Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review

Star Wars was my first fandom.

I was six (almost seven) when it came out, and Mom and I went to see it with our neighbors, a boy my age (who was my best buddy at the time) and his mom.  It was showing in the next town over, and by the time we got there, the line was stretched around the block twice.  Apparently, fire regulations weren't quite as stringent in 1977, because we all got into the single theater, though we little kids had to sit up front on the theater floor.  When it started up, the screen took up even beyond what my peripheral vision could catch.  It was the entire world, and it was beautiful.  My buddy and I spent the ride back quoting lines to each other ("Someone get this big walking carpet out of my way!"), and it became a major, major event right up until RotJ in 1983.  My later best friends and I formed a club, and wrote our very own Mary Sue fanfics for it. (Yes, they predated the internet, and it was astoundingly horrible, and I loved it and still do.)

I don't know if it's possible now to explain it, in a time when blockbusters come and go "like busboys in a restaurant" (as another of our cult movies put it).  By the time part three of a series comes around, people are barely talking about it anymore, and there's only a year between them.  The attention span was considerably longer in 1977.  Star Wars, well... it was what gave us our first generational identity.  It bound us, penetrated us, and bound the generation together, so to speak.  We were still buying toys from the first movie when the second one came out three years later.   When my college ran the trilogy -- all of us within a couple of  years of one another in age -- the lecture hall they showed it in was packed to the rafters, with people sitting on the stairs and standing up against the walls.  For hours.  Quoting along with favorite lines, cheering at the good guys, hissing at the bad guys, and, possibly the only time in my undergraduate experience, with no rancor between factions at all.  (Yes,  yes, there was the Rancor in RotJ, but that's a different thing.) (ETA: I have been corrected. Apparently, a left/right fistfight almost broke out over the "Wars not make one great" line.  I must have missed that in my own bliss-out.) I'm sure people later went on and on about how that awful blockbuster thing was reactive or some such nonsense, because that's what people do, but in the room, it was all love.

Then, in 1999, the prequels came out. There were people who didn't like them, but I wasn't one of them.  I adored TPM and AotC.  (I thought RotS dropped the ball on the thematic and narrative arc in a major way, for no discernible purpose, but this review isn't that review.)

And now, the third trilogy is here.  I wasn't excited.  I'm maybe still not excited, but largely because I was satisfied with the ending of Return of the Jedi. It was a fisher king thing, and I was happy that when Anakin was restored to himself, the galaxy was restored, because in a mythical sense,  he was the galaxy.  (And yes, I did  understand that at twelve, not later on, though I didn't have the frame of reference for it.)

I saw The Force Awakens today.  I wasn't so  unexcited that I didn't make sure to get tickets the first week, after all.  I review with spoilers, so, um... here's a picture and some graphics to take up space if you want to stop reading now.

Here I am dancing with one of my SW buddies, dressed up as our Mary Sues.

Still on the same screen?  More space-filler?  Here are our rebel note-passing codes, decrypted after all these years, so I hope our vitally important messages have been destroyed in the interim.  This should be enough to take up a full screen, so proceed beyond with caution...

Okay, still here?

I will assume that (a) you have seen The Force Awakens or, (b) like me, you rather enjoy spoilers, and think that any movie worth seeing is worth seeing even if  you know what happens in it.  They will be thick from this point out, so this is the last chance to hit the back button.

First the verdict: Eh. Not bad. Not bad at all.  In fact, I had fun.  I just wasn't all that engaged in the experience.

Plot
The Empire wasn't utterly destroyed at the end of RotJ, and now survives in the smaller, resurgent First Order, which seeks to crush the Resistance, supported by the Republic.  Luke lost an apprentice, who killed everyone, so he went into hiding, and now people are trying to find him. The apprentice in question was Han and Leia's son, and, as might be imagined, that didn't do great things for their relationship, and they now operating mostly as separate entities.  A map to Luke's location surfaces, and is hidden in a droid, and a new power trio assembles to protect it, get it to the resistance, and, ultimately, use it.  The fallen apprentice, Ben Solo (aka, Kylo Ren) also wants it, so he can track Luke down and destroy the Jedi once and for all. Also, they've turned an entire planet into a Death Star that can destroy entire planetary systems, because one planet at  a time is just passe now, apparently.  I'm a going to go ahead and put an extra level of spoiler here, just in case you don't want to know about a character death:

When Han confronts Ben, Ben -- who is genuinely conflicted -- uses his inner conflict to get close to Han, and promptly kills him with a lightsaber, then throws him down one of the 'verse's trademark bottomless chasms.

I still think the story was over with the restoration of Anakin's soul at the end of RotJ -- that was kind of the whole point of Luke's choices there, and I am and have always been a Luke girl.  I was fond of Leia as a tough girl and okay with Han, but I always felt that time away from Luke was just time wasted. ;p  So I have always been fine with his moral choice to heal his father bringing about the redemption of the galaxy by, essentially, magical means.

That wouldn't have left a story for them to tell, my old Mary Sue aside.  She was fun, but didn't  have a good enough story to carry a franchise.  (We were fourteen; the Sues barely had enough story to carry a good cosplay.) So they went in the more realistic direction that the Empire was dealt a serious blow, but didn't just fold up.  I can't fault them for that, and they did a better job than the EU novels I've read.  For what they chose to go with as a premise, they did a good job with the plotting.  I don't think they developed the relationships between old and new characters particularly well, and didn't buy the new character's exaggerated mourning for an old character they'd only just met, but that's a quibble.

I do wish that, instead of being "the resistance," they'd positioned the Republic as the power at this point, with the First Order (the new Sith, basically) and the Imperial remnants as a nasty underground force, if for no other reason than turning the tables. But they didn't.  I'll make judgments based on how well they did what they decided to do, rather than carping about what I wish they'd decided to do.  That's a kind of pointless critique.

Characters
Han Solo is the main old trilogy character seen here. Harrison Ford slips him on like a comfy pair of bedroom slippers, and I can believe this is a Han who's gone through thirty-two years and a couple of major losses, though the script doesn't establish them too well. (I think in its fear of telegraphing anything, it sacrificed emotional  urgency.)

Chewie is, as always, at Han's side, and has a good sense of humor. Han uses his crossbow a couple of times, and it's a running gag that he's just figuring out that it's a powerful weapon.

Leia also appears as the leader of the resistance, and doesn't have much else to do, even though her son is the bad guy.  Again, they lose some urgency on this front.

Luke appears at the end, and we don't know much at all, except that he's apparently spent an inordinate amount of time building stone stairs.

New characters, in order of appearance:
Po Dameron is a hotshot pilot who will undoubtedly have  more of a role in the future, but who really isn't in this one all that much. He sets things in motion playing Leia's role of hiding information in a droid, in this case, a ball droid called BB-8.  (Not sure how that's going to shorten.  The Beeb is a thing, and so is the Biebs.  I guess he'll just be Beebee?)  The place he gets it from, on the planet of Jakku, is destroyed by stormtroopers, at which point we meet...

Finn, a boy taken from his family and raised under mental conditioning to be a stormtrooper, who nevertheless fights that conditioning and doesn't participate in the massacre.  He is particularly noticed by Kylo Ren, who presumably senses the Force in him.  He helps Po escape from captivity in  stole TIE fighter, and they crash together on the planet, but get separated.  Finn is one of the more interesting characters. He lies easily and humorously, but knows how to take responsibility.  He's a tough fighter, and unlike Han in the first trilogy, doesn't dither about whether or not he wants to be good.  He makes the call and acts according to his call for the remainder of the story, showing that he has the kind of strong will that the series values.

Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is a little bit over-the-top, and I'm not at all sure what his deal is.  He's been seduced by the Dark Side, yes, and admits throughout that he feels the pull of the Light Side.  He just doesn't have the emotional or symbolic weight to pull off the Anakin role, though.  If he's rescued, even I couldn't find a way for it to symbolically repair the galaxy, though of course, it would make Leia happy, and that's good in itself.  (Well, every soul saved from the Dark Side is a good thing, if only because it's one less source of power for the Dark Side.)  Because we never knew him, it's a little hard to care about his conflict.  You can't just say, "This is Han and Leia's son" and expect the audience to go, "Awwww."  I want to know why he idolizes his grandfather's evil alter-ego, despite the fact that he should have had the whole story told to him all along.  What the heck's wrong with Luke and Leia that they let it get that far?  (And why in the GFFA would they keep the melted mask?)

The last major new character introduce is Rey, a scavenger girl on the planet of Jakku who, in Skywalker tradition, finds the droid and helps it get to the resistance.  She was abandoned there by unnamed parents and has been counting days until their return, but accepts it very quickly when told by bartender Maz that she knows they're not really coming back.  Here, Daisy Ridley is obviously going to carry the franchise, and she's good at it.  I like her. I like Rey.  I don't like the way they're playing the card of her identity as some kind of Sooper Sekrit thing that will be a big bombshell the way, "No, I am  your father" was.  You can't re-do that. It won't work. And if her father is Luke, what's the response?  Yay?  (Or, in my case if that turns out true, :eyeroll:).  If she's Ben's twin and therefore Leia's daughter, then you get to, "And Han and Leia  don't mention having lost a daughter as well... why?"   If she's some descendant of Kenobi's, oh,  yes.  Good going, oh you paragon of faithfulness to the Order. 

Look, she's obviously some connection to the family.  That's how SW works.  The Skywalker family is the GFFA.  More to the point, they went to the trouble of scouring for an unknown actress who could easily play Natalie Portman's younger sister... or her actual double.  Unless they're going to go with her being related to Sabe the decoy queen (Keira Knightley's character), then somewhere, she's connected to the Skywalkers.  Maybe at some point, someone stole cells from poor Padme's body and they were sitting in a cloning vat for  years, then someone decided to reactivate them.  I don't know. But the virtual capering around going, "I've got a secret and you do-on't know it!" is deeply annoying.  All it will do is cause fan wars so that large segments of the fandom will stalk off in a huff if their pet theories are wrong.

Kind of a quibble, though. It goes with my general theory of spoilers -- if knowing them actually spoils  your enjoyment of a movie, then there's not much to the movie other than cheap surprise -- but it's not relevant to her as a character. As a character, I really like Rey a lot, and I loved that she got a seriously kick-ass lightsaber duel scene.  I like that her interactions with Finn didn't try to mimic the bickering dynamic of Han and Leia.  Actually I kind of love that -- they're both really excited about what they can do, and they hit it off right away.  We don't see that often enough.  I like that she seems to be the apex of the new trio without it being in any manner a romantic competition.  And I like that she forgets that she needs to turn the blaster on before she can fire it.  And that she looks at a droid and treats it as an individual.  I could get into a Rey-based series, for the same reason that I'm a Luke girl: She's a hero whose choices I can buy as making all the difference.

Last and least, the new Big Bad, Snokes.  Yes, the Big Bad is basically Darth Snookums.  He appears as a giant  hologram, and I kept thinking that Toto was going to show up and pull a curtain, revealing a funny little man in a green suit.  This aspect needs serious work.

Setting:
Hmm.  The setting wanders a bit, and I don't get nearly the sense of Jakku that I had of Tatooine.  I can't for the life of me remember the names of the other systems. On the other hand, CGI has allowed them to create much more alien architecture and more varied landscapes, so it already seems more physically complete.  But it needs some world-building in the future.

They've added some land-side aerial battles -- it's not all  up in space. It gives some nice image work.

Style:
Abrams has done a good job re-creating the SW used-future style.  Everything looks  good; everything looks like it's in the same universe, except a few decades later.  Narratively, this isn't quite on the ball, because it doesn't take the time to develop the simple themes first. (It's back to that emotional urgency question.  This might have been a better second story.)

Theme:
I'm not sure, yet. Oh, the usual SW theme of choosing the light, no matter how tempting the darkness might be, but specific to this one... I just don't think we have enough information to guess on.

So, I'm going with "Not bad."

But for the record, I sat as far up front as I could.  So far up that I couldn't see the edges of the screen with peripheral vision.  For two hours, it was the whole world.

And yes... flaws or no, it was still beautiful.

Mockingjay, Pt 2 review

SPOILERS FOR BOOKS AND MOVIE.

I don't review without them, and it is at the top of my blog, but just in case: I'm not being particularly careful to avoid them. Or, actually, even trying at all.  If you don't want to know who lives or dies (and haven't already read the book, because there are no changes on that front), then this is probably where you should get off.

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Okay, still here?

First, I want to acknowledge that Mockingjay is an incredibly difficult book to adapt to any kind of dramatic form.  Most of the key elements take place in Katniss's head, and while having a fine actress like Jennifer Lawrence in the part helps matters, even Olivier couldn't have expressed a series of undiscussed decisions by a slight tip of the eyebrow.  It just doesn't work that way, unless you already know what the narration is.  Much of MJ is spent as Katniss begins to realize, with dawning horror, what the rebellion has become, and what it's doing to her and to her loved ones, finally culminating in the death of her sister in a false flag bombing meant to kill the last support for Snow by making it look like he bombed a plaza full of children.   The cruelest part was that the trap -- while never intended specifically for Prim -- was designed by Katniss's friend, Gale, who has become more and more radicalized as the story goes on, losing any compassion he once had.  (Though he understands it at the end, and I believe he can find his footing again.)

 Through it, Katniss has frequent fugues and times when she simply withdraws from the world and goes inside her head.  Many of her decisions happen in those head-spaces.  That is very hard to script.

So how did they do?

I had my doubts, but it was actually... pretty okay. Much better than I expect out of Hollywood, which has been the case throughout the series.  It's beautifully filmed, and most of the decisions made were, at the very least, not destructive.  And I don't mean to be damning by faint praise here -- Mockingjay is a very good, very thematically dense book, and I had a real fear that even these producers would drop the ball in the end and not really face the book head on.

Before I start, the major changes:
For some reason I can't even guess at, they decided to have Katniss sneak into the Capitol instead of just going with the star squad in the first place.  Since they promptly sent the rest of the squad in and didn't change from there, I'm not sure what the point of that was.  It couldn't be, at this late date, that they thought the audience was too stupid to figure out that she was just playing along.  Since the scene where she and Gale discuss the fact that she's planning on breaking away, that doesn't play.  So why? I dunno.  I guess it doesn't  ultimately harm anything (especially since it went exactly nowhere), except for the fact that we don't get to see the scenes where she and Johanna bond,  but I don't understand that call.

Katniss's injuries are much less severe.  She doesn't lose her spleen.  Her burns don't seem terribly bad, and neither she nor Peeta is close to death at the end, or even scarred.  Her mental state never degenerates into the self-destructive shock she goes into in the book, probably because it would have been too much screen time for an element too many people really didn't like.

They chose, finally, to address the importance of the bread scene, and in what I consider one of the biggest missteps, had Peeta attack her on that scene ("I should have fed it to the pigs"). The fact that he didn't do so in the book was one of the signs, to me, that he really was still in there. And original line, a wistful, "I must have really loved you," was more poignant.  Again, kind of an inexplicable narrative decision, but not awfully destructive in the long term.

There are about a million minor changes, but nothing that even a Evil Purist (tm) like me is terribly fussed about.  Most of the problems were in skipped characters. I'm sorry, but sending Prim in to talk to Peeta instead of his friend Delly is just stupid.  ANYONE would have made more sense than Katniss's beloved little sister.  I know they wanted to give her something to do, but come on. 

I'd heard that Prim's death scene was changed, but all I really spotted was that Katniss was standing on a truck instead of climbing a flagpole.  Otherwise, it's as written.

They switched the ages of the kids in the epilogue so Katniss would have a baby to talk to.  I'm perfectly fine with this change, though I hope it doesn't get picked up in fan art, where it's unnecessary.

I know why Tigress didn't remake them as much as she should have -- the audience is following visually, so you want your actors recognizable -- but it did make it giggle-worthy that, in essence, Katniss's only disguise as she went to kill the president was a big hood.

Elements?  Elements.

Character
There's a cast of thousands, of course, which means that no one gets much in terms of development.  Poor Finnick only got a handful of lines before his death, which left that scene without the emotional resonance of the book.  Haymitch got most of his book lines back, so I can be glad of that. (Haymitch is my favorite and I have given him more thought than I expect filmmakers to, so I'm not going to go on and on about how I wish they'd focused obsessively on this or that.  And they officially teased  Hayffie.  What more can a fangirl ask?)  Shoved into practically one-line-land are Beetee, Johanna, Annie, and, as mentioned, Finnick.  Paylor actually gets expanded a little, which is not a bad thing, since she's the one who ends up president, and seeing her in action gives a sense that maybe, just maybe, they've managed to get it right.

Snow... sigh. Look, I get that you snagged Donald Sutherland, and he is all manner of awesome, and is a fanboy to boot (he wrote a letter explaining all of Snow's motivations!), but time spent with his crew in scenes that don't really make any difference to the story is time not spent on the plot.

They worked around Hoffman's death pretty well.  The only significant Plutarch scene left was one where he talked to her about the end of the war, and it was re-written as  Haymitch reading her a letter from him, since he couldn't be seen with her right then.

Peeta and Gale.  Okay, I've said Hutcherson was miscast, and I am actually very pleased to take it back this time. Yes,  he still looks nothing whatsoever like Peeta, and his romantic chemistry with Lawrence is still nil, but here, he brings a very strong sense of the character, and, romance or no, he and Lawrence do a wonderful job with the inherent strong affection between these two characters, which isn't easy, given the material in this section of the story... but is absolutely essential to the plot. While the overt story is Peeta recovering from his hijacking with Katniss's help, the mirror story is Katniss re-learning who she is as well, as she chooses Peeta's kindness and quiet determination over Gale's increasingly frightening anger and vengeance.  The years of working together really pay off here.  Hemsworth's Gale also deserves a lot  of credit. He manages to take the character where he needs to go without ever sacrificing sympathy, or making it seem like Katniss is in the wrong to have anything to do with him.  His final scene, where he acknowledges how badly astray he went, is lovely.

Of course, it's Lawrence's Katniss that carries it all, as it should be.  Like I said, she doesn't go through the psychological injuries that she does in the book, but Lawrence manages to get across her  confusion and dawning horror as the movie goes through.  Without Katniss all of it falls apart, and we get good Katniss here. The scene where she finally realizes that Peeta wants to recover, and tells him about his favorite color, and that he double-knots his shoes -- it's taken verbatim from the book and it's absolutely GORGEOUS as a performed scene between them. The scene where she decides to kill Coin really does manage to get across thought processes without dialogue, with just looks between her and Harrelson.

Plot
It's the second half of Mockingjay, covering Katniss's trip to District Two, the surge into the Capitol, and the aftermath of the war.

I said that I thought they were right to split it into two parts, but after the whiplash-worthy D2 sequence, I have to admit: They probably should have split it into three.  I mean, dear God.  It was about fifteen minutes in when she'd (a) recovered from Peeta's attack, (b) asked to be sent to Two, (c) gone to Two, (d) been shot in Two, and (e) gotten back and been told that she couldn't go to the Capitol.   Until she actually got to the Capitol, I was sort of hating it for all the whipsawing, stone-skipping storytelling.  I mean, I can buy brevity, but this was the equivalent of telling Cinderella, as "Cinderella had dirty clothes, then she got new ones," then lingering in loving detail on the run down the palace steps.  It covers the bases, but you kind of miss something.

But once Peeta arrived in the Capitol, I was happy more or less until the end, even if they did start stutter-jumping around around the plot again for a few minutes.  That was most of the movie, so no complaints.  The battle scenes were horrifying, and they really did show the rebels explicitly opening fire on the fleeing civilians, including a featured child civilian.  The talks among the dwindling band were great.  The man playing Pollux (sorry, I don't remember his name) was really fabulous.  And the mutts in the sewers.  EGADS. Those things were exactly what I imagined when I read the book, and they were terrifying. 

The main issue, of finding out that Coin had been every bit as manipulative and dirty as Snow, is quite well handled, though I still think it was poorly set up in the last movie.


Style
Stutter-jumping story aside, this was a very well-filmed piece.  The choice to mirror Katniss's behavior in Peeta was brilliant, highlighting the real, underneath story.  In the book, Peeta mutters a lot. In the movie, they chose to make it explicit.  As Katniss opens by stating her name and origin, which she did in the beginning of the last movie, Peeta's mutterings are, "My name is Peeta Mellark.  I'm from District Twelve..." Etc. That was an excellent choice.  They chose not to have any light moments, really, except for the wedding and the epilogue.

And on a small shot  notice, I have to say, in the end... there's a montage as Katniss and Peeta heal, and there's a simply beautiful shot of them sitting in the doorway and watching a rainstorm together. It's a sweet, simple moment, and I think it's really a spot where I can believe that they're going to be all right.

Setting
I question the choice to have the Capitol so very gray looking.  It's supposed to be filled with candy-colored glass buildings, and I think the contrast of the war with the bright and beautiful city would have been more effective. But I guess I'm never going to convince Hollywood of 2015 that THEY DON'T HAVE TO SHOOT IN PSEUDO-BLACK-AND-WHITE to be be taken seriously.  Did I shout that?  Sorry, didn't mean to shout.  The Capitol apartment where they take refuge is quite luxurious (and for once, there's a future TV set up that I feel like a rich person might actually spend money on), but we don't see much of it, and it's very dark. I always imagined the Capitol as light and airy... a contrast to its behavior.  This just looked like an above-ground Thirteen.  They could have been cold and colorful and still contrast with the final scene, which is warm and natural.

The final, epilogue scene, in the mountains outside Twelve, with Katniss and Peeta playing with their children, is beautiful.   Full stop. I don't have anything else to say about it; I just wanted to say that.  I kind of just wanted to be there, too.

Theme
There's a lot that gets wrapped up in the series -- love triangles, politics, commentary on the media -- but all of it boil down to the line that Peeta says in the first movie, and Katniss returns to here: "I don't want to be a piece in their Games."  The whole idea, from start to finish, is that you can't let yourself be swallowed by circumstances. You can't let go of yourself, of your inherent sense of right and wrong, no matter what cause you think you're fighting for, because in the end, that will destroy both you and the cause.  Choose humanity. Choose the dandelion in the spring.

So, with that, the series ends.  Was it exactly perfect? No.  But in terms of movie adaptations of books?  This series has been a resounding success. Good job.

Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer Review

I've probably reviewed Riordan here more than I've reviewed anything else, but it's mostly because he puts things out on a very regular basis.  Five Percy Jackson and the Olympians books, followed by five Heroes of Olympus books, one a year, like clockwork.  Now, same time, same place, we move out of the classical world and into Norse mythology with his new series, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard.

First things first: I have never been particularly drawn to Norse mythology.  I'm a Homer fangirl.  It's kind of sad, since I'm considerably more Scandinavian than Greco-Roman,  at least by blood. Culturally, I'd argue that, through the Roman empire and the Renaissance, Athens is a deeper influence than the Northland.  Which is a long way of saying that, unlike the Percy books, I had to interrupt my reading to check the source material from time to time to  get Riordan's riffs on it, and that I wasn't as immediately interested in the cosmology.

Style
Straight up Riordan.  Take this discussion of a new rope to bind Fenris Wolf: 

Junior glowered at me. “Boy, your ignorance is breathtaking. Gleipnir was just as thin and light, but its paradox ingredients gave it great strength. This rope is the same, only better!”

“Paradox ingredients?” 

Blitz held up the end of the rope and whistled appreciatively. “He means things that aren’t supposed to exist.”
[...]

Junior huffed. “The point is, this rope is even better! I call it Andskoti, the Adversary. It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds— Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture!”Riordan, Rick (2015-10-06). Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 1: The Sword of Summer (Rick Riordan’s Norse Mythology) (Kindle Locations 3897-3900). Disney Book Group. Kindle Edition. 

We also see Thor wanting to watch television in his hammer, all dwarf-made items being named and having long histories, offhand mentions like Davey Crockett sitting as a thane of Valhalla (and Taylor Swift is a half-elf, in case you didn't already know), chapters like "I Am Trash Talked By A Squirrel," and oddball asides like, "If he was the lord of Muspellheim, High King Roasty Toasty, shouldn’t he pick on more interesting heroes, like the children of Thor? At least their dad had a movie franchise."

And, of course, the setting.

Setting
In Percy Jackson, we learned that the Greek gods had moved to New York, where Olympus is anchored above the Empire State building.  In Heroes of Olympus, we discover New Rome in the Berkeley Hills. (The centers of the gods' powers move west with western civilization.) Now, we move to my old stomping grounds in Boston, and there were several moments when I actually laughed aloud.

Boston, you see, is where the World Tree is, and always has been. It's what the Vikings were really questing for.  The Puritans' vision of City on a Hill was really a glimpse of another one of the nine worlds, and Valhalla currently appears as a luxury hotel near Copley Square.

And did I mention that you can access Yggdrasil by using a magic sword to cut open the air above the Make Way for Ducklings statue? Or that a giant eagle drops our hero off on the roof of the library, and later roosts on the Art statue, before turning into a giant and sitting on her lap?  Or that the dwarfs live just a hop skip and cosmic jump from Southie, which their realm resembles?  Okay, that was just fun, and I can't wait to find out if we visit my old neighborhood in Brighton, or if we'll see a send-up of the colleges, or... it's just fun to see Riordan's take on the place.

Other than that, we visit Jotunheim and Folkvanger, which aren't direct analogs of places in Boston (sadly), and dream-visit the ship made of discarded toenails, and ultimately the disappearing island where Fenris is imprisoned.  Like most of Riordan's modern myth-settings, it's both tongue-in-cheek and deeply affectionate.

Plot
Hmm.  Like the first of the Percy books, The Lightning Thief, The Sword of Summer isn't the best plot.  The plot is mostly an excuse to get jerked from place to place and meet new characters.  In this case, Magnus Chase (cousin of Percy's girlfriend, Annabeth, daughter of Athena) is a homeless orphan with a rich uncle, who scoops him up on his sixteenth birthday and gets him to reclaim the magical sword of summer, the weapon of his father, Frey, who bargained it away and will die at Ragnarok because he doesn't have it. (In keeping with Riordan's strict adherence to the worldview of the myths, I don't expect them to be able to change this.) He's killed and becomes a warrior of Valhalla, one of the einherjar, after being chosen by the Valkyrie Samirah al-Abbas, a mortal girl who is also trying to live her regular life with her grandparents.  He  discovers that his two protectors from the time he spent homeless are a fashion-conscious dwarf and an elf mage, and makes some friends among the other einherjar.  There are several mini-quests on the way to the main quest, which is to delay Ragnarok a bit by re-binding Fenris Wolf.

Mostly, it's set-up for the series.  I hope.  I wasn't terribly engaged, but then, I wasn't overly impressed with The Lightning Thief, either, and ended up loving that series.

One note: I'm not sure why Riordan felt compelled to make Magnus Annabeth's cousin.  She appears at three points in the book, and it's nice, but right now, I'm not seeing how the two mythos realms are going to interact, and it feels a little superfluous.  Also, she doesn't spill any information for him, so we don't get any new tidbits about old friends. So, phooey. :D

Character
Magnus has the sarcastic edge of most of Riordan's characters -- serious WORLD OF SNARK here -- but he's much more bitter than I'm used to.  He's not a secretly cheerful dude who lets things roll off his back, though by the end, he's defrosting a little.  He has potential, but I'm not hooked yet.

Samirah ("Sam" throughout) is also just forming; you can almost feel her forming on the page as she goes.  A young Muslim girl in a hijab (with magical concealment properties) who works as a Valkyrie and is a daughter of Loki. I'm not sure how this is going to work. The cosmology of these books is very clear that the gods presented are very powerful beings associated with various phenomena, but don't delve into the metaphysical question of whether what they refer to as "capital G God" exists, so on certain edges, you could make an argument that you could be a faithful practitioner of another religion while working for Odin, same as for any other boss -- in Heroes of Olympus, there's a minor goddess, Iris, considering becoming a Buddhist -- but it's still a dicey definition of monotheism, and I'm curious and a little concerned about how that will work out in the end (please, let it be handled well).  She's in an arranged engagement, and in a surprise move, she's not only good with it, she's glad of it, likes the guy a lot, and thinks her grandparents have been working with her interests at heart. It's an interesting take, and I hope Riordan sticks with it, because I think we've seen enough ARRANGED MARRIAGES ARE EVIL plots.  Sometimes, they're fine, and people are happy, and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise.

Blitz and Hearthstone (dwarf and elf) are sweet, but I find myself not caring about their melodramatic pasts all that much.

Other than that, we get very brief glimpses of the Norse gods, all with Riordan's wry accuracy to the myths.   Probably the best moment was when Thor told them not to call him "Lord Thor," because he is a god of the common people.  Fenris is a pretty frightening villain, and Magnus and Annabeth's Uncle Randolph is trying to get his family back and will do anything to accomplish it. Odin is wise and Freya is kind of silly.  We barely meet Magnus's father, Frey. Loki schemes, as one would expect. There's a whole host of characters I'm not familiar with because I was never obsessive about this mythology, but they seem fun.  There's the sea goddess Ran, and her husband Aegir, who's apparently become a divine hipster obsessed with microbrewing.  And assorted dwarves and giants.

Theme
Not sure yet. This one was all over the map.

In short, I'm intrigued with the world, but not totally sold yet.   I'll definitely pick up The Hammer of Thor next year -- same time, same place.

Insurgent/Divergent movie reviews

I'm lukewarm on the Divergent books to begin with, so I was never rushing out to the movies.  I've seen them both now.

Or, well, I've seen the first one all the way through and enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed the book, which is to say... I have a hard time remembering it when it's over, but don't regret the time.

The second one, I just stopped.

The book is not great literature, but it makes some kind of disjointed sense.  The movie just doesn't.  Full stop.  Yes, there's a battle for information.  But it isn't a search for SUPER-SPESHUL divergents who have the power to open a magical box.  It's computer information, stolen from Abnegation during the last story.  The Factionless want to destroy it. Tris teams up with Marcus (despite hating him for how he treated Tobias) to get the information before either of the other sides can.  In this, she works with several good Erudite members.  She also willingly goes to her execution at one point, though Tobias rescues her in the end.

In the movie, there's a weird wire situation happening, and she has to get through simulations (one of which is ???kind of??? like the security on Jeanine's office?), and they magically unlock a box that only the absolute most specialest of special people can open.  People come and go with very little reason.  The characters are changed, again for very little reason (and what are they going to do in Allegiant, since they took out the plot about Tori's brother and her desire for revenge, since he turns out to be a key figure in the next book?).  Marcus is sidelined, and Evelyn is mischaracterized.

Okay, elements:

Setting
The setting on these movies is easily their strongest point.   The set designers created a gorgeously decayed, apocalyptic Chicago, and realized their creation beautifully.  I have no qualms about it.  The first movie gave us the Dauntless.  Now, we see the Amity greenhouse with the central tree, the tall Candor building (though I'm not sure why they didn't use the canonical Merchandise Mart, which is also pretty imposing), the broken down buildings, the crumbling infrastructure.  It's all quite good.  It's the only thing I have no problems with. Roth worked her settings well, and the filmmakers did an excellent job at bringing them to life.  It's like a weird cyber-punk John Hughes joint.

Character
Shailene Woodley carries the franchise as well as she can. She's a good actress, and her Tris overcomes the poor scripting in several scenes.  (She also looks a good deal like the character in the book is described -- one of the most accurate bits of casting I've seen, with the only disparity being that she's taller than Zoe Kravitz's Christina.)  But a good performance doesn't, ultimately, save the character, who's just all over the place in her motivations.  Kravitz's Christina whipsaws around as well, and Theo James's Tobias has the personality of a wet cardboard box.  I suppose it's possible that a sixteen year old could look older than his young-ish mother (played by Naomi Watts, 16 years James's senior, but looking about five years his junior), but she's supposed to have been living hard fo a while.  Watts's Evelyn was portrayed as soft-ish, which is contrary to her nasty book  characterization, and is just not believable as the long-time leader of the city's de facto homeless population. Caleb's characterization is senseless in the book and continues to be senseless in the movie.

Theme
 The first movie is about discovering selflessness, to some extent.  Tris has left Abnegation because she's bored, and by engaging in Dauntless recklessness, she ultimately comes to value the simpler, service-oriented world that she left.  It's not quite as clear in the movie as it was in the book.  There's also the general series theme of not limiting yourself to a single way of being.

In losing the sympathetic Erudite, the second movie's theme becomes, "Smart people are bad."  Seriously,  it's not much more complex than that.  The books aren't exactly subtle in thinking that academics are arrogant and power-hungry, but the movie makes them look like they're using obscure symbolic language.  There's some mileage left in the book's "look yourself in the eye and learn self-forgiveness" theme, but not a whole lot.

Style
Aside from the setting, the style is general apocalyptic dystopia.  A lot of shots of people running, some mirroring themes, with the black and white of Candor used to contrast views of self from time to time in the second.  Nothing to write home about.

Plot
See the intro. The books were at best okay on plot. The first movie is relatively close.  The second one pulls out the supports and lets the whole structure fall in under its own weight.  Irritating.

My love/hate relationship with movie adaptations

It may be obvious, but when it comes to movie adaptations of books that I love, my relationship status is "complicated."

On the one hand, I love movies.  Big, splashy blockbusters, especially. Things that hit cultural nerves. I love the theme songs, I love the effects, I love the actors running around publicizing things. I love costumes and sets and big action scenes. I love sitting in a crowd and munching popcorn and cheering and...

Well, you get the picture. I love movies.

And I love books.  I love curling up with my nose in one.  I love listening to audiobooks.  If I'm not driving, I close my eyes and let the story play out on the back of my eyelids.  I love stories.  I love writing. I love TALKING about stories and writing.  I love reading out loud.  I love analyzing stories on as many levels as I can.  I love theme and meaning and extrapolation.  I love doing insane things like trying to figure out the geography and history of Panem from the scant clues in the books.

All of which often leads to great anticipation of movies made from books. How will this look?  Will they have noticed that little thing?  How will they get across the motivation for character Y to do action X, which is entirely internal in the book?

I'm not a complete novice. I've taken screenwriting.  I've produced and directed a college show.  I was in drama club for years.  I get most of it in principle.

There are obviously places where a script needs to be different from a novel.  You can't skim time in a movie the way  you can in a book. You can't just have an actor frown a little bit and convey the entire mental process of a character.  You can't always find an actor who looks exactly like the character who can also,  you know... act.  I'll take the ability to act over the ability to look like someone who only lived in an author's head.

That said, why on earth they don't even try sometimes is a mystery.  I mean, really...  you already put a wig on Woody Harrelson.  Why not put a wig on him that's the same color as his character's hair, which, in Hunger Games terms, is actually a back story point? (Blond is coded as the merchant class, while Haymitch, like Katniss, is from the miner class. In District Twelve it's a HUGE deal, and the fact that Katniss's mother is a blonde -- like her sister -- is serious business.)

Okay, I digress. But for a good reason, and I'll digress here again.

I've been accused of being a horrible "purist," by disparaging film fans who think I somehow don't "understand" the differences that need to be addressed between the two media.  I do understand it.  I just don't, nine times out of ten, agree with the particular choices. Other times, I really do agree strongly.

There are two Stephen King movies in particular that surpassed the source material, in cases where the source material is actually very good.  Shawshank Redemption took the novella it was based on and took the time-passing moments of the book into much more meaningful territory by the choices it made of which glossed over events to make scenes of and which to ignore.  It took the freedom of leaving Red's head sometimes to expand the world very nicely, and it developed several secondary characters. In the case of Stand By Me, I think the screenwriter understood the story King had told better than King did. King genuinely thought it was a story about Chris, told from the side perspective of Gordie, sort of like Watson telling the story of Holmes, but in more tragic circumstances.  It's very clear on reading it though, that it really is the story of Gordie, and the screenplay hones that and focuses on it.  It happens.  Sometimes, what you're really writing isn't the same story you think you're writing.  Other movies, like the Hunger Games movies, are pretty all right, though rushed, and I question a few decisions -- I won't know until November whether my fears are justified on those, and if they are, I will spew much venom.

But a lot of the time -- most of the time -- the choices are awful. (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I AM TALKING TO  YOU, OH YOU  PARAGON OF TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO-GOOD PRODUCTION DECISIONS.)  There is nothing in the transition from page to screen that requires changing the entire tone of a story.  There is nothing that requires one to make Mina Harker into Van Helsing's daughter.  There is nothing that requires changing a small town setting to a suburb ('Salem's Lot, most recent Carrie), nothing that makes you turn a frightening battle sequence into a random misty maze (Goblet of Fire), nothing that forces you to turn a twelve year old into a twenty-year-old (Lightning Thief), nothing that absolutely compels you to ignore the theme of the book and have a character publish the wrong novel in the end (Misery -- and even someone who hadn't read the book recognizes that one in an otherwise good adaptation; it's a noticeably wrong tonal note), or have the character who stepped out and challenged a mountain troll and a black rider reduced to hiding behind the rocks  in one scene and sleeping on Liv Tyler's horse in another (I stopped watching those movies at that point).  If you want to do any of those things, by all means, do it -- as a new story.  If those things are important, nothing is stopping  you from writing an original script that has those things in it.

So, yes, I get ranty about totally unnecessary and detrimental changes, and I get back, "But that's the director's INTERPRETATION!"

And that's the thing, as far as my love/hate relationship goes.  While I enjoy visual interpretation of the elements, the truth is, I don't enjoy having someone force his own textual interpretation on the material.  If everyone who felt like making  a movie of a book could just make one and pop it up on YouTube, then this wouldn't be a very big deal, but as it is, there don't tend to be a lot of movies out of the same book at a given time, and often, only one is ever made.  Because of that, movies get a lot of privilege about the interpretation,  so if a big movie of a book says, "This is what's important; the rest is irrelevant," then that tends to stand.   It spoils a lot of the fun.

Also, an interpretation needs, at some point, to refer to what it's interpreting.  Otherwise, it's kind of pointless, because you can't actually make the argument for or against it.  How can  you argue with, "Yes, but the way I saw the twelve year old, he was twenty, and I envisioned an entirely different plot"?  I mean, it's one thing to say, for instance, "In my view, District Thirteen was as evil as the Capitol" (me) or "In my view, District Thirteen was doing what it had to" (the movies, as far as I can tell).  If you can bring in the textual support, then you can have a reasonable argument about the subject.  The two might produce entirely different performances and different foci in the scripts.  But if, in  your interpretation, you decide to, I don't know, change the actual actions, then  you're cheating in the argument.

Another thing is, it tends to abruptly fossilize every other visual interpretation.  Fan art of The Hunger Games has gone almost exclusively to the movies, with Haymitch almost universally blond, even when it's not a literalistic drawing of Harrelson.  It's eaten up the actual text, which describes him briefly but very clearly -- the movie is overriding the real visual.  Now, I love Harrelson's performance, and wouldn't change a thing about that, but that doesn't mean he looks like the character.  And Jack Torrance sure-God doesn't look like Jack Nicholson (nor does Wendy look like Shelly Duvall).  But these images have absolutely frozen so much of the visual imagination!  (Again, this could be solved by having as many  people making movies as feel like it, but I guess they'd cut into each other's box office and cause fan wars about whose was the best, etc.  But at least no one would be left with the idea that such and such is the definitive interpretation which must now be followed.)

So that's the /hate part.

On the other hand, I still love hearing the dialogue I've only heard in my head.  I love seeing the characters and settings take life and begin to breathe.  I love the anticipation as they build up the hype every time, and I love the cultural moments that the movies create. I still read books and think, "Wow, I can't wait to see how this scene plays out on the screen!"  Heck, I'd love to write something that would look awesome on a screen.  I love the whole concept of the movies, and every single time, I go in thinking, "I can't wait to see this!"

So I find myself constantly whipsawed on the subject. It's annoying.

Twilight. God help me, Twilight.

Someday, I'll figure out why I challenged myself to get through Twilight this summer.  The craze is over, so it's no longer useful, and I never thought I'd like it.  I'd tried more than once, and with varying degrees of zeal, over the last few years, but I always gave up.  Finally, it came up on the list of recommended audio books for me, probably because I read other YA, and I thought,  you know -- I can have an audio book on while I'm doing other things, like driving, where it would be hard to turn off.  I can get through it that way.

Maybe it's just that I felt silly calling it crap when all I had was a strong suspicion that it was crap.  Now, I have solid evidence.

Yes, folks, I made it through the first of the Twilight books, from Bella's move to Forks up to her prom date with Edward. I even made it through more than half of the second before rebelling and returning the audiobook to the library early. Alice and Bella made it to Italy, and Bella reunited with Edward, which broke the momentum of "maybe-this-isn't-so-bad" that I'd been kind of building as we traveled with Jacob. And no, that's not about shipping.  I wouldn't wish this chick on Jacob.

Yes, I know what happens. I know that, in the future, Meyer scuttles Jacob's character by having him force a kiss on Bella, for which she punches him. And I know the whole bizarro imprinting thing. I do have a kind of cultural osmosis thing with it, so I know the steps of the dance. I just hadn't tried actually doing it before.  I don't know what would possess her to wreck the only character in the thing that she took the time for people to care about, but hey.  Whatevs.  I'm more likely to class that as a major writing error than a character problem.  But even with that, a little impulsive bit of grossness doesn't compare to the stalking and condescension and bad prose associated from start to finish with the putative hero.

Okay, okay. Elements of fiction.

Character
The main character is apparently one Isabella "Bella" Swan, who thinks herself plain and ugly, not to mention merely human, but somehow has every boy at her new school panting after her. Other than broody vampires and Linkin Park, I'm not sure what her interests are. She mentions some fairly standard classic books, but the only thing she emotionally engages in is fixing motorcycles.  There's nothing wrong with that, and it provided her with her first real characterization (IN THE SECOND BOOK), but of course, it's not treated as important, because it's not related to the real story.  Yes, I'd rather read, "Bella decides to defy her father's wish for her to go to college  by going to vocational school and learning to be a really kickass mechanic."  In fact, that might actually be a pretty good YA book, now that I think about it. The shelves aren't exactly filled with it already, either. Hmm.  Anyone who knows mechanics want to write that? Because I kind of think I'd read the heck out of it.  But I digress.  Because there's not much else to do.  Bella is spoiled, whiny, and otherwise bland, and ultimately wraps her entire life  up in (a) getting a cute guy and (b) getting him to turn her into a vampire.

Her lust interest, Edward Cullen, is a 108 year old vampire who only drinks the blood of animals. He's part of a family of vamps who live this way.  Super-rich and cultured, they've been everywhere and seen everything.  They're all pretty smug, but Edward takes the cake, and "smug" is  his best trait.  Beyond that, he's  controlling, violent, creepy, condescending, and basically, the villain of every Lifetime woman-in-jep movie-of-the-week you've ever watched when there's nothing else on, except with less personality.  The most common word to describe him in the prose?  "Perfect." No.  Not kidding.

Jacob Black is the third member of this little triumvirate.  He doesn't really get developed until New Moon, though he's a presence in Twilight.  A working class Quileute boy from the La Push reservation, he actually approaches decent characterization, even as he works through becoming a very odd kind of werewolf (they change at will and by temper tantrum, and only exist to hunt vampires).  We meet him when he's fixing up an old VW Rabbit, and he and Bella bond over fixing a pair of broken-down motorcycles.  He's generally happy, seems to care about his family and friends, and is genuinely nice to Bella until his author sacrifices him for... reasons.

There's a fairly large cast of other characters, including Bella's parents (the flighty Renee and the mostly decent Charlie), Edward's vampire family (most prominently the doctor, Carlisle, who founded their group, and Alice, who can see the future), Jacob's werewolf brothers (damned if I can remember their names), and a gaggle of mortal school friends who Bella will occasionally speak to when circumstances force her to.

Plot
Bella Swan is the new girl in school. Everyone wants her except Edward Cullen... only it turns out he wants her most of all, because her blood smells so good, but he can't be around her, because he might kill her, being a vampire and all. Bella becomes obsessed with the vampires, ultimately wanting to become one, and getting her wish.  This is temporarily broken up by an interlude when Edward leaves, and she befriends Jacob, though all the while, she's trying to get Edward to come back.  And then they get married and have a kid, and Jacob "imprints" on the kid, which means that he's marry her eventually.  The end.  Oh, okay,  there are also bad vampires, which sometimes need to be fought.

Style
In On Writing, Stephen King writes about the first book he read where he said to himself, "I can do better."  In his case,

Worst of all (or so it seemed to me at the time), Leinster had fallen in love with the word zestful. Characters watched the approach of ore-bearing asteroids with zestful smiles. Characters sat down to supper aboard their mining ship with zestful anticipation. Near the end of the book, the hero swept the large-breasted, blonde heroine into a zestful embrace. For me, it was the literary equivalent of a smallpox vaccination: I have never, so far as I know, used the word zestful in a novel or a story. God willing, I never will.

After Twilight, I'm vaccinated against ever, in any case in which I am not actually discussing a gemstone, using the word topaz, which is the color of Edward's eyes when he's not hungry.   Aside from potatoes, russet is also out (it is the color of Jacob's skin, and that of all of his friends, because, you know, a synonym of "red" is not at all in questionable taste).  And, ye gods and little fishes, if I start rambling on about how perfect someone is, please take away my writing license. If I felt like it was meant to call attention to Bella's immaturity -- making her sound like a gushing junior high student describing her favorite boy band, in contrast to more realistic prose -- I might take it better, but there's no hint that it's meant to do that.

Other than that, when the prose isn't awful, it's, at its best, serviceable, getting us from point A to point B.  The best scene for me is Bella's first motorcycle ride, describing the thrill of it as her skin is pulled back in the wind.

Setting
Eh. Could be worse. I've never been in Forks or on the Olympic peninsula, so I don't know if it's accurate or not, but the world in Meyer's head is reasonably well described.  I feel like I could probably recognize it if I saw it, and the constant rain and clouds make for a suitably unusual atmosphere.  I've seen city people complain that Bella would be lost in a new school her first day, but I'm a small town girl by upbringing, and the new kid would be a seven days' wonder in most small towns, especially as the daughter of the chief of police.  Whether or not she'd be  fawned over in quite this way would depend on her looks and her ability to fit in with the right crowd, but I'm not fussed about it. I guess my own inclination would be to choose the Olympic peninsula, then make up a town there that would have what I needed, but that's a quibble.

A bigger quibble is the use of the real Quileute reservation and making up folklore for a group that she doesn't belong to (she used some basic starting point, but needed a vampire mythos to go with the wolf mythos, and so made one up from whole cloth -- which is pretty standard writing practice, but starts to get a little hinky when you're messing around with someone else's folklore).  I guess they're getting some money in, which is good, but it's pretty much textbook appropriation. Then again, if she'd made up a nation, there would be some fairly serious problems, too.  She makes up legends and holidays for an Italian city, too, and plays pretty fast and loose with other western vampire lore. So... I don't know if there's a point there.

Theme
It's hard to say what the theme is exactly.  It's a romance.  Will Bella stay with Edward or fall for Jacob? You could tease out some disturbing misogynistic themes (the way Edward orders Bella around -- and the way she thinks that's right and "perfect" -- is creepy).  There's definitely a bit of a class theme happening.  (Middle class Bella must choose between patrician Edward and working class Jacob.) Maybe uses and abuses of superior powers? Could we tease that out?  Maybe. I'm not sure I like the conclusions of the books, but I think an argument could be made, at least, for that.

I don't know.  Mostly it's about who Bella wants to, um, be vampirized by.  Yeah.

Other
All of that said, these books obviously hit a cultural nerve.  I've seen people put up ideas about, "People read what they're told to read by really powerful marketing people!" which is... well, kind of bull.  Yes, once the machine starts running, there are people who'll jump on board to see what it's about, but I've seen way too many slick ads and marketing practices fail miserably to actually get this kind of cult following to think it's more than a minor contributing factor, at least at the beginning, when these things initially catch the public imagination... and after that, the marketing is using the popularity as much as causing it. It becomes an echo chamber, and that does make for greater popularity... but the marketing needs something to start bouncing that echo off of.   The books were being read and talked about before the real gestalt came. Yes, some of it was in the fandom fun game of Team Edward vs. Team Jacob (I am, personally, Team Buffy), and some came from the movies, but the books were hits before the movies.  I know. I was a YA librarian when they started coming out,  and the first I heard of them was when the kids started asking for them.

Does marketing help?  Sure. But if the people who pick them up don't like them, they're not going to grab their BFFs and say, "OMG, TEAM JACOB 4EVA!"  More likely, they'll get a shrug and maybe, "That was pretty good," like Sea of Trolls or The Mysterious Benedict Society or any of the vast number of books that the marketers have sworn are about to be "The Next Harry Potter!"  You  remember when everyone dressed up as Inkheart characters, don't you? Or when they camped out at the bookstore for the midnight release of Tunnels?  Yeah, me neither.

So, yes, Twilight (and other properties, including Potter and the Hunger Games) have huge marketing pushes, but that's not enough to account for it, because other properties have launched with the same amount of fanfare, only to fizzle out into invisibility because the initial readers don't care.  For some reason, they did care about Twilight.  Maybe there's an attraction to the chaste romance -- vampires have always represented forbidden sexual practices, and now chastity is treated as something of a sexual taboo, inviting ridicule and ostracizing from peers. That would be a weird new twist in the vampire lore, but not really one that doesn't fit into past concepts.  If that's what's currently taboo, then it might well accrue to the vampire mythos.  Maybe it's just the wish-fulfillment of having a choice of prom dates, though that's offered by a lot of other books.  The power seeking?

I don't know. I can't put my finger on anything that really separates these books from the many others of their type, published before and since. I am obviously not the target audience.  Even when I was a teen, teen romance kind of bored me.  I wanted to be a Jedi, not a prom queen.

But, at any rate, I finished the first one.

Dystopias, or, how I'm spending my summer non-vacation

This year, I decided to play the summer reading game, and, since I'm planning to do a workshop on how to put together a dystopia, I decided to refresh myself on the genre classics.

My reaction to the classics is... mixed.

First, credit where it's due, Anthony Burgess is awesome at creating slang in Clockwork Orange.  Seriously good at it.  (And it's a trick writers shouldn't try in public until they've mastered it, honestly -- that's difficult stuff.)  Nadsat is a work of genius.  And of the classic dystopias I've been reading, I definitely like this one best.  Of the protags, Alex is the most compelling, even if he's deeply evil.  Because he has a discernible personality, at least.

Yeah.  That's pretty much the problem.  Alex is distinctly unlikeable, but Orange was the only one of the dystopias that actually had a functioning character in the central role.  Granted, I'm a big one for theme -- I love theme -- but 1984,  Fahrenheit  451, Brave New World... all of these books struck me as not much more than theme as extrapolated through setting, with characters existing only because the author needed someone to view the setting.  In each case, the theme was important -- the manipulation of language and history from Orwell, the distraction and dumbing down from Bradbury, the hyper-controlled genetic experimentation and consumption from Huxley -- but it felt more like listening to a preacher tell a barely-crafted parable than actually reading a novel.  (Animal Farm, ironically, was much more of a human experience.)

And... how to put this...

Reading these classic bits of SF has really given me a window into why SF was talked about as a men's genre.  Orange is blatantly and violently misogynist, though that's chalked up as a fault in the viewpoint character in the end... sort of.  The others are... well, women are invisible, except insofar as they have an impact on the men who the story is about. Orwell's Julia is a deeply unpleasant woman who exists only as a catalyst for the just as empty Winston.  I literally can't remember the names of two women that Bradbury's Montag interacts with  (one his wife, the other a neighbor girl).  And BNW has Linda (a drunk who proves the downfall of Bernard's boss) and Lenina, a complete and utter blank slate who exists to be lusted over by Bernard and John Savage.  (I do have a kind of weird desire to do the intellectual exercise of flipping it -- to give women the agency to have wrecked the world all on our own, and have men play only the kinds of tangential roles that we see here... basically, I wonder what a world as hyper-feminine as Clockwork Orange is hyper-masculine could be made to look like... but it would have the same ultimate problem: It's a thesis, not a story.)

Even that, I could forgive, but the men they orbit are built of pretty flimsy cardboard, too. They're all of a certain stereotypical cast (Alex aside) -- virile smart men who gruffly state truths that ought to be written in stone.  Upstanding, but put-upon, people who, one understands, are right. They may be weak (Bernard) or breakable (Winston), but nothing about them really leads to seeing them as humans at all.  You can imagine them as square-jawed realists, staring into the face of Truth and being so tough that they can accept it when the rest of the world of dandified and fortunate people have to reject it...

In other words, plain old male nerd fantasy, thus giving rise to the idea that SF is a club for male nerds.

So I'm going to go ahead and say it: Dystopia has improved.

It owes a lot to these classics, which initially paved the way, but it's evolved to include actual,  you know, STORY.  Things happening to people you have some reason to care about.

This is not to downplay the importance of theme.  But theme happens whether you spend your time building it or not.  To paraphrase Stephen King (from somewhere in On Writing or Danse Macabre, maybe both), stories throw off meaning like uranium throws off radiation.  And if you have much of a story, if you've spent blood and sweat and tears writing it, the damned thing's got to be about something.  Let theme happen on its own. The stories turn out better if it's not the first thing on  your mind.


The ideas are amazing. Orwell was quite prescient, and the things he invented (Big Brother Is Watching, the memory hole, newspeak, etc) are permanent parts of the culture.  Both Bradbury and Huxley were great at spotting our distract-ourselves-to-death culture.  Burgess's questions about both evil and mind control in the attempt to stop evil are smart and worth asking.  My problem is just with the novels as novels. 

Cormoran Strike

Here's how I came to Harry Potter:

Once upon a time, I finished library school, and wanted to go into youth services. Young Adults, if I could.  I was fabulously lucky, and right out of school, got a job as a YA librarian.  It was June of 2000.  One month later, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out.

Now, I'd heard of Harry, of course.  I seem to recall my children's librarianship professor saying something along the line of, "If you haven't met Harry Potter, go meet him now.  For this field especially, but in general, this is a great series."

I grew up on Tolkien and Lewis, and I turned my nose up at this upstart.  Why was I going to waste my time on what was obviously some faddish imitation?  Why couldn't kids be reading real fantasy?  It was probably to fantasy what RL Stine was to horror. (And that comparison, I made with knowledge.  I read several of those wretched things for a paper.)

But with GoF constantly off the shelves, I kept having kids come up wanting something that was like Harry Potter.   Anything.  Only it seemed to be something very specific they were looking for, and I couldn't tell without reading the books.  So I waited until a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone came in without a hold on it, picked it up... and swallowed it whole that day.  I went to a bookstore to pick up the next three, and then proceeded to wait over three year summer on tenterhooks like everybody else.

Because they were that good.  Because I  loved the characters and the setting that much, and couldn't wait to find out how the story was going to come out.  Because Jo Rowling is a worthy heir of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.  (And if you're worried about the whole, "Icky-goo, grown-up people reading fairy stories" thing, let me direct you to Tolkien's On Fairy Stories and Lewis's On Three Ways of Writing for Children, thanks.)

Was there hype, and was it annoying?  Yes.  But the subject of the hype was well worth the fervor.

So what did I do with JKR's other writing? Well, I steered well clear of The Casual Vacancy, for the most part, and that one didn't seem to have legs, anyway.  And then there was her detective series, Cormoran Strike (The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm... so far), written openly under her pen name, Robert Galbraith.  So what did I do?

I turned my nose up and said, "Oh, she's just trying to get out of Harry's shadow.  Totally transparent, and probably self-consciously tough sounding and..."

I'm an idiot.

I was playing around with our e-audiobooks ([advertisement]pro-tip, if you're not a regular library user: Lots of e-materials available from most public libraries, and Summer Reading is a great time to try something new[/advertisement]) and The Cuckoo's Calling came up at the top of the list of currently available titles.  I downloaded it on a whim. The very opening didn't interest me much, then I met Cormoran Strike himself: An old-fashioned detective, in a seedy London office, just broken up with his infuriating fiancée, broke beyond belief, and dealing with bad pain on the stump of his amputated leg because he was forced to walk across London from her flat, his prosthetic limb chafing all the way.

Now, I like mysteries in theory. I like the puzzle aspect, I like the concept of solving crimes.  I often enjoy them on television.  But I've had a lukewarm relationship with them in print since I let go of Nancy Drew.  (That series is kid-specific.  Good kid-specific, but not one that has layers underneath what a kid sees.) In the well-written ones, it's often more the horror aspects I like than the mystery aspects, and in the badly written ones... well, the less said, the better.  I'm in awe of the ability of cozy publishers to come up with cutesy, punny names, and anyone who shelves books likes Sue Grafton  in theory, since her series is ALWAYS in order, but mostly, I haven't been able to attach myself to the style or the characters, and have rarely felt the need to pick up another book in a mystery series.

Before I was halfway done listening to Cuckoo, I'd placed a hold on The Silkworm. The Silkworm turned out to be even better. I'm now waiting eagerly for Career of Evil.

The mysteries themselves are good yarns -- proving that a popular supermodel didn't, in fact, throw herself from her balcony, finding the perpetrator a particularly grisly murder of an author who'd offended half of London's publishing industry -- and, with the exception of the common mystery tic of not having the POV character state something he knows, I like them a lot.  BBC America better pick up the miniseries, man. :p

But plenty of mysteries are interesting. It's always the rest that makes me give up on a mystery novel.

Rowling's gift is for creating characters not necessarily that you identify with, but who seem like people who exist, who you might know, and love or hate on their own terms.  Robin Endacott, Strike's  young assistant, opens the novel terribly excited to discover that her new temp job is with a private detective, because she's always wanted to be a detective, but never let it slip, because she thought people would laugh at her for wanting such a silly career. (Her fiancé, with whom  she unfortunately doesn't break up, is one of the people who sees the entire idea as inherently ridiculous, basically like she's playing at being Nancy Drew, and her boss is most likely some kind of faker.)  Anyone who's ever said something like, "I want to be an actress" or "I want to be a singer" knows the kind of looks she's feared.  It's a very real character trait, expressing both her insecurity and, to some extent, her naivete, especially when contrasted with Strike, who as an experience war veteran and investigator, takes his job quite seriously, but never had a romantic view of it.

And then there's Strike, who's just beautifully realized.  Is he a saint?  Oh, no.  NO.  His treatment of a few women in the novels is enough to make you want to smack  him.  (I'm hoping, like Robin's insecurity, that this is part of a character arc, and something he realizes toward the end of The Silkworm suggests that it might be.)  But there's something about him that wakes up on the page.  Part of it is the specificity of characterization -- his amputation is  a good example.  Rowling doesn't often dwell on it or treat it like it confers sanctity in and of itself.  He lost his leg saving a man who he now works with, and his feelings about that event are mixed -- half the time, he doesn't even like the man, and is totally nonplussed by the child who was subsequently named after him.  The leg is sometimes at the top of his thoughts, and sometimes not. (In fact, when he gets drunk and weeps to Robin, the leg is barely mentioned... but the child he claims he didn't want, and the ex-fiancée who either aborted it or lied about its existence in the first place -- and about whether or not it was his -- are stunningly present.  It's not often that we see a man mourning for children he never had, and Strike's relationship with children is complex, but... it's a really neat angle, and I'm looking forward to where it goes.)  Sometimes, it's very painful.  Other times, it's just an annoyance that he puts up with.  It's a very naturalistic picture.

There's also the issue of his extended family -- he's the son of a rock star he's only met twice and a "supergroupie" who died under mysterious circumstances while he was at Oxford.  He has half-siblings on both sides, and an extremely complicated relationship with the world of the well-to-do flit-abouts that he often works in.

This is the kind of thing that Rowling does exceptionally well.  She's also a very good observer of the physical world, and knows how to make her descriptions of it tell as much (or more) about the POV character than the setting he's describing.  Beyond the two main points of view, there's also Rowling, who seems to have an eyebrow raised a bit archly as she peers out at the world around her... a trait that carries over from HP.  I'm not surprised that it didn't take long for the pen name to be unmasked.

And she seems to be having fun, which is more important than people give it credit for.  When a writer is enjoying her story, no matter what its gruesome twists and turns, the books always crackle with that energy.

Cormoran Strike is definitely worth the read.

Remind me of that if I get on my high horse again.

Avengers: Age of Ultron review

First things first: I said back in my Captain America: The Winter Soldier review that I could really feel the absence of Joss Whedon on the writing staff, and now, in Age of Ultron, you can really tell that he's back.  He brings a light touch to the dialogue that's missing in so much of the genre, and bless him, it saves this movie from a godawful plot.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Also, don't take that as me not enjoying it.  The plot was silly and ridiculous and too involved in itself, but it's an Avengers movie.  Let's face it,  I'm there to watch the heroes kick some bad guy ass, and everything that works beyond that is gravy.  There's plenty of gravy; it's just not in the plot.

So, breaking it down.

Plot
Tony Stark builds an AI (Ultron) to help the Avengers, and it decides to kill them, and everyone else, instead.   In the course of this, Jarvis the previous AI gets an indestructible vibranium  body (and ceases to be solely Tony's AI), Thor has visions, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (unnamed by code name on screen) are evil and turn good, Hawkeye plans home improvement projects between Avenging assignments, everyone tries Thor's hammer, Hulk and Black Widow canoodle, Black Widow doubts herself, Hulk smashes a town, they take down an arms dealer, Cap learns to swear (because somehow he got through WWII without ever dealing with swearing soldiers), Tony goes through an existential crisis, Nick Fury dusts off a helicarrier, and, oh, yeah,  Ultron decides to scoop up a piece of Eastern Europe and drop it to cause an extinction level event.  And there's also a body being created, a scientist being mind-controlled, a party,  and Iron Patriot/War Machine doesn't impress the Avengers with his stories.  (Cheer up, guy... I wanted to hear the rest of that tank story, at least!)

Yup, this is a pretty crowded plot, and if you aren't an action movie person, don't bother trying to follow it.  It's not going to suddenly come together and create a beautiful whole.  Just take it as it comes.  Something has to link up one set piece to another.  It sort of works on its own logic, but it's a good illustration of why I can't get into comic books. By comics standards, this is pretty distilled.  After all, they have to keep churning the things out month after month ad infinitum, so they have to make them dense.

For me, the plot is just... well, what they use to stick everyone on screen, and I'm okay with that.  It didn't stick as well as the last one, but whatevs.  It got the heroes suited up and on screen, and that's all that's really needed of it.

For the record, I firmly believe that if you don't have a taste for the ridiculous from time to time, you shouldn't go to movies about people in silly costumes fighting robots, and if you do go to them,  you shouldn't bitch about it it being ridiculous. Of course it's ridiculous.  So are most things I like, from Odysseus hiding under a giant sheep and cracking jokes at a Cyclops to Princess Leia's metal bikini.  We all make our myths somewhere, and there's a good reason that we have flocked to these stories since the beginning of storytelling.  (This guy covers it pretty well.)

Character
Given how much was going on, there was a surprising amount of character work here, largely through the medium of the nightmares Wanda (the Scarlet Witch) gives to everyone to isolate them from each other. What people fear is often a good window into them.  Tony Stark imagines being responsible for the deaths of his friends -- given that he started out as nearly sociopathic in his refusal to connect to people that says a lot without anyone pounding at it.  We find out the depths of what was done to Natasha when she was trained as a spy (it's fairly horrifying -- and I have to say, I had a random idea for a Black Widow script, which her vision would lead into wonderfully).  Cap has a throwaway line about being "the world's leading expert in waiting too long," which is the essence of his vision -- but also something he acknowledges easily about himself, which is why it doesn't incapacitate him.  And of course, Bruce Banner is utterly terrified of the Hulk, leading to his feeling of utter betrayal when Nat says she adores him, but needs "the other  guy"... forcing him to turn into the monster.  Thor is terrified that things are falling apart on Asgard. Aside from the nightmares, we meet Hawkeye's very normal family, and see his desire to protect them.  We hear about Wanda and Pietro's horrible history (town bombed by people using Stark tech), but also see them immediately change when the realize that Ultron isn't really there to help.

This is actually some very nice work, character-wise.  Unlike the plotting, I felt like all the character lines were solid, and connected from beginning to end, and like I came out of the theater knowing each team member a little better, and having a better idea of them as a team.


Style
This is definitely a Joss Whedon joint.  Whenever the bizarrely overplotted stuff starts to get too heavy, he lightens the load with a little bit of humor.  Unlike The Winter Soldier, which often seemed heavily convinced of its own Deep Importance, Age of  Ultron seems to understand that it's a popcorn flick... and that there's nothing wrong with that.  (You could always tell when Whedon came back to Buffy after a bit, too, for the same reason.  He seems to understand that the material he's working with is ridiculous, but by acknowledging its very ridiculousness, gets beyond it and does really neat stuff.)

The fight choreography is gorgeous.  There's a shot that even beats the on the street circle in the first movie, where the Avengers are fighting together around a drill to keep the city from dropping.  Cap goes spinning over a couple of robots while Wanda blasts them with magic and Pietro runs around and Hawkeye shoots...  it's a money shot.

It would be silly to pretend it's not an FX movie (this is not an insult), and the FX are great.  No complaints.  I love the Ultron CGI.  Nothing else is wildly new, but it was all smooth and didn't make me stop to say, "Oh.  I guess that was an effect."  Which is what special effects should do.

Setting
Eh, okay. We get jerked around a lot, from Avengers headquarters to two fictional countries (Wakanda, where vibranium is mined, and Sokovia, where they fight the big battle). And Hawkye's farm.  And everyone's memories.  And the helicarrier.  There's not as strong a sense of place when Marvel leaves New York.  I have a strong desire to have the next installment take place in Western New  York (specifying it from the vague and non-descriptive "upstate" that they use to describe where they are at the end), and get them to film in Letchworth. Tell me it wouldn't be awesome to have heroic antics amid scenes like this.)

But nothing to write home about this time, except maybe the psychological effect of visiting the Barton farm, which seems to set everyone thinking about the future.

Theme
There are two themes running through it.  The first is, of course, the science fiction standard: DON'T MESS WITH THAT THING.  No, seriously, DON'T MESS WITH IT.  It's somewhat subverted when Tony actually manages to create a new hero as well as a new villain, but it's definitely a question they're all asking themselves -- not just should Ultron have been created, but should they have been? ("I miss the time when the weirdest thing science created was me," Cap quips.)

The other theme is about keeping the team together, when everyone is being pulled in different directions.  They don't ultimately succeed, either.  But through the course of the film, we see them working through it.  There were some terrific scenes of Thor and Cap using their signature weapons together, of Bruce and Tony working together (yay for more engineering geek scenes!), Hawkeye's kids loving their "Aunt Nat," and possibly my favorite moment, Black Widow using Cap's shield.  Something about that really worked well for me. I think it's that she was doubting herself through much of the movie, but really claimed that heroic mantle that's often eluded her.  The fact that isn't commented on is what makes it work.  If you have to draw attention to a visual symbol, it fails. She just rides her bike with the shield on the front, and you know -- she's in.  No running away, and no more, "Am I really a hero?" stuff.

Other
Little things:
While I enjoyed the idea of Cap/Nat as a ship, I think Whedon did something way more interesting  here, both with Cap and Hawkeye, who fandom had so much wanted to pair her with romantically: They were her friends.  Hawkeye actually emerges as her family, her best friend, her big brother.  Cap is her friend and equal partner.  And no one in the whole scenario (except a pair of actors who should have known better, but they did it off screen) acts like there's anything unusual about it.

I was really nervous after Winter Soldier that they were going to have Cap go cynical, which was almost pre-emptively boring me. But they didn't.  He's dealing with the world, and maybe has more questions than he would have in the '40s, but he's still the guy who was chosen for the program because he's a decent, solid human being who is trying, against all odds, to do good.

I really liked that the script essentially brought back SHIELD as good guys -- they fixed the problem and got the helicarrier back up (though not under official auspices).  It fits better with the actual events of Winter Soldier -- in which at least half the agents were good guys -- than the "Tear it all down" mantra that was going on there.  No, getting infiltrated by bad guys doesn't make you corrupt, any more than getting duped by a con man makes  you an accessory.

Scared of the dark?

Yesterday and today at work, two things got me thinking.

First, today, I had a conversation with someone who is frustrated with the tendency to  try and make superheroes "darker." I share this frustration.  It annoys me.  I know the theory; the thought is that darkness plus angst equal depth.  They don't. In fact, I think the opposite is true.  More on this later.

The other incident was yesterday, when I came across an edition of Lord of the Flies, one of my favorite books, with an introduction by Stephen King.  He describes it as the book that rendered all of the other "boys' books" he'd been reading "obsolete," because it told the truth about what would happen if real boys were stranded on a paradisical island: They'd turn to monsters.

Wait, what?  I just said the darkness equation annoys me!  But Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books?   I've never found a conflict there.

It is absolutely, one hundred percent fact that Golding was dead on about what would happen if you crashed a load of kids on an island together.  Flies is a book that rang with truth for me, from the second I read it in English class.  The human capacity for evil, sadism, and pure asshattery to fellow humans is well-documented and indisputable.  (Well, I guess you can dispute it -- you can dispute anything; free speech -- but I'm not likely to trust your judgment afterward.)  The boys' books Golding was responding to flatly lie about this, and what makes Flies so shocking is that he simply destroys that lie by telling the truth.  Put a group of humans of any age in an environment with no controls, and you're going to get Castle Rock.  (Not the one from King... well, that one, too, I guess.)  There will always and forever be a Jack Merridew, who gleefully embraces this dark side of human nature.  No society is exempt from it.  Golding himself wrote, in an afterword, "[T]he shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." 

And here's the thing: Lord of the Flies isn't the story of Jack Merridew at all.  It is the story of Ralph, Simon, and Piggy (self, heart, and mind).  Why?

Because Jack is boring.

Yes, Jack's actions drive the story, but Jack himself is more or less predictable.  He does what we know someone is going to do.  He's not conflicted about it (maybe he has a twinge when Roger kills Piggy, but that seems more about the threat to his power), and he forms the most basic society humans know -- rule of the fist.  It's undeniably true that this would happen.  As Dumbledore puts it in Harry Potter, he's faced with a choice between what's easy and what's right -- which is so often the case -- and he chooses what's easy.  Evil, generally speaking, is easy.   You can tart it up with plans and machinery and strategies, but the basic choice of, "I will stand up for what's right" vs. "I'll get mine and screw the consequences" is, um... well, easy.  And therefore, not interesting.

The interesting characters are the dwindling group of boys who know this is wrong, the ones who hold their feeble lights in the darkness.  Simon is most explicit about this, naturally.  He's soul and heart, and he never wavers. He also doesn't look away, which is possibly the most important thing about his character.  He looks the Gorgon in the eye, understands who the Lord of the Flies is, and tries to get through to the others.  Naturally, they kill him.

Piggy is more common. He tries to doggedly stick to his logic, even as the most basic of his axioms fall apart around him.  He even tries to evade blame for Simon's death after the feast, by blaming it on the dance and calling it an accident.  But he's never tempted to Jack's camp. He just becomes more and more confused by what's happening, as symbolized by his disintegrating glasses.

It's in Ralph that Golding achieves his most impressive character.  By the end, he's almost mute, running away from the gang, but after Simon's death, he has inherited the mantle of clear sight.  He says it out loud to Piggy: "That was murder."  He understands the full depth of depravity that they've fallen into.

And he keeps fighting.

Because that is also true, and far more interesting.  Darkness just exists.  Light is an action.  You can pull drapes to block light, or go underground.  But a single lit match is the point of focus in a dark room.  Golding's society depends on the ethical nature of the individual... and Ralph is able to pass the test.  While there is always a Jack, there's also always Ralph -- often standing to the side, mute and horrified, but sometimes taking action.

That's the interesting part of a story. Right there, that's the good stuff.

Which brings me back to the superhero stories.

Yes, they're silly.  Yes, the evil is overblown.  And no, it's not bad for them to have foibles.

But the interesting thing about them is the way they fight for what's good, when all of their power would make them very, very powerful bad guys.  The first Captain America movie addressed this directly -- that the serum enhanced everything about the person who took it.  Steve Rogers is a good man who wants to do what's right.  Red Skull... isn't.  And Red Skull?  Kind of boring.  But Steve is interesting, as he tries to hold a light up in the dark, against those incredibly powerful forces in the world.

That's why I think the Darkness Equation is bunk, and why it annoys me to no end.  Yes, there are temptations, and yes, they may be more powerful as the person gets more powerful. (I generally believe that the greatest strength is often interchangeable with the greatest weakness.)   But it's in fighting the dark that people achieve real nobility, in holding up that torch no matter how swallowed by shadows it seems to be, and no matter how difficult it becomes.  That's why the heroes are the heroes -- because that's what can hold a story together.

There's a wonderful scene at the end of the movie The Neverending Story, when Fantasia has been destroyed, and the Childlike Empress appears to Bastian, holding a single grain of glowing sand.  "Why is it so dark?" Bastian asks.  She tells him, "In the beginning, it is always dark."  Then she puts the light into his hands.

Then it devolves into a kind of silly fantasy sequence, but I got the point.

The beginning of a hero story should be dark.  Downright dystopian.  Then the hero holds out his hand, and grasps the light.  That's what heroes are for.