The Lindsay Brothers

Author: tristanlindsay

  • The Man Who Would Be King

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    93

    Traditionally it is rather difficult to find a good pair of buddies for a buddy movie. This is because almost any actor worth their buddy salt wants to be the hero. Eventually Matt Damon and Ben Affleck must go their separate ways. Sooner or later Butch and Sundance have that longing to star in their very own westerns. This was John Huston’s problem when he decided to make a movie based on the Rudyard Kipling short story The Man Who Would be King.

    Sadly the perfect buddy duo had already been cast

    Most of you may know John Huston as the director of such classic films as (hang on while I go look up his filmography) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Most of his major work was done in the 40s and 50s but he actually had quite the career.  Sometimes he even pretended to be other people for money. He seems like a swell chap.

    John Huston was originally cast as Kevin McAllister in Home Alone, but they felt that his performance was too saccharin.

    And fairly good at finding material, I might add. Somehow he got a hold of the Rudyard Kipling story and insisted on making a movie from it. This was back in the Fifties and he wanted to cast Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. However it was the Fifties, and Humphrey Bogart would die soon. If John Huston had known that, he probably would not have cast him. Then the rumor was that he tried to cast Butch and Sundance, aka Paul Newman and Robert Redford.  This did not work out because both Paul and Robert were deemed too Cockney. Thus he was left with James Bond and Alfie.

    How do you like my tiara?

    The plot is adventure to the extreme. It features battles and comedy in far off places such as Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The people of Kafiristan are pagans not yet converted to Islam and they somehow know the secrets of freemasonry.  And so when Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery) appears wearing a masonic symbol, they take him for a god.  (That and the fact that he appears to be pierced by an arrow, yet is unharmed).  Sometime later this would also happen to C-3PO, who is also played by a Brit. Wouldn’t you know it though? The SAT vocab words rear their ugly head and our heros are brought low by something called (spoiler alert) “hubris” which is defined as over-weaning pride.

    Despite his over-weaning pride, C-3PO was able to use his divine influence and get them out of this.

    Besides the mistaken-for-a-god part, The Man Who Would be King features many touchstones of extraordinary adventure fiction: Far away places, British People, Decapitation, pith helmets, British People, Rope Bridges, far away places, Alexander the Great, British people and Shakira Caine (Michael Caine’s wife, both then and now).

    Next up … Ninety-two

    Technorati:  XY5JDW4U8D65

  • The Right Stuff

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    95

    The Right Stuff is a book written in the seventies about the sixties, which was made into a movie in the 80s, took the 90s off and then was read by me sometime in 2010. It is about the mercury seven and is very similar in to Apollo thirteen in tone. All that being said, it is anything but by the numbers. It was written by Tom Wolfe (who was indeed raised by Wolfes), but is not related to Virginia Woolf even though he was born in Virginia.

    Seeing as he's an artist, Tom Wolfe must always be photographed in black and white from a low angle.

    Though there’s a lot of action in the book, it is actually really about the titular “right stuff” that may or may not be possessed by certain men in a certain profession. Mainly test pilots in the late fifties and early sixties. Lucky for us, that righteous stuff, even in story form, cannot be stated–only shown. And so we are treated with one thrilling story after another. The most thrilling of them occur with a man named Chuck Yeager at the controls. These are some of the best flying stories I’ve ever read.

    Chuck Yeager's first attempt at the altitude record

    The ego of the fighter pilot is said to be immense and having seen Top Gun, I feel qualified to agree with that assessment. Which is why it is all the more shocking, that Yeager the best star pilot in the galaxy was not chosen. And because the ego of the fighter pilot is so immense, so are all the other pilots equally shocked. And because the fighter pilot’s ego is so immense, it is not shocking that a great many of them (Yeager included) didn’t even sign up to be astronauts in the first place. Their immense egos, you see, would not let them look beyond the fact that the first flights would be merely “manned” not technically “piloted.”

    The other pilot's egos were writing checks that their bodies couldn't cash.

    And so we are left with the Mercury Seven. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. Out of the seven, I was familiar with merely three of them. And truthfully I suspect I only know Gus Grissom because he and I are both from Indiana and we had to learn about him in fourth grade (Thank you Mrs. Quakenbush). The other two Alan Shepard and John Glenn should be recognizable to most everyone who grew up in America.

    Seriously, this is them. They're doing some survival training and parts of their clothes are made out of parachutes!

    Though I remembered it vaguely once it was stated, I do admit to being a bit surprised upon being reminded that Shepard was the first American in space. For some reason, I thought it was John Glenn. Wolfe goes into why I thought that. Turns out John Glenn was the only one who really understood what was going on. Knew what the mercury program was and actually worked to make sure it was perceived in the way it was. Even though there is no proof that getting up at four in the morning and running for 2 hours helps you to sit weightless in a floating capsule thousands of miles above the earth. It’s part of the right stuff.

    At any rate, Americans liked him so much that they simply moved the goal for glory from being the first American in space to being the first American to ORBIT the earth, which he was. Also they kind of ignored that the Russians did all this before them and still do to this day. So sometimes you’ll hear that Glenn was the first man to orbit the earth, be annoying and correct those people when this happens. Tell them he was the first American to orbit the earth. Then scoff and say “Haven’t you read The Right Stuff?’

    Kudos to you if you're an American and know this man's name.

    The Right Stuff goes into a lot of territory, from the astronaut’s political hangers on to the pecking order of the astronaut’s wives. Their celebrity status and their ticker tape parades, but the best part is always the stories about the speed of the rockets and the test planes. It’s no mistake that NASA called it Project Mercury. The Right Stuff is the first on our list to be a true story, but it captures the awe factor of the space race. Especially in the present age, after we’ve been to the moon and shrugged it off as being boring. The Right Stuff is able to make even the creakiest of envelope pushing stories sound thrilling. The breaking of the sound barrier, or tumbling slowly head over heels at midnight over Australia, The sunsets in space, and what to do when you’re plane stalls out and the chute won’t open and you’re a hundred miles from home and 25,000 miles above the open desert.

    Next up: Ninety-four!

  • The Silmarillion

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    97

    Strangely, the adventuresque quality of The Silmarillion is due mostly to the fact that at least 80 percent of its appeal is in how dry and boring it pretends to be. Its desire is to be both adventurous and dull. This is not an easy feat to pull off, mind you. Nor do I contend that it is actually dry and boring, but either intentionally or unconsciously, either for good or ill, it tries its very best to copy the history books that you read in high school. It could just be that the guy who wrote it was dull (a strong possibility) but my guess is that it is intentional.

    "Little did you know; I am quite jolly and irascible."

    The reason for this is no great mystery. It was most likely approached from this angle to give it what the people of France call “realism.” The fact that The Silmarillion takes itself so seriously gives it that certain je ne sais quoi.

    Actually, on second thought, I do sais quoi. It's realism.

    The people of France, hitherto known as The French, have themselves another word: Milieu. Which is from the root word “mill” as in “to mill about”, which is yet another way of saying “to loiter”, and “ieu” which consists completely of vowels, but that is neither here nor there. Since folk must by necessity have a place or time to mill about in over time, the word evolved into its present day meaning: Physical or social surroundings. And while The Silmarillion is told in a somewhat linear fashion, it is more rooted in making us believe the place exists, not necessarily that the characters really said or didn’t say, or do the things it has them do.

    The story itself is truly epic on a massive scale and attempts nothing less than to sum up an entire (made up) world in one book. One tiny book that is about the same size as The Hobbit, but spans millennia instead of the mere measly months that encompass all of The Hobbit. It claims to be written by one J.R.R. Tolkein (which totally should be the name of a steam train somewhere). But it was actually written/collected by Christopher Tolkein, his son, who was not as well known for world building as his father, but presumably has cultivated a deep talent for sorting through his dad’s weird old stories. I happen to have a dad that tells weird old stories and I can tell you: This is no small accomplishment.

    All aboard the J.R.R. Tolkein, everybody! We’re going deep into the world of world building.

    The story starts with the song of Illuvatar who introduces a theme and then allows the Ea to play with the theme and provide the variations. As they sing, their song creates the world (or something). A dude named Melkor introduces discord into the tune and the stories get better from there. The real success of the Silmarillion is the absolute level of detail that you can see went into these stories. The fact that they are just the random collected back story for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy is startling. Even more curious is the claim that these stories and legends were written first.

    Unlike so many prequels these days, that claim has the air of legitimacy. It becomes even more believable when you realize that the characters and events that are present in the hobbit and LOTR (pronounced “loiter”, as in “to mill about”) are barely even blips on the radar here. Sauron here is merely just a toady of Melkor and is not really all that bad in comparison. Again though, the great adventure here is in how vast and wide the story is. Though it lacks a main protagonist, The Silmarillion is intensely readable and addictive and more than deserves its place on our countdown.

    Next up #96!