All posts by Lars Walker

Reviews

Film review: 'Thor: The Dark World'

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I saw the new Thor movie, Thor: The Dark World, this weekend, and I suppose I ought to review it. I find it hard to express an opinion, because I can’t find much handhold. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – I had a good time. I was well entertained. But I’m left without any strong impression. Lots of action, lots of CGI, lots of interesting visuals (some locations shot in Norway’s Lofoten Islands), but I came away with no great emotional response.

One problem is the clearly contrived nature of the central problem of the plot. Long ago, the Dark Elves (who, I must admit, look more like elves than the Jotuns looked like jotuns in the first movie) fought a great war against the Aesir gods, and were ready to unleash their doomsday weapon, called Aether, which is supposed to have the power to destroy the whole universe. But the gods forestalled them by some stratagem I didn’t quite understand, and now the Aether is locked away in a secret place. But a dark elf named Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) has recently re-awakened, and is plotting to reclaim the Aether, in a plan that comes to involve Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Thor’s (Christ Hemsworth’s) love interest from the last movie. There’s a big attack on Asgard, and Thor defies his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) in a desperate gamble to defeat Malekith.

One part I did enjoy was how the sibling rivalry issues were portrayed in Thor’s relationship with his adopted brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is first of all a prisoner, but then enters into a desperate alliance with Thor. I was troubled by the killing off of a couple important characters, which messes with the source material (both mythical and comic book).

When all was said and done, I didn’t come away with any feeling that the movie had transcended its sources, as I did with the first movie.

So I recommend it, but not in the highest terms. Cautions for lots and lots of comic book violence.

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I am the cutting edge

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Today I used my Kindle Fire HD with the Overdrive app to borrow and download, for the very first time, a book from the Hennepin County Library (one of Lawhead’s, if you care). I’m a student of library and information science, you know, and this is how I stay on the cutting edge.

What have I learned in my class so far? The most disturbing thing is that all that stuff we’re digitalizing to “preserve it?” It’s all crumbling to dust. CDs, DVDs, floppies, tape, every single digital medium deteriorates over time. As I recall they give the average CD-ROM a little over 20 years.

The most stable media for preserving data remain, for the time being, archival quality paper and microform.

Just to give you something to worry about tonight.

Authors, Religion

50 years gone

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C. S. Lewis’ grave in Holy Trinity churchyard, Headington Quarry, Oxford

Photo credit: jschroe

I’m going to alter my long-established custom of always posting about a days’ commemorations in the evening of that day, which means most of you read it the next day. Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis (also of a couple obscure characters named John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley).

I was, of course, around when it happened, in junior high if you must know. What did I think when I heard Lewis was dead? I’m not sure, because I wasn’t aware of his death date until years later, long after I’d become a Lewis enthusiast. I do remember the day though, because of the Kennedy thing.

But I’ve written about that before. I’d like to just recall what Lewis has meant in my life. It occurred to me today that Lewis was himself my Wardrobe, the portal through which I entered a larger world.

I was educated, like most of my friends, in Lutheran colleges which are now under the umbrella of The Very Large Lutheran Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless. But, unlike a large percentage of my friends from those days, I neither apostatized or became a liberal. It was Lewis who made that possible (with the help at a later stage of Francis Schaeffer). The Lutheran schools I’m speaking of had then, and I assume still have, one single purpose in their religious education curricula, and that is to destroy all Christian faith in their students. But Lewis (though no biblical inerrantist) showed me that embracing orthodox Christianity doesn’t mean giving up reason. I clung to reason, and I clung to the faith of my childhood.

You yourself may approve or disapprove of that course on my part, but as for me, it’s one of the things I’m thankful for as Thanksgiving approaches.

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Cheesy Danish

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Someone on Facebook posted a link to an article (not sure if it was this one; there are several out there) about this newly unveiled portrait of the Danish royal family, produced – though this seems incredible – at the family’s request, apparently.

If somebody did a portrait of your family like this, would you pay them?

I made a crack on my friend’s comments about how this is actually considered cheerful in Denmark, home of Hamlet and Kierkegaard.

But in fact I think it’s more ominous.

As a certified amateur artistic wiseacre, my immediate interpretation of these spooky figures, backed up by classical ruins, was that the purpose would seem to be to portray the royal family as doomed, a crumbling remnant of an outmoded social order.

And I bet the royals understand that, but know that pointing it out would just open them up to accusations of trying to suppress artistic expression.

But even more, it struck me that the composition reminded me viscerally of another famous royal portrait. This one: Continue reading Cheesy Danish →

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Much noted, long remembered

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One of three known photographs of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken by David Bachrach.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It was on this day 150 years ago that Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the battlefield cemetery. The words have become part of our national canon, and not without reason. Lincoln had the rare qualities of having both a first class mind and a masterful prose style. This is particularly interesting when we remember that he had about the least formal education of any American president. If he had not existed, it would have been impossible to invent him.

Fiction, Reviews

Storm Front, by John Sandford

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Another Virgil Flowers novel from John Sandford. The Flowers books are generally lighter than the Prey novels starring Virgil’s boss Lucas Davenport, but Storm Front actually veers off into farce territory. And it was OK. I enjoyed it generally, though it irritated me in places.

The story starts in Israel, where Rev. Elijah Jones of Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota (a real place) is involved in an archaeological dig. One morning he gets up early, breaks into a storage locker, steals a newly discovered artifact, steals a car, and sets off for home. Soon the Israelis are after him, and that’s where Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension officer in southern Minnesota, comes into it. He’s already happily occupied with investigating an improbably attractive redneck mother of five, whom he suspects of petty crime activity, when he’s ordered to pick up an Israeli Antiquities agent at the airport. Soon he can hardly turn around without bumping into Israeli agents, Hezbollah agents, Turkish agents, cable TV show stars, and ordinary reporters, all intent on getting credit for recovering a stone that—if genuine—could discredit the Old Testament and rock the faith of millions of Christians and Jews.

It’s mostly played for laughs, and nobody gets killed—which is a major change for a John Sandford book. People stumble over each other, pass each other ignorantly in the dark, and pass the stone back and forth—sometimes unwittingly—in something like a Keystone Kops scenario.

I suppose this is Sandford’s way of dealing with controversial material. Aside from the religious issues, there are Israelis and jihadis here. Sandford tries (and frankly it bugs me) to be evenhanded. The Hezbollah characters never get a chance to do their worst, and a ruthless Israeli agent is the real bad guy of the story. A couple of the Muslim characters, with terrorist associations, are seen to be essentially harmless and in love with western decadence. Which strikes me as wishful thinking, if it’s meant to be taken as typical.

But the book was amusing. Minor spoiler: Don’t worry about the threat to the Bible at the heart of the story. Mild violence, some sex, rough language. But, as mentioned, the violence level is pretty low, which may make this book more appealing to some than most of Sandford’s work.

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Coming attractions

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Floyd at Threedonia posted this trailer for an upcoming movie from Randall Wallace, to be released next Easter. What troubles me is that it actually looks kind of good. You all know the general rule about religious-themed movies: If the theology’s good, the movie’s probably bad, and if the theology’s bad, the movie’s probably bad anyway. But this almost looks like it could work.

Which would be a miracle. And that would prove God’s existence, right?

Fiction, Reviews

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, by Robert E. Howard

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Far back in Kane’s gloomy eyes, a scintillant light had begun to glimmer, like a witch’s torch glinting under fathoms of cold gray ice. His blood quickened. Adventure! The lure of life-risk and battle! The thrill of breathtaking, touch-and-go drama! Not that Kane recognized his sensations as such. He sincerely considered that he voiced his real feelings when he said:
“These things be deeds of some power of evil. The lords of darkness have laid a curse upon the country. A strong man is needed to combat Satan and his might. Therefore I go, who have defied him many a time.”

After viewing the not-bad movie Solomon Kane, which I reviewed recently, I decided to see whether there were any Kane stories I’d missed. I’d read one collection before, and thought that was all there was. But in fact, I discovered, Robert E. Howard wrote a number of Solomon Kane stories, enough to fill a book of reasonable length if you include the unfinished fragments, and that is what The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane is.
The stories start in Kane’s English homeland, where he battles various dark forces, but soon Howard takes him to continental Europe and then to Africa, where he stays for the rest of the book, except for a “homecoming” poem that rounds the collection out.
As you can judge from the snippet at the top of this post, Robert E. Howard was not a writer of elegance. His prose can clunk from time to time. But I have to say that I didn’t care. The man was unmatched in his ability to paint a weird scene, draw you into it, and engage you at every level. I read the book in great chunks, with immense visceral pleasure.
One surprising fact, which I learned in the excellent biographical sketch on Howard by Rusty Burke which is appended to the book, was that Howard was a fan of G. K. Chesterton. It’s apparent, though, that it wasn’t Chesterton’s theological writings that he liked, but his poetry, especially “The Ballad of the White Horse,” which he actually quotes at the section breaks in the story “The Moon of Skulls.” Despite being identified as a Puritan, Solomon Kane doesn’t actually think about theology much. He is even willing to use (though gingerly at first) a “ju-ju stick” given to him by an African witch doctor, though Howard softens the unorthodoxy of that choice later on by identifying the stick as being both the rod of Aaron and the staff of Solomon. In short, don’t look for Christian lessons here. This is pulp fiction from the 1930s, albeit top of the line pulp fiction.
Something should probably be said about Howard’s handling of race. Solomon Kane is not hostile to the black people he encounters. In fact he often acts as their protector, flying into volcanic rage over injustices and violence visited upon them. But he is patronizing in the extreme. The author’s view seems to be that Africans are a lower evolutionary form of human being, soon destined for extinction, and that it’s the duty of superior whites to look after them.
Lots of violence. The language was pretty mild, in the style of the times. And lots less sexual suggestiveness than in the Conan stories.
I should also mention that Gary Gianni’s illustrations for this book are simply wonderful – skillful line drawings in the old style of Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. They are fully worthy of the material and add immensely to the effect of the prose.
Highly recommended, as pure entertainment.

Bookselling

Star Wars as an Icelandic saga, and other matters

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First, a brief commercial message. Due to a momentary technical lag in our diabolical plan to raise the prices on my two self-published e-books, Troll Valley remains for sale for the old $2.99 price at the time of this posting. I have no idea how long this will last, so if you want it at the old, low-self-esteem price, get it now.

Author Michael Z. Williamson sent me this link to a remarkable piece of writing by Jackson Crawford, who teaches Norse and Norwegian languages at UCLA. It’s a retelling of the Star Wars story as an Icelandic saga, and to my ear it seems letter-perfect. Also better than the movies.

But Lúkr took Artú’s bloody cape and there found the message written by Princess Leia. He began to read it. “I am no runemaster,” he said, “But these words say, ‘Help me, Víga-Óbívan Kvæggansson; you alone would dare to avenge me.’ I don’t know how to read any more words, because they are written poorly and hastily. What is this?”

Artú pretended not to speak Norse, and asked in Irish, “What is what?”

“What is what?” responded Thrípíó, “That was a question. What was written on that message which Princess Leia gave you?”

“That’s nothing,” said Artú, “An old message. I think that Princess Leia is long dead.” Thrípíó translated his words into Norse.

“Who is Princess Leia?” asked Lúkr, “What family is she from?”