Some Other Movies From 1997 (2)

For further background on the year in film please refer to the Some Other Movies From 1997 entry.

The following things happened in 1997:

• Bill Clinton was sworn in for a second term as President of the United States.
• Scientists in Scotland cloned a sheep named Dolly.
• The U.S. government banned funding for research on human cloning.
• In Sri Lanka the Tamil Tigers overran a military base and killed over 100 people.
• The English Patient won Best Picture at the Oscars.
• The DVD format was launched in the U.S.
• Pokemon debuted in Japan.
• IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess champion Gary Kasparov.
• The first Harry Potter book was published.
• Diana, princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident.
• Titanic appeared in theaters and made A LOT of money.

Excellent

1. The Edge

If you ask me it's the best screenplay David Mamet ever wrote, and also the best movie Lee Tamahori ever directed.  Add to this a wonderfully studied performance by Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin and you've got a winner.  In The Edge Hopkins and Baldwin star as two guys lost in the Alaskan wilderness.  It's more than a story of survival, it's about individual worth and the nature of power.

Fun Fact: The bear that appeared in this movie also appeared in Legends of the Fall, a movie in which Anthony Hopkins was also a cast member.

2. Happy Together

Two men from Hong Kong fall in and out of love in Argentina.  I'm not a huge fan of director Wong Kar-wai's earlier films (stylistically impressive yet very disjointed), but Happy Together really worked for me.  The ending, by the way, is bittersweet for those who remember how close Taiwan and Hong Kong used to be.

Fun Fact: Tony Leung is better known to Western audiences, but his costar in this movie, Leslie Cheung, was a major star in his own right.  He may be recognizable from his starring role in Farewell My Concubine.

Classic

1. Starship Troopers

Never mind that most of the actors in this movie can't act worth a damn.  Never mind that they manage to outrun a nuclear weapon near the end.  In Starship Troopers director Paul Verhoeven managed to blow up the world he created in RoboCop and Total Recall to galaxy-size proportions, and the result is a glorious mix of fascist dystopia, outright propaganda, and commentary on war films in general.  Definitely one of the most entertaining films - if not THE most entertaining film - of 1997.  It's also far superior to the book that inspired it.

Fun Fact: The first scene in this film was adapted shot-for-shot from Triumph of the Will.

A Weird and Uncomfortable 1.5 Hours

1. Gummo

Life on the wrong side of the tracks in Ohio - at least until the twister hits. Parts of this movie are really hard to sit through, but I can't say it was boring.

Some Good Ones

1. Cube

On the one hand, a genius idea.  They must have raked in MILLIONS from a movie revolving around a group of theater actors and a single set.  On the other hand, watching Cube is like watching a sketch performed in drama class.  Would you REALLY get into those kinds of conversations as you're trying to escape a death machine?  I seriously doubt it.

Its cheesiness aside, anyone confessing a love of horror should watch Cube.  It might not have been an immediate hit, but it casts a long, long shadow over subsequent horror films.  Any movie featuring characters who have to advance through a space room by room probably owes something to Cube.

2. Princess Mononoke

It's Man vs. Nature in this Studio Ghibli production.  As the Studio Ghibli films go this is one of my favorites.  It's in some ways reminiscent of the much earlier Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, though this one is fantasy where Nausicaa is science fiction.  The human subplots at work in this film are also a lot more nuanced.

3. Selena

Life imitates art.  Long before anyone knew who she was, Jennifer Lopez starred as the famous Latina songstress.  It's a good movie, even if it strays into soap opera territory.

4. The Odyssey

It's good even if the special effects aren't.  Armand Assante stars as the hero of Homer's epic, with occasional appearances by Eric Roberts, Isabella Rossellini and others.

5. Perfect Blue

A Japanese pop start turned actress finds out she has a stalker.  Or does she?  This movie doubles and triples back on itself so many times you might not be so sure.

Fun Fact: American director Darren Aronofsky duplicated a scene from this movie in Requiem for a Dream.  There are also many similarities between this movie and Aronofsky's Black Swan.

6. Anaconda 

The snake looks stupid but if you can overlook that Anaconda ain't bad. Jennifer Lopez stars with Ice Cube, Eric Stolz and a delightfully cartoonish Jon Voight.

7. I Know What You Did Last Summer 

Damn Jennifer Love Hewitt had an impressive set of... nominations for various awards. NOT breasts. I'm definitely not talking about breasts.

In this well constructed slasher pic four high school friends share a terrible secret. The screenplay was excellent, the direction was tightly paced, and the actors were perfectly cast.

Not Able To Get Into It, Read Too Much Russian History.

1. Anastasia

Don Bluth-produced animated film about the famous missing princess.  It follows the blueprint laid down by Disney, with my only real complaint being the cgi-rendered vehicles, all of which look out of place in the film.  

But yeah, I've read too much about the Romanovs.  Of course every girl wants to be a princess, but how much human suffering purchased those fancy dresses?  Those idyllic exiles in Paris?  Those splendid balls?  While I was watching Anastasia I couldn't help but think about the average Russian peasant at the time, and how his or her ancestors had all suffered to pay for those dresses, vacations and balls.

Fun Fact 1: In researching this film Don Bluth consulted former CIA agents who'd been stationed in Moscow.

Fun Fact 2: Carrie Fisher rewrote parts of the script, a work for which she went uncredited.

Grim Fact: In real life Anastasia was assassinated alongside her relatives in 1916.  This was conclusively proven in 2007.

Some Bad Ones

1. Home Alone 3

Yet another precocious child of irresponsible parents sets traps for unintelligent robbers.  I laughed exactly once.  And hey, isn't that Scarlett Johanssen as his older sister?

2. Flubber

I was with this movie in the beginning, but about halfway through it gets so random that I lost interest altogether.  It's like the movie sets certain rules for itself, and then halfway through decides "Fuck it, this is for kids."  It's fashionable to mourn the passing of Robin Williams - and I agree that he was a talented actor and comedian - but he was in a ton of bad movies.

Fun Fact: Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve were classmates at Julliard.  They remained lifelong friends until Reeve's death.

3. Volcano

Yawn.  Tommy Lee Jones tries to save Los Angeles from a volcano.  There are some memorably cheesy moments but overall it's very boring.

One So Bad It's Almost Good

1. Speed 2: Cruise Control

A horribly miscast Jason Patric stars as an LAPD detective who's NOT (don't even think it!) the same character Keanu Reeves played in the first installment.  And opposing him?  Willem Dafoe, who spends most of this movie mouthing ridiculous bits of dialogue.  The lion's share of this debacle masquerading as a movie resembles The Poseidon Adventure, with an ending that seems more like a checklist of vehicle-related stunts than the conclusion to a coherent story.

Fun Fact 1: Temuera Morrison, last seen in Once Were Warriors, is in this.

Fun Fact 2: Star Jason Patric's salary was about half that of costar Sandra Bullock.

One So Bad It Really Is Good 

1. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation 

Right from the start this movie's writing checks the budget can't cash, and the cgi near the end has definitely not aged well. In its defense it knows exactly who its audience is (14 year old boys), and despite lame fight choreography many of the female cast members are smokin' hot. Several scenes feel like setups for porn but of course that never happens.

Fun Fact: Tony Jaa served as Robin Shou's stunt double for much of this film.

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"Annihilation" by Jeff VanderMeer (2014)

 "'What happened to her?' the surveyor whispered.  She kept taking quick, nervous glances back at me as she stood guard, almost as if whatever had happened wasn't over.  As if she expected the anthropologist to come back to horrifying life."

Jeff VanderMeer is an American science fiction author resident in Florida.  The Southern Reach trilogy is his most celebrated work, and Annihilation forms the first part of this trilogy.  He's often grouped alongside other authors within the "New Weird" subgenre, but in my opinion that subgenre is nonsense.  At what point was science fiction not weird?

I saw Alex Garland's film adaptation long before reading the book, and while the book and the movie are similarly bleak I'd have to say that the book is more of an intellectual exercise.  The film - as one would expect - adds more drama and characterization to what is a very bare bones story.  The movie is also more violent than the book, at least to the extent that the other characters witness acts of violence.  In the book deaths happen "offscreen" while the protagonist is busy elsewhere.

In case you haven't seen the movie or read the book, in Annihilation several characters explore Area X, a strange region quarantined off from the rest of the world.  These characters are never named, and the protagonist is known only as "the biologist."  Throughout this (very) short book the biologist reflects back upon her reasons for entering Area X, and although these reflections explain her reasons for being there her tone remains unemotional throughout.  This approach makes sense, because it is ideas that are being explored in Annihilation, not the characters themselves.

You might, by the way, want to check out the concept of annihilation in particle physics before either reading the book or watching the movie.  It sheds a certain light (or a certain number of photons) on what the author was trying to do.

Having only read Annihilation - again, a very short book - I'm unable to arrive at some sort of conclusion regarding Jeff VanderMeer as a writer.  He definitely has a good command of the subject matter, and the detail with which he explores biological concepts brought to mind Neal Stephenson.  Unlike Stephenson, however, VanderMeer knows how to get to the point, and I'm happy to say that where a book like Seveneves is burdened with unnecessary details (often at the expense of its story), Annihilation says only what it needs to say and nothing more.

But, strangely enough, what Annihilation really reminded me of is H.P. Lovecraft's famous story In the Mountains of Madness.  Sure, In the Mountains of Madness isn't science fiction by any stretch of the imagination, but both Annihilation and Lovecraft's story share the same sense of existential dread.  

To sum up, I'd recommend this book.  As science fiction stories go it's rock solid, and it will likely stay with you for a long time.  I have a few other books on my shelf yet to read, but after doing so I'll try to keep VanderMeer in mind.  I'm pretty sure the other two books in his Southern Reach trilogy are just as good as Annihilation.

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Albums That Changed My Life 10: The Late 90s

For me the late 90s was the onset of adulthood.  By then I had moved out of my parents' house, and I'd moved on to a series of girlfriends, rented rooms, used cars, jobs and whatever else goes into forming the adult version of yourself.  It was a good time overall, and in a much larger sense it was a good time for America.  Were mistakes made?  Sure.  Were any of those mistakes the end of the world?  No, not even close.

In terms of music I was listening to a lot of different stuff at the time.  With the passing of Grunge/Alternative from the public consciousness, I took a deeper dive into music and styles of music that I'd ignored or been ignorant of before.

1. Miles Davis - Miles in the Sky

At some point I crossed paths with Miles Davis, specifically Bitches Brew.  It was the most beautiful/nightmarish thing I'd heard up to that point.  Afterward I bought up a lot of Davis' discography on LP, with my hands-down favorite being Miles in the Sky.  I already loved Miles, but Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams really sealed the deal for me with this album.  It will always be one of the coolest things ever.

2. The Inner Mounting Flame

Of course for most of us Rock guys, jazz is the gateway to Fusion (or vice versa).  Soon after discovering Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk I moved on to Fusion bands like Tony Williams' Lifetime and (of course) The Mahavishnu Orchestra.  Do I enjoy The Mahavishnu Orchestra as much now?  Not really, but at the time I couldn't get enough of them.

3. Bach's Italian Concerto

Sorry if this transition is jarring, but I was big into Baroque at the time too.  Part of the reason was college - I found that studying was easier with music that didn't have vocals.  As far as Classical goes I pretty much started with Bach, and from there moved on to Vivaldi and other Baroque composers.  The Italian Concerto remains my favorite.

4. Isaac Albeniz - Asturias and Other Pieces

Those of us exploring Classical from a background in Rock are bound to come across music for the classical guitar sooner or later.  In my case a few misguided guitar lessons with a classical guitar teacher helped.  This teacher recommended one of Segovia's recordings, and that led me to Albeniz.

5. Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Tarkus

I still listen to this album quite a bit.  I always thought it was the best thing that band ever did, even if I do have a soft spot for their first album.  I loved ELP so much that I even went and bought all of The Nice's albums - hell, I even bought other albums by The Nice's bass player!  This said, none of those related albums are half as good as Tarkus, an album which continues to rock my world today.

6. Yes - Close to the Edge

I'll agree that it's a bloated album.  I'll agree that the lyrics don't make a lot of sense.  I'll even agree that Fragile might be the band's most concise statement.  But man, when this album builds to a climax it REALLY builds to a climax.  I can't tell you how many hours I spent driving around Seattle with this blasting in my car.  "Seasons will pass you by/I get uuuuuuuup!!!/I get down...."  Fuck yeah.

7. Atomic Rooster - Death Walks Behind You

I had this on tape when I lived in Seattle's University District.  Back then I inhabited a tiny basement room that occasionally flooded when the upstairs people flushed too much.  It was squalid, but I managed to lure female classmates into that hovel anyway.  And what were those female classmates likely to hear in that dilapidated space?  Death Walks Behind You.  I played it so much I broke the tape.

8. David Bowie - The Man Who Sold the World

Sometimes you get tired of Prog Rock.  Too many notes?  Whatever the reason, towards the end of college I switched over to Glam.  My point of entry?  Bowie.  I formed an easy friendship with albums like Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory, but it was The Man Who Sold the World that really blew me away.  It helped that I'd loved Cream for ages.  This lineup of Bowie's band sounds like a gender-bent version of Cream.

9. T-Rex - The Slider

Where Bowie goes Marc Bolan is soon to follow.  I kind of, sort of liked the first Tyrannosaurus Rex album, but like most people I didn't like Bolan until I heard him play electric guitar.  Of course it helped that Bolan had Bowie's pal Tony Visconti producing his albums.  In the absence of Visconti, Bolan wouldn't have been as good.

10. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory

The first time I heard Creedence I could have sworn they were a bunch of black dudes.  Imagine my surprise when I learned they were all white guys from San Francisco.  I got into Creedence about the same time I got into John Denver, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, James Brown and countless other bands.  In the late 90s the record and thrift stores were overflowing with that kind of stuff.  I found of a lot of great albums by a lot of great bands through them.

Of course in 2020 collectors/speculators have ruined stuff like that.  Back in the 90s Ebay and sites like it weren't much of a thing, and YouTube hadn't arrived yet.  To make matters worse there wasn't much on torrent sites.  Where did we go hunting for music?  CD stores, record stores and thrift stores.

And it might seem like a lot of work for those of later generations, but I sure picked up my share of girls in those places.

Or maybe they picked up me.

However it worked.

Back then.

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"Man's Fate" by Andre Malraux (1934)

"Ch'en could not move.  Finally he put out his arm, pulled the brief-case towards him, without the slightest difficulty.  None of these men had had the sensation of death, nor of the failure of his plot; nothing - a brief-case which a clerk had pushed towards the edge of the counter and which its owner pulls back...  And suddenly everything seemed extraordinarily easy to Ch'en.  Things, even actions, did not exist; they were dreams, nothing but dreams which take possession of us because we give them force, but which we can just as easily deny...  At this moment he heard the horn of a car: Chiang Kai-shek."

Andre Malraux was a French novelist active from the 1920s to the 1970s.  Something of an adventurer, quite often a liar given to exaggeration, Malraux wrote Man's Fate after visiting China briefly in 1931.  After WWII, French President Charles de Gaulle appointed Malraux Minister of Information, and later Minister of Cultural Affairs.  He died 1976, succumbing to lung cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking.

Man's Fate outlines the personal struggles of several communist agitators after the united front between the Chinese Nationalists and the communists begins to fall apart in Shanghai.  The title is a reference to death, and also to the idea that every man can only meet it on its own terms.  The character Ferral, president of the French chamber of commerce in the novel, can be seen as a stand-in for Malraux.

This novel is definitely the best known of Malraux's books.  It's very French in tone, with characters often pausing during improbable moments to have conversations about free will, the inevitably of political revolution, or some other subject that captured the author's fancy at the time.  It seems deep at first, but the conversations never last very long, or involve much heavy lifting on the author's part.

While reading it I thought often of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, another novel dealing with the collapse of republican China just before World War II.  I think Man's Fate suffers by comparison to J.G. Ballard's more thought-provoking work, and one never gets the feeling that Man's Fate is telling a story of the same scope.

Graham Greene's The Quiet American also came to mind.   But where's Greene's character Fowler says so much about fading European dreams of empire in the East, none of the characters in Man's Fate really make that same connection, or at least with the same level of resonance.  Greene, of course, wrote with an economy that Malraux can't match, and all the philosophizing in the world can't make up for a lack of dramatic conflict.

Is it good?  Let's say I'll give it a pass.  It's definitely not long, at any rate.  Yet if you're looking for a meaningful look at China before the communist takeover, you'll be disappointed by Man's Fate.  It fails to connect to either the Occidental or Oriental aspects of its story, and theories of revolution aren't enough to describe the complicated politics of the period.

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Some Other Movies From 1996 (2)

 

For further background in the year in film please refer to the Some Other Movies From 1996 entry.

The following things happened in 1996:

• 1996 was declared International Year for the Eradication of Poverty.  Remember back when we had poor people?  That was weird, wasn't it?
• The first flip phone appeared.
• A terrifically bad blizzard struck the eastern U.S.
• France conducted its last nuclear weapons test.
• A lot of planes crashed and a lot of boats sunk.  Really.  A lot.
• Taiwan held its first direct elections for the office of President.
• Theodore ("Ted") Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was arrested.
• The Nintendo 64 was released.
• The Summer Olympics were held in Atlanta, Georgia. (for details refer to the movie Richard Jewell).
• The Iraq disarmament crisis was ongoing.

Excellent

1. Breaking the Waves

Mention Lars von Trier and most people jump right to the most extreme examples.  Antichrist, Nymphomaniac and maybe The House That Jack Built.  Those with a deeper knowledge of his filmography might go back even further, to artier movies like Europa or Dogville.  But in the jump to these more extreme examples simpler movies like Breaking the Waves are often forgotten, and that's a real shame.

In Breaking the Waves Emily Watson stars as a woman convinced that defiling herself in the arms of other men will somehow restore her crippled husband to health.  And I know this sounds ridiculous, and in the context of Lars von Trier it sounds like another shock tactic, but this movie is very restrained compared to some of his other movies.  It also makes a nice point about forgiveness.

Some Good Ones

1. Happy Gilmore

Adam Sandler is a former hockey player turned professional golfer.  Honestly, this movie still holds up.  You'll think: "Oh, but it's an Adam Sandler movie," but really, it's still funny.

The director of this movie, Dennis Dugan, has directed several other Adam Sandler films.  This was the first film they did together, and I consider a vast improvement over the earlier Billy Madison.  Dugan plays the commissioner of the tour in this movie.

Fun Fact (s): Both Carl Weathers (Rocky, Predator) and Richard Kiel (Jaws from the Bond films) are in this movie.

Thinking Too Much for an Adam Sandler Movie: His grandma taking him to see Endless Love when he was a child was completely inappropriate.

2. Independence Day

If you don't like this movie you're thinking more than I was when I thought about Adam Sandler's grandma taking him to see Endless Love.  It's a big dumb American disaster movie  - that's all.  Did you complain about the contrived situations in The Towering Inferno?  Did you scoff at the character development in Earthquake?  Of course you didn't, and for the same reason you bought into the fact that Jeff Goldblum deciphered the alien code with prehistoric 1995 technology, and you also believed that primitive fighter jets could challenge a spacecraft 1/4 the size of the moon.  Interstellar civilizations?  Advanced computing systems, unintelligible to our species?  If you're asking such questions you're already thinking to hard for Independence Day, and you've also forgotten that the answer to all such questions is always AMERICA.  These colors don't run, buddy!

Fun Fact: The use of "ID4" in the marketing of this film wasn't just a way of capturing attention.  There was another film named Independence Day, released back in 1983, and the studio was reluctant to give the producers the rights to the title.

3. Fly Away Home

In Fly Away Home Anna Paquin plays a girl returned to her father's care after the death of her mother.  Before she's really settled into life in rural Canada, she finds a gander of motherless geese in need of someone to show them the way south.  It's a solid movie, if predictable.

Uncomfortable Fact: Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin play father and daughter in Fly Away Home, and later played lovers in 2005's The Squid and the Whale.

Comfortable Fact: What's Anna Paquin been up to?  She recently played Robert DeNiro's wife in 2019's The Irishman.

4. The Craft

Four Catholic high school girls practice witchcraft.  It's longer than it needs to be, but much better than I expected.  It's a very 90s kind of movie.

5. Last Man Standing

So, so manly.  But of course it is - Walter Hill directed it from a script he wrote.  Bruce Willis does his Bruce Willis thing, starring as a man pitting two gangs against each other in west Texas, and Christopher Walken always makes a good nemesis.  Is it as good as Yojimbo?  As good as A Fistful of Dollars?  I don't think so, but it's still pretty good.

6. Set It Off

Four women from the Los Angeles Projects become bank robbers.  It starts out great but overstays its welcome.  That romantic subplot involving Blair Underwood really wasn't necessary.

7. Matilda

Is it just me or is Danny DeVito kind of like his generation's Jon Favreau?  I wouldn't push this comparison too far, but there are some parallels.

DeVito directed this movie about a precocious little girl with a special power.  It was adapted from one of Roald Dahl's books, and the author's trademark quirkiness remains in the finished product.  I really enjoyed the first half - it gets weirder and weirder - even if it runs a bit long.  If you enjoyed the brand of humor present in Jojo Rabbit you'll also enjoy this movie.

8. Primal Fear

Richard Gere stars as a defense attorney defending a man accused of murder.  This was Edward Norton's first movie, and although both he and Gere's costar Laura Linney are excellent I wished it had been shorter.  Taking out some of those courtroom scenes would have made the movie better.

9. A Time to Kill

Matthew McConaughey and Samuel Jackson star in this look at racial injustice in Mississippi.  It's a good movie, but I have two complaints: 1) Sandra Bullock's character is completely unnecessary; he advances the plot in no way, shape or form.  2) It's a story worth telling, but director Joel Schumacher's characteristic lack of subtlety is evident throughout.  He's always trying to turn every scene up to 11, when letting the drama play out naturally would have worked a lot better.  As it is, the jarring emphasis on certain scenes and over-explanation show a lack of faith in the viewer.

Fun Fact 1: That judge look familiar?  If so, it's because he's played by Patrick McGoohan, who appeared as the villain in Braveheart the year before.

Fun Fact 2: Both Donald and Kiefer Sutherland are in this movie.  I could be wrong (they've been in a lot of movies), but I believe this was one of two movies they both appeared in.

"If You Don't Like Space Jam, You Didn't Grow Up in the 90s!"

1. Space Jam

It's true - I didn't and I don't.  I turned 15 in 1990, and by the time Space Jam arrived I was 21.  Too old for Space Jam.  As a blend of live action and animation it worked a lot better for me than Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but I still had trouble focusing on it for any length of time.  This love letter to Michael Jordan via the Looney Tunes characters isn't bad.  I just couldn't relate to it.

Fun Fact: A sequel, starring LeBron James, will be released this year.

Some Bad Ones

1. Jingle All the Way

Back in the day I would have responded to this movie with a big 'ol NOPE, but in 2020 it exerts a certain retroactive charm.  Is it good?  HELL no, but seeing Sinbad, Phil Hartman and the Mall of America (not long after it first opened) brought back some memories.  Like The Craft and Space Jam above, a very 90s movie.

Fun Fact 1: The studio cast Sinbad over Joe "Home Alone" Pesci.  I guess they were worried about unflattering comparisons to another famous Christmas movie.

Fun Fact 2: Martin Mull, who appears briefly in this movie, also played a DJ in 1978's FM.

2. The First Wives Club

Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton team up to get revenge on their ex-husbands.  It's very contrived, the revenge taken isn't very satisfying, and the chemistry between the three leads is nonexistent.  It's really hard to buy into the idea that the three women would want to hang out with each other in the first place.

3. Sleepers

Kevin Bacon, Jason Patric, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt... director Barry Levinson assembled an impressive cast for this one, but the script could have used some work.  Is it the story of four boys growing up in Hell's Kitchen?  Is it the story of abuses within a juvenile detention facility?  Is it a story of revenge?  Whoever wrote the screenplay kept falling back on The Count of Monte Cristo, but Alexandre Dumas' novel was a huge undertaking, with a deep understanding of both its characters and their place in the story he was trying to tell.  Sleepers isn't that.

4. La Belle Verte (The Beautiful Green)

When people say they hate French movies and then mention movies like this I get it.  I suppose you could sit through La Belle Verte for a French conception of the perfect society, but this story of an extraterrestrial tourist in Paris offers nothing but obvious statements.  Deep down we all know that money isn't that necessary; deep down we all know we should love others as we love ourselves, but without offering any solutions to the problems of modern life this movie says nothing.

Fun Fact: Coline Serreau, the director of this movie, was the writer and director of Three Men and a Cradle, which served as inspiration for the American Three Men and a Baby.

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"The God Machine" by Martin Caidin (1968)

"'Because much of what you feed into the electronic memory is going to be wrong.  And if not wrong, it will be distorted or misleading.  The world's knowledge?  No one knows what it is.  No one can verify its accuracy because much of it is opinion.  Feed a computer with the sum of knowledge on the characteristics of the terrestrial environment, request the computer to come up with an answer to a scientific enigma, and if this brain could do it, it would, as Selig Albracht once said in sympathy, 'throw up in the programming room.'  Because we don't know that much about the terrestrial environment to answer many of the questions we have.  And the computer can't perform miracles.'"

Martin Caidin, judging by his Wikipedia entry, sounds like quite a character.  He started out a pilot, went on to write science fiction, hosted a talk show in Florida, and later claimed to have psychic abilities which were largely debunked by James Randi.  He died in 1997, widely regarded as an authority on aeronautics and aviation.  One of his books, Cyborg, is remembered as the inspiration for The Six Million Dollar Man TV show.

The God Machine is Caidin 10 years or so into his writing career.  In terms of style it's very polished.  It's also full of not-so-subtle misogyny.  Women in this book are either servants or sex objects, sometimes both.  And while Caidin's protagonist does acknowledge an insensitivity with regard to women, it's obvious that the women in this book describe, at least to some extent, the author's preferred modes of female behavior.

Casual misogyny aside, The God Machine isn't bad.  In it our hero, a mathematical genius fresh out of college, is assigned to a secret government project.  As you can probably guess, the aim of this project is the creation of a sentient computer.  As the computer's malignant consciousness begins to manifest itself, our hero must rise to the occasion and oppose its nefarious designs.

If you're looking for a fast-paced thriller you'll be disappointed by this book.  It definitely seems like that kind of book in the beginning, with the protagonist narrowly escaping both a beautiful woman and an attempt on his life.  But from that point on there's A LOT of discussion - much of it framed around the then emerging discipline of cybernetics - and there's a also lot of theory as to how a thinking computer might or might not be constructed, what its motives at any given time might be, and how its way of thinking might differ from that of a human being.

On the whole I enjoyed The God Machine.  It made me think about China, and the very real possibility that the government there might try to offload the burdens of government onto a form of artificial intelligence.  IF that hasn't been done already.  With their recent forays into quantum computing and social engineering you just never know.  Those given to thoughts of paranoia might even extrapolate further, positing a world in which humanity, enslaved by cellular technology, bows before a vast, active, living intelligence by the name of Google.*

Caidin's novel also made me think about WarGames.  It bears some strong resemblances to that movie, and I wonder if those resemblances are purely accidental.  Take away the modems, take away the high school girlfriend, and yeah, The God Machine is pretty much WarGames.

Oh and The God Machine did remind me of one other thing.  It reminded me of this song, off Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World.  And guess what?  "Saviour Machine" came out in 1970, two years after The God Machine was published.

Related Entries:

"Dust" by Hugh Howey (2013)

"Shift" by Hugh Howey (2013)

"Pebble in the Sky" by Isaac Asimov (1950)

"Wool" by Hugh Howey (2013)

*The V.A.L.I.S. trilogy by Philip K. Dick.  I highly recommend it.