Giant

Anyway, I got the information I needed to get, and then as I was going to leave, John asked if I wanted to go with them to lunch. It seems that all of the old NeXT people have this tradition of going out to lunch on Wednesdays, and indeed WebObjects was going out somewhere that day as well. Since we had cut things so closely that I might not have been able to catch up to the WebObjects people, I figured sure, I'll go with this other group.

Well, we had a fine time getting Thai food in Mountain View, and also buying gelato (soft ice cream-like substance, which I've never had before, but which Adrienne had said was really good) for dessert. Plenty of shop talk and gossip, of course. It was a fine time.

Then in the evening I picked up the week's comic books and went to Cafe Borrone to read them, and who was there but the three people I'd gone to lunch with! It seems that I'm infecting all of my friends with the habit of going to hang out at Borrone regularly. (Strange, considering I live farther from it than pretty much anyone I know.) So I read some comics and then hung out with them some more.

Oh, and the project? Well, the information I got from Anders was spot-on and I've made good progress at getting that chunk of the project done, as well as talking with Anders about enhancements we'd like to see to make everything smoother for us. (To be fair, they're enhancements that they'd planned to make anyway, but had put at a lower priority because no one had yet raised it as a specific need, which is completely reasonable.)

This week I finished reading Alan Moore's novel Voice of the Fire. Moore, as some of you may know, is the popular writer of comic book series such as Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Sadly, this book is not nearly as good as any of those, and it might be the worst thing I've yet read by Moore.

It features 12 short stories which take place in and around Northampton, England over the last 6000 years. The stories are very tenuously connected to each other, in that occasionally a story will refer to something vaguely recognizable as being from an earlier story. But there's no overall unifying plot or theme to the stories, and several of them are very difficult to read due to their peculiar writing styles (mangled English, or lack of punctuation). Plus, most stories include widespread and gratuitous use of sex and scatological terms, which quickly becomes both tiresome and rather gross.

The best story of the lot is the second, in which a woman kills another woman she meets to take her place to try to get the inheritance from the woman's dying father. As with several stories in the book, there are suggestions of mysticism in the background, but nothing definite. But it does have a clever revelation at the end (one of the very few instances of Moore's trademark cleverness in the book). Moore applies a more cliched writing trick in the final chapter, which could have lent unity and coherence to the whole, but instead it just adds one more random and confusing element to the overall text.

This book is out-of-print, and even if you can find a copy, I recommend that you take a pass on it. It's really not worthwhile. What Moore had in mind when he wrote it, I don't know. I'd been hoping for a book detailing some 6000-year conspiracy or "shadow history" of the world, but that would require a sense of direction to the whole. I was bitterly disappointed.

Tonight Subrata and I went to see Giant (1956) at the Stanford Theatre. We had to go through a comedy of errors to get there, though: Some other folks who were coming with us ended up bailing at the very last minute, and we didn't have time to get dinner, so we ended up gorging ourselves at popcorn at the theatre. And then the movie (which is nearly three-and-a-half hours long) got out just after all the restaurants in downtown Palo Alto closed for the night. Grump.

Anyway. Giant is about a married couple, Texan Jordan "Bick" Benedict (Rock Hudson) and his wife Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). Leslie move from the southeast (Virginia?) to live with Jordan on his cattle ranch in Texas. There she meets his hand Jett Rink (James Dean, in his last film before his young death at the age of 24 in an accident) with whom he has a rocky relationship. Leslie feuds with Jordan's sister Luz, whose headstrong attitude soon leads to her death, and becomes friends with Jett, who acquires a parcel of Benedict land from Luz' will, is fired by Jordan, and becomes rich himself when he strikes oil.

Giant is a slow-moving film which spends long minutes on each scene. It's nice, in a way: Lovely sets, thoughtful dialogue, solid acting. (Dean in particular, although at first playing almost the same character he did in Rebel Without a Cause, shows greater range when he plays Jett as an older man later in the film.)

Where the film doesn't quite work is that its plot and themes are basically muddled. Is it about the relationship between the old and new rich? Is it about the culture clash between the Texan and the Easterner? Is it about racial prejudice? It's about each of these a little bit at a time, but doesn't really explore any of them in much depth. From the final scenes, it appears that the main theme is that the Benedicts' love for each other transcends everything going on around them over the course of the film (which covers about 30 years of time, including World War II).

It's an enjoyable film, but not entirely satisfying; a tighter writing job would have made a better film. And, ultimately, what it does do well was done better by Gone With the Wind, which is more and more clearly to me the standard for this sort of epic dramatic romance.