Quintet, Persuasion, & Never Let Me Go

Quintet is a 1979 Altman film, after his early 70s successes and before his late career resurgence. And thus, the fact that it's about a dystopian future where the human race is suffering through a new ice age and play a game of divided loyalties called Quintet, and you have a recipe for failure. And that's just what I got. Confusing as hell, I basically gave up midway through and stopped paying nearly as much attention to it as I could have. Not should have, because the movie didn't deserve it.

Persuasion is the first movie of the new Jane Austen adaptations shown on Masterpiece (apparently, the Theatre part of the title was just too much?). And while I liked Anthony Stewart Head as Sir Walter Elliot, most of the rest of the cast was not good. And cutting down a novel to a sub-90 minute movie just meant that actual characterization was sacrificed. And, as is usual for Austen, there was an extremely good version done in the mid-90s by the BBC. Probably my favorite two-hour version of an Austen novel. This one has a very weak Captain Wentworth, and some very un-Austen-y things, like running through Bath without a hat on. No one does that. Well, no one did that back in the early 1800s.

Never Let Me Go is Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent book, after the supremely excellent Remains of the Day, and the less good When We Were Orphans. I remember reading about it when it came out and thinking that it was sort of an Alice in Wonderland in a weird dystopian future with organ harvesting or something. I think that's slightly misleading, as it seems to be a weird science fiction-y present where cloning started soon after World War II, and there's a whole generation of children who were cloned entirely to provide organs for others. It's a pretty sad book, like Ishiguro's others. So much of what I watch, read, and come into contact with just leads to sadness. I really blame my intelligence for this. If I were stupider, things like Dan Brown novels and Jerry Bruckheimer movies wouldn't make me sick, they'd make me wonder just how they were able to put that much into a novel or movie. Instead, I'm stuck knowing they're crap and then looking for deeper things, and that way leads to depression. Which I've been getting significantly better at avoiding in the past couple years, but there are still things that just are extremely upsetting to me.