Z/Web

Fascinating story about how Lincoln was a master politician in getting the 13th Amendment passed in the House of Representatives in the waning weeks of the Civil War. I expected to be long and talky, and it was, but it wasn’t boring at all.

It was a little difficult to follow everything — there were so many characters (many tiny roles played by familiar actors), the language and speaking style was of the period and occasionally difficult to understand, and I’m not at all familiar with that time in history so some of the events lost me — but the key plot moments are fairly clear.

I am critical in that the movie expects us to know some of this history in order to understand things. For instance, I’m still confused about the relationship between Mary and Abraham. It was very dramatic and she’s a fantastic character, a worthy rival to Lincoln, but they argued about a dead son I knew nothing about, and at times they seemed to despise each other. That was not the impression I had about them from my history classes in school and while it was interesting, it left me bewildered.

Another confusing thing was that the whole movie is about the opposition to the Amendment, and since so much time is focused on that, we rarely get to see those that supported it. In truth, since passing a Constitutional Amendment requires a two-thirds majority, more people were for it than against it, but the film feels like it’s the entire world against a handful. I was shocked at the end when the whole Capital is throwing hats and cheering — making it seem like there was huge support for the Amendment.

I also was slightly disappointed in Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as Lincoln. Not that he did anything wrong at all — he was fabulous and flawless, as usual — but simply that the role was somewhat understated and not as dramatic as I expected. That was my own fault for bringing that into the theatre with me; in truth I love that they didn’t try to exaggerate Lincoln and I really appreciate Daniel’s low-key portrayal. He didn’t try to do too much but did just enough that we got a rare glimpse into the mind of a special man.

Other than that, there’s not much to be said. The film is in some ways predictable and typical Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful and emotional. It’s a good story and if you don’t know much about that time period, you’ll learn a lot. I found it fascinating throughout and really enjoyed it, despite my minor quibbles. Highly recommended, but don’t go in thinking it’s revolutionary or earth-shattering. It’s simply a really well done film.

Author: John Scalzi

I saw this on Audible and snagged it. All I knew was the title, which is from a joke about the Star Trek franchise where minor crewmen wearing red shirts are always killed off on away missions, and that the book was read by Wil Wheaton, a ST:TNG actor who has something of a cult following.

That gimmicky idea forms the basis of the story, which is about a ship in a Star Trek-like universe in which a disproportionally high number of low-ranking crew members are killed off in bizarre ways on away missions. A new member of the ship finds this trend disturbing, to say the least, since he’s exactly the kind of extra that’s likely to get killed off. He investigates and discovers the absurd truth — that their world is somehow warped in with a twenty-first century TV show. Whatever happens on the show happens to them in real life. So he and his friends go back in time to stop the TV show and save themselves.

This outlandish plot would be silly in any other book, but here it’s brilliant: the conceit is that this is a bad science fiction show, so any bad writing here (e.g. science that violates the laws of physics) is caused by the TV show and therefore makes sense.

The whole novel is hilariously snarky and perfectly delivered by the awesome Wil Wheaton (who does snark better than anyone — I highly recommend the audiobook). It’s just terrific.

But then the novel ends and we have three codas. These are extra stories, sort of a follow-up, if you will, on what happens to certain characters in the aftermath of the events of the novel. For instance, one is an amazing saga about a writer on that crappy scifi show who starts an anonymous blog on the Internet asking for help with his writer’s block because he’s just discovered that everything he writes gets people in the 25th century killed and now he’s too scared to write. This is just awesome; I can’t tell you how well it’s done. It feels like a real blog with real reader comments and this poor writer struggling to figure out his life. (It helps that the writer is snarky and funny, too.)

But what’s amazing about these codas is that they take what’s a very light-hearted and ultimately sort of silly gimmick novel into a place that’s very serious and cerebral. These codas are written as though everything that happened in the novel really happened and suddenly we’re looking at the entire novel in a new light. Instead of silliness, we’re feeling real emotion and genuinely thinking about the ramifications of what happens if a writer’s characters are real people in another space and time and everything the writer writes comes true. Totally awesome, and it makes the gimmick seem much less like a gimmick.

So basically the novel itself gets a solid B — it’s funny, wild, and well-written — but the codas turn the entire thing on its head and bring it up to A+ level. It’s just mind-blowingly good. Recommended.