Ben Peek's Blog, page 23
June 21, 2012
Classic American Science Fiction
In September, the Library of America will be publishing a two volume set of classic American Science Fiction from the fifties.
The series is edited by Gary Wolfe and features Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, Leigh Brackett The Long Tomorrow, Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man, Robert Heinlein, Double Star, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, James Blish's A Case of Conscience, Algis Budrys' Who? and Fritz Leiber's The Big Time. The list of authors is debatable--for example, I have absolutely no time for Heinlein and I reckon Bester's novel has a reputation it doesn't deserve--but it's cool to see folk like Brackett and Leiber there, the latter who I adore for his work in general, and the former because she wrote the script with Faulkner and Furthman that adapted Chandler's the Big Sleep.
(Don't do a bad geek thing and mention Empire Strikes Back, okay? Brackett died shortly after handing in the script and rumour has it that the one used for filming had little to do with her version.)
At any rate, I like the idea, more than I like the authors, and if I read the books or not will be based on how I'm feeling at the time. There's a couple I would like to read, a couple I could do without owning, a couple I own, so I'm probably not the ideal reader for the pair of volumes. However, you know what I would like--I would love to see a series of similar volumes that were Japanese Science Fiction from the 50s, Russian Science Fiction, Italian Science Fiction, and so forth. Admittedly, it probably won't be done by the same publisher, but that's neither here or there. I just love the idea. Imagine, Polish Science Fiction from the 50s!
I have no idea what that would be like.
But I would totally be there for that.
The series is edited by Gary Wolfe and features Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, Leigh Brackett The Long Tomorrow, Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man, Robert Heinlein, Double Star, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, James Blish's A Case of Conscience, Algis Budrys' Who? and Fritz Leiber's The Big Time. The list of authors is debatable--for example, I have absolutely no time for Heinlein and I reckon Bester's novel has a reputation it doesn't deserve--but it's cool to see folk like Brackett and Leiber there, the latter who I adore for his work in general, and the former because she wrote the script with Faulkner and Furthman that adapted Chandler's the Big Sleep.
(Don't do a bad geek thing and mention Empire Strikes Back, okay? Brackett died shortly after handing in the script and rumour has it that the one used for filming had little to do with her version.)
At any rate, I like the idea, more than I like the authors, and if I read the books or not will be based on how I'm feeling at the time. There's a couple I would like to read, a couple I could do without owning, a couple I own, so I'm probably not the ideal reader for the pair of volumes. However, you know what I would like--I would love to see a series of similar volumes that were Japanese Science Fiction from the 50s, Russian Science Fiction, Italian Science Fiction, and so forth. Admittedly, it probably won't be done by the same publisher, but that's neither here or there. I just love the idea. Imagine, Polish Science Fiction from the 50s!
I have no idea what that would be like.
But I would totally be there for that.
June 20, 2012
Adventures in Fiction, Not Written
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been doing some lecturing around at High Schools. It is pretty cool, all in all. I get to talk about the things I love and give advice and make jokes and at the end, I'm given applause and cash.
Yesterday, though, I had a really strange, but really cool experience. I had just finished one of these lectures and a bunch of students came up, afterward, which they do. One of them was a girl who had gone to one of my workshops four years ago and had encountered a piece of work there that she liked. For some reason, the title of the author wasn't on the handout, though I would have given it verbally at least. One of my favourite things to do is to introduce authors by the varied personal histories that they have--dead ones are better, of course, but live ones do alright, though alcoholism and abuse is always more palatable in a past tense than a present. The living authors I use don't have those histories, anyhow. They mostly have social concerns and thematics through their work, which I also like to talk about.
Anyhow, this girl, she didn't know the title, didn't know the author. But she could remember parts of it, four years later, she could. She quoted it to me.
"It's Final Girl," I told her. "The author is an American, Daphne Gottlieb."
Then I wrote down Gottlieb's name for her, and told her she would have to buy it online, because the book wasn't available in Australia. She thanked me.
And you know...
...It totally made my day.
Yesterday, though, I had a really strange, but really cool experience. I had just finished one of these lectures and a bunch of students came up, afterward, which they do. One of them was a girl who had gone to one of my workshops four years ago and had encountered a piece of work there that she liked. For some reason, the title of the author wasn't on the handout, though I would have given it verbally at least. One of my favourite things to do is to introduce authors by the varied personal histories that they have--dead ones are better, of course, but live ones do alright, though alcoholism and abuse is always more palatable in a past tense than a present. The living authors I use don't have those histories, anyhow. They mostly have social concerns and thematics through their work, which I also like to talk about.
Anyhow, this girl, she didn't know the title, didn't know the author. But she could remember parts of it, four years later, she could. She quoted it to me.
"It's Final Girl," I told her. "The author is an American, Daphne Gottlieb."
Then I wrote down Gottlieb's name for her, and told her she would have to buy it online, because the book wasn't available in Australia. She thanked me.
And you know...
...It totally made my day.
June 18, 2012
Three Days of the Condor
The other night I watched Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor for no real good reason. I thought it might be interesting and, to a degree, it was, but I think it was largely so because of the way that it was both relevant and, at the same time, out dated in today's politics.
The film tells the story of Joseph Turner who, played by a young Robert Redford, works for the CIA, reading books and trying to decipher if there are codes being sent in them. He stumbles across a code that no one is really interested in, except for, perhaps, members of the CIA who have been running a secret operation. In a series of over reactions, assassins led by a younger looking Max von Sydow who, in a fine performance, murders all of Turner's friends and puts him on the run. Paranoid, scared, Turner picks up Kathy Hale in a department store, and holds her hostage while he tries to figure out what is going on. It's here that the strongest wrong note is sounded, where Turner and Hale begin a relationship that seems improbable from the start, though in fairness, Dunaway gives her best at trying to make their sex scene look like a cross between being scared and aroused, but really, you just have to sit through it and wait for her to disappear from the film so you can return to the strength of it: the lies, the cheating, the deceit, and Max von Sydow explaining, in the final stages of the film, what will happen to Turner if he decides to stay in America.
As a film, what Three Days of the Condor suffers from is never carrying through on its promises. If it had been the cold, chilling thriller that it had set itself up to be with the opening, then it would have been a much more complete and better film, but it still has a lot of nice touches. Pollack's direction is decent, the scenes with Sydow always good, and when the romance between the two leads is done, he picks the film up and brings it back to a nice ending. But it's still a Sydney Pollack film and it's best not to expect anything but a crowd pleaser in that regard.
Still, what I found truly interesting was the use of oil as a plot device, as a mechanic for the CIA being evil, or plotting to take down Middle Eastern countries. Despite the fact that the film had been made in the early seventies, and verges on being close to forty years old now, there is a very real sense of it still being relevant in its discussion of world politics, of how it positions oil, of it being used as a training ground for when the world runs out of food, for when world populations have gotten so large that the planet can not sustain us anymore.
But it's the ending that I liked the most.
At the end, Redford's Turner leads Cliff Robertson's Turner along a street, refusing to come in from the cold, and he stops outside the New York Times. "I told them a story," he said, letting Higgins know that his blown the lid off it, that the shit will soon hit the fan. Journalism integrity will win out. In response, a desperate Higgins says, "How do you know they'll publish it?"
Turner leaves, and the ending, in the early part of the 1970s, was meant to be ambiguous, to suggest to you that you weren't quite sure what was going to happen, but you figured that the Times would run the story and good would triumph over evil, that the truth would come out.
Which, in 2012, you know differently.
In 2012, Redford's Turner is dead within a week, killed in the exact same fashion that Sydow's assassin explains, or perhaps not even that. But he is dead and the story is buried within the Times and that, that is how the modern end of the film works, with no faith in journalism, with the complete knowledge that the American government is corrupt and will have you killed when you step out of line.
Like I said, it's not much of a film, in the end. A few nice pieces here and there. But as a piece that shows you how the world has changed, it's pretty funky.
The film tells the story of Joseph Turner who, played by a young Robert Redford, works for the CIA, reading books and trying to decipher if there are codes being sent in them. He stumbles across a code that no one is really interested in, except for, perhaps, members of the CIA who have been running a secret operation. In a series of over reactions, assassins led by a younger looking Max von Sydow who, in a fine performance, murders all of Turner's friends and puts him on the run. Paranoid, scared, Turner picks up Kathy Hale in a department store, and holds her hostage while he tries to figure out what is going on. It's here that the strongest wrong note is sounded, where Turner and Hale begin a relationship that seems improbable from the start, though in fairness, Dunaway gives her best at trying to make their sex scene look like a cross between being scared and aroused, but really, you just have to sit through it and wait for her to disappear from the film so you can return to the strength of it: the lies, the cheating, the deceit, and Max von Sydow explaining, in the final stages of the film, what will happen to Turner if he decides to stay in America.
As a film, what Three Days of the Condor suffers from is never carrying through on its promises. If it had been the cold, chilling thriller that it had set itself up to be with the opening, then it would have been a much more complete and better film, but it still has a lot of nice touches. Pollack's direction is decent, the scenes with Sydow always good, and when the romance between the two leads is done, he picks the film up and brings it back to a nice ending. But it's still a Sydney Pollack film and it's best not to expect anything but a crowd pleaser in that regard.
Still, what I found truly interesting was the use of oil as a plot device, as a mechanic for the CIA being evil, or plotting to take down Middle Eastern countries. Despite the fact that the film had been made in the early seventies, and verges on being close to forty years old now, there is a very real sense of it still being relevant in its discussion of world politics, of how it positions oil, of it being used as a training ground for when the world runs out of food, for when world populations have gotten so large that the planet can not sustain us anymore.
But it's the ending that I liked the most.
At the end, Redford's Turner leads Cliff Robertson's Turner along a street, refusing to come in from the cold, and he stops outside the New York Times. "I told them a story," he said, letting Higgins know that his blown the lid off it, that the shit will soon hit the fan. Journalism integrity will win out. In response, a desperate Higgins says, "How do you know they'll publish it?"
Turner leaves, and the ending, in the early part of the 1970s, was meant to be ambiguous, to suggest to you that you weren't quite sure what was going to happen, but you figured that the Times would run the story and good would triumph over evil, that the truth would come out.
Which, in 2012, you know differently.
In 2012, Redford's Turner is dead within a week, killed in the exact same fashion that Sydow's assassin explains, or perhaps not even that. But he is dead and the story is buried within the Times and that, that is how the modern end of the film works, with no faith in journalism, with the complete knowledge that the American government is corrupt and will have you killed when you step out of line.
Like I said, it's not much of a film, in the end. A few nice pieces here and there. But as a piece that shows you how the world has changed, it's pretty funky.
June 17, 2012
Where There Were Wigs
[image error]
Last week, N. went to watch the State of Origin.
Apparently, they set a world record for wigs.
Link.
Last week, N. went to watch the State of Origin.
Apparently, they set a world record for wigs.
Link.
June 14, 2012
The Wrong Case, James Crumley
Originally published in 1975, The Wrong Case is James Crumley's second novel, but the first to feature one of his two reoccurring private investigators, Milo Milodragovitch. His second character, C.W. Sughrue, is in Crumley's third novel, The Last Good Kiss.
Crumley's first novel was, from what I understand, a book about Vietnam, and it wasn't until his second that he turned to writing hard boiled detective novels, of which he published seven, with the 1996 Bordersnakes featuring both Milo and Sughrue together. I'd read that one, which I liked, but I always felt a little as if I didn't fully appreciate it, having never read any of the previous ones, and resolved that I should. I've always liked a good bit of hard boiled crime, and Crumley, much to his credit in the prosaically titled The Wrong Case offers a pretty decent one, though by no means perfect.
The trouble begins with Milo lamenting his future. The son of a rich drunk, his fortune is unavailable to him until he turns fifty four, and until then, he has made his living off the law, in one way or another. Mostly, though, he works divorce cases--until, that is, a law came through that ended that work, ensuring that husbands and wives could get divorced on the grounds of differences, and without anyone proving that they were having an affair. Before, you had to get them on a felony or adultery, and nothing else mattered. As he explains it, "I made a good living off those antiquated divorce laws." What's a man to do, then, when his business is dying and his fortune is locked away?
Drink.
Milo is a drunk. He likes his drugs, and he'll be stoned and angry on speed at various points during the novel, but mostly, he'll be drunk. Drunk to forget the things that happen. Drunk to forget the things happening. Drunk to forget the girl who walked into his office, wanting him to find out how her brother died.
Generally speaking, the plot isn't anything special. It is a bit all over the place, for the kids addicted to heroin who are mugging people for cash, to the history of the brother, to the affairs and romances of the girl who walked into the office. Until the last two chapters, I would have sworn that they were just going to end fairly much in the way they did, but without giving you a sense of closure, or of feeling like a mystery had been solved. Yet, strangely, and I think perhaps despite Crumley himself, the book does manage that, and it does it in a fairly satisfying conclusion, even if at times getting there didn't feel like it.
But it's still pretty enjoyable, I have to admit. Crumley has a nice voice, similar to Chandler, but with a sixties, seventies theme of the state of America running through it. There's a very real sense that Crumley's return from the Vietnam War has changed how he sees the country and there is a real sense that he is using the narrative to explore that, especially in regards to the change in moral complexity taking place across this period. Even if the book didn't manage to pull itself together in the last twenty odd pages to close strongly, I'd still recommend it based on that.
Cool book, anyhow. I look forward to The Last Good Kiss which is, from what I understand, the one that everyone considers the best.
Crumley's first novel was, from what I understand, a book about Vietnam, and it wasn't until his second that he turned to writing hard boiled detective novels, of which he published seven, with the 1996 Bordersnakes featuring both Milo and Sughrue together. I'd read that one, which I liked, but I always felt a little as if I didn't fully appreciate it, having never read any of the previous ones, and resolved that I should. I've always liked a good bit of hard boiled crime, and Crumley, much to his credit in the prosaically titled The Wrong Case offers a pretty decent one, though by no means perfect.
The trouble begins with Milo lamenting his future. The son of a rich drunk, his fortune is unavailable to him until he turns fifty four, and until then, he has made his living off the law, in one way or another. Mostly, though, he works divorce cases--until, that is, a law came through that ended that work, ensuring that husbands and wives could get divorced on the grounds of differences, and without anyone proving that they were having an affair. Before, you had to get them on a felony or adultery, and nothing else mattered. As he explains it, "I made a good living off those antiquated divorce laws." What's a man to do, then, when his business is dying and his fortune is locked away?
Drink.
Milo is a drunk. He likes his drugs, and he'll be stoned and angry on speed at various points during the novel, but mostly, he'll be drunk. Drunk to forget the things that happen. Drunk to forget the things happening. Drunk to forget the girl who walked into his office, wanting him to find out how her brother died.
Generally speaking, the plot isn't anything special. It is a bit all over the place, for the kids addicted to heroin who are mugging people for cash, to the history of the brother, to the affairs and romances of the girl who walked into the office. Until the last two chapters, I would have sworn that they were just going to end fairly much in the way they did, but without giving you a sense of closure, or of feeling like a mystery had been solved. Yet, strangely, and I think perhaps despite Crumley himself, the book does manage that, and it does it in a fairly satisfying conclusion, even if at times getting there didn't feel like it.
But it's still pretty enjoyable, I have to admit. Crumley has a nice voice, similar to Chandler, but with a sixties, seventies theme of the state of America running through it. There's a very real sense that Crumley's return from the Vietnam War has changed how he sees the country and there is a real sense that he is using the narrative to explore that, especially in regards to the change in moral complexity taking place across this period. Even if the book didn't manage to pull itself together in the last twenty odd pages to close strongly, I'd still recommend it based on that.
Cool book, anyhow. I look forward to The Last Good Kiss which is, from what I understand, the one that everyone considers the best.
June 11, 2012
They Pay Brisk Money for this Crap
Raymond Chandler on Science Fiction, 1953:
That's awesome.
No, really.
Link.
Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It's a scream. It is written like this: "I checked out with K19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn't enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn't enough. He was right."
They pay brisk money for this crap?
That's awesome.
No, really.
Link.
June 10, 2012
I Am Not A Winner
Much to my delight, I did not win a Ditmar on the weekend. That honour went to Paul Haines (as it rightly should).
Regardless, that brings me up to ten nominations and no wins. I am equal, now, with Bill Wright, my friend and enemy, the only man worthy of sharing such an honour with me. No doubt you will all understand that I cannot and will not think you equal to myself and Mr. Wright. We have worked hard, we have. Jack Wodhams, whose first nomination was in 1970 (or 71, it is a bit unclear) is the closest to contest us, but at eighty-one, I am unclear as to what he is doing at this current time. No doubt, he is untrustworthy. No doubt, his plan is diabolical. I will await to see. Just as I will wait to see what Bill Wright plans.
My plans?
Well, I shall not speak of them, no, not publicly, not like this, no.
As always, thank you for your support and well wishes. I could not have come so far without any of you.
Regardless, that brings me up to ten nominations and no wins. I am equal, now, with Bill Wright, my friend and enemy, the only man worthy of sharing such an honour with me. No doubt you will all understand that I cannot and will not think you equal to myself and Mr. Wright. We have worked hard, we have. Jack Wodhams, whose first nomination was in 1970 (or 71, it is a bit unclear) is the closest to contest us, but at eighty-one, I am unclear as to what he is doing at this current time. No doubt, he is untrustworthy. No doubt, his plan is diabolical. I will await to see. Just as I will wait to see what Bill Wright plans.
My plans?
Well, I shall not speak of them, no, not publicly, not like this, no.
As always, thank you for your support and well wishes. I could not have come so far without any of you.
June 7, 2012
Open Letter to Ridley Scott
Dear Ridley Scott,
I have just returned from seeing your new film, Prometheus, and I would like my money back, please.
It cost me twenty one dollars, Australian, and I would like that money returned to me in dollar bills, by yourself personally, after you have flown to my country. It's Winter here, so I apologise for the cold, but you created that awful, mind numbing mess of a film, and you owe me.
The problems of your film are many: your characterisation is flawed, your science is bad, your internal plot mechanics make no sense, and there is absolutely no sense of pace or tension within the film at all. In truth--and I won't lie here--your film is completely and utterly unredeemable, from start to finish, and anyone who tells you otherwise has had their brain removed, placed into a jar, and set on your mantel piece so that you can rub your genitals over what remains of their grey matter.
It is clear, for example, that you have never met a scientist. I myself am not a scientist, but even I know that any real scientist would be meticulous, would not be taking off their helmet, would not be picking up the decapitated head of an alien to take back to the ship and try and get a 'response' from it. I know this. I know more, in fact, but what I don't understand is that if you offer me a pair of scientists who have managed to convince a very rich man to spend trillions of dollars to fly to a planet, why you would think that I would buy the fact that they are the most naive and stupid pair of scientists that you could possibly come across? And I'm not even talking about the fact that they didn't realise straight away that the old man was lurking in a secret freezer on the ship waiting for his chance of immortality. That was just a bad plot device that you and the scriptwriter--the last one, Damon Lindelof--should have sat around and said, "You know what? That's pretty fucking obvious."
"Yeah," I imagine Lindelof saying as he lines up thick lines on a glass tray, "but fuck, Ridley, we'll hide it behind an evil robot."
David.
David, the evil robot.
It's so obvious, from the moment he is combing his hair to look like Peter O'Tool, and repeating the line, "The trick is not minding that it hurts." So obvious that it's bad characterisation, that it's terrible writing. But worse than the fact that you have him lurking the spaceship and combing his hair and watching the dreams of others, is the fact that you don't even bother to follow through on his evil. Let me give you a hint: if you want to infect one of the crew with an alien disease which causes worms to emerge from his eyeballs, at least have the decency to follow it through, rather than simply burning the man to death when his infection is in full swing. You could have at least done something with that--created a connection to the aliens, allowed a dialogue to emerge, shown him disintegrating, similar to what happens to the alien at the start.
But no.
No, you take a flame thrower to him under a sudden 'quarantine' concern. Is that a decapitated alien head you have in your spaceship? Did the evil robot stash a alien case in above the sink while none of you were looking?
Of course, you might say, that that was all part of getting the alien born. Ah, yes. Yes. There's nothing like a woman who has to cut her stomach open to remove her alien child and then run staggeringly around the ship, covered in blood. One might suspect that someone would almost ask what had happened to her. You would think. She is covered in blood, after all. They probably just thought, "Oh, she's been playing with the fully functional medical pod that we just happened to glance by earlier, making it, you know, the only notable part of the ship. Of course she'll want to go there to have her alien baby removed." Of course she, as a scientist, might not leave her infection half alive in some part of the ship. But of course, scientists being stupid is part of the deal here, isn't it? Like when you left two scientists lost in the ship and they decided to be cute with what I can only assume were the mutated worms. No need to show those worms later, incidentally. Just have them kill some folk and then one of them can come back as a zombie and thin out the cast in what has not clear reasoning and does not even warrant a proper sense of place within the film.
"You know, Damon." You are looking at the empty glass trays sadly. "You know, we might have to explain the zombie."
"Nah, nah. Hand me that piping bag. We don't--through the nose isn't good enough. Just take down your pants. Trust me, Ridley, trust me, it's great. And all we have to do is have the old man go to the ship to meet the last surviving alien. Final act, man!"
But for all this bad film making, bad art, it was the subtext of the film pissed me off the most, you conservative piece of shit filmmaker.
Your whole film is ultimately a heavy handed sermon to Creationism. Of course the scientists are stupid, of course they have nothing resembling a thought, of course they're responsible for unleashing terrible death--because as your film so clearly and utterly says, we are not meant to know how we are created, we are not meant to know how life began. Put away your quest to know, put away your research. If you don't, you'll only unleash terrible things!
Your repeated shots of the main character's religious iconography, your shallow definition of her faith that, I hope, insults religious people everywhere, who are appalled that you reduced such an important part of their life to blindly 'believing', of asking "Who made them?" when faced with the knowledge that humans were made by aliens. I hope they are angry at you for suggesting that their religion comforts them, gives them a sense of having been made with a purpose, and allows them to put off any search or quest for knowledge in the universe. I hope they send you hate cards. Because you deserve them, not just for that, but because your shit film is essentially an attack on science, on evolution, and the kind of reaffirmation of creationism that is taught to hardcore fundamentalist Christians in ring wing shit stain schools in the States.
And, on one last note that you and your conservative cohorts can ponder as you fly over to return my twenty one dollars, is that it is humanity, not mankind.
Get it the fuck right, mate.
Yours,
Ben Peek.
I have just returned from seeing your new film, Prometheus, and I would like my money back, please.
It cost me twenty one dollars, Australian, and I would like that money returned to me in dollar bills, by yourself personally, after you have flown to my country. It's Winter here, so I apologise for the cold, but you created that awful, mind numbing mess of a film, and you owe me.
The problems of your film are many: your characterisation is flawed, your science is bad, your internal plot mechanics make no sense, and there is absolutely no sense of pace or tension within the film at all. In truth--and I won't lie here--your film is completely and utterly unredeemable, from start to finish, and anyone who tells you otherwise has had their brain removed, placed into a jar, and set on your mantel piece so that you can rub your genitals over what remains of their grey matter.
It is clear, for example, that you have never met a scientist. I myself am not a scientist, but even I know that any real scientist would be meticulous, would not be taking off their helmet, would not be picking up the decapitated head of an alien to take back to the ship and try and get a 'response' from it. I know this. I know more, in fact, but what I don't understand is that if you offer me a pair of scientists who have managed to convince a very rich man to spend trillions of dollars to fly to a planet, why you would think that I would buy the fact that they are the most naive and stupid pair of scientists that you could possibly come across? And I'm not even talking about the fact that they didn't realise straight away that the old man was lurking in a secret freezer on the ship waiting for his chance of immortality. That was just a bad plot device that you and the scriptwriter--the last one, Damon Lindelof--should have sat around and said, "You know what? That's pretty fucking obvious."
"Yeah," I imagine Lindelof saying as he lines up thick lines on a glass tray, "but fuck, Ridley, we'll hide it behind an evil robot."
David.
David, the evil robot.
It's so obvious, from the moment he is combing his hair to look like Peter O'Tool, and repeating the line, "The trick is not minding that it hurts." So obvious that it's bad characterisation, that it's terrible writing. But worse than the fact that you have him lurking the spaceship and combing his hair and watching the dreams of others, is the fact that you don't even bother to follow through on his evil. Let me give you a hint: if you want to infect one of the crew with an alien disease which causes worms to emerge from his eyeballs, at least have the decency to follow it through, rather than simply burning the man to death when his infection is in full swing. You could have at least done something with that--created a connection to the aliens, allowed a dialogue to emerge, shown him disintegrating, similar to what happens to the alien at the start.
But no.
No, you take a flame thrower to him under a sudden 'quarantine' concern. Is that a decapitated alien head you have in your spaceship? Did the evil robot stash a alien case in above the sink while none of you were looking?
Of course, you might say, that that was all part of getting the alien born. Ah, yes. Yes. There's nothing like a woman who has to cut her stomach open to remove her alien child and then run staggeringly around the ship, covered in blood. One might suspect that someone would almost ask what had happened to her. You would think. She is covered in blood, after all. They probably just thought, "Oh, she's been playing with the fully functional medical pod that we just happened to glance by earlier, making it, you know, the only notable part of the ship. Of course she'll want to go there to have her alien baby removed." Of course she, as a scientist, might not leave her infection half alive in some part of the ship. But of course, scientists being stupid is part of the deal here, isn't it? Like when you left two scientists lost in the ship and they decided to be cute with what I can only assume were the mutated worms. No need to show those worms later, incidentally. Just have them kill some folk and then one of them can come back as a zombie and thin out the cast in what has not clear reasoning and does not even warrant a proper sense of place within the film.
"You know, Damon." You are looking at the empty glass trays sadly. "You know, we might have to explain the zombie."
"Nah, nah. Hand me that piping bag. We don't--through the nose isn't good enough. Just take down your pants. Trust me, Ridley, trust me, it's great. And all we have to do is have the old man go to the ship to meet the last surviving alien. Final act, man!"
But for all this bad film making, bad art, it was the subtext of the film pissed me off the most, you conservative piece of shit filmmaker.
Your whole film is ultimately a heavy handed sermon to Creationism. Of course the scientists are stupid, of course they have nothing resembling a thought, of course they're responsible for unleashing terrible death--because as your film so clearly and utterly says, we are not meant to know how we are created, we are not meant to know how life began. Put away your quest to know, put away your research. If you don't, you'll only unleash terrible things!
Your repeated shots of the main character's religious iconography, your shallow definition of her faith that, I hope, insults religious people everywhere, who are appalled that you reduced such an important part of their life to blindly 'believing', of asking "Who made them?" when faced with the knowledge that humans were made by aliens. I hope they are angry at you for suggesting that their religion comforts them, gives them a sense of having been made with a purpose, and allows them to put off any search or quest for knowledge in the universe. I hope they send you hate cards. Because you deserve them, not just for that, but because your shit film is essentially an attack on science, on evolution, and the kind of reaffirmation of creationism that is taught to hardcore fundamentalist Christians in ring wing shit stain schools in the States.
And, on one last note that you and your conservative cohorts can ponder as you fly over to return my twenty one dollars, is that it is humanity, not mankind.
Get it the fuck right, mate.
Yours,
Ben Peek.
June 5, 2012
A Brief History of John Baldessari
Talent is cheap.
June 4, 2012
The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus
When I began Ben Marcus' new novel, the Flame Alphabet, I was quite excited by it. It was about a virus that emerged from the vocabulary of children and had a dark, satirical edge to it that I was completely behind.
The Flame Alphabet never lived beyond that opening premise, however. Suffering structurally from presenting a contagion narrative that never gave into it and, instead, presented a stationary, limited cast of what were metaphoric questions for the narrator, Marcus never moves beyond his initial statement comfortably, and never allows the novel to reach the heights of what could have been a hallucinatory vision. In truth, I think it's fair to say that, to a degree, my dissatisfaction with the book rose from what I thought it could be, rather than what it was, and from what I considered opportunities lost. It is entirely possible for someone else to read the book and be entirely satisfied with it for what it is.
The book opens with Sam and his wife, Claire, fleeing their home while their daughter is away, attempting to leave the plague that their child is part of. It's a strong opening, but neither Claire nor Esther, the daughter, have a voice in the book--a choice that Marcus appears to have made on purpose, since the 'silence' of the novel suits his vision well, but one that leaves you with a pair of characters who are flat and never fleshed out because they are never given voices, ironically in Esther's part. You never particularly care or sympathize with the narrator over his family, or indeed him, just as you never buy that Murphy is anything but a cheap villain. Murphy is perhaps worse than the family, however, because he represents Marcus' attempt to weld together the form of thriller, the the classic contagion narrative, into his large metaphorical piece, and the Flame Alphabet is not and will never be a thriller.
The question comes, then, to why would you read it?
Well, despite its narrative faults, Marcus' metaphor of language is actually quite fascinating in its own right. The deadly nature of the childs language is easily applied to the rise of childs literature for adults and the consequences of that in relation to the language of adults, arising to the point, later in the book, where Marcus' shows how the narrator begins to understand the world through fables. Then, again, there is the relationship that he forms later in the book that is free of language, and the nature of it, that's particularly interesting. In addition, the strange Jewish 'forest' cult serves as a metaphor for religion in general, and the set up of the huts, the communication, and so forth take on quite interesting fictional constructions that is, by the most part, skillfully done.
But in the end, the idea isn't a novel. It's a short story, a novella, something much smaller, more concise, without the repetition, the internal debates of the narrator that go nowhere, and after a while, the book labours with the effort to make it larger.
It's a real shame, too, because it could have been something special.
The Flame Alphabet never lived beyond that opening premise, however. Suffering structurally from presenting a contagion narrative that never gave into it and, instead, presented a stationary, limited cast of what were metaphoric questions for the narrator, Marcus never moves beyond his initial statement comfortably, and never allows the novel to reach the heights of what could have been a hallucinatory vision. In truth, I think it's fair to say that, to a degree, my dissatisfaction with the book rose from what I thought it could be, rather than what it was, and from what I considered opportunities lost. It is entirely possible for someone else to read the book and be entirely satisfied with it for what it is.
The book opens with Sam and his wife, Claire, fleeing their home while their daughter is away, attempting to leave the plague that their child is part of. It's a strong opening, but neither Claire nor Esther, the daughter, have a voice in the book--a choice that Marcus appears to have made on purpose, since the 'silence' of the novel suits his vision well, but one that leaves you with a pair of characters who are flat and never fleshed out because they are never given voices, ironically in Esther's part. You never particularly care or sympathize with the narrator over his family, or indeed him, just as you never buy that Murphy is anything but a cheap villain. Murphy is perhaps worse than the family, however, because he represents Marcus' attempt to weld together the form of thriller, the the classic contagion narrative, into his large metaphorical piece, and the Flame Alphabet is not and will never be a thriller.
The question comes, then, to why would you read it?
Well, despite its narrative faults, Marcus' metaphor of language is actually quite fascinating in its own right. The deadly nature of the childs language is easily applied to the rise of childs literature for adults and the consequences of that in relation to the language of adults, arising to the point, later in the book, where Marcus' shows how the narrator begins to understand the world through fables. Then, again, there is the relationship that he forms later in the book that is free of language, and the nature of it, that's particularly interesting. In addition, the strange Jewish 'forest' cult serves as a metaphor for religion in general, and the set up of the huts, the communication, and so forth take on quite interesting fictional constructions that is, by the most part, skillfully done.
But in the end, the idea isn't a novel. It's a short story, a novella, something much smaller, more concise, without the repetition, the internal debates of the narrator that go nowhere, and after a while, the book labours with the effort to make it larger.
It's a real shame, too, because it could have been something special.
