Nope nope nope nope. This movie was painful to watch from start to finish. It was violent, sad, awkward, and gross. On purpose!
Continue reading Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984)
Tarzan (1999)
I need to stop reading a book and then immediately watching the movie. This makes the movie feel incredibly short! I just did that with Project Hail Mary, and now I’ve done the same thing with Tarzan.
Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a long book, yet there are soooo many details from the book missing from the movie. There are also a lot of changes as well as omissions.
Below is a non-exhaustive brainstormed list of differences. Beware SPOILERS of both the Disney movie and the original book.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan, like Superman, has always existed. At least, that’s how it feels to me… there was never a time in my life when Tarzan didn’t already exist. But once upon a time, someone imagined him, and gave him life on paper. More than a hundred years later, he lives on, though his creator is long gone. It was a strange experience to read the original Tarzan story.
Madame Bovary: A post about book covers
I have to say, I really admire the graphic designer who decided to put a blown-up image of a face on the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary. My other favorite cover is the one chosen for the Standard Ebooks ebook, a painting by John Singer Sargent.
Anastasia (1997)
According to Wikipedia, there was a 1956 movie based on a 1952 French play based on the idea that Anastasia survived. Also, the phenomenon of people claiming/pretending to be Anastasia is real, and the play is based on the most famous of these. (The story continues to evolve: a 2016 stage musical included some of the same songs and characters, but substituted or added others.)
The rags-to-riches plot of this 1997 movie makes it feel like a standard Cinderella tale, but now that I think about it, the story may be more like Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady): a man fabricates an identity for a woman, then falls in love with her. That arc fits better with the 50s versions, though: in the 90s cartoon, the woman really was a princess all along. (Edit: It’s not my imagination… again, according to Wikipedia, they actually considered adapting My Fair Lady and deliberately took elements of Pygmalion. But I noticed the similarity myself.)
Tron: Ares (2025)
Welcome to a movie with no character arcs whatsoever! Sit back, relax, look at the pretty colors, and succumb to the nostalgia. (I hope you like Nine Inch Nails.)
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He apparently jotted down some philosophical thoughts in a diary as he was marching around on various military campaigns, and these fragmentary thoughts form part of the corpus of texts associated with stoicism, an ancient school of thought that encourages people to take life as it comes, good or bad.
The book is not coherent, and there’s a lot of repetition. It wasn’t written as a thoughtfully organized presentation designed to be consumed by others. And my understanding is that it’s not even complete. Bits of text are lost because the source is old and “corrupt”.
If you want to understand stoicism, I think it’s probably better to read some modern synthesis before or after reading old source texts. Still, I think it’s worth reading source texts like this one, because whoever writes the synthesis is going to put their own spin on whatever was “meant” by the original authors; but the same thing can be said for any English translation! I think it must be impossible to translate philosophy without making some biased assumptions about the author’s intended meaning. Maybe all we can really wrap our heads around is what people today construe stoicism to be. We just have to guess at what it used to be originally; and there may never have been a consensus among thinkers even then.
So anyway, what are some of the ideas to be found in the text?
Continue reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Now You See Me (trilogy)
The three Now You See Me movies are heist stories where the criminals in question are professional masters of deception—and possibly also of petty theft, burglary, and extortion. But as it turns out, the “Four Horsemen” are stealing for an arguably just cause, rather than personal gain, although of course their primary motivation seems to be that they really enjoy fooling people. After all, that’s why they’re magicians.
That’s why, at some level, I don’t like them. But I still like these movies. (Go figure.)
The Odyssey (2026)
As we’ve established elsewhere, I don’t much like tricksters, and The Odyssey is the story of the trickster Odysseus. But I would much have preferred the actual story of the trickster Odysseus to whatever you want to say Christopher Nolan gave us instead.
Selected works of Henry James
As part of my ongoing informal free public-domain classic literature self-education program, I decided to tackle the work of Henry James. I chose 2 novellas and 7 novels and read them in chronological order.
- 1878 – Daisy Miller (novella)
- 1880 – Washington Square
- 1881 – The Portrait of a Lady
- 1886 – The Bostonians
- 1897 – What Maisie Knew
- 1898 – The Turn of the Screw (novella)
- 1902 – The Wings of the Dove
1903 – The Ambassadors1904 – The Golden Bowl
I decided to drop the last two; you’ll see why. Below are my thoughts on the others, starting from the most recently read novel, The Wings of the Dove.
