While I wait to either finish one of the many novels I'm reading or see 'Clash of the Titans' (Damn! The! Gods!), I need something to criticise, so I decided to examine the French film 'Brotherhood of the Wolf', upon watching it again. Readers should be warned of my weakness for silly, OTT historical horror.
My God, though, this film is awesome. OK, it's not perfect. It's silly in places. I find it difficult to empathise with a lot of the characters. The Native American who inexplicably knows anachronistic martial arts and is so in tune with nature is such a backwards stereotype, I felt slightly embarrassed watching it.
But the visuals, acting and tone are wonderful. 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' is a fictionalised account of the true story of the Beast of Gevaudan, supposed perpetrator of a series of deaths in the Eighteenth Century. The Beast was supposedly originally hunted down in either 1765 or 1767 (depending on which was considered the 'real' Beast) and most accounts of the time claim it was a large wolf, but a documentary ('The Real Wolfman', History Channel, 2009) claims it was an Asian Hyena. This film concerns Gregoire de Fronsac (Samuel le Bihan), a expert in zoology and his companion, a Native American called Mani, who investigate the Beast, becoming embroiled in politics, intrigue and love along the way.
This is a French 'Sleepy Hollow', though slower-building and more sophisticated, with the same narrative beats as foule murders occur, an expert is brought in to solve them, winning the love of a local aristocratic girl, and finally the truth is revealed, dun dun dun. This does have the rather interesting framing tale of an aristocrat (the older version of a young character in the main narrative) recalling the story as he waits for the mob to come and take him to the guillotine, which links suprisingly well with the political undercurrents of the main narrative.
Of the actors, Vincent Cassel is my absolute favourite. As the effeminate and cruel brother of the love interest, he manipulates the viewer's (and the other characters') assumptions about Jean-Francois de Morangias with terrifying ease. Monica Belluci (Cassel's offscreen wife) looks darn sexy and pouts very well and all that, but I felt her character was of such broad strokes that the writers failed to engage her talent. The love interest (Emilie Dequenne) was surprisingly spunky, but suffered a bit from being an object of affection. With the main characters, Fronsac was...all right. He was nice and noble, but the bit where he warpaints up almost into blackface and runs around the forest (in a ninja revenge scene very similar to that in '28 Days Later') was just funny. With Mani, I felt that there were several places where he just seemed to be an excuse for a fight scene/a 'noble savage' trope, but the actor managed to convey an incredible range of brooding emotions through his eyes alone. Over all, he was a bit hard done by, but it's a surprisingly nuanced performance when looked back on.
The Beast itself was a bit of a special effects fail, even given the fact that 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' was made in 2001, and I'm not entirely convinced by the explanation of its true nature. The conspiracy plotline kind of passed me by, but honestly, the film makers are quite happy to let those of us without their intelligences to sit back and watch the exciting bits of the story play out. This is a terrific film that is pretty widely-known in the geek community, but really deserves wider acknowledgement. I insist on showing it to everyone who hasn't seen it, and watch it myself on a reasonably regular basis. I just really hope it never gets a Hollywood remake.
Monday, 22 March 2010
Writing methods
Hm, a friend's post on lj got me to thinking about how I write. So here are some random thoughts, internet.
In terms of plans, I went through distinctive stages in my approach: when I was a joyful kid, I wrote unheeding of rhyme, reason or plans. When I was a teenager, I learned to plan, and then gave it up because I realised that it was so much more fun and fulfilling to plan than it was to write the damned thing, so I never got round to the writing itself. Then I went through university, which was three years of not really writing except academically. Then I did NaNoWriMo and got my mojo back, learning that it was fun not to plan as well, and that the chaotic pace of creativity led to cool and interesting twists and turns. On the other hand, I quickly realised that the drafts produced were all but uneditable and that if it was an idea I actually cared about, writing at a break-neck pace meant I lost the form, shape and tone I wanted overall. Turns out it's a lot easier to form that as you go along than it is to put it in afterwards (for me, anyway).
So now I'm trying to craft my writing as I go. It's painstaking and incredibly slow, and may mean I never finish anything, but I'm producing something I care about that won't make me wince when I try and read back through it. It's a problem as I seek out the perfect beginning, which is causing massive writer's block in one case as I have to get the beginning right before the rest will (hopefully) magically follow, but I'm getting closer each time I try again.
I really like that Philip Pullman quote from the NaNoWriMo Pep Talk he did comparing a WIP to a ship: if you let it idle for too long, "you have to warm the engines up, start the great bulk of the shipmoving through the water again, work out your position, check the compassbearing, steer carefully to bring it back on track..." It kind of feels like that every day when I sit down to write, but I have a great hatred for writing snippets myself. When other people do it, it's cool. I just don't like to write unless I'm writing something that has meaning for me. I hate doing writing exercises. It's like my tendency never to roll my dice in a game unless I'm making a check. I just can't sit there and write a drabble with my characters chatting, or a description of a garden, unless it has a meaningful place in the story. So, for instance, I have written a bit where two of my characters get together in an AU that doesn't occur in the actual novel, but on some level I like to assume it's in the plot and never mentioned to explain all that sexual tension. I have written snippets, drabbles, exercise pieces, etc. but they never engaged me. I feel they're lacking the passion of my longer stuff, though at times they have been good.
I think planning and writing take different kinds of thought. One is the pure creative blast of imagining, without rules, without boundaries, anything goes and you know if it doesn't feel quite right. The other is much more logical, slower, and at times sweeter. It's like a sugar rush vs. the feeling of warm fuzzy contentment you get on a sunny day, or whatever equivalent experience you enjoy. However, putting one word in front of the other can be delicious and simple, pleasure coming from the construction of sentences or the imagined feel of words on the tongue. I find words sensual, as I can see their shapes, hear their sounds in my head, and know how they would feel to say.
Still, sometimes it's tough, if you can't think of what to do next, so you just dawdle in writing form (how I suspect a lot of filler is born) or if things aren't working the way you want them to. So sometimes it's worth doing the NaNoWriMo thing of just pushing through until you wrestle that damned muse back into line, word by bloody word. But then, sometimes it's because you don't know the nature of the beast, and there's some hidden treasure in the world you've created, if only you can find it by planning.
In terms of plans, I went through distinctive stages in my approach: when I was a joyful kid, I wrote unheeding of rhyme, reason or plans. When I was a teenager, I learned to plan, and then gave it up because I realised that it was so much more fun and fulfilling to plan than it was to write the damned thing, so I never got round to the writing itself. Then I went through university, which was three years of not really writing except academically. Then I did NaNoWriMo and got my mojo back, learning that it was fun not to plan as well, and that the chaotic pace of creativity led to cool and interesting twists and turns. On the other hand, I quickly realised that the drafts produced were all but uneditable and that if it was an idea I actually cared about, writing at a break-neck pace meant I lost the form, shape and tone I wanted overall. Turns out it's a lot easier to form that as you go along than it is to put it in afterwards (for me, anyway).
So now I'm trying to craft my writing as I go. It's painstaking and incredibly slow, and may mean I never finish anything, but I'm producing something I care about that won't make me wince when I try and read back through it. It's a problem as I seek out the perfect beginning, which is causing massive writer's block in one case as I have to get the beginning right before the rest will (hopefully) magically follow, but I'm getting closer each time I try again.
I really like that Philip Pullman quote from the NaNoWriMo Pep Talk he did comparing a WIP to a ship: if you let it idle for too long, "you have to warm the engines up, start the great bulk of the shipmoving through the water again, work out your position, check the compassbearing, steer carefully to bring it back on track..." It kind of feels like that every day when I sit down to write, but I have a great hatred for writing snippets myself. When other people do it, it's cool. I just don't like to write unless I'm writing something that has meaning for me. I hate doing writing exercises. It's like my tendency never to roll my dice in a game unless I'm making a check. I just can't sit there and write a drabble with my characters chatting, or a description of a garden, unless it has a meaningful place in the story. So, for instance, I have written a bit where two of my characters get together in an AU that doesn't occur in the actual novel, but on some level I like to assume it's in the plot and never mentioned to explain all that sexual tension. I have written snippets, drabbles, exercise pieces, etc. but they never engaged me. I feel they're lacking the passion of my longer stuff, though at times they have been good.
I think planning and writing take different kinds of thought. One is the pure creative blast of imagining, without rules, without boundaries, anything goes and you know if it doesn't feel quite right. The other is much more logical, slower, and at times sweeter. It's like a sugar rush vs. the feeling of warm fuzzy contentment you get on a sunny day, or whatever equivalent experience you enjoy. However, putting one word in front of the other can be delicious and simple, pleasure coming from the construction of sentences or the imagined feel of words on the tongue. I find words sensual, as I can see their shapes, hear their sounds in my head, and know how they would feel to say.
Still, sometimes it's tough, if you can't think of what to do next, so you just dawdle in writing form (how I suspect a lot of filler is born) or if things aren't working the way you want them to. So sometimes it's worth doing the NaNoWriMo thing of just pushing through until you wrestle that damned muse back into line, word by bloody word. But then, sometimes it's because you don't know the nature of the beast, and there's some hidden treasure in the world you've created, if only you can find it by planning.
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
'Avatar'
Why post on 'Avatar'? The world and his wife have seen it and the reviews have been almost unanimous in their declaration: 'Avatar' is a visual masterpiece with a world so real you can almost taste it (and, most add, an unoriginal story which does not diminish the impact of the film).
I'll happily admit I was all ready to be part of the 'Avatar' backlash. I have an inherent stubbornness that means if the world is awaiting something with baited breath and it does look like it will be good, I will react badly to it out of some mulish desire not to be a sheep (please excuse me mixing my metaphors). I saw the trailers and read the articles, and was generally underwhelmed. But, I suppose it helps to understand what you're criticising, so I went to see it in 3-D. Over all: I'm not quite a convert. I'm still decidedly sceptical about its story and characters, and I wasn't all that impressed by the world James Cameron created. Sure, it's detailed, but I suppose I've been spoilt by the level of obsessive detail most sci-fi and fantasy writers put into their work, be it for books, films or video games. When great, beautiful islands suspended in mid-air don't impress me, I think I might be a lost cause. But partly, that's because I've seen it done elsewhere. Hell, I've written about floating islands. I need something a bit more than just 'Oh, look, it's an impressive feature of the landscape' to make me engage. Give me Sanctaphrax from 'The Edge Chronicles' or the weird floating balloon islands from 'Schizm' any day.
OK, so here’s the story: humans come to a planet called Pandora to mine a rare mineral. A tribe of the native species, the Na’vi, live on top of the most plentiful deposit of the stuff. The military want to blast them, the scientists want to study them, and the corporates don’t care what happens, as long as they get the mineral. Enter the avatar project, in which humans pilot ‘avatar’ Na’vi bodies so they can breathe the atmosphere and interact with the locals. Cue green Aesop and conversion of the good guys over to the Na’vi way of life.
It’s been described as ‘Pocahontas in Space’ or, alternatively, ‘Dances with Blue Cat People’.
Sigh. I'm going to have to play Captain Obvious for a moment and say that it is visually arresting. There is a high level of detail that has gone into it. It is pretty alien in places (though not really alien enough to give me the sense of a completely different world, especially with the Na'vi, who while not exactly blue cat people, do not challenge the viewer to engage with them as a truly alien race would). There were sights that made me draw my breath in awe. Even so, I feel like the visuals were the focus of this piece, not the story. Cameron builds the details of the story round the visuals, or more specifically, the story moves to showcase what he wants to showcase about Pandora, but on the other hand the overall structure of the story itself is exemplary. OK, it has a green Aesop that is so sickening in places it makes me long for 'Fern Gully'. Some of the characters are so one-dimensional it's laughable, despite the best efforts of a great cast. But the story delivers exactly what is advertised. It's a predictable fable that could stand as a model of how to write this kind of narrative. Its characters are in broad strokes because with this much scenery to fit in, there is little time for development, so we're expected to fill in the gaps when we aren't assisted by the performances. However, the film is damnably entertaining, especially if one is unfamiliar with the templates that went before. And, frankly, I’ll take something this pretty over ‘Colours of the Wind’ any day. ‘Avatar’ just didn't get me, because snazzy new packaging isn't what makes a new take on an old story. As the Nostalgia Chick said, James Cameron is incredibly good at making money. It's a pity he isn't as concerned with forging new narratives as he is with making new technology to tell them.
There are really cool things: Sigourney Weaver brings a nicely strong performance as a Na'vi-sympathetic scientist, in one of the few characters with decent on-the-page characterisation; I'm now a Sam Worthington fan, because he was damn good as the hero in this, which makes me more enthusiastic about 'Clash of the Titans'; Zoe Saldana is fine as the alien love interest, from what we can tell under the layers of CGI, and I'm coming round to liking her as an actress. The highlights of this film, for me, were Colonel Badass himself Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) whose every scene is made of pure awesome if highly OTT (toxic atmosphere? Miles Quaritch does not need to breathe! Oxygen is for the weak!) and Michelle Rodriguez playing the stereotypical sympathetic turncoat, because Michelle Rodriguez is brilliant anyway, and she brings so much spunk to this supporting character that she was the only reason I was rooting for the good guys by the end of the movie.
It's going to go down through the ages as a masterpiece, with a minority wondering what's so special about it once you get past the visuals, and we will inevitably be bombarded with sequels, prequels and spinoffs. Honestly, I probably won't care beyond the first film. It's a by-the-numbers plotline that sometimes makes me despair for the average intelligence of the viewing public, but then that's me being a total snob. I suspect that people quite like the simplicity of the story and respond to the visuals and nauseating idealism with genuine, open wonder. It saddens me a little that I'm too jaded to be wowed by Pandora, but there are other worlds I care about more.
Also, they really called it unobtanium? Really? That cannot have been unintentional. Makes you wonder if James Cameron is a troper himself...
I'll happily admit I was all ready to be part of the 'Avatar' backlash. I have an inherent stubbornness that means if the world is awaiting something with baited breath and it does look like it will be good, I will react badly to it out of some mulish desire not to be a sheep (please excuse me mixing my metaphors). I saw the trailers and read the articles, and was generally underwhelmed. But, I suppose it helps to understand what you're criticising, so I went to see it in 3-D. Over all: I'm not quite a convert. I'm still decidedly sceptical about its story and characters, and I wasn't all that impressed by the world James Cameron created. Sure, it's detailed, but I suppose I've been spoilt by the level of obsessive detail most sci-fi and fantasy writers put into their work, be it for books, films or video games. When great, beautiful islands suspended in mid-air don't impress me, I think I might be a lost cause. But partly, that's because I've seen it done elsewhere. Hell, I've written about floating islands. I need something a bit more than just 'Oh, look, it's an impressive feature of the landscape' to make me engage. Give me Sanctaphrax from 'The Edge Chronicles' or the weird floating balloon islands from 'Schizm' any day.
OK, so here’s the story: humans come to a planet called Pandora to mine a rare mineral. A tribe of the native species, the Na’vi, live on top of the most plentiful deposit of the stuff. The military want to blast them, the scientists want to study them, and the corporates don’t care what happens, as long as they get the mineral. Enter the avatar project, in which humans pilot ‘avatar’ Na’vi bodies so they can breathe the atmosphere and interact with the locals. Cue green Aesop and conversion of the good guys over to the Na’vi way of life.
It’s been described as ‘Pocahontas in Space’ or, alternatively, ‘Dances with Blue Cat People’.
Sigh. I'm going to have to play Captain Obvious for a moment and say that it is visually arresting. There is a high level of detail that has gone into it. It is pretty alien in places (though not really alien enough to give me the sense of a completely different world, especially with the Na'vi, who while not exactly blue cat people, do not challenge the viewer to engage with them as a truly alien race would). There were sights that made me draw my breath in awe. Even so, I feel like the visuals were the focus of this piece, not the story. Cameron builds the details of the story round the visuals, or more specifically, the story moves to showcase what he wants to showcase about Pandora, but on the other hand the overall structure of the story itself is exemplary. OK, it has a green Aesop that is so sickening in places it makes me long for 'Fern Gully'. Some of the characters are so one-dimensional it's laughable, despite the best efforts of a great cast. But the story delivers exactly what is advertised. It's a predictable fable that could stand as a model of how to write this kind of narrative. Its characters are in broad strokes because with this much scenery to fit in, there is little time for development, so we're expected to fill in the gaps when we aren't assisted by the performances. However, the film is damnably entertaining, especially if one is unfamiliar with the templates that went before. And, frankly, I’ll take something this pretty over ‘Colours of the Wind’ any day. ‘Avatar’ just didn't get me, because snazzy new packaging isn't what makes a new take on an old story. As the Nostalgia Chick said, James Cameron is incredibly good at making money. It's a pity he isn't as concerned with forging new narratives as he is with making new technology to tell them.
There are really cool things: Sigourney Weaver brings a nicely strong performance as a Na'vi-sympathetic scientist, in one of the few characters with decent on-the-page characterisation; I'm now a Sam Worthington fan, because he was damn good as the hero in this, which makes me more enthusiastic about 'Clash of the Titans'; Zoe Saldana is fine as the alien love interest, from what we can tell under the layers of CGI, and I'm coming round to liking her as an actress. The highlights of this film, for me, were Colonel Badass himself Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) whose every scene is made of pure awesome if highly OTT (toxic atmosphere? Miles Quaritch does not need to breathe! Oxygen is for the weak!) and Michelle Rodriguez playing the stereotypical sympathetic turncoat, because Michelle Rodriguez is brilliant anyway, and she brings so much spunk to this supporting character that she was the only reason I was rooting for the good guys by the end of the movie.
It's going to go down through the ages as a masterpiece, with a minority wondering what's so special about it once you get past the visuals, and we will inevitably be bombarded with sequels, prequels and spinoffs. Honestly, I probably won't care beyond the first film. It's a by-the-numbers plotline that sometimes makes me despair for the average intelligence of the viewing public, but then that's me being a total snob. I suspect that people quite like the simplicity of the story and respond to the visuals and nauseating idealism with genuine, open wonder. It saddens me a little that I'm too jaded to be wowed by Pandora, but there are other worlds I care about more.
Also, they really called it unobtanium? Really? That cannot have been unintentional. Makes you wonder if James Cameron is a troper himself...
Monday, 15 March 2010
'Legion'
Oh, 'Legion'. This is a daffy film that is going onto my schlocky horror shelf as soon as it comes out on DVD.
The concept was promising, but not of a good film. The trailers were disappointing. The reviews were plain bad. But, being an open minded kind of girl, I agreed to go along and see it, admittedly with some reluctance. I was overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of silly this film contains. I was never quite sure whether I was being caught in a sly wink from the film-makers or a glorious failure to make a serious film. About Armageddon.
The plot is pretty classic: a group of misfits in a diner called Paradise Falls (that's the third use of that name I've seen recently) come under seige by supernatural forces. Turns out God has decided to destroy humanity (in a significantly less efficient way than the flood) and the last hope is the unborn baby of Charlie, a waitress at the diner (Supernatural's Adrienne Palicki). An angel called Michael (yes, that Michael) played by the distinctly scraggly Paul Bettany has gone rogue and wants to protect this baby.
So you've got the rogue angel, the pregnant woman in a siege, the small band of survivors against impossible odds. It's pretty cool. The acting is all right in places with a decent amount of talent thrown into the mix (Dennis Quaid, Paul Bettany, Lucas Black of 'American Gothic', Kate Walsh from 'Grey's Anatomy' and 'Private Practice') and while the script is, on the whole, quite bad, there are some especially fine quotable lines. If the 'spider-gran' bit hadn't been shown in every damn trailer, it would have been genuinely freaky. There is precisely one awesome fight scene, between Michael the rogue angel and Gabriel the loyal one (played by Kevin Durand, best known to me as Joshua from 'Dark Angel'), which is equal parts cool and silly (Swiss army mace, the noise Gabriel's whirligig of defensive wings makes as he deflects bullets, etc.) and doesn't really get going until Michael is divested of all of his guns.
This film shuttles between making me laugh and actually being genuinely good. The supposedly intense emotional scenes pretty much fall flat, a couple going that extra mile to really hilarious (the way the heart-to-heart between Charlie and Michael is shot makes it look like she's got a vestigial extra head and a beloved character is killed by explosive stomach acid). The characters are actually quite well done, with the long setup before the action starts paying off, but there are some decidedly sloppy things. Like, in their determination to only have a symbolically appropriate trio alive at the end, they kill off a decently well-developed character with a handwave. There are some genuinely creepy moments (I knew ice cream trucks were evil) but they are ruined by not following through or by narm-tastic moments. The much-trailered elastic ice-cream man is casually shot down before he poses any real threat, and a seriously creepy sequence with a possessed small child and a kitchen knife becomes gruesomely funny when someone (I think either himself or Michael, but it's ambiguous) cuts off his thumbs and he looks down forlornly as they spurt. Then it gets creepy again, but a ripple of laughter did run across the cinema at that point.
There were opportunities not taken up in the obsession with gun porn and religious subtext, such as a never-explained but really damn creepy girl with a bloody bag over her head banging manically on a car bonnet. I mean, put her in a movie of her own about a haunted orphanage and I'd have nightmares for a week.
The best thing about this film was undoubtedly Michael. OK, he was silly at points (walking out of a burning cross in the side of a building? Really, movie?) and an opportunity for a really cool fight was completely missed at the end, considering I'd been crossing my fingers and hoping for a burning sword vs Swiss army mace battle royale for the entire film, but Bettany is pretty much perfect as the intensely moral, just-compassionate-enough angel. I'm glad they let him use his British accent - it gave the character a nice touch of the otherwordly in an American-dominated film. Nice to know we Brits are either evil or angels in Hollywood, and the moment when he slides over the counter and lands all action-posey in front of Charlie gave me another action-angel to fangirl. Still, I really wish they had let him do more than one melee action scene. I would have paid just to see him go medieval on a crowd of zombie-angel-people (who apparently are no longer people and therefore totally OK to kill mercilessly).
The structure of the film was good, though a little lurching between set-pieces, but the ending just kind of petered out. They had far too much plot in a film that quite happily skated along on action scenes, and the sun-soaked journey over desert crags to the promised land reminded me of precisely what the ending of 'Planet Terror' was parodying. On the plus side, the main couple didn't explicitly get together at the end, and I'll count my blessings that the film skimmed over the final plot pieces involving the two least interesting characters in the movie. It's not quite on a par with, say, 'Revelation' (not the sequel to 'Apocalypse' from 1999 but the one with Udo Kier and Terence Stamp from 2001) in terms of silly, but I'd put this on an evening's schedule for bad-film-watching. It fits pretty much perfectly between the slices of bad but boring and so bad it's painful. For me, this is the definition of 'so bad it's good' and for sheer entertainment value, intentional or not, I don't begrudge paying to watch this in the cinema. Don't expect it to be good, but do expect it to be fun.
The concept was promising, but not of a good film. The trailers were disappointing. The reviews were plain bad. But, being an open minded kind of girl, I agreed to go along and see it, admittedly with some reluctance. I was overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of silly this film contains. I was never quite sure whether I was being caught in a sly wink from the film-makers or a glorious failure to make a serious film. About Armageddon.
The plot is pretty classic: a group of misfits in a diner called Paradise Falls (that's the third use of that name I've seen recently) come under seige by supernatural forces. Turns out God has decided to destroy humanity (in a significantly less efficient way than the flood) and the last hope is the unborn baby of Charlie, a waitress at the diner (Supernatural's Adrienne Palicki). An angel called Michael (yes, that Michael) played by the distinctly scraggly Paul Bettany has gone rogue and wants to protect this baby.
So you've got the rogue angel, the pregnant woman in a siege, the small band of survivors against impossible odds. It's pretty cool. The acting is all right in places with a decent amount of talent thrown into the mix (Dennis Quaid, Paul Bettany, Lucas Black of 'American Gothic', Kate Walsh from 'Grey's Anatomy' and 'Private Practice') and while the script is, on the whole, quite bad, there are some especially fine quotable lines. If the 'spider-gran' bit hadn't been shown in every damn trailer, it would have been genuinely freaky. There is precisely one awesome fight scene, between Michael the rogue angel and Gabriel the loyal one (played by Kevin Durand, best known to me as Joshua from 'Dark Angel'), which is equal parts cool and silly (Swiss army mace, the noise Gabriel's whirligig of defensive wings makes as he deflects bullets, etc.) and doesn't really get going until Michael is divested of all of his guns.
This film shuttles between making me laugh and actually being genuinely good. The supposedly intense emotional scenes pretty much fall flat, a couple going that extra mile to really hilarious (the way the heart-to-heart between Charlie and Michael is shot makes it look like she's got a vestigial extra head and a beloved character is killed by explosive stomach acid). The characters are actually quite well done, with the long setup before the action starts paying off, but there are some decidedly sloppy things. Like, in their determination to only have a symbolically appropriate trio alive at the end, they kill off a decently well-developed character with a handwave. There are some genuinely creepy moments (I knew ice cream trucks were evil) but they are ruined by not following through or by narm-tastic moments. The much-trailered elastic ice-cream man is casually shot down before he poses any real threat, and a seriously creepy sequence with a possessed small child and a kitchen knife becomes gruesomely funny when someone (I think either himself or Michael, but it's ambiguous) cuts off his thumbs and he looks down forlornly as they spurt. Then it gets creepy again, but a ripple of laughter did run across the cinema at that point.
There were opportunities not taken up in the obsession with gun porn and religious subtext, such as a never-explained but really damn creepy girl with a bloody bag over her head banging manically on a car bonnet. I mean, put her in a movie of her own about a haunted orphanage and I'd have nightmares for a week.
The best thing about this film was undoubtedly Michael. OK, he was silly at points (walking out of a burning cross in the side of a building? Really, movie?) and an opportunity for a really cool fight was completely missed at the end, considering I'd been crossing my fingers and hoping for a burning sword vs Swiss army mace battle royale for the entire film, but Bettany is pretty much perfect as the intensely moral, just-compassionate-enough angel. I'm glad they let him use his British accent - it gave the character a nice touch of the otherwordly in an American-dominated film. Nice to know we Brits are either evil or angels in Hollywood, and the moment when he slides over the counter and lands all action-posey in front of Charlie gave me another action-angel to fangirl. Still, I really wish they had let him do more than one melee action scene. I would have paid just to see him go medieval on a crowd of zombie-angel-people (who apparently are no longer people and therefore totally OK to kill mercilessly).
The structure of the film was good, though a little lurching between set-pieces, but the ending just kind of petered out. They had far too much plot in a film that quite happily skated along on action scenes, and the sun-soaked journey over desert crags to the promised land reminded me of precisely what the ending of 'Planet Terror' was parodying. On the plus side, the main couple didn't explicitly get together at the end, and I'll count my blessings that the film skimmed over the final plot pieces involving the two least interesting characters in the movie. It's not quite on a par with, say, 'Revelation' (not the sequel to 'Apocalypse' from 1999 but the one with Udo Kier and Terence Stamp from 2001) in terms of silly, but I'd put this on an evening's schedule for bad-film-watching. It fits pretty much perfectly between the slices of bad but boring and so bad it's painful. For me, this is the definition of 'so bad it's good' and for sheer entertainment value, intentional or not, I don't begrudge paying to watch this in the cinema. Don't expect it to be good, but do expect it to be fun.
Friday, 12 March 2010
Why do I only like ideas that are new and shiny?
I've started something new. Again. It's having to be longhand as neither of my old laptops are suitable for use (one has a cracked screen, the other overheats and dies after even a reasonable time of use). So it's back to the notebook. Problem is, I fleshed out the setting and a whole load of the characters on the computer, so I have to hope I remember everything. (I could print it out, but how interesting would the world be if it was that simple? Besides, I never remember to when I'm near a printer.)
I have a main character. I kind of like him, but he needs more personality.
I have antagonists, but they're all deliberately ambiguous.
I have some of a setting, but not enough.
I have a starting point for the plot, but nothing else.
*sigh* Time to put in some legwork. Hopefully I won't get any other awesome and pressing ideas before Script Frenzy, at which point I will have inevitably given up, so I can quite happily try to write 100 (or 50) pages of a form at which I am not very good. I sort of hoped this idea might hold out for a graphic novel script, but honestly, it suits being a novel so much better. Bits of it work fine as a novel, but the core plot is a bit dull for it. Maybe forcing myself to go onto campus for hours before and after work might help.
I have a main character. I kind of like him, but he needs more personality.
I have antagonists, but they're all deliberately ambiguous.
I have some of a setting, but not enough.
I have a starting point for the plot, but nothing else.
*sigh* Time to put in some legwork. Hopefully I won't get any other awesome and pressing ideas before Script Frenzy, at which point I will have inevitably given up, so I can quite happily try to write 100 (or 50) pages of a form at which I am not very good. I sort of hoped this idea might hold out for a graphic novel script, but honestly, it suits being a novel so much better. Bits of it work fine as a novel, but the core plot is a bit dull for it. Maybe forcing myself to go onto campus for hours before and after work might help.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
'The Gargoyle' by Andrew Davidson, in which I focus far too much on a pet peeve
I had this book recommended by a lovely friend of mine at Waterstones who is into the same genres as me, and she said that everyone in the world had to read it.
First things first: if you have phobias of burning, OH GOD DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. Honestly, if you have a serious problem with drowning or extended scenes of necessary procedures performed on a burn victim, it might be difficult for you. But burning happens a lot, and in hideous amounts of detail, even for someone with no phobias and a strong stomach. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, as this book is about a man who is severely burned across most of his body during a car accident. The novel follows him during the aftermath as he comes into contact with a beautiful woman in the psychiatric ward at the hospital called Marianne Engel. I really want to add '-who shows him what it means to live again', because that's what always follows that kind of sentence, and it is true, but I feel it's short selling this book a bit. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with this novel, Andrew Davidson's first. I love so many things about it: the protagnist, who is a cynical, horrible person masquerading his fear as a realistic outlook; the characters introduced round the edges, each of whom is surprisingly developed; the symbolism and the fairy-tale aspects of the stories within stories; most of all the blurring between reality and fiction, especially at the end. The thing I hate is Marianne. She is like the archtypal Manic Pixie Dream Girl (as named by Nathan Rabin on The AV Club). It's not necessarily always a bad trope (Hermine from 'Steppenwolf' counts as one of these) but does make me an awful lot more likely to hate the character bitterly.
Marianne is (by the main character's analysis) either schizophrenic or manic depressive or both. She believes that the protagonist is her reincanated lover and that she has been blessed/cursed by God to carve stone gargoyles as a way of giving out the thousands of 'hearts' in her chest over the space of the 700 years she's been alive. Sounds pretty cool? It is, actually. But Marianne seems to also have that not-really-crazy kind of crazy so beloved by writers of Manic Pixie Dream Girls. And she's rich, and beautiful. And always right. And everyone loves her except the awesomely sensible and not-developed-enough burns specialist, Nan. Seriously, Marianne throws a party for everyone at the ward and, lo, she is beloved. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then gave up in despair of Marianne ever being anything but perfect, beautiful and special (my god, she's even called 'Engel', or 'angel' in German, though that may be related to Engelthal Abbey). So I stopped reading about halfway through and went off to read something else.
I had this problem that I really wanted to love this book, but Marianne annoyed me way to much, and the emotional crux of the book relies on us giving a damn about her. So I came back to it, as it was pretty cool in places, and the second half blew me away. For a start, it focuses far more on Marianne's narratives, which are a different tone to her dialogue. A much less annoying one. At the point that she becomes a storyteller, the author seems to be much more relaxed in crafting the language and tone. There are many narratives within the main one: the ongoing tale of how Marianne and the protagonist originally met in medieval Germany, with a Marianne I much prefer but who doesn't really seem to relate to the 'modern' Marianne, and the tales of four other pairs of lovers who ended tragically. They are well told and span centuries, bestriding the world. Finally, there is a Dante-esque narrative journey into a kind of personal Hell, which is wonderful but alas, too brief. In addition, Marianne begins to show signs of serious mental disorder rather than just 'quirkiness', and her breakdown as the protagonist is powerless to stop her is heart-rending, but I was still strangely detatched. I cared far more for the protagonist, a twisted monster inside who became a grotesque on the outside and learned to see the good in people as a result. Marianne was still an academic exercise rather than a person, though I was pleased to find out that she had given herself the name 'Marianne Engel'.
I've focused so much more on what I dislike about this novel because everything else is pretty good. It didn't engage my emotions as much as I felt it should, despite having all the right ingredients, I think because I was distanced by a hated archtype being used without being fully explored. I'm uber-critical of female characters in novels, and I let writers get away with far more in their male characters than I ever will with female ones, so most people won't find Marianne a problem. Her breakdown at the end almost made up for her earlier perfection, especially in one particularly shocking moment, but the question at the heart of this novel is supposed to be 'Is she really crazy?' Frankly, I didn't care, and despite Davidson giving us some pretty awesomely eccentric behaviour, he decided to soften the blow at the end by suggesting that it was all true after all. Which annoyed me: we're adults, Mr Davidson. You've put us through the ringer with everything else in this novel: let us make up our own minds, because we can cope with that kind of uncertainty. The personal development of the protagonist provided a much stronger note of hope for me than the vague assertion that maybe there is magic in the world after all.
Oh dear, a rant. Sorry, it sort of snuck up on me. But the fact that I hate the character of Marianne Engel so much and yet I actually finished the book has got to be some pretty good evidence for it being worth a try: I wouldn't recommend it with the same fervour my friend did, but I would recommend it, especially to someone who will enjoy the references and symbolism. The stories-within-stories are pure joy, and the development of the main character is subtle and introspective. I would almost certainly pick up something else by this author, but only if it had a story that interested me, and I would probably put it down again if I saw signs of another Marianne Engel.
First things first: if you have phobias of burning, OH GOD DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. Honestly, if you have a serious problem with drowning or extended scenes of necessary procedures performed on a burn victim, it might be difficult for you. But burning happens a lot, and in hideous amounts of detail, even for someone with no phobias and a strong stomach. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, as this book is about a man who is severely burned across most of his body during a car accident. The novel follows him during the aftermath as he comes into contact with a beautiful woman in the psychiatric ward at the hospital called Marianne Engel. I really want to add '-who shows him what it means to live again', because that's what always follows that kind of sentence, and it is true, but I feel it's short selling this book a bit. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with this novel, Andrew Davidson's first. I love so many things about it: the protagnist, who is a cynical, horrible person masquerading his fear as a realistic outlook; the characters introduced round the edges, each of whom is surprisingly developed; the symbolism and the fairy-tale aspects of the stories within stories; most of all the blurring between reality and fiction, especially at the end. The thing I hate is Marianne. She is like the archtypal Manic Pixie Dream Girl (as named by Nathan Rabin on The AV Club). It's not necessarily always a bad trope (Hermine from 'Steppenwolf' counts as one of these) but does make me an awful lot more likely to hate the character bitterly.
Marianne is (by the main character's analysis) either schizophrenic or manic depressive or both. She believes that the protagonist is her reincanated lover and that she has been blessed/cursed by God to carve stone gargoyles as a way of giving out the thousands of 'hearts' in her chest over the space of the 700 years she's been alive. Sounds pretty cool? It is, actually. But Marianne seems to also have that not-really-crazy kind of crazy so beloved by writers of Manic Pixie Dream Girls. And she's rich, and beautiful. And always right. And everyone loves her except the awesomely sensible and not-developed-enough burns specialist, Nan. Seriously, Marianne throws a party for everyone at the ward and, lo, she is beloved. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then gave up in despair of Marianne ever being anything but perfect, beautiful and special (my god, she's even called 'Engel', or 'angel' in German, though that may be related to Engelthal Abbey). So I stopped reading about halfway through and went off to read something else.
I had this problem that I really wanted to love this book, but Marianne annoyed me way to much, and the emotional crux of the book relies on us giving a damn about her. So I came back to it, as it was pretty cool in places, and the second half blew me away. For a start, it focuses far more on Marianne's narratives, which are a different tone to her dialogue. A much less annoying one. At the point that she becomes a storyteller, the author seems to be much more relaxed in crafting the language and tone. There are many narratives within the main one: the ongoing tale of how Marianne and the protagonist originally met in medieval Germany, with a Marianne I much prefer but who doesn't really seem to relate to the 'modern' Marianne, and the tales of four other pairs of lovers who ended tragically. They are well told and span centuries, bestriding the world. Finally, there is a Dante-esque narrative journey into a kind of personal Hell, which is wonderful but alas, too brief. In addition, Marianne begins to show signs of serious mental disorder rather than just 'quirkiness', and her breakdown as the protagonist is powerless to stop her is heart-rending, but I was still strangely detatched. I cared far more for the protagonist, a twisted monster inside who became a grotesque on the outside and learned to see the good in people as a result. Marianne was still an academic exercise rather than a person, though I was pleased to find out that she had given herself the name 'Marianne Engel'.
I've focused so much more on what I dislike about this novel because everything else is pretty good. It didn't engage my emotions as much as I felt it should, despite having all the right ingredients, I think because I was distanced by a hated archtype being used without being fully explored. I'm uber-critical of female characters in novels, and I let writers get away with far more in their male characters than I ever will with female ones, so most people won't find Marianne a problem. Her breakdown at the end almost made up for her earlier perfection, especially in one particularly shocking moment, but the question at the heart of this novel is supposed to be 'Is she really crazy?' Frankly, I didn't care, and despite Davidson giving us some pretty awesomely eccentric behaviour, he decided to soften the blow at the end by suggesting that it was all true after all. Which annoyed me: we're adults, Mr Davidson. You've put us through the ringer with everything else in this novel: let us make up our own minds, because we can cope with that kind of uncertainty. The personal development of the protagonist provided a much stronger note of hope for me than the vague assertion that maybe there is magic in the world after all.
Oh dear, a rant. Sorry, it sort of snuck up on me. But the fact that I hate the character of Marianne Engel so much and yet I actually finished the book has got to be some pretty good evidence for it being worth a try: I wouldn't recommend it with the same fervour my friend did, but I would recommend it, especially to someone who will enjoy the references and symbolism. The stories-within-stories are pure joy, and the development of the main character is subtle and introspective. I would almost certainly pick up something else by this author, but only if it had a story that interested me, and I would probably put it down again if I saw signs of another Marianne Engel.
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