Kristopher Kelly's Blog, page 8

How I Would Fix Prometheus

What a trailer! Probably one of the best trailers of all time. It took me a while to notice how they match the pitch of a scream to the alarm blast, which associates the sound so beautifully with a feeling of terror. Genius. A brilliant piece of marketing.

Too bad Prometheus the film is not as scary as its trailer, or any of the other pieces of well-crafted advertising shepherding audiences into the theater. It has moments, to be sure; it’s not a bad film. Visually, it’s breathtaking. There are countless drool-worthy shots to justify the price of admission all on their own.

Likewise, Idris Elba, Charlize Theron, and Michael Fassbender all add to the experience in a positive way. I wish I could say the same for Noomi Rapace, but I found her annoying and boring (certainly no Ellen Ripley), and when I ultimately choose not to rewatch this movie it will be because I didn’t care about her character and there is so much of her character to watch.

Which brings me to the point of this article, which is not really a review (and from here on out, be warned: I am going to give  away plenty of things about the film, so if you haven’t seen the film, you’ve been warned — here there be spoilers!). Prometheus is a flawed film, but it could’ve been improved by one small change:

Lock the film’s point-of-view on Michael Fassbender’s android David. Don’t have a scene without him in it.

He almost is the protagonist already. The change would be small. What is most perplexing about Prometheus isn’t actually anything related to the Alien mythology–it’s David’s motives. Is he a sadistic android, contemptuous of his human crew members and creators? Could be, but then why does he change in the final scenes into a buddy-buddy friend, happy to help and provide life-saving tips? Fassbender is incredibly talented, and he stole the film regardless of his inexplicability. What is gained by keeping his directives murky?

One might argue that Weyland’s presence on board is a shocking reveal, but I found everything related to it entirely predictable from the outset, including Theron’s relation to him. And does Weyland’s presence change anything at all about the main mission? No. People still want to discuss origins with the Engineers. So little changes, in fact, that Weyland becomes just one more character to journey back, once more, to the two rooms we can’t seem to stop returning to in the other spacecraft (honestly, a whole alien planet, and the movie ends up feeling limited to the Prometheus, the room with the vases, and the alien craft’s bridge; even if it’s the same type of ship as the crashed derelict ship in Alien, it feels smaller this time around through the sheer force of repetition).

On the other hand, if we as the audience were let into David’s conversations with Weyland–if we knew, for example, why he poisoned Dr. Holloway and what he was hoping to gain from the grim experiment–we’d be able to see a character making actually very dramatic and important choices. Not seeing the reasons for his actions makes them random, which is less interesting.

Whatever he can’t be in the room for, he should watch or monitor. One of my favorite lines was his “I’ve been watching your dreams” line. How creepy is that, anyway? He should lurk around when Charlize and Stringer (sorry, old associations die hard) have their flirtation. Even better–they could flirt with him in the room! How emasculating and de-humanizing would it be to see people flirt in the same room with an android as if he weren’t there at all?

As for the soon-to-be-infamous abortion scene, there are always monitors to watch or switch off. Including a calculating point of view is easy. Just ask Paul Reiser. And the way the scene is set up now–with Shaw escaping, going through an operation, and being seemingly forgotten about for no good reason–doesn’t work, anyway.

Bottom line, there’s always a reason to include David, and they’d all make for a better film.

Furthermore, David is a natural and progressive choice for a protagonist in the Alien franchise itself. While we grow closer to the source of the xenomorph, it’s an interesting concept that we’d grow closer to understanding the pathos of Weyland Corp’s creations, as well. The androids of past films have always been compelling, and they are as much a staple as the strong female protagonist.

What better character to journey to the source of humanity than one created by humanity?

Yet the movie only half-commits to the idea. David is easily the most active character, but halfway through the film the emphasis shifts to Rapace’s Dr. Shaw, courtesy of the film’s most visceral scene, but it suffers for the shift in focus away from David. Shaw is simply not as interesting post-op (and, I would argue, rather incredulously upright, given what she’s just put herself through). Even when he’s having his decapitated head stuffed into a bag, I longed to know more about this fascinating character and what he was thinking. Was he glad to be free from Weyland? What is a freed android to do now? When the orders run out, is there something he wants? Did anything in what transpired on LV-223 mean anything to him at all? Is it even possible for anything to mean something to him? If so, what?

Answering those questions for David would have been one way to answer them for the audience.

Unfortunately, I would also change a larger part of the film, as well: I wouldn’t do anything remotely related to the origin of life on Earth. Problematic on the Darwinian front, inexcusably cliche on the sci-fi front (especially given that Battlestar Galactica just made the mistake of going down this round not too long ago), and unimportant to me as a viewer–I find it a silly waste of time and energy. I don’t see anything wrong with space jockeys who engineer life-altering weaponized black goo, but to have them also focused on Earth makes the whole entire universe smaller and feels to me like yet another slice of Earth-centric provinciality. Having the DNA match feels a little too much like Vader inventing Threepio all over again–unnecessary and reductive.

Let the aliens stay aliens for crying out loud. Not everything is about our puny little rock.

Review: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn’t think it was possible for me to like this book. I expected some jokey coffee-table stupidity, I guess. Instead, what I found was both a great survival manual as well as a dead-serious consideration of the zombie mythos in general. Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks) has written the best criticism of a tired subgenre that I’ve ever seen, and I think anyone who writes a zombie story from this point forward should at least read through this once.

While I don’t agree with every argument Brooks makes (e.g., I can think of several reasons why if the brain continues to function some vestigial behavior patterns could remain), his commitment to a scientific approach to the genre leads in some delightful directions (like zombies walking across the ocean over long periods of time — love that idea!).

Further, I feel this book highlights something about the world of zombie fiction (and, in a more general sense, all disaster stories and apocalyptica) and the role it plays for the reader (or the viewer): namely, that most of the fun of such stories is in the fantasy of a world where survivalism becomes once again paramount. By writing a book that is a straight-up survival manual, he trims a lot of the fat off what has become a lot of rote, by-the-numbers situational drama in a lot of stories that all end up feeling very similar. Instead, he gives his reader the interesting bits regarding what might work well, what might not work at all, and what might end up in disaster. Thinking about the potential for zombies to still swarm on a secluded island, as well as the threat pirates pose to such a place, is both more interesting and also briefer than sitting through another modern-day, half-baked schlock-a-thon.

I didn’t find the final third (brief accounts of zombie invasions through history) as compelling, but I did appreciate it in concept (Brooks really displays his history-buff side, and I like that, in theory). Even so, I’m interested in now giving World War Z a read, if only to see if Brooks can follow his own rules in a longer narrative format.

Those looking for a suspenseful horror novel or a humorous take on this material will probably not enjoy this book, but for anyone (like me) who enjoys watching impressive and straight-faced brainpower applied to a pop fiction mythology, look no further.





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Review: The Land of Laughs

The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A friend recommended this cult classic to me, and I read it without reading anything regarding the plot. I’m glad. This book takes some amazing, creative turns, even if as a whole I didn’t quite fall in love with it.

An English teacher obsessed with the work of children’s book author Marshall France journeys to that author’s hometown to unearth details for a biography. The narrative tone is likable enough, if slightly square for a book that is at times delightfully weird. On the balance, though, I think the tone works and is an advantage. There’s enough sex and swearing to keep it from seeming chaste or overly cozy.

The trouble with the book is how gosh-darned nice everyone seems for the greater part of the novel. The suspense doesn’t really fully kick into gear until the final third. The whole work feels under-dramatized to me, and the sentences were often a little under-written, as well.

However, the ideas in the book are delightful and nicely thought-through, and a lot of the imagery is compelling and memorable (I found myself really wishing I could read one of the books Marshall France wrote). The answer to the riddle of France’s hometown is a tough thing to do right, and I think Jonathan Carroll nails it. The end of the story is perfect. Overall, I liked this book, but I wish there had been more conflict throughout the piece as a whole.

Imaginative and creative, just a little unfinished.





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How to Cope with Ending a Relationship with a Really Long Novel

We’ve all been there. You’ve just turned the last page on a 1,200-page novel you’ve spent an emotional eternity reading, and you feel both relieved and like you’ll never be able to read again. Whether you liked the book or not, it’s never easy moving on. You’ve come to count on this tome and these characters. Your neural pathways think in the syntax of the writer. When you think back on these days, all you’ll remember is that during your lunchbreak and on the subway in the morning and as you were falling asleep at night, you were reading that book. Idioms and phrases repeated throughout the novel seem like your whole life. If you asked someone what he was doing back in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment or told your kid someday he’d sit the Iron Throne or asked a coworker, “Who is John Galt?”–all these questions and comments would be salient and apropos, because everyone in the world knows what a terrible surprise the scouring of the Shire is.

But no. Life goes on. Moby-Dick is not the only book about fish in the sea.

Remember that it’s okay to read different books. Perhaps the best thing to do is to have a quick fling with a short story or two, just to prove to yourself that there are other characters out there. Find a used copy of The Old Man in the Sea, rent a hotel room, and spend an hour reminding yourself what it was like to be an irresponsible teenager with a book report due in the morning.

Talk to others. Go to your book club meeting. The people there can help you learn from what you’ve read and understand how it all came about, pointing out the signs from the beginning of the book which foreshadowed events in the end. By analyzing the things you might have missed, you will become a better reader for that next novel.

Equally important, however: don’t obsess over it. Don’t go online and read every single post anyone’s ever made about the book. Don’t fight with people on the Internet who don’t “get” the book like you do. If you loved the book, you’ll hate to see it being torn apart by the likes of these idiots, and if you hated it you’ll hate to see it being praised when it’s a lowlife, bottom-feeding, piece of shit. But even so, you have to let it go. You have to move on.

Whether you go and mingle with new releases at a brick-and-mortar store or browse through descriptions on an online site, just get out there. Find something new to read. There are a lot of words out there. They’re waiting.

“The End” is not the end.

Review: Throttle

Throttle by Stephen King


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So I wanted to read a Kindle Single, and I found this one. Couldn’t resist.

In this episode of Sons of Anarchy, Samcro fights the truck driver from Duel after a drug deal goes bad on Breaking Bad. Written by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, it’s a tribute to the work of Richard Matheson and some TV shows. It also has cartoonish illustrations which look like panels from a silly comic book.

As a story, it hangs together pretty neatly. Neat, square, cheesy, and ordinary. Slightly boring, slightly entertaining … but definitely derivative. I expected something a little more imaginative from these two.

Ho-hum.





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Free as a Book Now! How I Made My eBook Free on iTunes AND Amazon

So a while back, I signed up for Amazon’s Kindle Select program, thinking to take advantage of the ability to give my book away for free for five promotional days. I didn’t like making the book exclusive to Amazon for the required 90 days, but I did it because I wanted to give it away.

After the 90 days expired, I decided no, it’s not the best to go exclusive with an ebook. Since none of these stories even have the imprimatur of being Kindle Singles, what was I thinking? I put it back on Barnes and Noble and iTunes. Then I made it free on iTunes, because it was easy to do.

Now, it seems Amazon has made my book free. Why?

Price-matching! They will match the competitor’s price.

So, while I can’t technically give it away for free on Amazon without being exclusive (and then only five days for everyone who doesn’t have an Amazon Prime membership), I can give it away elsewhere and thereby force Amazon to drop the price.

So now the book is free on iTunes AND Amazon. Who knows how long this will last.

I’ve done the impossible!

(For Nook fans, don’t despair — I’ve got an idea how to get this out there for free for you, as well. It the meantime, it’s still just $0.99 on Barnes and Noble.)

Vampire Traps

Ah, there is nothing like a random contest win to brighten a day!

Today, I won a Twitter contest over on Unshelved to design a vampire trap. The contest is a promotion for 32 Fangs, an upcoming vampire novel by David Wellington.

Because I had fun, and because Amanda got into it to and provided some hilarious entries herself, I’ve decided to round them up here for posterity. Check out the other winners and runners-up at the link above, otherwise, enjoy these, which were our entries:

1. Midnight marathon past the vamp nest, all runners hydrated thoroughly with holy water. (Winner.)

2. Vampires still gotta bathe. Have Father O’Helsing bless the reservoir supplying the water to Vamptown.

3. Play G Tom Mac’s “Cry Little Sister” at a carnival. Slayers standby. It is to vamps what “Shave and a Haircut” is to Toons. (My favorite of mine.)

4. Though my girlfriend says, “If it was a man vamp, a bloody booby. What’s better than that? Bloody boobies that’re hydrogen bombs.”

5. Girlfriend also recommends: “A trail of bloody tampons … leading to Kevin McAllister’s house.” (Contest judge gave this a nod as the grossest entry in a direct message. I think it’s obviously the best of all of these and am very proud of my girlfriend for being so disgustingly funny.)

Ten-Minute Write: Martian Hold ‘Em

At the bottom of a red chasm, the three surviving astronauts played poker. The vessel’s oxygen leaked out of their crumpled craft, rising into the Martian sky, passing the window beside the bruised and silent face of their dead colleague Muncey, who hadn’t been as lucky as the rest of them and was now the designated dealer, although they had yet to move past the first round of betting.

“I raise you the cure for cancer.”

“Under-betting the pot, eh? I’ll match that with my kid’s coin collection, raise you a first edition of The Catcher in the Rye. Nota bene, it’s got a bent corner. Earl?”

“I fold.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re not afraid of Nelson’s pair of threes, are you? Bet something.”

“Okay, I raise you a repaired spacecraft and another forty years of suburban life.”

“Nice try, Earl, but really best stick to what you can cover.”

“Can we please just see the flop already?”

“You gotta pay to see the flop, you know that. Come on, what’s your bid?”

Earl held up a screwdriver. “Muncey’s magic screwdriver.”

“You can’t bet a dead man’s gear. What else you got?”

“Air. I bet a thimble full of air.”

“Earl, you don’t have a thimble, and you’re almost out of air.”

“Ok, then, Jesus. I guess I’m all in.”

“Ain’t we all, Earl? Ain’t we all. All right, Muncey, Earl’s called. Deal the flop.”

But Muncey stayed dead, and in the window beside his head, the stream of air started to thin. The astronauts exchanged looks.

“I think we’re gonna need a change of dealer, boys. Just not getting the cards I’m looking for from this one.”

Review: Conjure Wife

Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There’s a lot to recommend this story of a man who learns his wife has a bit of a witchcraft habit. The writing style is clean and admirable, and the story moves at a decent clip. Whether Tansy Saylor, the wife of skeptical college professor Norman, is actually a witch or is instead one among a group of similarly deranged women is left to the reader to decide. Either way, in order to save her, Norman must often act as if the magic were real. I personally found the restraint required for such a balancing act to work a little tired by the twentieth chapter, but I often found myself really enjoying the chapters which attempted to place witchcraft in a more scientific context.

While I liked Norman and Tansy well enough, the book as a whole feels thin to me and a little too old-fashioned. I enjoyed its realism and its delicate touch, but often I found the other characters flat and not very compelling. It was difficult, for example, to tell the other wives apart, and even more difficult to remember the characteristics of their clueless husbands.

Still, there are some scenes that were very good–enough so that I’m glad I read this book. It was a pleasant enough diversion, and parts of it were still pretty inspiring.





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Film Review: The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

I’ve been following this film for a long time (it was originally filmed in 2009, but its release was delayed by MGM’s bankruptcy), protecting myself from spoilers, dreaming of a fresh new genre deconstruction that’s also a great horror film in its own right.

Having now seen the film, I don’t understand the media embargo regarding spoilers. The entire plot of the movie has, actually, been given away by the official trailer. And if it hadn’t been given away in the trailer, the basic conceit is given away in the first five minutes of the actual film. Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard and directed by Goddard, the film looks to be a clone of The Evil Dead, but ends up being more like The Evil Dead mashed together with the Initiative from season four of Whedon’s Buffy, except instead of being run by Lindsay Crouse, this paramilitary group is run by — well, I guess I can’t say. The day-to-day operations are handled by Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins (my favorite characters), with Amy Acker saying some lines over their shoulders.

I wanted a lot from this movie, perhaps too much. When I saw the 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I thought I was in for a treat. Sad to say, I was let down. The Cabin in the Woods is not a bad film; it’s just not a great one, and it’s disrespectful of its own genre. I enjoyed it far less than last year’s Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Cabin is slicker and savvier, but it’s also lacking any really likable characters, which given Whedon’s presence as co-scriptwriter, surprised me. Kristen Connolly’s Dana is no Sydney Prescott, and Fran Kranz’s stoner Marty is such an obnoxious, selfish twit he nearly ruins the film single-handedly (I also hated this actor a lot in Whedon’s Dollhouse, and my opinion of him has only grown worse).  The film is also not very scary or funny (it made me laugh a couple times and scared me not once). The trouble with the movie’s monsters is that they seem like the off-brand versions of villains we know too well. Instead of Hellraiser‘s Pinhead, we get a vaguely S&M-ish guy holding a puzzle sphere with saw-blades in his face. The film ends up less involving than if someone took the posters of a thousand horror films, cut them up, threw them on the floor, and then pissed on them to make them less recognizable.

Now I’m going to discuss the specific things I didn’t like about the movie. In detail. Get out now if you want to see this for yourself; spoilers after the jump.

You’ve been warned.

Ok, I’ll start with some good stuff. There were two monsters I loved: the murderous unicorn was inspired, as was the merman (man, did I love the merman–the whole merman subplot, everything about it made me happy). I also really enjoy the resolution of the situation in Japan. Turning the demon into a frog was hilarious.

I also more or less enjoyed the pandemonium of the purge, where two of the film’s surviving kids make it to the basement of the facility and unleash all the nightmare pets being kept in glass cubes underground. The mayhem was fast, gory, and quite the splatterfest.

But despite the explosions of gore, it was all very campy, and worse–it was camp designed to lecture its audience. The basic premise of the movie is that every so often, there needs to be some ritualized slaughter of trope characters in order to keep the Elder Gods from rising up from the depths and destroying the world. The team running the show beneath the cabin in the woods is an American group, but there are other teams in Japan and elsewhere across the world. The rules for the sacrifice (apparently region-specific, mind you, since the Japanese seem to be doing something entirely different) are common genre conventions: there must be at least five kids (a jock, a slut, a brain, a fool, and a virgin), and the virgin must last to the end (death optional). That the characters in the film don’t quite fit into their roles is something the movie has a bit of fun with (the jock is actually smart; the virgin is not a virgin; the blonde is not really a blonde; etc), albeit fun in the way of ho-hum inversion (see the previous parenthetical; all of those examples feel just as tired as they sound), while the technical team releases misty pheromones into the air to nudge the kids into behaving more like they are supposed to for the sake of the sacrificial rite.

Get the idea yet? The requirements of the genre are reductive! The Elder Gods are the audience, coming to witness the same old slasher film again and again, making the technical team reheat the same hash with some version of a monster performing the role of killer (in Cabin, the five characters are guided into the basement, where they pick through heaps of cursed relics, their choice of object ultimately deciding which monster or monsters will tear their flesh apart)!

Yawn. 

I find this sort of have-my-cake-and-use-it-to-kill-somebody-too style of sermonized horror filmmaking hypocritical, uneducated, and offensive. I didn’t like Haneke’s Funny Games or Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence for similar reasons, and I’m uncomfortable with any film which seeks to chastise its audience by making a film that looks like the kind of movie said audience would want to see. “Oh, you just spent money to see a horror film?! Well, thanks for your cash, and by the way: shame on you!” 

Well, gosh, thanks for the fourteen-dollar slap on the wrist.

For one, Whedon and Goddard made a horror film. It’s bloody. It’s got unnecessary nudity (and not just in the part which was about the technicians doing everything in their power to cause a sex scene; in the second scene of the film a girl is shown randomly walking around and talking to her friends in her underwear). Its characters are pretty damned two-dimensional. That it isn’t scary in the slightest is just another way they’ve failed.

Also, slasher films are a subgenre, they are not representative of the entire genre. Every time horror gets indicted, it’s by the kind of people who want to say that horror is just about teenagers getting picked off one -by-one, when in truth horror encompasses a much broader spectrum of narrative potential. Frankenstein wasn’t about teenagers getting picked off one-by-one. Rosemary’s Baby wasn’t, either. Nor was The Fly. Or even The Shining. Or The Silence of the Lambs. Or a billion other horror films. Yes, in the 80s, the slasher film genre reigned, but even then it didn’t represent everything that was out there for fans of dark and disturbing cinema.

But beyond either of these points, I resent the implication that this is what horror fans want. I loved Scream not because it was a slasher film, but because it was a smart film. I thought, then, that it was also a call for filmmakers to do better and to make more exciting, more intelligent films (turns out I was wrong, but those were still days of hope and promise). But beyond that, it had great characters I adored while at the same time putting them through the paces of an actually exciting horror film. Suggesting that horror fans want the repetition of a brain-dead formula is annoying, insulting, and wrong.

The horror genre does not need to apologize for itself; people who make bad horror films need to apologize to the horror genre. Also, I’d love it if people stopped insulting the audience by claiming that the audience wants bad films and also stopped insulting the audience by making bad films. Horror has a rich history, is deeply embedded in the best literature and stories and myths, yet it’s so easily marginalized by reductive and prudish thinking.

In the end, The Cabin in the Woods is just another mediocre, campy horror flick–amusing, and smarter than the average fare, perhaps, but also more misguided and infuriating. While it’s busy thinking of clever ways to be a self-hating horror film, it’s not finding any emotional truth in its story, or pausing to consider how selfish and awful the actions of its protagonists become under the parameters of its conceit.

If you had to die to save the world, wouldn’t you do it? I would. Yet these characters refuse, because it’s not really “the world” they’d be saving, but “the world of horror films,” which they deem as “not worth saving.” The point is, I suppose, that horror films that exist in order to slake the bloody thirst of its fans are not worth the deaths they depict, and so who cares? Don’t die to save that kind of “world,” let it be “destroyed”! Ok. But then how does such a sentiment work in a film where one person refusing to die equates to hundreds of people in the facility dying in gory ways? What has been “saved” there? How is any shred of such a meta-fictional argument intellectually valid or consistent?

I cry shenanigans on The Cabin in the Woods. The next time talented people want to criticize horror films, I hope they do it by simply being brave enough to try and make a good one–and save the self-righteous sermons for the pulpit.