I didn’t much enjoy the audiobook of The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells (and it was the book’s fault, not the narrator) but I still decided to go on to a re-watch of the movie starring Claude Rains—mostly in the hope of finding a better version of the story! And it gives me an entry for R. I. P.’s Peril on Screen.

I’m happy to report I much preferred the movie to the book—and would absolutely recommend watching the movie instead of reading the novel, and that is not a recommendation I often make! The funny thing is, it was a mostly accurate interpretation, which nevertheless made a bad book into a good movie. You see, what’s long and dull in a six-hour audiobook occupies a 70-minute movie very nicely!

The plot is more or less the same—a strangely bandaged man arrives at an inn, engages in scientific experiments, and is eventually revealed to be invisible…and then he proceeds to go on a rampage. Continue reading “Movie Review: The Invisible Man” →

My book club has a habit of talking about Star Wars. I don’t know how it happens, it just does—and eventually someone suggested that we ought to read a Star Wars book. I think we were discussing the failings of the prequel trilogy at the time, and so elected to read the novelization of Revenge of the Sith, Episode Three. That might sound like an odd choice, but two of us (including me) remembered it as being almost bizarrely better than the movie. And it really was, making me quite impressed with the author, Matthew Stover.

The book assumes that you’re familiar with the first two movies in the trilogy, and picks up midway through the Clone Wars. We open with an extended battle sequence, as Jedi Knights Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi fight to rescue the kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine. When they return to Coruscant, they find politics much harder to deal with than the simplicity of battle—and Anakin is increasingly torn between his duty as a Jedi, his love for Padmé, and his own darker desires. And…I’ll leave the plot summary there, but spoilers will follow in the discussion!

The best thing about the book is that there’s just so much more than there was in the movie. Somewhere I heard it was based on an earlier, longer script that included scenes not in the final movie. Stover must have brought more to it too, though, because some of the best parts are internal character struggles, or beautiful descriptions of battles that were just so much cooler in the book than in the movie. Continue reading “Book Review (really!): Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith” →