I’m always a few days behind on Doctor Who.
It can’t be helped, really. And me, being me, I knew a fair little bit about Dr. River Song long before I’d gotten around to finally seeing “Silence in the Library.”
And what I’d heard and read made me think of a single thing — The Time Traveler’s Wife.
I’d read the book a few years ago, not long after it had come out. I found it romantic and tragic and sad and hopeful. I liked it.
It’s a book that is, as the Doctor would say, “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.”
I should probably dig out my copy of the book, and give it a look over before the second part of “Library.” Not that there’s anything that Time Traveler’s Wife would spoil about Doctor Who — one story is about the endurance of love across time, while the other is about killer shadows in a library — but you never know.
It’s been adapted as a movie, coming out this fall, I think. Starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, if memory serves.
There’s one other wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey movie coming out this fall that I’m curious about.
David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man born backwards in time, who grows into youth as the world grows older.
This has come up in conversation twice in the past two days, in both cases as, “Have you heard about this?” And, of course, I had.
It’s based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.
Yes, we normally associate Fitzgerald with The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, and stories about the rich and the sheltered in the Roaring Twenties, but that’s not the entirety of Fitzgerald’s work.
He wrote historical heroic fantasy, for crying out loud.
I suppose if there’s a director who could bring “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to the big screen, it would be David Fincher. I once said, in all seriousness, on a message board that I thought a short story I’d written — “Make-Believe” — was absolutely unfilmable, but that if someone could film it, it would be David Fincher. I couldn’t tell you how. I have no idea what the screenplay would be like or how it would work. But I can almost envision it.
It’s probably the nihilism in his body of work. From Alien 3 to Se7en to Fight Club and beyond, Fincher’s work isn’t just adept at conveying a visual style, but it also carries with it meaning and depth. Fincher is a big budget arthouse director. At least, that’s how he comes across to me.
Coming back to Doctor Who, “Silence in the Library” had me on the edge of my seat. And I have absolutely no idea where it’s going. Brilliant stuff.