Fiction for the Autistic

Remember the SNL sketch about "dance theatre for the blind," in which the joke was that the dancers weren't blind, they were just really bad dancers and therefore appealed only to a blind audience?

( bad book review )

Anyway, that's over with. Maybe I can do something more rewarding with the rest of my weekend, like clean house.

movies

This will be a rich couple of months for fantasy films: Order of the Phoenix in July, Stardust in August, The Dark is Rising in October, Beowulf in November, and The Golden Compass in December.

Order of the Phoenix, which everybody reading this has already seen, was well done, although as others have pointed out it's so fast-paced that it would be incomprehensible to any of the nine people on earth who haven't read the book, and there were (of course) a number of lines that I thought important that were either cut or transplanted to different characters, changing their meanings.

Stardust, which we saw tonight, is also quite well done. Robert DeNiro has way too much fun playing a pirate captain; Michelle Pfeiffer does as good a job as one would expect as a wicked witch; Clare Danes is (of course) radiant as the fallen star, and relative newcomer Charlie Cox is quite believable in the hero role of Tristan. The smaller role of "young Dunstan", Tristan's father, is played by the "yummy" (to quote my wife) Ben Barnes, who I gather is also playing Prince Caspian in the upcoming Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's a straightforward fantasy romance with interesting, non-formulaic side characters. Now I have to finish re-reading the book.

I have low expectations for The Dark is Rising: although I enjoyed Susan Cooper's series of books thirty years ago, it looks from the previews to be fairly Hollywoodized (migrated from the UK to the US, among other things), and to have lost a lot of the Welsh-mythology atmosphere that made the books for me. I suspect that since this series is much less well-known than Harry Potter or Chronicles of Narnia, the studio felt they had to play heavily to an American teen audience. But I'll probably go see it anyway. And maybe re-read the book, although I fear the book may suffer from being read by an adult.

Beowulf, from the previews, appears to have little to do with the saga, other than starring a powerful warrior (Hrothgar is corrupt? Grendel's mother tries to seduce Beowulf?), but has a lot of big-name stars, and another Neil Gaiman writing credit, so maybe this will all make sense somehow.

The Golden Compass looks more promising: the visuals are close to my mental image of the world, the casting matches my mental image of the characters, and the screen adaptation (from the previews) seems to "get" the same things I thought were important about the books. This looks like a "must-see".