Isabel Cooper's Blog, page 20

Everyone Makes a Star Wars Post

So September contained no actual time: I was working on the first draft of Book 3, finishing edits for Book 2, going on blog tours for No Proper Lady, visiting a friend across the country, and…I don't even remember what else. I might have robbed a bank; I might have met aliens; it's all kind of blurry.

I'm back!

And a discussion over at Ana Mardoll's blog has gotten me thinking about writing redeemable villains, which in turn leads to the old geek standby: Yet Another Reason the Star Wars Prequels Sucked. Which I have to write eventually, anyhow, lest armed thugs come and confiscate all of my multi-sided dice.

First of all, a caveat: I'm approaching this from an audience perspective. To date, I don't think I've written any particularly redeemable villains. This is partly because I'm harsh and partly because it's…really pretty tough, striking the balance between "bad enough to need redemption" and "good enough that redemption is a triumph rather than a cop-out".

Vader establishes Point 1 pretty damn quick. We're a quarter of the way through the movie when he blows up a planet of civilians–okay, Grand Moff does that, but Vader certainly isn't protesting–thus skipping merrily across what TV Tropes calls the Moral Event Horizon. First objective: completed.

But then, somewhere along the line, the film became a trilogy and Lucas decided that Vader needed redemption, because he was Luke's father, and while I don't get the "sharing DNA with a good guy means you too must have the potential for good" trope, okay, whatever.

Except now we have a problem. Mr. Planet Exploder Force-Chokey Dude in Movie 1 shows up as a peaceful blue Force ghost in Movie 3, and somehow the audience has to be okay with this. This is not easy. Even the most universal-salvation-and-fuzziness religions in RL, one of which I nominally follow, don't dwell too much on the fact that Ted Bundy *also* gets to chill out in the good afterlife, because…yeah, nobody really likes thinking about that. Vader has billions of dead people on his count, and somehow he redeems himself.

The thing is? The three main movies make this possible, or at least make it possible for me to fanwank a story where it makes sense: guy starts out serving the Empire for good reasons, watches it become more and more corrupt, makes larger and larger moral compromises for "the greater good", and then finds he's in a place where he can't turn back and…what the fuck do you do then? You're doomed anyhow, so you might as well go along…and then someone stubbornly insists that you're not doomed, so you throw the Emperor down a convenient reactor shaft. Okay. I can deal with that. That's a guy like Obi-Wan describes, who could have been amazing and awesome but got lost somewhere.

Except…the prequels don't let me do that any more. The prequels establish that Anakin went from "basically faithful if slightly ragey Jedi" to child-excuse-me-"youngling"-killing-Sith-Lord over about two days, and that his thought process was something along the lines of "waaah the Jedi don't listen to an apprentice barely old enough to shave and I'm worried about Padme's Insanely Vague Vision and trying to prevent prophecies NEVER MAKES THEM COME TRUE OR ANYTHING fuck it I'm gonna hang out with a walking corpse called Darth Sideous and kill everyone".

I don't see the potential for extraordinary good in that guy. (Except in a fuzzy, nebulous, "we all have the potential for extraordinary good" way, and in that case, Luke's decision to redeem him at the expense of his own life and possibly the war doesn't make any damn sense.) I don't see the potential for *anything* in that guy. I don't really care if he gets redeemed or not.

I think there's a lesson here.

That lesson may be "don't be George Lucas", although the guy does have several billion dollars, which I would imagine does a lot to salve any artistic pangs he suffers.

Release, Blog Tour, and Conan

First of all: No Proper Lady releases today! You can find it at Amazon , or at the Sourcebooks website or hopefully at your local bookstore!

I am very excited, obviously! I am also doing a blog tour, and will post links appropriately. Today I'm at Urban Girl Reader, talking about female assassins and the advantage of surprise.

I would put up links to everything, but that does not seem to be working so well.

In unrelated news, I went to see the new Conan film last night. The Cimmerian–not Ahnold, the text version–was one of my first crushes, so I was tentatively looking forward to the film despite some pretty bad reviews.

Alas:

Good stuff:

1. The visuals. However you want to take that.

2. Um. Evil Utilikilt Guy and Marilyn Manson's Creepy Girlfriend seem to be having a lot of fun here?

Bad stuff:

1. We seem to have sacrificed character development in favor of a lot of random fight scenes.

1a. Yes, this movie is rated R. We know. You don't have to have sixteen decapitations and someone getting de-nosed to prove it. I don't *mind* the blood, but it got tedious.

2. Likeable sidekicks? No. Bundles of Unfortunate Implications? Oh yes.

3. So there's a random plot device. And the movie starts with Evil Utilikilt Guy getting the last bit. Except that there's another, previously unmentioned part, because we need the chick to be a plot device, because God forbid a female character in this movie have agency.

4. Oh, the chick. I do not believe anyone ever watched the 1970s Conan and wished that Valeria could be more like Princess Useless von Hairstyle, aaaaannd yet…here we are. Snippy damsel-in-distress "monk" with Great Destiny. Sigh. Valeria, I miss you.

5. Someone on the scriptwriting team clearly has A Thing for chicks dangling from great heights while shrieking.

6. The Mask of Ultimate Power seems like it basically a) lets you stick your dead wife's soul into another chick's body, and b) makes your evil lair collapse. This is not a great bargain as artifacts go.

7. So, Pirate Sidekick? I appreciate that you want to get your buddy laid and all. Well wing-manned. However, when the chick in question is possibly the key to resurrecting the Dark Artifact of Actually Not Doing Anything and definitely has a bunch of guys looking for her? Maybe you should consider not encouraging her to go wandering off onto the mysteriously forested island.

Sigh. A more detailed post tomorrow, but for now…I do not recommend it. Especially not in 3D, unless you like severed noses in multiple dimensions.

Wrinkle In Time: The Movie

I love this book. Love it so much. I started reading it when I was a tiny little Izzy–my mom assigned it to her students, and I remember being terrified of the red-eyed guy on the cover, so of course I had to see what was inside. Weird science! Stars! Creepy planets controlled by disembodied brains! Great female characters! Also, some damn fine writing: L'Engle had a great way of showing rather than telling, as the admonition goes, and also knowing how much to tell and not to tell. So awesome.

There was a movie? Yay! The movie's on Netflix? Double yay! Why did I never hear about this?

Oh, because the movie, to use a technical term, sucks. Seriously. I got halfway through and then decided I would need about a gallon of Everclear to keep going.

I'm not a purist about my adaptations. I grew up on Disney, I took Arwen's expanded LOtR role in stride (well, until "expanded role" became "lying around whining" in the third movie, ugh), and I've read enough comics to be comfortable with thirty-seven different versions of canon coexisting. I don't mind most changes.

I sure as hell, however, mind changes that make things worse. And this movie has a lot of them.

So, first of all, the stuff I like, or don't mind that much. It'll be shorter:

1. The credits are cool looking. The graphics are neat in general, with a few exceptions–the creatures on Uriel look like some guy named "SnowTiger71″ might have posted them to an Internet gallery. In 1995.

2. Okay, they've ditched the braces and glasses for Meg. I'm not crazy about this, but it works a little better in the modern world–orthodontics and glasses have both advanced to the place where neither's an automatic "OMG HIDEOUS"–and they *didn't* make her pretty. She's not ugly, either–she looks like an average thirteen-year-old with baggy clothes and no makeup–but I always got the impression that Book!Meg's ugliness was internal perception, as is very typical of adolescents.

3. Mrs. Which is all grouchy and brings the standard These Humans Will Be of No Use, because…apparently it's mandatory for any sufficiently powerful non-human group to have at least one member do that. (Oh, movie!Elrond…) For some reason. Still, she comes around fairly quickly, so I'll let this pass.

4. Likewise the fact that pretty much none of the introductions, except Mrs. Whatsit's, sort of, happen as they do in the book. And Charles is randomly in school. And Whatsit & Co. are associated with random crows, for…some reason. I can live with this. I don't know why it happened, but I can live with this.

And now, the rest:

The Actively Offensive:

1. Meg. Meg Meg Meg. Book!Meg was awesome. Book!Meg was insecure and snarly and hated everything, which made sense because her father had disappeared For The Government and nobody would believe it and she was living in Harper Valley, as far as I could tell. Book!Meg beat the crap out of bigger boys who made fun of her little brother and took her black eyes and did not care. Book!Meg, when informed that her father was imprisoned behind the Dark Thing, said "Let's go! Let's do something!", because Book!Meg was made of solid orthodontically-impaired kickass.

Movie!Meg…tries to beat up boys who hassle Charles. Only she can't. Because Calvin has to show up and rescue her. Because boys have to rescue girls, because that's how it works, APPARENTLY. Movie!Meg responds to the news about Dad and the Dark Thing by whining about how she doesn't know what they can doooo, because they're juuuuust kiiiids. So they have to go to see the Happy Medium.

2. Who…is a Comic Drag Queen.

This is the point where it became clear that I could either keep watching this movie or have a functioning liver.

I could absolutely see playing with issues of presentation and androgyny with the HM–that would be a change from the original book, but a cool one–but the way it comes off is the worst possible sort of mince-y comic stereotype. While I *like* "The Birdcage"…there's a difference between playing with stereotypes in a comedy, where the gay guys are main and fully human characters, and making the stereotypical drag queen the wacky comic relief minor character in an otherwise dramatic movie.

3. Likewise…okay. I am a generic white girl, and speak with no authority whatsoever. But: casting a person of color as a major character is cool. Casting a person of character as the wackiest of the wacky nonhuman trio is iffier. Making that casting decision and expanding the wackiness to include things like sniffing the air and licking food…does not sit well, let us say.

4. Mrs. Murray. Again, in the book, she rocks: she's troubled but serene, easily accepts things she doesn't understand, and is both sympathetic and abstracted. In the movie, she's the standard overprotective suburban mom who happens to read science magazines, as far as I can tell. And who has to look up "tesseract" on Google. Really? *Really*?

The Simply Dumb:

I was seriously considering putting "the writing" here and leaving it at that. Because…if you're going to go to all the trouble to get the license to adapt a book, because the book's popular, why not, and here's a crazy idea, actually adapt the book?

Yeah, there are scenes that don't work as well visually, and there are things that need explanation, and there are adjustments for time. But Wrinkle was a fairly short book, it does work on a visual level, and the explanations are there in the text. What the movie does is:

1. Move giant chunks of exposition to Whatsit & Co, instead of having the kids figure it out themselves. So now we have giant chunks of exposition and the kids look dumber. Y…aay?

2. Create giant exposition chunks where the necessary information could be inferred just fine before. The book explanation that Mr. Murray was on Camazotz and that Camazotz was a Bad Place came in two different bits–"on a planet that has given in" on Uriel, and the actual name and mention of "shadowed planet" with the Happy Medium–and everyone clued in. In the movie, we get three sentences with all the subtlety and grace of background text in a bad D&D module.

3. Assume we will not get or believe situations unless they're set up in the most obvious way possible. Calvin can't come find Mrs. Who out of his own compulsion–even though psychic wooginess is BLATANTLY CANON–and run into Meg there, so we have to have the ludicrous "girls can't fight" plot. (Although, if you did want to dispense with the psychic stuff, you could just have Calvin come by to apologize to Meg about his brother: all the explanation, none of the sexism!) Whatsit & Co. can't just decide to stop by the Happy Medium for a morale boost before the big fight, for some reason, so we have Yet Again, The Hero Doubts Her Abilities.

Sigh.

IT and Comparative Nostalgia

Just finished reading Stephen King's IT, as I do every few years, and got all sniffly at the end, as I also do every few years. The Dark Tower series is a more ambitious and sweeping work, and certainly does more with world-building, and I love a lot of it, but for my money IT is King's best: a really compelling look at childhood and friendship, at the power of belief, and at some extremely creepy forms of horror.*

Nostalgia–even nostalgia for times that could be scary beyond all reason–is another major theme here, and it's the one that caught my attention most on this read-through. The book's timeline is split: roughly half of it happens in 1958, when the main characters (then eleven) meet the titular Eldritch Horror/Creepy Clown, and half happens in 1985, when they're called back to finish the battle. I read the novel this time in 2011: roughly as far from 1985 as that year is from 1958.

The thing is, the 1958 scenes read very clearly as "past"; the 1985 scenes, for the most part, feel modern. There are a few off notes to a 2011 reader–characters looking for pay phones, the generosity of tipping a cabbie five dollars–and a couple attitudes toward gender and sexuality, q.v. asterisk below. (And to my mind, Richie being uber-famous as a DJ seems odd, but then, I haven't listened to radio since high school, really.) Otherwise, though, there's nothing that really throws me out or makes the 1985 setting seem dated.

Is the difference that there haven't been as many changes between 1985 and now as there were between '58 and '85? The Sixties were pretty world-altering…but so were the nineties and the early twenty-first century, in a lot of ways. Is nostalgia a function of the characters' ages? Childhood, I think, is pretty innately nostalgic for adult writers, but at the same time, there are references and foreshadowing bits in the 1958 sections of IT that aren't there–can't be there–in the '85 section. Maybe the key's in those–or in a combination.

I'd like to try setting a novel in the alternate-eighties or early nineties sometime, to see if I could do the nostalgia/retro thing closer to modern times, and with adult characters–the late-twentieth equivalent of steampunk, perhaps. And if Alternate Victorian is steampunk, and alternate fifties is dieselpunk, what *would* alternate eighties be? Punkpunk? Moneypunk? Cokepunk?

Something to think about during meetings, anyhow.

*It also has some issues, for the record: there's one scene at the end that most people will find all kinds of squicky, the attitudes toward race and homosexuality are well-meaning but problematic at times, and there's a trope that bugs me that I'll talk about next post. For the record.

X-Men: First Class

Yeah, posting schedule has been detoured, again. I blame the boyfriend and his nefarious ideas re: seeing movies on the weekend. Will nobody stop this madman?

So, my thoughts on X-Men: First Class:

* Retro-tastic! Always a plus, for me: I would go into some sort of Padme-style lack-of-will-to-live decline if I found myself back before birth control and lattes, but historical eras are always fun for me to read or watch. Especially when there are mutant powers or magic or something to make up for realistic historical squalor. I was not around in the actual sixties, but from my perspective, the movie did a pretty good job of establishing the time.

* Swinging Young Xavier is hilarious, also very cute. Not really sure why he had an English accent at six, what with being born in Westchester, but whatever. Not really complaining.

* Ugh, Mystique, stop being Clingy Jealous Girl. Cockblocking is not the way to anyone's heart; there *is* no way to Xavier's heart in the way you want; stop mooning and pouting. She does, thank God–and Magneto–but the first few scenes with Adult Mystique…GAH.

* Mystique's issues in general were…interesting. In the comics, and the modern-day movies, it's pretty clear that she's pissed that society will hassle her if she appears in her true form, and that this is understandable; in FC, at least at first, it seems to be more about boys not liking said true form. Which is very appropriately teenage, but…

a) If I could look however I wanted, for however long I wanted, I so would not care how "hideous" my natural form was. Honestly, the natural state of the "normal" human body is or can be twenty different varieties of either "ew, get it away" or "don't look at me like this", and while I assume Mystique's no more immune to head colds or food poisoning than the rest of us, shapechanging seems *way* easier than hair dye, facial scrubs, shaving, regular trips to the gym, etc.*

b) Mystique's true form is Jennifer Lawrence only…OH MY GOD SHE'S BLUE. And maybe kinda scaly. THE HORROR. Yeah, Xavier's not interested**, and Beast's got issues–dude, you have fleshy monkey feet, she's Blue Jennifer Lawrence, maybe not conflating the two so much?–but informal polling indicates that nine out of ten guys would hit that.

* Could have lived without the invocation of Black Dude Dies First, movie. Also having the only defector to Shaw's forces of Evil be the stripper. Really? And it's pretty *blatant* defection to evil, I gotta say: guy's just killed about a hundred people for no good reason.

* Shaw's attack on the facility was a nicely hardcore moment: no offscreen civilizations getting destroyed, no people disappearing…nope, a lot of guys getting dropped to their horrible screaming doom. And/or shivved. It seems strange that you have to establish that a film goes there when said film began with Nazis, but hey, it's effective.

* Speaking of Nazis: yeah, I'm kind of on Team Magneto here, or at least on Team Sometimes You Have to Put a Coin Through a Dude's Head. Shaw:

a) was a Nazi. If not an official Nazi, a guy who joined up with the Nazis so he could experiment on ten-year-olds, which is…not actually any better.

b) post-being-a-Nazi, tried to start World War III, and killed a lot of people in the process.

c) could absorb and redirect energy. Put this guy in a normal jail cell and he'll run into the walls until he can blow the place up.

Yeah, killing him might not bring Magneto inner peace, but it brought the rest of the world the assurance that we were one step further away from being nuked. I'm cool with that. Couldn't have been much fun for Xavier, what with experiencing the braincoinage second-hand, but sometimes you've got to break eggs to make an omelet. Er, kill a guy. Whatever.

* People who find dental stuff squicktacular: there's one scene in this that is just Not Okay. Geez. Inventive use of Magneto's power, yes. Comfortable to watch? OH MY GOD NO.

* Emma Frost could only be more Bond Girl if her name had been something like Frosti Piques. And if she'd gotten it on with Xavier or Magneto, I guess, but hey: PG-13.

* Yay training montage! *Snerk* at Hank's montage scenes. Beast is awesome and all, but the Jekyll & Hyde allusions are perhaps a little much considering that the guy has…monkey feet. When I think "hidden animal darkness waiting to be unleashed", I do not think "prehensile toes".

And I don't actually ever think "hidden animal darkness waiting to be released", because then I'd have to paint my nails black, listen to *way* more Depeche Mode, and write a lot of bad poetry during third-period study hall.

* The Russian/American parallels were all kinds of awesome, and the "it has been an honor" scenes rocked. That said, *wow* does humanity sort of justify Magneto's decision at the end.

*Disclaimer: these things aren't, and shouldn't be, mandatory for everyone out there. But they are for me, and I expect them or the male equivalent from anyone I'm involved with.

**And the movie leaves it pretty ambiguous why: maybe it's Mystique's blue scaliness, maybe it's a Westermark sort of thing, maybe he likes playing the field and doesn't want to bonk a girl he's close to. It's not clear, and I approve of that.

Green Lantern: Spoilers

Been a little while, no? I've just finished the first draft of the second romance novel–that sounds a little like a Scooter lyric, but hey–and am again experiencing the joys of free time. Or at least more free time than I've previously had. Upcoming posts: IT and the nature of nostalgia, more Shadow Hearts before the PS2 room gets too hot to enter, and probably something about Mass Effect.

Meanwhile, went to see Green Lantern last night. Not great; not bad; if you want to sit around somewhere with central air and eat popcorn, you could certainly do worse. A few notes:

* This summer's trend seems to be Half-Naked Guys and Exploding Galaxies. I am…not complaining.

* Stuff that I could have seen expanded: the training montage (I find it hard to believe that Jordan masters his ring in a day, plus you can never go wrong, in my book, with more training montage), the relationship between Carol and Hal (they seem to whipsaw back and forth between past friendship and past issues in a way that's weird for people who've been working together for years), Parallax's arrival on Earth (…the military didn't see this thing coming and fire some missiles? Really? It's only as big as AN ENTIRE CITY and it shows up all "BOO!" behind Hammond, WTF?).

* Stuff that I could've seen cut: the birthday party scene (we never see any of those characters again, and I think we get the Hal Has Paternal Issues and Also Is Irresponsible point already), the getting-jumped-in-an-alley scene (you can put the power-discovery bits in either the oath or the helicopter-rescue), and, to my mind, a lot of the renunciation bits. Things just seemed pretty uneven: Hal is loving this! Then he's hating it! Then he wants to be with Carol! Then he doesn't! Ow, my neck. Also, I felt like Parallax did not need the expanded backstory. He's a fear demon, he's yellow, he's creepy Lovecraftian badness, he was imprisoned and now he's not and it sucks to be us, end of story.

* Stuff I liked: Hal taking a third option on the girl-or-the-world deal. Carol being useful, and having her own deal. (And that she liked being part of the business end of things.) Parallax's appearance, which was very cool and Azathoth-esque, yipe. The creepy telepathy between Hal, Hammond, and Parallax. A Green Lantern Corps that looked alien (except Sinestro and Abin Sur, but hey: legacy) and a really alien-looking Oa, including the suggestion that the Guardians sit around in giant vertigo-inducing chairs glaring at the cosmos.

* Yes, the test pilot scenes *did* totally give me Hot Shots flashbacks.

* This is something I wonder about in the comics canon too: okay, so you have a ring that gives physical form to anything you can think of. Said ring is owned by…twenty-to-thirtysomething guys somewhere on the straight side of the Kinsey scale. I would expect a lot more evil to be fought with green naked versions of Alyson Hannigan. And that's the *most* tasteful assumption.

* My usual sympathy for academics kicked in and I felt really sorry for Hammond during the mindreading-during-class scene. It's unclear how much choice he had about getting Parallaxed–like, is the fact that he tries to kill his dad with TK the first time what brings on his transformation into gross fetus-faced guy? Or would that be inevitable anyhow?–although clearly he's given in at the end.

* Speaking of tragic downfalls…Sinestro? (I'm gonna go ahead and assume your name actually means "Wise, Responsible, and Totally Not Evil" in your own language, okay? At least you're an alien. Dr. Doom has no such excuse.) Forging a ring to use the power of the enemy did not work for Saruman, and it will not work for you.

Tho Am I, Buddy. Tho Am I.

Saw Thor right after getting back from a LARP session featuring ghost Vikings. Just so that bias is out there. Also, spoilers.

It is, first of all, a very eye-candy movie, in every possible sense. You've got both the cut blond and the pretty dark models of major-character guy–not to mention some serious minor-character hotness in Heimdall and two of the Warriors Three; you've got the warrior girl and the science girl and the cute zany intern and the hot badass mom; you've got exploding galaxies and awesome CGI and giant goddamn robots. These are good things.

Mythologically speaking…well, okay. I went in prepared to be forgiving, because this is Thor-as-portrayed-by-Marvel, and Marvel has done the "these are actually Advanced Beings who inspired the myths" handwave for longer than I've been alive. Still more faithful to the source material than Clash of the Titans: Yeah, Hades is the Greek Bad Guy God. Loki's crazy scheming is good times, in particular, which brings me to…

..characterization. Notably: there was exactly nobody I wanted to punch in the face during this movie. If you know me at all, you know how wonderful and goddamn rare this is. Wacky Comic Relief Intern? Actually comic and didn't fuck things up. Romantic Interest Girl? Had her own life, and her friends, and didn't come off as broken chick. Also, points for having two women who have some level of romantic tension with the hero, not having one turn evil or get killed, and furthermore not having stupid jealousy interactions.

*Furthermore*, and here's where it gets spoiler-tastic, the hero actually made the smart decision during the world-or-the-girl decision moment. I was worried for a second, but…nope, dude doesn't even hesitate, because dude has his priorities in order. Go him.

Thor in general? Pretty well done. I don't know from the comic, but I thought that Branagh and JMS did a good job both portraying the fish-out-of-metaphysical-water trope without making the guy seem dumb* and portraying a redemption arc that didn't make me hate the guy too much to care whether he got redeemed or not. Again: rare. Could have done without the Standard Christ Figure Moment, just because I saw it coming from about twelve miles away, but it did work okay.

I felt like the pacing lagged a little in the first half hour or so–"show don't tell" is a great rule about seventy-five percent of the time, except we really didn't need to see the whole ginormous Frost Giant battle *and* Thor and Loki's childhood *and* the coronation scene *and*…yeah. Then again, extended action scenes don't generally do much for me–scenes without words in general don't, personal wackiness there–so, again, bias.

I generally recommend it. I do not, however, recommend shelling out the extra $7 for 3D, though I don't know if you'll be able to avoid it. It shows well in theatres, but you could also get it on Netflix, watch it at home, and try to replicate the various drinking-and-then-smashing-things scenes. They get surly if you do that at the cinema, for some reason.

*Also, I will totally be announcing that this mortal frame requires sustenance from now on when I want some food.