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The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, 2011)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
D: David Yates
S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman
There’s something not quite right in saying that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the popular film series based on J. K. Rowling’s ridiculously successful collection of seven children’s books about a mostly hapless boy wizard, is the worst among all eight entries in the Warner Bros.-powered franchise. To say so is to assert that the film is, actually, bad. It is not. A more accurate manner of describing the film relative to its cinematic siblings is to say that it’s the least good of the bunch. If anything, this belief, held both by most viewers and by most critics, betokens the singular richness of the film series’ source material as well as the skill with which the filmmakers, within the span of a decade, adapted it—all six and two halves of it.
Order of the Phoenix was the series directorial debut of the then virtually unknown David Yates. The film was a modest success (which is still saying something, considering that what is being spoken of is a goddamn Harry Potter film), fraught as it was from the start with the hazards of condensing the longest and arguably least good (not worst) Harry Potter book into two hours, more or less, of celluloid. The result was at best pleasant, a corrugated affair having many a montage sequence, more than what a typical inspirational sports movie holds. Nevertheless, it was indicative of Yates’s nascent flair for character- and plot-driven fantasy, away from his usual forays into social realism. Yates went on to direct the remaining installments, thereby displaying his developing authorial confidence: from his mind’s eye emerged the deliciously somber Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the affectingly wistful Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and, finally, the frantically fleet-footed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But montage sequences are, three films and four years since the release of Order of the Phoenix, still among the things up Yates’s sleeve. To his credit, though, in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 their use is more compulsory than convenient.
(Source: pelikula)
2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3)
“The El Bimbo Variations” by Adam David (2010). Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” has been translated to numerous languages, not including, not surprisingly, Filipino. But not to worry: Adam David proudly presents “The El Bimbo Variations,” the closest thing—probably the only thing—Philippine literature has to a local version of Queneau’s masterpiece of verbal smithing. In it David subjects the famous first line of the Eraserheads song “Ang Huling El Bimbo” (“Kamukha mo si Paraluman nung tayo ay bata pa.”) to different sorts of formal treatments. Often he takes his cue from the work his literary forebear put in “Exercises in Style,” but he also includes new forms and techniques of playful textual manipulation interspersed with ingenious graphic material made in collaboration with illustrator Josel Nicolas and inspired by Matt Madden’s own tribute to Queneau, the graphic novel “99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.” Finding a more entertaining collection of renditions of a single line from a song will likely be an exercise in futility.
“Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo” by Will Self (2005). J. G. Ballard’s disturbing novel of automotive paraphilia, “Crash,” is recalled in “Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual,” a fantastical yet sometimes all-too-real tale of a family man gone astray. It is the first of two short stories by English enfant terrible Will Self collected by Penguin UK as part of its series of 70 super-slim editions published in celebration of its 70th anniversary. The other is “A Story of Europe,” the tale of a toddler in London and a German businessman. It’s laden with wordplay, but it’s unnerving enough to warrant a comparison with any piece of New Yorker short fiction by Shirley Jackson. (Reviewed here.)
“Mr. Thundermug” by Cornelius Medvei (2007). Fables, by conventional definition, is chock-full of animal characters. More often than not these animals talk, but they do only on their own plane of understanding and interaction, divorced from human comprehension and interference. Cornelius Medvei’s debut novella has for its main character a talking animal, a baboon inexplicably gifted with language—that most human of human abilities—and burdened with the reality of a mostly shortsighted society. But “Mr. Thundermug” is less a fable than an allegory, touching upon the elusiveness of intelligent conversation and emphasizing the importance of standing up for oneself even if one can hardly stand erect. (Reviewed here.)
“Icarus at the Edge of Time” by Brian Greene (2008). This boardbook with words by popular astrophysicist Brian Greene and pictures by the Hubble Space Telescope reworks the Greek myth of Daedalus’s disobedient son into a futuristic tale that substitutes Icarus’s wax-bonded wings with a snazzy micro-warp-drive engine and couples its source’s lesson in overambition with an introduction to time-space dilation. Turns out rocket science makes much more sense when it’s outfitted with art direction by book designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd. (Reviewed here.)
“Smaller and Smaller Circles” by F. H. Batacan (2002). The geometry implied in the title of this Palanca award winner hints at a case of asphyxiation waiting to happen. And it’s not a question of whodunit so much as an examination of a system oblivious of its own disease that this crime novel chooses to tackle. Shut the windows; this book is so invested with a perpetually gloomy atmosphere that reading it might bring about a thunderstorm.
Previous: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)
2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)
“Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories” by Dan Rhodes (2000). Dan Rhodes puts his mastery of the literary double take on display in this collection of a hundred and one funny and sad short short love and unlove stories each told in a hundred and one words. (Reviewed here.)
“Reportage on Lovers” by Quijano de Manila (1977). Nick Joaquin assumes the identity of his journalistic alter-ego in telling a quick succession of tales of, among many others, stolen kisses, inter-municipal liaisons, and love not at first sight but on second thought. There are only so many permutations of true love stories, whether ending in joy or tragedy, one can report before one shades into tedium, but Quijano de Manila seems equipped with a limitless writerly faculty that makes an otherwise dull and repetitive collection even more interesting than fiction.
“From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” by E. L. Konigsburg (1967). The Newbery honors committee seldom, if at all, rewards a mediocre book, and one of the best of the best books to receive the award-giving body’s highest mark of recognition for a work of children’s literature is this novel about two siblings who run away from home to hide in a museum. But perhaps a greater honor is having joined J. D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” in inspiring key scenes in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.” (Reviewed here.)
“03” by Jean-Christophe Valtat (2010). Devoid of paragraph breaks, “03” can surface and gasp for air only within the spaces, short as they are, intrinsic to periods and within the pauses, shorter still, afforded by commas, semicolons, and parenthetical marks. Jean-Christophe Valtat’s English language debut, smoothly translated from the French by Mitzi Angel, is the continuous monologue of a boy waiting at a school bus stop and admiring the “retarded” girl of his Joy Division-soundtracked dreams standing with her mother right across the asphalt-covered street. Its brevity and formal daring suggest a mode of unfoldment along the lines of Roth and Hrabal, but in its fixation with time, memory, and such precisely remembered acts as turning around inside acrylic curtains until one is wrapped tightly and out of breath, “03” is more Proustian than meets the eye. (Reviewed here.)
“Exercises in Style” by Raymond Queneau (1947). A man walks into a bus. Leave it to Raymond Queneau, a founding member of the Oulipo school of constrictive writing, to take care of the rest, by applying above-phrase-level elegant variations—no less than 99 figures of speech, narrative tropes, and shifts in perspective—to counterpoint the banality of an altercation in a communal vehicle followed by the provision of unsolicited sartorial advice in a train station. “Exercises in Style,” which has been translated and at points adapted from the original French to over two dozen languages, most famously in English by Barbara Wright, is a primer in the appreciation of the flexibility and malleability of words. (Reviewed here.)
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