A to Z: Elphaba

There's a certain subgenre in which existing, famous stories are retold from the inside-out. I'm not sure what this genre might be called, but when it's done well, it can be a lot of fun. There's a great example in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "Tribbles and Tribulations", which has the DS9 crew time-travel back so they are actually inside the events of the TOS episode "The Trouble with Tribbles". The second Back to the Future movie does this as well. And then there's the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

For these kinds of stories to work, the original story has to be fairly well-known, so the audience can notice when the events of the original are shown, but with the shift in point-of-view. One of the most famous recent examples of this kind of meta-story is the book Wicked (and its sequels), and its subsequent Broadway adaptation. It gives us The Wizard of Oz, from one possible viewpoint of the Wicked Witch of the West, whose name is revealed to be Elphaba. So there's our 'E'!

I haven't read the books, so my only acquaintance with this character comes via the show, which I saw last year and blogged about here. Wicked, the show, takes sufficient liberties with the characters and the original story that I can't honestly say that I'll be thinking of that tale lurking in the corners next time I watch The Wizard of Oz. But as a meta-story, it's a lot of fun, and in providing a sympathetic Elphaba, we get a good illustration that we're all the heroes of our own stories. The really memorable villains aren't always the ones who act the most evil, but rather the ones who are genuinely committed to their own causes and who really believe themselves to be on the side of the righteous.

Here's Elphaba and Glinda in the big Act One showstopper, "Defying Gravity" (embedding disabled). Elphaba is played by Idina Menzel, and Glinda by Kristen Chenoweth. (Menzel had apparently suffered an asthma attack minutes before going onstage to do this, which is why her breathing in this performance is so pronounced.)

Trivia: Elphaba's name came about by sounding out L. Frank Baum's initials.

Yet another reason why I really like this President

And wow, does Nichelle Nichols still look great or what!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

So last week, I asked what your favorite mountain is. Sticking with geographic features, what's your favorite river?

A to Z: Diana

So, now we have Diana. But not this one:





No, that would be too easy. We're going with this one!



Yes, it's Diana from V, V: The Final Battle, and the series V that lasted only a single season on NBC back in the 1980s. Diana was the show's main villain, and she was truly rotten to the core. Played with relish by Jane Badler, Diana never had, to my recollection, so much as a second of repentance or any kind of flash of good behavior. No Darth Vader-esque deathbed conversion for her; Diana was the show's Hitler. (Although that's probably not the best analogy, since she was a military leader and not a head of state.)

Here's Diana being all evil and stuff:



In retrospect, I'm not sure how well V holds up. The central SF-nal premise is deeply silly; these aliens have come from across the Galaxy to steal all of Earth's water, under the notion that water is a very rare commodity. Even given that it was the early 1980s, I think we knew at that point that water was more common than that; just a couple of years later, Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two made a key plot point out of the enormous amounts of water ice on Europa. It's just awfully hard to believe that these aliens can build interstellar FTL starships that are three miles in diameter, but can't figure out how to feed their people or come up with water.

And the characters are pretty much all stock characters, every one of them, right down to Diana, who could be a fascinating character to explore – what would the aliens' ethics be, that they're perfectly willing to slaughter a sentient species for food? Alas, this is never explored, in favor of action and derring-do. Which is all pretty fun to watch, it must be admitted. Diana herself is as one-dimensional as villains get. She doesn't even get to seem terribly intelligent; her main defining traits seem to be visceral loathing for humans and utter ruthlessness in getting what she wants.

But she's still really memorable, at least for me, because Jane Badler played her wonderfully.

Stop that, George.

OK. I'm about a quarter of the way through A Feast for Crows on the re-read, and of course, I'll have more to say about it when I'm done. But I've just read the chapter featuring Asha Greyjoy, and got smacked in the face with this (A 'maester' is a man who has undergone a high degree of formal education, so an 'archmaester' is an extremely learned man, in service to a King or Lord.):

Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.

Fantasy readers will be put in mind of The Wheel of Time, the long fantasy series mostly written by Robert Jordan...which is a pseudonym for a writer named James Oliver Rigney. Really, GRRM? A damned in-joke? GAHHHH!!!

(No, it's not a big deal, but it did throw me right out of the story.)

Where does she keep the gun when she's not pointing it at stuff?

Espionage-Mystery Paperback (15), originally uploaded by retro-space.

And wait...diamonds are deadly? I thought they were forever. But then, death is forever. So:

Diamonds are Deadly
Death is Forever
therefore:
Diamonds are Forever

I wonder what other adventures our white-booted, revolver-pointing spy vixen had!

A to Z: Clint Howard

OK, we're going with an actor here rather than a character or thing, but let's be real here: Ron Howard's younger brother Clint is, in addition to being one of the hardest working character actors anywhere, an absolute fixture in F&SF movies and, more generally, in geek culture. I mean, the guy has been in, as near as I can tell, just about everything. I mean, just go look at his filmography. It's astonishing how much stuff he's been in, and he's always so professional about it.

You want to know how cool Clint Howard is? In 1998 he was given MTV's Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Movie Awards. Now, this award was considered something of a spoof award, but when they gave it to Howard, it was an actual honor – so much so that they retired the award after he got it. Isn't that a hell of a thing!

So here's to you, Clint Howard. Geek culture and F&SF fandom would be poorer for your absence!








(That's Clint Howard, as a kid, voicing the child elephant.)

Finally, I can't embed this one, but it's a pretty funny send-up of movies like Armageddon, where early on the experts have to brief the President and use some handy metaphors to convey the direness of the situation.

Bravo, Clint Howard!

Extruded Aaron Sorkin Product #19

Here's a teaser-trailer thing for the new show Aaron Sorkin's writing for HBO, about...a news anchor. I honestly can't fathom why anyone still thinks Sorkin is a genius. Watch this and tell me it doesn't sound exactly like every other thing he's ever done.



Right there, in two minutes, is nearly every single annoying Sorkinism that exists. Ugh.

A to Z in April: Bib Fortuna

Continuing our alphabetical trek through the highways and byways and Fantasy and Science Fiction, here's a very minor character from Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Bib Fortuna is the chief servant of Jabba the Hutt, to whom falls the duty of being Jabba's main assistant and, I suppose, major domo.

Now, Return of the Jedi strongly implies that Jabba is an angry sort who tends to go through menial servants at a high rate. The only reason C-3PO is able to fill a job opportunity for Personal Interpreter to Jabba the Hutt is that Jabba reacted angrily to something his last interpreter had told him, and killed him. Bummer. Jabba is also given to torturing his droids in medieval ways, which seems kind of extreme, but what are you gonna do, right? Good help is hard to find.

However, in the Pod Race sequence in The Phantom Menace, we clearly see Bib Fortuna at Jabba's side, which means that by the time of ROTJ, Fortuna has been serving Jabba for at least 23 years or so. This implies several possibilities:

One: Bib Fortuna is really good at his job.

Two: Bib Fortuna is OK at his job, but really good at not pissing off Jabba.

Three: Jabba isn't as quick to murderous rage as he's made out to be.

Now, the third seems the least likely. Not only are we told that he's disintegrating his interpreter because he doesn't like what he was told, he also tosses poor Oola into the Rancor pit when she resists his 'charms'. And he does seem to keep a rather extensive catalog of Ways To Kill Individuals Horribly around, doesn't he? He's got a medieval torture chamber for droids, a Rancor, and for a really special execution, he's willing to whisk his entire court off to the Dune Sea for a game of Feed-the-Sarlacc.

We can probably also rule out Number Two, because of the sheer length of time involved. Jabba really does seem to have a fairly short fuse, and he seems to view death as the proper punishment for all transgressions (unless carbon freezing happens to be involved, but remember, that wasn't his idea). So I have to conclude that Number One is the case, and that Bib Fortuna may be the greatest single major domo in the history of science fiction. Too bad, then, that he died on Jabba's Sail Barge...

...or did he? Hmmmmm!

(Actually, according to Bib Fortuna's entry in Wookieepedia, it's a combination of One and Two, and he did get off the Sail Barge and go on to live a long life of crime! Check it out, it's interesting reading, if you're in any way interested in 'Expanded Universe' stuff.)

Sentential Links

Time for links...but first, minx! Or rather, the soundtrack to an adult film called The Minx. Now there's something I never knew about film music. (No, the link is not safe for work. Ye Gods!)

:: So I decided that he was going to have to pay what I call "Get-A-Clue Tax". So I took his three dollars to the local bookstore and put it towards getting Nalini Singh's latest book because, well, her Guild Hunter series is my guilty pleasure. Not to mention that taking a clueless white dude's money and using it to buy a book by an awesome woman of color writer was the sweetest possible justice I could think of. (The older I get, the more I see that no matter how obviously bad a given idea is, there's someone out there who thinks it's a great idea. The guy in this story deserved a lot worse than he got.)

:: Long time readers of this blog understand my hate and mistrust of the cephalopod - your octopus, your squids, your cuttlefish, your assorted tentacled beasties that inhabit the cold and dark of our oceans. I welcome any opportunity to inform new readers of the true danger these boneless freaks pose to our civilization. (Pagh. They're cute and harmless. I, for one, welcome our new cephalopod overlords!)

:: So April is going to be a time for me to write about who I know I am to help me figure out where to go next. (A fellow A-to-Z challenge blogger.)

:: "It was a pleasure and a hell of an evening, surely was our night to win". I think of these lines every time I've had a great night doing anything especially gambling. The American and African became friends for a night and who knows, maybe always. (Another A-to-Z Challenger, who is focusing on Jimmy Buffett songs. I'm already liking this challenge.)

:: April Fool's Day seems ideal for Daffy Duck as the swashbuckling Scarlet Pumpernickel, something of a cross between Zorro and Percy Blakeney. Familiar characters and zany ending aside, it's not a bad little genre tale. (Yet another!)

:: I am not sure if I will ever kill that afterhours woman within me. Maybe my soul has always been a night owl. Maybe I will be able to one day train myself into a daytime person and put these afterhours writing party aside. Until then I will write as much as I can at night and pray that Jose (the hubby to be) will continue to be understanding, as he has been to date. (Still another. Challenges like this really give the lie to the notion that blogging is dying!)

:: “Dickensian” names is a bit of a slippery category — something to do with meter, with allusions to King James or Victorian English, and with a delightful mix of concrete nouns and sheer whimsy. The standard I’m using here is extremely subjective — can I imagine a character in a Dickens story having that name?

:: But again, not one of these details can actually explain the success of the film. It’s just one of those times when magic happened. Lightning is captured in a bottle. You can’t set out to make such a film, although, of course, everyone tries. But sometimes it happens when you are looking the other way. (A wonderful post by Sheila O'Malley about Casablanca, which compelled me to comment thusly:

I can never get over Casablanca for the sheer accidental nature of its greatness. So much art is meticulously crafted, labored over with exquisite care, pored over by its creator until he or she feels that every note, or word, or brushstroke, or frame is in its perfect place…and then along comes Casablanca, with its script still being written while shot, with its ending determined by sudden epiphany, and then that ending not even working until someone figures out how to edit it together…I just can’t get over that. A movie about the making of Casablanca couldn’t possibly seem anything other than contrived — “Those two producers, suddenly looking at each other and shouting, ‘Round up the usual suspects’! Give me a break, like that would ever happen!!!” And yet, it did. Wow.

I’ve always liked Roger Ebert’s view that Casablanca doesn’t have its greatest impact until you watch it the second time. I can attest to that…I enjoyed it well enough the first time, but when I watched it again, six months later, the thing just shattered me. I then watched it every single Sunday afternoon for six weeks. Movies like Casablanca are one of the only reasons I find death fearsome: I don’t want to enter a state where I can never see Casablanca again.

More next week!

An open letter to CASTLE

(Welcome to new visitors arriving via this post! Castle is one of few shows that I genuinely look forward to watching each week, which is why I'm invested enough to write this. I can only assume that the same applies to anyone who reads this all the way through!)

Oh, Castle. Castle, Castle, Castle. I think it's time for someone to stage an intervention.

I've loved you since your first airing, and you know what? I still love you now. You're a wonderful show. You're witty and fun. You have two killer leads in Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic, and the chemistry between these two is so charged that you could probably light a few city blocks with it. But you're not content to stop there; you've surrounded those two with a terrific supporting cast, between Detective Beckett's associate cops Ryan and Esposito, Castle's family (his mother and daughter), the no-nonsense medical examiner, and two successive precinct Captains who are committed, intelligent professionals. You have intriguing murder mysteries with cool circumstances, many of which have twists and turns to make things not completely obvious. And then you mix things up with changes to your formula, such as a great episode that had Castle and his mother being held captive inside a bank by armed robbers, or another one that had Castle and Beckett drawn into national security stuff. And despite setting a murder mystery show in New York City, you don't make that city look like the grim, murderer-around-every-corner place that other cop shows that have gone before have featured.

So yeah, Castle, I still love you.

But...there are clouds on your horizon, and you need to do something about them. Not sometime. Not in a while. Not a little bit at a time. Now.

Part of the problem is the nature of teevee today. You see, you can't just be like shows used to be and engage in very little continuity, if any at all, from one episode to the next. You can't do that these days. Audiences are used to arcs and long-term stories and "mythologies". You can't do like Star Trek used to do and have every week's mission be wrapped up and never mentioned again in subsequent weeks. No, now you have to acknowledge that James T. Kirk is a mess for some time after he has to stand by and let Edith Keeler die. And you get this, which is why you've given a reason for Beckett's having become a cop in the first place: her mother was brutally murdered, and the crime was never solved. And along comes this mystery writer who can't resist a mystery.

But these days, you also can't wrap up your mythologies too early, can you? No, they have to be strung along for multiple seasons. But you never know if you're going to have next season, so what do you do? You try to find ways to make those mythologies last, and last, and last. So we have a situation where every time Castle and Beckett manage to peel back the curtain over her mother's death, all that's revealed is...another curtain. That's fine for a season or two. Maybe three. A fourth, and it starts to get annoying. A fifth season of this? I'm sorry, Castle, but as good as the stand-alone episodes are, if the murder of Beckett's mother keeps resisting a solution, it's just going to get annoying. You are in danger of wandering into X-Files territory.

Maybe a lot of people don't recall it, since The X-Files ended up collapsing under its own weight (especially once the actors started getting noticeably irritated and the best writers moved on), but there was a time – seasons three, four, and five, mostly – when the 'mytharc' episodes were actual events that fans looked forward to. That wore off, though, because it became clear that every time the show got renewed, the mytharc would be stretched upon the rack even more. I fear that's what's happening with you, Castle, and it's getting difficult to watch. You haven't done much with Beckett's quest this season, but the final arc of the season is coming. Will it bring a solution? God, I hope so. But I'm afraid it won't.

That's not even the biggest problem you're facing, though. And this is where I am really concerned. See, along with the slow progress of Beckett's quest, you've had the slowly simmering romance between Castle and Beckett. And that's where you're starting to show signs of overseasoning the soup, as they say. It's like you've had this soup going on the stove, in a big pot. And you've thrown in wonderful ingredients: some garlic here, some onion there. A bit of beef stock, thickened with a roux. Chunks of stew meat. Potatoes. And so on...but now that the thing's been simmering for several hours and the bowls await, you're still throwing stuff in there. Hmmm...some okra! Maybe some terragon! Here's a pinch of saffron! There's a teaspoon of Korean chili sauce! And so on. Meanwhile, the guests are filling up on bread. And no one wants to fill up on bread.

I know, I know. It's 'Will they or won't they'. Problem is, you've long since gone past the point of 'Will they or won't they', because now, the way you've written these two characters, you've made it clear that there is absolutely no way that they can not end up together and still have that be in any way satisfying. It just can't happen. And you know what? That is absolutely fine. When you create two characters who clearly must be together, then it's fine to get them together. You have to. And why not? You know how many crappy romances I've seen that tried so hard to convince me that two boring characters really belonged together? You've done something rare here, folks. You've created two interesting, three-dimensional characters who are obviously supposed to be together. Stop screwing around, already.

Again, I know, I know. Everybody will throw that old piece of shit from the 1980s, Moonlighting, in your face. Everyone will point out how that show lost all its steam and went down the tubes once its two leads finally slept together. What no one will remember is that the sexual tension between those two was the only interesting thing about them, so when that was gone, so were they. David and Maddie were like when you strike up a conversation with someone who happens to share a passionate interest in something that you have a passionate interest in, something you'd despaired of ever seeing that same passion in anyone else again...and yet, after you talk a while about your shared passion, you discover that you have exactly zero interests in common other than that one thing. So please, Castle, don't take any cautionary tales from Moonlighting. You are orders of magnitude a better show than that one was. I have faith that you are good enough writers that you can keep these two people interesting and engaging even after they end up together.

So I'm genuinely perplexed by the developments in your most recent episode, "47 Seconds".

This was a very underwritten episode. First of all, the mystery itself was not terribly engaging. I enjoyed the cat-and-mouse detective stuff, and I liked the eventual scenario that unfolded that resulted in that tragic bombing you depicted. That was good...but about five minutes in, I was wondering, "Is no one intrigued that somehow this reporter has managed to set herself up in the exact right spot to have her camera going when the bomb detonates?" That wasn't handled very well.

I also was not bothered at all, as was my friend SamuraiFrog, at the way the romantic developments in this episode were driven by a nasty bombing. That struck me as a real response, a human response; tragedies like that bombing do tend to make people rethink, at least for a time, their own approach to the things in their own lives that they value. Again, I'm fine with that. Really. So what was my problem?

My problem is that you, my beloved Castle, took an approach to the Castle-Beckett romance in this episode that does not belong on this show. Your approach, as evidenced here, belongs more on one of the greatest tributes to Cheesy Romance ever, and one which appeared on your own network thirty years ago. I'm talking, of course, about The Love Boat.

You remember The Love Boat. Each episode was an hour long, and would follow a few couples while they went on a cruise. The formula was pretty rigid. In the first act of the show (each show had four acts), couples would meet somehow. In the second act, they'd spend time together and start falling in love. In the third act, there would be a Big Complication – one would discover something about the other, and they'd spend the next chunk of cruise moping about the boat. And then, in act four, usually they'd figure out the way past their problem and leave the boat as a couple. Now, sometimes the show would break formula by having couples fail, but usually, this is the way things went about. And lots of times, the third act 'problem' was there just because it was structurally required to be there – otherwise there's no happy final kiss in the fourth act, and we can't just follow a happy couple around the ship for twenty minutes, can we? So we'd get the Romantic Comedy version of the 'Idiot Plot'.

An 'Idiot Plot' is where the characters are kept precisely as dumb as they need to be in order for the story to be as long as it has been predetermined to be. Remember the West Wing episode called "The Stackhouse Filibuster", the one where everyone in the White House is just wandering around all flummoxed because nobody can figure out why some old fart Senator is filibustering a bill until finally Donna Moss, a junior staffer, both figures out what he's up to and happens to be the only person in the White House well-versed enough in Senate procedure to figure out what to do next? That's an Idiot Plot. Smart characters are made to act stupid by a script that requires them to be stupid until a certain point. Or, for another example, virtually every episode of Three's Company ever made. Thus we have dumb misunderstandings that just go on and on because characters can never just say, "Hey, can we talk a minute about something that's bugging me?"

"Sure."

"OK. The other day, you said this:_______. What was with that? Because I was thinking, ______"

"Oh! You're misunderstanding me. What I really meant was _____, so we're fine."

"Oh, OK! Great."

So what did you do, Castle? First, you had Castle's mother tell him that it's time to, as it were, 'shit or get off the pot'. "Stop finding reasons to not tell Beckett how you feel. Just do it. And if she doesn't feel the same way, move on."

Which Castle does. Except we have to have the lamest damn thing in the book: Just as Castle gets halfway through the sentence "Kate, there's something I've been meaning to tell you," or however he phrased it, someone else comes along to interrupt. Really? That kind of tease? That may have worked when this romance was fresher, but not now. These two people have been through too much together, and been too much for each other, to have such a lame rom-com event happen. That's bad enough, but it's also dumb. Castle knows there's a huge case going on, so why is he thinking to have this conversation at Beckett's desk in the middle of the precinct house? Why, so he can get to the brink and then have someone come up and say, "Hey we got a break! Captain's waiting!"

See? Idiot plot.

And it got worse.

Castle gets to the precinct later on, after Beckett has already started interviewing a suspect. He's claiming amnesia because the event was so horrific, and as Castle looks on through the one-way window, Beckett says, "Last year I got shot in the chest and I remember every detail of what happened."

And Castle gets angry. You see, when she'd been shot, Castle had whispered to Beckett that he loves her...only to have her later claim, after surgery, that she didn't remember anything...although she would later admit to her therapist that she did. And you know what? That actually made some sense. That's the worst part. There had just been some major developments in the case of her mother's shooting. Her Captain had just been discovered to have involvement, and he'd been killed on account of that case. And Kate got shot at his funeral, by a sniper. She would later suffer PTSD over all this. Beckett had a lot going on, and it's completely reasonable that she wouldn't have felt up to dealing with her feelings for Castle at that time. Believe me, I get it.

And I also get why Castle was angry when he learned that she remembered. Believe me, I get that, too. He's thought all along that he's closer to her than just about anybody else, and to discover that she's kept something so big from him has to have hit him hard. I get that, too, and I get why he left angry. These were totally believable developments and totally believable reactions.

But.

Castle goes and tells his mother about this, and as noted above, she's always been his voice of reason. So, please oh please, explain to me how this awful exchange could happen?!

MARTHA: She isn’t dead.

CASTLE: She might as well be. I really thought we could have a future together. You know, I was– I was willing to wait… Turns out it’s all just a big joke. She knew. This whole time, she remembered. And she didn’t say anything… because she was embarrassed because she doesn’t feel the same way. I’m such a fool.

MARTHA: Well c’mon. Let’s go home. Break out some of the good stuff, okay?

CASTLE: Well I’d love to. I’ve got to be getting back.

MARTHA: Back? Why on Earth would you go back, knowing how she feels, knowing that she lied to you–

CASTLE: No, no, no. This isn’t about her. This is– this is about them. You know? It’s about doing something real. Something that matters. I’m not willing to let that go.

MARTHA: Richard, love is not a switch. You can’t just turn it off. You can’t work side by side with her and not feel anything.

CASTLE: Watch me.

Really? Really?!

Come on. It's bad enough that you're going to have Castle and Beckett act like doofs. But now you have to drag Martha down, too? Because what she should have said is:

MARTHA: She isn’t dead.

CASTLE: She might as well be. I really thought we could have a future together. You know, I was– I was willing to wait… Turns out it’s all just a big joke. She knew. This whole time, she remembered. And she didn’t say anything… because she was embarrassed because she doesn’t feel the same way. I’m such a fool.

MARTHA: Oh, for God's sake, Richard. You've had three marriages and Detective Beckett's never had a relationship last more than eight minutes because she's so busy being a cop. I ought to knock your heads together.

CASTLE: Mother, I don't think you--

MARTHA: Be quiet, Richard. Just be quiet. That woman had just found out that her mother's killer is still out there and harder to get than she ever thought possible, she'd just buried her Captain and mentor, then she'd just been shot and on top of all that, had you tell her that you loved her! And that was before the months of recovery from emergency heart surgery and post-traumatic stress! And you watched the woman you love get shot.

CASTLE: Uh--

MARTHA: My point, Richard, is that neither of you is going to win any awards for emotional stability or maturity. But this isn't a disaster. You don't know what she feels. You're not a mind-reader. You STILL NEED TO TALK TO HER. Until then, this moping is no better than when you were ten and I wouldn't buy you that bike.

CASTLE: Or when you didn't get that part. Last month.

MARTHA: We're not talking about me, darling.

And then, instead of Pouty Castle and Confused Kate, the episode should have closed out with the case getting solved, and then, at the very end, something like this:

BECKETT: Would you like to go for a drink?

CASTLE: I'd love to. But first...I just have to ask something.

BECKETT: Sure, what?

CASTLE: I actually heard some of your questioning, with that suspect. He tried claiming amnesia, and you said that you got shot...and that you remember everything from that day.

Beckett is silent.

CASTLE: I guess I'm wondering...if you really remember....

There's no question what he's referring to.

BECKETT: I remember it.

There's no question what she's referring to, either.

CASTLE: So I'm wondering...where do we go from here?

BECKETT: For that drink? To talk about it?

CASTLE: Are you ready to talk about it?

BECKETT: I don't know, Castle...but I'm kind of tired of not being ready to talk about it, if you know what I mean.

CASTLE: Yeah, I think I do. [beat] So...we try to talk about it and see where it goes?

Beckett's eyes are wide. This is uncharted territory for her.

BECKETT: Yes.

Castle steps aside and gestures 'Ladies first', and she leads him to the elevator. Both look apprehensive as the doors slide closed...they can't go back, now.

That would have been an honest way, a real way, to deal with this. But instead, you gave us a deeply bizarre thing where Castle decides that he's going to act all professional and disengaged. His mother asks, "Can you work alongside Beckett and not care?" And Castle says, "Watch me." But even so, he manages to say things, here and there, in Beckett's presence, that allude to what's eating him, and she notices that something's up. When the case ends, she invites everyone out for a drink, but Ryan and Esposito have to get home; Beckett says, "I guess it's just us," and Castle just says, "Yeah, I'm going home, too." And he does, giving her one last scowl before the elevator closes between them.

Seriously, Castle, what the ever-loving HELL is that?!

Here's what I'm thinking. Here's what I'm hoping, anyway. You know that you've got to put these two together at some point. You just have to. There's no way you've created this show and not realized it at this point. But you're also thinking in terms of the teevee season, which means that your Big Events can only happen in the first couple weeks of a season, or during November, February, and May sweeps. That's it. Which means that you've decided that (a) you can't have your Big Development until the season finale, and (b) you have to build up to it over several episodes.

And what does that mean? Well, in the preview for next episode, we have Beckett talking to Laney about whether it's time for her to open up...and meanwhile, Castle is cavorting around with some bimbo-of-the-week. Instead of having these two wonderful characters behave in a way that is true to themselves, you've turned them into plot devices in a damned Love Boat style romance, and the next three or four episodes are going to be the equivalent of the third act of a Love Boat episode, when our two romantic leads are moping around and talking sadly to Isaac over their daiquiri's. So instead of doing something natural and organic and character-driven, you're forcing these two characters in whom lots of viewers (including me, you dips!) have a lot of investment to serve as cogs in a machined plot than as people. And that, ultimately, may be deeply damaging.

Of course, the next episodes are already written and mostly shot, I assume, so by the time I'm writing this, the damage is either done or in the process of being done. So I'll end by expressing my hope that this dropping of the ball is a momentary aberration, a deviation from the norm; and my fervent desire that you'll get back to letting your characters determine what happens, and forget about letting the nature of the teevee season force you into delaying what really should be happening now.

And really: if you're all gunshy because of Moonlighting, for God's sake, stop that. You're better than Moonlighting. Act like it!

Love,
Your (not at all creepy) Number One Fan.

A to Z in April: Adama!

So I'm launching yet another series, this one called the "A to Z Challenge". The idea is pretty clear: write posts every day in a Month (excluding Sundays, excepting from that instances like today, when the first of the month falls on Sunday). I, of course, do post on Sundays, so this challenge may well guarantee that something fresh will appear on this blog every day this month. And who doesn't want that!

So I'm doing this A-to-Z thing, and I've decided to give it a Fantasy and Science Fiction turn, as is my wont. So each entry in this series will take its inspiration from something or someone from F&SF, that starts with the respective letter of the day.

Thus we start with Adama, the Commander of the Battlestar Galactica.

Of course, we've had not one but two Adamas. The first one was played by Lorne Greene:

And then, in the remake of Battlestar Galactica from the 2000s, Commander Adama was played by Edward James Olmos:

Now, I'm at a small disadvantage because I haven't yet watched very much of BSG 2003. In fact, I've watched barely any of it – all I've seen is the three-hour pilot movie, which I am actually currently re-watching as a prelude to watching the entire series. But I think I've seen enough of the Olmos Adama to make a small bit of comparison.

Both men are older, somewhat weary starship commanders who might well be at the twilight of their careers when the Cylons, humanity's ancient enemy race of androids, launches a devastating attack that destroys the human homeworld and most of its remaining star fleet. Humanity is quickly rendered unable to stand and fight, and must instead flee in a desperate journey across the galaxy for a destination that may or may not be there. That destination? The fabled 'Thirteenth Colony', called 'Earth'. So, Commander Adama not only has to rise to the occasion as a military leader; he must also be a political one, as he, his ship, and his crew are pretty much the only thing standing between the rest of humanity and the Cylon forces striving to kill them all off.

I've always dug this story set-up. It's a nifty premise that can go a lot of ways, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it shapes up in the remake series. The earlier version, made with great fanfare in 1978 but canceled after one season because the ratings, while decent, weren't sufficient to make the show cost-effective, was heavily steeped in Mormon lore and mythology; I expect that the mystical angle is downplayed in the remake series for a more character-driven SF drama. So it is that the later Adama seems to be a more three-dimensional individual than the earlier, Lorne Greene Adama.

Greene played Adama as a noble father figure who was often a source of wisdom to his crew. Olmos captures some of that, but his Adama is more flawed. He is tired and weary and, as the show begins, on the verge of retirement when the Cylons strike. Lorne Greene's Adama is rarely seen anywhere but the bridge or his quarters, and I don't recall ever seeing him out of uniform. This contrasts with Olmos's Adama, who is in his dark, cramped quarters wearing only a t-shirt when his phone rings with the news that the Cylons have attacked. Adama sighs and says, "I'll be right there." But when the grim situation becomes clear, he is able to shake off his haze and take command in a forceful way.

There are also hints of future conflicts to come, which were not always in evidence in Galactica 1978. Greene's Adama must also serve as de facto Head of State, but Adama is confronted by an actual Head of State: the Secretary of Education, who, as the only surviving member of the Cabinet, has just ascended to the Presidency of the Twelve Colonies. There is also conflict between the Olmos Adama and his son, Captain Apollo, whereas there wasn't much conflict at all between the Greene Adama and his son Apollo. As the remake series dawns, the Adamas have not spoken much since the death of other son Zack. In BSG 1978, we see Zack die and we see the two Adamas commiserate over it.

Lorne Greene brought to the original BSG the gravitas that the show needed. So far, Olmos seems to be doing the same. So which Adama is my favorite? I don't know yet. But we'll see!

(By the way, the original Battlestar Galactica series is often derided as being a post-Star Wars bit of genre bandwagoning, and to be sure, the show probably never would have been picked up by ABC if not for Star Wars. But creator Glen Larson was kicking the idea around the networks much earlier in the 1970s, and really, the show holds up a lot better than many seem to think. It's got its cheesy 1970s elements, yes, but it is not crappy teevee by any means. If you haven't watched it, check it out. You may be pleasantly surprised!)

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Major highlights in the history of Space Opera. I can quibble about some of these, but it's a cool little summation of my favorite genre-within-a-genre.

:: Apparently there are characters in The Hunger Games (the book) who are specifically described as being dark-skinned...and some readers who don't seem to be enamored of black people either didn't realize this or didn't notice it, so when those characters showed up onscreen as dark-skinned, well...hilarity ensued. In a pretty depressing way.

That's all I got for this week. More next, with hope! Stay weird and awesome, Internet!

Rating my Geekdom

A person named Hal Hefner has come up with a list of twenty things every SF Nerd must have (physically or emotionally):

So you think you’re a NERD. Not the kind of nerd that would hang out with Lamar and Booger and the other Tri-Lams–BUT a REAL Sci-Fi NERD. Whell let’s just how how nerdy you really are. Below is a little checklist of 20 Things Every Sci-Fi Nerd Should Own To Earn, physically as well as emotionally. If you “own” at least twelve of these twenty things, you are entitled to your SCI-FI Nerd Badge.

So -- setting aside the fact that I personally prefer the term 'geek' to 'nerd' -- let's see how I stack up!

1) Conan The Barbarian Soundtrack

Yes. This is an interesting pick, and well-chosen: it's just obscure enough that it's not going to be a mainstream thing that anyone outside of Geek Culture will own, but it's good enough that one can reasonably say, "Yes, you should own this if you like film music/fantasy film music/cult classic stuff." Whatever flaws that movie may have had, the Basil Poledouris's wonderful score isn't one of them. (I only wish it had been recorded better. The string sound on the score is thin and treble-heavy.)

2) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Sigh. I own nothing by Phillip K. Dick. This is not good. I accept the demerit here.

3) The Twilight Zone Collection:

I don't own it. But I do have a number of options for watching TZ, both online and via my local library. So I'm counting it.

4) The Original Star Wars Trilogy – WITHOUT ANY ADDED CRAP

Yes, I own it. On VHS. Which I can't watch, because we don't have a VHS player anymore. And I likely wouldn't bother anyway. I'm just not that invested in the idea of preserving the 1977 Star Wars experience in amber. Lucas's additions in later years just don't add up to enough to offend me. (And at this point, I wouldn't care if Han had never shot at all and Greedo had died when he got struck by a blowdart fired by a Jawa who missed his target and hit Greedo instead. I'm so sick of the "Han shot first!" whining and the conceit that changing a single two-second event somehow alters his character at the molecular level.)

5) A Profound Hatred for Star Trek Enterprise

I don't have a profound hatred for Enterprise. I do, however, have a profound apathy about it. I don't plan to ever watch it. By the time Enterprise came along, I was Trekked out. I would like to rewatch all of TOS, TNG, and DS9. But that's about it.

6) The Lord of The Rings Extended Edition, The Soundtracks and all of the books

What is 'all of the books'? I own three copies of LOTR, two of The Hobbit (including the annotated edition), and two of The Silmarillion. Do I also have to own all of the "History of Middle Earth" books and the various Tolkien collections and every other piece of Tolkien arcana that's come out in the last twenty years? I don't, but I'm counting myself good on this one, anyway.

7) A Profound Sadness for the Way Battlestar Galactica Ended

I just started watching BSG last week! As I'm only ninety minutes (the first half of the pilot telemovie) in, I'll have to hold this one in abeyance.

8 ) A Passionately Favorite Version of the REAL Doctor Who

I'm not nearly educated enough on Doctor Who to have a solid opinion. But the first Doctor I ever watched was Peter Davison, whom I liked just fine. I need to watch more, though. Much more. (Also liked Tom Baker, as I saw some of him, too.)

9) A Fear That Will Smith Will Someday Star in The Movie Adaptation of Your Favorite Book

No, but I don't know how Smith could appear in a movie of The Lions of Al-Rassan. I don't recall any black people in that book. Maybe he could be a particularly dark-skinned Asharite. Hmmmm. Anyway, I don't hate Will Smith.

10) Toys from Your Childhood That You Refuse To Part With

I don't have anything from my childhood, save a nesting doll that's around here someplace. I do, though, have toys that I acquired in adulthood that I wanted as a kid. That counts!

11) The Belief that the Word Midichlorian Was Just from a Nightmare and NOT a real Star Wars Movie

I don't have a problem in principle with midichlorians; I reject the notion that midichlorians represent a shift from the Force as 'mystical magic' to something 'scientific'. What bothers me about them is that there's no real story reason for them.

12) The Original TRON Movie

Yup! Have it and love it. (I also seem to be in the minority of folks who loved TRON Legacy.)

13) An affection for the TV show Firefly

Oh, yes. I have this in spades. Firefly is just amazingly wonderful.

14) A Hatred for Chris O’Donnell

Meh. I didn't mind him in Batman Forever (the Val Kilmer one), and the problems with Batman and Robin went a lot deeper than casting. O'Donnell's just kind of there for me. I had a harder time with him as D'Artagnan than I did with him as Robin. (And even that didn't bother me too much.)

15) You Know Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

Absolutely!

16) You think Cheetara is HOT!

I never watched Thundercats. It fell, timewise, into an era for me when it was able to slip past me, completely unnoticed. I don't even recall hearing about it back then, and I couldn't even begin to tell you what channel I would have watched it on. It's even possible that it started airing before we even had cable when I was a kid. It always interests me to see cultural things that just pass right by without even making a mark upon me. I have friends who are just a couple years younger than me who tell me how awesome Thundercats was. Sometimes a couple years is all it takes to shift your attitudes for life.

17) You Believe Aliens are our REAL Gods

I'm not even sure what this means.

18) You Have a Favorite Animated Cult Sci-Fi Movie

Heavy Metal? I guess....

19) You Blame Hot Rod for Optimus Prime’s Death

Sorry, but I never cared one whit about the Transformers.

20) You DESPISE Michael Bay for Masturbating on your Childhood

When did he do this? Transformers? Don't care. I think Michael Bay is a terrible filmmaker, but that's about it. He hasn't yet sullied anything that was important to my childhood.

So, by my count, I only have eight of these. I'm close on some, but I miss out by virtue of the emotional qualifiers involved. So by this measure, at least, I appear to fall short of true Nerd- or Geekdom. But that doesn't matter, though! Geekdom is like Zen or cool: it's a state of mind.

I'm Climaxing!

No, not like that, you bunch of weirdos. In writing. Like this:



Yup, I've been pounding at the words in quantity, and to judge by the photo, I'm looking angry as I do it. Oh well. I've learned that for some reason, my neutral facial expression -- how I look when I'm not making any conscious effort to look any way at all -- is usually interpreted by outside observers as 'angry'. This annoys me, but there's naught that I can do about it save pasting a PlastiSmile on my face at all times, and I'm not about to do that. Harumph.

Where was I? Oh yeah...writing. As of yesterday morning's writing session, I had, at long last, finally reached the climax in Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title). It's amazing to me the various twists and turns I've had to take to get to this point. When I started the book, I had a very rough idea of the shape of the story, which means that I knew (a) where the story was starting and (b) where the story was supposed to end. It's my experience, though, that these things always change along the way. I started off just charging full-speed ahead, but then at some point I realized that I'd missed a left turn in Albuquerque. (Seriously, Albuquerque, you have got to upgrade your street signage. You can't have everybody missing their required left turns when they get there.) This required rolling back four chapters of work. Ugh!

That was the biggest setback, but there were others too, and soon I realized that I needed to bite the bullet and actually set down some plot notes in the rough form of an outline (which I hate doing). But now, after all that, I'm at the climax, which is very much turning the same way I envisioned it way back when. This is exciting stuff. At least, it is for me.

As for the actual progress in the book, by way of numbers, here is the up-to-the-minute word count (I haven't written a word in the book yet today):



The current chapter is the Official Climactic Sequence; after that I'll have an Epilogue where some things are wrapped up and others are left there, in hopefully tantalizing fashion, for the Inevitable Sequels To Come. (Don't accuse me being unambitious: I can potentially envision a nine-book series with these characters. Space is a big place, bitches!) My oft-stated goal is for a first draft of no more than 180,000 words, and that still appears doable, as long as I don't get too wordy in these last two chapters. Then, during the editing process, I should be able to lose at least 20,000 words in tightening things up and rewrites. After that, it'll be time for...gasp...beta readers.

[Note that I have a single chapter at more than ten thousand words, which makes it rather an outlier in terms of chapter length. This bugs me, and I may try to split it in two at editing time.]

Here's another spreadsheet I made, in hopes of making it easier to hold my own feet to the writing fire. This one charts not the word count of the specific work-in-progress, but the number of words I write per day. (Only counting my fiction words here...not counting things like blog posts and Tweets and Facebook blatherings.) I started doing this almost two weeks ago, because I decided that I needed a better way of making sure that I was hitting my daily writing quota (which I have currently set at 500 words per day). Here it is:



Each column is one month's work, so that's the March column with the numbers in it. I didn't start doing this until March 20; the dates are in the left-most column and are repeated at left (so I'll still be able to see the dates when I get to the second half of the year, as twelve columns are too wide to appear on the screen at once). At the bottom I keep a running monthly total, and it calculates my average output per day. I've only come in under quota twice, and most days I've exceeded it by a nice margin, and on a couple of days I've blown my quota out of the water. I like seeing that, and I don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago. Goal-setting is great, but making the goals visible or tangible is really helpful. In the past I've checked the word count of the chapter I'm working on at the end of a session and just vaguely determined that I've increased it by at least 500 words. Now I can see it.

Now, there will be days when I'm either under quota or right around it, which you can see. Those days correspond to days when The Wife is off from work, and on those days, my focus tends to be more on doing things with The Family Unit than in producing words. I'm largely fine with this. My main writing sessions still come Monday through Friday, from 6:00 am to 7:00 am. On weekends I tend to produce later at night. And so it goes. I'm bracing for an entire week of reduced output next month (because I'm taking a vacation), but you know what? I might just have this book done -- in first draft form -- before then. That amazes me. Just as month ago, I was thinking that I'd have this draft done around Memorial Day.

So there's the navel-gazing for today. Onward and upward!

Local blogger to Buffalo: Drop Dead!

Chris Smith on the logical end of his years of Buffalo activism:

For the small percentage of people who don’t fit into the above, haven’t moved and aren’t currently planning an escape? You’re a special and unique little snowflake in this town. Try to remain sane as you swim upstream against the ferocious power of the status quo. But here’s a bit of unsolicited advice, stop trying to “save” Buffalo. It doesn’t want to be saved. This city is like an alcoholic, abusive boyfriend. The more you try to save him, the more he drags you down with him. I know, we don’t “know” how sweet he can be when you’re alone together, right? If you just try hard enough, he’ll change.

I wonder occasionally how the onward march of demographics might force change in Buffalo...but that's the long game, and I've never been much of an activist, anyway. Buffalo is where I live, because I have a job here and I'm generally happy already and...well, that's about it. I have zero interest in running for office, I have zero interest in working in politics in any real way, I don't plan to be an entrepreneur and start a local business. I think Buffalo will eventually change because nothing stays the way it is forever. That's not to say that it will change for the better, but other than that...I reached the same point Chris did a long time ago.

Something for Thursday

I read a news story yesterday that put me in the mood for this (and now I'll need to watch the movie one of these days): the launch scene from Apollo 13.



This is one of the most masterful sequences I've ever seen in a movie. It's very kinetic, but every shot seems to lead into the next, and the utter thrill of such an event as launching a Saturn V rocket on a mission to the moon is perfectly juxtaposed with the calm, professional precision with which all these people do their jobs. This particular video omits one tiny detail: we start with Flight Controller Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) asking the individual departments to check in. But immediately prior to that, which we don't see here, Kranz takes a calm sip of coffee from his coffee cup. That's it...but it's in the way Ed Harris plays it, as a guy at total command of his resources who basically says, "OK, one more sip of my coffee, and then, let's launch this rocket ship."

The news story I mention above? Apparently an expedition financed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos has located the engines of Apollo 11, the mission that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon, sitting at the bottom of the sea. Bezos hopes to raise all or part of the engines back to the surface, which would be an amazing feat. I don't know what shape they'd be in, but what an amazing artifact of our own technological past to recover!

Although...I'd be lying if I wasn't a bit saddened that we're excited to fine the used pieces of our old spaceships, when at the same time we don't seem all that interested in building new ones.

United Britain? Great Kingdom? Engireland?

Even though I know better, I still tend to get this stuff wrong in normal conversation.

I'll try harder, England. I mean, Great Britain. I mean, UK. Dammit!

Answers, the final!

[Oops. I've had this sitting in draft for a week...and I thought I'd published it, when I'd saved it in Draft to finish adding the links. I hate when I do that. Sorry, folks! But here it is.]

Time, at long last, to wrap up Ask Me Anything! February 2012. Huzzah!

Roger, a consistent source of intriguing questions, has a multi-part query:

There's that woman from 2 Broke Girls that you and SamuraiFrog seem to...enjoy. I don't get it. I mean she's got big...she's well-endowed, but her face has a hardness I find singularly unappealing.

Oh, and do you think that beauty is tied to the role one plays. That woman from Castle you like was in an episode of The Closer four or five years ago as a young Russian woman, forced into prostitution. But in Castle, she's strong, which, I think, makes her WAY more attractive. Thoughts?

And where the heck is ROWR?

Well, there's a lot to dig into there. The 2 Broke Girls woman is Kat Dennings, who I do like a lot. I don't find a 'hardness' in her face at all; I like her full features, especially her lips, and...well, just in terms of physical attractiveness, she has gorgeous hair, her body curves, and her face has a '1940s movie star' quality to me, in some way. I also like her a lot on the show, even if the show itself isn't all that good. It's hard to argue logically about what I find attractive; I seem to recall Roger Ebert once writing that Gene Siskel's view on discussing erotica boiled down to "Try and talk a man out of an erection." So there's that. (My sample size on Ms. Dennings is pretty small -- Thor and 2 Broke Girls. I like her in both, but it's not really a large enough sample to have a good sense on her level of staying power.)

And from Castle we have Stana Katic, of whose work I also have a limited exposure – just Castle. But she's awfully, awfully good on that show, both strong and vulnerable; she gets a lot of the show's best lines (the writers do a really good job of spreading the wealth, dialog-wise); she shows a lot of good comic timing; and her chemistry with Nathan Fillion is fantastic. I find the character appealing in all those ways. The actress? Well, that she is able to embody all those qualities is pretty great.

But that's not the question asked – is strength more attractive, or appealing, than weakness? Probably. I've seen a lot of weak characters on all kinds of shows who were much less appealing than other, stronger characters, and there have been times when I've liked certain actors or actresses more in one role than another because of strength or lack thereof. Maura Tierney is a good example: I loved her in NewsRadio, where she was strong and intelligent and professional, but I liked her less – or I liked her character a lot less – in ER, when she seemed to fill the 'wallow in existential misery' portion of the show much of the time that I watched while she was on it.

I do try to really differentiate between characters and the people who portray them. I hated Izzie Stevens on Grey's Anatomy for a lot of reasons, but it was a while before I decided that I didn't like Katherine Heigl much, either, and that was to do with all kinds of stuff I read about how obnoxious she is as a person.

Finally: where is ROWR? For those newer to the blog, ROWR is an occasional series of posts where I highlight women whom I think are both very talented and very beautiful. The series started way back in the early days of the blog, when Britney Spears was still an object of fascination; it really bugged me that she tended to get enormous press and praise despite not being all that talented at all. I moved away from that focus as Ms. Spears started to suffer her own slings of outrageous fortune; it started to feel like I was kicking someone who was down, and that's never pleasant. (Not that she has the first idea who I am, nor should she. Nor should she care if she did.)

But even when I changed the name of the series, it sometimes felt to me like I was somehow engaging in objectification of women, which is something I really don't want to do. I don't know...you tell me, readers! Was I really objectifying? Or can I resume that series as the harmless admiration of beauty and talent that I meant it to be?

Roger also asks:

What is something you often do without realizing that you’re doing it? (I'm a hummer.)

I hum as well...and I tend to sing, under my breath. I also 'write' in my head, playing scenes from my work on the movie screen in my brain, sometimes long before I write them. When I'm doing that, I can get pretty absorbed, and when I get absorbed, I can get a pretty intense facial expression going on, and that particular expression is apparently more "angry" looking than "thoughtful", because people will often say things like "Wow, you look pissed!" Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

But anyway, I find it spectacularly easy to daydream. And I'm not terribly repentant about daydreaming, either. It's an ability that has sustained me through any number of boring lectures, dull meetings, sleep sermons, and repetitive jobs in my life, and it's through daydreaming that I get a lot of the 'heavy lifting' of plotting done for my fiction. Just the other day I solved a structural problem with the climax of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) whilst daydreaming.

Roger also asks about the current state of my 'faith journey'. If there really is a journey going on, I'm walking in circles. I refuse to discount science and rationalism, which may make me unwelcome in a lot of Christian circles. My current pastor has a favorite saying, wherein he holds up the Bible and says, "When my life ends, I want to be able to say that I got this right." My problem with that is that the Bible, while full of amazing and wonderful stuff, is also full of stuff that sets my teeth on edge, and I know too much about how the Bible came to be to really be willing to unreservedly endorse it as "God's Word". I just can't help but think that if God was going to issue a book that communicates His will, he wouldn't issue it in as messy a way as he did the Bible. There's just too much humanity in the history of the Bible.

And besides, even if the Bible is an expression of God, by its very nature it's a faulty one, with all the collation and translation issues abundant within it, coupled with the fact that it gathers writings that reflect understandings of things that were in play 2000+ years ago and over a very long time period. It seems to me that the world itself must also be seen as an expression of God, and that if careful study of the world tells us one thing and a literal reading of a book tells us another, then, well, the book loses. Simple as that.

Ultimately...I'm just not convinced. Too much of it just doesn't add up for me. "God hates sin", I'm told...but why did God create a world with sin in it, then? And if God isn't responsible for sin in the world, well, how did we manage to create something that He didn't? I think a lot of a question posed by Plato: Does God love what is moral because it is moral, or are things moral because God makes them moral? Put another way: can God rewrite arithmetic so 2+2=5? I don't know that He can...which automatically poses a logical limit on a God who is supposed to be beyond limits of any kind.

Ultimately, I think I'm attracted to Christianity because I love the stories. But I'm not sure I can ever cross the line to total commitment. And I'm also not sure that this is a bad thing.

Roger also asked me to prognosticate on the Oscars, but I haven't seen any of the films that were nominated, even at this point, so I can't offer any thoughts at all. Sorry!

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous asks:

Do you like everything you read and see, or do you just write about the things you like?

Definitely the latter. I'm more likely to post about a movie I don't like than a book, because I'm much more likely to watch a movie I don't like all the way through than a book. If I'm not liking a book, I'll quit reading it and do something else. And if that happens, I'll rarely conclude that I don't like the book, but rather than I'm not in the mood for it or not attuned to it as of yet. I've had a lot of experiences where I started a book and just not connected with it (I call this "bouncing off the book"), but then returned to it years later and found myself liking it just fine, if not loving it outright. This happens with movies, too, but less frequently.

Ultimately, I'll post about something I dislike if I really really dislike it. A good example is Twilight, because I found my distaste for it kind of interesting, given that I really expected to like it a lot. I don't get as much enjoyment out of writing a good rant as I used to; I'd much rather steer someone toward something that they might like by virtue of my own enthusiasm. So no, I don't like everything. But I'm not a movie critic for a newspaper or something like that; I'm under no obligation to write about things I dislike.

Paul asks:

Corduroy overalls, yea, or nay?

Also, denim, deep blue, or faded?

I had a corduroy pair once, but they really fit weird, and corduroy tends to 'hang' differently, so I rarely wore them and eventually I put them on eBay. I like how corduroy looks, but in my experience, I don't like wearing it myself all that much. I own nothing corduroy now, in any article of clothing.

As for the denim: either/or! I like nice, dark denim when it's still fairly stiff (but not super stiff – you gotta wash them a few times). But well-broken in and faded is nice as well. I also like black denim, and I wish they were easier to find (aside from Carhartts, which are ubiquitous – I like Carhartts except for, oddly enough, the style of the shoulder-strap buckles, which always feel kind of weird to me).

Sticking with the overalls, Andy asks:

I have noticed when I wear my overalls that I get A LOT of people doing a 'double take' when they see me. Does this happen to you as well????

I don't notice...but then, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to other people when I'm out and about. It's part of the whole "daydreaming" thing I mention above...I'm really pretty good at divorcing myself from the world, which is a useful skill to have because the world can really suck. I've seen this kind of thing once or twice, but generally I don't care. One time I do remember that I thought was pretty funny – I was shopping, and some girl was snickering when I walked by, and when I glanced back a couple of times, each time she was looking in my direction. Funny thing was...well, not 'funny', but I'm not sure what the word is...she looked terrible. I hate to say this, but...well look, she wouldn't have looked too out of place in that "People Of Wal-Mart" website. So I just consider the source.

From the same anonymous reader above:

Why on Earth would you want to get a pie in the face?

Because it's fun and silly. Do I need a better reason than that? Nope! Hey, don't knock it until you try it!

And finally, from one more anonymous reader:

So what is the title to 'Princesses In SPACE!!!', anyway?

When I know it, I'll tell you!

And with that, thanks for playing, everyone! We'll do this again in August. (Not that you need permission to ask me anything, anytime!)

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

What's your favorite mountain? (You don't need to have actually SEEN the mountain...or stood upon it...heck, it can be a fictional mountain!)

Page One: A Princess of Mars

Here's Page One of one of my copies of A Princess of Mars. This copy is part of something called the "Library of Wonder". I bought it off the Bargain Books table at Barnes&Noble. Even though I already owned a copy (an omnibus I bought, in turn, back when I was a member of the SF Book of the Month Club), I couldn't resist this one. I read A Princess of Mars a while back, and I was surprised at how well the writing holds up after 100 years; I expected a pulpy work that would be difficult to read for its prolix writing, but Burroughs crafts a nice, spiffy, readable tale that doesn't have nearly as many anachronisms as one might expect. I haven't yet read any farther into the series, but I intend to. This volume contains the first three of Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Barsoom" novels, of which the first, A Princess of Mars, has just been adapted for the big-screen. Somewhat infamously, it turns out.

So, why did John Carter fail? I suspect for lots of reasons, not just one.

I've heard that there was a change in Disney management during the film's production, and William Goldman has pointed out in his books that often an incoming exec's first act of business is to make sure everything that the previous guy greenlit either gets ungreenlit or at least is just tossed out there without hype. I'm not sure about this; it's one thing to just put the brakes on developing projects, but quite another to purposely scuttle a movie that's already been made because the $200 million has already been spent. I've also heard that director Andrew Stanton was in charge of the marketing, and he made the decision to assume that audiences are more familiar with the John Carter character than they actually are. I'm not sure who was behind the decision to change the movie's title to simply John Carter, when John Carter of Mars would have been more evocative, and hell, A Princess of Mars would have been in keeping with the book on which the movie was based in the first place.

For my part? I wonder if this isn't the kind of movie that wouldn't have failed had it come out, say, twenty years ago, when movies could be allowed to be in theaters for a couple of months, when they weren't thrust into 18-screen multiplexes on as many screens as possible so as to guarantee massive opening weekends and then a couple more respectable weekends before the movie disappears from release entirely barely a month after its initial appearance. John Carter opened on a Friday, and I was reading about the movie's box office failure on the subsequent Tuesday. Four days later. That is insane.

Now, I'm not convinced that word-of-mouth can always change a movie from failure to success – remember, The Shawshank Redemption was a box office failure and word-of-mouth didn't elevate that movie to classic status that everyone's seen until it came out on video. But still, in this day and age when there are a bunch of movies coming out all the time, and when most folks in my experience only tend to go to movies once or twice a month at most (and many less than that, as the cost of moviegoing is getting to the point where it might well rival the cost of a nosebleed-section admission to an NHL game soon), they tend to only go see whatever the BIG new release is. And that, sadly, tends to be the sequel to the tentpole franchise, or the adaptation of the current favorite book, or whatever. Not a movie like John Carter, which is in turn marketed with ads that really aren't clear at all as to what the damn movie is about in the first place.

So anyway: I saw John Carter this past Saturday. For a reputed flop, there were a lot of people in the theater to see it. The place wasn't packed, but the auditorium was probably almost half-full. That's not bad, especially considering how packed the cinemas were for The Hunger Games. It's just not the case that no one wants to see this movie. It's just the case that, for whatever reason, this movie was set up to fail with unreasonable box office expectations that make the movies a sprinting horserace and an ad campaign that simply didn't get the job done.

My particular screening didn't start out so well. I attended a 2D showing, because I refuse to see 3D movies. I just can't do it. I had a headache years ago after sitting through a couple of fifteen-minute 3D flicks at DisneyWorld. And I'm certainly not paying extra for the privilege of having a headache. So 2D it was. But after the previews ended, a title card appears on the screen, accompanied by voiceover: "Please put on your 3D glasses, now!"

Uh-oh....

And yup, they started the 3D version, with the telltale doubling-up of the image that had me in mind of the Monty Python sketch with the double-vision guy planning an expedition to climb "both peaks" of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I wondered if I'd screwed up or ended up in a 3D showing by mistake, but suddenly there were a bunch of folks behind me saying "Wait, what?" and getting up and heading out to the hallway. A Cinema employee stepped in, saw the 3D movie on the screen, and said, "Uh, I gotta go upstairs." A minute or two later, the 3D version stopped, another minute or two passed, and the 2D version started. Huzzah! And they gave everyone there a free ticket to another movie, which was nice. So I get a free movie, for not that bad of an inconvenience.

(Oddly, when they restarted the movie, we had to sit through the previews again. Are they physically attached to the print of the movie you see?)

So anyway: about John Carter, the movie. Yeah, I loved it, and it depresses me that lost in all the discussion of the movie's terrible marketing and undeserved fate (which, unless the movie develops surprising legs and then goes on to a remarkable life on DVD, will rule out sequels) is the fact that John Carter is a kind of movie you don't see much anymore: a rollicking and entertaining adventure movie with high production values. The acting is good all the way around, especially the leads (Taylor Kitsch as John Carter, and Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris). The visuals are all well-done, with none of the odd muddiness that I've noticed in movies shot for 3D. The film is full of wonderful spectacles and set-pieces, and for the most part, the plot isn't hard to follow, once it gets going. There is a prologue that really doesn't have much need to be there, and I did find the final battle scene slightly hard to follow as it ended. Also, there are a few pacing problems in the first act, as we cut away from John Carter for a bit too long to learn about Dejah Thoris and her dilemma; in my view, in these kinds of "Fish out of water" stories, it's best to stay with the fish as long as possible. Those are fairly minor quibbles, though; once the movie settles into itself, about half an hour in, it's as absorbing an escapist movie as I've seen in a long time. Michael Giacchino turns in a typically professional score, sounding a lot like his score to Star Trek 2009, and just as ear-wormy as the earlier score – I've had the main theme stuck in my head ever since.

John Carter, and the books that inspired it, aren't really space opera, but its sister genre, planetary romance. There's no space here whatsoever. Carter is teleported to Mars – Barsoom, they call it – and there's an air of steampunk over the entire movie. It feels 'retro', and that retro feel is a large part of the movie's charm.

No, John Carter is not a great movie. But it's a very good one, well made, a fine addition to its genre. It deserves to be seen and enjoyed, not dissected in some kind of half-assed postmortem on what Hollywood does wrong these days.

Space Battleship Yamato

It seems that, aside from the occasional Star Trek movie, we just don't do big-screen space opera much in this country anymore. That's a shame...but at least there's Japan, who was nice enough to come up with Space Battleship Yamato in 2010. And what a movie this is. This thing scratched nearly every space opera itch I have: war against nigh-unstoppable aliens, a hero who is a discipline case and who has a history, a love story, a crusty captain, a warship that is humanity's last hope, and so on. And the warship looks like a 20th-century seagoing destroyer...made into a spaceship. You can't beat this stuff!

Space Battleship Yamato is based on a popular anime series from the 1980s, that was dubbed into English for American audiences and called Star Blazers. I never saw this, so I have no idea how faithful the movie is to the anime, but taking the movie for what it is...it's a grandly entertaining space opera epic. There's a massive alien threat to Earth, and the last-ditch effort to gain an edge featuring an enormous warship that is sent across the Galaxy; there are plucky heroes and skilled fighter pilots and talented officers with discipline problems. There's the old and grizzled captain with a history, and there's the hero who knows that things may eventually come down to him and him alone. We have desperate assaults on alien fortresses, and acts of noble self-sacrifice all the way around. And there's the warship of the title, the space battleship Yamato, which is built to look like...a seagoing battleship. Hey, why not?

In the year 2199, Earth is being ravaged under the attacks of the alien Gamilas. The last remaining battleship, the Yamato, is outfitted with a special new super-weapon and sent across the galaxy to the planet Iskandar, where they hope to learn how to counteract the lethal radiation with which the Gamilas have been rendering the surface of Earth uninhabitable. Along the way, secrets about the alien race are discovered, other secrets about the pasts of our characters are revealed, lots of space battles take place, and...well, if you think it should happen in a big-scale space opera movie, it happens here. This movie is almost the Platonic ideal of "Explodey Spaceshippy Goodness". It's well-acted, the characters are all pretty memorable, and there are only a few slow moments (and one moment that felt odd for me, as an American, when one of our Japanese heroes delivers a rousing address to the crew, citing the ship's namesake as inspirational figure). The effects are mostly quite good, and you rapidly get over any of the oddness of a starship that's built to look like a standard 20th-century battleship. I even loved the opening shot, which is an extreme closeup of someone's eyeball; the camera zooms back as the lights of blasterfire reflect from the eye, to reveal that the eye belongs to a fighter pilot who is in the midst of a major dogfight. Cool stuff.

I don't have much more to say about the film than that. But if you want to see a grand space opera movie, track this one down. It's very much worth the effort!

Sentential Links

Linkage...but first, Inkage!



How cool is that? The squid darts by the like Enterprise in the old Star Trek credits.

:: Seriously, you’re sitting in a theater wearing a pair of 3D glasses with a box of Jujubes in your hand watching a movie based on a pulp scifi novel written in 1912 about a guy in a loincloth sword fighting four-armed green-skinned Martians in order to save a half-naked red-skinned princess who’s also the chief scientist of the Ninth-Ray, and you’re all pissy that there isn’t some fancy dialog about the nihilistic pessimism of fate and circumstance described in narrative ellipses and playful points of view that explores the similarities and differences between Gods and Men, East and West, sin and virtue, good and evil?

Seriously?

I think you might have wandered into the wrong theater by accident. (I've got my own post about John Carter on the way, but until then, here's a placeholder.)

:: Instead I sit, and mumble, and grumble, and wonder whether I am the only one annoyed that winter never really came to the northeastern United States this year. (No, you're not the only one. I hated this winter. What a steaming bowl of FAILy suck it was!)

:: I promise I didn't realize this ahead of time, but I'm thrilled that it came down to these two. Looking back at the list of contestants, it always had to. (Michael May has been doing a "March Madness" involving cinematic bad-asses. Check it out, and read back into his series! Fun stuff, even if I do think he sold Det. Martin Riggs a bit short.)

:: We need an It Gets Better campaign for America–except I’m not sure it actually will.

:: But overall I’m happy with my purchase and figure that this will get me through the next couple of years just fine, by which time I’m sure phones will have gained intelligence and launched our own nuclear missiles at us. Whatever, man. As long as I can read the Internet on the phone until the very last second, I’m good. (Geez. I can't even do that. I'm still a couple of years from even entering the smart-phone arena!)

:: I'm so tired of Paul Ryan I could scream. Every year we get a slightly different version of the same old thing, and every year we have to waste entire man-years of analysis in order to make the same exact points about it. And the biggest point is that his budget would force enormous, swinging cuts in virtually every domestic program, especially those for the poor. If this bothers Ryan, he's had plenty of time to revise his budget roadmap to address it.

But he hasn't. He knows perfectly well that his budget concentrates its cuts on the poorest Americans. It's been pointed out hundreds of times, after all. If he found that troublesome he'd change it. Since he hasn't, the only reasonable conclusion is that this is exactly what he intends. Let's stop pretending otherwise. (All I need to know about Paul Ryan is that he requires his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. One can't hold up a brighter billboard for moral inadequacy than that.)

:: For the past couple of weeks, I've been reading Princess [A Princess of Mars - Ed.] out loud to The Girlfriend, one chapter per night, just before bed, and she observed very early on that the story is essentially a Western with giant, four-armed green men standing in for Native Americans. But of course that's what it is. Consider the book's history. It was originally published in serial form in 1912. Wyatt Earp was still alive in 1912, and I'm pretty Buffalo Bill's Wild West show was still touring then. The Old West occupied a tremendous amount of real estate in the popular imagination, Western stories dominated the pulp magazines that Burroughs was trying to break into, and science fiction as we now understand it did not really exist. (Indeed, Burroughs practically invented the sci-fi genre, or at least a certain subset of it.) Plot-wise, Princess actually starts off as a Western, with Carter fighting Apaches in the Arizona Territory just after the Civil War, before Burroughs unleashes his imagination. To complain that a movie based on this seminal, century-old story doesn't fit so neatly into our modern generic pigeonholes indicates to me that you're missing the point. (OK, one last John Carter link.)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Here in Buffalo, the newest thing going are the food trucks: restaurants on wheels that set up camp on a street someplace downtown and sell food. The trucks are pretty popular, but being Buffalo, we have to endure a whole lot of annoying bickering first, with restaurants complaining that the trucks are too close and sucking off their customers and yada yada yada. So, while we bicker and complain and argue about the food trucks, we don't even realize that the next step in food delivery is on the way. Behold...the TacoCopter!

That, sadly, is about all I got for this week...but hey, I spent a good amount of time writing, so that's something! More next week!

Saturday Centus (Sunday edition)

Arrgghhh, I missed another one. Oh well. Naught to do but get back up on the horse...this week we're to have exactly 100 words. Looking at the other end of my "Humanity abandoning Earth" theme that shows up occasionally on these:

Larry cracked a beer as the light from the thrusters of the last ship to leave Earth faded in the sky. The other light, the one of the comet that was going to destroy everything, was getting brighter, but there was no way he was leavin’. Nosiree. He was 92 and he wasn’t like to see that spiffy new Mars they’d been buildin’ anyway, so he just sat back in his rocker, sipped his beer, and figured to enjoy the next nineteen days until the comet hit.

“Yessir,” he said to no one in particular. “I’m livin’ the dream, man.”

I always find something a bit fascinating about people who make the rational choice to accept the death they know is coming rather than keep going.

Copyright Math

I really need to watch TED talks more often. Here, science fiction author Robert Reid delves a little into the mathematical claims of the movie and music industries when they rail against piracy.




I always love when big numbers are thrown about, and no one questions them at all. I remember the Direct Marketing Association's fierce opposition to the Federal Do Not Call List, on the basis that it would cost the economy something like two million jobs. A job hit of that magnitude, at once, would be an economic calamity of historic proportions, but that number just sat out there. Weird, huh?

Happy Birthday Mr. Shatner!

William Shatner's birthday is today. How old is he? Who cares? Here's one of my favorite scenes from all Star Trek, from the much-maligned Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.



Trek V is what I consider to be a 'noble failure', in that it doesn't succeed, but even as it falls short it has some really nice moments, and it really tries to do something interesting, something that really involves sending the Enterprise crew into an unexplored place to confront an unknown. The above scene comes early in the film, while the crew is on shore leave, and Kirk, McCoy, and Spock have gone camping in Yosemite. If nothing else, this film understands that at the heart of the original Trek crew is the three-way friendship of Kirk-Spock-McCoy, a fact which the folks in charge of the current Trek original crew reboot seem to be missing completely.

Anyway, happy birthday to Mr. Shatner! May you row your boat gently down that stream for many years to come!