Linx

One thing I've been remiss about is providing links to other writers' Websites. I apologize, and hereby rectify the matter:

Gary Colby


Who would have guessed history could be so much fun. Those wacky Greeks!

Jesse Goolsby


War is a terrible thing, and no one tells that truth better than a warrior.

David Abrams


First-person narratives of different authors on his or her first publication.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


When I first stumbled across Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on TED, she instantly captured my attention.

This list vastly under-represents female writers; 1 out of 4 is not a good statistic. Many other sites exist out there; feel free to leave other suggestions in the comments section: female, male, or otherwise.

Redford

This past week I meandered up to the video section in the local library. (A shout-out to libraries and librarians!) As I browsed (not unlike a cow chewing daisies), I came across a Robert Redford movie which I had never heard of, All Is Lost, with a cover photo featuring a sailor standing at the helm of a yacht in a driving, drenching storm. Once, long ago and far away, when I was a different person, I owned a small not-a-yacht sailboat myself, so the movie intrigued me.

Before I walked away with my selection, though, another movie caught my eye: The Company You Keep, also starring Redford along with a list of other well-known celebrities. My interest piqued, I took both.

The Company You Keep (2012) is based on Neil Gordon's book by the same name which in turn is loosely based on the mid-1970's paramilitary group, the Weather Underground, which was an American left-wing revolutionary group trying to bring about "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and achieve a classless world: world communism." Though the plot of the movie doesn't follow all the twists of the real-life story, the parallel is obvious. In the fictional piece, years after a bank robbery gone sour, most members of the group have morphed their wild, anti-government protests into respectable, middle-class facades. A widowed lawyer, Jim Grant (Redford), with a young daughter (played by Jackie Evancho who, regrettably, does no singing in this movie) is exposed by a young reporter, and sets out to prove that he had nothing to do with the killing of a bank guard during the robbery for the simple fact that he didn't take part in the robbery. As the reporter and law officials close in, tension rises over whether or not the lawyer will be supported or sold-out by his former lover who still carries the torch of anti-establishment counter-culture warfare through her one-step-ahead-of-the-law drug dealing. The movie's focus on Grant's struggle to clear his name instead of on the moral ambiguity of his group's actions, forces viewers to make up their own minds about the rightness/justice/morality of his group's stance. The cast is full of stars of enhanced name-recognition power such as Shia LaBeouf, Julie Christie, and Susan Sarandon.



All Is Lost (2013), on the other hand, has one character. Well, three counting the boat and the ocean, but one human character. The movie follows a sailor alone on his sailboat who runs afoul of a wayward shipping container bobbing in the middle of the ocean like the thousands of pieces of trash that were washed out to sea by the tsunami in Japan in 2011. The sea-worthiness of his boat is compromised, and the rest of the movie progresses to ever smaller boats/rafts/floatation devices till he has nothing left. The movie begins with a voice-over by Redford/the sailor, and at one point, the sailor is so frustrated that he yells a profanity (though I can't remember exactly which one it is), and that is the total dialogue in the film.

I recommend watching both movies with as little time/clutter as possible between them so their stark differences are more apparent. Take this as an exercise to heighten discrimination, and as a chance to see just how much Redford has grown/matured as an artist since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Memory and Truth

Although it has been close to fifty years, I can still remember the first episode of Star Trek I saw. It was called The Man Trap -- later titled by James Blish for his adaptation "The Unreal McCoy." Though I was an avid fan of the series for most of my high school years, as I grew older, I edged away from it. The movies especially made me pause. Most of the spin-offs have also fallen short of their potential for several reasons: flat writing; uninspired plots; mediocre acting. These things might be endemic to the genre of commercial television itself, but that's for some future diatribe; I have other fish to fry right now, specifically the latest movies.

Recently, I checked out of the library 2009's Star Trek (not to be confused with 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture). It is a reboot of the series, meaning the creative staff (producers, directors, writers, actors, and, though largely unacknowledged, viewers) can make what they will of the original story. And what they made of it would induce a Vulcan to weep. My peeves include:

Destruction of the planet Romulus -- the main problem with this thin plot device is that the planet absolutely exists throughout the original TV series (which, shudder-inducing though it may be, I hold as canon and unchangeable) as well as several of the subsequent movies;

Destruction of the planet Vulcan -- see above;

The death of Spock's mother, Amanda -- throughout the original series, much was made of Amanda's influence on her son. The fact that in the movie she was so cavalierly thrown off a cliff in mid-transport says much about the producers lack of understanding of Spock's character. He needs Amanda as a balance against his father. Spock simply would not be Spock without her;

Captain Pike -- in the original pilot for the TV series, Pike captained the Enterprise for several years with a sturdy female Number One as first officer and a laughing Spock as science officer. The accident which confined him to a wheelchair (however updated) happened much later in his career;

Parallel universes -- as an explanation of the discrepancies and of how the "original" Spock could interact with this abomination, the artifice is akin to using dreams to justify all manner of plot shortcomings, and is just as repugnant.

All in all, I felt the new version to be both unnecessary and out-of-touch with all the things that made the original even as moderately compelling as it was at the time. Such cavalier revisionism does, however, bring up a point: Though the past might seem immutable, history is only as solid as social perception and as lasting as the crowd's memory.