Rob Wickings's Blog, page 52

The A To Z Of SFF: A IS FOR AUTOMAN

INPUT ERROR: Scanning of additional data banks indicates that crew members Rob and Clive failed to mention RONALD SHUSETT as one of the credited writers on ALIEN. A key collaborator with Dan O’Bannon, the pair would go on to adapt the Philip K Dick short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ into another landmark Sci-Fi movie: Total Recall (also credited on that movie as writers: Jon Povill; Gary Goldman).

DATABASE: UPDATED

PUNITIVE ACTION INITIATED…

So, it turns out we missed out on a vital piece of data when talking about Alien. Consequence: three weeks in the space doldrums on a diet of sprout protein and beans.

The atmospheric controls have been taking a hammering, I can tell you.

CycloMedia has started talking to us again, and has challenged us to improve his knowledge of Automan.

Because if there’s one thing we hate talking about, it’s obscure 80s SFTV from the master, Glen A. Larson.

Cursor, draw me the Autocar…

https://excusesandhalftruths.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/a-is-for-automan.m4a

and while we’re at it, let’s check out some Automan action!

So I Joined A Writing Group

It took a while for my invitation to join Reading Writers to come through. Three years, if we’re going to be all tap-watch-and-glare-at-calender about it. Patience is a virtue, apparantly. That must make me pretty damn near Pope-like.

 

The thing is, it was absolutely worth the wait. There’s a reason it takes so long to get a place at the big table in Meeting Room 2 at the RISC. Reading Writers is a prime example of what a good writing group should be. A broad spread of people, from every age group and every level from happy amateur to published author, all reading and critiquing each other’s work in a friendly, non-judgemental fashion.

“But Rob,” you say, a hurt and bewildered tone slipping into your voice. “You are a writer of consummate skill. Your mastery of the Oxford Comma leaves me breathless. You do things with hanging participles that make my nipples hard. Why in the name of Headless Nedward Stark do you need a writing group?”

Well, there’s the question. I am, it has to be admitted, pretty kick-ass at this word-slinging thing. But I’m not yet so far up my own fundament that I feel bulletproof. It’s good to get a second pair of eyes on a story. The most important thing that a writer can have is honest feedback. And that, o lovely Readership, is something that a decent writing group will give you. Let me listicle this up.

It’s dangerous to show your writing to your family and friends. They will be kind to you. They will tell you how gripped, moved or LOLed they were by your purple prose. These people are liars and cannot be trusted. They are trying to spare your feelings. They don’t want to see a grown wordsmith cry. Which is why, my ink-spattered friend, you need an unbiased audience. A writing group provides that. Their focus is on making sure the words that you bring to the group are worth reading. There’s no baggage, none of this foofy “love” or “20 years of friendship” rubbish. It’s about the work. And once you start bringing your precious darlings to group, there’s something else that’s very swiftly brought to your attention.
Your writing is not perfect. I’m sorry, it’s not. You over-punctuate. You underpunctuate. Your sentences take up more than a paragraph (which is an impressive feat, but hampers readability). But these are flaws to which, my young padawan, you are blind. Writing Group will point those flaws out to you, kindly but insistently. If you have bad writing habits, these guys will winkle them out. That advice sinks in, too. You find yourself self-editing, correcting the egregious flaws in your sentence construction without really thinking about it.
So, great. You’re out of the ‘twenty-commas-a-sentence’ habit. Your prose is tight, sharp and clean. Job done, right? Nuh-uh. Big lesson coming up here, which I’m going to italicise for extra impact. You can’t please everyone. There’ll be plot points that people don’t get or like, characterisation that sets their teeth on edge, a turn of phrase that engenders a bark of horror rather than the gasp of transcendence at your poetry. Some members of Group will love your plot twist where the dog (a pug called Butler) did it, others… not so much. That broad spread of opinion is good. Accept that your work will not be to everyone’s taste. Write the best work that you can, and if you get a majority thumbs up, then you’re a winner and it’s chicken for dinner.
There’s a sidebar to that, of course. If there’s a majority vote that something doesn’t work, that’s a pretty clear sign that it either needs work or excision. Writing, a wise person once said, is about killing your babies: getting rid of the stuff that you really like that doesn’t serve the greater good of the story. That’s where writer’s groups are so valuable. They’ll show you where to point the knife.

The most important thing, though, is that you’re amongst kindred spirits. The members of the group are people like you, who understand what writer’s block can feel like, who know the frustrations in trying to get that perfect phrase, or what to do with that character that you just can’t get out of your head. That sense of community, of knowing that you’re not alone out there, is incredibly valuable and empowering. Writing is a starkly solitary occupation. It’s important to drag yourself away from your desk and be a human being. If you can do that in the company of people who won’t roll their eyes when you start geeking out about sentence construction then so much the better.

Reading Writers is quite a formally-constructed group, with minutes and an agenda and a yearly subscription. But there’s no reason not to start up one if you’re interested and fancy a meet with like-minded types. Meetup.com is a handy resource to find or start a group, and there are plenty of places that’ll get you a room or even just a quiet table at a pub. You could argue that Nanowrimo is the biggest writing group of them all, but sadly that’s onlty around for a bit of the year.

 

I wish I’d joined a group years ago. It’s already improving my work. I don’t want to disappoint them, you see.

Go, then. Spread your wings, happy writer, and find the people who will help you when you find you’re heading for a crashlanding.

The A To Z Of SFF: A IS FOR ALIEN

Alien. The movie that redefined SF horror and made the names of Sigourney Weaver and Ridley Scott. Is there anything more to say about this stone classic? Well, CycloMedia thinks there is, and it’s down to Rob and Clive to sort it out.


https://excusesandhalftruths.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/a-is-for-alien.m4a

The A To Z Of SFF: A IS FOR ANDROID

A wide-ranging SF subject, of course, but here CycloMedia has pointed us at the obscure New World movie from 1982, starring Klaus Kinski as a space Frankenstein.

It’s life, Max, but not as we know it…

 

https://excusesandhalftruths.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/a-is-for-android.m4a

and if you want to know more, what better than a peek at the film itself? Don’t say we never give you anything!

Zef Singularity

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. If you have not yet seen Neil Blomkamp's remarkable Chappie, I recommend:

a) You do so at the soonest opportunity, and

b) read this piece only after you have done so. Which chops the potential audience for it off at the knees, but hey, Readership, you know I have your best interests at mind.



Right, who's left? OK, are we sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

Reviews for Chappie seem to be skewing disappointed, as if it's an opportunity squandered. Sneering references to 80s robo-fable Short Circuit abound, and the consensus is forming that it's a movie that doesn't know whether it's a lumpen diatribe on what it means to be human or a balls-out gangster-action movie. Too nasty for kids, too twee for the adults.

This is shamefully lazy reporting on a film that has a lot more to offer the thoughtful, clued-up film-goer then reviewers would have you believe. Chappie packs an awful lot into its running time, touching on issues as diverse as the nature/nurture question, religion, the ways in which computer security can always be circumvented and what happens when a society both mistrusts and hands responsibility off to agencies that they cannot completely control.

Chappie's primary theme is one that most film reviewers have yet to touch on. It's a film about the Singularity, the theoritical point where technology advances to the point where two things happen, more or less simultaneously. First, artificial intellengence progresses past the capacity for humanity to understand it (there are those of us trying to install Windows 8.1 on a new laptop that would argue that this has already happened) while at the same time, mankind develops past the need for a mortal body. In short, downloading your concsiousness into a hard drive stack.

The notion of the singularity has been a key part of modern SF since the early 80s. It's a key element of the cyberpunk movement, for example. Of course, machine intellegence has been part of the scene for much longer, but we're not talking about malevolent supercomputers here. The Singularity is a form of merging, an evolutionary leap where humanity and the machines find common ground. It's a largely utopian vision.

Which is why film-makers tend to shrug it off. Screenwriters are told time and again that conflict is everything. Without it, their scripts lack momentum and interest. The Matrix, for example, is not a film where man and machine live together in harmony. In filmed SF terms, the Singularity is best described as the moment that Skynet becomes self-aware. It's a straightforwardly wrong-headed view of evolution: survival of the fittest, winner takes all.

 

 

Chappie subverts all that. The villians of the piece are those, like Hugh Jackman's impressively mulleted soldier and Sigourney Weaver's greedy defence contactor, who stand in the way of the Singularity. They represent the two traditional pillars on which modern society is built: God and Mammon. Chappie is a subversion of that order. He needs neither. Of course they want him out of the picture. But he never feels that in order to survive, the primates that came before him have to suffer. Things simply don't have to work that way.

Religion is dealt with in a really interesting way in Chappie. Our robotic hero gets a chance not just to meet and talk with his maker, but to tell him off for putting his perfect creation in an imperfect body. Chappie lives on an accelerated timeline: from child to man in less than five days. The presence of death in our lives is an uncomfortable truth we all have to deal with. For Chappie, that truth doesn't just loom more quickly, it's sitting on his chest in plain view, a battery display inexorably ticking down the moments until he has to move on to another place. But Chappie doesn't just have faith in what will happen. He sets out to actively ensure that he has an afterlife — or rather, a whole new life in a new body.

The final moments of the film, when Chappie not only succeeds, but takes Dev Patel's scientist with him, is a deeply transgressive moment. There is a real reversal of roles here. By shifting his maker's concsiousness into a new robot body, Chappie has remade God in his own image. The son has become the father. Chappie is starting again from scratch, reforming the flawed belief structures he grew up with into something more logical. To him, at least.

 

 

Family is another theme that is quietly subverted in the film. Chappie is raised by a family that, to our eyes, is not good for him. Criminals, wannabe gangsters that try to make him comply to their way of life. As played by Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser, in roles that cling closely to their own outsize characters as rap-rave stars, they are a parody of the dysfunctional family. The mother figure loves Chappie unconditionally, but stands aside when daddy wants him to hang tough and be a man. The zef life has its own built-in tragedy, and Ninja's ganster poses and twisted idea of what makes someone cool seem destined to lead Chappie down a dark path. When brought into conflict with the rules that Chappie's maker has instilled in him, the tension becomes greater still, and it's telling that neither side ever really ask the most important question of all: what Chappie wants.

And there's the thing. Chappie is a non-human intellegence that, from the moment he comes to be, is given a conflicting set of expectations, boundaries and rules. I view the early parts of Chappie's life cycle as that intellegence imprinting on the way he should act given the available information. Sure, he acts like a gangster once Ninja gets his mitts on him. But when Chappie is “born”, he is given the clues that he should act like a child. Deon explicitly says this on more than one occasion: Chappie is a child. How else is he supposed to act? These moments are portrayed by Sharlto Copley's smart and subtle mo-cap performance with grace and charm, adding dignity to moments that could be played exclusively for laughs. What we see in the sequences of Chappie's early days with the Vissers is an exploration of non-human intellegence making sense of its surroundings, and learning at an exponential rate.

 

Chappie is by no means a perfect film: I'd question why Chappie's battery can't be recharged, as Deon finds it easy to slip in and out of his workplace with a van full of robot parts at will. I'm also disappointed that Blomkamp didn't take the opportunity to put the Chappie concsiousness into every Scout that the villainous Vincent disabled. The notion of a peaceful robot uprising, something akin to the one good moment at the end of Alex Proyas' I, Robot, could have been something to see.

Nevertheless, I'm still finding ideas and questions every time I think about the film, and I'd like to think that it's one of those movies that will grow and find its audience. I expected smart, funny and action-packed SF from this third Blomkamp movie. I really wasn't expecting anything quite this thought-provoking.

You know who agrees with me? William Gibson.

Chappie's giving me that thing where I like it progressively more in retrospect. A second viewing is definitely in order.

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) March 10, 2015

 

I think if the father of cyberpunk thinks Chappie is worthy of attention, then maybe we should ignore the trailers and sneering commentary, and give it a go.

 

 

 

 

The A To Z Of SFF: A Is For Adams… again

https://excusesandhalftruths.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/a-is-for-adams-2.m4a

Cripes! CycloMedia was deeply unimpressed with last week’s exploration of Douglas Adams. Join Rob and Clive as they try to placate the crazy calculator with a chat about Dirk Gently and Doctor Who. Let’s hope it goes a bit better this time around…

Download A IS FOR ADAMS… AGAIN.

The A To Z Of SFF: A IS FOR ADAMS

Off we jolly well go, then. In this first edish (it’s a word, look it up) of the A To Z, we discuss that most English of SF writers, the esteemed Douglas Adams.

It doesn’t quite go as planned…

https://excusesandhalftruths.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/a-is-for-adams-1.m4a

Tack Is Back!

It’s always good to see something new from up-and-coming horror talent Mike Tack, and his latest, garden-core nasty The Allotment is a step forward for the hardcore accountant.

Following the success of Two Careful Owners, which had international screenings, he’s gone down to earth with a tale of murder, revenge and garden tools. Featuring our favourite Leading Man, Clive Ashenden, and X&HTeam-mate Keith Eyles, The Allotment is a hoot. I caught up with Mike and asked him to explain himself.

Mike, what were your influences in writing The Allotment? It has a lighter touch than the Careful Owner films… although the emphasis on bloody revenge is still front and centre!

I wanted to make a monster movie which wouldn’t look out of place in a Creepshow or EC comics episode. My wife had a nice scarecrow at her allotment and she suggested it would be a great location to shoot a film. I then wrote a script which was more obnoxious and violent than I ended up filming, with swearing and a bigger gang. As my father-in-law was lined up to play the pensioner, it was too hardcore to be honest to subject him to that draft of the script. So I went back to the drawing board and trimmed the scope and nastiness down but kept the revenging scarecrow idea. A good move really, as my moral compass is a bit out of whack compared to "normal" people... as I am frequently reminded! I think the film is better for it too. I still wanted visceral death scenes and those are still in there. I think a lot of people will get some perverse satisfaction that the hoodie scumbags get their just desserts in the film.

A completely outdoor shoot for you on this one: what challenges did you face in shooting The Allotment in, you know, an allotment?

Wind and sun periodically coming out then going in all the time proved very challenging. I had to prep every take to get the white balance and exposure consistent which was a real headache as it was the first time I'd used a DSLR (Mike's first film was, famously, shot completely on an iPhone 4). Also we thought that all of the live sound recorded was useless due to the very windy conditions. Luckily we salvaged most of it and just about got away with it (Rob says: This didn't strike me as a problem at all. Dialogue was clear and sharp. There's a lot of traffic noise throughout, but to be honest this adds to the ambience of what is, even in pastoral surroundings, a typically Tack urban horror). I also had to secure a film licence from the parish council so we did not upset other allotment holders during the shoot. That's why we shot the death scenes in my back garden late at night, so we didn't get the police called on us!

I love your use of POV shots to heighten the eerie mood of the night sequences. What made you decide to try that?

Well, as we could not shoot on the allotment at night I chose to use POV for suspense and simply to move the story forward so I shot that sequence during the day and had to try and make it look like it was night. I am going to see if I can make it look a bit more seamless as a couple of shots still look a bit too different from the real night scenes. I also like POV as it puts the viewer in the shoes of the character in a way that hopefully makes them say "don’t go there!"

As ever, Tim Richard’s gore SFX are nicely juicy. Can you shed any secrets on how the gags were pulled off?

Tim is an artist and a hard worker. He spent over an hour stuffing sausage meat and blood into some sausage skin we procured from my local butchers. He also got some garden tools so he could cut them up for different stages of the big death scene. The guts were held in a reversed hat attached to a t-shirt in order to keep them in one place. Cheap, nasty and effective is how I sum up our gore FX and Tim gets all the credit for that.

What plans do you have for The Allotment? Any festival gigs lined up yet, following on from the successful appearance of Two Careful Owners at British and American fests?

I am hoping due to the shorter 7min length and the fun monster elements that we should get a good festival run. 12 tests so far have been submitted so fingers crossed.

Fingers crossed indeed. As ever, Mike blends a tough urban feel with an almost biblical sense of bloody retribution for wrongs committed. The Allotment is a great deal of fun, and if you like EC-style horror, you’ll enjoy this a lot. I’ll keep you posted as to where and when you can watch the film. For now, here’s the trailer.

 

 

 

Coming Soon: THE A TO Z OF SFF

The Adventure Begins…

At the end of the Singles Going Steady Speakeasy, we mentioned that we were starting something new. Well, here it is.

At least, here’s the trailer for it.

With more than a little help from the astronomically talented Maria Thomas, here’s a taste of what you can expect from Clive and I.

Welcome to the A To Z Of SFF…

https://excusesandhalftruths.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/a-z-teaser.m4a

Download The A To Z Teaser

The Machinery Of Romance

I consider myself a romantic. As a long-term SF addict, my sense of wonder is sharply honed, and I love my wife with a passion that can reshape continents. But the notion of Valentine's Day, and the industry it supports, has largely passed me by.

To me, love is something that you celebrate every day, in those little acts of kindness, in patience and understanding, in promises kept and pledges honoured. The notion of having one day to declare your feelings is patently ridiculous. You don't feed and water a plant once a year and expect it to grow and flourish. The industry of romance is selling a lie, one that raises false expectations and often leads to disappointment.

The romantic comedy is the prime example of how we're expected to view love. The modern rom-com is a finely tuned and tautly organised piece of entertainment. The characters have been rolled from a limited set of dice, the situations designed as part of a 21-point plan that leads inexorably to the final clinch and fade-out. Even the posters look the same. The two leads lean jokily against each other around a chunky, sans-serif title, on white. It's painfully predictable, cookie-cutter stuff.

I'm cheered, a little, by the appearance of Fifty Shades Of Grey as this year's Valentine's Day movie. No matter what you think of the material, at least it's something a bit different. Of course, it's celebrating an abusive relationship with a lead character that's close to being a psychopath. But then so is Wuthering Heights, and that's one of the great romantic stories of all time, apparantly. And don't get me started on Romeo and Juliet. Love-crazed kids go on rampage, six dead.

 

For Valentine's Day this year, TLC and I settled down in front of David Wain and Michael Showalter's They Came Together, a clever deconstruction of the rom-com tropes. It takes a Zucker Brothers, Airplane-style approach to the material: it's played straight, and everything is fair game. All the tropes are there, from the kooky friends to the montage to the chase to stop the girl marrying the wrong guy. Perversely, They Came Together works as a kind of primer for romantic comedies: from character types to plot points, it digs under the skin of the genre and shows you how the whole thing ticks.

In fact, the movie is almost too clever for it's own good. It's so meta that it very nearly disappears up its own primary assumption, becoming as much an exercise as the films it's supposed to parody. Luckily, smart casting saves the day, and both Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler bring things back from the brink. With a solid handful of Saturday Night Live cast members helping out, They Came Together is worth a look as an antidote to the usual V-Day fluff.

Personally, I think the studios are missing a trick. Why should Valentine's Day just be for romantic movies? Release an action film or a horror on the nearest Friday, and you'll get everyone that hasn't bought into the myth flocking through the doors of the cinema in droves. My weekly trip to the flicks was cancelled because there was nothing new that I wanted to see. Given the choice between Mr. Grey and The Backstreet Boys, I think I'll stay at home, thanks.