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.

Mockingjay, Pt. 1 Review

I said back in my Catching Fire review that they should have done the trilogy as a pentalogy (that goes for the books as well), and Mockingjay, Pt. 1, confirms my opinion on it.  It splits the narrative very neatly, at exactly the point where the second story in the novel begins.  The rhythm is exactly right.

Not everything is exactly right.  Or wrong.  I'm left with some concerns about the set-up for Mockingjay, pt. 2, but on the whole, this is a strong entry in the series.   Of course it doesn't stand alone -- it ends on a cliffhanger -- but if you go to something where "Part One" is in the title, you don't really have much ground to stand on if you complain about that. ;p

Before I start going through the elements, I'll mention the change of having Effie in District Thirteen.  For all their talk about how they had to have Elizabeth Banks, they didn't end up using her all that much.  They  used her reasonably well (taking the place of both the prep team and, oddly, Fulvia Cardew), but really, she could as easily have been in her cell in the Capitol, ramping up the worry with the others.

As always, SPOILERS.  If you don't want spoilers for the books or movie, this would be a good stopping point.

Theme
Of all the books, Mockingjay is the one most clearly centered on the power of the media, one of Collins' best themes.  The movie is able to amplify it by actually showing the direct effects of Katniss's propos, going to the district and seeing the way they're used by the rebels, both as a recruitment tool and as a signal. (I'm on the fence with them actually singing "The Hanging Tree" in District Five while storming the power plant, because, well... kind of bad tactics.  Wouldn't it have made more sense for a small group to infiltrate and plant the explosives than to have a huge crowd singing and chanting as they storm the place?   But I see what the script was going for.)  The scene where the District Seven lumberjacks use the mockingjay call to signal their attack on the Peacekeepers is excellent, and the attack on the dam in Five, using "The Hanging Tree," was thematically and cinematically terrific (despite my questioning of the tactics).  Making them run directly after we see the propos gives a sense of how powerful Katniss's voice has become.  This is a real strength of the movies, being able to move outside of Katniss's head and see all of this.  We also get to see the rescue of the captured victors, at least in part.

There's some play with how absurd the actual concept is -- Katniss dressed up in a costume, and the director Cressida seeing every event in terms of how to film it.  Most hilarious is the failed first propo, where Katniss is supposed to act, and the whole scene plays like actors making fun of directors giving them bizarre orders, with Jennifer Lawrence getting increasingly frustrated alone in front of a bluescreen while she's told to imagine that she's storming the Capitol with her brothers and sisters at her side, while she waves an invisible flag and says a melodramatic line.  Of course, the propo turns out hilariously bad, and Haymitch takes over, to get her to be herself for the cameras, leading to the main thrust of this part of the story: The conflicting narratives being driven by the rebellion and the Capitol, using their respective proxies of Katniss and Peeta.  And while we spot the absurdity and laugh at Katniss's bad performance, the script (like the book) immediately contrasts it with the reality of the war they're fighting.
 
It also doesn't diminish what Katniss is doing -- she's providing a face and a voice to the feelings of the country.  When she goes into the hospital and the wounded see that she's alive and strong, it makes a difference... well, until Snow bombs them, anyway.

Plot
Takes the story from just before the beginning of the book to the rescue of the victors and the discovery of what was really done to Peeta in captivity, which was pretty much where it had to go.  We see Katniss choose to become the Mockingjay, the symbol of the rebellion, after setting certain conditions, including the rescue of the rebel victors and the right for the family cat to stay put.  She begins to rally the districts, which are now in full-scale war on the Capitol, and deals with the fact that Peeta, captured by the Capitol, is showing up on television and calling for a ceasefire, claiming that the rebels are using her.  She finally breaks down, unable to deal with what's happening to him because of her, and this prompts District Thirteen to launch a rescue... after which she learns what really happened to him.  Then, "To be continued."

While I like Donald Sutherland a lot as Snow, I think most of his added scenes were kind of a waste here.  Screen time is precious, and some things seem to have been skipped to keep those in.   I don't think it was a good trade-off. More on that in other sections.

This act of the series is mostly moving pieces into place for the final confrontation, so there's a lot of workaday plotting going on.   Nothing wrong with that, but of course it's not as exciting as some of the other sections.

Character/Acting
Katniss, appropriately, gets the  lion's share of character work here.  It's her story, and she should.  I have no gripe there.  Jennifer Lawrence continues to do very well as Katniss's mental state whipsaws around under incredible amounts of pressure.  She really sells the "If we burn,  you burn with us!" propo.  I wanted to go rebel against something. :D

The rest of the cast continues to act well, but isn't given much to do.  I mentioned Elizabeth Banks's Effie, here doing the part of the prep team.  Good?  Yes.  Sure. In a couple of scenes.  Woody Harrelson's Haymitch (for some reason played throughout in what appears to be a wool cap with hair extensions stitched to it) is in several scenes, but doesn't have much to say in them after he redirects the propos.  (Skipped entirely is his job as Katniss's handler, and her refusal to listen to him.)  Liam Hemsworth's Gale gets a little more screen time, but his difference of opinion with Katniss seems to be limited to Peeta's actions, and how they should be received.  For some reason, Sam Claflin's scenes as Finnick come off flat. It's not his acting.  It's the pace or the direction, I think.  It's too bad.  I like him in the role, and it should have been good.

Julianne Moore's Coin is a bit of a misplay.  It's not a bad performance, but the choices she and the director made seem odd in the context of the character she's playing.  They're certainly deliberate choices, for both the actress and the writer, not bad acting.  I'm just not sure how they're going to play out in the remainder of the story.  For instance, she doesn't have to be convinced that Peeta is telling the truth about the coming bombing, and she voluntarily acknowledges that he saved the district, rather than having to grudgingly admit it under prodding.

I'm not sure why the movies have such a hard time with the Katniss/Peeta dynamic.  The first movie glossed over their central shared memory (the Boy With the Bread scene), the second one rushed through everything, and this one misses the chance to finally tell that memory properly (replacing it with a scene where Katniss illogically has a long-distance conversation with Snow... aargh).  They did add a dream scene where Katniss imagines him coming in to comfort her, which was nice, but only a replay of a scene in CF.  It would have been really simple to start the first movie with that scene, but they chose not to.  It would have been really simple to put it in here, since it's in the novel, but they chose not to.  It's a really strange scene to skip, and does a disservice to the characterization.  I was also sorry they skipped her direct address to Peeta, where she went to the bakery and pointed out to him that his family was dead, and his calls for a ceasefire had no one left to listen to him.

Setting
This is the big ball-drop in this movie.

Oh, sure, the physicality of District Thirteen is well-played, but District Thirteen itself is missing most of what made it ominous. By the time Peeta asks Katniss whether or not she trusts the people she's working with, in the book she has very good reason to consider the question.

The biggest problem for me (which seems tied to the odd choices with Coin) is that Thirteen is not shown as anything other than a bunker.  Sure, light references are made to strict rules, and Haymitch complains about it being dry, but one of the primary establishing moments is turned on its head.  In the book, when Katniss's prep team is introduced, they're in a prison cell, and have been kept there, in chains, because one of them stole bread.  (There's that bread again... jeez, they skipped District Eleven's gift of bread to Katniss, too. It's like someone's trying to avoid a certain theme and certain allegorical connections.)  In the movie, Effie, who has taken the place of the prep team, is explicitly not in a cell, told she's free to come and go as she pleases from her room, and is asked, not told, to be Katniss's escort.  Katniss is not forced to go in and free her, and there's no conflict with Gale, wanting to know how she could care about someone who prettied her up for slaughter, which shows the first serious schism between Gale's worldview and Katniss's.  She barely understands the question.  She doesn't need to here, because it's not asked.  The whole questionable side of Coin's leadership (of Gale as well as D13) is more or less skipped.

We don't see the tattooed-on daily schedules, or hear about the strictly rationed food, or even get a sense that Katniss has left one dictatorship for another.  Granted, in the books, it takes her some time to understand this -- she's seventeen and wants to believe -- but the reader certainly sees it immediately. In the movie, there's no real sense of it at all.

This is a fairly major breaking point in the remainder of the story, which ends with meet the new boss, same as the old boss -- a situation Katniss is forced to resolve in a very nasty way at the climax.  If District Thirteen's real nature hasn't been revealed, then will that choice even work?  Oh, book readers will get it, but the movie-only people?  I'm just not all that sure.

(They did, to some extent, show some callousness -- people gathered and cheering for a propo when there are hundreds of people dead, and then doing it again while Peeta screamed and screamed in the hospital, bound in his restraints -- but I don't think it showed it to the extent really necessary to understand just how bad it is.)

Style/Technical
There's an unrelenting grayness about District Thirteen that's very well put together.  The horrible jumpsuits -- Effie's opening scene shows her holding on to the bright Capitol dress she presumably was wearing when they took her, and the contrast is lovely -- and the bleak rooms, and the claustrophobia is really caught well.  The contrast with the outdoor scenes, when Katniss is truly herself, makes an interesting study in itself.  Thirteen could be shot in black and white without much notable difference, but the scenes on the surface, both at the lake and while Katniss and Gale are hunting, are breathtaking.

I do wish the first person to design the sets hadn't made the districts all look so urban and uniform, but it's silly to keep complaining about that.  The set design on the return to District Twelve was suitably distressing (especially when Katniss accidentally steps on a skull). I think it had a very different feel from the book, where everything was quite literally ashes and silence, but I'm not sure how that would have come out on film.

In all, a decent entry in the series, with a weakness that I'm concerned about in regard to the remainder of the story.

In praise of memorization

Memorization isn't hot with the cool kids.

It never has been -- it's been the bogeyman of education reform movements pretty much since education reform movements existed.  Now, it gets the added boost of, "Oh, if you don't know that stuff, you can always look it up on the internet! So who needs it?  You should be free and only learn facts that matter to your constructed education and appeal to your interests!"

(Dear readers from other countries: Welcome to why we don't know where you live, what your capital city is, what language you speak, or what your major exports are.  And let's not even start on the foreign language issue.)

The problem with this is that, while you do learn based on what you're interested in, you also develop interests based on what you've learned, and quite a lot of that stems from random facts that may be rolling around in  your memory -- facts that get there because you, well... memorize them.  By not learning facts (even if you're not immediately fascinated), you're severely limiting your horizons.

Is it ever going to matter to me that the capital of Andorra is Andorra la Vella?  Well, it might show up on a Sporcle quiz, but probably not.  (If it does, though, I am prepared, man. ;p)  But that fact starts to get a lot of other things glommed onto it.  Andorra has two princes (though it's a constitutional republic).  Do I have a great deal of interest?  Not at the moment, but because that's in my head, it's in what Tolkien called "the Soup pot" -- I have it at my disposal.  I am curious about the arrangement, how it works within a power struggle, how it's historically operated.  Maybe not wildly curious, but a little curious.  And maybe someday it will combine with some other oddball fact kicking around in my skull (the crown prince of Japan is the first crown prince not to go to the traditional royal family school in Tokyo?), and those two things will make something new in my head. Who knows? The point is, they will never have a random collision if I don't know them.

Another point, of course, is that it's embarrassing not have the slightest idea where your new neighbor comes from after he tells you, and have to run off to Wikipedia to do a quick check.  And it's flatly dangerous to not have a basic understanding of biology or chemistry.  Math... oh, math.  The ancestral home of memorization, so traumatizing to the reformers.  But really, if you don't know the formula for area of a circle, and you need to, say, find a tablecloth... you're not going to be able to work it on your calculator, because you don't know what numbers you're pulling in.   And grammar... sigh.  Just, sigh. Who really needs to know how to make communication clear and readable, anyway, right?

(Note: Knowing grammar does not mean never letting your hair down.  You don't have to speak like a textbook, or write like one, to know how the parts of speech work, or where to put an apostrophe.)

Then, there's the question of fun.

There's a lot of hyperventilating about how learning should be fun, and not be about memorization... but have you ever heard a kid rattle off his favorite memorized facts about dinosaurs?  Or a fantasy footballer go on about his team's stats?  Heck, I think geography is useful, but to be honest, I did learn to name 197 countries in fourteen minutes for a Sporcle quiz, and I'm now in the process of learning their capitals because it's fun to know this stuff.  Not everything that goes into your head has to become the subject of  a soul-searching personal essay about spiritual and creative growth.  Sometimes, it's just cool to know that when Krakatau blew, they heard it in Perth (much cooler when you know where Krakatau and Perth are).  This is as true for little kids as it is for adults. I do geography in preschool storytime, and that particular fact is amazing to them -- it's like something blowing  up here and being heard in Chicago.  And, by the way, it's okay to introduce geography the same way you introduce math. You learn that 2+2=4 before you get to non-Euclidean geometry.  It's okay to also learn that there are horses in Mongolia before you start debating the historical legacy of Genghis Khan.

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a real downside to the ability to memorize facts.  I've never understood the rush to denigrate it.