Svankmajer

Saturday, 22 November 1997

Kevin called up the other night and invited Chris and me along with a small group to see some Jan Svankmajer movies at Lincoln Center. (Current HTML doesn't seem to be up to Czech diacriticals; in a perfect world I'd be able to put a little upside-down circumflex over the S in Svankmajer.) We saw The Alchemist of the Surreal and a reel of selected shorts, the better of which I'd already seen in animation festivals.

At his best, Svankmajer has a great talent for surrealism, mood, and dark comedy. At his worst, he's very fond of making holes in things, and rapid flash cuts of the kind that give me headaches when I see them on a movie screen. What I saw was a very mixed bag, and probably not worth US$8.50 for each of the two shows.

On the up side, we followed the show up with some really good cheap Chinese food, and chatted about Starship Troopers -- the novel by Robert Heinlein, not the movie which none of us has seen. Kevin is rereading it, and not liking it. I'm tempted to reread it myself, to see if I agree with his criticisms, but I'm still in the middle of Master and Commander, and then I've got that copy of Greg Egan's Axiomatic that Chris got me. If I hadn't started reading Master and Commander on the way home from the bookstore, I'd have started with the Egan; he's probably my favorite currently writing SF author.