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.
Drug stories are all the same. Things start kinda bad, then they get a LOT worse. After that it doesn’t really matter if they get better or not. The point is made, it’s always the same, you know what it is from the start, and if you don’t use, it doesn’t really apply to you. You just watch people gradually lose everything to their interlocking needs for money and some mixture of bliss and oblivion.
But when you put it that way, those are the same needs we all have. Drug stories just strip them down to their barest forms, cut away all the subtleties. But they conceal as much as they reveal, they tell you that if you’ve never stuck a needle in your arm it can’t happen to you. That’s why the Sara Goldfarb plot is there, why this movie works; she’s just an aging woman with nothing to look forward to, and she gets hooked on speed prescribed to her as diet pills.
Even so, it’s not the story, but the way it’s told. I still haven’t seen Pi, so this was my introduction to Aronofsky’s style. When I describe it in words — quick cuts, split screens, repeated images, second-long shots — it sounds disorienting, frenetic, what cantankerous critics still refer to as “MTV style.” In fact it’s the opposite, unbelievably expressive and lucid, perfectly comprehensible, intuitive and yet explicable. He makes so many other directors look pathetically dependent on script and clumsy with their imagery.
The tradeoff is that he’s not quite as adroit with the more traditionally dramatic moments. A key scene between Ellen Burstyn and Jared Leto comes off as an after-school special, and it’s partly a misstep in the script, spelling out the obvious in phony language, but it’s also Leto’s awkwardness as Burstyn’s son. He’s much more in his element with his best friend and his girlfriend, and so the moment doesn’t really work and the plots don’t quite connect. Fortunately the movie doesn’t turn on that connection and we can get by without it.
I don’t think I’ll ever watch this again; it’s a downer among downers. But I’m glad I saw it once. And maybe it’s just because of smack and the Jami Gertz expression she wears throughout the movie, but I think Jennifer Connelly belongs in the next Bret Easton Ellis film adaptation.
There’s little to say about this inoffensive fluff piece except that the smattering of reviews I just peeked at were very kind to the females in it. Hugh Grant is Hugh Grant again with Andrew Ridgeley sprinkles on top, and though he’s played this part so many times he could hardly help having mastered it, he’s definitely mastered it. Unfortunately, Drew Barrymore is also Drew Barrymore again, and unfortunately that means she’s very difficult to believe most of the time.
However, she’s John Barrymore next to the teensy blonde playing Cora, the Britney/Madonna amalgam. All the reviews I skimmed loved her, but I just saw a massively blown opportunity — she read her lines as though she were a makeup girl they grabbed at the last minute and faced toward a teleprompter. So what could have been a trenchant, hilarious send-up of singing nymphets wasn’t. Britney might be nuts but she’d need a lobotomy to sound this stupid and tranquilized. It’s hard to believe they couldn’t have found a girl able to sing, dance nearly naked, AND read a line with marginal feeling.
Oh well. It was a pleasant enough background while I learned how to check the fuses in my car and futilely tried to find cheap flights across the country.
Old movie night again at the Stanford Theater! This time it was North by Northwest, one of the best. I have a hard time picking a favorite Hitchcock film but this one’s in the running for sure.
It also contains the scariest scene from any Hitchcock film: Cary Grant in a towel! Okay, the man was 55, so the skinny arms, droopy pecs, curved spine, and overall tawny man-glow just came with the territory, but yikes. And then that cleft chin on top — it looks like some tabloid Photoshop job. I’ll never understand how that was considered irresistible.
I always assumed that I would have two jobs when I grew up. One would be a job with a salary and benefits. The other would be fiction writing.
Since college, I’ve had jobs with salaries and benefits. I haven’t done a lot of fiction writing.
I’ve typed a lot of words, it’s true. And they’ve been published. But only on Usenet, and mailing lists, and Livejournal, and finally this site. Not “real writing.” Not “real publishing.”
And perhaps this is one reason I felt the need to spend a couple hours repudiating Robin Hobb’s rant about writing vs. blogging. I saw myself in it: a failed writer seeking asylum and solace in a shadow of my former ambition.
But then I always believe the worst that anyone says of me, and when I thought seriously about what I’d been writing, I realized I hadn’t entirely been wasting my time. On Usenet and on mailing lists I learned to argue, both the right way (facts + rhetoric) and the wrong way (invective + psychological warfare) — a vital skill for a writer of nonfiction. On Livejournal I learned to tell a potentially mundane story with humor and suspense and brevity, to find meaning in small incidents as well as large phenomena, to examine life and share it with an audience — all vital skills for a writer of fiction.
I could have spent all of that time churning out stories and novels, and sending them off to publishers in hopes of being noticed, thinking I’d made something good but receiving no feedback to confirm or deny my assumption. But since I fortunately didn’t have to write in order to pay the rent, I could afford to spend the time learning instead.
More importantly, I discovered along the way that I wasn’t itching to write about imaginary characters and places the way a “real writer” is. I discovered that, freed from the strictures of format and publishing, I could write about only and exactly what interested me, and to express myself plainly and directly. Once I got over the idea that my words were useless and inferior if they couldn’t be sold in 300-page bindings at Barnes & Noble, and that I had a responsibility to myself to publish or be silent, I could enjoy my writing for what it was, and not for the product it could be.
That’s not to say I’ve entirely given up on writing fiction, though. I’ve been turning over a novel idea on and off since 2001, trying to find the narrative line in a series of images, trying to find the courage to write it without turning it into a research project. I’m almost ready to start on it again. Hobb would pounce and say “aha! you’ve been keeping a journal on and off for that same amount of time! you’ve proven my point!” Well, maybe I have.
And maybe I haven’t, because in 2006 I finished Nanowrimo and proved to myself I could churn out a novel just fine if I put my mind to it. Number of LJ entries I wrote in November 2006: 19. One of them on the 15th is called “nanowrimo halfway point.”
Nothing will keep you from writing whatever you want as long as you set your mind to it. Most of the time I don’t, but I’ve proven that I can. Maybe this year — blog or no blog — I will.
March 18th, 2008 in
books,
writing |
1 Comment
The other day, my sister, in her Livejournal, linked to a rant about how Livejournal in specific and blogging in general interferes with the art, craft, hobby, and profession of fiction writing. This is the rant.
I hate the word “rant,” at once falsely modest and self-excusing. I hate the way this rant was written; it’s purple prose, overwrought and overripe, well beyond what’s needed to establish the half-serious tone she aimed for. It’s too long, two or three times what would have been effective. It repeats itself. Some might say it could be reduced to the last line: “Don’t blog. Write.”
I thought this was what bothered me about it. This, and the snobbish tone that seems to come with being a certain kind of science fiction or fantasy writer (though, in their defense, I’m sure they see more crappy “competition” in the form of doggerel and fanfic than other types of writers).
But there’s something else.
Hobb makes one good point in her rant, about the addictive nature of the interactive instant gratification of online blogs, journals, and comments. It’s true that these things can distract you from writing. Or from any other work you do. Or from eating or sleeping.
But that’s not all of it. It’s specifically about the difference between “writing,” which is “revealing to your rapt reader a world, page by page by fluttering page,” and “blogging,” which is “twitch[ing] and writh[ing] and emot[ing] over the package that was not delivered, the dinner that burned, the friend who forgot your birthday.”
Well. It can be.
“Writing” can also be rehashing the same old recipes of Tolkien and McCaffrey and Brooks and Lackey, doing Harlequin romance with dragons and swords, warmed-over shit stuffing the shelves of guys with long greasy hair and bloatees and wolf T-shirts and kilts. “Blogging” can also be the most wonderfully anarchic and prolific period in essay writing the world has ever seen, out-newsing the newspapers, out-analyzing the analysts, and — here’s probably the uncomfortable part for someone whose livelihood depends on pushing pulp printed on pulp — out-publishing the publishers.
Maybe you don’t buy the blog hype, though. Not everyone’s trying to write timeless essays, it’s true. Some people are just telling you what they bought that day and what color the food particles were when they flossed. Some blogs are just personal diaries, and some read just like letters to their friends. Lame, right? What real writer would lower themselves to put out that shit when they could be writing actual novels?
Well, it looks like James Joyce: Letters, 3 Volumes in 2 Books; Reissued Corrected Edition, the hardcover from 1966, is available on Amazon used starting at $344.50. Letters Home by Sylvia Plath is in print, so it’s only $18. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition is $21.95. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wasn’t exactly a novelist, but he did write more than 25 non-fiction books and win two Pulitzers, and somehow still found enough time to keep a diary for 48 years, published as Journals: 1952-2000 and marked down to $26.40 on Amazon from a cover price of $40.
I’m quoting the prices not because I think it’s meaningful that you have to pay so much for these letters and diary entries about, I’m sure, what Nixon had for lunch or that day Ted Hughes got mad about the dirty dishes, while you can buy any number of Robin Hobb trilogies for $7.99 per paperback. I’m just trying to point out that what these writers produced for free — the letters they sent to their friends and relatives, the personal diaries they probably showed to no one while they were alive — is now considered valuable enough to publish, to buy, and to read.
In other words, it’s “real writing.”
Oh, but no one would buy faeriegoddess88’s letters. You need a name like Nabokov on the cover. If it weren’t for Lolita and Pale Fire no one would give a shit about the damn letters. So you have to write the novels or the trenchant political histories for your, you know, blogging to be worth anything.
That may be true, but I don’t think it’s coincidence that these enormously brilliant and productive writers wrote enough letters and journal entries that they could be published in separate volumes. It’s not just that they clearly had time to write “for real” and “blog,” such that the “vampires of the postal service” could not prevent them from writing Ulysses and Ariel.
I think it’s that there’s more to writing than just the stuff you’re trying to sell. I think there’s a reason every writing teacher encourages students to keep a journal, to do freewriting to stir up ideas and limber up the muscles. I think there’s a reason writers in the pre-Internet age were also big letter-writers, like Raymond Chandler (Selected Letters and The Raymond Chandler Papers are, embarrassingly, yours for a fiver and change plus shipping).
This stuff is practice, and more than practice: it’s where ideas are born. “That is life,” Hobb says of blogging, “and we all have one.” She’s right about that: it’s just that some of us take the trouble to examine it, to find more than “the nonsense and drudgery of reality,” as only an escapist fantasy writer would put it.
And speaking of escapist fantasy, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien is $10.20 on Amazon. Meanwhile, Robin Hobb’s “rant,” “Vampires of the Internet,” rife with sentences just aching for blue pencil like “With a trembling finger, I double clicked my mouse to unfurl the missive upon my screen” — that’s available online for free.
Utterly.
Brilliant.
Made up 200% for that Dalek trash. This is easily the best episode they’ve done to date and probably one of the best in the entire series, going back to 1963. Why they waited till the third season to mine this vein is a mystery; maybe they needed the character to be fully established before they could hide him within himself.
That hiding — it’s a bit far-fetched, of course. But once you race past the fantasy science you’re good to go. It’s all a bit Seventh Doctor, but that’s only natural considering the source material, and though I was never very fond of that whole “make him a mystery again” idea (it culminated in some truly awful bullshit like that whole Lungbarrow thing) it’s fine here and it fits.
It’s a pleasure to see Martha doing this instead of Ace, who was never a favorite of mine. And to see the girl from Spaced, a brilliant comic actress, in such an adroit dramatic role, is icing on the cake.
The series can decline from here and circle the drain if that’s how it’s to be. This alone was worth it.
Why didn’t I buy Paul Cornell’s novel back in the day? Now the damn thing is out of print and sells for twice the cover price, at least.
March 8th, 2008 in
television |
No Comments
Funny how all it takes is one dog of a two-parter like this to puncture my swelling enthusiasm for this show. You’d think they could knock those out of the park, since they have the equivalent of four of the old-school episodes to develop the story and don’t have to rush it out in 45 minutes, but I guess when it’s as full of dumb, far-fetched ideas as this one, it doesn’t matter how long you have.
I can’t fault the ambition: it takes balls for an English company to do a story set in Manhattan in the 1930s. The accents weren’t as awful as I thought they’d be, though the boy from Tennessee couldn’t even stay consistent and Solomon was so obviously not a New Yorker.
But the plot was dopey from the start. Why pigs? Why not just docile humans? I guess the answer is that they were test runs for Dalek Sec’s transformation, but I never bought that any Dalek would ever do something like that, and I certainly never bought the resulting alteration of his personality. It just seems like a story idea someone thought would be cool, not one that made a lick of sense.
I mean, remember, they won the “Time War,” right? It wiped out most of them, but their main obstacle to survival is the Doctor. It’s not that they’re “not human enough.” Obviously I don’t agree with the Dalek philosophy, but there’s no way Sec’s experiment would advance it. We’d have to believe he had some secret motivation, but as far as I can see none was offered.
Fortunately this story did contain one element I like about the new season: every episode so far has featured at least a cameo by a super cute guy. They seem to either die or be turned into pigs pretty quickly, though, which kind of takes the fun away. And the story also contained almost all the elements I hate about the new series:
1. The Doctor’s magic wand sonic screwdriver. On the one hand, it makes sense for a guy like him to carry around a universal tool, a sort of super-Swiss-Army-knife. On the other, it doesn’t make sense that he can do freaking ANYTHING with it. It’s far more omnipotent than it was in the old series, and even then they destroyed it so that the Doctor would have to solve problems with his wits like everyone else. The thing needs limitations, badly.
2. Science that seems more like magic, which I guess is the same problem. The Daleks’ “genetic” techniques; gamma radiation delivered as a lightning strike (did I miss something there?); the Doctor’s ability to rig up a DNA testing machine out of some stage lights and the inside of a 1930s portable radio; it’s all, not to put too fine a point on it, pure bullshit. Of course the old show was never about hard SF either but at least they usually tried to make it seem vaguely possible. It’s obvious this lot just care about telling a fanciful story, which is good on some levels but when the motivations don’t make sense either, what’s the point?
3. The Doctor’s nigh-invulnerability. So far this season he’s had his blood drained (through a straw…don’t get me started), nearly asphyxiated, been voodooed by space witches (DON’T get me started), and now electrocuted by an obviously lethal dose of gamma radiation (see #2), and he just seems to get up and keep going with no explanation at all. In the past he would have mumbled something about a respiratory bypass system, or he would have freaking regenerated, but something tells me this Doctor could have survived a fall off the Empire State Building with nothing but a single tear falling on his cheek to revive him. Kind of relieves the tension when you know your main character can survive anything.
4. Martha mooning over the Doctor. Somehow it seemed natural with Rose; she seemed to have a few boundaries, or something. Martha’s fallen for him with one kiss and they’re hammering the romantic tension way too hard. So far I haven’t seen much about her that’s remarkable, and her family isn’t really in the picture so she doesn’t even have that dimension to keep her interesting.
I don’t know if I’m going to keep the DVD set I ordered. I certainly never want to watch this story again.
I’ll probably end up posting more commentary on encyclops.com soon, but okay, okay, I finally have warmed to the new Dr. Who.
I still think the plotting has a tendency toward great setups with incredibly stupid endings, but I’ve really begun to enjoy it. I’ve gotten through the first two seasons now and am a few episodes into the third, all of which I liked so much (except for some seriously uncalled-for scenery-chewing by the Racnoss Empress) that I’ve ordered the third season from Amazon rather than watching borrowed copies. I’ll probably get the other two eventually.
I miss Rose, and I miss the characters associated with her, Jackie, Mickey, and even her alternate-universe dad. I thought the romance angle was questionable at first but it got to the point where I didn’t mind at all and kind of liked it. I wasn’t sure how I’d warm to Martha, but so far she’s just fine, if a little nondescript. She carries on the fine-booty tradition from Rose, too, which was never part of the appeal of the show for me before (well, almost never).
I can see why people liked Chris Eccleston. He was entertaining, and he didn’t look like an explosion in a fabric store, which must have helped to broaden the show’s appeal along with the slightly improved effects budget. And when he said he was gonna fuck somebody up, you believed he meant it. This was really a new thing for the Doctor, who in the past usually seemed to get through everything by the skin of his teeth. He carried off that “alien” quality well, and the edge we’d never associated with the character before.
I guess what bothered me about him was that he just didn’t quite seem like the same guy, even taking into account his post-traumatic stress. His leather-jacket-and-jeans outfit seemed more like the production team’s choice than the Doctor’s. His catchphrase “Fantastic!” really wasn’t. Something about him just didn’t fit. He could have been the Doctor’s little brother, maybe, but not quite the Doctor I grew up watching. It wasn’t too jarring; any sufficiently nerdy fan (me, for instance) could easily justify all of the choices made. But it distanced me a bit from the show — that and some of the lamer stories.
Some of the second season stories seemed even lamer, which killed my interest in the show for a while despite the fact that the new Doctor, David Tennant, was in my opinion perfect casting. In place of the catchphrase, we now had a motormouth comedian, which at first seemed corny but quickly became endearing, and his look and manner seemed a lot more the Doctor to me. But the great setup / weak ending thing was driving me nuts.
The finale to the second season was probably what hooked me again, though. It’s hard to believe any Doctor Who writing team could have pulled off a story with Daleks and Cybermen, but they did, and even though there’s a lot of disbelief to suspend in the resolution (and along the way: you mean to tell me that there were Cybermen and Daleks all over the world and we didn’t see them shoot anyone outside the Torchwood building?), it’s entertaining enough that I just didn’t care.
And it didn’t hurt that over the course of the season, Tennant just kept shining. I’m not ready to say I like him even better than Tom Baker. But I’m getting there.
So here’s hoping the strong (if perennially implausible) stories that started off this season continued; otherwise I’m going to be very disappointed in my reinvestment in one of my biggest, geekiest childhood obsessions.