Harry Connolly's Blog, page 26

Batman v Superman is a bad movie, but it’s not incoherent

I saw Batman v Superman on Friday, despite the reviews. as expected, it was full of (dark) spectacle, but as I said on Twitter, it played as if it had been made by people who didn’t understand how stories work.

Screenwriters talk about structure all the time, which is a concern that goes beyond the usual cause and effect of plot and character. How does each scene play out? What effect will this have on the audience? How does this scene play in relation to the scenes that came before and after it? For example, if you watch the scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Nick Fury is attacked in his super spy van, you see a standard (and effective) escalation of threats. First, Fury faces a squad of well-equipped gunmen and kicks their asses. That extended scene demonstrates that he’s a badass. The scene ends when the Winter Soldier takes Fury out in a second or two, sending Fury running.

First, you establish a character as super capable, then you present someone who outdoes them.

The similar scene in BvS, where Batman in his Batmobile dismantles Luthor’s security team on the road, only to be stopped by Superman, tries to hit the same note and fails. You don’t need to establish Superman’s power level. He’s Superman. And Batman isn’t being a hero in that scene, he’s being an anti-hero (because he’s stealing from a villain and murdering his henchmen), so we’re glad he’s been foiled.

And it just doesn’t work on multiple levels, and that’s just one scene.

But a number of reviewers are calling it incoherent or saying the plot’s baffling, and that’s a separate issue entirely. It’s extremely common for viewers (critics included) to see a movie, decide they’re not enjoying it, then mentally check out. They stop caring, stop paying attention, and quickly get left behind by the plot.

Why didn’t the protagonist just kill that guy? Why did they have that long scene in the courthouse? Why this why that? Why not fly the giant eagles straight into Mordor?

For viewers who are paying attention, the answers are right there in the film. For viewers who aren’t, their self-inflicted confusion is just another strike against the filmmakers. Although of course this happens with books, too.

There must be a name for this phenomenon, but I don’t know what it is. But whenever I hear someone say “I didn’t like this movie, and it made no sense” I always believe the first half and remain agnostic on the second.

I will be at ECCC

For the first time ever, I’m going to Emerald City Comic Con. I’ll be there on Sunday April 10, signing books at, I believe, noon for the University of Washington bookstore booth. After that, I have no idea what I’ll be doing.

I’ve never been to ECCC before so I don’t know what to expect. There will be books on sale (I’m being hosted by a bookstore, after all) but mostly I’ll be happy to see folks and say hello.

 

Spoiler-Free Review of Daredevil, Season 2.

I was sort of excited to stay up all night and binge-watch season two of DAREDEVIL, even though I expected it to be a disappointment. What can I say? I like staying up.

First thing: the show is really good.

Second thing: except for the parts that aren’t.

Third thing: the good parts outweigh the bad by a lot. A whole lot.

The first episode of the season was by far the worst. It wasn’t just that it was unimaginative; it looked weird, too, like cheap video. Were some scenes shot on someone’s phone? I couldn’t tell.

The first, second, and most of the third episodes were also full of bullshit about What It Means To Be A Hero. You know what? At the start of the season, I don’t want to hear two vigilantes have a philosophical discussion. I just don’t.

Then, near the end of the third episode, the show gives us another of its excellent fight scenes, and it seemed to find its groove again.

Part of the problem is the costume. When it showed up at the end of season one, I was upfront about how much I disliked it. The full red suit from the comics would look ridiculous, and while the devil suit at the end of S1 is an improvement, it still doesn’t work. I suspect the showrunners realized this, because they contrived to change it slightly. That’s another improvement, but it still doesn’t quite work.

What’s more, I don’t think they quite understood how to make a live-action masked superhero story really work. Basically: use the mask as little as possible.

The best and cheapest special effect a show can have is an actor’s face, and most masks that are reasonably faithful to their comic book versions look flat and silly on screen even after you’ve been awake for 27 hours and have been watching a show for ten. So I’m not really a fan of actors wearing their supers costumes when they’re not a) hurrying to the rescue, b) scaring the hell out of a bad guy or c) beating the hell out of a bad guy. Action scenes. That’s what masks are for. Otherwise, give us human expressions.

Because a dude in a superhero costume just standing around having a conversation looks like a grade A fool. For example, if a costumed vigilante is going to have a conversation with someone, it should not look like this:

Yeah, that’s a bit dark, but you can see Daredevil on the right standing face-to-face with Turk on the left. Just two dudes standing around chatting, except one is wearing a horned helmet.

This is a much better choice:

In case it isn’t clear from this single shot, the man foregrounded on the left is on his back, slightly raised off the floor. The background is the roof.

It’s an unusual framing. It’s interesting. It’s dynamic. It’s not two dudes chatting.

Oh, one last thing: Hey Karen Page, is season two filled with bloody violence and hair-raising sound effects just like season one?

Gotcha. Thanks.

Again we get great performances and fast-moving plots with lots of twists. Also, instead of a mini-boss structure like season one, there are two separate ongoing plots for each of the featured guest stars that compete for Matt’s attention.

Like other Netflix shows about superheroes, this is more like a miniseries than a weekly program, so get ready to binge or follow a complicated plot over an extended period of time.

So, despite a shaky start and a costume that doesn’t quite work, season two of Daredevil is fantastic. Check it out.

A spoiler post will be forthcoming, I expect.

“Rude Girl is Lonely Girl” My post about Jessica Jones, finally.

With the second season of everyone’s favorite blind masochist about to air, it’s time I finished this post:

I’ve watched Marvel’s Netflix series JESSICA JONES all the way through three times. Twice on my own and once with my wife. I’ll say this: It’s very good. Flawed, but very very good.

For kindness sake, I’ll do a brief recap on the assumption that there’s one or two people reading this who haven’t heard of the show: it’s a 13 episode Netflix Original series that’s loosely adapted from the comic book ALIAS, which launched in 2001 as part of Marvel’s MAX line. Basically, it’s an R-rated comic, where characters can say Fuck and occasionally do fuck. Nothing ground breaking about that, except that this comic also featured Captain America and a bunch of other characters from the main branch of Marvel publishing, where the Comics Code mentality still had a lingering influence.

The lead character was created at the last minute for the comic; originally, it was supposed to be Jessica Drew, aka Spiderwoman, but Marvel’s editors decided to use her for something else, so Brian Michael Bendis created Jessica Jones to replace her. Jones’s story in the comics: After a traffic accident with a truck full of chemicals (like Daredevil) she gained superstrength, limited invulnerability, and the ability to fly (awkwardly), so she did what she thought she was supposed to do. She put on a costume and fought crime, taking the name “Jewel”.

Then it went all wrong. She fell under the sway of mind-controlling villain The Purple Man for months. When she finally broke free, her life was ruined. What’s more, she realized that she had vanished for months but no one had noticed. She threw away the costume and, with her anger and pain and PTSD, became a hard-drinking private investigator.

It’s a great idea: a super-powered private eye in the Marvel comics, which is a world where superpowers have been around for generations and there are a whole lot of people with dearly held secrets.

For the TV show, Jessica is pretty much the same but the setting is not. Jessica still has powers (superstrength and superjumping, with a smidge of toughness thrown in) and she’s still self-medicating for her PTSD from her clash with a mind-controlling villain, but she inhabits a world where superpowers are a rare thing, largely hidden and mysterious to the public at large.

So the show has some superhuman abilities, but there are no costumes, no masks, no secret identities, and no thwarted bank robberies. Instead, it has great characters. Yeah, the pacing falters late in the season, but those characters carry it through.

Spoilers after the cut

ADMIRABLE AND ALSO AWESOME

I was surprised to hear that some people didn’t like the show because Jessica wasn’t a “hero” in a traditional sense. Hearing people say “I preferred DAREDEVIL” was particularly baffling. I enjoyed season one of DAREDEVIL a lot, and I’m planning to stay up for season two, but can we please remember that Murdock tortures people, throws them off roofs, and says—without any contradiction later in the show—that he enjoys hurting people?

Jones starts off the show with zero interest in being a hero. She is struggling to get by, and deep into the cynicism that comes from working a seedy job focussed on peoples’ worst behavior. It’s only when the man who ruined her life—the one whose superpowers trumps hers—turns out not to be as dead as she’d believed that she puts aside her fear and trauma in order to protect others.

No, that’s not putting on a mask and beating up bank robbers. God forbid, because that bullshit was boring in the comics, too. And as much as Jessica goes against the boy scout superhero archetype, the show continually demonstrates that, alongside her self-destructiveness, cynicism, and abrasiveness, she has an instinct to do good.

JESSICA HERSELF

Hogarth: You’re acting paranoid.

Jones: People keep saying that. It’s like a conspiracy.

I want to come straight out and say that Krysten Ritter really makes this show work. There’s so much weight on her–along with some clunky dialog mixed in with the good–and she manages just the right balance of dourness, sarcasm, defiance, and self-loathing.

There are lots of great performances here, but Ritter’s stands out.

ABUSE AND ABUSERS

Much of JESSICA JONES is about abusive relationships of one kind or another, and they’re not all romantic relationships, nor are the abusers all men. Kilgrave (played by David Tennant and thankfully not purple-skinned like in the comics) is the mind-controlling Big Bad of the series and he’s exactly as awful as you’d expect—especially when played by someone with Tennant’s charisma) but Rebecca Du Mornay is fantastic in a smallish role as Trish’s abusive stage mother, and upstairs neighbor Robin swings wildly between awful/tragic/comic relief and back again. Then there’s Will, one of Kilgrave’s victims who is desperate to regain control of his life, even if that means hurting the people who are supposed to be on his side.

Much of the plot follows the abusers themselves. If they were only about taking control, they’d be pretty dull. They want to be loved, too. They’re looking for connection with their victims, sometimes forgiveness, sometimes a second chance, sometimes a fresh start, and yeah, it’s gross.

While the Jessica/Kilgrave storyline is completely fucking amazing, the other abuser storylines don’t work so well. Trish and her mother, hinted at during the early episodes of the season, takes over too much of the storyline as it stretches to fill 13 episodes. Will, who is a frightening, then likable, then frightening character again, plays the role of untrustworthy ally, then becomes a mini-boss for Jessica to overcome.

And finally, there’s Robin, the only character in the show that didn’t work. The transitions from abuser to pathetic figure to comic foil to infuriating plot complication soured the tone. The performance was too broad, almost mugging for the camera, and the directors should have asked for something else.

The interesting thing is that the abusers want what the same thing the other characters want: connection. It’s just that they want it on their own terms, without having to give up anything of their own.

Of course, Jessica herself plays the role of abuser at her lowest point in the story. When her self-loathing is at its strongest and she’s more drunk than she’s ever been, she finally goes out and does what Hogarth hired her to do: use threats of violence against Wendy, Hogarth’s wife, to force her to sign some divorce papers. It doesn’t work out, in part because Jessica screws up and nearly turns her threat into actual lethal violence; the only reason Wendy isn’t killed is that Jessica has to save her.

Those (aside from Jessica) are the main four, but there are other, smaller examples of characters who offer abuse: Hogarth really, really shouldn’t have hired Jessica to threaten her wife, plus the obnoxious dude in the suit at the bar, plus the fabricating neighbor, plus plus plus.

TRISH

In the comics, Jessica’s closest friend is superhero Carol Danvers. Unfortunately, Danvers is going to be the star of the forthcoming CAPTAIN MARVEL movie, due sometime in 2019 after having been postponed several times.

So, the TV show couldn’t use that character (and probably didn’t have the budget to portray her flight/energy blasting powers) so she was replaced by Patricia Walker, called Patsy in the comics and Trish on the show.

Walker actually pre-dates Marvel comics itself: she was the star of an Archie-like romance comic in the forties, and had a long history until her company was acquired by Marvel. Eventually, she was recycled into the hero Hellcat, who was basically a highly trained martial artist.

Her romance comic past has been changed to a starring role in a teenage TV show in the style of CLARISSA EXPLAINS IT ALL. As an adult, Trish hosts a popular radio show, and is Jessica’s only friend, although they’re estranged at the start of the show.

But they kept hinting that she might become Hellcat. She trains hard with a self-defense expert. She’s excited by the superhero costume she has whipped up for Jessica (the only appearance of the Jewel outfit in the show, since TV-Jessica refuses to consider it). She wants to be the hero that Jessica refuses to be.

Too bad for her that it never works out that way. She puts up a good fight when Kilgrave sends Will to murder her, but despite her training it’s Jessica who saves her life at the last moment. When Kilgrave’s bodyguards rescue him, they take her out easily. Even when she steals Will’s fighting drugs to take him on at the climax of his plot thread, she’s facing an opponent who doesn’t want to hurt her and she still can not defeat.

But for all Trish’s inability to exert herself through violence, she’s still the moral center of the show. She’s the one who urges Jessica to do what’s right, who keeps their plot against Kilgrave moving forward, who stands by her friend no matter how dangerous things get.

HOGARTH

Jeri Hogarth is a type of character that I really like: a terrible person working on the side of the good guys.

Carrie Ann Moss plays the role beautifully, bringing an understated chill to the role. Hogarth is a character who will do whatever she has to do to get what she wants. If that means hiring an alcoholic with superstrength to bully her wife into signing divorce papers, or other, more mundane ethical violations, she’s there.

And when she finds out about Kilgrave’s powers, not only does she idly wish she could hire him for her team, she arranges for aborted fetus of one of his rape victims sent to a lab. It’s never stated directly, but it seems pretty clear she was hoping to find a way to get Kilgrave’s power for herself.

Anyway, a fantastic, understated performance. Every time that Jessica’s PTSD lead to an unplanned display of superstrength, Hogarth’s carefully controlled expression showed her refusal to show fear. Moss deserves an Emmy nomination for the part, at the minimum. (And while we’re at it, so do the hair and costuming people)

KILGRAVE

There’s a lot that could be said about the character himself and Tennant’s performance, but most of it has already been said. This isn’t the first villain he’s portrayed, but the show gives him a chance to really run with it. And there’s something about his physical presence that really works; he looks so scrawny, especially in those skinny suits. Every time he was on screen, I was thinking that he looked like he could be overpowered so easily, if only someone could get close enough. So frustrating!

One of the big differences between this show and season one of DAREDEVIL is that Fisk was almost a co-protagonist. It was an odd, off-putting structure for a crime show, because Fisk’s plots often portrayed him as an underdog beset by powerful enemies, and he turns the tables on them at the last moment. That’s a plot structure that is usually reserved for the hero—the guy we’re rooting for—and at no point was I ever rooting for Fisk.

In contrast, when Kilgrave’s backstory comes, it’s not structured like a clever man’s triumph. It’s a story of pain, and of feeling used, and using people in return. I’ve seen more than one person say the show turned them off because Kilgrave was made too sympathetic. Personally, I didn’t find him that at all; I thought his history deepened the overall narrative.

LUKE CAGE

The end of a story tells you what the story is about.

After 12 episodes of sneaking around, gunfire, kidnapping plots, betrayals, snark, and horror, huge portions of the final episode are devoted to taking care of Luke Cage, injured after Kilgrave forced him to attack Jessica.

After Jessica and Kilgrave, Luke is the third super-powered character on the show. He’s incredibly strong (although not as strong as Jessica) and has unbreakable skin, and he spends most of the show keeping people at a distance by being cool and reserved.

He’s also the love interest. Jessica, the woman with the broken front door to her home office that won’t lock (because: exposed) is paired with the guy whose flesh and personality is impenetrable. And of course she gets under his skin, and it all goes wrong.

In the final episode, while one part of the plot focusses on Jessica’s pursuit of Kilgrave, the other addresses questions of loneliness, connection, and the difficulty people like Luke and Jessica have in connecting with others.

It’s a weirdly low-key string of scenes, almost meditative, especially when compared to the combative final confrontation with Kilgrave, but it mostly works.

STRUCTURE AND PACING ISSUES

It’s odd, but the comic was more like a TV show than the Netflix show was. The original comic was more episodic, with Jessica taking several different cases over the course of 29 issues. In the show, she has the case that opens the pilot, then her parents ask her to find Hope, there’s a brief scene where she serves a rich jerk for Hogarth, and she’s hired to get the pictures of a supposedly cheating husband.

That’s vanishingly little actual casework for a detective show, but the plot is much more interested in Jessica’s clashes with Kilgrave.

As such, the story feels drawn out over 13 episodes, when ten or eleven might have been a better fit. Kilgrave is captured and escapes one too many times, the plot spends too long with him as his enhances his powers, and the story spins out in several directions with Trish’s mother, Robin’s grief, Hogarth’s divorce, and so on. For all its predictability, DAREDEVIL’s mini-boss structure gave the show a steady escalation to its climax. With JESSICA JONES, they had to throw in an unmotivated traffic accident to weaken Jessica enough that Will, with all his combat-enhancing drugs, could be a credible threat.

In that sense, it’s more like a mini-series than a traditional show with self-contained stories in each episode. Multi-episode story lines are a death sentence for shows that air once per week, leading to a ratings drop in shows as diverse as FARSCAPE and PERSON OF INTEREST, but for a Netflix binge watch it works pretty well.

WRAP-UP

But whatever its flaws, this is a great show full of fantastic characters. It has me excited for season two, whenever it comes, and for LUKE CAGE this fall, and the second season of DAREDEVIL tonight. I have a couple pots of coffee ready to brew so I can binge the show all the way through.

My post about Jessica Jones, finally.

With the second season of everyone’s favorite blind masochist about to air, it’s time I finished this post:

I’ve watched Marvel’s Netflix series JESSICA JONES all the way through three times. Twice on my own and once with my wife. I’ll say this: It’s very good. Flawed, but very very good.

For kindness sake, I’ll do a brief recap on the assumption that there’s one or two people reading this who haven’t heard of the show: it’s a 13 episode Netflix Original series that’s loosely adapted from the comic book ALIAS, which launched in 2001 as part of Marvel’s MAX line. Basically, it’s an R-rated comic, where characters can say Fuck and occasionally do fuck. Nothing ground breaking about that, except that this comic also featured Captain America and a bunch of other characters from the main branch of Marvel publishing, where the Comics Code mentality still had a lingering influence.

The lead character was created at the last minute for the comic; originally, it was supposed to be Jessica Drew, aka Spiderwoman, but Marvel’s editors decided to use her for something else, so Brian Michael Bendis created Jessica Jones to replace her. Jones’s story in the comics: After a traffic accident with a truck full of chemicals (like Daredevil) she gained superstrength, limited invulnerability, and the ability to fly (awkwardly), so she did what she thought she was supposed to do. She put on a costume and fought crime, taking the name “Jewel”.

Then it went all wrong. She fell under the sway of mind-controlling villain The Purple Man for months. When she finally broke free, her life was ruined. What’s more, she realized that she had vanished for months but no one had noticed. She threw away the costume and, with her anger and pain and PTSD, became a hard-drinking private investigator.

It’s a great idea: a super-powered private eye in the Marvel comics, which is a world where superpowers have been around for generations and there are a whole lot of people with dearly held secrets.

For the TV show, Jessica is pretty much the same but the setting is not. Jessica still has powers (superstrength and superjumping, with a smidge of toughness thrown in) and she’s still self-medicating for her PTSD from her clash with a mind-controlling villain, but she inhabits a world where superpowers are a rare thing, largely hidden and mysterious to the public at large.

So the show has some superhuman abilities, but there are no costumes, no masks, no secret identities, and no thwarted bank robberies. Instead, it has great characters. Yeah, the pacing falters late in the season, but those characters carry it through.

Spoilers after the cut

ADMIRABLE AND ALSO AWESOME

I was surprised to hear that some people didn’t like the show because Jessica wasn’t a “hero” in a traditional sense. Hearing people say “I preferred DAREDEVIL” was particularly baffling. I enjoyed season one of DAREDEVIL a lot, and I’m planning to stay up for season two, but can we please remember that Murdock tortures people, throws them off roofs, and says—without any contradiction later in the show—that he enjoys hurting people?

Jones starts off the show with zero interest in being a hero. She is struggling to get by, and deep into the cynicism that comes from working a seedy job focussed on peoples’ worst behavior. It’s only when the man who ruined her life—the one whose superpowers trumps hers—turns out not to be as dead as she’d believed that she puts aside her fear and trauma in order to protect others.

No, that’s not putting on a mask and beating up bank robbers. God forbid, because that bullshit was boring in the comics, too. And as much as Jessica goes against the boy scout superhero archetype, the show continually demonstrates that, alongside her self-destructiveness, cynicism, and abrasiveness, she has an instinct to do good.

JESSICA HERSELF

Hogarth: You’re acting paranoid.

Jones: People keep saying that. It’s like a conspiracy.

I want to come straight out and say that Krysten Ritter really makes this show work. There’s so much weight on her–along with some clunky dialog mixed in with the good–and she manages just the right balance of dourness, sarcasm, defiance, and self-loathing.

There are lots of great performances here, but Ritter’s stands out.

ABUSE AND ABUSERS

Much of JESSICA JONES is about abusive relationships of one kind or another, and they’re not all romantic relationships, nor are the abusers all men. Kilgrave (played by David Tennant and thankfully not purple-skinned like in the comics) is the mind-controlling Big Bad of the series and he’s exactly as awful as you’d expect—especially when played by someone with Tennant’s charisma) but Rebecca Du Mornay is fantastic in a smallish role as Trish’s abusive stage mother, and upstairs neighbor Robin swings wildly between awful/tragic/comic relief and back again. Then there’s Will, one of Kilgrave’s victims who is desperate to regain control of his life, even if that means hurting the people who are supposed to be on his side.

Much of the plot follows the abusers themselves. If they were only about taking control, they’d be pretty dull. They want to be loved, too. They’re looking for connection with their victims, sometimes forgiveness, sometimes a second chance, sometimes a fresh start, and yeah, it’s gross.

While the Jessica/Kilgrave storyline is completely fucking amazing, the other abuser storylines don’t work so well. Trish and her mother, hinted at during the early episodes of the season, takes over too much of the storyline as it stretches to fill 13 episodes. Will, who is a frightening, then likable, then frightening character again, plays the role of untrustworthy ally, then becomes a mini-boss for Jessica to overcome.

And finally, there’s Robin, the only character in the show that didn’t work. The transitions from abuser to pathetic figure to comic foil to infuriating plot complication soured the tone. The performance was too broad, almost mugging for the camera, and the directors should have asked for something else.

The interesting thing is that the abusers want what the same thing the other characters want: connection. It’s just that they want it on their own terms, without having to give up anything of their own.

Of course, Jessica herself plays the role of abuser at her lowest point in the story. When her self-loathing is at its strongest and she’s more drunk than she’s ever been, she finally goes out and does what Hogarth hired her to do: use threats of violence against Wendy, Hogarth’s wife, to force her to sign some divorce papers. It doesn’t work out, in part because Jessica screws up and nearly turns her threat into actual lethal violence; the only reason Wendy isn’t killed is that Jessica has to save her.

Those (aside from Jessica) are the main four, but there are other, smaller examples of characters who offer abuse: Hogarth really, really shouldn’t have hired Jessica to threaten her wife, plus the obnoxious dude in the suit at the bar, plus the fabricating neighbor, plus plus plus.

TRISH

In the comics, Jessica’s closest friend is superhero Carol Danvers. Unfortunately, Danvers is going to be the star of the forthcoming CAPTAIN MARVEL movie, due sometime in 2019 after having been postponed several times.

So, the TV show couldn’t use that character (and probably didn’t have the budget to portray her flight/energy blasting powers) so she was replaced by Patricia Walker, called Patsy in the comics and Trish on the show.

Walker actually pre-dates Marvel comics itself: she was the star of an Archie-like romance comic in the forties, and had a long history until her company was acquired by Marvel. Eventually, she was recycled into the hero Hellcat, who was basically a highly trained martial artist.

Her romance comic past has been changed to a starring role in a teenage TV show in the style of CLARISSA EXPLAINS IT ALL. As an adult, Trish hosts a popular radio show, and is Jessica’s only friend, although they’re estranged at the start of the show.

But they kept hinting that she might become Hellcat. She trains hard with a self-defense expert. She’s excited by the superhero costume she has whipped up for Jessica (the only appearance of the Jewel outfit in the show, since TV-Jessica refuses to consider it). She wants to be the hero that Jessica refuses to be.

Too bad for her that it never works out that way. She puts up a good fight when Kilgrave sends Will to murder her, but despite her training it’s Jessica who saves her life at the last moment. When Kilgrave’s bodyguards rescue him, they take her out easily. Even when she steals Will’s fighting drugs to take him on at the climax of his plot thread, she’s facing an opponent who doesn’t want to hurt her and she still can not defeat.

But for all Trish’s inability to exert herself through violence, she’s still the moral center of the show. She’s the one who urges Jessica to do what’s right, who keeps their plot against Kilgrave moving forward, who stands by her friend no matter how dangerous things get.

HOGARTH

Jeri Hogarth is a type of character that I really like: a terrible person working on the side of the good guys.

Carrie Ann Moss plays the role beautifully, bringing an understated chill to the role. Hogarth is a character who will do whatever she has to do to get what she wants. If that means hiring an alcoholic with superstrength to bully her wife into signing divorce papers, or other, more mundane ethical violations, she’s there.

And when she finds out about Kilgrave’s powers, not only does she idly wish she could hire him for her team, she arranges for aborted fetus of one of his rape victims sent to a lab. It’s never stated directly, but it seems pretty clear she was hoping to find a way to get Kilgrave’s power for herself.

Anyway, a fantastic, understated performance. Every time that Jessica’s PTSD lead to an unplanned display of superstrength, Hogarth’s carefully controlled expression showed her refusal to show fear. Moss deserves an Emmy nomination for the part, at the minimum. (And while we’re at it, so do the hair and costuming people)

KILGRAVE

There’s a lot that could be said about the character himself and Tennant’s performance, but most of it has already been said. This isn’t the first villain he’s portrayed, but the show gives him a chance to really run with it. And there’s something about his physical presence that really works; he looks so scrawny, especially in those skinny suits. Every time he was on screen, I was thinking that he looked like he could be overpowered so easily, if only someone could get close enough. So frustrating!

One of the big differences between this show and season one of DAREDEVIL is that Fisk was almost a co-protagonist. It was an odd, off-putting structure for a crime show, because Fisk’s plots often portrayed him as an underdog beset by powerful enemies, and he turns the tables on them at the last moment. That’s a plot structure that is usually reserved for the hero—the guy we’re rooting for—and at no point was I ever rooting for Fisk.

In contrast, when Kilgrave’s backstory comes, it’s not structured like a clever man’s triumph. It’s a story of pain, and of feeling used, and using people in return. I’ve seen more than one person say the show turned them off because Kilgrave was made too sympathetic. Personally, I didn’t find him that at all; I thought his history deepened the overall narrative.

LUKE CAGE

The end of a story tells you what the story is about.

After 12 episodes of sneaking around, gunfire, kidnapping plots, betrayals, snark, and horror, huge portions of the final episode are devoted to taking care of Luke Cage, injured after Kilgrave forced him to attack Jessica.

After Jessica and Kilgrave, Luke is the third super-powered character on the show. He’s incredibly strong (although not as strong as Jessica) and has unbreakable skin, and he spends most of the show keeping people at a distance by being cool and reserved.

He’s also the love interest. Jessica, the woman with the broken front door to her home office that won’t lock (because: exposed) is paired with the guy whose flesh and personality is impenetrable. And of course she gets under his skin, and it all goes wrong.

In the final episode, while one part of the plot focusses on Jessica’s pursuit of Kilgrave, the other addresses questions of loneliness, connection, and the difficulty people like Luke and Jessica have in connecting with others.

It’s a weirdly low-key string of scenes, almost meditative, especially when compared to the combative final confrontation with Kilgrave, but it mostly works.

STRUCTURE AND PACING ISSUES

It’s odd, but the comic was more like a TV show than the Netflix show was. The original comic was more episodic, with Jessica taking several different cases over the course of 29 issues. In the show, she has the case that opens the pilot, then her parents ask her to find Hope, there’s a brief scene where she serves a rich jerk for Hogarth, and she’s hired to get the pictures of a supposedly cheating husband.

That’s vanishingly little actual casework for a detective show, but the plot is much more interested in Jessica’s clashes with Kilgrave.

As such, the story feels drawn out over 13 episodes, when ten or eleven might have been a better fit. Kilgrave is captured and escapes one too many times, the plot spends too long with him as his enhances his powers, and the story spins out in several directions with Trish’s mother, Robin’s grief, Hogarth’s divorce, and so on. For all its predictability, DAREDEVIL’s mini-boss structure gave the show a steady escalation to its climax. With JESSICA JONES, they had to throw in an unmotivated traffic accident to weaken Jessica enough that Will, with all his combat-enhancing drugs, could be a credible threat.

In that sense, it’s more like a mini-series than a traditional show with self-contained stories in each episode. Multi-episode story lines are a death sentence for shows that air once per week, leading to a ratings drop in shows as diverse as FARSCAPE and PERSON OF INTEREST, but for a Netflix binge watch it works pretty well.

WRAP-UP

But whatever its flaws, this is a great show full of fantastic characters. It has me excited for season two, whenever it comes, and for LUKE CAGE this fall, and the second season of DAREDEVIL tonight. I have a couple pots of coffee ready to brew so I can binge the show all the way through.

State of the Self, 2016 (aka, the “We’ll see” post)

On Tuesday, I hit 100K words on the work in progress, currently titled ONE MAN, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to assess where things stand in a general way. No encouragement or advice, please, especially about the medical stuff.

Me, personally

I turned 50 last year, which I guess is supposed to be a big thing but it didn’t feel like it. Mostly, it felt (and continues to feel) like a timer ticking down. As more and more of “my” pop culture figures pass away (and more and more of them are closer to my own age) I’ve become increasingly aware that my own time is growing short. Right now, somewhere inside me, I probably have a cancerous tumor that’s lying quiet, small for the moment, but ready to expand aggressively under the right circumstances. If I’m very very lucky, I’ll live long enough to see my son married and living a stable life, to have earned a sense of accomplishment with my work, and to feel as though I’ve lived enough.

I can’t really imagine that, but that’s my hope.

The petty medical issues that have plagued me since 2012 haven’t gone away, but I’ve decided to work through them to focus on my weight. I’m down 10lbs in the last two weeks and plan to continue. The first few are always the easiest, of course. We’ll see.

Finally, for a long time I’ve pretty much avoided social situations. I talk to my wife. I talk to my son. I order coffee at the cafe. Beyond that, it’s extremely rare for me to speak to anyone aloud; all my interactions have been online. I guess the only exceptions have been the two-hour SF2W meetups that Django Wexler arranges, and I’ve been to, I think, two in the past year. Once in a rare while a reader drops me a note and we’ll meet face to face. Very rare.

Aside from that, I’ve been actively avoiding social events. I don’t go to conventions. I haven’t contacted the roommates I had 20 years ago to suggest we grab lunch. It’s been a very quiet life, and I like it.

But a week ago I cashed in the Christmas gift that my niece gave me: a tour of some of her favorite brewpubs in Ballard. It was extremely mellow, and we got the chance to just hang out and talk, which I don’t do much.

The following Friday, I had the event at the UW Bookstore, where a number of authors in the anthology Unbound signed books for readers. I suspect most of them were there to see Terry Brooks, but people were nice and it was good to talk to them. It had no noticeable effect on my book sales, but I enjoyed myself, and I enjoyed hanging out with the other authors afterwards. (What I could hear of it, anyway. People in bars are noisy.)

So I’m thinking I should put more energy into that sort of thing. Talking to people. I dunno. Maybe.

Family

My wife is doing pretty well, especially now that she has an APAP machine to help her sleep through the night, which she can do now, sometimes. She’s also spending more of her time painting. Making art was hard for her after her father died. She and her siblings inherited his canvases, which no one outside the family wanted and no one inside could bear to dispose of.

She began to feel the same way about her own work. Our apartment is already crowded, and she didn’t see a point to creating more stuff that her kid will have to deal with when we die. Slowly, she’s moved past that and is doing the work for its own sake, which is fantastic and makes me very happy. She’s also gotten into a couple of shows. Did I say it makes me happy? It really really does. Now I just need to write a hit book so we can afford a place with a studio. North-facing, naturally.

My son turned 14 a few months ago and starts high school in the fall. Homeschool is coming to an end, and I’m hoping that a) he’ll make more real life friends and b) I’ll have more writing time. It’s going to be a rough transition, but he’s ready for it. His sleep schedule might not be, but he is.

Games

I’m still playing Sentinels of the Multiverse on Steam. In fact, I’m playing it too much. I should probably download a program that will block Steam for most of the day. I’d get more done, and do less obsessive clicking.

BUT! I should say that, when I’m playing SotM, I don’t feel hungry, or itchy, or sad. I’m almost completely absorbed, even moreso than when I’m writing. It’s worth keeping around just for that. I just wish it was less irresistible.

Reading

After several years of feeling burned out on reading inside the fantasy genre, I’m finally feeling burned out on crime and mystery. It doesn’t help that I tried to shift from old classics to books that are popular and current, and really really did not enjoy them.

Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names, which I picked up solely out of a sense of gratitude for the social events mentioned above, is a flintlock fantasy that I enjoyed way more than expected. Recommended. At the moment, I’m reading Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon because everyone on reddit loves those books passionately. I’m 80 pages in and mostly enjoying it, despite the fact that I’m not usually fond of high magic settings.

Watching

I took the family to DEADPOOL, which is an objectively bad movie, but hugely enjoyable anyway. It’s been a while since I saw a modern Hollywood film (that wasn’t SPY) that made me laugh really hard. Now I hear that the people behind Batman v Superman are planning an R-rated version, because… I don’t know, they think it was the rating that made DEADPOOL a hit and not the humor? Don’t know. Don’t care all that much.

I’ve also dropped a number of TV shows that I was watching through sheer momentum, not because I enjoyed them. Most of what I found compelling in season one of ARROW is long gone, and I just don’t have space for it anymore. After trying both LUCIFER and LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, I’ve decided that they aren’t going to do that Star Trek thing where it takes them a little while to find their rhythm and they become awesome. Both are dropped. At this point, I’m only watching ELEMENTARY, FLASH (which has been way less fun this season) and AGENTS OF SHIELD (which has been improbably improving).

I’m looking forward to season 2 of DAREDEVIL, even though it will probably be a disappointment. We’ll see.

No one in my family is remotely interested in the upcoming DC adaptations. We’ll see, redux.

Writing

As I mentioned above, last week I crossed the 100,000 word mark of ONE MAN. What I didn’t mention is that last August 26th, I was at 31,000 words.

I know this because of this horrible new record-keeping that other authors suggested I do. All it does is tell me things that make me unhappy.

For example, last fall I took a month-long trip to Portugal, and my plan to squeeze out a few pages during quiet moments never worked. I got zero new words done that month.

After Thanksgiving, I stopped writing the first draft and went back to revise what I had. Revise it extensively, which took a month and a half.

When that was finished, I realized the game supplement I promised my Kickstarter backers was way overdue, and I spent three weeks revising that.

When I returned to ONE MAN, I re-outlined the rest of the book (using the virtual whiteboard app Scapple, which I like) and now things are tearing right along.

It’ll take another long revision process, and it’s going to be a long-ass book: at 100K words, I’m still looking ahead to the beginning of the climax. Still, I feel like this is good work. I just hope the market agrees.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to work on after that. The next book in the series is TWO DRAGONS, but I have a short story due for an anthology (soon) and I might want to write something else in between. Plus there’s that game supplement.

I wish I could be more prolific.

And that’s where things stand.

Hacking Popular Books But Still Confusing Popular With Good

Every question can be answered by computers, apparently, including What’s the difference between bestselling fiction and fiction that doesn’t sell?

Oh hell, am I supposed to make you click a link??? Have this relevant blockquote instead:

They took the first 1,000 sentences of 4,129 books of poetry and 1,117 short stories and then analyzed them for various factors. They looked at parts of speech, use of grammar rules, the use of phrases, and “distribution of sentiment” – a way of measuring the use of words.

They found that successful books made great use of conjunctions to join sentences (“and” or “but”) and prepositions than less successful books. They also found a high percentage of nouns and adjectives in the successful books; less successful books relied on more verbs and adverbs to describe what was happening.

More successful books relied on verbs describing thought processes rather than actions and emotions. The results varied by genre, but books that are less successful, the researchers reported, used words like “wanted,” “took” or “promised.” Successful authors employed “recognized” or “remembered.”

“It has to do with showing versus caring,” Choi said. “In order to really resonate with readers, instead of saying ‘she was really really sad,’ it might be better to describe her physical state, to give a literal description. You are speaking more like a journalist would.”

Communications researchers believe journalists use more nouns, pronouns, and prepositions than other writers because those word forms give more information, Choi explained.

“Novelists who write more like journalists have literary success,” she said.

And to think that I deleted all those prepositional phrases from my books because I thought they were unnecessary! Josh Helman might be playing Ray Lilly in the movie version right now if only I’d left them in.

More seriously, color me skeptical that Choi’s analysis above, which boils down to showing vs telling, is more than post hoc rationalization (or a mundane error in science journalism) since it seems to contradict the paragraph before, which says “actions and emotions” take second place to “thought processes” in successful books. It’s almost as though the data has to be twisted to fit the popular model of how to write well.

It’s almost enough to make me grab a Lee Child novel off the library shelf to see how much ink is spent “retaliating first” and how much analyzing story beats.

At the back end of the article, a writing teach claims that the research must be all wrong, since it’s verbs that make for good writing, and that people choose books based on subject matter rather than style.

Both statements might be true, but good writing is not the same as popular writing, and if you’ve got the subject matter, maybe there’s a boost to be gained by writing in a journalistic style.

Which, honestly, is interesting to think about, but which I’ll completely forget about by the time I return to my current book. I just gotta do my own thing. As much as I’d like to be successful, I suspect I’m immune to the advice that could make that happen.

Have a Nook? In the UK? Back up your books

If you’re in the UK and you have a Nook (there must be at least ONE of you out there) be sure to back them up. Nook is pulling out of the UK market and relying on a third-party to take over for the Nook books people have already bought.

Personally, I don’t put a lot of trust in maintenance arrangements with third parties.

Details here.

I’ll be at the UW Bookstore event on Friday, 2/26

As I mentioned before, I appeared in the anthology UNBOUND. Check out the list of authors. Pretty amazing, right? How’d I sneak in there?

Anyway, there’s a launch party at the UW Bookstore this Friday, the 26th, and I’ll be there. The event description doesn’t include my name, but I’ll be there.

Come by! Say hello. It’s a Terry Brooks thing, so there might be a whole lot of people. It’d be cool if you were one of them. (You don’t have to buy anything.)

Randomness for 2/20

1) The Author Who Cyberstalked Me.

2) “Trust me. I’m an engineer.” Video.

3) You have already missed your chance to enter the first beauty contest judged by robots.

4) A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy. Oh, what 50 years of safety regulation can do!

5) Surprising applications of the Magnus Effect. Video. This is cool.

6) Highway font Clearview being ditched in favor of older Highway Gothic.

7) Welcome to the future: Hackers hijack CA hospital computers and demand $3.6 million ransom to release them.