Tinker Tailor Soldier Review

Hey,

So I went down to see the new movie adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley, a high-ranking member of British Intelligence (the Circus) kicked out with his boss when a secret job in Hungary goes bad. George gets called back in when it's revealed that there is a mole working for Soviet Intelligence within the Circus. Since Smiley was forced out in disgrace, it's probably not him and he's in the best position to ferret out the rat.

So, I've read the book so the central mystery of who-dunnit wasn't as big a surprise to me. And because the book could take more time in the film, the various suspects got a lot more time to really up the level of confusion. Here, the movie can't give that lengthy focus so it makes up for it with tension as Smiley's agent Peter Guillam steals from the Circus archives to help build up Smiley's case.

But the movie is a lot of fun to watch. The Circus looks like a British Intelligence office from the 70's. It's all Governmental-Industrial and shabby and everything looks like it was the state-of-the-art in high tech back when they were fighting Nazis. Everyone turns in a great performance. Mostly, it's all very understated and people look like civil servants and not dashing spies at all. Gary Oldman turns in a great Smiley. He's like a block of weathered wood. He just sits there and listens and asks a few questions here and there and then ponders over his clues. He probably could get away with talking even less.

I was also surprised that the movie had some very funny bits sprinkled in here and there. Not laugh-out-loud, but funny and quite unexpected.

Anyway, it was a very good movie, although now I'm interested in seeing the BBC television series.

NOTE TO KENDALL SQ. TEHATRE GOERS -- So you know how the parking garage used to be pay in cash as you leave? Yeah, well now they've got a system where you can pay at a kiosk in cash or credit OR you can just pay with a card as you drive out. You drive out, put the parking stub in, then put in the credit card. BE WARNED -- you want to put both cards in with the magnetic stripe up and be very careful when you validate your card at the theatre or else it won't be correclty validated and you'll be severly inconvenienced. So +10 points for not being "cash only" anymore but -30 for their terrible execution.

later
Tom

Artemis Review

Hey,

So this weekend I also finished up Artemis by Phillip Palmer. This is the latest installment of his "Debatable Space" books which is his future history to play in. There's a fair amount of high-tech stuff that mostly revolves around FTL communication, decent relativistic speed travel and really, really dodgy quantum teleportation.

The protagonist is, as you might expect, a woman named Artemis who comes from a quiet world or archivists and researchers but who comes equipped with a wide and deadly array of augmentations. One of the most important is her ability to interface directly with the quantum computers that ccontrol most planetary systems. Quite handy when you want to get information or control.

The book opens with Artemis in prison as step one in a complex plan to get revenge on a former lover and head of a criminal empire who mistreated her rather badly. She soon organizes a break-out from the prison and begins carving a bloody path of revenge which is eventually halted when the Earth government picks her up to enlist her services in bringing down even larger criminal scumbags whose aggressive expansionism is making more advanced alien races a little skeptical of this whole "let the humans live" deal.

So it's a revenge motif against high-tech super-psychos, which is very reminiscent of The Demon Princes series by Jack Vance. Palmer has a brisk writing style and while Artemis's narration (really a thought-record) can be a bit grating at times, he keeps the action going and he's got a lot of good ideas and some sly observations about modern living and how we use technology to both control and alienate ourselves. Overall it was a fun read.

later
Tom