The New York Times recently offered a different perspective on the holiday classic  It’s a Wonderful Life:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

Read full article here: Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life

I found this article via Metafilter, where users started snarking against the movie.  In the Metafilter comments, a user named Miko writes a great summary of the movie’s message:

Anyone who thinks of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as a one-level, heartwarming Christmas feelgood movie has the wrong expectations – or just isn’t thinking about it. The author’s observations are obvious in the film; they’re the setup. George is a young man with dreams, but his sense of responsibility – overdeveloped, probably – and the needs of others make him sacrifice his dreams. There’s no smarmy sense that obviously one needs to sacrifice one’s dreams for the well-being of others; portraying that shallowly is what Hallmark Christmas Specials do. Instead, the sacrifice is slow, anguished, an excruciating death by a thousand cuts. Capra meant the viewers to notice, and be pained, every time George receives another disappointment… Capra wasn’t hiding this from the viewer.

…The heartwarming part is that George is able to make a conscious decision to accept the price. Can you say the same? When George decides not to die, he realizes the life he’s been despairing at – with the loud annoying kids, the dilapidated house, the “broken-down old building and loan,” the deferred dreams – is actually a pretty good, in fact damned lucky life. People love him; he has resources he never bothered to assess; his life has meaning. If you have never felt that way, suddenly profoundly appreciative of the basic goodnesses in your own life, I’d wager you’ve never yet nearly lost your life. Because that is exactly how a person feels when you realize that your day-to-day stresses and strains and disappointments and bothersome entanglements are not in the way of you living your life; they are your life. The fact that you never got to become and engineer and see the oilfields of Venezuelas, or whatever it is for you, tends to fall dramatically in relative importance.

The movie is dark and depressing for a reason. This is a challenging message, one a lot of people really don’t want to hear, and yet it turns out to be pretty true in most lives.

Miko’s last sentence sums up the reason why It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite movie of all time.  There are challenges and difficulties, failed dreams and changed plans, but after all that, it is a wonderful life.

Finished reading Solaris in only 3 days. It felt great to speed through a fascinating novel with a strong driving plot and a mystery that’s never fully explained. The book’s protagonist and most of the characters are scientists themselves, and took a logical, Sherlock-Holmes-like approach to the planet’s surface.

I actually watched the movie about a year ago, and kept expecting the book to follow the movie’s plot. I did like the movie, but thought the novel did a good job of leaving certain mysteries unsolved and making the unknowable nature of the planet a main theme of the story.

Lem himself had a great commentary on the movie vs. the book:

[Some critics] speculated that while the producer won’t make a lot of money and there will be no crowd at the box office, the film belongs to the genre of a more ambitious science fiction – since no one got murdered and neither star wars, nor space-werewolfs nor Schwarzenegger’s Terminators were present.

In the US an atmosphere filled with very concrete expectations usually accompanies the release of every new film. I found it interesting that although my book is quite old – almost half a century means a lot in present times – someone wanted to take the risk despite the fact that the plot did not meet the abovementioned expectations. (Along the way he might have gotten scared a bit, but the latter is a pure speculation on my part.)

The full article can be found here.

Lem’s comment on the “deep, concrete ruts of thinking” and “stereotypes of American thinking regarding science fiction” are a good commentary on the dangers of unoriginal sci-fi writing.

Almost every project I’ve been involved with has required a scope change – a change to the original agreement between vendor and client due to some unforeseen change.

Maybe the client comes up with some harebrained idea midway through the project, maybe the people working on the project get too busy, maybe there’s a legitimate change that neither group could predict. When these scope changes happen, I usually think of Lord of the Rings trilogy.

If you’ve seen The Return of the King, you’ve seen the “winged Nazgul” that swoop down on the city of Gondor. They’re the big black “fell beasts” shown below:

In one of the “Passing of the Age” feature on the The Return of the King, Extended edition DVD, the filmmakers discuss how the scene came about. Apparently the production was moving very fast as the release approached, and there was a scene in the script for a single fell beast to swoop down over the city and rain terror and debris on the citizens of Gondor.

Weta Digital got the shot, read the script, and saw that there were 4 fell beasts instead of 1. Each one had to be visualized, produced, and digitized. The unshakeable release date for the movie loomed larger and larger, and the scope of the job had just quadrupled.

And yet, when the Nazgul fly over the city in the final movie, the audience falls silent in awe.

The Appendices on the DVD showcase the numerous other scope changes that caused chaos and all-nighters at Weta, such as:

• Producer Barry Osborne calling intense “all-hands” meetings of all departments to coordinate the varying messages coming from director Peter Jackson, as Jackson came up with new ideas during shooting.
• The number of shots going up as the deadline loomed – with 5 weeks to go, the effects group had more shots to go than the first 2 movies combined.
• Sound guys frantically coordinating the sound of each footfall of Shelob, the giant eight-legged spider, as the Shelob shots changed from day to day.
• Weta Digital adding trolls crashing through the gates of Gondor, despite the fact that the scenes shot had not been prepped for the trolls to be inserted.
• The special effects people hearing the line “The eagles are coming,” and realizing they had to design and produce eagles flying over the still unfinished army.
• The “silent wave”that the special effects team did as Peter Jackson approved the final shot of the ring melting into the lava of Mount Doom.

All of the filmmakers on the Appendices note the intensity, the tension, the fear and rank smell of flop sweat that infused the last few months. It sounds like a backbreaking slog that resulted in every team member pushed to the limit, and it was far from the ideal method of making a movie.

But the DVD goes on to show the movies sweeping the Oscars, the sense of pride (and disbelief) the filmmakers felt in their achievement, and the massive appreciation of the fans and the world at large. There’s a sense that although it cost them dearly, it was, as Ian McKellan says, “a journey worth going on.”

Because scope changes often result in chaos, but sometimes they result in great art.