I’m finally getting around to watching the remake of The Lion in Winter with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close. I’m halfway though and it’s phenomenal. That’s tough for me to say. I know (and adore) the original backwards and forwards the way some folks know Shakespeare. My family and friends have been known to quote it at the drop of a hat.

So, the history geek in me is nit picking the props (the mail isn’t riveted, but that’s a stone bitch to produce and expensive as hell besides) and intrigued by some of the costuming choices (vaguely eastern look for Louis and Elinore – makes some sense when you think about the impact of the second crusade).

Alais’s accent seems to meander though most of Europe at different points, but she’s *beautiful* and carries off her delivery with a lot less pouting than Jane Merrow, so I’ll forgive it. A younger Jonathan Rhys Meyers is playing Phillip, and looks very feminine compared to how he swaggers about on the set of The Tudors. Actually, they’re playing Phillip a lot softer and less intense and seething than I’m used to, but it seems to be working. (She says halfway though the movie. We haven’t yet gotten to the scene with the tapestries)

The production values and cinematography are beautiful – incredibly lush when compared to what the crew of the ’68 production had to work with. (yay for technological progress)

The cast seems to work best with the quiet scenes – the big blustery arguments aren’t working as well for me, but that might just be dissonance in my own head from being so familiar with O’Toole’s scene chewing. Actually, they’re making my least favorite scenes (Richard and Elanor in the garden, for example) really *work*. I never quite believed Anthony Hopkins’s Richard in his quieter moments, though he never had any problem matching O’Toole in the fights.

They’re still playing John as an imbecile, but that’s a fault in the text itself. (He was a better ruler than Richard, in many ways, but got a serving of some of history’s worst PR) I believe all three sons as damaged children here, as well as ambitious princes, and I believe Henry and Elanor as deeply flawed and regretful parents, as well as rulers. In total, I think all the new performances are more nuanced, and very interesting in and of themselves – not just as a contrast to the original.

And I must mention that Patrick Stewart looks damm sexy, and Andrew Howard (Richard) has some amazing blue eyes. (Like, in some lights I’m almost thinking Fremen blue.)

Look kiddies… someone made a remake of The Lion in Winter. With Patrick Stewart. Neat.

After watching the recent movie adaption of “The Time Machine” with Bill, we got to talking. First topic of discussion was the fact that the movie, while very pretty to look at, stank like week old fish. Much style, little substance, and no soul. (But every now and then, one really does just want to watch something pretty with no redeeming value, so that’s ok.)

Actually, that discussion happened *during* the movie. After, I started musing about why any modern adaption of Welles’s work was doomed to failure. Well, any modern movie adaption that Hollywood got it’s grubby mitts on. Why? Because even the most venerably old and honored stores, when adapted to movie form, have to get a whole honkin’ load of modern sensibilities dumped into them. Why? ‘Cause you just can’t make a move these days where there’s no happy ending, or an ignoble hero (unless he’s a suave, sexy, anti-hero), or bias (racial, gender, religous, etc…) of any sort being displayed. (Unless these traits reside in the villian. Then it’s ok.)

The problem being that most literature was written in far less “enlightened” times. Early steampunk, and golden/silver age pulp sci-fi authors were products of their times. Which means the can come across to modern readers as crass, sexist, racist, blah blah bliddy blah.

I don’t have a problem with this. I can deal with the fact that very few of the “classic” authors couldn’t write a decent female caracter to save their asses, over idealized “primitive” (non-western) cultures; or conversly, demonized them. To ask that the work of these (mostly dead) people conform to a current definition of “proper” (or worse, faking that PC-ness not out of a craven desire to avoid giving offense, but out of the crass desire for even more profits) kills the very story they are trying to make a buck off of.

When we write about the future, we are almost never correct. What we are envisioning, is a possible world shaped completely by what we know *right now*. Many of the steampunk stories were rendered obsolete when the atom was split and the old euro-centric political hegemony was replaced by the two nuclear superpowers. The golden age writers, basing much of their work on what was current (scientifically and politically) in the 30′s through the 50′s, were unable to forsee what changes global computer networks would wreak upon sciety, and on and on. Even William Gibson’s Neuromancer says more about the wide eyed “what-if” period of the early internet than it does about the world today. (Which it was, in theory, actually describing.)

So Sci-Fi isn’t about the future at all. And this is never so apparent as when we try to take a story that was the product of a very certain era (late 1800′s) and try to make it acceptable to an early 21st century audience. All the oomph gets drained out, and we’re left with pretty people running around.

If I want a sci-fi story that conforms to modern conventions, you know what I’ll do? I’ll go pick up a modern author. (Nancy Kress, Sharon Shinn, Edward Lerner, and Richard Chedwick all come to mind.) But if I *really* want to time travel, I’ll pick up some Welles, Shelley, Doyle, Asimov, or Clarke.

Specifically, Tolkien. Over the last year, there have been dozens of articles and op-ed pieces about the role of women in Tolkien’s work. Or rather, the lack of role. I don’t care. I love the books, I love the movies, I love the artwork (well, some of the artwork. The Hildebrant brothers don’t do much for me, but Alan Lee rocks) As for the female characters and how they aren’t there – so what? Is every author supposed to anticipate shifting social values fifty years post publication and cast his/her novels accordingly?

This meme is more annoying than the usual “well, the author really means this/that/some other thing” kind of lit crit that I grew to know and abhor in school. How the hell does some academic crawl into the head of a (possibly deceased) author and figure out that they were thinking at the exact moment they put pen to paper? Who cares? Can’t a great story just *be* a really great story?

Oh, wait. We’re dealing with Art and Literature and lots of other pretentiously capitalized concepts that will leads us to Higher Meaning and… yes! Even world peace!

Here’s what I think. Art is not philosophy. Nor is it religon. Even if it was either of them, it still wouldn’t be something you could peer into and discover the deep, musty scerets of the soul because people have been trying that with religon and philosophy and, by and large, they haven’t gotten too far with them either. At best, art, philosophy, and religon are starting points for finding truth and The Meaning Of Life inside oneself. None of the big answers will come from a book, no matter how good it is.

So back to Tolkien. Who, when you get down to it, was just a guy. Shaped by his time and his world (which was very different from the one we know today) and writing because he loved it. He wasn’t trying to create a world that would be gender-politically acceptable to future generations even if such a feat would have been possible. He was just doing what artists have always done. He created something. It was not an allegory, it was not a political tract, it was not a philosophical guide to enlightment. It was a story. A really good one.

I really was planning on not buying anything nonessential today. Really. No splurging. So after I’d virtuously gone grocery shopping, I thought I’d relax at the bookstore for a while. Browsing only, no buying. And I manage to find two books I’ve been trying to find for ages. I’m pretty good at resisting temptation, but if I hadn’t grabbed them then, I’d have lost my chance at either of them for at least a few more years. (My luck is like that – if I thumb my nose at opportunity, fate finds a way to get back at me.)

And what were they? The Book Of Forms, (A very good poetry textbook, one which I was assigned during my junior year and foolishly sold back at the end of the semester – been looking for it almost ever since.) and Children Of The Night. (One of Mercedes Lackey’s earlier books – the first one of hers that I ever read, and one of her best. And it’s my *third* copy. This one is not getting lent to *anyone* – every time I do that with this title, it grows friggin’ legs.)

But there were temptations that I resisted. Like the used copy of Nancy Kress’s Beggars In Spain – which if I hadn’t found the two books above *would* have come home with me.

I also stopped by at my old local library, which still beats any of the libraries in the Bergen county area hands down. So now I’m working my way through Year Zero, by Jeff Long. Only about ten pages in, but the premise is interesting. Ahhh…. I don’t indulge my booklust nearly enough these days.