Remake

Rating:
Summary: Great fantasy for fans of movie musicals
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Great fantasy for fans of movie musicals
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A book that grows on you...
Review: Connie Willis is undoubtedly a genius, but even geniuses have their failures. One is tempted at first to think that Remake will be one of her lesser works, even if by no means a failure. But really it's up there with her greater books. The characterizations, of the narrator/hero in particular, are good and entertaining. And the premise/setting of a Hollywood in which thanks to digital technology every actor is entirely interchangeable (but good scripts are obviously still in short supply or can't get made) works vividly well.

Rating:
Summary: A book that grows on you...
Review: Connie Willis is undoubtedly a genius, but even geniuses have their failures. One is tempted at first to think that Remake will be one of her lesser works, even if by no means a failure. But really it's up there with her greater books. The characterizations, of the narrator/hero in particular, are good and entertaining. And the premise/setting of a Hollywood in which thanks to digital technology every actor is entirely interchangeable (but good scripts are obviously still in short supply or can't get made) works vividly well.

Rating:
Summary: An elegy to love lost that never was and Fred Astaire.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of twists and turns; an intriguing view of the future
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: If you love SF and THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT, this is for you.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Let's Dance
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Romantic Comedy
Review: It takes Willis a long time to write a novel, due to the incredible amount of research that she does for them. Of course, this is also one of the reasons why they are so good. In the early 1990s, her editor had a brilliant idea--why not write shorter novels? Connie, in a rare fit of insanity, agreed. The idea was crazy because she does the same amount of research for a novella as for a novel. If there was a silver lining in this cloud, it is likely the increased amount of shelf space that Willis now takes up with seven different titles instead of four (I'm not counting her new book, nor the collaborations with Cynthia Felice).

There may be another silver lining in that we got three novellas that might otherwise not have existed, and it is a format that Connie excels at, and a format that, rarely, is as financially rewarding. This is the second of the three that I have read (I also commented on Bellwether). It is not a screwball, per se, which is somewhat surprising given that it is about movies. It does, however, contain that signature Willis humor.

Tom is a poor student at the UNC film school, who has to moonlight as a film "editor" to pay his tuition. I have to put editor in quotes, because this is the future, where movies are not made but remade with digitized famous actors. Into this walks Alis, a "face" who confides to Tom that she wants to dance in the movies.

Like many of Connie's stories, this one plays with the concept of time-travel, although the one-way trip into film nostalgia here is an unusual twist. If this was made into a film, the likely category it would fall into is romantic comedy, although comedy and tear-jerker aspects are there. Think of it as Willis' Jerry Maguire.

Rating:
Summary: short but still tiresome
Review: 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.