Platypus of Truth

Works of Art endure for a reason. Even when aspects of them become out outdated, (say as in the case of the Iliad, composition-in-performance goes out of fashion) the power of the story shines through. That's a rare thing for a genre that is as dependent on up-to-date technology as a Science Fiction Film. The story, the message, has to be uniquely powerful to endure once the future becomes the present or special effects take another leap forward. I spent some time this week on a sci-fi film that has endured, even though 1997 has come and gone: Terminator 2: Judgement Day . My reasons for picking T2 were three-fold: 1. I hadn't seen it in over ten years, 2. It's a James Cameron film that fits in with my Save the Cat homework, 3. the film had a powerful impact on me when I was a teenager and I wanted to see how it held up. The edition of the film I viewed was the extended cut. While I get the impression that Cameron prefers the theatrical version for aesthetic reasons, I...

My Save the Cat  homework continues, this time branching out into films within the broader horror genre. Where I began with Alien , a 70s horror classic, I decided to move on to the late 90s with The Blair Witch Project . My first introduction to The Blair Witch Project,  appropriately enough, was a student film advertising Biola University's Saddie Hawkins week: The Babs Witch Project.  I particularly liked the on campus tie-ins in the spirit of the original: hanging stick figures outside the cafeteria. Anyhow, I regret to say that in spite of spending six years hanging out with film majors, I never saw the original. So here I am now, yet again, a day late and a dollar short. It's a happy coincidence however, since I now know more about Film and legend tripping . Preface aside, there are three things about The Blair Witch Project  that I appreciated and think helped to sell this rather unorthodox film: 1. Nostalgia -The film is set in 1994 and was released in ...

This summer has been a film summer as much as it has been anything else. That is due in large part to kicking things off with a read through the unofficial screenplay bible  Save the Cat . While I was casting about for a means to better digest its principles, I noticed that another Alien  prequel had landed and so my Save the Cat  homework for the next few months was set. In order to prepare for Alien Covenant , I would work through three other movies in the franchise and an assortment of related films. You can find my assessment of Prometheus  here . In anticipation of Alien Covenant , I chose to work through the films according to the mythos' chronology. That meant beginning with the most recent of the three, Prometheus . I then moved on to the core of the franchise with Ridley Scott's Alien  and Jame Cameron's distinctly different sequel Aliens . Each of the core films is very much the product of the decade that produced it. Alien  is a horror pic th...

Pastel is the right medium for The Silmarillion  even if I haven't figured out how to properly scan it. I suppose that's ok given that Tolkien himself could never settle on the right medium for his massive corpus of myths and legends. Following his father's will, Christopher Tolkien attempted to codify the stories of the Elder Days into a definitive version -a sort of "elven bible" -the published Silmarillion . Over the next forty years, however, Christopher developed his own ideas regarding the presentation of his father's work. As a scholar himself, he chose to bring out groups of fragments as they stood contextualized by a mass of critical apparatus. As a consequence, The History of Middle Earth, and the stand-alone volumes that followed it have garnered many scholarly readers and very few lay ones. For good or ill, it is the choice Christopher has made and his long work is now complete with the final volume: Beren and Luthien . Beren and Luthien  present...