Asking the Wrong Questions

The first thing you notice about Crimson Peak is how deliberately, consciously old-fashioned it is.  This is a movie that starts with the camera zooming in on the cloth-bound cover of a book bearing the film's title, and whose scene breaks (chapter breaks, we should say) are signaled by irising in on a prop or a character's face, as if we were watching an old-timey silent film.  The second thing you notice is that it's a movie for and about bookish people.  The heroine is a writer, and characters name-drop Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle as if these authors and their work were fixtures in their lives.  The third thing you notice--though seeing as Crimson Peak comes to us from director Guillermo del Toro, most of us will have walked into the movie theater expecting it--is how gorgeous this movie is, every set dressed to within an inch of its life, the late Victorian interiors groaning with heavy furniture, busy wallpaper, and knickknacks on every a...

When coming to write about The Martian , Ridley Scott's space/disaster/survival movie about an astronaut stranded on Mars, it's hard to resist the impulse to draw comparisons.  The Martian is perhaps best-described as a cross between Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity and Robert Zemeckis's Cast Away .  Its focus on the engineering challenges that survival on Mars poses for hero Mark Watney, and on the equally thorny problem of retrieving him before his meager food supply runs out, is reminiscent of Ron Howard's Apollo 13 .  The fact that Watney is played by Matt Damon (and that the commander of his Mars mission is played by Jessica Chastain) immediately brings to mind Christopher Nolan's Interstellar .  The problem with all these comparisons is not so much that they show up The Martian 's flaws, as that they throw into sharper relief the very narrow limits of what it's trying to be. Gravity and Cast Away , for example, are both, fundamentally, films about wha...

Two years ago, writing after the end of Hannibal 's first season, I called the show a rich but ultimately unsatisfying feast.  I admired a lot about Bryan Fuller's take on Thomas Harris's novels and their sadistic, cannibalistic central character: its use of visuals and music to set an almost oppressively dreamlike tone, its willingness to flout the conventions of good storytelling, its clever reinvention and reuse of the central set-pieces of Harris's novels.  But at the end of its first season, I still didn't have a strong sense of what Hannibal wanted to be, what story it wanted to tell.  The show seemed to be having far too much fun staging gruesome tableaux of murder victims and letting its demonic title character (played with a perfect dry mischievousness by Mads Mikkelsen) pull the wool over all the other characters' eyes.  What it wanted to achieve with any of those elements, what emotion it wanted to evoke, was utterly unclear to me. Two years later...

For a number of reasons, I found myself neglecting my literary fiction reading in the first half of 2015.  I tend to bounce back and forth between litfic and genre--too much of the mimetic stuff and I find myself longing for something about more than a few people and their emotional issues; too much SF or fantasy and I end up wishing for something more concrete to hold on to.  So this last month I've been indulging in the "respectable" end of the literary spectrum (not all of the books below are properly litfic, but most of them are marketed that way), and, unsurprisingly, finding the same mixture of good and bad there that I do in genre. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - There was some surprise when North's novel ended up on this year's Clarke shortlist.  Or, at least, there was on my part, because the plot description for Harry August , in which a British man experiences his life during the middle decades of the 20th century again an...

It's 6hrs before the Hugos. I am going to bed, but before that I will make this public prediction: I think the pups are going to be trounced — Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) August 22, 2015 This year's Hugo results are a landmark occasion: they are the closest I've ever come to guessing the entire slate of winners.  In an informal poll last week among friends (which I'm now kicking myself for not putting on twitter) I guessed all but three of the winners, and in two of those categories, Best Novel and Best Novelette, I had the winner as a strong second choice (the only real surprise?  Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.  I was sure that the--inexplicable, to me--love for Doctor Who 's "Listen" would carry the day, and didn't think Orphan Black would even be in the running). I'm mentioning this not so much to brag, but to make the point that this year's results --in which the by-now infamous puppy campaigns were soundly defeated,...

You could probably run an interesting poll among genre fans to see which ones find the elevator-pitch description for Netflix's new show Sense8 --a globe-spanning genre series from the minds of the Wachowski siblings and J. Michael Straczynski--an immediate selling point, and which ones see it as a reason to stay away.  I have to admit that I'm in the latter group. The involvement of the Wachowskis, whose recent work has vacillated between glorious messes ( Cloud Atlas ) and tedious ones ( Jupiter Ascending ) was cause for some concern, if also no small amount of curiosity.  But Straczynski, best-known for the formally innovative but cliché-ridden and self-satisfied Babylon 5 , gave me some genuine pause.  It was some time before I could bring myself to get past my expectation of long-winded speeches and juvenile cod-philosophy and give the show a try.  I can't exactly say that Sense8 defied these lowered expectations.  It is a mess, and it is cliché-ridde...