Difficulties and Problems

For some unfathomable reason, I've been trying to get on Livejournal a lot today. Maybe it's that forbidden fruit thing, which is a poor analogy because I don't particularly like fruit, and there isn't some fucking snake telling me how fucking delicious Livejournal is or anything. Apparently the "datacenter" needs "power" to run, which I believe translates to "we got really moshed last night and woke up in the wrong state, excuse us but we need to find our pants and remember our names."

I am not, shall we say, a qualified translator of technical difficulties.

I have been trying to avoid the internet (read: HP7 spoilers), and so have not returned with enlightening or entertaining anecdotes. I've started the book, though. I'm enjoying it so far. Say nothing.

I meant to say something about the Order of the Phoenix movie, and it would've probably been something like this:

I liked the film, in that it kept a brisk pace and managed to make an overlong and sometimes tedious book into a taut and entertaining movie. The new casts all did a fine job, Umbridge (who wasn't exactly what I expected, but then I expected a complete cartoon and was happy with the alternative) and Luna in particular. I find there are a lot of unfortunate and unfounded complaints with the HP movies - they left this out, that person isn't right, they changed that. The movies do a very good job, I find, of matching the tone of the books, of coming close to the vision, and of hitting the right points of the story, and I believe we have to accept that it might never be exactly what was in your head.

I had a problem with the script, not in its deviation from the original story (a film is different from a book, and the story needs to change) but purely as a work of adaptation. I was in the process of rereading the fifth book when I went to see the film, and wasn't struck by the glaring inaccuracies or deviations from the story, but rather the peculiarly patchwork dialogue. Nearly every line in the film is a close variant or exact rip from characters' speech in the original book. The dialogue, as it stands, works fine on the page, where there's nearly eight-hundred pages to establish things like character and emotion and theme, but there's more of an onus on spoken language in a film. It's the responsibility of an adapter to create dialogue that illuminates the characters, and reinforces the themes, and usually this means creating and changing the text to suit the new medium. Mark Goldenberg, the writer of the fifth film, seemed content to cram Rowling's words into a hundred-and-thirty minutes, and then stand back.

The result was a strangely unbalanced film that seemed to be almost exclusively about Harry and Umbridge, and only occasionally about anyone else. And while I appreciate that those are the protagonist and antagonist, there's a rich ensemble who fall by the wayside because Goldenberg was too lazy to write them in.

Madness at Midnight

I suppose it was inevitable.

Despite my pronounced distaste for Rowling's prose (described in this somewhat scathing indictment as "toxic"), I've been rereading the fifth book in anticipation of rereading the sixth book in anticipation of the seventh. My brother and sister and I have been negotiating over who will be the first to read The Deathly Hallows, and I'm having a great time going over the stories again. Rowling can craft characters and a plot, and I've been reading the series since I was twelve - I am as anchored, emotionally, in the world of Hogwarts as I am in any fictional universe.

So it came as no surprise that I ended up at a Midnight Madness event, and have already picked up the last of the Harry Potter books. It had to happen eventually.

It happened like this:
"Hey, are you doing anything right now?"
"Not really. Reading Order of the Phoenix."
"You wanna go check out the madness at Chapters?"
"Sure."

The place was (predictably) packed, but no lines going around the block, no excess of cosplayers or peculiar, complex games or merchandising schemes. There was a suspicious, red-vested kid, standing between the in-and-out traffic near the front door when we left, who was going through a deck of cards, lifting them one at a time, facing away from him; on the cards faces were shapes - triangles, circles, squares. He was concentrating very hard, and staring determinedly into the space above the heads in the line. I suspect he had incredible psychic powers and was testing them, but no one seemed to be paying much attention to him, with the exception of an overweight, mustachioed man wearing a trucker hat, who smiled benignly at the cards, saying nothing.

When the book boxes came out of the back room, a screech went up, like a host of banshees or an all-girls primary school riding the Ghoster Coaster.

All told, we hung around for about forty-five minutes, got the book, and went home.

(A note on the article I linked above: The guy seems to be a member of that small contingent of readers who don't like the books, but are somehow incapable of understanding how anyone else could, either, and so choose to disparage the stories and those affiliated with them, rather than sort of accepting that everyone has their own tastes. He makes a couple of good points, though, especially about booksellers early on, and he's nowhere near as harsh as Harold Bloom or A.S. Byatt - you can see some of their juicier quotes in the Wikipedia article. 'Course, Harold Bloom's a dick.)

By the way: I'm not going to read the book right away, but I'm sure I will soon, and I'll want to blog about it. I imagine many of you will do the same. If you spoil anything for me, if you spoil word one, there will be a great reckoning that will end the world. A suggestion then, that will keep me spoiler free, and spare you your miserable life: if you want to blog about the book, use rot13. It's a neat little cypher engine that lets you conceal text without needing to hide it behind a jump or something. Try using it to translate this:

Naq yb! hagb gurz gurer pnzr n ivfvba, bs qnexarff naq greebe rireynfgvat, bs n Terng naq Greevoyr Ornfg jubfr anzr unq orra jbira vagb gur gncrfgel bs qbbz, naq ur fnvq gb gurz, va n ibvpr yvxr gur ubjyvat bs ybphfgf: "Lr jub unir fcbvyrq gur raqvat bs gur Qrnguyl Unyybjf jvyy arire xabj gur oyrffrq serrqbz bs qrngu!"

So just cypher your post, and put a link to rot13 in there somewhere.

(Idea stolen from Making Light)

I was going to talk about the OotP movie, and then about some other stuff, but I'll do that later. Instead, I'll leave you with the most ridiculous quote from this somewhat ridiculous, but mostly pretty cool AV Club interview with Britt Daniels:

AVC: What happened to calling [the album] Trouble Minx?

BD: Oh, you know. The whole thing about naming an album is that it's got to be something that everybody's happy with. And to be honest, I didn't really know what Trouble Minx meant after a while.

Because Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is clear as the fucking Arctic summer sky.

Descent Dissection

After angry and venomous discussion, I ended up listening to practically everyone, except for the pale, sickly fellow in the back who insisted that I should get to bed at a decent time. He really should speak up.

It turns out The Descent is good (it's the one about six women going into a cave who get trapped, and then attacked by creatures that live in the dark). I haven't said that about a horror movie since The Sixth Sense, which only sort of counts.

I think part of the reason I dislike most horror films is that I want the genre to be so much better than it is. I mean, I'm sure there are good horror movies out there - I hear they do some wonders in Japan - and I think people used to know how to make a good horror flick (The Shining's a beautifully crafted film, and scary as hell; The Exorcist I find less frightening, but still compelling). There is a wealth of story to be mined in the horror genre, and really interesting and complex questions to ask about people and the world through the lens of horror, and a fuck ton of entertainment and adrenaline value. But somewhere (probably in the fucking '80s) Wes Craven and his cronies showed up and ruined the whole damn project, with their needless gore, stupid plots, shallow characters, and endless sequels.

Now, it seems, the genre ruins itself. Every new horror movie makes the exact same mistakes as its predecessors: cheap, easy scares, confusing, ill-conceived, or poorly-explained premises, a cast of unlikeable, wooden stereotypes, played by attractive but forgettable twentysomethings, who function as fodder for whoever the Bad might be. It's as though Freddie Krueger and Jason Voorhees are the bouncers of Horror, and unless you've met the Dress Code (shitty, out-of-date, pseudogothic leather), you can't come into the party.

So where did The Descent go right?

First, its cast. Likable characters to whom we can easily relate, all female (eliminating the necessity for pointless and constant sexual tension), and most importantly, real. These are women you've met - the fact that they're wilderness and adrenaline junkies is an added layer, rather than the defining thrust of their personalities. I could see my high school English teacher going spelunking with these women; I could see my mom having a drink with them. If they're not particularly deep or complex, we can forgive them that - they're a world better than the cast of Scream.

That's important, the reality of the characters. It makes us care about what happens to them. And it makes us think that we could just as easily find ourselves in their shoes, and that makes the fear hit home.

Second, its atmosphere. The director (Neil Marshall) cultivates an environment of tension from the first few minutes, and is able to maintain it through practically every minute of the movie. This is no mean feat, considering the Baddies don't show up until the second half. But that's the beauty of the genre - once you establish the danger, you can maintain the tension using the environment itself. Every corner and shadow should be a threat, every beat a moment of potential violence. The caves, and the dark, are as much a part of the nightmare as the things that live in them. Marshall's aided by the natural claustrophobia of the caves, but that's as much a part of the horror as the creatures - the caves are the enemy, as well.

Third, and finally, the lack of gratuity. The film is violent, and bloody, and at times gruesome, but never to excess. There's never gore for the sake of gore, or sex for the sake of nudity. The blood is earned, which is miles better than the torture-porn kick.

That's not to say that I didn't have problems with the film - the characters and plot could be a little more robust, the final act could use some tighter beats, and the ending seems contrived. But it's a step in the right direction, and in a genre that needed all the progress it can get.

The floor is open.

I am having an internal debate.

The first voice, a hard-nosed, grey-haired guy with a thick neck and a smoking habit, tells me that I need to get my ass in gear, write six or seven hundred more words, get up and do it again tomorrow. He says this with a burnt, greasy cigar in his mouth. He drinks scotch.

The second voice, a soothing, sultry thing in a red silk dress, tells me that I should take a load off, mix myself a drink, lie on the couch and watch The Descent. She slides up to me and tells me the writing can wait. She smells like jasmine.

The third: an eager, bouncy kid with a striped shirt and scuffed overalls. He tugs at my jeans and says I should keep reading Harry Potter, so I'll be ready for the seventh book. He is chewing bubble gum, and inexpertly tries to blow bubbles, more often than not spitting the gum out of his mouth, picking it up out of the grass, brushing at it, and tossing it back in.

The fourth voice looks suspiciously like my mother, and says I need to get laundry done. She reasons that I can do this while listening to anyone else. She is worldworn and smells like soap.

The fifth voices sits in a chair in the corner, with his feet up and a computer on his lap, and mentions casually that I should blog about the other four.

Harry Potter Sucks (not really).

After I did that last trailerdump, Apple released something like twenty-three new trailers in as many hours. So I'm going to dump a few more:

Get Smart
Gone Baby Gone*
Ghosts of Cite Soleil
Death At a Funeral**
Charlie Bartlett
3:10 to Yuma
Rocket Science
The King of Kong
... and a better quality No Country for Old Men

* I like Casey Affleck and Dennis Lehane, and Ben Affleck was great last time he was behind the lens.
** Alan Tudyk. Nuff said.

I'm really not sure what it is I want to sit and write about next. I suppose, at this point, I should be going back and reworking things that I've already written. There are a bunch of them (something like eight or nine short stories, and one short play). And most of the things I want to write are going to take a while.

Read, if you can, The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler (otherwise known as Lemony Snicket). It's his first novel, and a very dark, funny, tricky look at high school. I suspect that, on occasion, Handler simply channeled some people I know in writing it. I suspect that people I know are being channeled a lot. I also wear a tinfoil helmet, and fear the Army of the Twelve Monkeys.

(I only just watched Twelve Monkeys the other day; I don't know what took me so long. See it, if you haven't, and watch it again if you have.)

I've gone bargain bin diving at Chapters, recently, which is a little like going to a used bookstore, but all the books are new and there aren't as many of them. I've found a couple of great little things, though - Cory Doctorrow and Jonathan Lethem and China Mieville. (Incidentally, China Mieville's new book, Un Lun Dun is out - has been for half a year, actually, and I missed it somehow - and further proves that he is smarter and more talented than we are, as he has illustrated the whole thing in addition to writing it. If you haven't read Mieville, go find Perdido Street Station. He's a monster.)

Further along the vein of great writers, you can read the first chapter of Warren Ellis's first novel Crooked Little Vein here. If you're not familiar with Ellis's writing, a warning: the first sentence involves rat urine and it generally goes downhill from there, in terms of filth. Really good though, can't wait for the book.

I made a slightly controversial statement on Friday that went something like this:
"I'm rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
"Yeah."
"J.K. Rowling is a terrible writer."
"..."

This is a feeling I've had for some time, but I haven't really voiced it or justified it till recently. Allow me, first, to elaborate, before you start clawing for my eyes. In Hearts in Atlantis (the book, which is good, not the movie, which is trash), Stephen King (via the character Ted Brautigan) makes a statement about literature that I think is actually a very simple and accurate measure of quality. It goes like this. "Some books have good stories, but bad writing, and some books have good writing and bad stories. And the books that have good stories and good writing are the great ones." It's something that I've applied to many of the books I've read since. Salem's Lot, one of King's own, for instance, has a great deal of remarkable writing and a mostly worthless story. Everfree, the last of Nick Sagan's Idlewild trilogy, is a very intelligent, layered story that is often ill-served by rushed and shallow writing (a shame, really, as the first two books are wonderfully written, and there are moments of splendour in the third). Basically, he's saying that there's a difference between Story (the plot, the characters, the themes) and Writing (the mechanics and poetics of the words on the page).

Harry Potter demonstrates, above anything else, Rowling's remarkable talent for storycraft, and her ability to shape memorable, compelling characters. But the writing...

I'd like to amend my earlier statement, actually. Rowling's not a terrible writer. She is a completely unremarkable writer, with moments of brilliance and moments of abhorrence. And I'm aware that the novels are "written for children", which is no excuse. Coraline is written for children. So are The Hobbit, and Narnia, and Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan.

That being said, I'm rushing through the fifth and sixth books in anticipation of the seventh, which I am going to find and read as quickly and quietly as I can.

As a moment of Zen, please read.

Trailerdump

Trailerdump: A Rundown of Movies and Games that You Might Be Interested in Knowing More About, and a Few that are Utter Trash.

Movies.
(From oldest trailer to newest)
Pierrepont: The Last Hang-Man
I Am Legend*
WALL-E
Interview
Sunshine
The Golden Compass*
Shoot 'Em Up*
American Gangster
untitled (1-18-08)*
This Is England**
Dans Paris**
Vantage Point
30 Days of Night
The Ten*
No Country for Old Men***

* Movies for which I'm particularly excited.
** Trailers that won me over (THIS IS ENGLAND wasn't what I expected. DANS PARIS was better than I expected.).
*** The only trailer feed I could find, which wasn't very good. Still, the film looks phenomenal.


Games. [In no particular order]
(Click the link and scroll down to select the trailers - special emphasis on the E3 2007 Trailers)
Heavenly Sword
Rock Band
MGS4: Guns of the Patriots
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Smash Bros Brawl
FFXII: Revenant Wings
Folklore
Killzone 2
Final Fantasy Tactics
Resident Evil 5
Halo 3
Call of Duty 4
Assassin's Creed
GTA 4


And Some Other Trailers that are Terrible, Regardless of the Quality of the Films They Represent.
Moliere
Skinwalkers
Lady Chatterley
Becoming Jane
I Know Who Killed Me

Cthulhu fhtagn. Maybe.

I suppose I should blog again. If only to get into a decent writing habit.

Occasionally, over the past few weeks, I've come across something cool and thought, "I need to blog this," and then promptly didn't, either because I didn't have a computer or the time handy, or because I thought, "That alone isn't worth it." Now I've forgotten most of those cool things, and am forcing myself to blog until I remember them.

Is blog a verb? I blog, you blog, weblog. Heh. (I think that's the name of a real blog, somewhere, actually, "I blog you blog weblog." Let me check. Yep! Well, close. It's right here. I've read some of it before - a really excellent poliblog. Or, at least, it was about politics. Currently it seems to be about Doctor Who, a show I really should start watching, as, I imagine, should you all.)

(Speaking of parenthetical references to television shows, I started watching Deadwood, recently. They say the word "fuck" and "cocksucker" a lot. It's pretty good so far.)

I have, thankfully, written a fair deal since getting home - I'm on my third short story, and there's a short play in there, and a bunch of semi-revived half-stories that I need to go back and edit. Eventually, I'm going to go back, pound them all into shape, and start sending them places.

I already have a gnawing, urgent obsession with J.J. Abrams as-yet-unnamed upcoming film. If you saw Transformers (and I have a whole damn rant in store about that movie) you may have seen the trailer already. If you haven't, go here immediately, chose your preferred size, and strap in (that sounded like a sexual reference). I'll wait.

Done? Ok. Here's the scoop, sort of. Nobody really knows a damn thing about it yet, but there are plenty of rumours. It's being written by Drew Goddard, a man who's worked mostly on television (and has a damn good resume - Buffy, Angel, Alias, and LOST, including the best episode of the last season of LOST and maybe ever, "The Man Behind the Curtain"). It's a giant monster movie of some kind, and the monster's codename is "The Parasite".

Here are the two rumours that have me most intrigued:

First, it may be shot entirely by hand-held camcorders. I feel like I need to keep justifying why this is cool to people, who seem to equate hand-held with Blair Witch. Here's my point - this is big budget. There will be a cinematographer on set, not a drunk film school grad who thinks she can act scared in the woods, filming her own snot. It will look good, and it will look real, and it'll give you the kind of perspective that you would get if an enormous monster attacked New York.

Second, it might be a Cthulhu movie.

This has been inferred from the two pieces of viral marketing that's been released for the film. Check 'em out:

http://www.1-18-08.com
http://www.ethanhaaswasright.com/

The second one is a big puzzle, and promises more information on August 1st. Can't wait.

Sleep now. Blargl.

"... they were a continent called the imagination..."

I am toiling the night away in the Word Mines, and feel like I may be up to see the sun rise - it's one of those times where I'm prepared to sit huddled under a blanket (only not in this heat) with my computer on my lap, imagining conversations until the metaphorical candle gutters out - but will probably give up on that, because I'm blessedly not on deadline.

I've spent a lot of time over the past few days thinking about writing, and then actually doing some of it, and realizing how very much of it I want to do, and how comparatively little time I have to do it in (that being the rest of my life). And I've been thinking, at least a little, about genre. Most of what I've written can be classified as some genre - a lot of it fantasy (or dark fantasy), some of it noir, even a little mystery - and precious little falls under the so-called natural, realistic world of "literary" fiction. I like my world, the world of imaginative and impossible stories. It's where I spend most of my time, reading, or writing, or watching.

And it has always bugged me when someone's said to me, "Well, I wish it was more literary," or "I tend to stay away from 'fantasy'." In the latter half of the Creative Writing class at UW, the professor instructed us at the beginning that we shouldn't be writing "genre" fiction (she later relented and qualified that after I cited Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link as precedents of "literary genre" fiction). And that irked me because I wasn't interested in writing stories trapped in the real world. And then, another professor, who I admire and respect, told me, after looking at Voices, that it was all very good, but that I should spend more time on human emotion and less on "the science fiction-y stuff".

So, as a writer, I've spent a lot of my time feeling like my world is the stunted, bastard cousin of literary fiction, that it's the world of pulp and that real writers stick to real life.

Read this speech, given completely impromptu by Clive Barker at Fantasycon 2006. It says everything I'd like to say about genre, and a good deal more.

And I'm going to go back to my world of myth, and fantasy, and magic, and imagination, and be very, immensely happy about it. Good night.