Dune not actually close to the record

When I witnessed Dune winning six Oscars but not best picture -- which I never thought it had any chance of winning -- I wondered if that was the most Oscars ever won by a movie that didn't win best picture.

Nope, and it's not actually as close to the record as you might think.

In 1972, Cabaret won eight Oscars without winning best picture, though it was nominated. The only Oscars it was nominated for but didn't win were best picture and best adapted screenplay -- both of which went to The Godfather. The only other Oscar that went to The Godfather was the best actor trophy for Marlon Brando, which he famously declined.

Ha, that's exactly 50 years ago, though of course that Oscars ceremony won't celebrate its 50th anniversary until next year. 

The weirdest thing about this story might not be that Cabaret won all those Oscars without nabbing the big one, but that The Godfather was not more of a sweeping awards phenomenon, given the cinematic reputation it has gone on to enjoy. To be sure, it was nominated for 11 Oscars, but kept coming up as the loser in the early part of the show -- which must have seemed like a bellwether for its chances of taking home the big prize. 

Looking at this now on Wikipedia, I see that the 11th nomination was actually revoked for the film's score. I have to read up on that. 

It appears that part of the film's love theme was already used in the 1958 film Fortunatella, so they had to replace it with the score for Sleuth. 

I guess they did not have a "best adapted score" Oscar back then. 

Minimum Oscars prep

As has been my custom for about ten years, I kind of tuned out on the Oscars once I learned the nominees six weeks ago. I used to be obsessed over these awards when I was younger, but when I see a friend of mine repeatedly post on Facebook about joining his Oscar pool, I kind of just scoff. Part of it is that I don't really care, but another part is that I feel like you can just take your predictions from a number of reliable sources online and you'll get 75% of them right, with only a few surprises eluding you. What fun is a pool where half the entrants have basically the same picks?

But I do feel a bit of an obligation, which is actually coupled with genuine desire, to do a little Oscars prep, so this weekend, I watched the only remaining best picture nominee I hadn't seen, and my second-favorite of the nominees. (My favorite, Drive My Car, may have been available, but I can't just casually throw on a three-hour movie.)

Friday night it was Nightmare Alley, which I had planned to watch on the projector in our garage, until I realized, moments beforehand, that I had that problem last year trying to play iTunes rentals through our projector. It's incompatible for some reason. So I just watched that one in the living room.

On Saturday night I got my technical specs worked out correctly and remembered to rent Dune through Amazon instead, where I could play it through the Amazon Prime website rather than my iTunes software, hence allowing a projector setup in my garage. (There may have been a way to do this with an Apple equivalent streaming site, but I didn't bother to figure it out.) 

I liked Nightmare Alley a lot better at the start, before Cate Blanchett's character came into it. No offense to Blanchett, but the direction the story took after this point just didn't do it for me, nor particularly did her performance if I'm being honest. (Okay, so, some offense.) I was set to give it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd by the end, but ultimately caved and went with four just because of how great the first hour is and how much I liked the production design, the camerawork, and the overall effort that went into creating this 1930s circus. I think I am a sucker for old circuses (aren't we all). Also, I remain an old softie when it comes to star ratings. I just can't help myself.

As for Dune, I did not expect my enjoyment of it to diminish on a second viewing, and indeed it did not. I said above I could not casually throw on a three-hour movie, but I guess a 2:35 movie wasn't as much of a hurdle for me. But Dune moves more quickly for me than a movie that length usually does, and besides, I had already decided I was going to allow myself a certain luxury when watching it: Namely, if I started to fall asleep, so be it. The tricky thing about watching on my projector is that I don't have a way to remotely stop the movie from playing, so I have to get up out of my bean bag and press stop if I want to close my eyes for a minute. In a movie I've already seen, though, I decided I could just let sleep overtake me for a few minutes, knowing a loud sound would snap me back to attention periodically (especially with Hans Zimmer doing the score). And if I missed a few minutes, it would be stuff I already knew was going to happen anyway. Besides, the first half of the movie, where I was less likely to fall asleep, is the best part anyway. It was pretty freeing to make this decision, and indeed, I probably did miss a combined ten minutes of the film's final half-hour.

I've got one more night, Sunday night, before the ceremony airs on Monday my time, so am I going to watch the best costume nominees I haven't seen and jam in as many of the live action shorts as possible?

Nope. Talk to 2002 me if you want to see that sort of thing.

I will, however, be avoiding spoilers during the day on Monday, and will gladly watch the ceremony, as I always do, on Monday night once the kids are squared away for the evening.

I haven't missed an Oscars since the mid-1980s, and none since I started watching them regularly. Some things will never change.

Denis Villeneuve's remake of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and other original Dune thoughts

What the hell am I talking about with that subject?

Well I'll get to that in a moment, but first, a little prologue. 

And also:

Dune spoilers to follow.

So I figured the perfect way to wrap up my Dune experience of the past three months -- which started with my October viewing of Jodorowsky's Dune, followed by the concurrent reading of Frank Herbert's novel and viewing of the Denis Villeneuve adaptation -- was to go back and watch the David Lynch film that I thought was so hilariously awful when I watched it 15 years ago. Almost exactly 15 years ago, in fact. My records surprised me by showing that I watched the 1984 Dune on January 26, 2007. 

On January 28, 2022, I watched it a second time, and you'll be glad to know I got more out of it having read the book. That still doesn't excuse the poor storytelling choices, which I think would be completely lost on someone who wasn't familiar with the material (which described me in 2007), but it's not the inept mess I once made it out to be. It just has some really funny individual choices that stand out and fatally undercut it.

But first, what the hell am I talking about with that subject?

As I was watching Dune I determined Denis Villeneuve must have had a crush on Sean Young when he was growing up. I noticed that Young plays Chani, the role assumed by Zendaya in the Villeneuve remake.  

What else do we know about Young? Well, her most memorable role was probably as the android Racheal in Blade Runner -- a film Villeneuve has also rebooted.

Now 54, Villeneuve would have been about 15 when Blade Runner came out and about 17 when Dune came out. Good ages to still be working out your crushes, methinks. 

My natural conclusion is that Villeneuve is working on a remake of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective -- where Young plays Lois Einhorn/Ray Finkle -- right about now. (If you have a different choice for the third most prominent role in Young's career, don't tell me.)

Some other thoughts:

I didn't know who Sting was

Even after finishing the book and getting to this character's big scene, I didn't actually know who Sting was supposed to have played in the movie until watching it on Friday night. 

Now obviously, the portrayal of the other Harkonnens, in both the book and Villeneuve's film, makes them out to be corpulent and repugnant, even potentially unable to walk on their own without the use of suspensor suits. That would not describe the image of Sting in this movie, which shows every inch of the physical discipline that makes him excel at tantric sex, as his body is lean and finely chiseled -- a fact we can't help but notice as he is pictured wearing only the interstellar version of a speedo.

But maybe it's an indication of the weird role Feyd Rautha Harkonnen plays in the book that made me unable to initially make the connection. His role is very backloaded, so much so that Villeneuve did not even feel the need to introduce him as a character in his adaptation of the novel's first half. Even Herbert's book would have no use for him until its final 20 pages if it had not introduced him in a random scene just after the halfway point, a scene that seems there only to lay groundwork so his role in the novel's climax does not feel so out of left field.

Maybe the film's peculiar usage of Sting -- which was actually straight out of Herbert's text -- was one of the things that prompted me to judge the film so harshly. I was like "You've got Sting, and then you barely use him?" I should have directed that question to Herbert probably.

The whispered voiceover still sucks

One of the byproducts of needing to fit so much novel into only 137 minutes of movie was that Lynch had to take shortcuts in his exposition, the most famous of which was to have the characters' thoughts appear in voiceover. More often than not, these are whispers -- an apparent attempt to remind us they are only thoughts, though I don't know how that could escape us given that the characters' mouths aren't moving.

More than any other questionable decision Lynch made, this was the one that really undermined my ability to appreciate the film, and in fact turned any instinct to appreciate it into derisive laughter. It just doesn't work, and 15 years later, it still doesn't work.

I guess the main difference now, though, is that I understand this was not just a bad creative choice. It was an attempt to solve the unsolvable problem of how much information needed to be communicated in such a short amount of time. Villeneuve solved that problem by turning the story into (an expected) two movies, each of which will be longer than Lynch's film. Lynch wouldn't have had that option in 1984.

I think the funny thing about it is that so many different characters' thoughts are heard this way. If it were limited to the main character, Paul, that probably would have been more defensible. But even random side characters we've only just met reveal their thoughts to us. There just had to be another way.

And it seemed like once Lynch had committed to this being necessary, it prevented any instinct to show rather than tell. A number of these thoughts can be deduced from characters' expressions and needn't have been explicated. Like when Kyle MacLachlan gets a stunned look on his face upon first seeing Young's Chani, we don't need to hear via his thoughts that he thinks she's beautiful. Duh. Do you think we've never seen a movie before, David?

I remembered "Remember the tooth!" as funnier

The biggest howler from my first viewing was the scene where Dr. Yueh (Dean Stockwell) implants the poison tooth in Leto Atreides (Jurgen Prochnow) and tells him to "Remember the tooth!" when he crosses paths with Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan). Of course, I didn't know who any of those people were or what the hell they were talking about in 2007 -- I was already out by this point.

In my memory, the phrase "Remember the tooth!" gets repeated about five times. In reality, it's only said once. But the part that probably really made me laugh at the time -- and did again on this viewing -- was that after Yueh utters the full line, Lynch goes in to a close-up of Stockwell's mouth as he repeats "The tooth! The tooth!"

Still, I had hoped to get more satisfaction from the "Remember the tooth!" moment when a paralyzed Leto does come across Baron Harkonnen. But the word "tooth" doesn't even get uttered again, unfortunately. Leto's thoughts include something like "What did Yueh say?", which is also funny -- if you had just had a poison tooth implanted in your mouth, you would not soon forget it. But it wasn't the awesome sticking of the landing on that bit that I hoped it would be. 

Predating Jean-Luc Picard by three years

Patrick Stewart has had a long career, so I could not say for certain that this was his first trip to outer space. But a quick scanning of his credits indicates that indeed, Dune appears to be his sci-fi debut, just three years before he would be chosen as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Did one have anything to do with the other? Hard to say. The internet would probably tell me. I can't be bothered.

The thing I find really funny, though, is that Stewart was cast to play a man of action, a fighter, in Gurney Halleck. Even when he was cast as Picard, it was not because he was seen as deft in hand-to-hand combat. No, his brains and regal quality were what made him right for Picard, not his skills with his fists. Ditto for his work as Professor X. 

Fists aren't totally required in this role either, but from the book I know Halleck is considered to be a great fighter, and indeed he does have a sparring scene with Paul in which they are protected by shields. 

This might have been one of the funniest scenes, though, as the 1984 visual effects for a personal body shield were so clunky that the bodies of the combatants are almost completely obscured. Maybe that was a blessing in disguise as it hid the fact that this is just not Stewart's forte. 

The worm stuff is good

I expected the worms to look like crap. They did not look like crap.

In fact, their breaching of the sand and the flower-like opening of their mouths were accomplished with exceptional technical skill for 1984.

Alas, some of the rest of what's depicted doesn't nearly measure up to it. The visuals involving outer space or green screens are extremely variable in quality. 

Overall, a reasonable effort

It was tempting at the time to think that Lynch's famously eccentric sensibilities caused him to wildly misstep in his conception of Dune. The reality is that this is a pretty straightforward attempt to adapt the material, and its greatest sin might be that it's boring.

Indeed, while I definitely thought that a revisit of Dune would be "fun," I found it pretty tedious.

Oh I liked it better for sure. When you know who the characters are and what's at stake, you don't just think this is a hopelessly impenetrable text filled with goofy people saying silly made-up words. That's definitely the impression the uninitiated would get, and did get in 1984.

But I was hoping I would like it a lot better, and that's just not the case. It actually probably needed to be more of a Lynch film rather than less of one to really resonate. 

David Lynch himself would tell you that. 

                                                            ***********

One final thought about my three-month Dune experience takes us right back to where we started.

I read all of Herbert's novel certain I was aware of one big spoiler that would not be revealed in Villeneuve's film:

Paul Atreides dies.

It's something that Alejandro Jodorowsky, cheeky bastard that he is, reveals in his conception for what would obviously be one of the film's final scenes. I thought at the time "It's too bad I found that out, but then again, I was the one who chose to watch this movie before I had read the book, and with only a vague recollection of the Lynch film."

If I'd thought to consult those vague recollections of that film, I would have realized I have no memory of Kyle MacLachlan's character dying because you know what? He doesn't. 

I obviously got it wrong. He must have been talking about the death of Leto Atreides, a scene with lots of possibilities of how to stage it.

But it's funny in retrospect to have been thinking the whole time how Paul was going to die and how enough stuff needed to happen in the story for the legend of MuadD'ib to have reached sufficiently legendary status before this happened. And when his fight with Feyd Rautha starts near the end of the book, I knew this had to be where he died but also that I didn't think his legend had really grown enough to warrant it in a narrative sense, given all the little chapter-starting histories of Muad'Dib written by the Princess Irulan. 

But no, he just sticks a blade in the underside of Feyd Rautha's chin.

So I really have no idea how many of the Dune sequels Herbert wrote Paul will appear in. I may not find out until Villeneuve adapts them, if he does.  

Although I ultimately enjoyed the experience of reading Dune -- I thought the appendices were an especially illuminating look into the depths of Herbert's mind and his bottomless capacity for "silly made-up words" -- it was, in the end, a slog to finally finish it so I could move on to my next book.

But whether I get to Dune Messiah or Children of Dune or whatever all the others are called, I feel like I now have a really good understanding of this world, its characters, its unique terminology, and a whole conception of how to give birth to a distinctly considered science fiction franchise.

I'll be back for any and all movies even if I'm not back for any more books, and then I'll at least go into those movies without knowing any spoilers. 

Dune vs. The Book of Boba Fett

Yesterday I finally got caught up on two "books," making it the perfect time to write a comparison of them.

The first was an actual book, Dune, which I had started reading back in October in the hope of completing it before seeing the film, which didn't release here until early December. It was always an ambitious project, especially given that I was moving, but I learned that the early December deadline also didn't matter because the movie was only going to be the first half of the novel. I reached the point I needed to reach before seeing the movie, but then I slackened my pace and only finally finished yesterday.

The second book is The Book of Boba Fett, whose most recent episode we watched last night, leading us to be fully caught up on the show for the first time.

Mild spoilers to follow. 

It was a couple episodes ago when I noticed the similarities between Dune and The Book of Boba Fett -- the latter taking inspiration from the former of course -- and they've only become more comical since then. Note: Yes, I am aware that I am probably the eleventy hundredth person to notice these similarities and write about them on the internet, but I haven't read any of those other comparisons so maybe you haven't either.

Let's go:

Both take place on a desert planet.

Both feature a hero left for dead and presumed dead among the harshest elements of that planet.

Both heroes are directly threatened by a large desert creature whose gaping mouth full of endless sharp teeth is its primary defining feature.

Both heroes originated off world. 

Both heroes are saved by a band of natives who wear robes or other coverings that almost completely obscure them while protecting them from the harsh desert atmosphere.

Both heroes are initially the prisoners of these natives before proving their ability to bring value to the tribe.

Both heroes blend fully into the cultural customs and fighting ways of the local tribe.

Both heroes assist the natives in fighting the threat of far-worse off-world invaders than themselves. 

Both heroes must ultimately return to some version of their previous station and to become local leaders on the planet.

In both, there is spice.

I think it was the last that really made me laugh. Could Jon Favreau and Robert Rodriguez really introduce the discussion of spice into The Book of Boba Fett without making their theft of Frank Herbert's original material completely clear?

Given that this series is all about paying homage to earlier Star Wars anyway, maybe they didn't care -- maybe they even wanted it to be obvious. The Book of Boba Fett is the ultimate example of the way the same ideas cascade down through the years and are in knowing conversation with one another. 

This show is full of Easter Eggs for the original Star Wars and Return of the Jedi in particular, and we've already gotten some Attack of the Clones as well. But it's now clear to me after consuming three versions of Dune -- the first of which, David Lynch's version, I intend to watch again now that I understand the story better -- that George Lucas had to have had Dune in his head when he originally conceived of Tatooine, the planet where Luke Skywalker was raised, and where an inordinate amount of the Disney TV shows have taken place. (With more to come, of course, as there is an Obi-Wan Kenobi show coming up.)

But you know what? Frank Herbert didn't start this either.

In listening to a pair of podcasts on The Next Picture Show that were released at the same time Denis Villeneuve's film was released, I learned that Herbert had a film in his own head -- Lawrence of Arabia -- when he was writing Dune. So ultimately, all of these stories go back to real historical events involving real British officer T.E. Lawrence, who presumably did not base his own life experiences on anything else.

It's just that when two such similar entertainment properties come on our radar within two months of each other -- and even less time here in Australia -- you can't help noticing their similarities and commenting on them.

Does this diminish either of them, though?

Nah, just good fun in both cases, and satisfying viewing. And I'm a bit surprised to find The Book of Boba Fett so satisfying. From the little preview of it that closed the last season of The Mandalorian, I thought the show looked like it would be humorless and a bit of a slog. Not that Mando has a huge amount of charisma, but I figured Boba Fett would have significantly less, and also be significantly less redeemable.

As it turns out, Temuera Morrison is really easy to like, the show has been conscious of needing to be fun and even sometimes needing to be silly, and overall, I find it in the same vicinity of enjoyment as The Mandalorian. 

I guess Disney's stewardship of Star Wars really can do no wrong, especially when it takes inspiration from one of the most classic tales in sci-fi history.

Preserving my body's water, and other Dune thoughts

I wrote to you six weeks ago about my personal countdown to the opening of Dune in Australia and the fact that I was trying to read the book before that happened.

But lately it's been clear that my whole cinematic life has been focused around the approach of December 2nd.

Not only was there the reading of the novel, which I knew I didn't have to complete in order to cover the events of this movie, which is technically Dune - Part One (though for now I don't think I'm going to write it that way in my lists). I got to page 350 (of 577) prior to the film opening, well past the point I knew would function as the climax of the movie, given what little birdies told me.

But then I had also paused in the chronology of about three different podcasts that were set to discuss Dune in their next episode. In recent days that has left me with a dearth of podcast material if I wanted to stay in chronological order, which I like to do if at all possible. 

It struck me as funny that I was both trying to avoid Dune spoilers and actively courting them. I mean, the very reading of the novel meant that I wasn't trying to keep the plot a mystery in my mind, never mind the fact that I'd already seen David Lynch's adaptation, though I don't remember much of it. There was always the possibility that I'd hear a bit of the plot ruined that I had not yet reached in my reading, but that wasn't really the motivation behind avoiding the podcasts.

No, it was that I wanted the style of this film to remain a mystery -- the look of it, to the extent I could (I was also avoiding trailers). I considered people's opinions on the film to be spoilers themselves, and if someone described some particular great shot or profound artistic choice, I didn't want that to be ruined.

Well opening night finally arrived last night, and because I was seeking an immediate end to all the various Dune-related states of suspended animation in my life, I made sure I was available to go.

I arrived at the theater sweaty from my ride along the bike path into the city to attend a 9:20 showing at Crown Casino's Village Cinema, a favorite spot for big blockbusters due to its massive VMax screens and the fact that they don't blink at taking my critics card. Some other places aren't taking them right now as they assess their own financial bottom lines in pandemic times, and though I understand that, I also like getting movies for free, my right as a member of the Australian Film Critics Association and my only compensation for being a working film critic in 2021.

I also really like this ride. The bike path snakes along a river from my house down to the Docklands, and I hug the Docklands and into the city proper, only having to cross traffic about three times total. It's a lovely little ride of about 20 minutes, and when I move from North Melbourne to Altona in a few weeks, I'll probably never do it again. 

But the sweaty arrival, coupled with my COVID mask, made me think of one of the characters from Dune in his or her stillsuit, the highly refined desert wear that recycles sweat and saliva to result in a loss of less than a thimble of water per day. I'm not sure if my rain jacket itself (it was also lightly sprinkling) was the primary reminder of this, since it's orange rather than the dark gray of the movie, but the mask definitely pushed the whole getup in that direction. 

And then, finally, it was time for Dune.

WARNING, THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD. 

A massive, impressive sci-fi vision

I'm not going to give a true review of my feelings on Dune here, nor do I expect to do so on ReelGood, as another writer claimed the movie like six months ago. (Given the percentage of reviews I currently write for ReellGood, I was happy to oblige.) But I did think I should give you some sense of my thoughts on the movie itself before I get into the extra-textuals that typically comprise a post like this.

Simply put, Denis Villeneuve is a master of size and scale.

What a large vision. Everything that felt small about Lynch's Dune was trebled and quadrupled here, except the acting styles, which were not laughable as they were in that movie. The sweeping desert vistas, the ships of all shapes and sizes that disgorge other ships, the ornithopters beating their wings like dragonflies, the covered cityscapes to shut out the heat, and finally, the massive worms, whose Sarlaac Pit-style openings for mouths are usually all you see of them -- and all you need to see. It's all there in Villeneuve's vision and it's all absolutely breathtaking. Even though there's comparatively little time spend on the Atreides home world of Caladan, even that is built out into a true physical space with its own distinct ecologies and architecture.

It's just all there.

I'm not really sure what more you could want from a Dune movie than this. I still haven't sampled the critical consensus on the film, and I'm sure there are people out there nitpicking about certain decisions, but before I do go wading into those reviews, I don't know what those nitpicks might be. (And I'll probably wait a few more days before I do, just to be sure my colleague does actually write the review and I don't have to pinch hit for him.)

It strikes me as more successful by a fair bit than Villeneuve's previous venture into prestige sci-fi, that being Blade Runner 2049, which was also quite a complete and distinct vision. There the story felt like it really dragged, and that the choices made within that story were sometimes questionable. No such problem for Dune, though being in the process of reading the book certainly could help in that regard. In fact, I felt that this movie streamlines and even improves the book in necessary ways, even while covering only half of its content in this first movie. As just one example, what happens with Dr. Kines in this movie -- who was also re-envisioned as a woman -- is more satisfying and less of a cosmic joke.

All in on Chalamet

There have been times during Timothee Chalamet's rise to fame when I have been unsure if he were the real deal or if we were being sold a bill of goods. To be clear, I have never doubted his ability as an actor, which was present from the moment we were all first exposed to him in Call Me By Your Name. But maybe because I reacted to that movie a little less positively than some people, some of that skepticism rubbed off on Chalamet, and I've since been wondering if he's more hype than hope.

No more.

I could not imagine a more perfect casting choice for Paul Atreides, and maybe I never had to imagine one because I knew before even reading the book that Chalamet had been cast for this. But I don't think that prevents me from recognizing the brilliance of getting Chalmaet for this role. There's something in those eyes that creates a presence, a tone, the sort of thing you could easily imagine religious people latching on to as they seek their messiah. In this case that's a good thing, but it's also a complicated thing, and I think Chalamet's performance perfectly embodies that.

But there's a particular moment I wanted to call attention to, which is Chalamet's variety of expressions as he has his hand inserted in that box with the gom jabbar at his neck. Maybe that's the moment everyone is talking about, I don't know -- remember, I've been avoiding reviews and other thoughts on the movie. But he runs the gamut from pain to righteousness to calm as he endures the Bene Gesserit test, and the range of his emotions is not as simple as those three words I've used to describe them. In each shot that returns to his face, he's in a different part of that journey, something subtly more or less intense, something frightening in its very determination, its superiority, its disgust. There's possibly something even psychotic in there. Remember, with Paul Atreides, it's complicated.

Duncan Idaho doing Duncan Idaho things

One of the things I found strange about the novel is that we lose characters from the narrative before it feels like we've even really met them. One of these is Duncan Idaho, who I knew from near the start of reading was being played by Jason Momoa. 

When Idaho dies in the book with little fanfare, I wondered why they had even bothered to get someone with Momoa's star wattage to play the character. I think this points to something a bit unusual about Frank Herbert's writing. While he goes into great detail about some things, he gives relatively little "screen time," as it were, to others. Idaho is a prime example of this. We hear his name a couple times and there are vague mentions of his role in House Atreides and warrior feats he may have accomplished, but he's gone before he gets a real "scene."

This movie corrects for that. The script by Villeneuve, Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts gets him on screen about every 15 minutes for one reason or another, so by the time we do lose him, he's done the things we'd expect of a character with his importance to the narrative. We see him fighting not once but twice, whereas in the book, those fight scenes are vaguely alluded to but not detailed. 

It's another way the film takes what seem like small oversights in the book and gets the most out of them. Or maybe, more charitably, capitalizes on the advantage films can sometimes have over books, which is to depict things that might seem laborious to depict in a novel. While Herbert's writing would probably have been weakened by a blow-by-blow description of Idaho fighting Sardukar warriors, we can see that in the movie and we can appreciate what it means to lose a warrior of his abilities.

Words I was pronouncing wrong

It was disappointing to learn what the "official" pronunciation of Harkonnen is. 

I put "official" in quotation marks because you can never be sure what the "real" pronunciation is of a made up word that appears in print. Presumably, Herbert gave interviews at the time, during which he spoke the word out loud and confirmed what he envisioned as its pronunciation. But if not, then I disagree with the pronunciation they've chosen here.

When I say this word in my head, I say "Har-COE-nin." When they say this word in the movie, they say "HARK-uh-nin."

I don't suppose I can really argue why my pronunciation is better than theirs, but I do think my pronunciation is easier to say. I also think it sounds more threatening, though I can justify that impression even less. 

The other phrase I wasn't saying quite right was "Bene Gesserit," mostly because I used the hard G sound at the start of the second word rather than the J sound they use. I actually think theirs is better in this case.

Actors who weren't playing the characters I thought they were

One of the cast members I knew before seeing the movie was Dave Bautista playing Baron Harkonnen, which I discovered through an ill-fated google image search. In fact, I mentioned this accidental discovery in the post I wrote six weeks ago.

Of course, Bautista does not actually play this role.

I'm not sure what happened with that google search, and I can't recreate it now as the search produces the correct results this time. Baron Harkonnen is actually played -- quite chillingly, I might add -- by Stellan Skarsgaard. Bautista's role is Rabban, actually not a character who really factors in to the first part of the book if memory serves. 

Now that I've seen the movie, of course my own images of the characters is going to suffer for the 200+ pages of the book I have remaining. For example I know now that Gurney Hallack is Josh Brolin, and Thufir Hawat is Stephen McKinley Henderson. However, I don't think this is going to change my view of the Lady Jessica, who I have envisioned as Jessica Chastain (probably because she shares the character's name). Even though I learned early on that Rebecca Ferguson was playing this role, it wasn't enough to supplant my image of Chastain for the character.

What other sci-fi franchises can Villeneuve salvage/revive?

Now that he's made the consecutive grand sci-fi visions of Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune, Villleneuve has clearly established himself as one of the preeminent makers of prestige sci-fi, right up there with guys like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron and Ridley Scott. In fact, his track record probably contains fewer blemishes than any of those guys.

It's probably also pigeonholed him a bit. Oh well. It's not a bad way to be pigeonholed.

Villeneuve has got a full slate with the second Dune on the way, an announced role as director of the new Cleopatra movie and even an announced directing credit for a Dune TV series. But it did occur to me to think about what other sci-fi brands could get boosted by a little of the Denis Villeneuve touch. 

Here are the top five, in no particular order:

1) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Terminator movie.

2) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Alien movie.

3) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great remake of Strange Days.

4) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Matrix movie.

5) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Star Wars movie.

Some of those may be obvious, and they do involve the work of the aforementioned Scott and Cameron. And I've only listed them without elaborating because you can probably imagine what movies like this would look like under the creative supervision of this man. 

But I guess what I'm saying is that whatever this guy makes in the future of his career, even if he can't get to any of these ideas until 2025 or later, I'm there. This is a man who knows how to make movies.

                                                          ***********

The night almost ended on a sour note. As I was riding my bike back home well after midnight, in fact probably closer to 1, I was listening to The Next Picture Show podcast, in which they compare a new release to a classic film that may have helped inspire it. I wasn't ready to fully listen to a Dune podcast yet -- if I have to review the movie, I don't want my perspective to be biased -- but in this particular pairing, the first episode was about Lawrence of Arabia. They'll get to Dune on the next episode.

When I was about eight minutes from home, one of my ear buds popped out, and I couldn't find it.

It was something I should have expected. As I took my helmet on and off, I risked dislodging my right ear bud on multiple occasions, and had to push it back in place. I should have known that it was not fully in there and was susceptible to falling out. In fact, kind of like Paul Atreides with his visions, I predicted it would happen even before it did. 

The spot where it fell was on the bike path, so I didn't have to worry about a car driving over it or anything. And I noticed the loss of sound from the right ear almost immediately. But because I couldn't find it straight away, I worried that it might in fact have fallen in the busy road I'd just recently crossed, or worse, fallen down the grate I had just ridden over, lost for good. I had even removed the bike light from the front of my bike and was using it as a flashlight over a stretch over a decent stretch of path.

After more than five minutes of looking, and just when I was about to give up, there it was, glistening a little in the dirty by the side of the path, not too much before the spot I'd originally stopped.

Better yet, it was still in perfect wording order.

Good ear buds. They're comparable to a good stillsuit in terms of bang for your buck. 

And thus ends a Dune odyssey whose post rivals the girth of the movie. 

The countdown to Dune

For most of you, this countdown is already over. Dune is open in North America and everyone's got an opinion they've expressed online about it, which I am doing my best to avoid.

Dune doesn't open in Australia, though, until December 2nd. It's a deadline that's approaching fast for a reason that would not apply to most people ... although maybe more than I would have thought. 

See, on October 12th I watched Jodorowsky's Dune, the great 2013 documentary that interviews members of what would have been the principle creative team for Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Frank Herbert's seminal science fiction novel. It would have gone before cameras in the mid-70s, years before David Lynch's disastrous 1984 version -- even before Star Wars. The world was not ready for it at the time -- potential financiers thought Jodorowsky was crazy -- so all that remains is a massive bound bible of storyboards Jodorowsky had made, the memories of the people who would have been involved, and this film.

It was enough to get me to buy Herbert's book on Amazon when I finished my current book a few days later.

If the film were releasing in Australia in October as it has in the U.S., I wouldn't have done it. I would have had to plow through its 575 pages in less than a week, when that length book would normally take me a couple months.

Or, in this case, hopefully six weeks.

I calculated that if I put in a good effort, I should be able to knock out the whole thing by the Australian release date. I don't usually average 100 pages per week on any book I'm reading, but it's certainly within my capabilities, even as a slow reader. 

Making it a bit extra ambitious, though, was the fact that Jodorowsky says in the film that you don't really understand what's going on in Dune for its first 100 pages. I took that as a challenge rather than a warning, even though I've been known to get beaten by books I could not make sufficient sense of. ("Beaten" does not mean I stopped, except in the case of David Foster Wallace's behemoth Infinite Jest. It just means that the book ended up consuming half my year.) 

Fortunately, Dune doesn't make sense in accessible ways. It throws out a lot of terminology without explaining what it means, but the actual language is straightforward and the main characters are introduced in such a way to make it easy to keep track of them. In fact, I felt momentum rather than hesitation at the start of the book, knowing that what I didn't know would make sense as the book went along, or that the parts that didn't make sense might end up more like flavor notes I couldn't really appreciate than narrative essentials to understanding the story.

But then another event came along that I could have sort of anticipated, though there was every chance that it wouldn't occur before December 2nd:

We bought a house.

This is a big topic and it certainly bears more discussion at another time. I don't mean to just drop it in your lap and leave it there. But let's just say the whole thing is freaking me out enough that I haven't even posted about it on Facebook yet, even though it occurred eight days ago. I certainly don't feel ready to delve into it right now. I'll just say that a house hunt that was most likely to stretch into next year ended abruptly when we were the winning bidders at the first ever auction we attended. I think it still hasn't totally sunk in for me. 

The thing that's important for the current discussion is that this will add a lot more complication to my schedule before December 2nd. Which suddenly looks like a far less attainable deadline for finishing the book, especially since I currently find myself only on page 185.

The next question is whether it even matters if I finish the book before then. And there's a lot of reasons it might not.

For one, I already saw the Lynch version from 1984. I don't remember more than a few hilarious details ("remember the tooth!"), but I've been exposed to this entire story and everything that's happened in it once already. Still, I probably wouldn't be reading the book right now if I had seen it recently and it were fresh in my memory.

What I have seen recently, though, is Jodorowsky's Dune, in which Jodorowsky blithely reveals the fate of one of the movie's main characters. So I already knew that before I made the decision to purchase the book. 

The other reason it may not matter if I finish the book is something I just found out yesterday, after I began drafting this post:

Denis Villeneuve's Dune is not the same as either David Lynch's Dune or Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune would have been, in that it is only half the story.

I'm glad I happened to be discussing the book in a Facebook chat with a friend yesterday, which led me to the discovery that he had also read the book in the lead-up to watching the movie, and that the movie only covers about the novel's first 300 pages. It's Dune Part I, something the rest of you surely already know, but was news to me.

This brought with it a huge sigh of relief. It'll be easy for me to read another hundred-plus pages in the next three weeks, even with my busier schedule. No problem there.

Now the only problem is trying to read the book with my own ideas of what various characters look like, without being totally poisoned by the cast of Villeneuve's movie.

Since I don't remember very much of Lynch's version, the only thing I could say for sure was that Kyle MacLachlan played Paul Atreidis, the protagonist. I have a suspicion Sting played Baron Harkonnen but I'm not going to look it up to confirm it. 

Not that it matters in those cases, because neither of those two actors are competing for my mental images of Paul and Harkonnen. I know Timothee Chalamet plays Paul in this version, as he has been front and center for the advertising I've already consumed (though I have turned my eyes away so as not to see any of the film's trailers). By necessity he is my Paul as I read this. Then I happened to google Baron Harkonnen to see how he had been depicted in illustrations, failing to realize that of course the actor cast to play him in this version, personal favorite Dave Batista, would also be revealed in that search. So Batista is my Harkonnen.

But then a few others I uncovered by accident, specifically, Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho. Only just now, as I was selecting a poster for this post, did I note Rebecca Ferguson on the poster and realize that she's the perfect casting for the Bene Gesserit, the Lady Jessica. Perhaps only because of her first name, I had been picturing Jessica as Jessica Chastain, and hope I can continue to do that. (And I discarded that poster and went for the one of just Chalamet so as not to worsen this unconscious matching of names to faces.)

There are other actors that I know are in this film, such as Oscar Isaac, but I don't know what role he plays so I can maintain some additional ignorance on that front. (Oops, just blew that. In the interest of fact-checking to make sure Isaac was, in fact, in the movie, I googled "Is Oscar Isaac in Dune?" in the hope that I would get a simple confirmation. Instead it showed me what character he plays. D'oh.)

It may not really matter if you can maintain your own mental image of a character in a book. We read countless books while already knowing who appeared in the most prominent film adaptations of that book. It's a hazard built in to being a person who's aware of popular culture and cannot possibly read all literature before it gets made into a movie.

Besides, my faculties are failing me a bit on this one anyway. For some reason when each new adviser to Leto Atreidis gets introduced in the book, I mentally cast him as looking like Timothy Spall. Timothy Spall is not in Villeneuve's movie so I have no idea where this came from.

One thing that's for certain is that reading Dune before the movie was not an idea that was unique to me. Not only was there the friend who gave me the approximate amount of the novel that appears in this movie, but another friend had previously told me he'd chosen to read the book in the lead-up as well. He's actually an Australian who could not wait for December 2nd and has found a place to watch it illegally online.

Me personally, I'll be waiting. I'm not concerned about the plot or even really the casting being ruined, but I am concerned about the grandeur being ruined by watching it on a TV screen, as this guy and countless HBO Max subscribers around the world have chosen to do. Because when it all comes down to it, movies like Dune may live and die by the spectacle they put up on the screen, not whether they get every detail right from a book that has notoriously been considered unfilmable over the years.

In a few weeks, I'll be able to add my own opinion to the online chorus. 

Why I can't get all hot and bothered about Warner Brothers

Six months ago, if you'd told me a major studio like Warner Brothers was sending movies like Dune and The Matrix 4 straight to the small screen on the day and date of their release, I would have run screaming in the streets, pleading with strangers to go by a movie ticket -- even if theaters were closed. (Actually, I think it was about six months ago that theaters were open for a short time in Victoria, before swiftly closing again after the latest outbreak.)

I guess it goes to show just how much this year has changed me, because I greeted the latest news in the slow-rolling death knell for movie theaters with sort of a shrug.

Now, the movies that are debuting on HBOMax -- which include Wonder Woman 1984 as soon as three weeks from now -- will also be playing in theaters. Warner Brothers is not robbing its audience of the chance to see these big spectacles on the big screen. It's just also providing them a small screen option that an increasingly large number of people may avail themselves of, which spells the long-term doom of movie theaters.

Oh well.

Seriously, this idea made me hyperventilate not long ago. It was only April 30th when I wrote this post, in which I bemoaned participating in a decisive experiment by Universal in which it charged viewers $19.99 to rent Trolls World Tour at home. So many of them did -- so many of us did, I'm ashamed to say -- that I worried I had played a role in changing the very paradigm of going to the movies.

But as 2020 has worn on, I've realized a couple things:

1) You can't fight change, nor can you fight the circumstances that lead to it, however unexpected they are, and however intrinsically unrelated they are to thing itself that's changing.

2) I'm just one man, and my opinion doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

Of course, the second one is a bit defeatist -- maybe they both are. I certainly don't subscribe to that "just one man" and "can't fight change" logic when it comes to voting in elections. And buying movie tickets -- or home rentals -- is very much like voting in an election, in that you are telling the purveyors of the thing you're voting for what you want, and what you don't want.

But as this year has gone on, I've realized more and more that the kind of sea changes an industry goes through are a combination of many, many factors, almost all of which are beyond our control, and most of which we don't even notice happening as they are happening, until it's too late to do anything about it.

Twenty twenty has certainly made those changes noticeable, as an unexpected event has pushed us forward maybe five years sooner to a place we were going anyway.

I think of a recent bemoaning of mine of Facebook, about how when I was growing up, we had these syndicated afternoon TV shows we watched when we got home from school, like The Brady Bunch and Three's Company. I was a WLVI guy in the Boston area, and whatever they put on in the afternoons, I watched. 

Kids today, I bemoaned, watch people play video games on YouTube. Very much unlike a syndicated TV show, which is defined by playing time and time again until you memorize the dialogue, these videos are essentially ephemeral, never to be watched a second time, never to produce any memorable lines of dialogue, never to help build a common frame of reference and inside jokes among a whole generational of people. I can say to anyone in my age group "Mom always said, don't play ball in the house," and they will immediately think of the Brady Bunch episode where the Brady kids break Carol Brady's favorite vase with an errant throw of a football. What's the 2020 equivalent of that?

But a commenter helped me see the flaws in my own argument, how it's naive of me to expect anything to stay the same. Our parents, this person said, listened to radio dramas when they were that age. Which, you might note, are also essentially ephemeral, as I don't know the extent to which they were rebroadcast, and whether kids bothered to listen to the same one again.

They turned out okay, right?

A paradigm shift is not the aberration. It's the norm. While some kids, like mine, do watch these YouTube videos on a television, some have actually done the same sort of device shift as our parents' radios to our TVs. Some watch these videos on an iPad or a phone, a device we couldn't have even conceived of when we were kids. At least our parents knew what a television was, and most probably had one, even if it came later in their childhoods.

As long as movies don't go away, as long as they still make them, as long as I can still watch them on some device, maybe it will all turn out okay.

This does not mean I am giving up on movie theaters. In fact, I have been paying for all the movies I've seen since theaters first closed in March. For a while my critics card wasn't being accepted, as the local theaters behaved as though they were hanging on by tooth and nail -- which they probably were. But now, some of them have started accepting them again, with the rest to follow soon enough. And even though I could go to the movies for free if I just selected the right theater, I've been supporting the "wrong" one at $20 a pop -- six times now since the movies opened again. I want my vote to count for something.

And the thing is, none of the theaters I've regularly visited in Melbourne have actually closed. Even the single-screen ones are still afloat. They are as determined as I am.

And being as determined as I am, I like to think that I'll go to all those Warner Brothers movies in the theater, so that my vote does count. But will I make that choice? For the purposes of this argument, let's pretend I'm actually an HBOMax subscriber, which means I can select either option available to me. Will I?

The results of the same scenario involving Netflix are not hopeful in that regard. To this day, I have yet to go to the cinema to see a movie Netflix had given a short theatrical run prior to making available on its service. Not Beasts of No Nation. Not Roma, though I later regretted that, as I thought seeing it on a big screen may have made me like it more. Not The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Not Marriage Story. The closest I got was when I tried to buy us tickets to a rooftop screening of Mank a few weeks ago, when the guidelines surrounding movies were stricter than they are now, but it was sold out on the night we wanted to go. So I will watch Mank on Netflix as well.

In every case, I have thought, "I could watch that on the big screen, and I'm sure it would be cool. But it will be available on Netflix in just a few weeks anyway."

That makes me different from the lazy viewer I am implicitly contrasting myself with how, exactly?

But I do have hope.

Even if going to the movies wanes for a time as a social activity enjoyed by groups of people on a weekend night, I can't see how it will ever really go away. Just last night at dinner I was discussing with some friends how commercial districts, especially during pandemic times, may recede, and there may be a lot of FOR RENT signs in the windows, but that new businesses tend to eventually take their place, like vegetation growing again after a forest fire.

And so it will be with movies theaters. Some will close for good, no doubt. That space will be reused for something else, even possibly having all its seats gutted to pave the way for an entirely new function that is not based in performance. Free-standing buildings may even get razed.

But most, or at least enough, will probably reemerge at some point in the future, with a new name, a new ownership, a new source of financing that has not been crippled by dying out in 2020 in the first place. 

Maybe in those five years I discussed earlier, movie theaters will return as a novelty item, and young people raised on screens will rediscover them as a sort of retro activity, like when drive-ins started becoming popular again. Everything phases out; the good things are remembered and reenergized for future generations.

My understanding is that Warner Brothers' ploy is not intended to persist past 2021, at least not so far as they have announced. Optimists are viewing it as a short-term attempt to cash up by leveraging the streaming services and the mysterious financial realities that swirl around them. 

Pessimists -- and maybe realists -- are seeing it as perhaps a watershed moment in the end of movie theaters.

Me, though, I am an optimist, something I discover more about myself all the time. 

I guess I'm also a realist, though, otherwise I wouldn't be wearily sounding the alarm in this post. Can you wearily sound an alarm? If so, I am. 

But going to the movies is a good thing, that I am sure of. And as I said earlier, the really good things persist. 

Record stores may disappear, but they are like the reruns of The Brady Bunch in this scenario. They have a specific nostalgia associated with them because they remind us of a time and a place in our lives, which our kids will never be able to experience. 

But people have been going to the movies for a hundred years, and I believe they still will in the future. Those of us who want to will be able to. Those who don't want to will have that option as well. 

And this, too, shall pass.