Customer Reviews

Remake

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're a movie nut, and moreover an MGM musicals nut who's seen most of the films excerpted in the THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT movies, and you like good speculative fiction, this is definitely going to be down your alley. If however, you have no idea who Eleanor Powell was, and invoking Fred Astaire's name doesn't speed up the heartbeat, forget it: this ain't for you. And if you're one of those Connie Willis fans who only likes the fun & funny books (To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether, etc.) and not the deeply somber ones (Doomsday Book, Lincoln's Dreams, etc.), this is gonna sail right over your head and under your emotional radar. It hit me like a ton of bricks, and is one of my favorite Connie Willis novels.

Unfortunately, Willis does not quite manage her usual blend of vivid characters and phenomenal insight in this novel. She probably would have been wiser to condense her plot into a short story--it could have made an excellent one, but for a few other problems.

She develops her characters only to a limited extent, an unusual tactic for Willis that she may have intended to tie in to the superficial movie world of "faces." Even so, as I read, I ended up caring very little about what happened to the primary characters themselves. The narrator Tom's actions are haphazard and seem to lack a unifying emotion, and his relationship with Alis contains so very little that I had trouble understanding what reason she had for becoming angry with him at all.

In addition, the majority of the profanity did not contribute in any way, rendering it annoyingly gratuitous.

And, finally, I confess I failed to detect a viable theme. The closest contender I saw would go something like: "Don't let anything, even impossibility itself, stop you from doing what you want to." Since that statement says nothing proactive about the human condition, I doubt it is the one Willis had in mind; still, it was all I could find.

I finished reading the book solely because I am a confirmed Willis fan. If I decide to read it again, I probably will change my mind and re-read _To Say Nothing of the Dog_ or _Bellwether_.

Alis is a determined young woman who comes to Hollywood to dance in the movies. Unfortunate, that, because in this world of the not-too-distant future musicals are dead, as is most live-action film-shooting. The hot properties in the movies are the images of stars long-dead - Marilyn Monroe, Carole Lombard, River Phoenix, and James Dean, and every new film is a remake. Tom is a freelance movie editor whose primary occupation is fitting classic films with the images of the studio boss's latest girlfriend. This sad fact galls him to no end, since unlike most of the beautiful young people on the make in Hollywood, Tom actually watches movies, and hates to see the classics butchered by the soulless, self-serving, drug-numbed, money-hungry executives who run the studios. Fascinated by Alis and her impossible dream, Tom tries to help her as best he can and gives readers a sardonic overview of how movies will be made in the future in the process, but Alis proves resourceful enough all by herself, and manages to achieve her dream in a way that no one could possibly have imagined.

The novel is structured something like a treatment for a movie script (possibly a hypermodern, science fiction remake of Casablanca), and the first-person narrator shows his obsession with old movies by constantly referencing classics by Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and Alis's favorite dancer, Fred Astaire. This is not another tightly knitted time travel story along the lines of Willis's irresistible To Say Nothing of the Dog. The sci-fi/fantasy aspects of the story are extremely hard to follow and may ultimately prove disappointing to fans of such, and the humor tends to fall flat more often than not. But at the same time, the love story (which is really the unifying force here) is so infused with dance scenes, movie references, and techno-jargon that no one could confuse this book for a romance novel.

If you love the old movie musicals, and Fred Astaire in particular, this book should be an unending delight. There are so many references to characters, scenes, and dance numbers from the movies of the mid-Twentieth Century that a true aficionado could spend years checking them all out on video. If on the other hand your knowledge of such films is virtually nil and you couldn't care less, you may feel that this book has nothing special to offer.

The small amount of action in this story is lengthened into description after description of the narrator doing drugs and drinking while altering classic movies. You really want to shout "OK, I get the idea, already! Would you please move on???"

Finally we get to the climax, and it's not much. There is no suspense, more of just an explanation of how the would-be dancer Alis has mysteriously appeared in some of the old movies. It's a required SF explanation (so that the story can be called SF) but really it's hard to be curious when you just want the thing to end, please -- by this point in the story you know it's not going to get any more interesting.

It seems that Willis put all her energy into coming up with the SF premise and watching old movies so she could insert little descriptions of scenes into the text. It needed more attention to the characters and a plot. This would have made a passable short story.

In Remake, Connie Willis displays the humor, deft-plotting, and imaginative detail that have made her one of the most award-winning writers in science fiction history. Set in the Hollywood of the future where movies are no longer made so much as assembled, where all the great actors and actresses of the twentieth century have been digitalized and can be programmed to act out any scene at the touch of a button, a cynical digital processor meets a woman who wants to do the impossible -- dance in the movies.

I loved this wonderfully cynical view of the future of filmmaking, and Hollywood as a whole. The characters came to life against a mild science fiction backdrop, and the story itself took lots of unusual turns. The dozens of movie references, subtle and not, have me left me wanting to rent a whole slew of old movies.

About half way through the book, I finally got tired of waiting for the story to begin and quit reading. She does a good job of building a world, but it's not one either I or the characters want to live in.

One of the odd things I noticed is that while the narrator is supposed to be a guy, his personality feels like that of a woman. This may be one of the hazards of writing in the first person where the character is the opposite gender, but it was a bit off putting.

The idea is ok, if dystopian, but in the end, I felt that the main insight came early in the book, where the narrator observes that it is strange that so many people want to be someone they aren't, when the main asset they have to offer is their own uniqueness. I was hoping for more strong insights and a gripping story, but sadly, the other main interest in the book is a compilation of good movie quotes.

Willis' intriguing take on the future of Hollywood is almost too real, as recent beer commercials demonstrate. Not her best book (read BELLWEATHER for that), and done in a more serious tone than some, this is a fine read by an author who should get much more recognition. Recommended

Connie Willis, while a master of SF trophes like the extrapolation extremis of trends just visible today, never loses sight of the hearts of her characters. She writes with a wry and compassionate tone of the hopes and disappointments of her very human characters. Here she marries the retrospective tone of unrequited love stories with a "if this goes on" pessimistic forcast of the recent commercial exploitation of dead movie stars. Spider Robinson also reached for the sad sentimentality of the unattainable love in "StarDancer" but Willis proves his master in tone as she never dips her prose in treacle. Although much of the "cyberpunk" trappings of doing "remakes" are standard, what gives this novella life is its sincere love of the grand old movie musicals and especially the genius of Fred Astaire. The magic of Astaire's grace has never been better euligised than in this paeon to dance. Although I found the ending weak, and the attraction of the view-point character for his "Laura" a bit facile, I have to admit I spent the weekend after I finished reading, watching (Roger and Hammerstein's?) Oklahoma for the first time in twenty years.

Willis clearly loved researching the history of the film and especially musical film. Her sense of humor and her technical grasp of the modern digital regime make for a really enjoyable read. I'm not a fan of her Doomsday style writing, but really like her humorous work. If you are a film buff and like her lighter work, this is a winner. There are problems with the book; for instance I'm not quite convinced that it won't be commercially viable to make new, live films. But despite the flaws I really like this book.