Movie day

I spent today watching long movies: Kill Bill and Return of the King. Two very different approaches to screen violence. In Kill Bill fights are like dances, very stylized and exaggerated, with fountains of blood. They’re also quite brutal, with the immediate physical consequences impossible to ignore. The opening image of the movie, the protagonist’s bruised and bloody face, is difficult to watch.

Return of the King, on the other hand, takes the traditional heroic adventure (war sub-genre) approach — huge anonymous hoards clash, most fights are glimpsed only in passing, and little blood is shown. This movie realizes these mass fights in much more detail than previous movies — when we see a group of warriors falling from a high onto a cityscape, we can actually follow them all the way down to where they bounce off of buildings. But still, there’s a distance there.

In other respects, I had mixed feelings about Return of the King. It’s big and spectacular, and I just didn’t care all that much about most of what was going on. (Had the same problem with the books; I skipped over the first half of Return of the King when I read it.) It may just be too big a story to really work in film. Still, it’s really cool when Captain Jack Sparragorn shows up with the crew of the Black Pearl.

Kill Bill works much better. A brutal, vicious revenge story, interesting all the way through. I’m looking forward to the second half.

How to read New Sun

The Book of the New Sun is the classic Gene Wolfe book. It was originally a four book series (well, originally three, but the last one got too big). But, well, wait, let me tell you another story so I can tell you this one:

Within the story of the Book of the New Sun, our viewpoint protagonist, Severian, carries around a book called Wonders of Urth and Sky, a collection of old stories. (Very old stories — New Sun takes place some large but unspecified number of millennia in our future.) Every so often he’ll sit down and read a story. One such is “The Story of the Student and His Son”. The names of the hero and monster in this story are both puns, but the names are not given in the story. There’s enough information for you to figure out who they are, and to figure out what the puns are, and that’s good enough for Wolfe.

( For those who haven’t figured it out... )

New Sun is built around a climax, but the climax never appears in the four-book series. Instead, there’s enough information for you to figure out most of what happens, and that’s good enough for Wolfe. Not good enough for his editor, who made him write a fifth book, Urth of the New Sun, which I’m halfway through, and I’ve finally come to agree with the folks who say it’s not as good as the other four. I think now that the best way to read the series is to read all five, and then go back and reread the first four.

( SPOILERish speculation, that didn’t pan out, about Urth and the Long and Short Sun books )