Movie Reviews #85…
Around the World in 80 Days. (PBS Masterpiece Theater) Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a movie review. I haven’t been to a movie theater for two years. Covid put a hiatus in this traditionalist’s view of date-night being a good movie and dinner out. I’m still cautious and wear a mask (too many idiots out and about!). And most fare on TV and from Hollywood is drivel, so PBS comes to the rescue at times, as in this case.
The movie came in several weekly chapters like a good book, not nearly as long as the Jules Verne original, of course, but longer than the usual Hollywood two-hour schlock if put end to end. It was well done and entertaining. Creating a magnificent audiovisual experience out of Vernes’s marvelous story can’t be easy, but the production has moved any previous attempts to the dark recesses of my old memory cells. The principal actors, the English actor David Tennant as Phineas Fogg, the French actor Ibrahim Koma as Passepartout, and the German actress Leonie Benesch as Abigail Fortescue, were simply marvelous. For the racists out there (I don’t expect many racists read this blog), get your bigotry and hatred sensors turned on: Abigail and Passepartout have many romantic moments. Passepartout often saves the day too, so take that! (You’ll find bios of the cast at the PBS website. I enjoyed reading that Ms. Benesch had trouble keeping up with a running Tennant at times. Poor Fogg took a beating when he couldn’t run fast enough, though.)
By Jove, well done, I dare say! Although it differs from the novel (what movie doesn’t these days?), it’s a better story because it comes from one. This is a great adventure story without much sci-fi. (I suppose some would say it’s more fantasy than sci-fi too.) Jules Verne is often called the progenitor of all modern sci-fi, but that’s more true of Voyage to the Moon and his prescient 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (the Nautilus’s strange mode of locomotion was most certainly a nuclear reactor, don’t you know?) 80 Days is more like those other swashbuckling adventures I used to read as a kid; novels by H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs are a few more examples.
You must really see this movie, either in streaming video or reruns. And I hope you won’t miss the nuanced next-to-last scene where reference is made to another Jules Verne classic.
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Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Who gets the new code for quantum computers based on ideas in a recently discovered Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook? Surprise, surprise! Autocrats are up to their dirty tricks here—and maybe even the US?—and they send spies and assassins to steal the technology. One of Esther’s brilliant old friends from her Oxford days has created the code. In the background, another bad player, who’s always interested in new technology, lurks as well. Can Esther and Bastiann protect her old friend? Find out here. This novel is available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reliable ebook dealers (that excludes Amazon).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
