Meanwhile…

My traitorous wife went to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes without me. She reports satisfaction with the proceedings. I hear from other trusted sources that the new Conan fares not nearly so well, which, while not unexpected, makes me sad.

At the suggestion of a friend, I have read House of Suns, by Alistair Reynolds. It’s good. There are a lot of big, high-concept science fiction ideas going on there, rendered in a fun fashion. I loved the ending. I thought the narrative structure would be awkward at first, being told in first person from two different characters, but it worked out well. If I have a complaint, it’s that there are too many scenes of people sitting around hashing out every potential option, outcome, motivation, and course of action.

Yes, we are aware that if they wanted to they could have killed you already.

But I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I have now started in on one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s space opera books, and am chugging through it at break-neck speeds. Fantastic. Fun. Recommended. Though maybe you should research and see which one to start out with first. I picked one at random and for all I know I’m spoiling the rest for myself. Actually, a glance at the reviews there on Amazon suggests that this actually is a good place to start.

I am working on a couple of stories. I seem fascinated with compressing epics into something bite-sized. Epic flash. Epic burst? I dunno. I’ll see if it works. I still have a couple of stories out for consideration, and will report back their failures in due time.

Managed to sneak out and see Captain America: The First Avenger this weekend. Loved it. They nailed the characters, the mood, everything. The performances were spot on. The action is fun. And if you’ve been paying attention to the Iron Man and Thor movies, there are lots of little tie-ins to neatly place these movies all in the same universe.

Not that it’s perfect. It could have used another trip through the editing room – some of the action scenes could have been trimmed, and the USO tour was way too long. I would have liked more Bucky, and a more epic…destiny for him.

I also would have liked them to push the Nazi superscience a little more – a huge robot for Steve to bring down would have been a blast, and would have probably helped a general audience believe that this is a man who can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with guys like Iron Man and Thor. I think when the Avengers movie comes out, Cap is going to have to prove himself in a way he never had to in the comics.

But, overall, I really enjoyed the flick. Looking forward to seeing it at least once or twice more.

I was going to write an elaborate, scene-by-scene savaging of this weekend’s Green Lantern, but then the A/C on our house died late Saturday. This unit is, I’m guessing, as old as the house, which by coincidence makes it about as old as I am.

Some of us in the business might call that foreshadowing.

But, yeah. Green Lantern. Yeesh. The Tomatometer has it at 26%, which if you ask me is being generous. The editing is choppy, the characterization off mark, and the script is a laundry list of amateur screenwriting mistakes that would make a first year semester day RTVF major blush. A full third of the movie and several of the major characters should have been cut entirely.

And the villain looks like big pile of poop.

When I get a chance I may pull up the script online somewhere and go through it in more detail, but for now, suffice to say it should be avoided if you at all value your opinion of Hal Jordan.

It was a delight to see the alien Green Lanterns – Kilowog, Tomar Re, and a bunch of the obscure ones (they even had this guy and her). And Mark Strong was great as the completely underused Sinestro.

Otherwise, though, this thing pretty much stunk on every level. I dearly wanted it to be good, but they just didn’t pull this one off.

Possibly the worst part of this failure is that, if the movie isn’t financially successful – I haven’t looked at the numbers yet – the studio will probably come to the wrong conclusion as to why it failed. As bad as it is, the movie is actually quite brave in not pulling its punches and making the story as cosmic and out there as it does. Most of the comic book movies hold back a little – bringing the costumes down to earth, cutting out the more bizarre aspects, etc. Green Lantern really didn’t do that, which is admirable. And that’s far from why the movie is bad. I just hope its failure doesn’t hinder future DC properties.

Managed to get out and see X-Men: First Class this weekend, the third in the X-Men franchise and a prequel to the original.

It’s pretty good. It’s a giant Bond movie – like an original Sean Connery jetpacks and mad scientists trying to blow up the moon ’60s Bond – but with super powers.

There are about a million things I could nitpick, little flaws throughout that could have been fixed with another draft or two of the script. I’m gonna pick on the most glaring weakness, though, which was Emma Frost. January Jones looked the part, but, aside from her lackluster acting skills, the movie really didn’t give her anything to work with. None of Emma’s ruthless cunning came across at all. She’s a great manipulator, that’s her thing, but in this she was just another minion. (And this is excluding the heroic aspects of her character, which obviously wouldn’t have worked for the story in this movie.) It didn’t help that there was no Kitty Pryde-type character for her to bounce off of. It made me sad.

It also annoyed me that her clothes turned to diamond along with her skin. Maybe that was just a limitation of the special effects. But that’s just one of the million nit-picks.

Anyway, I guess it can’t be helped. The first couple X-films messed up Storm just as badly, so they have a track record for this sort of thing.

Just so I don’t end on a bad note – Magneto and Xavier were perfect, flawlessly executed (well, mostly – nearly everything between Xavier and Mystique was odd). The rest of the movie is there primarily to make them look good. It was fun seeing Magneto be a bad-ass and being morally ambiguous, which is always how I liked him in the comics (his moments of pure evil, trying to massacre millions of people, always struck me as out of character). And Xavier was great – we got to see him using his powers, training people to use theirs, healing people, and displaying some genuinely moving moments of compassion and empathy. You could definitely see this man going on to inspire others to follow his dream.

Anyway, there it is. Fun, but flawed. Just don’t think about it too hard while you’re watching.

Saw The Green Hornet over the weekend. It’s actually not bad. I had little knowledge of the Green Hornet and Kato before, other than they exist, so I went in with no expectations and low standards. What most impressed me about the movie was that though Kato was the bad-ass, the script managed to stay on track with the Hornet’s story – it’s his moral arc that drives the plot forward. Fun stuff. Eleven-year-old nephew Logan thought it was the greatest thing he’d ever seen (however, he also laughed uproariously at the trailer for the next Big Momma flick, so we take these things with a grain of salt).

[Noted: Seth Rogan has a love/hate relationship with balls. Not sure what's going on there.]

My nephew, however, has no idea who Bruce Lee is. This is something I must rectify.

In other, totally awesome news, I have been informed that With the Band will be included in Every Day Fiction’s Third Best of Anthology (er, their third anthology, not their anthology of third-best stories, hah!). I’ve been so busy lately I didn’t even realize they were putting the anthology together (though it is that time of year) or that I had a story eligible. This is a nice little surprise after a year that was, overall, a very dismal writing period for me.

In other other totally awesome news, I have a pretty solid fantasy story written that I’ll be submitting to the writing group for crits, probably tonight after a few tweaks. Clocking in around 2,600 words, it’s new ground for me, as I haven’t written nearly as much fantasy as someone with my background should.

At any rate, I predict success for this story. I’ll need to blow the dust off my Duotrope account. We shall see!

I had a half-written review of Tron Legacy I was going to post, but didn’t get a chance. And now the film has been out for like six years, cinema time (cinema years are like dog years, except if you don’t make a bibillion dollars in three days everyone forgets about you). What’s the point? It is pretty. Bad script. You know the drill. I still enjoyed it, because I’m a big fan of the original. I love the larger concepts of the Tron universe, the idea that there are sentient (but severely limited and frustrated by their own ambitions) computer programs thriving and worshiping human beings as gods.

I got a big thrill when Tron said “I fight for the users!”

A quick comment on this Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark broadway show: it’s clearly not working, for whatever reason, despite other shows being just as stunt-heavy. What I’d love to see them do is focus on the civilian side of Spidey; have a show about Peter Parker and Mary Jane, these two crazy kids trying to make it in the big city that happens to be full of superheroes, one of whom happens to be Peter. Minimize the adventure aspects. Really, tell the story from MJ’s perspective. That would be different and interesting and something that hasn’t been done in film and definitely not in theater. We don’t need to see the fights; does someone think Spidey is really going to lose? It’s the lead-up and aftermath that contain all the drama. There’s no reason to have people bleeding in the aisles. And it would show a audience that likely never reads comics that there’s more to the characters than beat-em-ups.

Oh, friend Stephanie has set up a tumblr for writing prompts. Use them!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off waiting by the phone for my call from the Spider-Man producers.

In case you hadn’t heard (like I just did like an hour ago), someone is remaking Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Without Joss Whedon!

Someone grab the pitchforks! Boycott something! OMG!!!111!!

Seriously, though, I don’t care.

Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some Buffy. I own all seven seasons on DVD and have been faithfully reading Season 8 even when it’s not that good. I even watch it occasionally in syndication on Logo when nothing else is on despite the ridiculous drag queen commercials. There’s an awesome Mr. Pointy replica a friend crafted on my bookcase alongside my signed Green Lantern and Cardboard Tube; the greatest weapons in the universe. I own that one issue of Rolling Stone with Sarah Michelle Gellar on the cover. You know the one.

Just in case you don't.

Here’s the thing: Buffy is awesome. She’s a great, fun character, and the metaphorical genre-twisting that made the show special is built into the basic premise; you can’t take that away from her, at least as long as Buffy is still kind of a silly name.

Other writers have handled the character, and done it well. The television series that so many people are treating as sacred wasn’t even the first version, but sort of a soft reboot of the story started in the original movie.

Everyone complains about remakes, but for the most part it’s ridiculous whinging. There are perfectly good characters and stories laying around waiting for the right writer or artist or cinematographer to come along and do them justice. For every unnecessary Psycho remake there’s a Maltese Falcon. If someone offered me a chance to write a remake or sequel to The Last Starfighter I would sell any number of your souls to do so – I love the original, but come on how awesome would the Death Blossom be in 3D, amiright?

At any rate, the mere existence of remakes doesn’t invalidate the one you love. The originals are still there, you can still watch or read them. No matter how many times George Lucas craps on his own Star Wars flicks, I still have the originals to re-watch and pass on to my descendants (somewhere…on VHS…that I don’t have a VCR to watch, but still).

My point is Buffy is a strong character with great potential. Getting all worked up about a remake is not just silly, but mildly insulting to her and to Joss. She can stand on her own and create a legacy that generations to come can enjoy. We can either let her go and do that, joining the ranks of other great fictional characters like Conan the Barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, and Batman, or we can horde her and let her become a forgotten cult classic once the current core audience dies out.

Either the remake is great, in which case yay! or it’s terrible, in which case it’ll be marginalized and quickly forgotten. So relax. There’s no losing side to this.

Disclaimer:  If they ever go through with that Seven Samurai remake I’ve hearing about for the last few years I WILL MURDER SOMEONE’S FACE.

That is all.

I’ve finished reading Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, and it is quite good. It’s like 1984, but with the past 20 years of pop culture, the internet, and pretty recent political hullabaloo thrown in. Hyped as a hilarious satire, I actually didn’t find it all that hilarious. Amusing, sure, but not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s an excellent read for other reasons, though, so I give it a hearty recommendation.

(And I don’t mean to put down Shteyngart’s comedic skills – I’ve heard him on NPR and he’s a brilliantly funny guy. I just didn’t think humor was Super Sad True Love Story‘s strength.)

The Sad is what’s most vital to the book, I think. In a way it’s overreacting to certain things – the belief that language is dying, for example, something you hear a lot but is largely nonsense. But other things are dead on, like how everyone is obsessed and addicted to their iPhone equivalent, and how the US economy is based pretty much entirely on us buying that useless crap. Maybe the book is funnier than I thought, and I couldn’t see it because that sort of thing annoys me so much.

Now I’m rereading Salman Rushdie’s Fury, which I read years ago and have thoroughly forgotten. It is very funny. Also funny – my wife and I spotted him in New York City on our honeymoon. My wife is so awesome at spotting celebrities she can pick Salman Rushdie out of a crowd at the Museum of Natural History. This is her super power. Even she doesn’t even know how she does it.

Unwritten, Vol. 2,  by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. Excellent stuff. Did I mention Unwritten before? It’s about this guy whose dad wrote a series of Harry Potter-style boy wizard books, and he’s living off his father’s fame. Then the lines between the books and the real world begin to blur, with some pretty horrendous consequences.

The Plain Janes, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg, from DC’s now-defunct Minx line of comics. Nothing that will blow your mind, but I enjoyed it. There’s some cute art stuff going on. I’m seeing some reviews now complaining about one-dimensional characters and it’s hard to argue with them.

Old Man Logan, by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven. There are a couple of stories that the X-Men do really well, and bleak, horrible futures is one of them. Stories where the heroes failed and are now all dead or otherwise gone always bother me at a fundamental level, but they’re still fun. I guess it’s good to see why we need them. McNiven’s art is incredible.

Irredeemable, vol. 2, by Mark Waid and Peter Krause. Mark Waid has always been one of my favorite writers, and he’s still got it. This series about the world’s most powerful superhero gone bad, killing his former friends, enemies, and millions of innocent civilians keeps taking unexpected turns.

I finally got around to watching Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is, ahem, fantastic. It’s up there with Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, my favorite Wes Anderson movies. If you’ve been as negligent as I, you should check it out.

Ugh. 20 days! I have been immensely busy with work (and other things) of late. Corporate America is currently in a “Let’s keep producing more while not replacing all these people we laid off a few months ago” phase. It’s awesome.

A couple of recommendations for you today, from a couple of my wildly talented pals:

First up is this noir-flavored short from friend Aaron. I always want to work more with Aaron, but never get around to it. My loss!

Second is another short, from friend Alex. He actually shot this some time back for a web series that never took off (evidently the writer caved under the pressure). But it is pretty.

Third is the new CD, Five Deadly Venoms, from my comrades in the Mr. Bungle-inspired Shaolin Death Squad. These are people with whom I toiled in the unforgiving planogram mines and then drunkenly philosophized with until the wee hours of the next day. They know more about me than I am comfortable with. You should listen and soak in their wisdom.

I have seen Kick-Ass. It is awesome. I have more to say about it, but currently lack the energy to do so. Perhaps later.

In general I feel pretty meh about the Oscars nowadays, but I thought I’d glance over them anyway. I don’t have much opinion on the performance nominations and what not. Since I have a terrible memory for this, I’ve got a list of the movies that came out last year and I’m comparing it to the nomination list. Prep yourself for some stream-of-consciousness style commentary.

Best Picture. Avatar will almost certainly win, though everyone but the voters will likely agree that it shouldn’t. Why is The Blind Side there? Haven’t we seen the “feel good high school football movie in which somebody overcomes great disadvantage” about a billion times already? District 9 and Up In the Air are good, but not Best Picture good. Out of the ones I’ve seen, I think I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds the most, but I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m cursing myself for not having seen A Serious Man. From what I’ve heard, Precious might actually be the one that deserves the prize.

I feel like if it hadn’t made a babillion dollars, Avatar wouldn’t be there, and Sherlock Holmes would have been able to take it’s rightful nomination.

If Avatar wins Best Art Direction I’ll be sorely disappointed. People have complained about the recycled script, but there was nothing remotely original about the art design. It didn’t deserve a nomination, much less a win.

Wait, why wasn’t Watchmen nominated for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)? Instead we get District 9, which devolved into a generic action movie in it’s 3rd act.

(Observation: There were a ton of documentaries about the environment in 2009.)

Damn, I didn’t get to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, either. Or The Fantastic Mr. Fox. A lot of stuff came and went during my insane busy season at work.

They should create a special Most Number of Heads Cut in Half Because Ninjas Don’t Fuck Around with that Neck Nonsense award for Ninja Assassin.

I also didn’t get to see The Imaginanium of Doctor Parnassus, an omission for which I should be beaten with reeds.

The Wife Awards: Jeff Bridges wins the Most Frequently Mentioned Person My Wife would Totally Do award, and (500) Days of Summer gets the Movie During Which Wife Most Frequently Glared at her Husband award.

And really, those are the ones that matter.