S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 9

10 Things Suicide Squad Got Right

I mentioned Suicide Squad in my prior blog, and I did indeed see it in the theatre the other day. So what did I think? Well, most of the folks critical of the movie are right, it is badly flawed— and almost all those flaws can be attributed to the execrable editing. Amazingly, though, somehow the film’s good points managed to just outweigh the horrible damage done to it in post-production. Enough to make one weep at what may have been, and actually justify a “director’s cut” Blu-ray release. So, rather than harp on the film’s many faults (and they are legion) I thought I’d give a list of what the movie actually got right:

10) The casting is pretty superb in my book. Even Will Smith’s typical glib demeanor syncs well with portraying a complete sociopath. And the chemistry between him and Margot Robbie make the film.

9) The acting also shines, once you take into account the limits of the choppy editing and the fact that this is an ensemble action movie where we aren’t going terribly deep into these characters.

8) The bad guys are actually bad guys. All of them. It seems that every time a Hollywood movie gets its mind on focusing on a group of criminals doing something there is a near-irresistible temptation to make our hero(s) wrongly convicted, or justified in their criminal acts in some way. But there’s no question here that the characters belong in prison. Only one character has a redemption arc over their criminal past, and their crimes are so irredeemable that this only elicits some sympathy.

7) The movie isn’t as nihilist as it appears on first glance. Suicide Squad may deal with characters without a moral center, but they actually are aware of that, and suffer for that lack. You see this with every family/romantic connection shown for the members of the Squad. (It’s arguably the point of the bar scene.)

6) The film is aware that getting this group together is a bad idea. But this isn’t a plot hole. It actually is the plot.

5) The Joker. This movie needed a different take on him, and the one they chose both fits in this universe, and is distinct enough from every other portrayal to stand on its own. Also, it was a wise decision IMHO to use him sparingly, because he can easily chew up a whole movie by himself. They needed him because Harley, but only for that. Any more would be a distraction from the main plot.

4) The soundtrack. Sure, they may have been trying to riff on the Guardians of the Galaxy’s MO. I don’t care. This would be a case of a DC film learning the right lesson from Marvel.

3) The one-liners. “I love your perfume! What is it, the stench of death?”

2) The tone.  This is another case of learning the right lesson from Marvel. Getting the tone right for a superhero movie is a delicate process, it’s very easy to fall into the two extremes: either take everything way serious and fall into gritty angst and nihilism, or descend into self-mockery and keep winking at the camera to show the audience that you’re not falling for it. Somehow, this movie avoided that trap. It knew the place of humor, and it wasn’t at the expense of the characters or their stories. (Except Captain Boomerang, but we’re supposed to think he’s an asshole.)

1) It showed that you can make a superhero movie diverse without an accompanying internet meltdown. And given that it looks like this movie’s making money, there’s a good chance we’ll see more of this type of casting. . . and maybe a little less of the online angst.

Speaking of the 1980’s. . .

How many of you remember the Tobe Hooper film, Lifeforce, from 1985? It’s probably the only piece of genre pop-culture from the 80’s that Stranger Things didn’t pay homage to— possibly due to the combination of full-frontal nudity and zombies. Lifeforce hasn’t gotten the same love from posterity as Tobe Hooper’s other efforts (such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Poltergeist) which is unfortunate. It’s worth checking out for reasons beyond Mathilda May walking around a government facility completely nude, killing guards right and left (shades of Elfin Lied). The whacked-out story is also worth the price of admission, as are the impressive effects for a Golan-Globus film. (You will not believe this came from the same people responsible for Superman IV.)

One of the more impressive bits of the film is the apocalyptic destruction laying waste to London as the space vampires’ contagion turns the population of the city into undead monsters rampaging through the streets. Then, in order the save the world, the protagonists need to make their way through the dark nightmare streets of the destroyed city, toward the evil light blowing up into the sky from the heart of St. Peters. Our hero has to survive to reach the source of the light and our evil female villain in order to stab her through the heart and stop the apocalypse. . .

Lifeforce (1985)

Wait a minute now. Where have I seen this recently?

Yeah, Suicide Squad— intentionally or unintentionally— made its climax an extended homage to an obscure 80’s Golan-Globus B-movie.

Suicide Squad (2016)

(PS: I know, the evil sky beam is it’s own trope lately, but Lifeforce needs some love for pioneering the form.)

Stranger Things

Just finished watching Stranger Things on Netflix, and it is fantastic. By now you’ve probably heard that it is a nostalgic throwback to 1980’s cinema, and you’ve probably heard people name-drop Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and John Carpenter when describing it. This is all true; we have a host of Speilbergian characters, a plot that could have come from a King or Koontz novel, and a score that Carpenter could have written. Even the title font is lifted directly from those Signet paperbacks that crowded the rack on the corner drugstore circa 1985. But leaving it at that (as awesome as that description is) is really selling this series short.

First off, the series works on its own terms even if you could care less about the nostalgia factor. The acting is stellar on all counts, especially the kids’ ensemble. You care about all these people and what they’re going through. Second, while some critics might complain about the plot being simple, derivative, and “stuff we’ve seen before,” that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most of the story beats in Lethal Weapon were already well-worn by 1987. Halloween’s story can fit on a postcard and leave room to list the cast and crew. Tarantino’s complete oeuvre is derivative of classic 70’s exploitation films. Stranger Things takes a basic story, a host of genre tropes, and a deep knowledge and affection for a particular era of filmmaking, and executes it so well that one half-expects the show to be followed by a VH1 “Where-are-they-now” documentary focusing on the child actors, now in their forties. I’d go one further and say that, unlike Tarantino’s work, Stranger Things fits seamlessly amongst is influences, less as a modern child, and more as a belated-but-contemporary sibling.

Also, those who critique the tropes and homages miss one of the more impressive bits of writing alchemy here. This isn’t just one story, but three distinct stories braided together. Or, really, the same story from three different points-of-view and three different genres. You have the Speilbergian kids story where they take in the “alien” stranger who might have a connection to their missing friend. You have the adults, the grieving mother and the alcoholic Sheriff, caught in a government conspiracy over sinister Cold-War CIA experiments reminiscent of early King, Firestarter in particular. Then you have the teens caught in a monster movie/creature feature that bears more than a passing similarity to A Nightmare on Elm Street. All three levels work and the plot gears mesh seamlessly. When the separate braids join up in the end, there’s no question that all the story parts hang together. If you want a case study in how to successfully mash-up an arbitrary number of diverse story elements into one work, Stranger Things couldn’t be a better example.

IMHO, this is the best thing to come out of Netflix since Jessica Jones.

Welcome to Moreytown

You may have heard me mention on Facebook that I’m writing a game for the fine folks at Choice of Games based on my Moreau Novels.  As I said when I broke the news:

If you’re unfamiliar with CoG’s work, think of it as a (much more) sophisticated digital version of the “choose your own adventure” titles from the 1980s.

Nohar

My current progress on the project: I just crossed the halfway mark on the draft of the game.  If we count by chapters, I’ve finished six of twelve so far.  If we go by “word” count, it’s probably short of halfway because I suspect the code part of the writing will become more complex as I close in on the climax.

That “word” count  is a good way to give you some idea of the difference between this kind of project and straight prose.  In a typical novel, my chapters typically run an average of 2,500 words or so.  The chapters in the game probably cover the same range of plot development as my prose, and display to the reader/player a similar amount of narrative.

Sexy Nohar

However, when we include the code along with the narrative the reader/player doesn’t see (for instance, because they went out the door rather than the window) each game chapter runs from 5,000 to 10,000 “words,” that’s 2x to 4x the amount of writing for a comparable prose chapter.

Some non-spoilery details about the game so far: You will be playing a non-human— fox, tiger, rat, capybara, etc. The setting is a non-human ghetto, the eponymous Moreytown, in a unspecified US metropolitan area.  It will have street gangs, drugs, and explosions.  It will have fights, cults, and, potentially, interspecies romance.

I will keep everyone posted as this works its way through the development pipeline.

Star Trek

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I’ve finally seen the most recent Star Trek film and it has my enthusiastic approval. No it’s not the original series. But, IMO, that’s a plus. The major weakness of the first two post-reboot movies were the ham-handed attempts to tie this Star Trek to that Star Trek. This is the first of the three to admit that it’s its own thing. Almost. There’s a couple of callbacks that were made necessary by the premise of the reboot, and they still feel as weird as characters from Tim Burton’s Batman making cameos in Christopher Nolan’s. The good news is that this movie seems to be explicitly closing the book on that. It finally feels comfortable being itself, and gets to rank itself in the upper tier of Trek films.

Also, the Sulu = Gay thing: I can’t imagine something being more a non-issue from any side of it you’re coming from. You’d be hard pressed to find a less empowering or more ambiguous way of representing a gay character on film. Not only is it a fraction of a second that was probably added in post to get some social media buzz, but there’s no context, and no impact on the plot or Sulu’s character. If the guy in the scene is Sulu’s gay husband (and there’s no confirmation in the film that this is the case), Sulu seems a little less concerned about the guy’s possible demise in the subsequent attack than he should have been. Contrast with Uhura’s attitude toward her ex, Spock. Or Scotty’s attitude toward hot alien chick. If you just want to drop some gay representation without making the story about that, watch some Doctor Who episodes, and don’t film it like you’re embarrassed and plan to cut it later.

5 remakes I would like to see

So there was this Ghostbusters remake/reboot that caused a lot of angst among various peoples. Since I’ve yet to see it (I’ll probably wait until it’s on Netflix.) I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another. But the existence of the film has made me ponder the idea of remakes/reboots in general; why they work (Battlestar Galactica, Casino Royale), limp past the post (Star Trek, Miami Vice), or explode in an incandescent glory of fail (The Wicker Man, The Day The Earth Stood Still.)

One obvious thing is that decent quality source material doesn’t guarantee the quality of a remake. In fact, it often seems that there is an inverse relationship; the better the original, the worse subsequent attempts seem.  That may be simply a side effect of comparing the two.  After all, it’s easier to improve on a crappy movie than improve on a great one, and making any movie worse is the easiest task of all. It also seems to me that the best remakes take the existing property and do something new with it (counter-example and failure: Psycho). Much is made of “gritty reboots,” so much so that it’s now a cliché, but there’s also the “campy reboot” that can also work/not work just as well (see Dragnet or Dark Shadows), what matters is that the change in tone gives a reason for the remake to exist.  The gender flip in Ghostbusters obviously serves a similar meta-purpose, to change the story enough to justify the movie’s existence.

With that in mind, here are five stories I’d like to see getting remade.

#5 Starship Troopers (1997): This is probably the most fun movie that not only fails as an adaptation, but also fails spectacularly as a critique of the original story. Paul Verhoeven went so far over the top in the neo-Fascist imagery that the movie comes across as reveling in the propaganda it presumes it’s critiquing. Verhoeven does not have the subtlety of a Spinrad, and his move ended up less Iron Dream and more Triumph of the Will. There’s still a move to be made here, critiquing Heinlein’s vision or not, since the existing one doesn’t successfully critique the source or adapt it. Also, we need to have our powered armor!

#4 Silent Running (1972): This strange and dismal movie is the bastard love child of 2001: A Space Odyssey and every 70’s eco-disaster flick you can name. I’ll let the IMDB describe it for you:

In a future Earth barren of all flora and fauna, the planet’s ecosystems exist only in large pods attached to spacecraft. When word comes in that the pods are to be jettisoned into space and destroyed, most of the crew of the Valley Forge rejoice at the prospect of going home. Not so for botanist Freeman Lowell, who loves the forest and its creatures. He kills his colleagues taking the ship deep into space. Alone on the craft with his only companions being three small robots, Lowell revels in joys of nature.

Given that the movie is all about a twitchy Bruce Dern straight-up murdering his crewmates as he goes quietly insane, this would be great if remade as a horror flick.

#3 Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth (1967): Speaking of horror, this is a classic Hammer Films remake of an earlier TV drama, I would love to see this come full circle and have the folks at the BBC behind Doctor Who and Sherlock take a stab at bringing this gem back for a modern audience. This is, in my opinion, one of the scarier horror movies of the era, and manages it largely on atmospheric buildup of existential dread rarely seen outside Lovecraft or the Exorcist.  The story has a climax that deserves to have the full apocalyptic treatment. (If you have time for the whole movie, it’s on YouTube.)

#2 Logan’s Run (1976): Another entry born of 70’s neuroses that might have some current relevance. A sort of mashup of Malthusian fears and the rise of youth culture, we have a sealed city where everyone is killed off at the age of thirty. (Well they’re told they’re being “renewed,” but we know better, don’t we?) There is a lot someone can do here with dependence on technology, authority, and the deliberate erasure of history. Just, please, change the ending so it isn’t the hero talking the computer into catastrophicly short circuiting.

#1 The Starlost (1973): This has to be one of the saddest missed opportunities in Science Fiction history. The premise came from Harlan Ellison. From Wikipedia:

The show’s setting is a huge generational colony spacecraft called Earthship Ark, which has gone off course. Many of the descendants of the original crew and colonists are unaware, however, that they are aboard a ship.

They had Ben Bova as a science advisor, they had a pilot script “Phoenix Without Ashes” that won Ellison a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. . . and the producers completely screwed the pooch. By the time the filming started, technical snafus, budget cuts and dumbing down of the scripts caused Harlan to bail and have his name removed from the project. This is a damn shame. I don’t know who has the rights, but if anything deserves to have a Battlestar Galatica-style revival, it’s this. This whole premise is made for the current style of “mystery-box” world-building in genre television.

Top 10 Highlights from the RNC here in Cleveland

10) Rickrolls!

9) Party Unity!

8) Tolerance!

7) Higher Education!

6) Huge Protests!

5) Self-Immolation!

4) Highway Closures!

3) Urine fights!

2) Boobs!

1) Gary Johnson!

About 16 years ago we wanted a new cat…

So we went to the Geauga Humane Society to get a new friend for our cat Mu. Michelle wanted a fluffy white Persian, but she made the mistake of handing me a little black kitten before filling out paperwork. By the time she came back, I told her we found a cat. She was all, “no, that was not what I was looking for!” But what did she expect, handing me a kitten like that?

Not a white-haired Persian

She got her name, Panzer, because she was built like a tank and had a habit of running and plowing over poor Mu, even when Mu was twice her size. Though, that didn’t last as Panzer eventually grew bigger than Mu.

Mu didn’t have any hard feelings though

Panzer grew to be a pretty large cat.

No more room, go away.

And she was probably the most playful.

What you hiding in here?

While she was always closest to Mu, she did get along with all our subsequent animals.

This is what mommy was looking for?

Unfortunately, after a bout of illness, we had to say goodbye to her this week. All I can say is what we gained from having her this past decade-and-a-half outweighs what we lost on Monday.

File under “cat picture.”

Game Update

For those of you that don’t follow my Facebook page, or missed my announcement last month: I have been contracted by Choice of Games to write a “choose-your-own-adventure” style game based in my Moreau Universe. And, yes, one of the first choices you make in the game is choosing your species. And yes, you can play a genetically engineered capybara. You can thank one of the editors for that ;). The game is progressing well ahead of our deadline, about 1/3 written so far, and I’m finding it a nice change of pace from linear novel writing. I will keep everyone posted on my progress, but it seems on track to appear sometime next year.

For my writing friends: It is worth checking out these guys. They pay rates comparable to a genre mass-market paperback sale. Just bear in mind that you need to access a different skill set than straight novel writing. Any experience coding is helpful. Also any experience running a RPG is also helpful.

 

Libertycon 29

Me and head programming guy, Rich Groller, at the tail end of LibertyCon

If you were following me on Facebook you know I attended Libertycon 29 this past weekend. I had a blast. Even though it was a bit outside my normal stomping grounds, I found no shortage of folks to talk with— no small thing for an introverted cave-dweller such as myself. Highlights:

The con staff was fantastic, everything I saw ran smoothly, from the con-suite to the banquet to the panels. (And buy a banquet ticket if you go, it’s well worth it.)
The venue is the most impressively strange setting for a con I’ve ever been to, it’s like having a con in an alternate steampunk universe.
My time in Author Alley was well spent, even though I only sold a handful of books, because of all the folks I met and talked to who said they were fans of my stuff. (Apparently there’s a big Venn Diagram overlap between fans of my work and Libertycon attendees.)
And I got a kick when Jonathan Maberry, the literary GoH came by my table, said he liked Hostile Takeover and bought a copy of Prophets. Had a nice chat with him then, and later in the con suite, and even later had him sign a copy of Patient Zero for me.
And even more of a kick attending the Baen dinner party, where I got to hear Larry Correia wax poetic on video game tanks, and spent most of the evening talking with David Weber.

All in all, a great time, will do it again.