jsmog

I finally saw this film almost 40 years after it came out - and I'm glad I waited so long. I would have walked out in 1984. The high praise from IMDB users and from critics at the time, including a few Academy Awards, absolutely mystifies me. It's a pretty film and, at the time, was probably seen as a nice tongue-in-cheek criticism of the Reagan era. But the portrayal of everyone in the film, with the exceptions of Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield, is a travesty. The Mercury Seven are shown as womanizing, arrogant flyboys, especially Gus Grissom, who was not alive to rebut the film (and died because of the redesign of the Apollo capsule hatch, which came about partly because of the accidental explosion of the hatch on Liberty Bell 7), making him look like he blew the hatch himself. The astronauts form a gang against the stereotypical German scientists and the NASA brass, and both Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson are played for laughs. It is no surprise to me that all of the astronauts hated the film, as did Tom Wolfe, noting the film is nothing like his book of the same title. The only compliment I could find from someone portrayed in the film came from Chuck Yeager, who liked the competent work of Sam Shepard (which to my mind are the only watchable parts of the film.) I could see how the effects dazzled many in the early 1980s, but I've actually met some of the engineers who worked on the Mercury project, and like the astronauts, they are all taciturn, consummate professionals - nothing like the satire of this film. Find a good PBS documentary to learn what it really took to get us into space.

No spoilers...none are necessary. If you've read the book, you might find it hard to imagine a better adaptation. The poor reviews of the film would probably be just as confused by the book, a classic Ballard which takes an ordinary situation (although relatively new when he wrote it in the early 1970s), a self-contained skyscraper, and allows it to degenerate into a modern jungle. Those who know Ballard well and admire him as I do might be apprehensive about any film version of his work, but so far the three I've seen are spot-on, the perverse hilarity of "Crash", Spielberg's maudlin but effective "Empire of the Sun", and now this. The decision to set the story back in an alternative, dystopian '70s is a good one, because it is hard to imagine this story set in our future...even though the brilliant thing about the book (less the film) is the way Ballard made this strange descent into primitive madness seem not merely interesting, but inevitable.

There are two great Maigret adaptations available online or in DVDs from the 1990s, the British version done by Granada for two seasons in 1992, starring Michael Gambon, and the Dune French version that lasted from 1991 until 2005 with Bruno Cremer. Both have strong qualities, although in many ways they are completely opposite. Gambon's Maigret is affable, poetic, emotional, sympathetic, and works in close concert with his men; his Paris (Budapest) is sunny and bright. Cremer's Maigret is taciturn and intense, preferring to wait silently while people reveal themselves, riding his men hard at times, especially the often incompetent officers he encounters outside of Paris; and his Paris (Prague) is always gray or pitch black, dark wet streets, his pipe glowing. In many ways the visual look of the shows are opposite, with the British series relying more on the romance and nostalgia of Paris, while the French series is a showcase for the dark psychological mysteries of Simenon. The French series hews more closely to the original stories, and also has the advantage of the episodes being 30 minutes longer; it is also a more complete canon, with nearly 5 times as many stories. In the Gambon series, Gambon is more pleasant, his men work with him as a clever team, and we see much more of Mme. Maigret, who appears in nearly every episode, but the humor and the characterizations are typically British, which can be somewhat disconcerting. The Cremer Maigret varies in quality with the directors, but he is almost always brilliant, playing his hunches and guiding his investigations with a deep psychology that truly honors the original Simenon novels. And it goes almost without saying, the French version pulls no punches and has a much darker way of exploring aspects of the French character that the heart of Simenon; Cremer spends a lot of time listening to people and asks questions which seem strange but reveal hidden truths. Gambon's Maigret does more of the talking and seems to succeed more through luck and teamwork, which may be failings of the shorter format and the transition from French to English storytelling. I'm fond of them both, but the Cremer Maigret is one of my favorite television programs, with plenty to love, at over 75 hours. It is also possible to watch the Cremer Maigret's over and over, picking out new clues and details, but there is no such depth to Gambon's Maigret.