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Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Star Wars: Enthusiasm Awakens

(Minor spoilers ahead, but no major ones.)

I went yesterday to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens on a 3D IMAX screen, because really, there are some things that are just kind of cool to go virtually flying through. But lest you think I’m way behind the curve, this was not the first time I’d seen it, nor even the second; it was the third.

Partly this is because of a quasi-joke I made a while ago about “girlcotting Star Wars.” If staying away from something or refusing to buy it for political reasons is a boycott, then, I reasoned, actively going out to support or purchase it for political reasons should be called a girlcott. (Yes, I know the etymology doesn’t remotely work that way.) A Star Wars movie with a white woman, a black man, and a Latino man in leading roles? Yes please. A Star Wars movie whose crawl text blazes with the words GENERAL LEIA ORGANA(1), one where there are women taking up blasters to defend their village and female X-wing pilots running around the Resistance base and Gwendolen Christie as a Stormtrooper captain? Yes, yes, yes. I would have gone to see it even if it were terrible; I might have gone to see it twice. Fortunately, Abrams gave me something much better than terrible — he gave me Star Wars.

Because I’ll be honest: in hindsight, the prequel trilogy just doesn’t even feel like Star Wars to me. Sure, it has Jedi and Sith and lightsabers and spaceships and so on. But the opening crawl text of The Phantom Menace is all about a Trade Federation and frickin’ taxation. Where’s the EVIL EMPIRE? Where’s the noble REBELLION? Not here yet, I know, I know . . . but that’s part of the problem. Star Wars is supposed to be sweeping and epic. When its crawl text sounds petty and mundane, you’re off to a bad start. But right from the opening lines of this movie, and then the beautiful shot of the Star Destroyer eclipsing the planet . . . it felt right. And it continued to feel right the whole way through, so that I walked out of the theatre energized and excited, and the spoiler-free review I gave to people in the following days consisted of clasping my hands in front of my chest, going starry-eyed, and bouncing on the tips of my toes.

With more distance and further reflection, writer-brain is fascinated by the relationship between this movie and the source material. I disagree with those who say, eh, boring, it’s just a retelling of A New Hope. Does it use many of the same elements? Yep: desert planet, rescuing a prisoner from the bad guys, a bar filled with colorful aliens, a big scary weapon that has to be destroyed(2). But those elements get used like Lego blocks: you can build lots of things out of them. One of the things I love about it is the way that, although you can find points of correspondence between this and A New Hope, none of those points become a line that runs all the way through. Poe feels like Han Solo (hotshot pilot), but he’s also Leia (dedicated member of the Resistance, captured by the bad guys and then rescued), and as Todd Alcott points out, he’s also kind of a high-speed Obi-Wan to Finn (from a political rather than mystical angle). Rey may look like Luke — orphan on a desert planet — but she doesn’t dream of getting off the planet and doing something cool; she wants to stay on her planet (and get back to it once she leaves) because she’s waiting for something important there. Maz Kanata’s bar is not where our heroes come together; it’s where they split apart, and Maz herself is one of two Obi-Wans to Rey (the other being, from a backward angle, Kylo Ren). And there’s just zero precedent for Finn: a humanized Stormtrooper, a “bad guy” who face-turns right out of the gate and offers the other heroes an insider’s perspective on how the faceless masses operate.

To discount all of the deeper changes just because the surface looks familiar is, in my opinion, a mistake. Sure, maybe you could have had this plot with Rey growing up on a jungle planet and other such superficial changes. But that would have jettisoned the psychological effect I can’t help but think Abrams intended: “look, guys, we’re getting back to basics. Forget about the prequel trilogy. Remember what you loved about Star Wars. I’m going to give you that experience, and take it in a new direction.”

I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about Abrams directing. I’m fine with his Star Trek movies; they’re not brilliant, but as somebody who has zero emotional investment in the franchise, I found his films very enjoyable. My concern here wasn’t so much that he would screw Star Wars up as, it would now feel the same as Star Trek. As it turns out, that fear was unfounded: I think Abrams successfully poured himself into the mold of this franchise. Because it really is true that my immediate reaction upon walking out of my first viewing was a satisfied sigh of “now THAT was Star Wars.” Better than that — it was Star Wars plus, where there’s more than one woman, and not everybody is white, and the characters speak dialogue you can imagine coming out of the mouth of an actual human being.

I can’t wait for the next one. <clasps hands, starries eyes, bounces on toes>

***

(1) While waiting in line at a coffee shop over Christmas, I picked up and idly flipped through a Star Wars: The Force Awakens book written for very young children. The first page I flipped to began with the line, “General Leia is a princess.” Which might possibly be the most awesome sentence in the history of children’s literature.

(2) I will grant that I could have done with a bit more variety on the whole super-weapon thing, because it really is an Even Bigger Death Star. But I would have been satisfied with a single change: if you’re going to call it Starkiller Base, in homage to Luke’s first-draft name, then have it kill stars! Not by draining them, but by BLOWING THEM UP. Send the Hosnian sun supernova. That would have been awesome.

Spectre

The new Bond movie is . . . not very good.

I’ve mostly liked the Craig movies, by which I mean Casino Royale and Skyfall. I basically remember nothing of Quantum of Solace, and the only reason the same won’t be true of Spectre is that I’m bothering to post about its shortcomings.

The main thing that disappointed me with Skyfall was the feeling that, at the end, we had returned to the usual classic Bond status quo. Craig’s Bond didn’t have gadgets, didn’t have Q, didn’t have Moneypenny, and M was a woman. By the time Skyfall ended, you had gadgets (albeit minor ones compared to past films), Q, Moneypenny, and a male M. The whole film was explicitly about looking back to history, both of the franchise and of the characters in it, and so as an ending to the story I think I would have been okay with it. But then we got Spectre.

Which is an utterly conventional Bond movie that fails to be anything more than the sum of its parts. One villain is so obvious that I assumed, the minute he showed up, that the script was doing that as a red herring and the real situation would turn out to be more interesting. Alas, no. The plot is phenomenally stupid; it hinges on the idea that nine countries have decided to share 100% of their intelligence information — and those nine countries include the UK, Russia, and China. I’m sorry, what? Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but the notion that those three countries would be peachy keen with sharing all their secrets because surely they’ll be BFFs forever and never end up in conflict with one another is so far outside the bounds of reality, I lack the words to describe it. (And I write fantasy.) Nothing gets explained enough to have any impact: Monica Bellucci shows up for long enough to babble something about how she hated her husband but her marriage was the only thing protecting her from being killed by nevermind we’ve run out of infodump time GET TO THE MAKEOUTS. And then she vanishes from the film, with nothing about her entire situation having any relevance to the story whatsoever, except that we’re twenty minutes into the movie and the schedule says Bond has to get into bed with somebody. The main villain is clearly supposed to have all this personal resonance for Bond, but unless he came up in Quantum of Solace and I forgot it (entirely possible), we don’t know anything about that personal resonance until the last third or so of the movie, which is far too late for it to mean anything to the audience. Bond commits inexplicably stupid errors: we see him notice a not-at-all hidden security camera, but apparently he decides there’s no point in wiping it before he leaves, just so there can be a later scene where somebody else is horrified to see what it recorded.

Skyfall, though not perfect, was in every way a better movie. It had the personal weight this one seems to think it has, but doesn’t. It had a thematic argument about human intelligence vs. the technology of the new age, which gets stuck in a microwave for Spectre and does not reheat well. It had a meaningful relationship between Bond and M, instead of a Bond girl who almost manages to be interesting but again, her backstory is not explored very well and somehow I’m supposed to believe Bond retires and settles down with her or something? It had genuine tension; I’m not a filmmaker, but even I can tell this movie dragged stuff out for too long, kept the score at too THRILLING! EXCITEMENT! of a level with insufficient dynamics, made things more complicated than they had to be so I’m wondering why there are all these string things set up instead of worrying about the characters’ lives. It had entertaining moments, but they added up to nothing whatsoever.

It turns out the best part of Spectre was Daniel Craig’s press tour.

#GirlcottStarWars

One thing that comes up a fair bit in discussions of diversity and so forth is the accusation that liberal types are only buying/watching/otherwise supporting particular books/movies/tv shows/etc because those things promote a particular agenda: racial inclusiveness, gender equality, queer acceptance, and so forth.

It occurred to me today, after reading this excellent post by Jim Hines, that we seem to have no problem with boycotting things because we disagree with their political agenda and wish to not support it. That is, in fact, a time-honored and widespread tactic for registering your displeasure with a situation. So why is it wrong to do the opposite?

And clearly, if “boycotting” is avoidance for the sake of protest, then participation for the sake of support ought to be called “girlcotting.”

(Yes, I know that isn’t the actual etymology of the word. Hush you with your logic.)

So I say, those who feel that science fiction has room for bug-eyed aliens of all kinds but not women or black dudes as protagonists should feel free to boycott the new Star Wars movie. Me, I’m going to girlcott it. I’m going to try to see it opening weekend, and if it’s good, I’ll go see it again. Because sometimes you need to throw your toys out of the pram . . . but sometimes you need to grab hold of them and say, yes. mine.

Eeeeeeeeeeeek!!!! Or, how many people actually scream?

A couple of hours ago I asked on Twitter how women react when they see something terrible. My proximate reason for asking was that I’ve discovered Netflix has Murder, She Wrote available streaming; in watching it, I’ve been reminded of the standard-issue scream uttered by women in TV and movies when they find a dead body. You know the one: hands to the cheeks, mouth and eyes wide in horror, a high-pitched and wordless shriek coming from her mouth.

It’s always seemed weird to me because I don’t do that. Okay, to be fair, I’ve never come across a dead body. But I have accidentally lit myself on fire — my clothing, anyway — and my reaction at the time was to bellow “FUCK!” at the top of my lungs while beating at the flames with my other sleeve until they went out. The top of my lungs . . . but not the top of my range. Same thing when my husband accidentally kicked my badly-sprained toe, causing me no small amount of pain. I don’t scream so much as yell, often with a great deal of profanity.

So I posted on Twitter because I wanted to know: how many women out there do scream at such things? Is it the majority, and I’m a weird outlier, or is that just a convention of media that doesn’t happen so much in real life? Twitter anecdata thus far suggests a moderately even split; there are definitely women who do the high-pitched wordless shriek thing, but not an overwhelming majority by any means. (Also, at least one guy has testified to uttering a scream of his own when subjected to sudden pain.) It seems the trope isn’t unfounded, then, but it’s also not universal. Which, because I’m an anthropologist at heart, means I’m now wondering whether that reaction has become less common over time (as women are no longer socialized in the same way as thirty or fifty years ago) and whether our media depictions have changed as well.

I have no idea. But it’s interesting to think about, because the standard-issue scream has always felt so very fake to me.

two sensory experiences

By which I mean, two pieces of media that focus on sensory experience in one way or another.

***

Perfect Sense did not, in the trailer I saw, bill itself as a science fiction movie, and in a lot of ways it isn’t. The focus is primarily on how the relationship between two people (a chef at a restaurant, and an epidemiologist who lives in an apartment overlooking the restaurant alley) is affected by an unexplained (and inexplicable) global epidemic that begins with people losing their sense of smell. But the epidemic doesn’t stop there: next they lose taste, then hearing, then sight. What makes it SFnal is the exploration of how individuals and society adapt to these changes. Eva Green’s epidemiologist never does figure out what’s causing the change, but at the restaurant where Ewan MacGregor’s chef works, they keep looking for ways to pursue their art even as the basis for it is pulled out from under them. Smell is a huge part of how we experience food, so when that goes away, they begin putting together the most strongly-flavored dishes they can. When taste goes, they turn to sound and texture: crunch, squish, softness, grittiness. (There’s a great scene where the restaurant manager reads out a glowing review of their work.) The transitions are bad; they’re always preceded by some kind of huge emotional swing, and many of these are extremely destructive. But after hearing fades, you see a table full of people at the restaurant carrying on a cheerful, animated conversation in sign language. Since the characters we’ve been following are still communicating through written notes and a handful of very rudimentary signs, there’s an unspoken implication that the people at those table were deaf long before this began: what the viewer has been encouraged to see as a calamitous loss is ordinary life for them, and that life can still be good.

I usually like my SFnal exploration more front and center, rather than squeezed in around the edges. But the anthropologist in me quite enjoyed this one.

***

Sadly, I was not as enthused by Sense8, the new Netflix series from the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer.

They did a great job setting up the cast. Our main characters are eight individuals linked by telepathy, and it’s obvious the writers had a mission statement to represent a broad cross-section of the world: the cop from Chicago and the hacker from San Francisco might seem like standard issue, the DJ from Iceland and the thief from Berlin a little less so — but then you get the banker from Seoul, the film star from Mexico City, the privileged young woman from Mumbai, and the bus driver from Nairobi. Four are women, four are men; one of the men (the film star) is gay, and one of the women (the hacker) is a transgender lesbian. I’m sure some people have sneered at this as “diversity for diversity’s sake” (as if that’s a bad thing), but it also matters to the story — because one of the important things going on here is that they have different backgrounds, different skill sets, different assumptions about the world. And it’s fun to watch those things collide. The “sensates” can project their spirits out so they see each other’s surroundings, and then they learn to possess each other’s bodies. It means they can give one another comfort and advice and, in a pinch, solve their problems for them: the Korean banker is also a participant in underground fighting rings, and kicks the asses of people threatening other members of her cluster. The Kenyan driver winds up behind the wheel of more than a few getaway vehicles. The Mexican movie star lies like a rug to get the German thief out of trouble, etc.

So why didn’t I like it more?

In a nutshell: too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby. In the first episode of the series, it becomes obvious that (of course) there’s some kind of nefarious conspiracy to control and/or kill sensates. By the end of the twelve-episode first season, we know that . . . there’s some kind of nefarious conspiracy to control and/or kill sensates. We can put some faces and names to individuals involved, and we know there’s a doctor who specializes in lobotomizing them — but we don’t know why, or what makes sensate clusters come into existence, or really anything of great substance about the metaplot. Most of the show’s attention is devoted to the lives of the sensates in this cluster and how they interact with one another. This means you’re tracking eight different plotlines at once: there are hints that some of them may connect, but even after twelve episodes, it’s little more than hints. And however much I may enjoy some parts of the character development (like the horrific encounter between Nomi and her family, or the hilarity of the kind-of threesome Lito ends up in), ultimately, I was really frustrated that the show seemed mostly content to wander around in the characters’ lives without really tying the whole group together and going somewhere with them.

Really, the opening credit sequence perfectly represents the problem. It’s a montage of shots from all around the world: famous sites, scenes of daily life, brief little snippets from Nairobi and Seoul and San Francisco and Mexico City and all the other places the characters are from. But there’s no arc to it, no coherent thread other than “hi, our show takes place all over the world!” It is, to use the old description of history, just one damn thing after another. Individually the bits may be lovely, but I want the whole to add up to more. And while it’s entirely possible the show will get there eventually . . . I’m not sure I’m willing to wait around for “eventually” to happen. I gave it one season to hook me; I don’t know that I’ll give it more.

Sonya Taaffe now has a Patreon

Sonya Taaffe (sovay on LiveJournal) has just set up a Patreon to back her film reviews.

If you don’t understand why I’m signal-boosting this, you probably haven’t been reading her reviews. She writes beautifully about film, primarily with an eye toward the performances of the actors: she has a knack I envy, of describing characterization and behavior in a concise, vivid fashion, and showing how characterization is revealed in behavior. She also has wide-ranging tastes; while a good deal of her blogging is about classic or forgotten films from decades ago, she isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a snob. Here is her review of Thor, and here is The Avengers. Both, as you might expect, pay particular attention to Loki:

Marvel can do whatever it likes with gods I don’t have a personal stake in, but I expected to be bleeding from the ears from the reconfigured family relationships alone. Instead I wanted much, much more of him. I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he’s a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child’s desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing. All of his scenes are exactly as they should be.

Or here she is about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the ten minutes of really great movie buried in the middle of an extremely mediocre one.

I love her film-blogging enough that I sent her a complimentary DVD of Seven Souls in Skull Castle, just because I want to know what she might have to say about it. (And by the way, if you want to see that movie for yourself, you can now buy your very own copy.)

So if you want to see more of that, consider supporting her Patreon. More lovely film-blogging for everybody!

Every Frame a Painting

This is a fascinating series of videos.

The video blogger, Tony Zhou, digs into the art of the director and the cinematographer to talk about how they achieve their effects. For somebody like me, who is a dyed-in-the-wool narrative geek but doesn’t know the first thing about the craft of film, it’s like catnip: a chance to understand how one tells stories with images rather than words.

Mind you, I can’t quite follow everything he says. There are times where he’ll try to draw out a particular point, but its effect is subtle enough or he doesn’t unpack the idea enough or I don’t have enough basic grounding in film craft that I end up shrugging and thinking “okay, if you say so.” But many of them are just great, like “What Is Bayhem?”, wherein he dissects the work of Michael Bay. It isn’t about saying “oh, he’s such a genius” — he isn’t. Zhou’s thesis is that Bay imprinted on a couple of visual tricks and then BEATS THEM TO DEATH in every movie he makes. But it’s possible to identify what those tricks are, and to see he got them from or where other people try to copy him without understanding what he’s actually doing. It’s possible to put your finger on why you don’t like Michael Bay’s films (if indeed you do not like them) . . . because the man uses the same visual tricks without much regard for the material he’s using them on. It’s the equivalent of playing a piece of music all at one volume: there’s no dynamics, no contrast, just EVERYTHING IS EPIC ALL THE TIME. Even when the story itself is not actually being very epic at that moment.

I also loved the video on “Edgar Wright: How to Do Visual Comedy”. It hammered home for me some of the reasons why I find Wright’s movies to be a lot of fun, while a lot of other cinematic comedy bores me stiff. I’ve said before that the issue is one of content, and that’s true: I don’t find humiliation funny, I’m annoyed rather than amused by people acting so stupidly I’m not sure how they can even walk and talk at the same time, gross-out humour is just NO, and I’m very hit-or-miss with physical comedy. I like wittiness, and wittiness tends to be in short supply these days, at least in American comedy films. But it turns out there’s more to it than that. Zhou points out that so many movies have limited themselves to only one channel of humour, which is people standing around talking: they don’t use lighting or well-timed sound effects or matching scene transitions or soundtrack synchronization or things entering and leaving the frame in unexpected ways. (It was interesting, watching Galavant after seeing that video; I found myself noting the places where it employed a broader array of tools.) Using all those channels means you can vary your approach, make your point in different ways depending on the context.

Other particularly good ones: “Jackie Chan: How to Do Action Comedy.” “David Fincher: And the Other Way Is Wrong.” “A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film.” All of them are interesting to watch, but I found those five the most comprehensible and eye-opening. If you have any interest in that sort of thing, they’re well worth taking a look at.

Seven Souls in Skull Castle

Tonight I saw a movie which is probably the most refrackulous thing I’ve watched in ages.

Its Japanese title is Dokuro-jo no shichinin, and it’s actually a recording of a stage production, deliberately intended (so the blurb for it said) to be a blend of cinema with live performance. That much is comprehensible.

But the plot, you guys. The plot.

It just —

These characters —

I — I have no way to describe it that wouldn’t be full of spoilers. Which you probably don’t care about because the number of you who will ever see it is minuscule. But I can’t tell you why Tayu’s crew of prostitutes are so awesome. Or who exactly that one dude turned out to be (though I can say that I turned to my sister about ten minutes prior to that reveal and said “if he turns out to be X, I am going to laugh my ass off.” Of course he was X.) I just —

Okay, look, here’s an example. The story takes place in 1590, eight years after the death of Oda Nobunaga. There’s this guy who’s set up shop in Skull Castle in the Kantou region, calling himself Tenmao, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. (This story: it is SUBTLE, yo.) It turns out that he, along with several of the other characters, used to be one of Nobunaga’s retainers, and hasn’t really gotten over his lord’s death. I believe the technical term for his state of mind would be, hmmm, how do they put it, oh yeah — bugfuck crazy. So one of his former comrades-in-arms goes to Skull Castle, and something like the following conversation ensues:

TENMAO: See this mask on my helmet? It was made from the skull of our dead lord!
FORMER COMRADE IN ARMS: That’s a little crazy, dude.
TENMAO: That’s funny, coming from you. I happen to know those beads you wear are made from our dead lord’s bones!
FCIA: . . . okay, that’s true. <caresses bone necklace>
TENMAO: And this drink in my cup is made from our dead lord’s blood!

Whereupon he drains the cup, kisses his former comrad-in-arms, and spits the blood into his mouth, which turns out to be drugged, so FCIA also goes what you might call bugfuck crazy.

It is kabuki on crack and cranked up to eleventy-one. It also dodges the Smurfette trap (three of the seven heroes facing down Tenmao are women), swings wildly between broad comedy and rather grim drama, features some kind of amazing stage fighting, and has a character who basically figures out how to turn the fact that he can’t make up his mind which side he’s on into his superpower.

I am so buying this the instant it’s available on DVD. And then I am going to inflict it on everybody around me.

a thought on racebending and genderbending

Which is to say, casting female performers for characters who are canonically male, or actors of color for characters who are canonically white.

Look at Hollywood. Look at TV. Look at how frequently they remake or reboot or sequelize existing narrative properties (for a host of reasons, not all of them terrible, but we won’t get into that here). For crying out loud, we’ve got three separate Sherlock Holmes franchises in progress right now.

If you don’t turn Starbuck female — if you don’t cast Lucy Liu as Watson — if you don’t make Idris Elba Heimdall — if you don’t break the mold of those existing texts in ways that will let in under-represented groups — then your opportunities for having those groups on the screen in the first place drop substantially. You’re basically left making them minor new characters, or else cracking the story open to stick in a major new minority character (and people will complain about that, too). Because all those stories we keep retelling? They’re mostly about straight white guys. And the stories that are new, the ones that aren’t being retold from one or more previous texts, can’t pick up all the slack on their own. You make Perry White black, or you make a Superman movie with no black people in it above the level of tertiary character.

Which isn’t automatically a problem when it’s one movie. But it isn’t one movie: it’s a whole mass of them. Including most of our blockbusters.

So either we chuck out the old stuff wholesale (and as a folklorist, I entirely understand why we don’t do that), or we rewrite it to suit our times. (And as a folklorist, I entirely understand that too — and I cheer it on. Go, folk process, go!)

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/594044.html. Comment here or there.

Batman had it easy

Only just now remembering to link to it, but this months’ SF Novelists post is “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” in which I challenge the notion that so-called “gritty” fantasy is a) realistic and b) superior on account of its realism.

(Both that post and the rest of this one discuss sexual violence — quelle surprise, given the obsession gritty fantasy has with that topic — so if you don’t want to read about them, click away now.)

This is part of a much larger discussion floating around the internet right now, which I keep encountering in unexpected corners. The most recent of those is “The Rape of James Bond,” which makes a lot of good points; toward the end, McDougall talks about her own decision-making process where fictional sexual violence is concerned, and whether you agree with her decisions or not, her questions are good ones.

But the part I found the most striking was where she talked about reactions to Skyfall and the first encounter between Silva and Bond.

Cut in case you haven't seen the movie and want to avoid a spoiler.

recent media

You get rambly thoughts. Yay!

Revenge: A bit muddled here and there, but still interesting, especially because of the extent to which (at least at the beginning) it’s framed as this faceoff between two women, both powerful in their own way. Because of the aforementioned muddling, it doesn’t quite stay that way, but it was still nifty while it lasted. And I kind of love the relationship between Emily and Nolan — all the more so because the show is unafraid to make Nolan a physical wimp. When somebody holds him at knifepoint, he gets scared. And then he turns around and calls Emily on her errors, and she generally admits he’s right.

[profile] kniedzw called it a “soap opera” at one point, which got me thinking about the extent to which a soap opera can be defined as a drama that caters to a female audience. There are other aspects, too — the daytime slot being a shallow one; the constant plot churn being a more substantial one — but “soap opera” has a connotation of “ridiculous,” and really, I don’t think Revenge (at least in its first season) is any more ridiculous than various evening dramas that cater to a male audience. So there’s that.

Lost Girl: The werewolf guy is hot, but the tone of the show really doesn’t do it for me, and I can’t help but roll my eyes at the extent to which the protagonist’s nature seems like an excuse to have her make out with people every episode. Not my cup of tea, I think.

The Vampire Diaries: Also not my cup of tea, but I watched the first two episodes out of curiosity (yay Netflix streaming!), and have to applaud the way Stefan goes against the stereotypical grain of the YA paranormal boyfriend. Which is to say, he’s not an asshole. In fact, he is an anti-asshole in some ways I can’t help but read as a deliberate response to Edward in Twilight, whether that’s the case or not. I still don’t find him that interesting, but at least I don’t want to deck him.

Coriolanus: And now for something that isn’t TV. Not one of Shakespeare’s better-known tragedies, but after watching this adaptation, I have no idea why. It’s been too long since I read the play (my sophomore year of college, I think) for me to recognize whether it’s a matter of how they edited the script, or just the bloody fantastic performances from Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler and Brian Cox and James Nesbitt and oh my god Vanessa Redgrave, but it fits all but seamlessly into a run-down, militarized present day, with weary politicians and some conspirators who are, when I think about it, weirdly honest. I think I may have to buy a copy of the movie and add it to my library of Good Shakespeare Adaptations.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577305.html. Comment here or there.

leaving Poland

There will (I hope) be more extensive trip-blogging after it’s over and done with, but in brief: I leave Krakow at an obscenely early hour tomorrow, after seven and a half days. We got a dusting of snow this morning, that half melted off in the afternoon, but lasted long enough to make the Basilica of St. Mary and the Cloth Hall and St. Florian’s Tower and so on look charmingly picturesque in a way I hadn’t already photographed. So kniedzw and I ran around repeating a bunch of shots, then hid from the cold in some museums, and then — when we couldn’t usefully sightsee anymore — went and watched Skyfall, subtitled in Polish. So ha-ha, I saw it before most of you. 🙂 (Short form: quite good. And surprisingly focused on the personal side, with the Big Threat being more the vehicle that delivered the personal story, rather than the major point of the film.)

I have spent the last two days with a cold I really could have done without, but even with that sapping my energy, it’s been an excellent trip. There will be many photos, and assuming I can muster the will, some chatty posts as well.

First, though, I have to endure a transatlantic flight with a cold. Oh joy.

Twenty-five years of my life

It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Princess Bride (the film; the book had its anniversary a while ago). I, of course, celebrated by watching it again.

I had things I needed to do tonight, and I figured I could do them while the movie was on. More fool me: it’s been a while since I sat down and watched it, and I quickly realized I really just had to give it my full attention — mouthing, as I usually do, all the quotable lines* as they were said.

I can’t pick my favorite book, or my favorite song, or my favorite food. But I can pick my favorite movie. The Princess Bride is the reason I studied fencing; it’s also the reason I studied Spanish. (Can you tell which character I imprinted on?) I don’t know if it’s the first movie I saw in a theater, but it’s the first one I remember seeing. It’s one of the few fantasies from the ’80s that I would say is genuinely good, instead of just lovably cheesy.

It is, now that I watch it with a professional eye, a fantastic example of good storytelling. I could go on for a good half-hour at least about all the intelligent decisions Goldman made with the script, the elegance of the structure, all the places where the dialogue leads you perfectly along its path. It strikes that beautiful balance between comedy and drama, where the laughter makes the occasional punch land all that much harder. (Inigo’s storyline as a whole — which gained extra impact when I found out about his father dying of cancer, and Patinkin channeling his grief from that into the final confrontation with Count Rugen.) There are almost no wasted lines in this film, no random chatter to fill the time. Every bit pulls its weight.

I don’t know anymore how many times I’ve seen it. I used to keep count; I started when I could still remember all the occasions, and I kept a record on our old VHS box — the one taped off TV, eventually replaced by an official copy, eventually replaced by a DVD, eventually replaced by the Dread Pirate edition that has d_aulnoy in one of the special features. But somewhere along the line, I lost my record of the count. The last time I was sure of it, it was in the low 60s.

There is no movie in the world I love as much. They’ll never see these lines, but to William Goldman, Rob Reiner, Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Andre the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Fred Savage, Peter Falk, Carol Kane, Billy Crystal, Bob Anderson, and all the other cast and crew of this marvelous film: thank you.

*Approximately seventy-five percent of the script

Spoiler Alert! (Watch this make people not read the post.)

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece from January about spoilers and how we respond to them. Short form: for many people, spoilers actually enhance, rather than detract from, their enjoyment of the full story. And this is true even for people who are convinced that they prefer not to have any spoilers at all.

I would put myself in the camp of not wanting spoilers, but when I read through the reasoning presented in the article, it was exactly what I would have predicted. By knowing where the story is going, we allay our subconscious anxiety. Knowing that Character A lives means we don’t have to be as afraid for her; knowing that Character B dies means we’re prepared for it when it comes. As brilliantly cathartic as it can be to go through those experiences without the psychological safety net, that works best when we really, really trust the storyteller not to disappoint or betray us. And how often is that true?

A story can work even when we know the ending — even when we can quote the entire thing line for line. Usually people say this is because you can still appreciate the craft, the process by which that ending comes about, and there’s a lot of truth to that. But it isn’t the whole story (no pun intended). A good enough narrative can still pack its emotional punch as well as an intellectual one, even on a revisit. My favorite example of this is Apollo 13, a movie I adore and have watched quite a few times. Not only is it familiar to me, it’s based on freaking history. You would think that by now, there would be zero suspense for me in the question of whether they’ll get home safely or not.

And yet, every time I watch that movie, I’m on the edge of my seat during those minutes of radio silence.

There’s a secret ingredient that makes it work: empathy. Sure, I know that the astronauts will be safe. I knew that even before I sat down to watch the movie. But the characters don’t know. And because my heart is with them, because I am imagining myself in their shoes rather than sitting comfortably in my own, I am petrified and tearful, just like they are. And when it all turns out okay, I get the same cathartic release.

I find myself thinking that when people say spoilers ruin the story for them, I am the most inclined to believe the ones who also never re-read books, never re-watch movies. But I have plenty of books and movies I revisit, and enjoy just as much (or more) the second time around. So it makes me think that, for me at least, what spoilers ruin are bad stories. Weak ones, that don’t do the work of making me empathize with the characters, and don’t provide the intellectual pleasure of examining how the dominoes got lined up. They have to rely on the element of surprise to engage me, and once that’s gone, they’ve blown their wad. Good stories survive the spoiler process just fine, and maybe even turn out better for it. I can relax into the experience, knowing I’m in skilled hands.

Possibly this explains why I love movie trailers as much as I do. I still get annoyed when I think the trailer gave the whole story away (and feel pleasant surprise when it turns out I’m wrong — that’s happened in the oddest places, sometimes), but I like the preview of what I’ll be getting. I read the cover copy of books, I read friends’ reviews (though I sometimes — not always — avoid the ones that say they contain major spoilers) . . . but I don’t go as far as some do and read the last five pages. I’m sort of tempted to try that now, and see how it goes. After all, the good books should, in theory, be unharmed.

But I’ll still put spoiler alerts on things I write. It’s expected courtesy these days, and I might get lynched if I didn’t. So I’ll just say: it’s okay. You’re allowed to highlight the hidden text, to click through and see what’s behind the cut. I won’t judge you for it if you do.

link dump

Two more on gun control:

American gun owners are under siege

The Second Amendment and the fantasy of revolution

Several on gender:

Kickstarter project for another Gamers movie (which is going into this category because of this update)

Rundown on the Readercon debacle

Finding That a “Dynamic” Pose is Defined by Gender (comic books, and not surprising, but the redraws really help hammer the point home)

Victoria’s Secret vs. Dove (a very striking contrast)

Just Another Princess Movie (an interesting analysis of Brave, that says it is not just another princess movie)

Awesome photos:

Imgur set

National Geographic set

Music humour:

“Early one day, a C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar . . .”

The truth about oboes

And now my browser can stop weeping for mercy.

we can’t all be the goddamned Batman

There’s a moment in The Dark Knight Rises — don’t worry; no spoilers — where Bruce Wayne gets from one part of the world to the other, in a very short span of time, without access to his usual resources.

How does he manage that? As kniedzw said when I brought this up to him, “He’s the goddamned Batman, that’s how.”

And you know, I’m fine with that as an answer. It fits the genre, and the place that scene occupies in the story; nobody wants to pause there for an extended dissertation on the logistics of international travel. Or even a short one, really. If it isn’t an interesting and relevant part of the story, we should skip over it and get to the parts that are.

. . . I talk a good talk there, but the truth is that I have a damn hard time doing this in my own work. Skipping over routine things, sure. I don’t do a blow-by-blow of every last action my characters take. But when something less than 100% routine happens, I have a hard time saying “my character is the goddamned Batman” and moving on. If I’d been writing The Dark Knight Rises, I would have had to figure out — for my own edification, if nobody else’s — just how Bruce Wayne got from A to B under those circumstances. And, if it were a novel, probably looked for a place to toss in a line of narration or dialogue nodding in the direction of whatever explanation I worked out. Because however willing I am to grant other people’s stories the benefit of the doubt in these cases, I have a hard time believing anybody else will do the same for me.

Obviously there are places where the benefit of the doubt falls down. If the thing being glossed over is too outrageous, I can’t bridge that gap, and the stumble distracts me from the story. Or if you make too frequent a habit of doing it, I begin to feel like you’re lazy, dodging all the hard stuff because you only want to have fun (and your fun gets flimsier as a result). Or if you’re trying to be all realistic and crunchy about how things get done, and then you handwave past something major, I suspect you did that because you couldn’t find a way to get it done, and your only answer was to cheat. I also think it’s easier for movies to get away with this trick than novels. They move at their own pace, rather than the reader’s, leaving less time for spotting holes; they also aren’t expected to go into as much detail, lest their run time be nine hours. And some genres accommodate this trick better than others.

But we do it in novels, too, whether the extent is lesser or greater. Dorothy Dunnett spends all of a couple of sentences on telling us how half a dozen guys made their way across sixteenth-century Europe to Russia. Those sentences nod to them having a lot of trouble doing it, but it’s only a nod, with no explanation; we are invited to understand that they are each the goddamned Batman, and that’s how they managed it.

Sometimes it’s a benefit for me to work through those things, to answer all the logistical questions for myself, if not for the reader. Sometimes, though . . . it’s easy to get hung up on this, to stall forward progress because I have to nail down every last detail in my head. And sometimes I catch myself subsequently putting those details into the story, because if I don’t show my math I don’t trust that the reader will trust me.

It isn’t just a plot issue; sometimes it’s a worldbuilding one, too. For Isabella’s memoirs, I’m working through a myriad of details on climate, geology, and other such details of the natural world, because my hindbrain is convinced that I can’t be allowed to gloss over a single thing there. We aren’t talking Tolkien’s suspiciously rectangular mountain ranges here, either: I mean that if I don’t set up the elevation and surrounding topography of the swamps of Mouleen precisely right for the amount of rainfall they receive, everybody will notice.

And the truth is, only some readers will. The climatologists among you. If they’re paying close attention. And maybe not even then, since it isn’t like I’m providing information on the exact latitude of Mouleen, or the direction of ocean currents along its shore. (Though believe you me, my brain would try to work the ocean currents out, if I didn’t keep it on a leash.)

I have to do some of this for the series because it’s about a scientist, and that means I need to be able to talk about the science without the whole thing falling down. But it is also supposed to be an adventure. The adventure tone is not served by me anxiously showing my math on every last detail of plot and setting. And yet I still struggle to believe that I can get away with anything, even as I let other people do it all the time.

I’d be interested in examples of authors you think have done this badly or well. What factors determine how willing you are to leap over those gaps?

Malevolence

(The following post talks about The Avengers on its way to the actual point, but does not give spoilers.)

Interestingly, one of the moments that has stayed with me the most strongly from The Avengers is the speech Loki flings at Black Widow.

He has other Villain Speeches in the movie, of course. But this one stands out for its sheer, unbridled malevolence. He doesn’t say those things out of megalomania or fraternal resentment or any other such understandable motivation; he says them because, quite simply, he wants to hurt her.

I’ve said before that I tend to write antagonists more often than villains. That is, I write characters who think they’re doing the right (or at least the necessary) thing, who happen to be wrong about that. There are exceptions, of course; Nadrett doesn’t give a damn what’s right, only what he can get away with. But I have a harder time writing that sort of thing.

Which means — of course — that I want to study how it’s done. So this is a Recommend Stuff to Me kind of post: what books/movies/TV shows/etc have those moments of pure malevolence, where the character is just trying to hurt somebody? Off the top of my head, there’s Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles (“Stop sidling, my swan. I am going to hurt you, but I am not going to kill you, just yet. You are going to provide me with a deal of merriment still.”), some of Angelus’ moments in Buffy, and pretty much everything the main villains do in Tokyo Babylon and X, but I’m having trouble thinking of more. (Actually, that’s a lie. I can think of plenty of sadistic villains. It’s just that most of them are sadistic in a shallow, uninteresting way, and I want ones that really manage to get the knife between the ribs.)

Where have you seen this done well?

Edited to add: Please to be avoiding spoilers as much as possible. This discussion will necessarily involve a degree of revelation, but if you can use phrases like “the main villain” instead of the name (where the villain is not obvious from the start), etc, that would be much appreciated.

The Avengers

I’m not usually much of a shipper (in the fanfic sense) . . . but I want ALL THE HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FIC NOW.

Ahem. Apart from me loving those two and wanting them to get their own movie, I thought The Avengers was quite excellent. Once I have it on DVD, I may well sit down and try to pick apart just how the writers managed to balance their script. Superhero movies have foundered before on the “too many heroes/villains” problem, but this one did a remarkable job of giving each character a meaningful role, without letting the pacing bog down in side tangents. It’s helped, of course, by the fact that they’re operating off a whole slew of individual movies — but that doesn’t account for all of it, because you can do that and still have a terrible team-up (just look to comic books for proof). This one handled things very deftly, I thought, and I’d love to dig into how.

And now, I crash. Because I survived my first kobudo seminar today (though I’m not sure my feet did), and have earned my rest. 🙂

Pick-a-mix

I had a bunch of things I meant to post yesterday, but ended up getting all political instead. (I am heartened, though, by the news that at least some organizations are seeing a funding surge. And there’s at least one doctor advocating for civil disobedience when the law would threaten the rights and well-being of patients.)

But! The point of this is to post the other stuff!

I neglected to mention this on the 16th, but I have my usual post up at SF Novelists, talking about audience expectations, and whether it’s better to be wrong or right about where the story is going.

Next, I’d like to point you at a friend’s Kickstarter project, for The Urban Tarot Deck. The existing art for this is pretty awesome; I own a print of the Princess of Swords, and kniedzw has the Magician. I’ve been hoping for years that he’d be able to finish the deck (and must confess to a hope that if this project is a success, he’ll finish his Silhouette Tarot, which I like even more). So mosey on over to take a look, and if you like what you see, send a few bucks his way.

(Okay, full truth? I am sorely tempted to shell out silly amounts of money to be on one of the remaining cards. A bunch of the models for the existing cards are friends of ours, and I love what Rob did with them; it would be nifty to see what he’d do with me. But, um. Kind of silly amounts of money, for something I cannot even pretend is a business expense.)

Third, cogent analysis of why John Carter tanked. I confess that if anybody ever makes a movie of my books, I would love to have control over various aspects . . . but then I see what happens when somebody with no distance from the subject gets to run the show, and I reconsider. I’d like to believe I would be sensible enough to listen to other people’s advice, but who knows? I might be just as short-sighted and detrimental as Stanton was.

Fourth, fellow geeks of a certain stripe may be interested in the trailer for a live-action Rurouni Kenshin movie. I have to admit, watching it breaks my brain a little; I’ve been a fan of the anime for (ye gods) nearly half my life, and Suzukaze Mayo is the voice of Himura Kenshin. The guy in the trailer . . . is a guy. (When a friend told me they were filming a live-action movie, I asked, only half-joking, whether they were going to cast a woman as Kenshin.) But there are things flashing by in the trailer that have me bouncing in my seat; does that gatling gun mean we’re going to get Aoshi and the Oniwabanshu stuff? I must watch and see. 🙂

And, to make five (non-political) things, I leave you with The 25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions.