Gene Phillips's Blog, page 91

RTO #1: THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU

I recently reread Wells' 1896 book THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, which many know best from its three major film adaptations, as well as about two dozen knockoff horror-films, mostly from the Philippines.



What I found most interesting is that in Chapter 14, that little old beast-maker Moreau relates his theory of human morality to the viewpoint character:

"Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into cour...

RANDOM THOTH-OBSERVATIONS

Well, since beginning this blog I haven't yet found a method of streamlining my comments so as to become more productive.  I have three other blogs, two of which remain pretty active, but I don't want this one to drop off the map.

My current plan, then, is to avoid long essays like ELECTRA COMPLICATIONS, and pursue shorter, hopefully no less pithy "thoth-observations" (a very bad pun on the hackneyed phrase "thoughts and observations).  If I keep trying to do the sort of long essays...

ELECTRA COMPLICATIONS

Though I'm trying not to recycle an inordinate number of my fantasy-film reviews on this blog, I want to examine in greater depth the concepts suggested by this passage from my review of the 2012 SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN:

Apparently Magnus' wife does die naturally, but following that event, Ravenna uses her sorcery to stage a fake attack on herself, so that Magnus can come to her rescue and be ensorcelled by Ravenna's charms.  This duplicity leads to the film's strongest scene, wh...

"WHAT WE HAVE TO DO" VS. "WHAT WE WANT TO DO"

I've only made it halfway through Marina Warner's NO GO THE BOGEYMAN, whose first few chapters I talked about here.  The book's theme seems rather sprawling, and she's been accused of simply accreting loads and loads of data and dumping it into a thematically disorganized book.  I won't have an opinion on that until I've reached the end, but I'll say that even IF I find it true to some extent, I credit Warner with having gone the extra mile in her researches.  I'm particularly...

REVIEW: HEIR OF SEA AND FIRE

In my review of Patricia McKillip's THE RIDDLE MASTER OF HED, I wrote:

RIDDLE-MASTER is a solid effort, though on many occasions it feels too transparently like what it is, a setup-novel for the next two parts—which, my memory tells me, read much better. 

 

I finally slogged my way through the middle book in McKillip's trilogy, and by my choice of words it should be apparent that I didn't get a sense that the "middle book" read better than the first part.

Where the first book left...

THERE'S NO IDYLL IN IDEOLOGY

Though I sometimes explore gender issues in my film-criticism, I wasn't moved to do so in my review of OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL. 

However, such was not the case with some contemporary reviewers, as can be seen in this Film.com review.  In this review Elisabeth Rappe takes issue with the Sam Raimi flick, arguing that GREAT AND POWERFUL is a "major step back" from the Oz books of originator L. Frank Baum.  Rappe says of Baum:

Though Baum brushed off claims that Oz was at all poli...

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (2013)

Note to readers: I've decided to reprint my film-blog's review of OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL here as a prelude to a forthcoming essay on the relation of fantasy and ideology.)

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As a film OZ is far from being "powerful," and has no shot at all at being "great."

I have nothing against latter-day talents doing remixes of well-known works, be they famous books like L. Frank Baum's WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ or its best known cinematic adaptation from 1939. Indeed...

EVIL EYEFULS

I'm currently reading Marina Warner's NO GO THE BOGEYMAN, which covers a wide variety of what might be called "cannibal ogre" myths.  Some of them appear in actual myths, as with the tale of Polyphemus in Homer's ODYSSEY, or Kronos' devouring of his children.  Some deal with literal folktale ogres, while others deal with human beings who act like ogres, such as the evil stepmother in the Grimms' recounting of "The Juniper Tree" and Titus Andronicus in Shakespeare's play of that name...

MYTHIC DREAMS

I've always found it a source of aggravation that I rarely have mythic dreams of the kind H.P. Lovecraft describes in his old letters.  Most of the dreams I can remember are depressingly bland remixes of everyday life, with only mild if any symbolism.

For instance, some time after I retired from my job at the end of 2010, I dreamed of my place of work as a desolate shell, which had been (so far as I reasoned in the dream) temporarily closed down so that massive work could be done on the p...

RACE, TO THE FUTURE

When one submits one's work to critique by other writers, it can be interesting to see what sort of prism the reviewers may look though.

My Big Long Fantasy-Project-- long both in physical terms and in terms of how long I've worked on it-- falls more or less into the category of the "post-apocalyptic" novel.  A catastrophe destroys the infrastructure of civilization and reduces humankind down to numbers with which a writer can deal more easily.  Five hundred years after the cataclysm...