One point on which Cleolinda and I differ is the porn factor of these books. For her it’s mushy vampire romance, which she both loves and laughs her ass off at. For me it’s Jacob Black running around shirtless and getting naked at any opportunity…granted, it’s so that he can turn into a wolf, but the mental picture remains. He’s so much more my type than Edward, though he’s at least a foot taller than I’d like.
The thing is, he’s more Bella’s type too, in that they actually have some ordinary human chemistry, a solid relationship based on how much they enjoy spending time together, in sharp contrast to “we’re just in love, okay? don’t question it” Bella + Edward. The vampire twit was out of the picture for most of the novel, which was great, except that Bella moped about him for most of the novel, which wasn’t. I wasn’t keen on the creation of a love triangle, but it could have been interesting if we’d been able to believe for one moment that Bella might have second thoughts about being with Edward. Unfortunately she’s not allowed to, so there’s no real conflict or suspense.
This novel also introduces Meyer’s vampire elders, the Volturi. They’re pretty corny. The conceit that they could exterminate an entire tour group without anyone noticing is hilarious.
This was the point in the series where I was surprised to find that, after many years of being into vampires, I suddenly started to find werewolves a lot more appealing.
I’ve finished the rest of the Twilight series. After this I’ll post some comments on each of the other three books.
First of all, let me admit that I did mostly enjoy reading them, which is pretty amazing considering that I hated a lot of the characters, situations, and plot developments. I really don’t like the heroine Bella very much, and I like her dullard vampire boyfriend Edward even less. She’s difficult in arbitrary ways that are never adequately justified (chiefly: she wants to become a vampire to be with her boyfriend forever, but she doesn’t want to get married because what would the neighbors say?). She’s not so much masochistic and suicidal as passive and codependent. She wishes she were beautiful but she hates dressing up. Meanwhile he’s somehow remained not only a virgin but romantically inert since he was born, despite living 17 years as a human at a time when that seemed older than it does today. He exhibits almost no inner life apart from being in love with Bella, so that we eagerly welcome the rare passages when he shows off as a musician and a literary critic. She loves him because he’s gorgeous and saves her life a time or two. He loves her because she smells delicious.
And yet Meyer hooked me. For me, it wasn’t about the wish fulfillment; at first I was a little envious of the clear, relatively uncomplicated romance, but it quickly became so over-the-top that I could no longer suspend disbelief. It’s not about the supernatural adventure; Meyer keeps all the most dramatic action sequences offstage and candidly admits on her own website that she isn’t into “Hamlet endings” where lots of characters die, so there’s not much adventure to be had. It’s true that killing off characters is a cheap and dirty way to raise the stakes, and it’s not as though this makes us happy. But we recognize that real life has consequences, and Meyer’s are usually pretty limited. So I’m not sure what I was responding to, unless it was the obvious love and warmth Meyer feels toward her characters. Many more literary authors have lost me because I could feel their clinical attitudes toward the stick figures they were writing about, and because they didn’t care, neither did I.
However, there are a million things that bothered me about the books, and someone named Cleolinda covers pretty much all of them and then some in her Livejournal.
I was really severely into vampires around the time I was entering college. I’d just discovered Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and at that point she was only three books into them and they were still good. I loved the atmosphere, the melodrama, the imagery, and of course the homoeroticism. But most of all I think I appreciated the idea of an immortal existence free of responsibilities and requirements. Rice’s vampires don’t need to worry about money, they can sleep pretty much anywhere and be relatively safe, they can survive being knifed to ribbons and burned alive, and they have all night every night to explore and learn and create and party. Their main worries are finding a meal that doesn’t trouble their conscience and not getting a permanent tan. This was an attractive enough prospect when I was entering college, and it’s even more attractive now. If Rice were still readable and maybe hadn’t found Jesus, I’d probably still be eating those books up.
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight shows us vampires who in some ways have it even better. These cats can go out in the sun anytime they like — as long as nobody’s watching, because their skin sparkles like diamonds in it, which is kind of a giveaway. Like Rice’s Louis, the vampire protagonists have a conscience, and they strenuously avoid killing humans, to the dismay and detriment of the wildlife in the lush Washington forest they live near. Like Rice’s Lestat, they’re rich as Midas and seem to possess additional psychic talents such as telepathy, precognition, and a sort of empathic projection.
But they’re neither antiheroes nor übermensch libertines. They’re socially responsible, staunchly heterosexual, and one of them is in love with Our Heroine.
I love my antiheroes and libertines but that’s no way for a nice Mormon girl to write about vampires. It certainly creates immediate, potent conflict to have vampires struggling with their predatory natures (mostly stoically, unlike whining Louis), and since a vampire is basically a serial killer who does it for food, not pleasure, you have to make them sympathetic somehow. So I’m cool with her take on the subject.
I have to say, though, that it’s the nicer side of a phenomenon that makes me a little queasy these days, which is the savage killer using his or her powers for good. The most prominent example is a show I admit I’ve never watched and might find fairly entertaining: Dexter, the serial killer vigilante on Showtime. He seems partially inspired by what happened to Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s novels and the films made from them. In Silence of the Lambs, Lecter’s helpful but clearly evil, unambiguously ruthless. In Hannibal we’re meant to despise his victims — instead of hapless policemen doing their jobs, they’re out to get him or they’re sexist, nasty FBI agents, so clearly he has no choice, right? And in Hannibal Rising, with one exception, he’s just getting revenge against the evil men who destroyed his childhood and murdered his sister. There’s something about the way we turn killers into heroes — instead of recognizing their villainy even if we take a macabre pleasure in its excess — that seems disturbing to me.
Twilight isn’t really about vampires or murderers so much as high school romance. Here’s how it works. A girl moves to a small town where she discovers to her amazement that she’s relatively hot and desirable. Every guy asks her out but she puts them off, intrigued by the one guy who seems to hate her guts and yet saves her life. Eventually it turns out he only seems to hate her because — I’m really not spoiling this for you — he’s a vampire, and her scent is almost irresistible. It’s not clear whether he loves her because she smells so good or if the two just happen to coincide or what. He is just thoroughly in love with her despite hardly knowing her and yet he’s forbidden to love her because that enticing scent makes him want to kill her.
She loves him, of course, because he is godlike in his beauty (as we are told in so many words several times) and also his nigh-omniscience (he reads minds) and nigh-omnipotence (he runs almost as fast as he drives, can stop a car with one hand, and hunts wild animals without guns). Also he is an older man, around five times her age, though of course he looks seventeen, which is a good deal if you can get it.
This is how a lot of teenage romance works, it’s true: hormones, pheromones, and pretty faces. But I don’t think it would have killed Meyer to give these two a little prosaic chemistry. Our heroine Bella doesn’t seem to have a lot of hobbies or conversation, though she seems to like music, and her undead beau Edward has had decades to master piano composition and performance, so that helps. Still, it’s hard to root for a romance where the two seem to have so little in common, where the magnetic forces are Edward’s preternatural beauty and Bella’s improbably delicious blood.
Fortunately the prose is lively and charming enough to entertain over the course of 500-plus quick-reading pages. The setting is vivid and full of character; I really want to visit the lush Washington forest myself now. Edward’s vampire family is colorful and interesting, and all of them are falling over themselves trying not to lose control and murder Bella, which is weird and fun. There’s even a local native tribe, the Quileute, who know Edward and his family are vampires, which starts to become central to the plot in the second book (I’m 300 pages into that one) and gets very interesting indeed.
I’m actually rooting for Quileute boy Jacob Black to become a viable romantic rival to Edward; he’s much sweeter and has a lot more personality. The thing with Edward is that most of his scenes with Bella involve him either struggling to make out with her and not give in to the temptation to kill her (which you can read as: he’s trying not to take her virginity, or his for that matter — yeah, he’s been a vampire for the better part of a century and has never fallen in love before…uh huh), or else being kind of an asshole because he’s worried about killing her or about some other vampire killing her. “I shouldn’t be with you…it’s not safe,” that kind of thing. “You should go live your life — I’m wrong for you.” Blah blah blah. It’s really kind of a drag. Even after we find out that Jacob has some secrets of his own (which of course we see coming from the minute we meet him), he’s still more appealing in my book. The two of them have fun together. They’re best friends, and there’s clearly an attraction. If it weren’t for Vampire Superman, who knows?
Anyway. I’m looking forward to the movie, not because I think it’ll be amazing (doubt it) but because I think it’ll be entertaining, which is the same reason I like the books. The only drawback is that I can skim the romance in the books, and in the movie theater I’ll have to sit through it.
Eh.
You want to hear more? Okay.
Well, like the first film, we have a perfectly cast Ron Perlman, we have a reasonably charming Doug Jones, and an irritating Selma Blair who suffers from the same problem Leo DiCaprio has, which is that funny generimerican accent that leaves me unable to forget for one second that she’s just an actor reciting a script. We have Guillermo del Toro directing and scripting, which means that all of the visuals are almost unbearably rich and beautiful, and almost all of the dialogue is directed with a tin ear. And we have the tired “we’re heroes, but we look like freaks, so people are scared and ungrateful” trope that has been trod into the dirt by countless superhero stories and movies in the past 50 years or so.
Unlike the first film, we have an almost insultingly stale plot about an elf prince who needs to recover three pieces of a magic crown that will let him control a robot army to destroy the human world. There’s no telling why he’s waited at least 100 years or so to do this, or why his father thinks his obsessively martial son will take no for an answer. (Or why his twin sister, who apparently shares every injury with him, doesn’t try to keep her brother from getting so many fights, considering he could easily get her killed.) Unlike the first film, the attempts at humor and character development are almost insultingly weak.
I probably would have liked both films a lot better if I hadn’t read creator Mike Mignola’s comics. The comics aren’t literary masterpieces, but they are artistic ones: sumptuous black backgrounds from which phantasmagoria loom, punctuated by hilariously incongruous tough-guy talk from Hellboy. The moods and creatures are Lovecraftian, Gothic, or older still, folk tales from earliest Europe.
I don’t ask that the movies faithfully reproduce this mood; I get that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The first film came pretty close, though, and when I saw the del Toro Creature Studio vibe in the trailer I knew this one would be ranging farther afield. To this film’s credit, it doesn’t spend much more time than necessary on the dull plot, but replacing this with Hellboy’s romantic and professional drama isn’t much of an improvement.
At least there are a few nice touches. Johann Krauss is a great addition to the team, basically an ectoplasmic ghost in a suit whose inconsistent character is balanced by some great lines and equally great voice work by Seth McFarlane. That thing you’ve seen in the trailer, with no eyes on its crested head but dozens of them on its wings, is also terrific, though maybe I just like it whenever someone calls Hellboy “Anung un Rama.” And there’s a scene about halfway through where a city street is covered in moss and falling flowers that’s intensely beautiful, articulating the movie’s ostensible theme much better than any of the dialogue. If only it had all been that sublime.
I love the internet and the people who post things on it. Thanks to these diligent souls I’m now ahead of the Sci-Fi Channel and all the way up through episode 11 of seas 4 of Dr. Who (“Turn Left”).
I’m a fan of the new series now, even though I still think it’s only intermittently good. The first episode this season I thoroughly enjoyed was “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” and the two-parter that’s currently airing (“Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”) was even better. And then there was “Midnight,” which looked like it would be a stinker and ended up a slice of modern drama Sartre might have appreciated. It’s hard to believe this is the team behind that dopey “Adipose” stuff and the episode where the Empire State Building was architected by Daleks.
And I have to admit, I’ve really come to appreciate Donna. What she lacked initially in charm and youthful beauty compared to Rose and Martha she’s made up in character and sheer force of personality. The other two seem pretty shallow now in comparison. I don’t know who the companion’s going to be next season, but I find myself kind of hoping it’s not Rose again. I’d settle for someone new, but the bar has been raised.
The melodrama and scale of the finale are going to be a bit of a drag — you get desensitized to the whole world being at stake, ALL THE TIME. But I still can’t wait to see what happens. And thanks to the internet and my indifference to video quality, I’ll have to wait less than a week.
I may or may not write about these at greater length, but here are the capsules.
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Loved it. It’s a slight drag that the quest in this one is for two (specific) girls instead of a shitload of little hamburgers, but it allows for some cute scenes and the whole thing is pretty funny. And yes, the giant bag of weed returns.
Running with Scissors (the book)
Creepy, depressing, bizarre. It’s hard to read it without the ever-lurking suspicion that this guy did, as he repeatedly suspects, inherit some crazy from his batshit mom. I can understand why his foster family wanted to take him to court, though if half the book is true they’re still a buncha fruitcakes. I can’t imagine how they turned it into a movie, but I know how I can find out.
Death Note (the live action movie)
Fucking awesome. It felt a little goofy at first, especially since they showed it with an English dub, but it got really good. The actor playing L is perfect and his voice is just as good, provided in the English dub by none other than Alessandro “Gaeta” Juliani. Can’t wait to see part 2!
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
It’s just okay. Ford is 65 now and looks it. The action is more cartoonish than ever, to the point of being so silly it’s hard to enjoy. The plot is slight and never really explained, relationships are established and wasted, and once again insects and aboriginal peoples are made out to be far more villainous than they ought to be. Still, it’s reasonably entertaining, and rarely embarrassing. Cate Blanchett’s not nearly as much fun as she ought to be; her Russian is kind of a robot, though she strikes some dashing poses. Shia LaBoeuf’s already scant charisma has completely worn off for me; I find him agreeable but not spectacular here, and the prospect of him donning the hat and taking up the whip for future installments is even more depressing than the idea of a fifth movie where Indy hurtles off a cliff in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, surviving unscathed. Luckily I’ve never been this franchise’s biggest fan, so I could be pleased without needing to be impressed.
I love Amy Winehouse. My girlfriend can’t stand her, and suggested to me recently that I try some of the more classic stuff, namely Smokey Robinson. So I checked out a box set of Smokey and the Miracles from the library and have been sampling it at random for a few weeks.
There’s nothing to dislike about Smokey. I don’t agree with irritating 80s band ABC about much, but we are on the same page about what it feels like “When Smokey Sings.”
The thing is, and I’m a little shocked, most of these songs don’t do much for me. The execution is marvelous (though perhaps not miraculous), and the basic sound is like butter and cream. But not every song is catchy, and some of them seem to meander over a melody that’s not really sure where it’s going, and some of the catchier ones are kind of annoying.
But the worst problem is that lyrically and emotionally most of them are of their time — that is, generalized and uncomplicated, odes not so much to the beloved as to love itself. They’re bubblegum, sweet for a minute or two, then flavorless, good only for habitual, unconscious chewing.
They don’t have a lot to do with why I love Amy Winehouse. Part of it’s That Voice, and both Smokey and Amy have their own That Voices, even if Smokey’s is more like wine and Amy’s is more like smoke. Part of it’s the retro stylings, and of course with Smokey they weren’t retro but contemporary.
But a lot of it is what she’s singing about, which is love but not in vague, impersonal, blithe terms. There’s pain and lust and guilt and bliss and resignation and wisdom in there, some of it sounding as young as she is, some of it sounding as old as time, but all of it both personal and universal, specific and general, simple and complicated in all the right ways. It’s not just ear candy, but every flavor you can think of all together in one sublime dinner.
Her personal meltdowns are beside the point, though I don’t necessarily think they’re part of her talent. Maybe they put the darkness into her music, and maybe that’s why it’s more memorable than 80% of the Miracles stuff, but they’re not a reason to dislike her art. Would I like this Smokey box set better if there were more songs in it about losing love and fewer about being in it? I’d like to think I wouldn’t, but then again, there’s “Who’s Loving You,” one of the stone classics on here, and if anything the sweet sad sorrowful question to which “You Know I’m No Good” could well be the answer.
Well, I finished up the last three episodes of Firefly Tuesday night, and they weren’t that bad, though as Aimeric warned me, one of them was a fairly ordinary western set in a ramshackle whorehouse (approximately 60% sexier than a high-class bordello from what little we saw of it). I thought the last episode, “Objects in Space,” was going to be my favorite until the scary bounty hunter started in with some zany woo-woo Joss Whedon dialogue and the dramatic tension whooshed out the airlock. Oh, and we were set up for River to do something spectacular and violent, but there was no real payoff because she just did something clever instead. That would have been fine if the series had continued for one or two more seasons (the “‘verse” isn’t fleshed out enough for more than that) and the show’s secrets had unfolded gradually and naturally.
But of course it was cancelled, and Whedon had to rush his ending with this movie. We find out some things we basically already knew — that River had been extensively altered by the government to be a psychic living weapon — and some things we didn’t know, like where the Reavers came from, and why the government is so keen to get River back. Those last couple secrets are unfortunately a bit anticlimactic and only one of them is even faintly plausible. Perhaps the problem is that we know so little about the Alliance government — except that it must be bad because it does mean experiments on people and because Our Hero Mal fought against it on the yee-haw side of the Civil Star Wars. It’s never been clear what kind of regime this is — dictatorship? oligarchy? plutocracy? or just a corrupt republic like we have in the US of A? — so it’s hard to guess what’s at stake for this government if its secrets get out. People buy fewer Oaty Bars? There’s another Civil Star War in which the Rebels lose again? A “candidate for change” gets some votes?
And doesn’t it seem a little out of character for Mal to stake so much on this? It does, which is why in every other scene someone is talking about strength of belief, why the enigmatic Shepherd Book (whose past may now remain a secret forever, unless the series is revived, and maybe even then) has to pound into Mal’s skull the idea of “believing in River” — because Mal now has to do something stupid, profitless, incredibly dangerous, and completely against his nature, not to mention sort of pointless. Even today the media has a lot less power than we imagine; one conspiracy theory from a disreputable source is just a drop of oil in the ocean.
What happens is SO out of character, in fact, that Mal has to threaten his crew to get them to go along with it. This is incredibly clumsy writing for a show that prided itself on being about people and relationships. The latter don’t get their due either; I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are deaths in this movie and none of them are visibly mourned. Yes, we see their graves, but that’s not mourning. It just rings hollow.
I had some other minor complaints, like how Mal could hold his own for more than a minute in unarmed combat against a master assassin, or why the master assassin AND the scary bounty hunter from “Objects in Space” are both black and both ultimately diffident in bizarrely inconsistent characterizations. But what it comes down to is that the pacing and — I’ll admit it — pretty solid writing of the TV series didn’t quite work in this film. It’s too bad, because in a lot of ways this is better TV (and it’s HELLA better sci-fi) than the new Doctor Who, and even if you don’t like a person, you can’t always enjoy seeing them give themselves a wedgie. It’s sad.
When I heard Battlestar Galactica was going to wrap up this season, I was scared that it would end up like this: a rush job that didn’t and couldn’t do justice to the measured development you get with a solid TV series. It still might, but BSG has the luxury of 900-odd minutes to wrap up, and Firefly had only about 115. Serenity didn’t totally suck, but it sure didn’t blow me away.
After dismissing the show pretty quickly (my sister failed to get me into it, and then I failed to get her into Battlestar Galactica), I’m finally getting back around to working through Firefly. I have 3 or 4 episodes to go and then I can watch Serenity and be done. It’s never going to be my favorite show, and it’s definitely not “the best science fiction series ever” as I’ve seen some otherwise intelligent people soberly claim, but I’m not hating it.
It’s very clever, the “space western” angle. A lot of science fiction shows have their foundations in more traditional genres — Star Trek’s a naval exploration thing, Star Wars is a samurai movie, Battlestar Galactica is “Wagon Train to the stars” and also based partly on the Book of Mormon if I understand correctly, and Blake’s 7 (the classic low-budget British series this show closely resembles) is “The Dirty Dozen” crossed with pirates. I can’t remember any of them wearing their underpinnings so nakedly, and it’s kind of admirable.
It’s not that enjoyable, though — probably just because I don’t really like Westerns or slide guitar or country fried theme songs. So a little dust and tumbleweeds and six-shooting and fiddling and hoeing down goes a long way. It’s best when it’s sprinkling flavor on the space thieving action, and kind of a drag when we’re soaking in it.
The more I watch, the more I miss Blake’s 7, which was mainly lacking in budget and warmth, but had the same premise: a small group of thieves and rogues and rebels travel the galaxy pulling off heists and guerrilla operations, staying one step ahead of authorities and bounty hunters. We have Blake and Mal, basically good leaders on the wrong side of the law; Zoe and Dayna, women of color handy with guns; Avon and Jayne, selfish and ruthless antiheroes (though one’s a computer genius and the other’s a brute); Wash and Tarrant, boyish, feckless pilots; Cally and River, troubled psychics.
Oddly, though the characters in Firefly are better developed, more sympathetic, and often better acted, I still don’t like most of them as much as Joss Whedon wants me to.
Wash is a dork, just annoying on every level. Zoe’s the kind of dull Amazon you get when an actress is too aware that she’s supposed to be playing a Strong Woman but doesn’t really inhabit a character. Kaylee’s cute in a Sanrio kind of way, but the jaunty downhome syntax the writers insist on putting in her mouth comes out sounding false. I can’t stand preachers in real life, and I don’t like this Preacher any better. And then there’s the Ren Faire hooker with a tea set of gold, the “Companion” who somehow manages to be thoroughly unsexy, the least titillating element of the show, and that’s saying a lot. It’s a funny thing about professional sex: the more respectable you try to make it seem, the less appealing it becomes.
So that leaves Simon and River, who fortunately bring a thread of mystery and gravity to the whole affair. River’s psychotic breaks can be kind of melodramatic, but I’m interested in their story and I mostly don’t mind watching them. Mal’s pretty watchable too, the sort of captain who cuts Gordian knots with a single unerring gunshot, and that’s all right with me. My favorite character on the show, however, is Jayne, partly because I love the Id on every show (see also: Eric Cartman, Bender), and partly because Jayne’s Avon-like amorality is fascinating and funny in a way that the all-for-one-and-one-for-all crew’s camaraderie isn’t.
So I feel about this the way I feel about Buffy: it’s massively overrated, maybe half as good as it’s cracked up to be, but since it’s cracked up to be pretty damn good, it’s still halfway decent. If only the incidental country music would stop!
Well, I’m glad I didn’t pay to see this in the theater, but watching the library’s copy for free (thanks to my girlfriend) was just fine.
There’s a little too much story and not quite enough jokes, and at least half of the jokes are weak serves, and probably a quarter of those involve star Dan Fogler getting kicked in the nuts or having expensive electronics shoved up his butt or otherwise abused and grimacing in pain. He doesn’t bring a lot to the movie aside from tastefully underplaying a lot of the comedy and being at least 60% less annoying than Jack Black. I’d bet money that if they weren’t hoping to land the man himself they were at least telling the casting director to get “a Jack Black type,” and frankly I’m glad they got this guy instead. But watching him get hurt still isn’t funny.
Fortunately, watching Christopher Walken do Christopher Walken is enough to keep a slow Sunday night moving along, and there are a few other funny moments with the rest of the cast. Having Walken’s harem of courtesans be all-male is one of those weak serves, but it’s returned more vigorously at the end of the film when Fogler has to go back into danger to rescue them from their cell. This subgenre of competition-movie parody is all but played out (Dodgeball, Blades of Glory, even Zoolander) but roping in clichés from other formulas helps this one stay afloat just a little longer.
Still, I wouldn’t give it your undivided attention. Maybe put it on in the background while you’re doing your taxes.