March 2012 - ForgottenStars.net

March 31, 2012October 3, 2021

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.

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March 31, 2012October 3, 2021

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!

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March 30, 2012October 3, 2021

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.

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March 29, 2012October 3, 2021

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.

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March 28, 2012October 3, 2021

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!

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March 28, 2012October 3, 2021

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!)

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March 28, 2012October 3, 2021

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!)

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March 27, 2012October 3, 2021

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.

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March 26, 2012October 3, 2021

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!