Stardust trailer rant, part I

Following the forty minutes of pre-movie advertising for people with the attention span of a four-year-old with ADD, we had twenty minutes of upcoming movie trailers. There were two that stood out and prompted these musings rants.

The first was one that I was glad to see: the trailer for The Dark Is Rising.
A bit of backstory: Susan Cooper's kid story about good and evil was one of my early favorites. I have no idea how early - because I read and re-read the series long before I got into science fiction (which was when I was ten I think). Anyway: assume I was nine; I read all of them repeatedly, but most of all the second and the last two. The second is The Dark Is Rising and the last two star the main character Will. The idea that you turn eleven and find out you're magical - well, it's awfully appealing. (The first and third novels felt shoehorned in in an attempt to broaden the cast of characters and make ordinary eleven-year-olds the center; I never liked them as much.) I still have all five novels with their browned pages and '70s-something printing dates.

So, now you know the cherished place that this series (and this one book in particular) hold in my childhood mythology.

If you haven't seen the trailer, here's what IMDB says:

"Based on the acclaimed novel by Susan Cooper, THE DARK IS RISING is the first film adaptation of the author's acclaimed The Dark Is Rising Sequence. The film tells the story of Will Stanton, a young man who learns he is the last of a group of warriors who have dedicated their lives to fighting the forces of the Dark. Traveling back and forth through time, Will discovers a series of clues which lead him into a showdown with forces of unimaginable power. With the Dark once again rising, the future of the world rests in Will's hands."

Shall I translate?

"An American named Will turns eleven and becomes a mini-Gandalf. And a mini-Aragorn. He has more power than anyone else in the world, especially his mentor Merriman Lyon (aka Merlin, hello?) and must develop his magickal powers to save the world."

In summary: this will be yet another piece of my childhood shredded, thrown on the ground, and stamped upon. It will be bad. Not "Black Cauldron" bad, which similarly raped the Prydain books of Lloyd Alexander so poorly that even Disney refused to acknowledge it for years. But it will be "The Secret of NIMH" bad, which failed to translate anything of worth from "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH".

I am glad I saw the trailer because now I won't waste any more of my time thinking it might do justice to the book.

(pant, pant, froth)
Part II to follow when I've recovered a bit of composure. I thought this rant was going to be the short one...

(no subject)

We watched 61* last night. It's Billy Crystal's love story to the Yankee$ and the summer of 1961, when both Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were chasing Babe Ruth's single-season home run record.

It was very good. I don't like the Yankee$ - and even back then they were all about buying championships - but this captured the glory and tradition of baseball. The feelgood.

Stardust trailer rant, part II

The other trailer worth mentioning was for a film called Across The Universe. Directed by Julie Taymor, who is a Broadway director - she did the original Lion King stage show, as well as the Anthony Hopkins Titus Andronicus. So you know it's going to be stagey, and indeed people randomly break into song.

Film summary from IMDB: "A dock worker Jude travels to America in the 1960s to find his estranged father. There he falls in love with sheltered American teenager Lucy. When her brother Max is drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, they become involved in peace activism."

Film summary from madbaker: "Hair redux. A British hippy and a U.S. hippy compete for the same hippy chick to the sound of (surprise!) Beatles cover tunes. Gratuitous shots of Vietnam contrasted with self-righteous protesting against The Man." (I didn't know that the chick was the American's sister - it's not clear from the trailer.)

Can we as a country get over, once and for all, the delusion that the '60s were a magical time of rebellion? That wearing tie-dye, following the Dead around the country, and using patchouli oil instead of bathing all grant moral superiority? That chanting "peace and love" will make bad people stop doing badness?

Maybe it's because I'm not a Baby Boomer. I don't have that purple haze of misty-eyed nostalgia when it comes to the '60s. I just see pointless self-indulgence with bad hygiene, and I can still get that just by walking around most of San Francisco.
The best line about hippies comes from the Kingdom of Loathing: "What, does the Earth Goddess cry when you bathe or use deodorant?"

In other words, I don't plan to see this movie.