Posted on 07/27/2006 6:49:43 PM PDT by marc costanzo
The essay below was originally written in the early Spring of 2001:
With the passing away of LEXX ends an intriguing albeit tawdry experiment in Sci-fantasy. One that breaks with conventions, or should I say cliches of TV sci-fi of the 90's . The politically correct pabulum, the multicultural indoctrination, the BladeRunner motifs, and not the least; the steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return !?
How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Rockne Obannon, Michael J. Stracinsky, etc .. It is time to end their reign of un-American cynicism and fatalism !
How about Tia Carrere? I liked her role as an archaeologist/adventuress in "Relic Hunter". If you need taller, perhaps Kelly Hu.
Louis Wu. From a distance he was an oriental, with pale yellow skin and flowing white hair. His rich blue robe was carelessly draped, so that it should have hampered his movements; but it didn't.
Close up, it was all a fraud. His skin was not pale yellow-brown, but a smooth chrome yellow, the color of a comic-book Fu Manchu. His queue was too thick; it was not the white of age, but sheer clean white with a subliminal touch of blue, the color of dwarf star sunlight. As with all flatlanders, cosmetic dyes were the colors of Louis Wu.
That is followed by the section you were thinking of, and you got it very close from memory (I'm cheating... I have the ebook)
A flatlander. You could tell at a glance. His features were neither Caucasian nor Mongoloid nor Negroid, though there were traces of all three: a uniform blend which must have required centuries. In a gravitational pull of 9.98 meters/second, his stance was unconsciously natural.
His biological father, Carlos Wu (at least according to the collection of Beowulf Schaeffer stories put out as Crashlander), was described as more oriental in appearance, and the above piece makes it clear that he wasn't Caucasian, so Shawn would probably be to "old white guy" to pull it off.
But I was mostly talking about the "cool" factor. When Jim Cameron was talking to Larry Niven about making the movie he suggested someone like Chow Yun Fat, not because of his race but because he was cool and could play both youth and age. Wallace Shawn can play menacing, mostly at second hand, where he'd have to have someone else to carry out his threats. I could never believe a scene with Wallace Shawn standing up to a Kzin and issuing a challenge to hand to hand combat as anything but farce.
Accustomed to his own standards of tact, Louis had expected the kzin to lie. Then Louis would have pretended to believe him, and the kzin would have been more polite in future ... too late to back out now. Louis hesitated a fraction of a second before he said, "And what is the custom?"
"We must fight bare-handed -- as soon as you deliver the challenge. Or one of us must apologize."
Louis stood up. He was committing suicide; but he'd known tanj well what the custom was. "I challenge you," he said. "Tooth against tooth, claw against fingernail, since we cannot share a universe in peace."
If Shawn tried to deliver that line it would be pure comedy. If someone like Chow Yun Fat did you could believe it, and he could probably make you realize that he knew it was his own death sentence he was proclaiming, but he issued the threat anyway.
Lieb Schrieber might pull it off. A younger (and less emaciated) Willem Defoe could to. The Rock could do it if he played it the way he played his character in Rundown. In fact, he might be the best choice, if he could downplay his physical stature and could manage to convery world weary age.
Do understand, I love Wallace Shawn's stuff, but he just makes me shudder in association with Louis Wu. Wallace Shawn is whiny, even when he's not whining. Louis Wu doesn't whine (except to lull his adversary into a false sense of security).
In it, the villian was trying to facilitate the end of the world becuase he was Pontius Pilate's gatekeeper who totured Christ, and was condemned to speand the rest of eternity to wander the Earth, until the world came to an end!
I never saw that one. I'll have to add it to my Netflix queue. Thanks for the tip!
Vance's character development and discriptive dialog would be hard to do.
I would be interested to see who would play my favorite Vance character "Cugel the Clever".
Even as a kid I recognized and enjoyed the caricatures of government bureaucrats. To a kid who grew up during the height of the Cold War it was a breath of fresh air.
that would be an awesome movie. Or even better ... "Invasion". Of course the PC police would kill that one in it's cradle.
True. You'd almost need a narrator to work in some of the prose.
I would be interested to see who would play my favorite Vance character "Cugel the Clever".
Possibly John Kerry?
I think that the movie is discordant from the series. The series was "small", and things were in the details and personal interactions. The movie had some cool stuff, but it had to be "big". Thus for me, it lost a lot of what I liked about Firefly.
I'm not particularly fond of Wheldon's other series, but Firefly was just "wow"...once you get past certain assumptions.
Harlan Ellison is a freaky nut. Straszinski found the home for him - visual ideas, with no control over anything. Ellison is very good at being disturbed.
GOS is still the first book of the series. With the second book (I think it was "How Few Remain"), the outcome of a sovereign Confederacy in GOS is referred to, but the time-traveling Afrikaners had been quietly replaced by Lee's lost orders as having led to a victorious South. My impression is that Turtledove had gotten flak from Confederacy buffs who objected to the need for foreign help in a South-wins scenario.
Add to that their tacky remake of "Dune". Yes, the miniseries form gave them the space to tell the whole story, while the David Lynch version had to be jammed into the runtime of a feature (with the crucial dinner scene omitted, for example), but it couldn't touch the production values of the original film.
Wil Gibson wanted to get away from the sacharine shiny-happy-future that had taken over SF in the 70s. Personally I like the changes, those clean shiny SF worlds were primarily boring, they didn't connect to <<
What, a lot of dystopian movie were comming out in the 1970's,
SILENT RUNNING, QUINTETTE, DARK STAR, ALIEN(a Gibson fav)
the last Planet of the Ape movies -
Wil Gib also had a hand in writing the first drafts of ALIEN3 screenplay, remember that nightmare ?
Let us get this clear, I am commenting primarily on Movies and TV entertainment .
Most of those in the past 25 years !
Gibson also made an appearance as himself in that god awful Oliver Stone produced WILD PALMS, rem that crappy TV miniseries from 1993 ?
>>I never saw that one. I'll have to add it to my Netflix queue. Thanks for the tip!<<
If you like the younger pre-boob job Demi Moore, yes !
So far I'm enjoying Weber/Wright's "Insurrection" amongst others.
I even enjoyed Allen Steele's Coyote and Coyote rising. He is a liberal author but his characters wind up coming to some rather conservative conclusions. He is at least honest enough to believe in self reliance and the tyranny of leftism.
I hope they never get the rights for any of Lois McMaster Bujold's "Miles Vorkosigan" books. I started reading her when her novels first came out and they're about the only ones I buy in hardcover.
Another terrific author I hope SCIFI never touches is Julie Czerneda. She's fairly new on the SF scene but I highly recommend her Web Shifter series and "In The Company of Others." She's also extremely reader-friendly.
Nor could the tacky Canadian version match the higher quality acting of the David Lynch movie .
A longer version of that 1984 movie was released on Sci-Fi channel years ago - it more elucidated the story, with series of painted montage still scenes and a narration .
David Lynch insisted his name was to be stricken from the credits(Alan Smithee pseudonym) .
They could re-edit a superior version of the Lynch movie that would easily be far superior to that cheesy Cable TV version- with is bad Canadian actors
Would you believe, I re-read that a few months ago! One great story. I have many of his books.
I have "Voyage of the Space Beagle" in a trilogy form called "Triad"....with "Slan" and "The World of A".
I read a little every day, usually with my coffee, when I get up.
Most of these didn't make much money. Star Trek and Star Wars ruled the SF roost in those days, clean ships, clearly defined enemies, no hard decisions.
You can't look at the last 25 years without looking at the years before. Trends tend to be a reaction to other trends. Shiny-happy-future bored a lot of people, some of them writers and directors. Alien started the rebellion against that kind of SF, but it got legs and a brand when Neuromancer came out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.