On January 10, 2024, at 8 PM EST, I'll present two short silent films with live keyboard accompaniment over Zoom. Details are in my blog post; I'll make the Zoom link available later. Guest participation will be heavily restricted, making it safe to share the link.

I've had fun doing silent movies at the library, and the people who have gone say good things about my accompaniment. This is a way to reach more of an audience. Edison Studios' Frankenstein and Méliès's The Impossible Voyage are interesting films. Charles Ogle played the Monster two decades before Karloff, and the Méliès movie tops his A Trip to the Moon with a train ride to the Sun!

SPOILER ALERT: This post talks about many aspects of the novel and the movies.

The more you love a book, the less possible it is for a movie adaptation to satisfy you. The Atlas Shrugged movie trilogy, which I just finished watching, had an impossible challenge to face as far as my reaction was concerned. Still, it wasn't terrible, and it had some effective parts.

It didn't help that the series was produced on a shoestring. Each movie had a different cast, with actors who usually didn't look at all like each other. Often they didn't get the spirit of the characters right. I'll give points to all three Dagny Taggarts. I'd heard negative things about the casting of John Galt, but I didn't find him bad.

The movies stayed closer to the book than many other adaptations of famous novels (e.g., Peter Jackson's treatments of Tolkien). A lot of omission was necessary, even with three movies. In general, the broader philosophical dimensions were lost to the political and business stories. Galt's speech wasn't much more than five minutes long, but obviously you can't put a three-hour speech into a movie. The date was changed from November 22 to November 23, probably because of the connotations of the former since 1963.

The portrayal of Galt's Gulch in the third movie worked well. Also, its start redid the scene which the second movie ended with and restored it to something closer to Rand's intention. There was a very nice touch right at the end; after New York City went into a blackout, the lights on the Statue of Liberty were still shining.

I could give a long list of complaints. The movies mostly missed the impact of the most memorable scenes in the book. Rearden almost completely vanished from the third movie. There shouldn't have been commentators debating Galt's speech; it was clear in the book that general censorship was in effect by then. But I prefer to dwell mostly on the positives.

If you haven't read the book, read it first.

Yesterday I watched Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald and was completely confused by the ending. Just now I found that the people running dedicated fan sites are equally confused. That makes me feel better about myself, though not about the movie. At least it was a library disc, so I didn't spend any money on it.

Yesterday I finally saw Solo. It was OK, if rather predictable. Its explanation of "the Kessel run in 12 parsecs" was nice.

It left me puzzled over Chewbacca's name, though. The Wookiee vocal apparatus apparently can produce vowels and gutturals, but not the consonants that we produce with the lips and tongue. Chewbacca gave his name, which Han repeated back as "Chewbacca," but it didn't sound anything like that. It would have worked better if Han had said, "I can't say what you just said. Is 'Chewbacca' close enough?"

I just got a box of DVDs with 50 mad scientist movies in the mail from Oldies.com.

If you don't hear anything from me for the next two weeks, come and pry me away before it's too late. :)

A nearby library asked me to help test their trial run with Kanopy, a streaming movie service. It has a much better selection of old movies than Netflix. It even has some German-language movies.

One of the movies I've watched is Buster Keaton's The General. It's an excellent movie, though it's a bit difficult to deal with today, since it presents a viewpoint sympathetic to the Confederacy. It's not in the same category as Birth of a Nation, which is aggressively anti-black and pro-KKK. It reminds us that for many Southerners, fighting for the Confederacy was mainly a matter of defending their homeland.

The eponymous General isn't a military officer but a locomotive. Half the movie is train chases. Occasionally the matting is obvious, but the production values are remarkable for 1926. The collapse of a burning bridge as a train tries to cross it is impressive. Update: According to Roger Ebert, this scene was shot not with a miniature, but with a real locomotive!

Keaton's character is on the wrong side and makes some amusing flubs, but he always recovers from them, and he's competent and dedicated. So many comedies today assume that to be funny, a character has to be inept or dishonest.

I've been reading a bit about the movie Christopher Robin, and it's got me convinced it's a movie I would find extremely disturbing to watch. In real life, Christopher Robin Milne fought all his life against being regarded as a character in his father's children's book. In the movie, as far as I can tell from the summaries and reviews, the Pooh characters drag him back into being just that.

I have personal reasons for finding a trapped-in-childhood scenario terrifying, and I'd most likely flee from the theater in a panic if somehow I was persuaded to watch it.

Comments disabled. I'd prefer not to discuss this, at least not in a public forum.

The Last Jedi was considerably better than I expected it to be. It had the elements of strong character and tragedy which had been seriously lacking since the original trilogy. There were lots of points that didn't quite make sense to me; I'm not sure if they're plot holes or I just wasn't paying enough attention. But that's standard for any Star Wars movie.

The audience was very small for yesterday's silent movie, but I had fun and so did the people who showed up. Scott from the Plaistow Library didn't make it because he was sick yesterday, but I talked with him today, and he's still interested in having me accompany another movie there. I've ordered a batch of silent DVDs from Alpha Video which I'm waiting for.

Today the shelter had more black cats. I'm starting to think its slogan should be #BlackCatsMatter. Kellogg is very hard to spot against his black shelf. There was a new black kitten who was very frightened and wasn't eating.

Dewey Decimal was acting as receptionist all morning, sitting on the front desk and enjoying attention. I made several attempts to get a picture of him without much success, then Virginia grabbed the camera from me and got this picture while I tried several tricks to get D.D. to look at the camera.

Another cat, named Old Tom, was just sitting and moping. I put a dish of tuna under his nose, and he showed no interest in it, though Beck and Petit Manan were trying to get into his cage to take it from him. Old Tom isn't old; he's 3 years old according to his card in the shelter and 5 according to the website. It seems like a poor choice of name to get the cat adopted.

The yard sale has been rescheduled for Saturday the 9th. The weather report says we should have warm weather and some sun, with no rain till the afternoon.

Today I was working in the Plaistow Library. I saw a DVD of Phantom of the Opera (the musical) on sale for a dollar, so I picked it up. While buying it, I mentioned that I'll be accompanying the silent version of Phantom in Kingston on June 5 (plug every chance you get!). She was more interested than I expected, and she called to the assistant director for adult programming.

It turned out that they had been talking about running silent movies just today. I talked with him for a bit. We didn't make any definite plans, but he sounded interesting, even asking how much of an honorarium I'd charge. (I told him, "A tip jar.")

This could start to get interesting.