Yma Sumac, Michael Crichton

I would be remiss if I did not mention the passing of Yma Sumac and Michael Crichton.  Sumac I knew through her gonzo lounge-exotica album Voice of the Xtabay, an LP I kept in my collection for many years.  She was a true one-of-a-kind entertainer: how many other Peruvian sopranos were there who dressed like an Incan princess and sang oddball "exotica" in New York clubs in the 1950s?

Michael Crichton was, of course, a much more easily-defined talent: he wrote bestsellers.  Lots of them.  The Andromeda Strain was one of my first "grown-up movie" movie-going experiences, I was probably 10 or so when my brother took me to see it.  It scared the hell out of me, images of the town full of dead people still linger in my mind.  I remember, even then, admiring the deft twists of its plot, and the way it criticized the fallibility of science.  I rushed to see The Terminal Man in spite of the fact that it was, of all things, a George Segal vehicle — pardon, a George Segal thriller, and Futureworld, which was a kind-of sequel to Westworld, which set the tone for a number of Chrichton plots to come: rich guy takes a cool scientific principle and tries to turn it into a theme park — with disastrous results.  Chrichton had a hugely commercial understanding of how to make science cool to the casual entertainment consumer and was the source of many successful adaptations, as well as some interesting misfires — The 13th Warrior springs to mind, with its end-of-Act I moment where Antonio Banderas, after being kidnapped by a cannibalistic tribe, suddenly finds that he can understand their language.  The scene is handled beautifully — Antonio is huddled by the fire, scared to death as the barbarians talk in their strange, brutish tongue, and then suddenly an English word pops up here and there, and then suddenly they’re all speaking English.  The dramatic point of the scene is that Antonio can now understand them, but the screenwriters figured out how to express that the way it would seem to the protagonist, and I’ve always kept that scene in the back of my mind in case I ever need to steal it for something.  (The 13th Warrior is based on Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, which, well, if you don’t think Eaters of the Dead kicks The 13th Warrior‘s ass around the block title-wise, I just don’t know what to tell you.

UPDATE: Okay, okay, I didn’t describe the translation-by-immersion scene from The 13th Warrior very well.  swan_tower , as usual, puts it much better below.  And this blog entry must surely be the largest gathering of 13th Warrior fans ever assembled.