NaPo 11: Role-Playing

i'm going to try the haibun for tomorrow, but Wednesday's my late night, so here's just a little dodoitsu, inspired by an RPG program.


Life, death, and all their glories--
ev'ry bold misadventure
Forever contingent on
A roll of the dice

NaPo 9: Forgotten songs and NaPo 10: Stage Fright

I um... forgot yesterday. So, two poems today.  Short, but still here.  A rondelet and weird little free-verse.

Forgotten Songs
Forgotten songs
That whisper in the summer leaves
Forgotten songs
That gossip of remembered wrongs
That sneak along the snowy eaves
to find the one who still believes
Forgotten songs.

Stage Fright
Throat locked.
Hands clasped.
Read in monotonic blasts.
Get through to the end of your part.
Just read and read and don't look up and
keep your voice level and low and whatever you do
Reveal
Nothing.

NaPo 8: Limerick

One day in this year's NaPoWriMo
She that a poem did she owe...
She was stuck for a line,
with just imperfect rhyme
With just fifteen minutes to go!s

Okay, yes.  It was a busy day and I overslept to boot.

NaPo 7: From the abandoned daughter to the family historian

Again, using the prompt, to have a weak part of your personality interact with a stronger part -- in this case... well, the title is it.  And that's all I'll say.


From the abandoned daughter to the family historian
Make your trees, if you have to
Bytes and megabytes of

name after name after name--
dates and documenation
limbs of your glorious roots
trees twining in the forest of your soul.

I know the truth, and so do you,
as deeply buried as you might keep it.

But you still pretend!
Fake belief that somehow
curious relatives will find you, and
gamble their comfortable lives
for a stranger they never wanted, following
dangerous trails left in spit,
blood and pixels, straight to your door.

Can you really be such an idiot?
Can you really think they'll forgive you,
coming into the light when they prefer you in the dark?
Like you really even exist to them at all!
Sneering high society does not want a
tale of sordid, secret
liaisons, better swept under history's rug.

Bringing your secret life
to the attention of anyone...
nothing good can come of it.
Trashy talk shows may like it,
hopeful for  scandal, be we--they--are of a
high order, too high for such a gauche reveal.
So hoard your little lists of pretended relatives,
but heed reality: you are not welcome in your own space.

NaPo 6: Insomnia

Trying the NaPo challenge today to use line-lengths that feel outside my comfort zone.

Insomnia
Dark
Quiet
Cat asleep
Clock ticking
Thoughts running through my mind on rattly tracks
Wild mine cars picking up and dropping off
What did I say wrong today and where did I leave my socks and is my dress ruined and did everyone notice the holes in my stockings and if I haven't heard about the job does it mean I have no hope and
Upstairs,
Someone stirring.
Pipes rush.
Feet shuffle.
Still awake.
My feet itch like they want to dance
My face twitches.
My hands lace behind my head and I stare at the ceiling and wonder if there are spiders in the wall, or ants, or whatever phantom thing my cat sometimes hears when she bats at a blank spot, and do they come out at night when I close my eyes and is it because I'm a terrible housekeeper and what if everyone finds out that there are things in the walls and
Headlights.
Splashing over my window
Late night visits ending.
I look.
Blinds are down (not that they do any good on my side)
I go over
Raise them
Leaves rustle and wind blows over grass but I can't see the mountains and maybe it's raining and maybe I should have air maybe air would help maybe cold will put me to sleep and I am so tired but my legs are twitching and my heart is skipping and am I going to have a heart attack in my sleep and I wonder if I'm hyperactiveattentiondeficitdisorder or some other thing they've invented since I was a child and
Cat.
Bumping into my ankles.
Nipping at me to get treats.
I'm sleeping now, I say.  Can't you see I'm sleeping?
Another nip.
I ball my fists tight to stop the tingles.
Turn on the light.
Give up.

NaPo 5: A cheat

A Cheat
I feel like a cheat
But I have so much work left...
Only a haiku

And then another
Because it takes far too long
To keep these things short

I don't have the time
To abbreviate my thoughts
And still keep them clear

There's still so much work!
A presentation to do
Put off forever.

So I can't write poems --
Or is that first line six beats?
I don't really know...

Counting syllables
Is an addictive pursuit
But I don't have time!

I can't... cannot... do
This ridiculous night's work
After the lock-out

But if I do not
Then I'll be forced to concede
On only day five.

Napo 4: Loneliness

Working off the NaPo prompt, to use concrete imagery for an abstract concept.

Loneliness
The clock ticking at midnight.
Lights on, humming low
but loud in the silence
Cat sleeping
dreaming and twitching her toes

The keyboard is sticky
And a little squeaky as I hit each key
My phone beeps
Squawks
Video game feet kllp-kllp-kllping
down the Hawkins paths
YouTube playing
CocoLegallyBlondeHairJCSCinemaSinsReactionsReviewsPolitics
Whatever
Keep it quiet enough
not to wake the neighbors
But it doesn't matter otherwise

Fast food boxes and drinks
Scattered on the desk
I haven't used the stove for days
(though I actually like to cook)

Will I go to bed soon? 
After the day's poem?

I don't care, and neither does anyone else.

The clock continues ticking
On its way to one.

And two.

The lights hum.

And I finish.

I have a game to return to.

And a sleeping cat.

And maybe, eventually, sleep.

NaPo 3: Lost in the Gray

Well, the NaPo  prompt today was about band names, but I couldn't get into it.  It did get me thinking about music though, so I thought I'd try something like lyrics for a pop song.

Lost in the Gray 
(lyrics)
Lost in the gray
I see a light shining through for me--
the things that you do for me,
guiding me on.

Just a roll of the dice
sent me far from your side
into the deepest dark
where monsters abide

Just a twist of bad luck
a wrong turn on the road
and I was lost in the shadows
where cold rivers flowed

Lost in the gray
I see a light shining through for me--
the things that you do for me,
guiding me on.

I called out for you
in the fog and the mist
and I felt you nearby
like the night we first kissed

I heard your voice in my heart
and I began to see
the light filtered in
and I knew I'd be free

Lost in the gray
I see a light shining through for me--
the things that you do for me,
guiding me on.

The monsters still move
in the shadows below
But I'm moving away
Toward the love that I know

Lost in the gray
I see a light shining through for me--
the things that you do for me,
guiding me on.

NaPo 2: Accents

Okay, this one's a little better than yesterday's.  I do like a sonnet here and there. It's old-fashioned, but so be it.;p

Accents
(Elizabethan Sonnet)
I always craved an accent of my own
A voice that said I came from somewhere real
A place of hoary words and ancient stone
Where tales would flow and mossy bells would peal.

The words would fall like gentle, lilting leaves
And each would be a gift from voices past
Old songs and words would ring down from the eaves
And I would know my secret name at last

Instead, my voice is flat and harsh as ice
As gray as Erie's endless shallow waves
The nasal tones that only would suffice
In the nowhere that I find my fathers' graves

My real voice sings of nearby country lanes
And the factories, farms, and Yankees in my veins.

NaPo 1: The Storm Cloud

Blech. Not an inspiring start

The Storm Cloud
(Villanelle)
Inside the cloud, the storms already rage,
the anxious pleadings of their impatient cast
To raise the curtain on a furious stage.

Beneath the sky, the heavens form a cage
We can't know how long the rain will last
And inside the cloud, the storms already rage.

The duration is impossible to gauge
Now that we have all the players massed
To raise the curtain on a furious stage.

The tempest shouldn't strike in reason's age!
The storm is something breaking from the past...
But inside the cloud, the storms already rage.

And the orders have gone out to engage
The bombers will release a fatal blast
And raise the curtain on a furious stage.

The coming storm is taunting's heavy wage
And when it comes, the burning will be fast --
Inside the cloud, the storms already rage,
To raise the curtain on a furious stage.

Aw, why not keep going early?

So... I did an iconograph.  Because, why not?

NaPoWriMo is approaching

Just creating a tag to stick (hopefully) daily poems on for NaPoWriMo.  I can do this.  Yup. Done it before.

Once.

Well, I did literally just write sixteen poems in two hours (wrote the instructions for 16 kinds of short forms in verse), but that was at work, so it doesn't really count.

I haven't made a real habit of poetry for about four years.  Let's see how it goes...

Heh, I'm starting a little early.  Just wrote a virelai to fill out a chapbook, and I kind of love it.

Ooh, Shiny!

What was I thinking, just moments ago?

I lost the thread as it sped to and fro!

How was I trav'ling and where would I go?

And people around me are staring...

Other folks keep to their topics, I know

They can stay steady and manage the flow

But me? I'm constantly erring!

I grab shiny things like a raven or crow

No, that's a magpie, they're all corvids, though...

Oh, blast, now I'm off again, raring!

Thoughts won't stay in order, above or below

I hope I can cover it, so it won't show

But inside, I'm kind of despairing.

What was I thinking, just moments ago?

I lost the thread as it sped to and fro!

How was I trav'ling and where would I go?

And people around me are staring!

 

Wonder Woman review

I guess in the great war between DC and Marvel, I come down pretty hard on the Marvel side... not that I read the comics, we're talking strictly cinematic universes here. I find that I've never had the patience to try and catch up on fifty years of comic history for... well, anything.  That said, I have nothing special against DC properties.  I liked Superman and Wonder Woman in the 70s, and I like them still.  I'm vaguely fond of Batman.

So, while I wasn't exactly waiting on the edge of my seat for the Wonder Woman movie, I certainly meant to go see it, and I finally did.  Since I was late in the game for blockbuster, I doubt I really need a spoiler warning -- everyone who meant to see it probably saw it before me -- but for form's sake, I review with spoilers all of which are unmarked.

It was... pretty good.  I'm not sure about all the hype about how utterly amazing I'm supposed to find it, but yeah.  Good flick.   I liked the people (which isn't always a given for me in recent DC films), and I liked the overaching theme that the way you behave toward people isn't about what they deserve, but about what you believe.

And yes, it's cool to have a female-led major summer blockbuster.  Dear Marvel, aren't you kicking yourself now about not bothering with a Black Widow movie just because you thought female superheroes wouldn't bring in the box office?  Want a plot?  She has to infiltrate Hydra and retrieve a Macguffin, forcing her to don several undercover identities along the way.  Or she is using her common tactic of pretending to be captured when outside events trap her among the enemy, and she has to escape and rescue whoever she was sent for.  Or she discovers that the red room is still active, and goes in to rescue girls who have been so brainwashed that most of them don't even think they need rescuing. Or... you know, pretty much any well-written story would work.  If you can come up with stuff for Tony to do, you can come up with stuff for Nat to do.  It is not an alien concept.

It's true that female-led superhero movies in the past have flopped -- Catwoman, Supergirl, Elektra.  That wasn't because they were female-led.  That was because they were awful movies.  Get a good movie with a female action lead, and people come to it like any other awesome popcorn flick.

Which brings us neatly back to Wonder Woman.

It's much better than it has any right to be, following, as it does, one of the worst superhero movies I've seen, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  I hadn't bothered to watch it before, and only watched it now to find out how they set up WW, and, spoiler, it's as bad as the reviews say.  Just a big, dark gray, muddled mess.  But Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman was the best thing in it, and by some miracle, they gave her over to people who could capitalize on that instead of killing it.

So, elements:

Plot
Diana, princess of the Amazons, spends her childhood on the hidden island of Themyscira, home of the Amazons.  After a bloody battle Zeus hid it from sight with his last breath.  Diana is the only child.  She has been raised to believe that it's the Amazons job to defeat Ares eventually and stop human wars. When WWI pilot Steve Trevor crashes through the barrier, chased by German troops (defeated by the Amazons because they're just that good), she learns about the Great War and decides that Ares is abroad in the world.  Taking the sword she believes to be the god-killer and the magic lasso that compels people to tell the truth (along with her iconic gauntlet bracelets, of course), she follows Steve back out into the world of the 1910s.  They stop first in London, where she gets her first taste of modernity ("It's hideous!"), and then they go to the Belgian front, where she suits up as a superhero and goes through a brilliantly shot bit of trench warfare to save a village. She believes the German commander is Ares and determines to find him and go mano-a-mano, especially after he destroys a village with a poison gas attack -- the very village that she, backed up by Steve and the Howling Commandos -- er, I mean, Steve and his band of misfits -- had saved.  She kills him, but he isn't Ares, and it makes no difference.  The real Ares shows up, and gosh, it turns out that killing him won't really work either, since humans pretty much make war without a lot of help from divine or demonic forces.  She's tempted to simply give up, but Steve makes a huge sacrifice to save a lot of lives, and she understands that Ares' view is too simplistic. Yes, humans do stupid and cruel and violent things, but they also do great and brave things.  So she continues fighting (though, judging by BvS, she gets pretty jaded afterward.)

Again, not bad.  There is a lot of seriously mangled Greek mythology, which bugs my Grecophile self, but I'm guessing they're stuck with it from the comic source material.  Just as a taste, Ares has killed all of  the other gods. Yes, in this verse, the Greek gods had Ragnarok.  Also, more irritatingly, THE AMAZONS WORSHIPPED ARES, mythically speaking. They were daughters of war, not pacifists sworn to fight their own patron god.  And Zeus wasn't exactly a pacifist, and he didn't create humans (that was Prometheus) and Ares... sigh.  Suffice it to say, if you're a fan of classical mythology, just kind of... remember that it's most likely not the movie's fault, and what they came up with makes a kind of internal sense.  Ah, well. Someday, a movie will do justice to Greek mythology, but that movie is not this movie, and that's okay.  They're constrained by a lot of comic canon.

Character
Much improved for DC.  Diana is good protagonist. She goes through a very believable innocence-to-experience arc, and she works even the sillier elements of the WW mythos -- the Lasso of Truth, for instance -- work in context.

Steve Trevor is good as the love interest. Like most superhero love interests, he's strictly support, but he does it well.  He and his band of brothers follow WW through the trenches. He teaches her to dance. She rescues him several times. But he's a believable enough sort of guy, and Chris Pine does well with him.

Ares is... well, let me put it this way.  If you can't figure out exactly who Ares is really pretending to be within one scene, you haven't been watching a lot of hero movies. The telegraphing was breathtakingly clumsy, one of the few plot missteps, unless it was actually almost brilliant: It was so obvious that I thought for at least part of the movie that it might be a red herring, and that they were playing all of the cliches to try and misdirect my attention from someone else.  But... they weren't.  Still, David Thewlis seems to be having a good time with it.

Setting
The first setting is Themyscira, and it's a lovely  Mediterranean island with glowing water and an ancient Greek society. For that part of the movie, they actually used saturated color, almost.  After that, we're in Great War Europe, which is understandably bleak, though not as understandably mostly gray. 

I like the historical setting.  We don't have a lot set in WWI, and it's a striking choice because of it.  I wish there were more period pieces, though most of Diana's frame story is in the present, so we most likely won't get any  more.

Style
Have I mentioned how much I hate the "gritty" look, and how fervently I wish the fad to end? Because I hate the gritty look and fervently wish for the day this fad will leave.

That said, while it's certainly of an aesthetic piece, it is brightened up somewhat, and Themyscira uses almost lifelike color. Maybe they're slowing digging their way out of they gray, but feel they can't do it too suddenly?

Theme
"It's not about what they deserve. It's about what you believe."

The theme is actually relatively complex.  Wonder Woman learns that mankind is troubled and deeply flawed, and she can't save the world with a single grand gesture like killing Ares. And people may not deserve the help she gives.  But it's important to be a good person anyway, important to be a hero, because the more people choose to be heroes, the more likely we are to defeat our flaws.  Therefore, believe in love and goodness and heroism (all names for the same thing in this 'verse), and act accordingly toward your fellow creatures, and in that way, you contribute to saving the world.  It's a pretty healthy message.

I guess there's some complaint that Ares' presence as a real figure undermines this somehow, but I don't think so.  He whispers to people about how to do more efficiently what they want to do anyway, but he doesn't cause them to want to do it.  My own interpretation is that the nature of the humans is what created the god of war in the first place, and they therefore sustain him, rather than vice versa.

That's about it.  I enjoyed the movie.  It has a lot of details that I liked and didn't mention because they're just... details.  But yes -- I may even make an effort to see Justice League in a more timely fashion, since this movie shows that DC can make movies.  (And also because Joss Whedon touched it up, of course.)

Lord of the Flies (1990 movie) review

Ah, another day, another adaptation.  And really, it's right on point.  Who doesn't need a review of a 27 year old movie that's never exactly been considered a classic?

It's a classic novel from 1954 -- that would be 63 years ago -- so I don't think we exactly need the traditional spoiler warning anymore.  I'm going to talk about the book first to get to the movie.

But I'm going to be doing a book-and-movie group on the subject, so I re-watched, and my re-watch=review.

For starters, I consider the book one of the best to come out of the post-war cynicism.  It came out in the 1950s, when Europe was still reeling from WWII, and William Golding's text rooted the evil that had just occurred not in some specific failure of the German state, but in the evil of human hearts.  ALL human hearts (or at least most of them), which can manifest itself in any society.  Golding stated, "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable."  He explores this by crashing a planeload of English boys onto a deserted island, with no adults in the vicinity.  (He left girls out because he -- wrongly, I think -- thought that girls wouldn't form this kind of microcosm of society -- and because he didn't want to mix any of it up with the question of sex, which he seems to have considered a distraction from the question.)

In the book, this largely plays out through the main character of Ralph, who starts out as a fairly normal boy, but as he gains responsibility over the others, he sees the society they initially formed begin to fall apart as they realize that they're not answering to anyone or anything, and descend into violence, anarchy, and, ultimately, murder.  It ends with Ralph, once the acclaimed and beloved leader, running through the burning jungle as he is hunted.  The implication (the stake sharpened at both ends, which they use to sacrifice pigs before they eat them) is that they're about to cross over into cannibalism when the smoke from their out-of-control fire finally draws a rescue.

The descent is largely shown through Jack. He starts the novel fairly normal, but authoritarian and boastful. He insists that they will have a perfect society, for instance, because they are English, and "the English are the best at everything."  He first becomes obsessed with getting meat, but that quickly morphs into an obsession with blood and with causing pain to the animals he's hunting.  After his hunting causes the signal fire to go out just when a ship is passing, he and Ralph come to a parting of the ways, and Jack goes to the other end of the island, where he sets up a violent dictatorship, drawing the boys off one by one, either by the lure of living outside of society's "normal" rules or because they are scared. Toward the end of the book, the sympathetic characters of the twins Sam and Eric are actually tortured into remaining in Jack's band, peeling off the last of Ralph's friends.

A younger boy named Simon is the only one of the boys who is presented as fully good.   Rivers of ink have identified him as the Christ-like figure, and story-wise, it's true.  Certainly that would be Golding's frame of reference.  What is it, though, that makes Simon good?  Interestingly, in the novel, it's that he's able to see the truth from the start: That the Beast the children are afraid of is something inside of them.  When the rest mistake a dead parachutist for a beast watching them -- which ultimately shifts the balance of power to Jack, who promises to hunt it -- Simon climbs the mountain to look the beast in the eye and understand what it really is.  He frees the dead man from his riggings and lets the wind carry him out to a sea burial, then goes to tell the others the truth... only to be murdered in their first act of frenzied violence against one of the human characters.  Simon is also the one who has a vision of the pig's head on a stick, which is the scene the title come from.  It becomes "The Lord of the Flies" (ba'al zevuv, from Hebrew, surviving in English as Beelzebub), and it taunts him with his own inability to articulate the horror that's happening, and the fact that the other boys will think him crazy. (Filmwise: This crucial scene has got to be almost impossible to film, and I don't envy anyone doing this adaptation at this point.  It's the crux of the whole book, and it's NOT VISUAL AT ALL.)

The last of the four main characters is Piggy, a physically weak, overweight boy whose real name is never revealed.  He's the voice of "baffled common sense" -- a technocrat of sorts, who is generally right about many things, and who is Ralph's most loyal supporter up until his death, when he, along with the conch which represents a sane, Apollonian society, is crushed by a rock deliberately dropped on him by his equivalent on Jack's side -- a sadist named Roger who, it is strongly implied, is very happy to drop all of the trappings of society so that he's free to indulge his whims.  Piggy is increasingly debilitated through the book, as his severe myopia eventually leaves him blind when Jack steals his already broken glasses  to make fire.  (And yes, making fire with myopia lenses isn't possible, but we'll suspend that disbelief for symbolism.  Piggy's specs are the rational world, and they are used to create the signal fire that stands for hope in the world.)  Piggy has one major moral failure: When Simon is murdered, Ralph -- picking up Simon's clear-seeing mantle -- identifies the action for what it was, while Piggy denies it vigorously.

(If you want a more recent story, take Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption -- King is a major LotF fan, so this isn't surprising.  Shawshank Prison is more or less the Flies island.  Most of the men deny whatever crimes they've committed, as the boys deny responsibility for Simon's death.  But Andy, like Simon, is genuinely innocent, if unable to articulate/prove it, and Red, like Ralph, accepts, understands, and regrets his crime, thereby making penitence and the titular redemption possible.)

Okay, yes, all of that was set-up to review the 1990 movie.

Which had some excellent elements, but also dropped the ball in some MAJOR ways.

The first and most obvious change is that English schoolboys have been changed to American military school boys.  Of all of the changes, the nationality change bothers me least in terms of the themes of the book.  Is anyone going to seriously argue that a random group of American boys wouldn't contain a good number saying, "We can't screw this up -- we're Americans, and Americans are great at everything"?  Which is, of course, the root of what goes wrong, because pride is never a good start, and association with any group pride is not a good start.  It depends on the individual and his ability to do what's right ("the choice between what is easy and what is right," as Dumbledore would later put it, and what are the Death Eaters but Jack's followers, all grown up?). You could tell this story about a group of people from literally anywhere in the world, and it would play out the same way, because it's not a truth about Englishmen or Americans.  It's a truth about human nature, and humans, God bless us (please), are humans.  You have your Ralphs, Simons, Piggys, and Jacks pretty much anywhere. Was it necessary?  No (except in as much as everyone occasionally needs that slap upside the head saying, "Yeah, that could happen to you, too, if you're not careful").  Was it destructive to the theme?  Also, no.

The most baffling change was leaving one of the teachers alive but delirious, ultimately becoming what they perceived as the Beast.  I understand the thinking: Ultimately, it served the same purpose as the dead parachutist, pointing out that the adult world was the macrocosm of the island.   But it didn't work well in practice, and since the boys all knew about him, it seemed much more unlikely that NO ONE other than Simon would figure it out.  The parachutist drifted down at night, from a battle that the boys didn't even know about, and was therefore utterly terrifying to them.  The beast was death and war and all of the endpoints of where their dark sides were leading them.

There's also not much establishing of why they were in a plane over the island in the first place.  In the book, they're being evacuated because of the war. It's not specified, but given the choir's stated stops -- Gib and Addis -- it's a reasonable guess that they were being flown down to Australia or New Zealand from Great Britain, and the plane was shot down on the way.  Wherever their latest stop was, the airport was blown up out from under them as they took off.  That's why the ending isn't the cheat that some people think. Wow, they're rescued by a naval officer.... who is taking a break from hunting his quarry to rescue them.  To paraphrase Golding, sure, the cruiser rescued the boys, but who's rescuing the cruiser?  In this movie, there's not much indication that there's anything going on other than a routine patrol, and there's no talk of any war going on.  So the ending loses some of its horror.

But the worst failure was in the characters.

I don't mean the child actors. Some were bad, most were competent, and Balthazar Getty as Ralph was quite good. Chris Furrh, who played Jack, seems to have left acting, which is too bad for the profession (though probably good for him), since he actually was very good.

The problem with the characters was the script.   Granted, the story is a fable and therefore a lot of them are sort of one-trick ponies in the first place (by design), but script decided everything needed dumbing down.  Therefore, Jack is written not just as kind of an ass to Piggy, but as every bad thing that the screenwriter could think of. Instead of a choir boy whose absurd (but kind of amusing) notion is that he should be chief because he could sing a C sharp, he's a juvenile delinquent sent to military school as a disciplinary measure.  From the start, he's a snake in the grass.  And Ralph, who is the ego character and therefore the only one who changes in the course of the story, begins and ends the movie at the same place: A deeply serious boy who is obviously right about things. Basically, he's Simon, but with power, which renders Simon kind of pointless as a character.  And since Ralph is already right about everything, it also leaves Piggy basically to supply the glasses and to whine.  Now, at the end of the story, this characterization works, but it's because Ralph has come by his wisdom the hard way. He's lost his innocence.  In the movie, he begins this way, so there's no growth at all.  (This is especially galling, as Golding told the story of the two images that became the book: A happy boy doing a headstand in delight as he finds himself on an idyllic tropical island, followed by the same boy weeping and filthy, having discovered how humans would really act.) ETA: Interestingly, in neither film version do we see the final moment of Ralph and Jack's feud.  The naval officer who arrives asks them what they are doing and asks who is in charge of this obvious disaster. Jack, who authored the misery, shrinks back to just be one little boy among the group, while Ralph answers that he is, indeed, responsible, in charge.  It seems like a strange thing to skip, now that I think about it.

Simon, while filmed in a kind of beatific way, is left with very little to do.  He loses his central scene (except for a puzzling shot of him staring at the pig's head -- see above for my sympathy with the screenwriters on doing this scene), and he doesn't get the establishing scenes where he shows kindness and responsibility toward the littluns, fetching them fruit before going about his own business.  You can't see his struggle to tell the others what he  understands.  He's just basically a good egg who has the unfortunate luck to choose the wrong time to run into a Dionysian revel.

I don't want to say that this movie is all bad.  It's not. There a lot of elements I like.  Philippe Sarde's score (here's the main title) is very good, and, while they skip the choir in the story, the choral backing toward the end brings it in surreptitiously (I wonder if the composer was annoyed that the choir was cut). It's not as chilling as boy sopranos singing Kyrie Eleison, as they did in the 1960s version, but it's dramatic and effective.  Like I said, Chris Furrh's Jack is very well realized, and Balthazar Getty, when not hampered by bad writing, seems to understand what's going on.  The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and the dance scene where Simon is killed is genuinely frightening.  And truth is, it's hard to do this story badly, per se, because it is a very simple story that works well on film even when individual elements don't play out properly.  Like most very basic stories, it can be told and retold in a lot of different iterations, and an updating isn't a bad idea.  You could also put it in space or... I don't know. In an arena on deadly reality television show? In a prison?  Lots of places.

So, my feelings about this movie are mixed.  The technical work is excellent, and parts of the story come out very well.  I don't hate it.  But given their resources, it could have been so much better!

Ah, well.

Rogue One

Remember: Review contains spoilers.  No attempt to hide them will be made.

The climatic scene of Rogue One, the battle on Scarif, was shot in sunlight with fully saturated colors.  I just want to take a moment to appreciate that.  Fully. Saturated. Colors.  It was a horrifying sequence, in terms of plot, and still amazing to look at.  Even the inside of the Imperial base, where you'd almost expect gray, they did almost in jewel tones, and Vader's pad on Mustafar was vividly red. What a change from the dreary gray tones of so much of contemporary film.  It was refreshing.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled review.

First things first, I liked it.  Quite a lot, actually.  I warmed up to The Force Awakens after a while, but this one, I liked right away and continue to like.  My reasons are outside of the "elements" format, so I'll get to them more in depth at the end of this essay.

Let's just go straight into the elements. 

Plot: More on this later, but essentially, I see this as a very well executed bit of fan fiction (and no, that is NOT AN INSULT).  It's a very plausible answer to several questions raised in the canonical films, and it explores something that has to have happened: The battle mentioned in the very first opening crawl of the series, where the rebels stole the Death Star plans. The story follows Jyn Erso, daughter of the engineer who was coerced into designing it, as she first finds him and learns about the flaw he built into the station (nice gap-filling on a major fan question), then, with the team she's built along the way, leads a suicide mission against the Imperial archives to obtain the plans and transmit them up to the fleet, where Leia will retrieve them and set us off on the saga.  The movie ends perhaps a day, perhaps only minutes, from Leia's capture at the beginning of A New Hope. (And makes her lie about being on a diplomatic mission all the more audacious, since she's literally been chased from the battle.)

Character: Probably one of the weaker elements. I wasn't really drawn into the conflicts of any of the OCs (original characters) who populated this tale.  I mean, there was nothing wrong with them, but with the exception of the reprogrammed imperial droid, K2SO, I didn't think, "Wow, I can't wait to find out what that one is doing next."  Jyn's got some good moments, but I feel like they tried to force a character arc on her by making her cynical without any particular explanation, so that she could later find belief.  I didn't really understand Cassian at first; I thought after he killed the informant that he was an Imperial spy, and waited the whole movie for something to come of it (either that he'd betray the rebellion at a crucial moment or he'd reform).  I realize that was a wrong assumption, but the first act we see him take is murdering a rebel after getting information, so... Kind of a curveball, and not in an interesting way.  Krennec isn't a very credible villain (and it's not helped by the costume... most of the costuming is good, this poor guy was saddled with what looked like the kind of bedsheet cape kids will trick-or-treat in this year). Vader is great, but doesn't get much screentime.  Tarkin... more later.  I like Chirrut and Bazea and (especially) Bodhi, but I guess I'm just as glad I didn't get attached.  Was that the plan?  To have characters not be especially attachable so that people wouldn't be particularly phased by all of them dying at the end?

Setting: There are several settings, from the city of Jehda to the rebel base to the Imperial base at Eadu, to the amazing Scarif base.  I've already mentioned how refreshing Scarif is.  Eadu is more standard, but they chose to set the battle during a raging rainstorm, and it looks fabulous.  Jehda is more or less the standard desert planet trope of Star Wars.  Looks good, but it should... they've had enough practice!  To be fair, I'd think the desert-planet type is likely to be a common occurrence, so that one's fair to have several examples of.

Theme: Rebellions are built on hope. Conveniently stated outright.  (Though of course, the Empire was originally built on hope of correcting the corrupted republic, too. Hmm.)

Style: This is a gorgeous looking film.  Saturated is the best word for it, I think. The look is detailed, there is great care given to lighting and sound, and the creators clearly love the fact that they are working in this universe.  They savor the details.

Beyond the elements:
There is, of course, more to the movie than the regular elements because it is an entry in a long-running, well-beloved series.

I referred earlier to the movie as well-executed fanfic, which is what I believe it to be.  Good fanfic interacts with the canonical text, asks questions, offers ideas, and plays around with what is plausible and even probable within the world.  Rogue One does this wonderfully.  It takes that open question -- that shiny bauble: "How did the rebels get the plans to Leia?"  It's an obvious question, and it leads to other questions. Who were the people who got it?  Why did they take that risk? What happened to them, and why did we never hear of them again?  It even looks at minor questions like why the call sign Red Five was available for Luke to take over.  The script is a well-thought out and highly plausible answer to the questions.  It feels like the real answer, or at least like it could be the real answer.  (And no, I guess I don't ultimately feel the Disney era stuff is canonical.  I mean, it's not anti-canonical and there's nothing wrong with it, but I just don't subjectively feel like it's part of the saga.)  Full marks for fan imagination here.

My main fannish quibble is that they brought in a lot of Expanded Universe stuff, like Kyber Crystals, that are part of a whole overly-complicated structure that I wish they'd  stayed away from. They didn't need to reject it outright, but I'm not a big fan of bringing things in from outside the main line.  If people are just watching the movies, they should be able to just watch the movies -- the rest of it is like tinsel on the Christmas tree.  People should be able to take the tinsel off if they want to, and I feel like a lot of it got tangled up in the branches here.  That's probably just me, though. I did a little jig when I found out Disney was jettisoning the EU, and I don't like seeing it back, largely because I detest the Star Wars EU.  Which, you  know... is probably just me.

I hadn't read up on the movie a lot before seeing it, so I actually didn't know that they'd used CGI to bring back Peter Cushing's face for the role of Tarkin, or a 1977-vintage Carrie Fisher (the real CF did the voice of course) for Leia.  As a concept, I don't mind it, though I think they're going to have to start making deals with actors in their contracts to use their likenesses in other films, potentially far in the future. If you're dealing with a series that may well jump around in time, it's the best solution.  My problem wasn't moral or ideological. It's just that, while the Leia appearance was all right (not perfect, but pretty good), Tarkin kind of screamed "Hi, I'm a CGI character."  It was just not... quite... there.  A little bit of Uncanny Valley going on there.  The tech will get better, though.

God bless James Earl Jones for voicing Vader again.  The character would just not be right otherwise.

And now, the big fan war: Force Awakens or Rogue One?  God knows why SW fandom is so given to these fights, but it is, and I come down on the side of Rogue One.  I didn't dislike TFA.  It's okay.  But for me, the main saga was satisfactorily closed with Return of the Jedi.  (Well, chronologically with Revenge of the Sith, I guess.)  The saga was the story of Anakin Skywalker -- how he rose, how he fell, and how he was redeemed.  Because of that, TFA felt a little... unnecessary?  Disconnected?  And any connection seems forced (no pun intended) because the story is over.  The final shot at the celebration was the eucatastrophic moment (ref, Tolkien) that put a button on the tale.  It began with the equivalent of "Once upon a time..." and ended with "And they all lived happily ever after."  It was done.  Reintroducing it and grafting on problems that didn't need to be there just... I don't know. Of course it's the beginning of a new story, so you need a problem, but... I guess I just didn't need the new story.

The fill in stories, though, the back stories and one-offs and midquels and so on?  Those, I feel like there's an unending need for.  What about the life of the Imperials?  I wrote a story once about kids trapped in an Imperial boarding school when the Death Star went up, who needed to escape from enraged mobs.  The normal, everyday people of the Empire would seem to be endless fodder for this kind of story.  What about the handmaidens?  What happened to them?  Did Obi-Wan do anything during his exile?  Did Vader have moments before RotJ when his loyalty to Palpatine may have wavered?  How did Leia end up in the Senate at the age of 16? It's fertile ground, and I hope Disney continues to explore it.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

I caught up on my movies today. I've been meaning to see this one and needed to see Rogue One (review later), so I said, "You know?  Let's just hang out at the multiplex."

So, Fantastic Beasts.  As always, please recall that I review WITH SPOILERS. There will not be immediate pre-warnings or blanking out.

The verdict?  Eh.... not bad.

Enjoyable, actually.  It's a story about grown-ups in Potterworld, which is neat.  It's in a new setting, which is also neat.  Eddie Redmayne is a blast, and the critters are cool.

But...

I don't know.  Something didn't entirely click.

So, the elements of the story are all not bad.

Plot: Newt Scamander, author of future!Harry's textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, arrives in New York in 1926, carrying a suitcase full of magical creatures.  The dark wizard Grindelwald is on the loose, but Scamander doesn't have much to say about it. Meanwhile, in New York, a very explosive magical force is destroying a lot of things, and it's being blamed on gas leaks.  A former Auror named Tina Goldstein (related to Anthony Goldstein, later of Hogwarts?) is investigating a muggle (non-maj... was there any reason for Americans to use a different term for this? That one's pretty clunky, so I'll just use Muggle) group called Second Salem, which is calling for the destruction of the wizarding world (though of course, no one else believes they exist).  One of Newt's critters -- a Niffler -- gets free in a bank and causes havoc, which sends Tina after Newt.  Meanwhile, Newt bumps into a Muggle named Jacob Kowalski, and they accidentally switch suitcases.  Jacob doesn't know what's happening, and several creatures escape.  Tina brings Newt in, but is ignored by the upper echelons of MACUSA (the American wizarding government), and they go to find Jacob, though it's too late to stop the escape.  Tina brings both men back to the apartment she shares with her sister Queenie, who immediately falls for the kindly Jacob.  Then there's another attack by the violent force, this time killing a young politician, and for a time, suspicion falls on Newt's creatures.  He explains that the force is an obscurus, a violent expression of suppressed magic, but they don't believe him and sentence both him and Tina to death for breaking the statute of secrecy and possibly causing a war with Muggles.  They're rescued by Queenie and Jacob, and it all comes to a fight with the obscurus, which is the magical energy of an abused teenage boy who was raised by the head of Second Salem.  The MACUSA wizard who's been in charge of the case -- who's been blocking the heroes at every step -- turns out to be Grindelwald in disguise, and he wanted to start a war because he wants to dominate Muggles, as we know from the books. His position is not made especially clear in the screenplay, though. After the battle is over, Newt's creatures help with a mass obliviation spell, which ultimately has to include Jacob (don't worry, Queenie re-introduces herself later), and Newt returns to Britain to write his book, promising Tina that he'll come back.

Yeah... there's a lot of plot. The magical creatures plot is pretty good. The Second Salem plot doesn't quite work, and the obscurus plot is melodramatic to the point of being unintentional self-parody. It reads like about a million poor-ickle-Draco fanfics. But the rest of the movie is quite charming.

Character: Newt is just awesome. Awkward, a little annoying. He's Sherlock Holmes-ian in his inability to fit in.  Smart and kind-hearted as well.  His real purpose in America is to release a thunderbird named Frank back into the wilds (it's Frank who saves the day in the end), and he is willing to die to protect his creatures.  He's also friends with an adorable bowtruckle.  He's not so good with Tina and Queenie (possible romantic heartbreak in his past), but he's delightful with Jacob.  Jacob himself is a great addition to the universe. I thought for a while that he might be excused from obliviation, but he isn't. He's gobsmacked by the magical world, but he keeps up and works with Newt all along.  Tina -- a bit insecure after her sacking, but determined and well-meaning, and able to change her ideas about Newt as she sees the truth of the situation. Legilmens Queenie is a little pushy, but funny and appealing.

Most of the American wizarding government has pretty short shrift. Graves, the persona Grindelwald is using, is more than a little over-the-top, but I'm guessing, with Johnny Depp taking over the Grindelwald role, that the man is supposed to be over-the-top.  The less said about the Second Salem group, the better. I don't mean, "Wow, they're unpleasant."  They're villains, that would be allowed.  I mean, they're soap opera villains, with motives so paper-thin that I couldn't suspend my disbelief over them.

Theme: Don't suppress your talents and gifts, or require others to do so.  Not a bad theme.  I imagine anyone who's been told to give up an aspiration to be in the arts feels it, or really anyone who has a particular talent that's being hidden.  All of the smart kids who feel they have to play dumb to get along, all of the creative ones whose ideas are shot down as absurd, all of the hopefuls ones told to get real.

Setting:  New York City is a super odd setting for that theme, though.  I mean, the essence of New  York is not letting anyone hold you down. You have a city of... what was it in the 20s, three million?  Every one of them chasing down one dream or another.  The only city less likely for the "don't suppress your gifts" theme would be L.A.  (Unless you're talking about a gift as a nuclear scientist, I guess, but in terms of municipal mythos... not so much.)  We didn't see a lot of the American wizarding world, which I'm glad of because I prefer to imagine it for myself, but it seemed relatively interesting.

The other setting is the inside of Newt's suitcase, which is full of magical environments for the beasts.  It has the wonder of Hogwarts in the earlier episodes, and I'd dig an entire movie set in the suitcase.

Style: This movie is in the same style as all of the later Potter movies, with the same effects and design, and, outside of the suitcase, the same bleak, gray undertones so common in pop movies today.  I have no idea why this is a thing, but there you have  it. I guess there's no getting around it.  (Except that Rogue One kind of does... but that's for later.)

Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle, by Rick Riordan

Spoilers, lots of them, as always.

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Okay, if you're still reading, you're going to get spoiled.

I adore Rick Riordan's Greek mythverse, in case you haven't noticed by the number of reviews.  The man has an excellent grasp of the mythology, and he loves to throw in even more great tidbits as he learns them.  The books have a great sense of humor, and a lot of genuine heart, too.

The Trials of Apollo is the third and final quintology of the series, which began with Percy Jackson and the Olympians and continued the Heroes of Olympus.  Here, Riordan takes a fairly obscure pair of myths about Apollo being turned mortal as punishment from Zeus, and updates them into the contemporary world.  Apollo, in trouble for letting his oracle set a prophecy in motion, comes crashing down into a garbagey alley in New York, as a sixteen year old mortal boy with acne. He has no idea how to regain his godhood, so he asks for Percy's help to get to Camp Half-Blood, and there, quests for the Grove of Dodona (the titular Hidden Oracle), because it's the only place where a good prophecy might be found a the moment (Apollo is the god of prophecy, among many other things, and neglectfully let his oracles be taken by a hostile force).

I'm going to be blunt: The beginning is rough here.  The first several chapters had me doubting Riordan, as Apollo's voice is almost parodic, and the new character, Meg (a street urchin who protects him from bullies and then claims his service), is... well, irritating.  And not just in Apollo's point of view.  I was irritated at even being asked to care about this one.

But I stuck with it, because the first book of PJO started a little rough, too, and the series ultimately became quite good.   In this book, things take a turn for the better when Apollo reaches Camp  Half-Blood and begins to deal with his somewhat complicated relationship with his own half-blood children, now his own age or even older.  This is when he begins to develop his own voice, and it's actually quite winning.

If you're hoping for a lot of check-in with older characters, keep hoping.  Percy appears at a couple of key points, and Nico is a small presence throughout (he's dating Apollo's son).  Another member of the crew of the Argo II shows up at the end, with an implicit promise of more in the next book.  Everyone else is just name-checked.  Apollo lampshades it by wondering where the A-listers are, but it still feels a little bit of a cheat.

Elements.

Style:
It has the usual Riordan touches, acknowledging the absurdity of the situation and using sarcasm and wry humor to make it feel like, yes, this is how modern people would  react to these elements of Greek myth.  The chapter titles are done in deliberately bad haiku (god of poetry, of course).  The most dangerous of all prophecies are delivered as limericks, which we learn by the horrified reactions of Apollo and his oracle, Rachel Dare, to a limerick delivered by the Grove.  There's a talking arrow that gives Apollo instructions in Shakespeare-esque dialogue, and Rhea appears as a first wave feminist hippie who thinks the young goddesses coming up don't really understand the struggle, since they weren't asked to stand by their men while he ate their children.  Basically, Riordan gives good Riordan on the tropes of the 'verse.

Like I said, the beginning is off-kilter.  Apollo as a character in the earlier books had a certain grandiose way of talking, which is amusing in itself as dialogue, but as interior monologue, it's grating very quickly.  It's understandable that he'd still think of himself as a god who ought to be worshiped instead of tossed in garbage, but there's a kind of self-consciousness to the prose that makes me feel more like Riordan is making fun of his protag than that he's dealing with the protag as a character.  This starts to self-correct as Apollo becomes more human.

The interesting thing about it is that Apollo turns out to actually be a very decent guy, and the less he brags, the more apparent that becomes.  At first, he's talking about how awesome he is, but later, he decides that he's a terrible person, that he's not as worthy as his children, that he's nothing but a blowhard... but throughout the whole thing, we've seen him quite consistently doing the right thing, worrying about his children when they're taken, befriending his son Will (who he is happy to play second fiddle to as a healer), being deeply proud of his daughter Kayla and his son Austin (an archer and a musician, respectively), staying loyal to Meg even when her behavior is open to question, and generally being a good egg.  Like his inability to be a perfect archer or play  music perfectly, he is focused on his failings while the text makes clear that he's succeeding wildly.  It's a very good example of unreliable narration.

Setting:
A garbagey alley, Percy's apartment, an orchard on Long Island, and Camp Half-Blood.  This isn't a very setting-heavy book. The labyrinth is back, and will likely be more of a plot point later on.

Theme:
I'm not sure I can say, thematically, what it's all about, Alfie.   There's a lot of focus on destiny and on innate talents.  Maybe some notion of finding out what you're really good for, getting to that middle ground between "I'm the greatest god that ever was" and "I'm an unworthy worm."  But if I were to put a circle around  weakness in this particular story, it's that I feel like this first book doesn't know what it wants to be about.  The same was true of The Lightning Thief, except that the plot there had more urgency.  I could almost feel Riordan groping for a theme. I think it will come together more in subsequent books, because there were a few places where it was touching on something. I just can't quite put my finger on it.

Plot:
Eh.  There's a lot of exposition here, and the plot skips around a little bit. Meg rescues Apollo, then they're with Percy, then there's a problem at camp (kids disappearing into the woods), and there's a problem with prophecy and...

I'll get this over with. The new bad guys are semi-deified Roman emperors, led by Nero, who are trying to be a Triumvirate (Apollo reminds Nero that this never ends well).  They are the financiers behind the events of the other books, and I have to admit, I'm getting bad season six Buffy vibes from them.   Meg's connection to them is painfully obvious from the start, and Riordan still treated it like a big reveal.  Not loving this development.

Other than that, there's the search for the Grove, an encounter with giant ants, and a fight with a giant bronze statue of Apollo, which annoys him because it's got a neck beard.  Also, he finds himself irritated that it's not wearing underwear, even though he knows they almost never do. Because it's weird having a battle with a 50 foot tall naked bronze version of  yourself, I guess.

Finally, Apollo gets a prophecy to set him on the path to his next adventure, which is going to at least be started in the company of a crewman on the Argo, his girlfriend, and another bronze automaton.

Characters:
Since this largely exists to introduce the character situation, that's where the book spends most of its time.

Unfortunately, the old characters don't appear much, and the new characters are kind of duds.

Not good:
Meg McCaffrey is a twelve-year-old half-blood (daughter of Demeter, which for some reason was treated as a big deal to Apollo), who has been living on the streets with a protector.  (Three guesses.)  She's not actively unpleasant, but she's also just... not there.  We're asked to care about her immediately, and the character gives us no compelling reason for it.

Nero... I can't with this villain.  There is no point at which I care about what he's doing. Maybe that will change; I don't know.

Percy and Chiron: Are there. So is a pregnant Sally Jackson. None of them do anything particularly impressive.  Rachel is a smidge better (she's jealous when she finds out that Apollo has other oracles), but she doesn't do much.  She's largely been sublimated to Meg.  (What I would have done: Rachel's father or his business partner turns out to be one of the Triumvirate. She's the one who rescues Apollo and gets him to camp, with Percy's help, and goes on the adventure with him.)

Much better:
Will Solace, Apollo's healer son, started to come into focus at the end of The Blood of Olympus, when he starts flirting with Nico, and, more importantly, actually standing up to his Prince of Darkness routine and making him interact with the world. Here, Nico is a satellite while Will comes into his own.  He's head counselor to the Apollo cabin, which means he has to keep his head when things go wrong (which they always do), and he feels very responsible for the well being of his siblings and the camp as a whole.  He's a naturally good doctor, and he's the first one Apollo makes a real connection with.  His siblings, Kayla and Austin, are less prominent (they are mostly missing for the book, as pieces for Apollo to rescue), but all three of them turn out to be caring and generous kids, who are sympathetic to Apollo and immediately behave as real family to him, which isn't always a given. (Riordan is pretty frank about how badly the Greek gods treated their kids.)

It's in Apollo's interactions with his kids that he becomes a very interesting character.  He absolutely adores them.  He chastises himself for being a terrible father (I have a feeling that sometime in the series, we're going to get some information about this that will change perceptions), but he loves it when Will, like his other son Asclepius, surpasses his skill as a medic, and he is absolutely delighted by the others as well, calling Austin his beautiful son, and praising Kayla's archery skills.  He has to go on a quest, but he wants to stay with them, to be part of his cabin and part of life at camp.  It wasn't what I expected in the first book. I figured that would be part of the process of character development. But it's there at the start, and I'm very interested in where it goes.

In general, it's a shaky but promising start.  I trust Riordan to deliver on the rest of the series.

Ender's Game Prequels, by Card and Johnston

I was in either my junior or senior year of high school, if I recall correctly.  It was, at any rate, the first science fiction convention I was going to go to, with a friend of mine and her mother.  One of the guests of honor was Orson Scott Card, who I'd never heard of.  My friend shoved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead into my hands and said, "YOU HAVE TO READ THESE."

I more or less missed the convention, curled up in bed, reading the story of Ender Wiggin as it existed at the time.  Like many an academically gifted kid before and since, I gulped it down.  Yes.  This was a true story.  It's a nutty story about alien invasions and a convoluted plot about having to believe a real war was a game because only a brilliant child who didn't know he was doing it could win it, but it was also a real story about a kid who was isolated and lonely, whose ambiguous relationship with the power structures left him with no one who understood him, with the exception of one kid, possibly even smarter, but younger and less socially adept.  It was the story of the equally bright brother and sister, who weren't chosen for the program for other reasons, but who felt frustrated, bored, and out-of-place in an everyday school.  And proceeded to take the world over by interesting uses of "the nets," a fairly prescient notion of an internet as it would become in a few years (and may become again, if it gets stepped on and reined in a lot).

Someone knew how all of that felt.  It was repeated in Speaker for the Dead, with young  Novinha, though that novel was less interested in the visceral character creation and more interested in the speculative part of speculative fiction.

The following sequel novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, had strong points to them, but never reached the intensity of EG and SftD.   I liked a lot of the introduced characters, but the speculation got more than a little odd. (Beating lightspeed travel by wishing was probably the worst, though the philosophical wrangling over a lethal but possibly sentient virus also got a little tiresome.) Then there was the parallel series, beginning with Ender's Shadow, telling the story of Bean, the aforementioned younger child who became Ender's friend.  I liked many things in the Shadow series, and disliked many things in it, about in equal measure.  Bean's story was too much of a trauma conga line, basically, and I would have liked more of Peter's plot and less of the ridiculous villain Achilles de Flandres. Seriously, I kept expecting him to grow a mustache just so he could twirl it absurdly; the problem wasn't that he was scary.  It was that I never believed in him for a second past his initial moment of threat in Bean's early story.  He was a believable threat in that context. Everything after it was just eye-roll-worthy.

So basically, I didn't jump straight into the Formic Wars series, which are the prequel to the main series, telling the story of the First Formic Invasion, co-written by Aaron Johnston (I neither know nor care who wrote what in the story).  I finally decided to give it a go.

The first book (Earth Unaware), largely concerned with miners out in the Kuiper Belt, left me vaguely intrigued, but I wouldn't have been in a rush for the second, except that I had nothing else pressing on my list.  It wasn't bad, per se, just kind of a pedestrian story.  We get to meet the main players, including rich mining magnate Lem Jukes, working class "free miner" Victor Delgado, and Wit O'Toole, the head of the international strike force which would obviously become the international fleet.  Lem and his dramas aren't thrilling, though there's some interesting work with perspective and unreliable narration.  Victor is a good character, though his story arc seems  little herky jerky for the first half of the novel.  Wit's the most interesting, and in the most interesting setting (Earth... unaware!), plus he gets us to the only known character, Mazer Rackham, who is rejected from the strike force... but he also gets the least screen time.

The second and third books, which are really a single story, from the actual invasion through the destruction of the scout ship, are much better.

Or maybe I just really like the action scenes, and they are super action heavy.  I learned for myself how difficult action scenes are to write, and I have a great deal of respect for people who can write them well, and use them to advance the story and the characters.  It's much harder to have a character grow while you're also maneuvering him through battles than have him gaze at his naval for a few chapters and tell you all about himself.  They also introduce a Cardian character on the level of Ender or Bean in young Bingwen, a boy trapped in the devastation when the Formics begin their attack in southeast China.  Through the course of the books, he attaches himself to Mazer and later to the strike team, but is most striking in the third book, when, with the help of a medical device designed for soldiers on the battlefield, becomes a de facto medic.  All of the characters make their way into the same sphere for the final attack... and then we're left with a young woman discovering, after the devastation, that the second invasion is on the way.

I will be joining the series in progress this May, when The Swarm comes out.

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.