Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Archives for June 2004

The Chronicles of Riddick: the review

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Okay, I have a pretty high tolerance of asininity in movies. I liked Gladiator, remember? (Well, I think I did. I seem to remember I did, but I hardly remember anything about the film. Eh, who cares? Russell who?) But I have a current winner for annoying cinematic asininity.

Darin and I actually have been getting out to see movies again: we have date night every other Wednesday. On the whole, however, we’re having a hard time finding movies to go see. I said, “Isn’t this summertime? Shouldn’t we have a cornucopia of flicks to choose from?” Apparently not. Oh well.

So last week we went to Chronicles of Riddick. Badass Riddick, from Pitch Black, wends his way to New Mecca, which happens to be the place where the feared Necromongers invade next. Necromongers are weird half-alive, half-dead guys who go around flattening planets and “converting” the masses to belief in the Underverse (writer-director David Twohy loves him some technobabblish terms), all the while wearing bizarre fetish clothing. Riddick manages to evade being vaporized through his superior, um…physique? gravelly voice? muscle flexing? Whatever. He avoids the Necromongers but gets picked up by some mercs. They take him to Crematoria, a planet that’s 700 degrees during the day and minus 300 at night and has a high-security prison built beneath the surface. Riddick manages to escape the prison, get back to New Mecca, and defeat the Necromongers.

It’s all pretty standard stuff. Lots of serious pauses. Lots of slinking in silly costumes.

But there was one moment that just hurt my head. See, the Russians who operate Crematoria are going to flee using the one available spaceship, and they’re running down the tunnel built into the planet between the prison and the spaceport. Riddick needs to get to their spaceship before them.

So he runs on the surface.

Um…

The conceit is that he’s running in the twilight, following the night, ahead of the daytime, so it would be warm enough but not too warm.

Um…

Dudes? Temperature aside? There’s no freaking atmosphere on that planet.

When you have science in your movie that someone who failed Physics for Poets finds egregious…rethink.

(Sadly, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics does not have a review for this flick yet.)

My daughter the diva

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We went out to dinner tonight at El Burro, a Mexican restaurant at the Pruneyard. Darin was sitting next to Sophia, and he accidentally spilled her glass of water on her. She immediately began hollering:

My dress! My beautiful dress!

I. Could. Not. Stop. Laughing.

Darin clamped his lips together tightly as he helped her dry off, but it was tough work as she quite dramatically bemoaned her dress, her bee-yoo-ti-ful dress, over and over.

(She was wearing a cotton sundress. Nothing happened to the dress, or to her, actually—we were sitting outside and it was a warm night.)

A litle while later Darin asked if I was going to make a MDMBD entry. After I figured out what he meant, I said, Oh you betcha.

The Rule of Four: the review

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(My friend Otto threatened me with bodily harm if I didn’t post, so I got my butt in gear and finished this review.)

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is the latest publishing marvel to come down the pike: it’s twisty and brainy and has puzzles in Renaissance art, like The Da Vinci Code! It’s written by two young punks just out of Princeton! It’s erudite and a gripping read! Yadda! Yadda!

Well, not so much.

The Rule of Four is the story of Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris, two seniors at Princeton the night before their theses are due. Paul’s thesis is about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real book from the Renaissance that details something in a strange code that has yet to be broken. Tom’s father worked on the puzzle for years; Paul looked Tom up at Princeton because what Tom’s father did on the book.

There were several things that bothered me about this book. The infatuation with Princeton is overweening—the emphasis placed on every little part of the Princeton experience as though it’s poetic or marvelous or something. (I asked Tamar if students at Harvard are this fatuous. She did say that Princetonians are a lot preppier. Then she snorted when I mentioned that these guys are working on a thesis the night before it’s due.) There is a hell of a lot of emphasis put on eating clubs, for instance. As someone not currently at Princeton or worked up about which eating club I belong to, the awe that “the Ivy” appears to inspire seems, uh, ridiculous.

Paul, the guy working on the thesis (and apparently doing so to the exclusion of anything approaching a life at Princeton), manages not to figure out that what he’s doing might be of some, uh, notice, in academic circles, if nowhere else. (You think some undergraduate working on a paper that happened to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem might have an inkling that what he’s done might be of interest?)

The title is The Rule of Four, and much is made of the four guys at the center of the story (Tom, Paul, and their roommates Charlie and Gil)…except they have no relation to the title, no parallels, no thematic unity.

The puzzles that Tom and Paul figure out definitely struck me as stuff that was reverse engineered to show off how esoteric and cool the authors are and not how well the supposed author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili might have hidden whatever secrets the book might contain.

The timeline of the book really bothered me: I believe the entire current storyline of the book covers one night and one day, and there is no way the events described in there could happen.

But what annoyed me most about this book is that it’s not about anything. Or, even worse, I found the theme of the book to be this: it’s all about the bling-bling.

(Yes, the suburban mom in her thirties used “bling-bling,” thereby proving beyond a doubt that phrase has jumped the shark.)

The Rule of Four wants to be The Name Of The Rose, but the biggest difference between that book and this one is that The Name Of The Rose, for all of its puzzleworthiness, is about ideas. What is the secret of the monastery, and why are monks getting murdered for it? The Rule of Four is, in my opinion, pretty much about the stuff. I can’t tell you more without giving it away, of course, but tell me that what you’re supposed to think at the end is: Oh wow, wouldn’t that be cool?

Anyhow, if you want a twisty-turny thriller that makes you feel smarter than you really are, definitely check out The Name Of The Rose (by Umberto Eco, in case you’re wondering). Another one, always fun, is The Eight by Katherine Neville. There are also all the books by Arturo Perez-Reverte, such as The Club Dumas. (I’m not a huge Perez-Reverte fan, but he’s way better than this book.)

But if you want to read The Rule of Four, get it out of the library. Or better yet, read the rest of this entry and I’ll spoil the book for you…
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