and
Bill Bryson, that only guarantees that there'll be plenty of humor. He steers
clear of political stuff, and my only criticism of this series is that so far it has
only two volumes.
No, there's a second criticism. Because the first two volumes came out in
2008, it looked like a semiannual series. But all of 2009 has passed without a
single entry, which suggests that it didn't sell well enough and it has been
canceled.
Isn't that the way my life goes? The stuff I like best is too often such a minority
taste that the cold dead hand of Adam Smith slaps me down again and again.
Since I have appreciated Michael Ashley's acrostics, I looked him up on
Amazon and discovered that he has also edited a series of books of "Historical
Whodunits." It sounds like an interesting kind of fiction anthology, and so I'll
be giving them a try.
*
Computer Games are dominated these days by first-person shooters and other
mammoth games that require that you invest many hours of twitching and
adrenaline to win. I admire these games. I love watching other people
demonstrate them for me. I'm just too old, and too busy, to play them.
That's because none of them have a "geezer" setting that slows the game down
enough that those of us with fading synapses have a hope of winning.
This lack of customizability has always puzzled me. Sure, in an online game
you all have to play at the same speed, but when I'm playing alone, against the
computer, what harm would it do to allow me to set the speed where I need it
so I can enjoy the game?
Yes, they often have a "novice" setting -- but it's not the same thing. Usually
"novice" is intended as a training version of the game. But I don't need that.
I'm not stupid, I'm just slow. Permanently and irrevocably slow. And the
gamewrights generally shut me out.
Which is why I'm enjoying a series of games from eGames --
http://www.egames.com -- which offers a wide selection of inexpensive, clever,
and usually well-designed games of every genre.
This means that I can buy and download games that take no longer than the
time I can afford to devote to them; games that aren't fast twitchers, but
instead allow me to take my time to think. But I don't have to give up high-quality graphics, and often the games are wonderfully creative and
entertaining.
For instance, for a month I played Faerie Solitaire almost every day. While,
as a fantasy writer myself, I found the storyline to be a little silly (I usually just
skipped the story bits), the various solitaire games were absolutely compelling.
Besides a vast variety of spreads, the games also enabled you to acquire special
powers -- like a few peek-aheads per game, or a few opportunities to change
the top card, or other "cheats" which, because they are within the rules, allow
you to develop strategies to get through some incredibly hard levels.
Weirdly enough, however, after a couple of months the game suddenly
disappeared from my computer. When the very helpful manager of the website
allowed me to reinstall it, the same thing happened again a few days later. But
that's OK -- I had essentially worked my way through the whole thing and had
received far more than my money's worth in enjoyment.
Right now I'm still working my way, a few screens at a time, through Magic
Ball, which is far and away the best pinball game I've ever played.
It doesn't look like a pinball game, but it is. You control, not a pair of flippers,
but a bow-shaped paddle that lets you bounce the ball back into the screen.
And instead of just racking up points on an unchanging array of bumpers and
such, you're given a scene to methodically destroy.
Yep, this is the ultimate knock-em-down game. As your ball bounces around
through the scene, it destroys everything it touches -- though sometimes it has
to touch four or five times.
Meanwhile, the game starts throwing things at you that aren't the ball. There
are diamonds and coins for you to try to catch and collect. There are cool
features you can acquire for a few seconds at a time -- one that turns your
paddle into a cannon, for instance, or a laser; one that makes the ball "drunk"
so its path is quite unpredictable; one that brings in an "atom robot" which,
once it lands, you can blow up to break open a large chunk of the field; and
dozens of others.
One of the main delights of the game is the art. Different levels take you to
different places, and while there are some who will be offended by the
deliberate and comic treatment of the "natives" -- human and animal -- of
each habitat, it seems to me to be done with affection and humor. The choice
of sounds when you collide with things is especially entertaining.
The prices are, in my opinion, more than reasonable for the value you'll receive.
And you can easily buy these games as a gift for someone else -- as long as you
have their email address.
Just one word of warning: When you buy a game, you get a long, long letter of
instructions. What you don't know (unless they've listened to my complaint
and revised it!) is that the instruction letter includes, at the very end -- so it's
not visible on the first screen -- the key codes you must use to activate the
game.
It's not in a separate email, so just keep reading the instructions in their bossy,
imperious tone, till you get to the codes you need -- and remember that the
game itself will not be in that tone!
*
In my ongoing love affair with audiobooks on my Nano -- all downloaded from
Audible.com -- there have been some losers.
For instance, while I have fond memories of reading Jo's Boys, by Louisa May
Alcott, when I was about eight years old, it certainly does take a long time for
any kind of story to get started, and the tone is distant and a little simpering.
Unlike Little Women and Little Men, to which it is a sequel, Jo's Boys simply
doesn't hold up.
But it's certainly no worse than the sequel to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
-- Tom Sawyer, Detective -- which exists solely to show that Mark Twain can
write as bad a book as anyone. You can have a pair of books that are classics,
and follow them with a miserable self-imitation that fails completely, and it
doesn't erase any of the quality of the first two.
I also gave The Pickwick Papers a try, and while it's possible that the book
might get better if I stuck with it, life is simply too short. The "humor" of the
book depends on its being a parody of a kind of writing and a way of life that
simply no longer exist. The result was that it was not even slightly amusing --
though that may have been partly the result of a rather second-rate reading.
Perhaps a reader with a genuine and droll English accent might have made the
experience more pleasurable, but the plodding flat American accent of the
humorless reader made it deadly.
Listening to mediocre readers certainly makes you appreciate the good ones!
Tom Parker's reading of Larry Niven's classic novel Ringworld, for instance, is
simply superb. You quickly cease to notice Parker at all -- you don't really
notice that it's being read at all. You're simply absorbing the story.
And Ringworld is a book that holds up better and better each time I reread it.
Larry Niven emerged in the world of science fiction at precisely the time that a
lot of writers were rejecting (or "moving beyond") the classic science-based
fiction of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and their ilk.
Some truly brilliant work was done at that time, led, perhaps, by Harlan
Ellison with his own brilliant short stories and his Dangerous Visions
anthologies.
Meanwhile, Heinlein himself -- the master of the science-adventure story --
had started writing the self-indulgent sex-obsessed bushwa that marred the
end of his career.
So it was up to Larry Niven to keep the tradition of Heinleinesque fiction alive.
At no time, however, did Niven imitate Heinlein. Instead, he matched Heinlein's
quality while telling stories that bore the stamp of Niven's own astonishing
imagination and wit.
Ringworld is set in a far future when at least two different alien species have
made direct contact with the human race. One, the Kzin, is a violent predatory
race, from which the Wookies of Star Wars were obviously stolen. Humans
fought several vicious wars with them, and we would certainly have been wiped
out if we had not acquired a few bits of superior technology from another
species.
Then there are the Puppeteers, which make the Kzin seem almost human.
With three legs and two heads, the Puppeteers are certainly not designed to use
human furniture. The "heads" each have a single eye and a mouth -- whose
lips are used the way we use fingers. The brain, however, is located in the
thorax, between the two long, slender necks.
The result is that the heads look like a pair of sock puppets -- hence the name
"Puppeteers" for the species.
The Puppeteers are absolute cowards (or so it seems). They will go to
astonishing lengths to keep themselves safe from any and all dangers. As the
novel opens, they are moving their planets on a vast voyage to another galaxy
-- to avoid being around when our galactic core explodes.
Along the way, they have run across a solar system whose inhabitants have
taken most of the planetary mass and reshaped it into an incredible world -- a
vast ring, many thousands of miles wide, that encircles their sun like a ribbon.
The result is so much living room that trillions of people could dwell there
without bumping into each other.
But the technology to make such a world is so mind-numbingly advanced that
the Puppeteers are terrified that the makers of the Ringworld might be a danger
to them. Therefore they put together a tiny expedition to visit and observe the
Ringworld and report on it.
The party consists of one Puppeteer -- an insane one, by definition, since he is
willing to take risks -- one Kzin, and two humans. One of them, Louis Wu,
narrates the book; the other, Teela Brown, is brought along because she's
lucky.
In fact, that's the central scientific conceit of the story -- that it is possible to
breed for luckiness. Because human population is being severely limited, the
chance to have more than two children is determined by lottery. Thus there
are several generations of humans who exist only because of lottery wins, and
Teela Brown is the luckiest of them all.
Whatever luck means! Because a lot of what happens to this expedition is not
what anyone would call lucky!
A few things don't hold up well. Niven, to avoid swearing (the book was
published in 1970), uses the unfortunate substitute "tanj," which is an
acronym of "There Ain't No Justice." The word is only occasionally irritating,
but nowadays it simply feels unnecessary.
The other thing that hasn't help up well is the sex. In the late 1960s and early
1970s writers in every genre were reveling in the then-new freedom to show
their characters having sex. The result is that sex acts are included that are
neither necessary nor interesting today, in our more jaded time.
I think if Niven were writing Ringworld today, he would impatiently skip over or
merely refer to sex acts that he overdescribed (though never pornographically),
as so many other writers did in that era.
But these irritations are rare, and can't really be counted as flaws -- I
remember that when I first read the book, I was of that time, and simply
accepted these aspects of the story.
What matters is that Niven's clear, strong writing, his inventive world creation,
and his delightful characters keep this book alive as one of the great works of
science fiction.
And it's so entertaining that listening to it can keep you awake on a long, late-night drive. So yes, Ringworld can save your life!
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