Ahh, the fall is well and truly here, and I couldn’t be happier.
Well, with the weather anyway, many other things in the world continue to be less than ideal. And we’re due to have a monster of an en niño this year, so even the weather may betray me in the end. Still, things are pretty good up here in the City of Destiny lately. Coming to the end of a big project at work, about to start on some new ones. I’ve been battling a weird cold that keeps going away and then coming back in force for the past couple weeks, but I think I’ve finally got it licked now. So let’s get into it.
The Tembusu Tree Mystery
This is the latest by Ovidia Yu, in the Su Lin series which I started reading earlier this year. Just came out last month, and I am happy to report that it was much, much better than the previous novel, the Rose Apple Tree Mystery.
This one is back in Singapore, where Su Lin has a new job running the movie theater, which is about to reopen after being put to use for propaganda during the Japanese occupation. But, the book actually ends up being about some big, big shifts in her life, and about how to move forward through terrible grief and the changes that it wreaks.
It also has a pretty good murder mystery in it, one that you can figure out pretty quickly if you pay close attention. Feels like there’s less cheats, you really get all the information you need almost from the moment the crime happens. Nonetheless, it was very satisfying in how it all resolves, and it goes against some of the patterns we’ve had in recent books. When one character showed up I was all but ready to roll my eyes and assume she’d be the murderer just from her physical description, but she wasn’t!
It all comes together with the character writing, following along with the developments of the last few books, in a wonderful way. It even made me cry at one point, very rare in a book. I don’t want to spoil anything, since the book is so new, but there are some big changes in Su Lin’s life, some more unexpected than others. Makes me very excited to see where the series goes next, we could be due for another big time jump. If not in the next book, then the one after.
After Hours
This is, of course, the Martin Scorsese movie from 1985. I’m continuing my odyssey through Scorsese’s filmography alongside the Blank Check podcast, one of my all-time favs. I really can’t recommend that podcast enough, it’s such a fun listen. I don’t always agree with the hosts, but that doesn’t matter, it’s just very enjoyable to listen to people yammer away with such passion about something they love.
Anyway, this was a movie I was going into convinced I was going to hate it, or at least not care about it at all. There’s a certain… thing that happens in media which can kind of drive me crazy. It’s like… this assumption that an extremely local reference can be made universal without any effort. It happens a lot with highly populous cities, like New York or Paris or London.
The go-to example in my mind is, weirdly, the novel The Prague Cemetery, a historical fiction novel about the creation of the famous antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Umberto Eco. I liked the book, it’s quite good, but in the early parts it has just reams and reams of extremely specific references to locations in Paris. At the corner of such and such street in so and so arrondisment, the famous restaurant le whatever. I don’t mind when he does it with historical figures, that’s kind of the point, but just listing off places and things assuming that you already know what they are is kind of maddening.
Perhaps part of it is that this never happens with where I live. The Pacific Northwest has barely been represented on film, at least the region I’m in (Vancouver has plenty, though not under its own name). Nobody makes local references to here. Even as an American, it sometimes feels like all the media I engage with is imported from some foreign land that is unrecognizable.
Anyway, this is all to say that I went in with a low opinion of this movie off the bat because it’s about going from a nice part of New York City to a sketchy part of New York City. This sort of neighborhood chauvinism is exactly the kind of thing that annoys me, as a person who’s never been there. Some line in a book or movie like “she’s a person who’s never been south of 257th street!” and I’m just supposed to laugh along like I know what the hell that means.
But… After Hours won me over. It’s really more about going to a place too late and night and getting into one insane situation after another. The protagonist, Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), makes one terrible decision after another out some sort of misplaced sense of pride or petty vindictiveness or just a desire to not have to do something he’d rather not. I found that somewhat relatable! Who hasn’t been put in an awkward position and made it worse trying to get out?
The whole “can’t get home” aspect also spoke to me, as someone who doesn’t drive. Being stuck somewhere is something I go to great lengths to avoid.
It’s a lot of fun, ends up in an over-the-top place and comes full circle by the end.
The Silmarillion
Well, I’m finally reading the ol’ elf bible. Written by J.R.R. Tolkien, and assembled posthumously by his son Christopher in .
In terms of the actual content of the book, I’m having a grand old time. It’s a very slow read, but only because it’s extremely dense. Any two random pages could easily be expanded into a full 200-page fantasy novel, easily. It’s written in the style of Norse sagas, kind of summarizing events from great remove, only the occasional line of extremely important dialogue. Very different from the Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Hobbit.
It concerns the entire history of all creation up to the beginning of the Hobbit, give or take. I think it does actually cover both the Hobbit and LotR in brief. But we’re talking going all the way back to pre-Genesis, so to speak. God creating the angels and then the world and sending them down there to get things ready. And then the endless wars between the elves and the forces of evil (and each other).
Some of it gets rather dry and repetitive, but the bits that have more of a real narrative are a lot of fun. The history of Middle Earth is a lot weirder than you’d think, partly because of Tolkien’s own interest in mythology that gives him a wide set of influences, and partly because his own Catholic faith lead him to set things up in very particular ways.
Anyway, I do have one major problem with it, and it’s exemplified by a simple fact: the map in this book sucks ass. It’s just terrible. It lacks many important landmarks, like the location of Angband, the place that Morgoth (read: the devil) is hanging out and which all the elves are carefully arraying themselves against.
This is surprising because both The Hobbit and all of the Lord of the Rings books have wonderful maps, drawn by the elder Tolkien himself. Even whole different pages for different regions in newer editions, it’s quite nice, you can always go and look up and see where things are in relation to each other, or where our protagonists have gone.
But this is because The Silmarillion was assembled from copious notes and endless drafts by Christopher after his father’s untimely death. Tolkien never quite got everything to line up the way he wanted, so he did not publish the Silmarillion, even though he intended it to be released alongside the LotR novels as a kind of companion, an encyclopedia where you could look things up to help understand this fantastical world.
So, his son took it upon himself to assemble this missing tome, at long last. But… he seems terrified to add anything new to it.
In spite of basically being a co-author of the Lord of the Rings, as he helped his father with editing and writing, even when he was off fighting in WWII he continued to help review drafts. Christopher seems to basically hold his father’s various notes as a kind of holy text, from which the Truth can be derived if you study them long and hard enough. This is even more evident in the later works that he published, which were essentially archaeological studies of the various drafts of different stories, laughably titled the History of Middle Earth.
To me, this is an extremely frustrating approach. I am not here to learn about the creative process of writing a legendarium, I am here for the legendarium itself. Tolkien the elder did not publish his letters or his drafts. It is somewhat interesting to learn about them to give context to the story, but I do not think they should take precedence over the story itself.
The Silmarillion doesn’t quite fall into that… but I think the lack of a good map is a symptom of this fundamental issue. You see, the reason that Angband is not on the map is that there was a slight textual contradiction with regards to its location. It’s 150 leagues north of Doriath, but that would put it much too far away when you look at how it is talked about in other places. So, he just didn’t put it on the map at all, to smooth things over, rather than make a decision and say “well, that was ‘as the wolf runs’, so it can be here” or whatever.
No, both things must be true. We cannot work around this contradiction to make the story work, we have to dig in and lay bare all the material he was working with, over the next few decades. Obviously I don’t think it all arose from this particular issue, but I think it’s at the core of the strange compulsion to examine every stray comma in the works of his father for some sort of hidden truth.
Just tell me about the elves and their petty wars. I want to hear about how shitty and useless the Valar were. I want to read about the adventures of Luthien and her magical dog Huan. Tell me about how the world used to be lit up by two trees, but only in the beautiful and perfect lands where the angels lived. There’s so much weird and cool stuff in here, I only wish it had a better steward, in the end.
The Silmarillion was left incomplete, and rather than complete it, Christopher Tolkien threw it together into one volume and put it on sale, in a raw state. And that’s a shame.
Digger
Hot off the presses (do they uses presses to make film? probably not), the brand new Alejandro Iñárritu movie! Starring Tom Cruise is a comedic (?) role as an oil tycoon in the midst of a crisis. Digger was a huge flop, and has become the latest controversial movie in Iñárritu’s filmography, dividing audiences and critics alike.
Personally, I didn’t like it. The movie did not work for me, so to speak. Much like Disclosure Day earlier this year, I can see what it’s trying to do and do not think it achieves it. Not in any big, grand way, I fully agree with its politics, but in a structural way. This movie has seven people listed as writers (three for story, four for screenplay), and I think that indicates an issue.
It’s hard to talk about without getting deep, deep into spoilers, but there is a certain… lack of unity in its production which causes it to be neither fish nor fowl. If I say “it’s not funny” I can already hear people clacking away at their keyboards to write back “it’s not supposed to be”. But it sure seems like it’s trying very hard to be funny, and simply falling flat on its face in a very tiresome way.
There’s another angle to it that has been hidden from the marketing material, shall we say. But that angle ends up feeling extremely shallow and undeveloped. It doesn’t go hard enough in either of its two forms, so it just feels lumpy and shapeless.
There are some sparks here, of potential greatness, but nothing ever catches. Cruise is trying his damndest to shed his usual movie star presence, and doesn’t quite succeed. John Goodman is doing great work, but can’t salvage this mess.
It’s a feel-bad movie, so I’m not surprised that it’s a big ol’ flop, but not even in an intelligent and pointed way, more in a very generalized way. It ends up feeling, to me anyway, like a big ol’ shrug. “What are you gonna do?” it says, as you sadly trudge out of the theater to utter silence.
Ahhhh, that felt good. I’m kind of tempted to spoil things and get more into details about Digger… but I’ll save that for another post. I still have thoughts about it, I’ll let ’em percolate and see where things stand next weekend.
I’m also like 70 hours into Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, but I’ll save that for another day too. This is… relatively early in the game, believe it or not. It’s absolutely gigantic, I’ll be lucky if I can finish by the end of the year.
Until next time, shipmates!
