I’m definitely not a tech blogger/reviewer, but there’s something I want to point out about the charging cable that ships with the new iPhone 12. Compared to the usb-c charging cable that came with the iPad Pro I bought earlier this year and old apple lightning chargers, the new iPhone cables appear to be reinforced:
By now, everyone’s aware of the durability issues that have plagued the old cable, so I’m glad to see that Apple has done something to try to address it. We’ll see how it goes.
Deck Z: The Titanic: Unsinkable. Undead
by Chris Pauls and Matt Solomon
published September 2012 by Chronicle Books LLC
This review may contain spoilers.
This book is one of the most awesome books I’ve ever read about the Titanic.
In Deck Z, a zombie virus breaks out on board the the ship, and Thomas Andrews and Captain Smith team up with a few others to battle walking dead. None of this actually happened in real life, of course, except the part about the ship sinking, but that doesn’t matter. I’d still recommend it to any person who counts the study of the Titanic among their hobbies.
I’m not a fan of the whole zombie apocalypse trend that’s been popular in the last few years. With the way the world is today, I do not want to spend my free time fantasizing about what it would be like to be one of the handful of people who survives in a world where most of the population has been turned into zombies. I suspect that this book is a product of the craze, but I didn’t care about any of that when I found it. I could not resist the opportunity to read Deck Z, which, though fiction, offers such a different perspective of the disaster.
As a person who’s been studying the Titanic since childhood, I’ve read my fair share of books about the ship, its people, and its foundering. I haven’t read much fiction about the ship, though. I’ve read some fanfiction (I’ve even written some), but now that I think about it, I can’t recall reading one fiction book about the Titanic. That’s so odd because I know that these books exist. I guess you could count Zero: 999, an interactive graphic novel that I recently completed. And of course, I’ve played games based on it. My absolute favorite was the computer game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, but there was also Titanic: The Board Game.
I love how Captain Smith is portrayed in Deck Z. He’s one of the major heroes in the story, and he wields a bad-ass sword (which he uses to skillfully decapitate zombies). In many fiction films I’ve watched, Smith seems to be relegated to almost a supporting role in all the drama of the night. He’s the captain—it’s awesome that he gets a starring role in Deck Z.
Thomas Andrews also gets the star treatment here. How? Let’s just say that homemade grenades made out of squash balls are involved. Pure awesomeness.
I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed Deck Z. The only reason it caught my attention in the first place was the Titanic connection, and I expected it to be mediocre at best. But surprise, surprise–the plot and the writing are actually good! I’ve always wanted the chance to walk Titanic’s decks (I kind of already have if you can count visiting the Titanic museum in Pigeon Forge). While I can’t say that I ever wanted to do this during an outbreak of a zombie virus, reading Deck Z made me feel like I was right there in the middle of the action. This book is a must-read for anyone who’s read extensively about the Titanic and may want a change of pace on the topic.
Based on the play “The Berg,” Atlantic is a fictionalized retelling of the Titanic’s sinking. It was the first sound film made about the disaster and the first full-length sound film in Germany. Actually, the film was produced in three languages. In addition to German, there were French and English versions, as well as a silent version. I viewed the English-language version. Interesting fact: the film was originally released as Atlantic, but more recently, it has also been known as Titanic: Disaster in the Atlantic.
But wait–if it’s a film about the Titanic, why was the movie originally called Atlantic? There’s a good answer for this. Originally, the film was supposed to be explicitly about the Titanic, and it’s title was to be Titanic. Due to lawsuits, however, the film’s producers changed the name of the film (and its fictional ship) to Atlantic.
Beyond the fact that a large, unsinkable ship hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and sank, there’s actually very little in the film that resembles the narrative that students of Titanic are familiar with. Atlantic begins with a tale of adultery. Mr. Tate-Hughes, a first-class passenger aboard the ship, is stepping out on his wife with another woman on the ship, but that plot line quickly falls by the wayside as the ship hits an iceberg. Even as the real action begins, the film remains devoid of many of the mainstays of Titanic film. We don’t see any of the familiar faces–there’s no Captain Smith, no Thomas Andrews, no Bruce Ismay. We don’t even see that much of the ship itself, and what we do see barely resembles the ship we’ve come to know.
I was confused by the characters’ costumes that I’m not even certain that the film is supposed to take place in 1912. The ladies don’t look like other 1912 women I’ve seen. They’re not dressed like women of the era, and I saw quite a few short women’s hairstyles that don’t seem to be from that period, either. The clothing seemed more like a mish-mash of 1912 and 1920s styles.
There are several scenes of chaos out on the Atlantic’s decks, as panicked people scramble for spots in the lowering lifeboats. I was shocked to see that at least one of these people was a black man. There may have been two, actually, but the second man was on screen for such a short time that I wasn’t able to get a good look at him. I’m pretty sure this is the only Titanic film I’ve seen that features any black people at all. Earlier this week, I wrote about Shine, a mythical black stoker on the Titanic who survived the sinking. Unfortunately, the dude on the Atlantic wouldn’t be as fortunate as Shine. During the scenes on deck, the black man breaks through the crowd and struggles against an army of men as he attempts to enter a lifeboat. He gets pummeled, but he makes it into the boat, where he gets pummeled some more, and choked, too. Finally, an officer shoots him, and he falls out of the boat and into the sea. Not a very positive light in which to depict black people, but it’s certainly not surprising, given the period when the film was made.
As a Titanic film, Atlantic is pretty forgettable overall. The scene where the officer shoots the black dude is what sticks out the most to me, not exactly something I’d like to remember most about a film. It had potential in the beginning, with the adultery plot, but that storyline just kind of fizzles out. It’s possible there was a resolution, but if there was, I don’t remember it. This should have played a much larger role in the film, but most of what we get is the man’s poor wife grieving over her husband’s unfaithfulness and his daughter sneering anger over her father’s behavior. Such a waste.
La Hantise (or Obsession, for those of us not well-versed in French), is a French silent film from 1912 that chronicles a woman’s obsessive fear for her husband’s safety after an encounter with a palm reader at a party.
Plot
At the beginning of the film, Jacques Trevoux receives a letter from his friend advising him to postpone his transatlantic trip due to the large number of icebergs in the Atlantic Ocean, a condition that is making transatlantic ship travel dangerous. Jacques is reluctant to cancel, but his wife and son plead with him, so he acquiesces and plans to sail at a later date.
A few days later, Jeanne meets a popular palm reader named Josepha at a party. Josepha reads Jeanne’s palm and supposedly discovers something so troubling that she refuses to share her findings with her client. Well, of course, Jeanne can’t leave it at that—she has to find out what the palm reader has seen in her palm, so she arranges a private meeting at the Trevoux home.
When Josepha meets with Jeanne, the former reveals that the latter will face the imminent loss of a close loved one. Jeanne keeps the findings to herself and does not reveal them to her son or husband. Meanwhile, Jacques decides that it’s time to rebook his transatlantic trip, this time on the Titanic’s maiden voyage. He will board at Cherbourg, France.
Once Jacques leaves for his trip, Jeanne, distraught over the palm reader’s prediction, writes to her godfather, Julien, asking him to come stay with her. When Julien arrives, Jeanne tells him about the palm reader’s prediction, but he laughs it off, turning his attention to the mail and newspaper that have just arrived. Among the items is a postcard from Jacques sent from the Titanic. But there’s something else: splashed across the front page of the the newspaper is a shocking report that the Titanic has sunk, killing 1,800 people. Jeanne and her son are, of course, devastated. In fact, the kid is so grief-stricken that he falls gravely ill.
But no worries. Later, Jeanne receives another message from Jacques that he was among those saved by the Carpathia. That’s great news…except that the palm reader’s prediction is still on her mind, and she becomes worried that since Jacques didn’t die, their son may be in danger of succumbing to that fate.
It Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This
I like this movie, and one of the reasons is because it was produced so soon after the Titanic sank. It was released in 1912, the year of the sinking, and until a few months ago, I’d never even heard of it. I only know of two other films about the Titanic that were filmed and released in 1912: Saved from the Titanic and Un Nacht en Eis (In Night and Ice).
Saved from the Titanic was written by Dorothy Gibson, a famous actress in 1912 and the star of the film. She was a first-class passenger who survived the sinking of the Titanic, and when she arrived in New York after being rescued, she began working on Saved from the Titanic, which was released later that year.
I would love to see Saved from the Titanic. I mean, a Titanic film written by and starring an actual survivor? For someone who’s into Titanic film history, that would be amazing. But the chances of me actually seeing the finished product are extraordinarily slim. All known copies of the film were destroyed by a studio fire in 1914, and no copies are known to have survived. All that’s left are a few stills. It’s possible that a copy might crop up one day—it’s happened before with films that were thought to have been lost, but it’s not likely with this one.
Something along the lines of La Hantise is the next best thing. Everyone involved in the production of the film was actually alive when the Titanic sank. The fashions that you see in the film, the hairstyles, the furniture—all of that is authentic to the period. It’s not people from a later era trying to recreate the environment after the fact. One scene that I love is the scene where Jeanne and her son drop Jacques off at the train station. You see their car pull up to the side walk, and there’s all this action going on in the background, people going about their lives in the hustle-bustle of an early 20th-Century city. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, really, but I find it fascinating.
A Tale of Two Versions
My experience viewing this film was a reminder of how important it is to check multiple versions of old films like this. Many films from this era have expired copyrights which no one has renewed, so there’s no infringement on who can display them or where. This is why I saw two versions of this film on YouTube, and the experiences of watching each couldn’t have been more different.
It’s interesting how a few details can totally change how you view something. The first version of the film I viewed was a shortened, altered version, but I didn’t find this out until after I’d watched it. During my viewing of the film, I had no idea that Madame Trevoux’s first name was Jeanne until I was deep into the film, and that was only because you can see her name when you see the letter that she wrote to Julien. Up until that point, no one had addressed her by her first name. I thought it was a weird oversight, considering that she’s the main character in the film. Later, during my viewing of a second version of the film, I found out that the conclusion I’d reached was not at all accurate. I’ll explain why in a minute.
The first version of the film also had no musical accompaniment whatsoever. I kept checking to see if maybe I’d somehow muted the video accidentally, but I hadn’t. That was just the way this version was. I mentioned earlier that this version of the film wasn’t even the full film. The last few minutes were missing, having been replaced by a card that explains what happened at the end of the film.
By chance, I found a second version of the film that hadn’t shown up in my results when I first searched for the film (or maybe it had, and I’d simply overlooked it). The introductory frames told me that this version had been distributed by Kino, a company that distributes a lot of old films like this one, so I had high hopes that maybe this would be a full version with the scenes that had been missing from the first version I watched.
Right away, I knew that I had a good version of the film, at least one that was better than the first one I watched. This one had music, and the title cards matched the rest of the film more than those in Version 1 (the cards in the first version of the film seemed like they were added later and were not original to the film). The scenes are so much more impactful with the music, especially the scene depicting the Titanic sinking, which features “Nearer My God to Thee.” Without the music, watching this scene is like watching a toy boat sink in a bathtub.
One scene that I’d found a puzzling in Version #1 of the film made much more sense after I watched Version #2. Here’s what happens: One night, Jeanne looks out the window at what appears to be the Eiffel Tower. Something about the view unsettles her, but in Version #1, there’s no explanation about what it was. Version #2 of the film confirms that Jeanne is indeed looking at the Eiffel Tower and offers an explanation as to why Jeanne was so distraught. Apparently, Jeanne thinks that seeing tower lights come on are a bad omen. There’s no way in the world I would have known that without a title card to explain it.
Version #2 provides a more detailed version of the ending, too. Both versions feature a scene where Julien writes a letter to Josepha requesting a palm reading for his niece. In Version #1, this scene is the very last scene, and it makes no sense whatsoever. It kind of made me think that it was a flashback scene and that Julien had set up that initial meeting between Jeanne and Josepha near the beginning of the movie.
Fast-forward to Version #2. The scene is still in the film, but it’s also accompanied by a title card explaining that Julien and Jeanne have hatched a plan to test whether Josepha is a fake. Jeanne will pose as Julien’s niece and will hide behind a curtain, sticking her hand through so that Josepha can read her palm. The palm reader predicts a glowing future for the bride-to-be. Julien reveals his trickery, and Josepha flees, leaving her purse behind. Julien finds a letter in it: basically, Josepha has been running a con game with an acquaintance, who has advised her to take advantage of as many people as she could. With the exception of the scene where Julien writes the letter, we don’t actually get to see these scenes because they actually are missing. But the key is that the scenes are described on a series of cards, so there’s context here in Version #2 where none exists in Version #1.
In Version #2, we also get to see the final scene of the film, an epilogue which depicts the family enjoying a meal at the table after Jacques returns home. The Trevoux boy is healthy again, and Jeanne has overcome her obsession and her belief in palm readers. Interestingly, the epilogue wasn’t part of the original film and was added in 2007 by a French film studio called Gaumont, which used source material from the original screenplay and an incomplete print held at Archives Francaises du film du CNC.
While I wish that La Hantise featured more Titanic scenes, I’m glad for the one scene that we get featuring the ship. And the historical tidbits about that I gleaned about the era from other scenes do a lot to make up for the lack of Titanic. The film isn’t a must-see if your interest is purely Titanic. However, if you’re interested in the era in addition to the ship, you’ll probably find that it’s worth it, even if you only see it just once.
Cane River by Lalita Tademy
Published April 2001 by Grand Central Publishing
A blend of fact and fiction, Cane River explores the history of Tademy’s family. Tademy tells the story of four generations of her slave-born female ancestors: Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily, all born along the Cane River in Louisiana. Their stories revolve around how they try to create a better life for themselves and their children while constantly having to find a way to work within and around the limits that society has placed upon them.
Course Correction Studio 