777 times lovelier than I'd ever seen
February 2004
February 21, 2004
The Praxis
I was really excited when I read that Walter Jon Williams was going to be writing a space opera series. I really like Williams' more space-opera-like books. Aristoi is a remarkably solid piece of science fiction (although like most books that are not Camp Concentration, its depiction of artistic genius leaves something to be desired). City on Fire, the sequel to his earlier Metropolitan, is not space opera in the Doc Smith sense (or even in the early Iain Banks sense), but it shares a certain similiarity to the genre; it's the story of a low-level bureaucrat who gets wrapped up in the undertaking of a coup, and her slow transformation into a political power in her own right. It's got its flaws, but it's my probably my favorite science fiction novel that I've read in the last few years. This is a subgenre that Williams can do quite well. Alas, you wouldn't know it from Dread Empires Fall: The Praxis, the first volume in what promises to be a horribly extended series.
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February 6, 2004
Bay of Angels
The opening shot of Bay of Angels, a gorgeous, high-speed reverse tracking shot away from Jeanne Moreau and down the boardwalk of Nice, set expectations the rest couldn't match. The script -- the story of a young bank clerk, played by Claude Mann, and his wild gambling jag with a broke and desperate Jeanne Moreau while on a vacation in Nice -- asks the viewer to swallow an awful lot. The look on the faces of the two actors is wonderful, as it encompasses the sheer boredom of gambling, and particularly of roulette, a game that has all the appeal for me of wagering my paycheck on a lumberjack contest on ESPN2. There are long moments of bored stillness once the chips are down, punctuated only by Moreau's fingers twitching slightly as she kills another cigarette. But real life doesn't have the timing of a script, and the down-to-the-last-dollar wins the pair keep racking up are just predictable and tiresome, even granting that it's just a movie. The end seems to be missing about five minutes of footage, and whether it's meant to be a happy ending or a cheerfully ironic "happy ending", it has all the subtlety of cinder block dropped from height. The film is aware of its own artifice -- Mann compares Moreau to a novel, her lifestyle to an American movie. The actors are excellent and have real chemistry (although, as V. notes, nobody beats up a woman quite as ineffectually as a Frenchman in a New Wave film); Moreau's performance is particularly good. She has a sort of breathtaking squirreliness, sexy and doomed and dangerous to herself and others; the part reminded me of a number of other self-destructive archetypes (I kept thinking of Sid and Nancy, actually, for very little reason that I could see on the screen). But I was expecting more than this from the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; everything felt too much like Demy was purposefully making a Hollywood-style movie, too pat. The opening shot, a high-speed reverse tracking shot down Nice's boardwalk, is wonderful, and for the first half of the movie I thought I was going to get an honest paean to the real pleasures of being young, reckless, and stupid. If Mann had had his wild fling, lost his money, and never seen Moreau again, he could have treasured the memory and the film might have lived up to that amazing opening.