Category: Generalities & Rants

Trailer Park

(All new!)

So we saw “The Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2” Monday afternoon (and had a lovely time, thanks). It has long been my custom to assess the trailers accompanying any movie we see in the theater, so here we go:

There were eight trailers. This is excessive. It hasn’t been that long since five was the norm.

“Transformers: The Last Knight” looks big and loud and stupid. I am so not interested.

The remake of “The Mummy” does not look very promising, either. Both these first two trailers were so loud that I was beginning to worry the whole feature would be unpleasant and ear-tiring, but fortunately that did not turn out to be the case.

“Spider-Man: Homecoming” was the first trailer that was not just a barrage of noise and CGI. It had moments of character, bits of humor, and generally lots of stuff to indicate that the film is not just a noisefest and lightshow. I expect to see and enjoy this one.

“Alien: Covenant”… I dunno. It looks better than the last couple of Alien movies, but that’s saying depressingly little. I think I’ll pass.

“Dunkirk”: It’s a war movie. It looks as if it’s a well-made one, with some good characters, but I’m not much on war movies these days (with exceptions for superhero war movies). If the word of mouth sings enough hosannas, I might check it out.

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” looks pretty good, and I still plan on seeing every feature in the series. It would take a real stinker to make me stop. The three prequels were building up a significant amount of suckage, but the Disney takeover has cleansed my palate and renewed my enthusiasm.

The trailer for “Thor: Ragnarok” has a little more CGI than I really wanted, but the line “I know him from work!” sold me — I wanna see it. In general, the Thor series has not been at the top of my Marvel list (not that they suck, they just aren’t as good as some of the others), but this one has promise.

And finally, the next Pirates of the Caribbean film — does it even have a definite title yet? — capped off the previews. I regret to say that even though I loved the first one and it’s always a delight to watch Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, I think the series has outlasted its sell-by date. Zombie sharks are one of those ideas that sounds great in a late-night conversation but should probably not actually be used.

All in all, it was a very loud set of trailers.

Those Who Can

From a newsgroup post dated April 10, 2007:

Down in another newsgroup a couple of people posted pitches for their unpublished novels. I wasn’t impressed — in fact, I thought both were pretty lame, though the novels might not be.

I should have just let it go, but I didn’t — I rewrote ’em both.

I pretended this was an educational effort, but I’m pretty sure I was just showing off.

The thing is, though, that the reason I bothered to do it was that it was so easy. I mean, both pitches contained, as originally written, all the elements needed to make a good pitch — plot, setting, character — but they didn’t make it sound interesting.

One of them spent too long explaining how a disaster happened, when the novel is about the after-effects of the disaster. Who cares why it happened? The cool stuff is what the survivors have to do afterward!

The other had long unpronounceable names all over it, when what matters is the romantic triangle of a mad lord, his loyal henchman, and the courtesan secretly plotting the lord’s overthrow.

They could both be great stories — but alas, I’ll bet they aren’t. It’s a shame.

And it demonstrates a couple of things:

That it’s not the idea that matters, it’s the execution.*

Why I stopped trying to teach writing — it’s too frustrating, seeing all this potential that’s never going to be properly used. That romantic triangle could be a classic, done right, but the odds that it’s done right are mighty slim.

Feist’s Corollary: There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently untalented writer can’t fuck it up.**

==

* My great-great grandfather was born on an estate in Maine named Execution. It’s kind of a family mystery why anyone would name a house that, but it almost certainly has something to do with the concept that it’s the execution that matters.

The house is now a hole in the ground in the middle of a forest; the only part of the estate that hasn’t gone back to wilderness is the family burial plot, which is maintained by veterans’ groups because there’s a Revolutionary War hero buried there. They consistently put the Memorial Day flag and flowers on the wrong grave, though — there were lots of Goodwins with the same few names. So much for execution.

** This corollary to Watt-Evans’ Law is the only time I have ever seen Ray Feist use the word “fuck.” I think I cleaned it up for the version on my webpage, but this is the original.

Stupid Little Things That Annoy Me More than They Should

From a newsgroup post dated October 24, 2006:

I like Frito-Lay’s “Wavy Lay’s” potato chips. I eat them a lot. For years, I’ve gone (with the help of Julie and the kids) through maybe three or four 11.5 oz. bags a week — I keep an open bag on my desk and nibble on them off and on. (Now you know how I got so fat.)

I deliberately bought the 11.5 oz. size because the larger “Family Size” (which I think is about a pound) was too big — by the time we finished a bag, the last few chips would be soggy, and who wants soggy potato chips?

Last week Frito-Lay did something that I’m sure they thought would be wildly popular with consumers — they changed their standard medium-sized bag from 11.5 oz. to 13.75 oz., for the same price.

But 13.75 ounces is too much. The last few chips get soggy.

So yes, I’m seriously annoyed that they made my favorite food cheaper.

I know it’s perverse of me; I don’t care. 11.5 ounces was just exactly right. 13.75 is too much.

But it didn’t last. They currently sell three sizes — Regular, Family Size, and Party Size. Family Size is 10 ounces, which is a good size.

The Decline and Fall of Science Fiction

Newsgroup post, August 23, 2006:

A while back I agreed to be an award judge again. This is a stupid thing I keep doing — I don’t really think awards are a good thing, I can’t really afford the time, but somehow it’s so flattering to be asked that I keep agreeing.

In this case, I’m one of a panel of judges reading five nominees and choosing one as the winner. They’re all supposed to be science fiction.

So I read them. Well, some of them; I admit to not finishing all five, which I excuse by saying that if I don’t want to finish a book, it hardly deserves to win an award, does it?

Of the five, only two were actually fun to read.

The others were a slog, all of them over-long, with long, slow stretches and not much in the way of excitement. One’s more or less a near-future thriller that alas, isn’t thrilling. The other two are solidly SF, with all the stefnal accoutrements, but just didn’t appeal to me at all.

Of the two I enjoyed, one’s only SF by courtesy; it takes a standard dark fantasy trope and treats it as a scientifically-explainable secret history, rather than as supernatural.

Of the two I enjoyed, one is slickly written, nicely crafted, but didn’t really engage me emotionally very much. The other’s prose is charming, but a bit clunky at times, and some of the science and setting stuff is pretty absurd.

Both have fairly weak story structure, with oddly flat and predictable endings.

None of the five have vivid characters or genuinely exciting action or wonderful, mind-bending ideas.

If this is the best the genre has to show these days, no wonder SF sales are down and fantasy is eating its lunch.

Addendum, May 2, 2017: I don’t know whether this would describe the state of SF now, but it did seem to in 2006. I have no idea what’s happening in SF right now; I’m years behind on my reading.

That’s Not Catchy, That’s Sick!

From a newsgroup post dated June 24, 2006:

(From a thread about why so many songs are about really unhealthy relationships…)

Got one stuck in my head today —

“Get down now baby, let your boss man see
If you can howl just like a dog for me.
Black leather is my favorite game
And you will learn how to scream my name…”

“Ball Crusher”
from the album STEPPENWOLF 7

So what really twisted pop songs can you guys think of?

Here are a few of my favorites:

“Every Breath You Take”
“Possession”
“In Your Room”
“Obsession”
“How Do I Make You”

Those are all stalker songs, more or less; then there’s stuff like Grace Slick’s “Silver Spoon,” about cannibalism.

Damn near anything by the Bloodhound Gang would qualify, I suppose. “Yummy Down On This” and “The Ballad of Chasey Lane” seem especially lurid.

Linguistic Theory

Originally posted to sff.people.lwe on March 23, 2006:

I have a theory — not a very serious one — that languages are optimized for specific uses. German’s good for giving orders, Italian’s good for singing, Spanish is good for gossiping, English is good for explaining.

And Mandarin Chinese is good for arguing.

Any comments? Suggestions for other languages?

Remakes: The Good, the Bad, and the Really Ugly

Newsgroup post from March 3, 2006:

Okay, I didn’t see it, but can someone tell me why they remade “When A Stranger Calls”?

Or “Fun with Dick and Jane”?

Or “The Bad News Bears”?

Or “The Shaggy Dog”?

Or “The Hills Have Eyes”?

Or “The Omen”?

None of these are unjustly-neglected films that deserve to be remade to give them a second chance. None of them are classics due for an updating. They’re just, y’know, old movies. Not even all that old, really –The Shaggy Dog” is the oldest at what, forty?

So why have they all been remade?

And there have been lots more inexplicable remakes in the ten years since then, too.

Blind Spots

(This is very much out of sequence, but caught my fancy.)

A newsgroup post from 6/26/2008:

Elsewhere on the nets, I’ve been reading (but not participating in) a discussion where a couple of people are talking about how they despise modern popular music — “modern” in this case meaning everything after 1955 or so.

What boggles me is their air of superiority — they listen to real music, i.e., classical. All this modern stuff is just noise.

Well, no, it isn’t. You cannot sell people straight-out noise; it’s been tried repeatedly. (Anyone remember what Yoko Ono did before marrying John Lennon?) Obviously, if millions, perhaps billions of people find something enjoyable in popular music, there’s something there to enjoy. No, you cannot fool that many people for that long. If you genuinely can’t hear it as anything but noise, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the music; it means there’s something wrong with you. You are lacking a normal human response.

This is not something to be proud of. You, whoever you are, are a part of the human race, a member of a social species. If you cannot understand, even intellectually, something that provides billions of your fellow humans with pleasure, this does not make you part of an elite; it makes you defective, an outcast, a failure.

I would think this was obvious. Apparently it isn’t.

On the Classification of Classifications

Okay, there have been signs of life among the comments, but I’m still quoting this newsgroup post from August 13, 2005. Note that I said I’d let it stew overnight before pursuing it; well, I never did pursue it. Apparently it didn’t look as interesting the next morning.

So over in “Strange Days,” we’ve been discussing the relative merits of SF and fantasy — which I don’t think is a very good idea, but thinking about genres has just triggered an insight of sorts.

Why are SF and fantasy so often grouped together? Well, partly it’s for historical reasons — fantasy hid in the SF mags for the middle decades of the 20th century, and many authors wrote and write both because of that shared history. I think that it’s partly, though, because both are genres defined by setting.

SF is set in our universe, as altered by new science or technology.

Fantasy is set in a universe other than our own. (It may look just like our own with magic added, but it isn’t, since we have no capability for magic here.)

Compare this with genres defined by plot, such as mystery or romance; you can set a mystery anywhere, but it involves someone solving a crime by evaluating the available evidence; likewise, a romance can be set anywhere, so long as it follows two people as they fall in love and overcome whatever obstacles there may be to consummating that love.

And horror is a genre defined by mood — in fact, Douglas Winter famously said that horror is a mood, not a genre at all.

This has me thinking that we really ought to sort out genres into categories according to whether they’re defined by setting, plot, mood, or some other story element.

It is, however, late, and I have a busy day planned for tomorrow, so I’m going to let this stew overnight rather than pursuing it right now.

Things You Probably Didn’t Know

So here’s the deal: I’m going to keep posting old stuff from my newsgroup until I either run out — and I have over 500 old posts saved — or until we get a good conversation going in the comments.

This one is way out of sequence; I skipped ahead a couple of years. It’s also out of date, unsurprisingly.

September 1, 2008:

So I hold stock in a company called Triarc, which owns Arby’s — they used to own other stuff, but now it’s just Arby’s. They’re planning a merger with Wendy’s, and it needs stockholder approval, so I got this big fat mailing I was looking at just now.

Some of the stuff from the comparable companies I find fascinating.

Did you know Applebee’s is now owned by International House of Pancakes?

Did you know that Hard Rock Cafe International is owned by the Seminole Indians?