You guys, this is happening:
And check out the casting: Hugh Jackman is Jean Valjean (yay!), Russell Crow is Javert (um, okay). The Thénardiers will be played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter. And in a particularly nice touch, the Bishop of Digne will be played by Colm Wilkinson, who was Valjean in the 1985 cast.
I can’t wait for Christmas.
(Hat tip to Dave Munger, on Facebook.)◼
In my favorite long read of the week, David Shechner of Overthinking It sets out to determine whether Indiana Jones could’ve survived an atomic bomb from the safety of a lead-lined refridgerator, as depicted in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Spoiler alert: Indy (and the franchise) wouldn’t have survived, in the real world. But exactly how Professor Jones would most likely meet his end is a much more enjoyable question. Here’s a tiny bit:
Sadly, the lead and steel shielding which the authors intend to protect their protagonist from ionizing radiation can itself become a source of it. While beta decay constitutes a relatively small portion of the average nuclear device’s output, what little sprinkle the Frigidaire receives it will transmute, in kind, into an X-ray bath for its inhabitant. It’s sort of like the way a Russian Sauna works, but instead of hot coals there’s a nuclear explosion, and instead of steam there’s a burst of X-rays, and instead of a wood hut it’s a Frigidaire, and also you’re dead. [Link sic.]
As additional evidence of Shechner’s scientific bona fides, he presents the whole analysis in the persona of the third reviewer. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a takedown of one of George Lucas’s late-career cinematic catastrophes so much since Anthony Lane wrote, in reference to Yoda’s diction in Revenge of the Sith, “break me a fucking give.” ◼
Reamde. Photo by jby.Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Reamde, opens in a self-consciously stereotypical image of rural America: three generations of the Forthrast family engaged in recreational firearms practice in the midst of an annual reunion on an Iowa farm. The next thousand pages follow two members of that family out of the Midwest and across the globe.
Reamde zips from Iowa to Seattle, the mountains of British Columbia, urban China, the Isle of Man, the Philippines, a trailer park in Missouri, and a survivalist compound in north Idaho. The engine driving this jet-setting plot is a computer virus, the eponymous Reamde, propagated through a fictional massively multiplayer online game. Reamde reaches out across the Internet to entangle the creator of that online game and his niece with Russian gangsters, a Hungarian hacker, Chinese professional gamers, a Wales-born Al Qaeda terrorist mastermind, British and American intelligence agents, rural U.S. militia members, and two fantasy authors—one outrageously highbrow, the other hilariously low.
I’ve never read a Stephenson novel I didn’t enjoy cover to cover, and Reamde draws on what I like best about his work. There’s incredible attention to detail, whether in the workings of a fictional online game, the layout and choreography of spectacular action set pieces, or the cultural details of Chinese internet cafes. There’s a delightful slew of nerdy in-jokes, particularly in the simmering feud between the two fantasy authors working as creative consultants for the online game. And there’s an international cast of smart, dryly witty characters risking life and limb in a succession of perfectly rendered international locales. It’s a great read, but it’s also interesting for its perspective on the world we inhabit today.
The first-blush gloss on Reamde is that it’s a William Gibson novel set in the present day. But it even more strongly recalls the sub-genre of international/intercultural dramas that were popular as Oscar-baiting films a couple years ago, like “Babel” and “Crash.” Those movies would pick a selection of seemingly unconnected people across greater Los Angeles or the entire world, and attempt to demonstrate how their lives were really interconnected on some profounder level via apparently insignificant links propagated across the karmic ether. Reamde achieves the same effect organically, accumulating each new player by following the next thread in the widening web of Reamde, and (mostly) doing so without breaking the plot’s techno-thriller pace.
What’s remarkable about Reamde (though not surprising coming from Stephenson) is its unabashed optimism in the midst of circumstances that shade from trying into horrific. Our unprecedented global interconnectedness creates the chaos that propels the plot; but apart from the obvious bad apples (did I mention Al Qaeda is involved?) the wildly disparate people snagged in the web of the Reamde virus react to each other with the open-handedness of friendly strangers meeting in an online comments section, rapidly identifying their common interests to work together across cultural, economic, and even linguistic divides. Even as the body count racks up, the people who need to avoid potentially tragic misunderstandings manage to do exactly that, and see to it that the folks who need comeuppance get it. When the Forthrast reunion reconvenes at the end of the book, the attendees include members of a newly assembled global family. ◼
Via Leonid Kruglyak: Hey, a romantic comedy about a Ph.D. student (in, from the trailer, some flavor of biochemistry) considering an unexpected marriage proposal. I am constitutionally suspicious of the genre, but it is long past time a movie tapped the comedic potential of emergency showers. ◼
Via Got Medieval: Myths RETOLD does exactly what it says on the tin, with ATTITUDE. For instance, Beowulf. Here’s our hero awaiting the murderous monster Grendel’s highly predictable arrival after the party in Hrothgar’s meadhall:
then the party kind of starts to wind down
so beowulf just goes ahead and strips naked
in the hopes of making this task as needlessly difficult as possible
which actually he fails to do
because it turns out no weapon on earth can harm grendel anyway
so naked fisticuffs are optimal
(naked fisticuffs are always optimal)anyway Grendel shows up
makes a big show of ripping the doors off
which actually begs the question
do they replace the doors every day?
or does Grendel replace the doors every day
just so he will have something to rip off at night?
either way he immediately eats one of Beowulf’s men
while Beowulf stands there like HMM I SEE
INTERESTING
Even if you haven’t read the original, you will laugh painfully hard. Expect seriously salty language, but nothing that Beowulf himself wouldn’t use if he had a MySpace page.
Via io9: Douglas Trumbull, who supervised special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, is working on the definitive documentary about the making of the ground-breaking science fiction film. I can’t wait to see this.
Mike D’Angelo of the AV Club, on 2001: A Space Odyssey, pretty much my favorite movie ever:
What makes the human beings in 2001 seem a bit less than fully human isn’t just the nature of the performances—it’s that every interaction among them is completely functional. We’re seeing people say and do whatever is required to achieve their objective at that particular moment, and nothing more. HAL, by contrast, demonstrates what we all recognize as neurosis. And while it’s mostly implied by his behavior, it does have one explicit manifestation: that refusal to answer Dullea’s summons for 43 seconds, followed by capitulation when it becomes clear that Dullea isn’t gonna shut up. That’s so human, it almost hurts.
Cane Toads: An Unnatural History is a film that seems almost engineered for geeky cult status. It’s an Australian documentary about one of the most graphic examples of an invasive species, the cane toad Bufo marinus, which was introduced to the continent to control cane beetle grubs. This didn’t work out exactly as planned – the extremely fecund toads have swarmed over northeastern Australia, eating everything they can catch, killing most things that catch them (they’re poisonous), and not eating cane beetle grubs.
The documentary describes this ecological disaster, and Australians’ wildly varied responses to it – from treating the toads as pets to slaloming across the pavement so as to road-kill as many as possible – with a sort of wry glee. Delightfully, it’s all on YouTube. Even more delightfully, there is a brand-new sequel, in 3D.
That’s right. Cane toads. In 3D.
No word on a U.S. general release date, but I’ll be keeping an eye out. This has me way more excited than Avatar ever did. In the meantime, here’s the first ten minutes of the original. Just imagine the added depth this will have, when you’re wearing the silly glasses in front of an Imax screen.
That’s when the splendid-looking Charles Darwin biopic Creation finally opens in the U.S. A new trailer is exclusively (?) available over at BeliefNet, of all places.
Shades of Clouseau, but this still looks like I’d enjoy it way too much.