A Month Already? Jebus!

So since I last wrote, I’ve been to Vegas, come back to Oklahoma, spent a week being sick, recovered, and generally milled about as a grad student for a while.  More on that in a moment – first, this thought:

I just made my second attempt at liking The Office.  It is so…. fucking…. passive aggressive… that I want to go punch my fist through a cow, pull out its steaming viscera, and devour them messily – anything to counteract the 20 minutes of pathetic half-smiles and mumbled sniveling that is that show.  I’m further perplexed that someone could go and work in an office for 8-10 hours and then come home and watch that.  …ahem.

Of actual importance, Vegas was a very nice trip, and I’m glad my mom got to see it – she hadn’t been there in 50 years, so things had changed a bit.  🙂  We saw Penn and Teller and Ka, a Cirque di Soleil show.  Both were excellent.  Penn and Teller was much more laid-back than I expected, a sort of thoughtful musing on deception and what it means to master something.  Many of their tricks were centered around the idea that the feat was not the result of magic or even talent, but shitloads of practice and time.  Ka was totally different – an utterly thunderous spectacle with acrobatics that I can only describe as ‘beyond nuts.’ Most of the show was built around preparing you for the idea that they were about to do something completely insane, and then doing something five times more insane.  And again, the theme of mastery through raw repetition was everywhere – this was a flawless that came from inconceivable amounts of rehearsing.

We spent a lot of time in the Bellagio, even though we weren’t staying there.  There was a sort of serenity there that the rest of Vegas doesn’t match – it’s a place where you can sit in a pair of chairs in a walkway and hear yourselves talk.  There was a conservatory and gardens and all sorts of things that don’t come to mind when you think of a casino.

Our own hotel was Planet Hollywood, which was far, FAR nicer than my first Vegas hotel, the Imperial Palace.  We stayed in the cheapest room at PH and still had loads of space, a plasma screen TV, and one of the nicest hotel beds I’ve ever slept in. 

Since it was March Madness, every hotel had giant rooms devoted to basketball betting, which was pretty amusing to watch – boisterous manly cheers would periodically erupt when something happened.  I’m sorry my Spartans lost, but they were pretty much David and Goliath, with ‘Goliath’ being one of those mechs from Starcraft that fires anti-aircraft missiles.  Alas.

After I got back from Vegas I was sick for a while, which sucked, but now I’m in good shape again.  There’ve been various social gatherings, the latest was the English Department’s Spring Mixer, which was a very good time.  Lil’ Smokies were consumed, cash bars were patronized, and after a while we retired to the Stonewall, which is sadly the grad student hangout bar.  I say ‘sadly’ because right down the street is Eskimo Joes, which has  awesome burgers and booze.  Instead, we frequent the one bar in the freaking universe that sells NO food!  They don’t have a kitchen, but hell, if they microwaved freaking Hot Pockets they’d make a fortune.  I’m always amazed when people think to themselves ‘The last thing I need is for my business to be raking in money hand over fist.’  Alas.

Two weeks of class left, then finals.  No idea yet if I’m teaching over the summer, but I should hopefully find out soon.  I definitely want to get back to mitten-shaped places before the fall, and I can’t plan anything quite yet.  Alas.

I’m working my way through Sandman, and it is magnificent.  The seventh book is the last one I finished and probably my favorite so far – four books yet remain, and I’m trying not to finish them too quickly, since there’s no more to come.

But now, as it’s very late and this entry’s very long, it’s bedtime.

Coraline

I saw Coraline this evening, and it was good, particularly with the 3D.  I know they’ve made a couple pushes for 3D in the past, but this looked especially gorgeous – there was contour, not just flat things that appear to be further away from each other.  I have the book but haven’t read it yet.  As I was walking to my car I found myself thinking "Damn Pan’s Labyrinth was a good movie!"  This sort of felt like Pan’s Labyrinth for kids – disturbing but not horrific, stinging but not painful, and a very different ending.  It’s good, but it’s not brilliant.  The powerful sense of beauty left at the end of Wall-E was absent, and while Coraline‘s setting is vivid and lovely, there’s very little to the characters to make them truly compelling.  Coraline herself is really the only character that’s explored at all, and I’m not sure that she really develops much.

To be fair, there is nothing wrong with the film, and it’s amusing, creepy, and enjoyable.  Not every movie needs to have the grandest of adjectives attached to it.  But then, don’t we all like a little grandiosity now and again?

Frost/Nixon

Saw it today, and it’s reasonably good.  The original play was directed by the same dude that did The Last King of Scotland.

Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem as Last King, in which it’s almost entirely made up.

Not just little stuff, mind you, but the entire premise!  The film works up to a climax of Frost getting a confession out of Nixon, but there was no actual confession!  Frost is portrayed as this hero outwitting the giant, but in the real interviews this basically didn’t happen at all.  Much like Last King, the reason to see the film is for an actor’s brilliant portrayal of the villainous male lead.  The story is otherwise a nice little parable told with fairly uninteresting tropes.  "A pleasant fiction," essentially.

I suspect the guy playing Nixon will be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and that he’ll lose to Heath Ledger.  It definitely doesn’t deserve Best Picture, though it’s perfectly enjoyable to watch.

On Jokers

Watched the end of the 1989 Batman today, and it was interesting to see how much different it was from The Dark Knight.  The latter just felt incredibly more mature.  Nicholson’s Joker makes little sense, he’s this grinning Lucifer figure that tempts people and then turns on them at the drop of a hat.  The name of his character is taken very literally, and he’s loaded with dime-store novelty items – spraying flowers, fake hands, he feels like a sort of kids-magazine-catalog gone wild.  He murders for basically no reason other than to be a Christian allegory – don’t make deals with the Devil because he’ll turn on you, dagnabbit!  His downfall of course is when he himself is tempted by Vicki Vale.  Everything about him is etched in stone because of the moral symbol he’s supposed to represent.

Heath Ledger’s Joker is so fascinating because there is no niche for him, and his lack of a societal place is what makes him compelling.  Of course, he is built from the template of a Trickster, and such characters are not new.  But he is interesting because while Keaton’s Batman knows precisely what to do to save the day, the Joker of Dark Knight offers no easy solutions.  Rater than a decipherable allegory, he is simply chaotic, and cares nothing for symbolic dances at the tops of cathedrals.  He wants only to be a collection of feral randomness, an elemental force that forces people to question the value of order.  Rather than a downfall laden with Christian imagery, The Dark Knight’s Joker falls because he has lied to himself about his nature.  He believes he is free from planning and calculation, but he depends on his victims to be reliable, predictable, exploitable.  He mocks and assails that which is dependable, but his perception of the world is held together by order.

Nicholson’s Joker has a moral mantle that he has taken on to live and die by.  He is supposed to be frightening because he’s crazy, but he’s hollow because his actions are constrained by his allegorical necessities.

Ledger’s Joker has an elemental force that he has tried to embody.  He is frightening because he does it so well, but has depth because even he cannot truly master it.

Events

Yesterday I went to Laura’s really-fun-pool-party-even-though-it-rained-all-day-and-there-was-more-water-in-the-air-than-the-pool-party.  There was a Mexican theme and I made taco meat for it, which I wasn’t particularly pleased with – it came out pretty tasteless, despite being rolled in herbs and spices, then stewed in them, then fried, then fused together with the very living essence of flavor in the center of the sun.

The party itself was hella fun, with some ridiculously fun board games.  Time’s Up is supremely enjoyable, think a hybrid game with three rounds – the first is Taboo, the last is Charades, and the middle is Charades except you can say a single word in addition to your flailing about.
Especially interesting is that the names to guess stay the same between rounds, so there ends up being this sort of meta-language for figuring things out as a name crops up again and again.  PENIS

We also played Mafia, which was pretty darn intense.  It’s quite simple on paper, but insanely complicated to play.  It was extremely engaging, although I was niggled by how impossible it is to get actual information.  I know you’re supposed to be busily reading people, playing people, and so forth, but to me that seems silly.  Virtually anything said could be faked or part of an act, making it almost meaningless.  You have no choice but to base long strings of actions on theories that are completely unverifiable, which makes the game essentially a well-veiled coin flip.
I suspect playing as the Mafia would be less that way, because you know from the start who to trust.  The game then is to stall for time until enough people are dead.

Also saw Wall-E twice, once with each parent.  It is excellent.  The plot itself is quite standard, but the wonderfully minimalist storytelling and genuine tenderness of the characters make it a pleasure to watch.

Conferred with Ross this evening on graphic novel doings – we’ve resolved to keep in regular contact on it to spur regular work being done, and so far I think will be very good for us.

Bedtime!

Thoughts on Ferrous Males

If there was ever a movie that said “See critics?  It’s not for you!” it’s Ironman, and so I won’t launch into any deep whatevers.  In short, I liked it, it has no weaknesses, there’s stuff I wish they’d done more of.  Specifically, more suit!  We see the damn thing fully operational for like two minutes!  More suit!

Beyond that, some other surface thoughts:

– I don’t know what’s weirder, seeing The Dude as the villain, or seeing him spear bald.  He wasn’t particularly convincing to me, and if there’s a chink in the movie’s armor (and now I pause to laugh at my own blatant pun – Ha Ha!), it’s him.  He isn’t helped by having the preview trailer for The Dark Knight before the film, in which the Joker looks like a spectre woven out of freaking nightmares.

– Robert Downey did an awesome job, hischaracter is great and has a lot of personality.  His last line is totally perfect and really makes the film.

– People talk over each other too damn much.  It’s supposed to seem edgy and shit, but it’s just annoying.

– It’s weird to me that the new Hulk movie looks to have exactly the same plot as this – “Oh noes, evil twin!”  They’re both made by Marvel, which is even more baffling.

– I’m not sure that seeing comic book characters in movies is always a good thing for them.  It reminds you of just how much damn belief you have to suspend.  In the most recent Superman movie, we see him pushing against the nose of an airliner to stop it from crashing from a tailspin.  Rather than look all cool and special-effectsy, it looks surreal because there’s just no possible way it could happen.  I know, it’s fantasy, but if it’s so obviously unreal, it’s a jarring disconnect..  Telling me Superman is strong enough to lift a car is one thing, actually showing him squeezing blood from a stone is another matter entirely.

Anyway, watching Ironman get flung around like he does just made it startlingly obvious what his weakness is – however invulnerable the suit is, killing the guy inside is cake.  Any major impact would kill or knock him out, and every hit just meant I had to work harder to remind myself it was fantasy.  Seeing every single hit wasn’t helping with this.

– Samuel L Jackson wearing an eyepatch is the single greatest piece of technology in the film, and is an advancement in badass for all mankind.  Don’t know what I’m talking about…?

Science Fiction!

I’ve been playing through Mass Effect, a space opera epic released on Xbox a year ago and recently published on the PC.  It is both gorgeous and superbly written, very much a masterpiece of gaming.  All of the play mechanics are brilliant, except for some sections where you drive a ‘rover’ type car – you basically are driving a little six-wheeler across the most rocky, impassable terrain in existence.  But I digress.

I think the game is most interesting as a barometer for the state of modern American science fiction, which of course is a barometer for the state of modern America.  It shows us a setting that is at once firmly grounded in the likes of Star Trek and yet firmly separated.

Humanity in Star Trek is self-assured, confident in its ability to spread its good will across the galaxy – always with the Prime Directive there to curb the overenthusiastic.  Humans in Mass Effect are more tentative, the new kids on the galactic block, looking to prove themselves.  They are reasonably liked but untested, not yet deserving of respect. 

Star Trek is famous for its Sex with Blue Women, and Mass Effect holds to this tradition.  Yes, nearly every alien species from a gabillion light years away is humanoid, bipedal, with human-like faces, genders, and of course, breasts.  They all speak English, too.  And yet, the game is weirdly progressive; games like Fable frustrate by giving you no choice but to play as a male; Mass Effect allows for a full experience as a male or female character, with unique events and voice actors for each.  Sex With Blue Women is perfectly possible as a female character, although there ironically are no Blue Men for characters of either gender.  Progressiveness only goes so far, I suppose. 

And yet, the women of Mass Effect are no starry-eyed ‘scientist’s daughters,’ gushing praises toward big-blastered men.  In Genre Evolution we considered that a major accomplishment of female authors was to put women into traditionally male leading roles, and that tradition carries on in the game.  It’s one of the few games I’ve seen where the named characters (and minor characters) are evenly split gender-wise, and the Colony Leader is not automatically some dude.

I recall a professor commenting that as long as sexuality is taboo for video game plots, they will be stymied as a true art form – art can encompass any aspect of human experience, and if there’s areas that are off-limits to video games, they will be hamstrung as an art form.
I agree with this, and while sex in Mass Effect is not graphic, it is at least present beyond ‘and they kiss at the end.’  This seems a happy middle ground to the more recent sci-fi magazines I was seeing, which generally had stories be utterly asexual or nearly porn (Asimov’s in particular for the latter).

When I was in the Genre Evolution Project, we aggressively refuted Judith Berman’s idea that the science fiction magazine (and possibly sci-fi itself) was dying.  Mass Effect makes perfectly clear that:
1) Science Fiction is alive and well, perfectly capable of being approachable and relevant
2) Sci-Fi Magazines are dead as a doornail.

I think the strength of Mass Effect’s storytelling lies in the fact that it is a video game, simply because it is able to spend time with a player in ways that only a television series has been able to.  Fully completing the game requires 30-40 hours, about three times as much time as the entirety of Firefly.  Although much of that time is spent doing video game stuff like fighting, a substantial chunk (maybe the majority) is spent talking to characters, exploring the ruins of ancient civilizations, and slowly filling in little details that make the setting intensely immersive.  Whereas a novelor TV series must consider its narrative to hold one’s interest, a game like Mass Effect allows the player to explore what interests them, on their terms.  Worlds and tropes can simply be scattered about to be found at the whim of the player – while a master plot exists, it is not a pre-destined, one-way ride as in a book or show.

Although I think a video game is in many ways a superior storytelling mechanism, I lament that it is so difficult to build a game.  Anyone can whip off a 20-page short story, but Mass Effect was quite obviously a hideous amount of work, requiring a team of dozens of the best programmers, artists, and writers.  Its accessibility as art makes it inaccessible to artists – there’s simply no way for someone to create that kind of experience by themselves.

Science fiction is left in an uneasy place – the highest quality work takes so long to produce that something else has to fill the time between.
And yet, the time-filler looks ridiculous compared to the main event.

Andromeda Strain

This is based off the the A&E mini-series, haven’t read the book, so don’t know how much difference there is. 

Overall the story didn’t make much sense.  It’s generally an Extremely Bad Idea when TV or movies try to go all Hard Science, because they usually have no freaking idea what they’re talking about.  The various ‘hypotheses’ mentioned in the movie just sounded silly.  But I know, I’m a scientist, I’m not the target audience.  Shows that I adore like House would surely make real doctors cringe at the ‘medicine’ presented.  I understand that this is theatre, after all; the aim is to evoke science, not be science.

The problem with this series was that even with disbelief suspended, things were just kind of confusing.  Some people it kills, but some it drives insane, but in both cases, it’s because of a fatal blood clot in the brain that should kill them instantly?  It came from another planet but it came from our planet?  It sometimes eats through plastic, can communicate with itself from miles away, somehow realizes what nuclear missiles are (it eats radiation) and tries to get them fired at itself, but when a cure is found, it just can’t defend itself at all?  Once a host is killed it can’t transmit the disease, but the water supply gets contaminated from infected corpses?

That’s all straight from the script, which made things fairly well confusing.  Not having hard science is one thing, not making any damn sense is another.

Ultimately, they put too much into the disease until it became ludicrous.  An intelligent, mind-controlling, plastic-eating, not-bound-by-time-and-space superbug starts getting silly, although if it was just one of those, you’d actually have a pretty cool story.
And the way they dealt with it was pretty spiffy – the bug was sulphur-based,  so they tossed a bacterium at it that ate sulphur.  Neat, and not some crazy-ass, totally impossible solution like I was expecting.  In short, they tried too hard.

I make a point of watching stuff like this because I’m worried that the post-apocalyptic genre is getting a lot of use lately, and seeing as our intended graphic novel is post-apocalyptic, I don’t want the Last and Final Great Apocalypse Story of Our Time to come out while we’re still sitting there with a half-finished manuscript.  Maybe some people would be encouraged to see work similar to theirs having success, but I get nervous.  If your work emulates the movies coming out this year, you behind.  If your work emulates what comes out next year (and hence is being written now), you’re keeping up.  You’re only ahead of the game if you’re looking even further in the future than that.

I Am Legend

Today ended up being Free Day.  When my mom and I saw No Country for Old Men, the fire alarm went off and we missed the first couple minutes of the movie.  As we were leaving, they handed us coupons for a free ticket in the future.  Knowing full well that the intent of these vouchers is for them to end up in a sock drawer and be buried until 2012, I resolved to use mine straight away.  Then I got a thing in the mail for a free chicken dinner at a new place in town, so I ended up having dinner and a movie for nothing.  🙂

The movie was quite good, better than I thought it was going to be.  The previews hinted at a dude left alone in a post-apocalyptic New York City, which piqued my interest, but then I heard vampires were involved, which really worried me.  Vampires offer some of the best possible storytelling and are usually used to create some of the worst.  It’s like people see all the roiling potential in that beaker and get scared; the power is there, but it has to be used skillfully.  Writers typically freak and spill the mixture, leaving the energy to erupt and consume the lab rather than do anything useful. 

I Am Legend skirts the problem by not having the movie be about the vampires, and by making them essentially feral.  No questioning of identity or what it means to be human need take place when the vampire is just an animal in a human shell.  The storytelling of the movie, however, is very good and very believable.  For most of the movie we’re just seeing Will Smith and his dog, and gradually finding out what has happened and what his role in everything has been.  There’s plenty of scenes of cyclopean ruins; huge, lifeless pans of a New York City that hasn’t been tended for three years; everything’s still there, it’s just beginning to be reclaimed by nature.  (I love that kind of thing, I could look at ruins all day)  Scenes of empty apartments filled with bottled water and sanitary items reflect some of the themes Ross and I went for in our own post-apocalyptic work (the vampirism is caused by a virus, there’s no supernatural in the film).

The film does interesting things and does a good job of presenting Smith’s character as an unreliable narrator;  he’s mostly right, but he is losing his mind a bit, and the movie shows that well.  It does a good job with its story, but it borrows a lot from otherwork, particularly Children of Men and Serenity.  Without those movies, it would have been a spectacular film.  It stands enough on its own that it is very much worth seeing, but if it taken a couple steps further away from its roots, it might have been better still.  Those movies broke some conventions in ways that made them brilliant, and ironically, Legend backs away from doing the same, sticking a little closer to standard Hollywood than it probably needs to.

But still, well done, not a big violence-fest or improbable CG romp, and a care is shown with storytelling that is always worth encouraging.

An Intriguing Confluence

Saw a musical today with my mom, Love Sweet Love.  It’s one of those thrown-together affairs that’s a tribute to some artist, in this case Bert Bacharach.  It’s sort of similar in style to Rent in that it’s almost entirely singing with only snippets of dialogue.  It was also similar to Pump Boys and Dinettes, which I talked about in this entry.  While I enjoyed today’s performance reasonably, this was more because I was studying it rather than becoming engaged with it.  It suffered many of the same flaws as Pump Boys, in that it was a congregation of loosely attached songs made into a story.  Love Sweet Love attempted to tell a single, coherent story (unlike Pump Boys which was mostly scattered nostalgia), but the fact that none of the songs were actually written for the musical made some of the transitions a little weird.  The musical is essentially one of those clips where you splice together different soundbytes of the president so he says I / like / Osama bin / Laden.  Some of the songs are just in there to fill space, and this is particularly visible when the characters are in a Karaoke bar and start singing The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance.  The musical is about modern-day urbanites falling in love, and Liberty Vance is about a duel that ends a lawless cowboy.  A bit of a non-sequitor!  Also like Pump Boys, its emotional moments are largely allusions to the audience’s own lives, rather than weaving anything from within itself to get a reaction.

A thought occurred to me mid-way through it, however.  Both musicals were bright and colorful, with impossibly cheerful people singing about impossibly perfect nostalgia.  The Good Old Days that never even existed.  Now think of Anime, which at its core is escapism and often nostalgia for a type of life that largely never even existed.  Think of the bright colors, the smiling faces, the burgeoning middle school romances, the first kisses, the stand-alone houses with big lawns that you virtually never see in Japan.   Anime and these musicals are serving a very similar function, dealing with very similar themes. 

When I was in high school, musicals were still active within the culture.  Phantom of the Opera was still doing well, and Rent was thriving.  High schoolers still thought about musicals, with a thriving choral nerd section that knew the lyrics to countless showtunes.  My suspicion is that this has changed, but I’m no longer in the high school scene.  Still, can you name a single mainstream musical that came out this year?  Or this decade?  Hairspray was recently in theatres, but it’s based on a 1988 movie, when musicals were still alive and well.  Sweeney Todd comes out soon, but again, it’s old writing, old story.  Kid’s movies and cartoons used to have regular musical numbers (The Lion King, Pocahontas, etc), but this has become much more rare.  I think it’s safe to say that the influence of the musical on mainstream culture has weakened substantially over the last ten years.

Now consider this: In high school for me, 1994-1997, anime hadn’t really ‘made it’ here yet, but it was on the verge.  By college, and the start of this decade, my friends and I were all watching Lodoss, Slayers, Kenshin.  Sailor Moon was here, Pokemon was here, and Dragonball was arriving.  As I was graduating college in 2001, you could find manga in any major city that had a japanese bookstore, and by the time I was starting my master’s in 2004, you could find manga in any bookstore period.  Film anime is easily obtainable and regular viewing for young folks of all ages.

Remember how I said that anime and musicals largely cover the same themes of perfect nostalgia?  Here’s my hypothesis; anime has been around for much longer than it’s been a force in the United States.  Attempts have been made in the past to bring it over, but with limited success.  Sure Voltron and Robotech crossed the pond, but the glut of anime remained unknown to us.  My assertion is that the musical kept it out.  As long as the musical was a sturdy force within American culture, the function of perfect nostalgia was filled; there was no room for any other competitors.  However, as the musical began to wane as a cultural mainstay for us, a void opened up for younger people.  Older people still had the musicals that touched the things that they cared about, and so their perfect nostalgia was in place.  But for anyone younger, there was no longer any media aimed at them that served the purpose the musical once had. 

The anime that had been flinging itself at (and bouncing off of) the wall around our country suddenly found that the wall was gone, and began pouring in.  By the beginning of the decade the musical was on the ropes (there hadn’t been a mainstream hit since Rent in 1996), and so the time was ripe.  Early adapters brought anime in and got it established, and the fact that there was thriving trade in bootleg subs and dubs brought the big distributors nipping at their heels, wanting the cash for themselves.  A concurrent growing acceptance of Manga due to a weakening American comics industry meant that the mainstream was ready and willing for Japanese media to enter into the system.  (For more on manga’s entrance into the US, go here.

And so here we are in 2007; the American musical relegated to greatest hits Billy Joel and Abba tributes, and the American comics industry trying to drag the last scraps of life out of Superman, Spiderman, and all the other used-up comic book heroes.  Both of these institutions on their own have provided escapism, nostalgia, and an idea of what a perfect life would be like, whether it’s a teenage power fantasy or the Sunny Side of the Street.  As these media have waned, anime and manga have swooped in to plug the hole, and I believe this is the reason why now is the time that have finally reached mainstream acceptance.

Revisiting

This entry is about a tv show called Venture Brothers, and has some pretty major spoilers.  It’s also really long.  Watch out if you care for such things!

So I’ve been watching season two of the Venture Brothers, and by and large, it sucks.  This is a shame because the first season is brilliant.  While Season Two tries to do some interesting things, there’s some key reasons why it fails.  I think its weaknesses can be instructive, however, as these are common mistakes when something is dragged out longer than it should have been.  (To the creators’ credit, they ended the series in the first season very well and conclusively, and then got lured into doing another, uncalled-for season.)  Anyhow, I see the second season’s failures as follows:

1) The Matrix 2/Pirates of the Caribbean 2 Effect: The first installment completely told the story.
The writers created a very tight story in the first season of Venture Brothers and basically brought closure to everything (particularly since the two main characters were killed).  Everything in the story had been arranged toward the final episode, which meant that when the first season ended, the writers had ‘blown their wad,’ so to speak.  Movies like the Matrix and Pirates were complete at their conclusions, which meant that later installments were almost entirely cut off from their originals.  Compare them to The Lord of the Rings and you can see the difference; when Fellowship ends, there are still major objectives that haven’t been dealt with at all.  Sauron hasn’t been touched, Saruman looms large, and groundwork for war has been laid.  But in the Matrix, Smith is dead and he’s the only face evil has had in the film.  Neo has the girl, the codes to Zion are safe.

Ah, you say!  Foreshadowing has been laid for future installments with his ‘I’m out to get you’ speech at the very end of the movie.  Jack Sparrow sails off on his ship to fight another day, you say!  Not the same.  Aragorn and Gimli have a whole world of adventure ahead of them because we know there’s unfinished business, business which will be kindling for the next story.  But for Neo and Jack, the fire has been totally burned dry, and they start the next film with nothing.  No lurking threat,  no loose ends  waiting for resolution.  For a second film,  you’re not continuing their story because their story is done.  You’re instead making an entirely unrelated story and dropping them into it.  It’s about the same effect as wondering what would happen to Pride and Prejudice if you suddenly plunked in Boris Badenov and Rocky the Flying Squirrel.  This problem leads to other, more severe problems:

2) The Greatest HitsEffect: “Remember that time that…”
Because your second installment has nothing in its plot to do with the first, you need to put in reminders that this is in fact the same story.
So you have to allude to the first installment.  A lot.  Jack makes the same jokes about Will, the rum is gone again, old minor characters like the Oracle show up again in the Matrix Reloaded, all so that you know that yes indeed, it’s not just some other guys in trenchcoats and sunglasses.  But again, remember that you closed up all the loose ends in the first movie, and so these people, lines, and jokes don’t really do any work for you.  I’ve said before that alluding to something funny doesn’t make you funny, and your new movie is now hamstrung because it’s relying on old content to even make sense.  Every time you use a joke from Volume One, that’s time lost for an original joke in Volume Two, time Two desperately needs so it can stand on its own.  It’s also easy to use the good ol’ days as a crutch, bringing back the same guys, the same plots, the same crap because you’re afraid to make something new.  And this leads to an even bigger concern:

3) Overdoing It: “Agent Smith was badass, so let’s make hundreds of him!  Badass times a hundred!”
One of the things that made Venture Brothers great was that it walked the line of uncomfortableness, hinting at those little squirmy things of being human; the day you realize you could beat up your dad, the reality of death, teen sexuality.  The writers knew how to put in just the right amount of creepiness; it made the story more believable and compelling.  And that’s the thing, you see; it was an accent to the existing plot.  And now we get back to the allusion problem.  You want people to know it’s still Venture Brothers, but since you closed up the plot, people won’t know unless you shove it in their faces (they actually will know, but you’re afraid they won’t).  So when you’re not pointing back at the old content, you’re trying to make the new content edgy, potent, something that redefines what it means to be the Venture Brothers.  And you massively overdo it.  If slightly creepy was good, then super creepy will be awesome!  Have naked men all over the place!  Swear more!
Have grown men trying to marry prepubescent boys!  Overdoing it shows you’re scared, scared of yourself and scared of your audience.  You don’t trust them, and you’re afraid that they’ll see that you don’t actually have a story to work with  (And you’re right, they’ll see).
Combine 2) and 3) and you get…

4) Too Much Information! “Watching Neo Do His Taxes”
So your main character got the girl, saved the kingdom, and is fat and happy in his castle.  He doesn’t want anything, and conflict is what drives a story.  This is part of why you now have no plot as you start Season Two.  But wait!  What about his lovable sidekick?  What are his hopes and dreams?  And what about the Old Man from Scene 24?  Deep down he’s really a three dimensional character with profound thoughts and feelings, isn’t he?  What about his compelling story? 

At this point, you really are just grasping at straws, trying in some way to have a story related to the first one for marketing purposes and nothing more.  The thing that makes bit characters so great is that they aren’t developed.  The scene with the Oracle in the first Matrix is one of my favorite pieces in all of cinema, but she is not a character that should ever be outside of that kitchen.  I don’t need to know who her dad was, or whether she likes to golf, and I damn sure don’t ever, ever need to know why she exists.  In the Lord of the Rings, it’s made clear that we’re going to spend a lot of time with Frodo, with Aragorn, and there’s an expectation that when each book finishes, we’re not done with them.  At the same time, we know that while Gimli and Legolas will receive further depth, there’s not ever going to be The Hundred Pages of Gimli’s Life.  That’s simply not what they’re there to do.  Expanding the roles of side characters into something they were never meant to be gets to my final pitfall of sequels:

5) Pretending You Thought of It in the First Movie But You Didn’t
Remember that time when they talked about firing Will Turner’s dad out of a cannon?  Well that… uh… foreshadowed the whole second movie!  And remember how Girl Hitler and Catacops got killed in the first season of Venture Brothers?  Well, they didn’t, and they’ve been plotting in secret this whole time!  We totally did not just make that up, right now!  It gets especially bad when you’re trying to write The Hundred Pages of Gimli’s Life, because Gimli as a character is basically one of those cardboard cut-outs with a voicebox.  Ha Ha!  Oh yes, he hates those elves!  And he likes ale!

The single, tantamount problem of trying to make a complex character out of a simple one is that you approach the whole thing backwards.
Making a true character with depth means that you already know a lot about them before they utter a word on paper.  You arranged an entire damn story around them, and so you had in mind why they’d be reacting to things like they do.  Jack wants the Black Pearl, he’s wanted it for a long time, he used to be the captain; he used to know the crew.  Every single thing he does in Pirates is based around that motivation, and he’s made a lot of plans, long before the time we see him in the movie.  His mannerisms, the words he says, and the things he mentions are all calculated by him and the writer of the script. 

Now remember the two British army guards that he fast talks before he tries to steal a ship; they’re lovable and funny comic relief; and that’s it!  They don’t have pasts, or histories, or dads, they’re just plot devices (and good ones; they’re a lot like Gimli).  And so when you wrote those two men, you based their words and actions around a function, not their hearts and souls.

You designed Jack from the inside out, his words are determined by his psyche, a psyche that you thoroughly know the ins and outs of.  But in making The Hundred Pages of Gimli’s Life, you have to do the reverse; you’re fabricating a psyche based on words.  You’re using what little  Gimli said and retroactively inventing a person; why does he hate those elves?  Was he raped by elves as a boy?  Why does he like that ale?  You’re not even using interesting words!  He never gave any big speech on the nature of existence or anything like that; the poor guy was just comic relief!

So you have to assemble Gimli the Three Dimensional Character in a slapdash fashion, kind of like just jamming random face pieces into a Mr. PotatoHead until enough of the holes are filled.  It’s also common to grasp for plot devices this way:  Gimli must’ve had a dad.  Maybe he was… kidnapped!  Yes!  Gimli’s on a life-quest to save his dad!  He just never mentioned it until now, nor did he show any sign of being bothered by any of it!

Conclusion
So yes, my point is that the second season of Venture Brothers does all five of these things, and that’s why it sucks.  Season One totally finished the story, and so when they started Season Two, they had nothing to work with.  They use way too many old gags and old characters, essentially just taking the cast of each Season One episode and putting them all in a wacky ‘new’ situation.  They go totally overboard with the little details that made the show great; Brock is superhyper aggressive and bellowing all the time, Underbheit turns into this weird maniac, and all the mildly creepy stuff is SUPER creepy and over the top (and way too frequent).  Comic relief bottom rung characters get made into central focal points, which they were never meant to handle, and Phantom Limb, a pretty minor character, is suddenly this big supervillain (it was hinted at all along, of course).

Granted, the second season does have merits and a few genuinely funny/touching scenes, but these are really rare and almost completely crippled by the problems I listed above.  While I don’t see a sequel as an automatic death sentence, one must be SUPER careful.  Star Trek: The Next Generation worked because it was essentially unrelated to the first show.  The Animatrix is far better than either of the Matrix sequels because it expands upon the universe of the Matrix while leaving those characters and plots alone.

To do a sequel right you either have to have genuinely planned for it and left yourself some open plot holes, or else you need to go totally balls-out; every one of the failings I gave above is the result of fear; fear your new jokes aren’t as good as your old, that your audience won’t understand where you’re coming from, that your new story can’t stand up without the first one.  Worry, concern, and apprehension are all natural for writers and for human beings.  But if you write scared, every fear you have is justified.

And you get Venture Brothers, Season Two.

Godwin Revisited

Most people by now are familiar with Godwin’s Law, which states that any debate on the internet that lasts long enough will inevitably lead to someone being compared to the Nazis.  There’s a corollary that suggests that whoever flings the Nazi analogy also loses the argument.

I think the reason for automatically losing is that tying someone’s points to Hitler is lazy; merely saying the name of him or his party evokes a swarm of horrific images, and the person making the accusation generally doesn’t bother to select just one.  It’s left as an exercise to the reader how mentioning Nazis is even relevant, but it’s intended that the mere fact they were evoked means that their opponent is Double Plus Bad.  You don’t just call anyone a Nazi, after all, so this is serious.

The point of this is that the reason to cite Hitler is to let him do your work for you; just spit out his name, then sit back and revel in the weighty ponderance of your argument.

Although not usually done with Hitler, fiction and entertainment can rely on this exact tactic, and Pump Boys and Dinettes, a musical I saw last night, is an excellent example of this.

The trick in fiction is a little different than Godwin, but is lazy in the same way: you allude to some emotional event outside of your story, and use its weight to pretend that your story has value.  This is the entirety of Pump Boys and Dinettes.  There’s literally no plot; on one side of the stage there’s four men that run a gas station, on the left there’s two women that run a diner.  (Are You Being Served…?)  What few lines there are are just lead-ins to songs, and the lyrics are just shallow evocations of shared experiences that the audience is expected to have; i.e. the viewer does all the work.  There’s a song about how fun it is to go fishin,’ about how tasty catfish are, about when Grandmaw died. 

But since there’s no plot and no character interaction, these events don’t mean anything.  We never see Grandmaw or know anything about her, and a sad song about her death just shows up in the middle of happy songs with no lead-in.  The only reason the song is emotional at all is because of the audience.  It basically just says “Remember when your Grandma died?  It was pretty sad, wasn’t it?  Look, you’re sad now.”  The same thing happens with another totally random song about the two sisters not really being close.  They sing all these songs about how fun it is to run a diner together, and then out of nowhere there’s this heart-felt number about how they’ve grown up together but don’t know each other at all.  This hasn’t even been intimated anywhere else in the musical!  There’s nothing in the story to tie it to, and the whole thought is completely dropped after the song’s over.  The musical is a shotgun blast of common American themes, just spraying around a bunch of ideas and hoping that one of them hits you.  “Your grandma didn’t die?  Hmmm.  Like catfish?  No?  Feel alienated from your siblings?  Good, good, just think of that.  Sad now, aren’t you?”

Good fiction, like a good argument, does the work for you.  When Lear emerges from the dungeon carrying the body of his one honest daughter, it’s not a devastating moment because it’s pointing at some other book or some event in your life in order to make you feel something.  This man, the one right in front of you, has lost the single person in his life who loved him unconditionally.  You’ve spent two hours watching him spurn her, seeing him finally realize his error after everyone else has turned on him, and you understand that with her death, the chance of redemption for both of them is gone forever.  There’s no hand pointing to someone else’s face to show you his anguish, it’s there in his eyes, in his faltering steps, in the silence that has filled the theatre.

One, single bullet. 

Buckshot is for Nazis.

Did it Right

There are things in life that when one dies, they can rest knowing that they did them the right way, even if it was just once. Seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Antony and Cleopatra with Patrick Stewart as Antony will probably have been the best possible way to do it within my lifetime. Seeing Lear in Stratford left a similar feeling; I have done Lear, short of performing in it, there will likely not be a more perfect way to experience it while I’m alive.

Tonight I saw 300 in an IMAX theatre, and I can safely say there will be no better way to experience that film.

300 is a profoundly stupid movie. Frank Miller’s idea of gender roles is truly frightening, essentially barbaric. The fact that we as a culture feel any kind of need for his vision of a world shows that we really are still just the audience in the Roman coliseums, screaming for blood and combat. We think because we wear suits that we’re not savages, but that is a lie, lie, lie.

Anyway, I knew all that long before I walked in, so I just ignored it so I could watch the gore and special effects.

I’d like to say that for the kind of movie it is, 300 is special, but it really isn’t. They basically just ripped off Gladiator, even down to the shots of the wheat fields. 300 is Gladiator with more nudity (male and female), less plot, and really fuggin’ cool cinematography. Apart from the adrenaline, the cinematography is the entire reason to see it. Much of the violence isn’t that interesting (except for how it’s presented), and the movie does a poor job of getting you worked up emotionally. I’ve been to plenty of bad movies that got me emotional, where I sat riveted as shallow, one-dimensional characters screamed war cries at one another. The movie does a bad job of establishing tension and making you care about anyone. When Maximus fights Commedus in the arena and his guards won’t give him a sword, you feel a grim pleasure at what awaits him, as well as sorrow because Maximus is still doomed. 300 has scenes that try for that, but because the characters are more forces of nature than men, nothing that happens to them really matters that much. Apart from a few fleeting moments of humor and sadness, Miller’s Spartans are soulless killing machines.

300 would be better if it weren’t for other movies that have come before. Gladiator did a better job of showing us a lone hero, Gettysburg and Braveheart are both way better at showing the camaraderie and desperation of a small group of men facing legions, Lord of the Rings had more fearsome armies, The Matrix had better one-on-one combat, Children of Men was far more visceral, far more frighteningly in your face. The success of those movies robs 300 of a lot of its thunder. The otherworldliness and supernatural touch helps keep it interesting, and the movie certainly feels like a Greek myth, with everything impossibly grand, impossibly evil, impossibly strong. That’s pretty cool. But I was expecting a movie that you storm out of, full of pent-up fury, ready to go speeding off at 90 miles an hour, ready to kill a man with your bare hands.

This ain’t it.

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Little Miss Sunshine

Kind of spoilery stuff on Little Miss Sunshine below. No specifics, but I talk about the mood at the end of the movie, so don’t go below the cut if you plan to see it.

We Named the Monkey Jaaack

Saw some Pirates, ate some Denny’s, watched some Mr Show, hung out with folks. A good time.

I’d say it sums up to:

Pirates 1 = Laurel and Hardy
Pirate 2 = The Three Stooges

Don’t interpret that as saying that the Stooges are bad, but they’re different, and when you’re not expecting them, they’re not always welcome. Also, the movie needed some deleted scenes, badly. Like, at least a half hour should’ve gone. Probably the entire time with the cannibals. The movie was basically a long string of outrageous action sequences, with the story as a side effect. Still, the villains were good, the characters excellent, there was just too damned much going on. Great actors and characters hamstrung by writing that was, ironically, too well done. Too tight, too allusion-filled, every loose end tied up, every reference carefully noted so that you missed none of them. In short, totally unbelievable and wound impossibly tight.

And don’t give me any of that ‘It’s fantasy, it doesn’t have to make sense’ shit. Good storytelling means knowing when to talk and when to leave your mouth shut. When you talk and talk about what a clever storyteller you are by pointing out every allusion (“Hello Poppet”), you’re showing weakness. You’re not guiding the listener through the story and helping them see more; you’re making sure they notice what a brilliant writer you are. Merely pointing out your skills once or twice isn’t arrogance, but when you have to do it in every damn scene, that’s insecurity, thuggishness. You must be able to shut up to be a good writer. Leave some gems around that only a few will find, and maybe even no one. Have some things that some people in the audience will catch, and some will miss. Let everyone have their own collection of what they got, so that they can talk and expand their understanding. Being a good writer is being a good retail store salesman: make sure the customer sees what’s most important, then shut the hell up and let them find the rest.

Having faith in your listener shows strength and mastery, and faith in yourself. The table is laid out, and if you’ve laid it properly, everyone will feast. Trying to feed the food into their mouths yourself shows a lack of trust and respect.

At the same time, there’s more to writing than staying silent. You have to prepare the food, and you must bring the guests to the table. You must make sure they know how to follow you there. If you take a turn and don’t show them how you got there, they’ll get confused, start milling about and not be with you, and that’s why even fantasy stories must make sense. Change as many rules as you want, sure, but make them clear and don’t fuck with them. Don’t just drop some dude on an island because you need him there; give a real reason for how he’s there and didn’t drown. It can be a fantasy reason, that’s fine, but having no reason again is weakness, laziness. Play within your rules so your guests can follow you to the table. Never make them wonder how it could be that there’s a meal waiting, or how they’ll get to it.

Is a world consistent with its own reality necessary to make Pirates II a good movie, a fun movie? No. I won’t try to convince anyone that Pirates II is a bad movie because it uses dramatic license; that’s a fight I can’t win. But would it be a better movie if it had said more sometimes, said less in others, been a good and proper host?

A hundred times yes.

Da Vinci Code is Teh Roxx0r

I won’t spoil plot for those of you who want to see it and haven’t read the book, but the movie works very well; better, I think, than the book. The book has pretty flimsy characters and is written in a very ‘New York Times Bestseller’ style, but that kind of feel works great for a movie. Plus, the movie keeps some of the pretty ballsy attacks on current Christian thinking that the book did. I’m really impressed that something this mainstream was able to actually discuss meaningful things. The music was well done, and the movie was well cast. So yes, speaking as a former English major who thus intrinsically hates all creative work, I liked it.

Sin!!!

Saw Sin City for the first time last night, and it was hard to form an opinion about it. I guess I left with the feeling that it was superbly done, but superbly done much like the perfect sauerkraut and bat guano sandwich would be. The freshest rye bread made in a stone oven, sauerkraut from a revered maker in Bavaria, just a dab of homemade mayonnaise, and a generous helping of imported Peruvian bat guano. Made with rare, expensive, quality ingredients, but at the same time a horrific thing.

I guess I just didn’t understand why we needed Sin City. It was interesting, but god damn. How many gravelly-voiced psychopath men can you pack into one movie? How many internal monologues about how ‘He hurt the woman, and he’s gonna PAY, and he’s gonna PAY HARD and I don’t care if I have to DIE to make him PAY?’ The thing that surprised me about the movie is that that line I made up isn’t an exaggeration. People talk like that for the entire movie.

The men are all complete psychopaths, the only question is whether they take out their mindless rage on other men, which is acceptable, or women, which is forbidden. The women are always helpless, even if they appear not to be. In one of the vignettes, there’s a group of prostitutes who are the law in a particular area, and they’ve got swords and knives and guns and are deadly and shit. But when their way of life is threatened by men, who can save them? Three guesses, and the first two that are a ‘she’ don’t count.

But at the same time, the lighting, use of color, and effects are all wonderful. There’s a consistent mood and tone that’s painstakingly set and perfectly maintained. Oblivion sometimes feels awkward because you’ll have a beautifully rendered castle on a green-brown blob that’s supposed to be a hill. Sin City never wavers in its setting, never breaks character, completely sucks you in to its world. The cast is brilliant, the acting is superb.

But this male power trip bullshit? Women totally helpless in the clutches of monster men as gun-toting, scarred old knights rescue them in the most gruesome manner possible? Every knight wrangling with some internal flaw, like a heart condition, every monster utterly depraved but yet identical to the knights? Two hours of this? It was well done, but God, why did we need it? Can’t we do something else?

Quick Thoughts on V for Vendetta

If you haven’t seen it, don’t read below. I promise I don’t go on about it for pages.

Meh

Don’t worry, no long, drawn-out ‘I’m a failure of a human being’ thing.

I just want to be done with the next month or so. It’s that time of year where it’s not really hospitable out, the weather can’t really make up its mind, so you end up with that cloudy, 35 degree shit, for days. There’s like 1/8 inch of snow that falls in the morning, and then it’s gone by noon. Never enough that you could do any wintery fun, and it’s always just cold and windy enough that a nice walk or game of frisbee isn’t really an option either. Everything’s still thoroughly dead, so with no snow, you just see bare branches and flattened, tan grass. In a few weeks, things will be hoppin’, but for now, climatic Purgatory.

Not much going on with both classes canceled; I’ve wasted most of the time as expected, although I’ve been getting some reading done. Again, school is seeming especially Purgatorious at the moment. Nothing bad, just a long way of papers and lectures I really don’t care about anymore. I just want out, I’d like a real job, I’d like more activity. I’ll get them all, but there’s a month of school in the way before any of that starts being possible. (Yes, I know I can do more activity now, but you know what I mean. I can’t move away and get a nice job before I’ve finished grad school, and if I did, I’d be a moron for not finishing the degree) So yes, a month of fairly uninteresting and fairly lengthy work, then I have the summer to do my thesis and look for work. Summer should be very nice.

Oblivion is very good; I’ve had my days of disappearing into my room with it, and now I’ve re-emerged with hair mussed up and shirt only half-tucked in. It’s not perfect, but it’s very well made, and they played to the game’s strengths. Out-of-doors in the game is kind of awkward; there’s lots of lush detail, but things load in strangely, (just popping into existence rather than fading in) and distant textures are hellaciously undetailed. (the sides of hills are perfectly smooth, blotchy green) Since less recent games have dealt with these problems, it was strange to see them on the cutting edge game. Combat outside is also pretty jerky unless you crank down the settings.

Indoors, the game really shines. Confined spaces mean less processor lag, so you can have all the lighting and special effects you want. The interiors of some of the temples and shrines are absolutely gorgeous, and dungeon crawling is incredibly fun. Monsters are actually both dangerous and frightening, and you can’t just make a frontal assault and kill them in two hits. Oblivion’s monsters are durable and smart, and they’ll chase you all over the place. Even the cherished ‘go into another zone’ defense doesn’t work. I pissed off a necromancer and ran out of the dungeon to escape. I sat by the door to recuperate, only to have the necromancer burst out and finish me off. Combat is a delicate art of hiding, blocking, moving, and striking that makes the game extremely fun. There’s been more than one occasion where I was out-gunned but able to win by being smart, and not just from exploiting a glitch in the game or a dumb AI, as has usually been the way to win such battles.

That’s enough nerdiness for now. Last night folks came over and we made dinner, tonight we’re going to a reading of Becky’s. I’ve been leaving tomatoes out in the sun all week for the occasion. 😉