blair mitchelmore's blog

Let’s talk about Up in the Air, and what it all means. To me anyways.

Ryan Bingham looks like a happy man. He spends a large majority of the year flying around the country firing employees of people too scared to do it themselves. He enjoys this life immensely, relishing the artificial hospitality he receives, the connections he imagines between him and his airline.

We all hope the connections in our lives are real, but we don’t know what other people think, the facades people put up. Ryan does it everyday, meeting perfect strangers and helping them find solace in the unemployment he brings to them and he is very good at that job as scene after scene demonstrates; he always manages to bring people back from the brink, they leave the room comforted if not sated. Bingham’s job is giving false comfort, so he’s surrounded his life with a world of the same.

But then he meets Alex. They bond over which car services are shitty, what hotels offer what perks, and whose flown more in what is, to my eyes, a laughably — and intentionally — superficial meet cute through which they form a simulacrum of a relationship. It never goes beyond that for Alex, but Ryan cares more than he knows. And the movie follows through on that slow burning realization.

The movie works on basically every level, with great performances from all the cast. Clooney played the lead role brilliantly, using his natural charm to convince us of the wisdom of his baggage-free life, up until the final cracks appear, though I think the real surprise is Anna Kendrick. A full third of her film credits right now are from Twilight which doesn’t bode well, but she brings a really great performance.

I’d go see this one. I think it operates mostly as an empty vessel for each viewer, but that doesn’t mean its impact is without value.

Topless Robot, a really cool nerdy blog, had a contest to find awesome nerdy theories. There are a lot of gems in there, but the one that semi-blew my mind the most was the one that attempts to justify midichlorians in the Star Wars universe as a Sith creation. You can read the whole thing at the link, but I’m going to describe a few of my favourite aspects of the theory.

Here’s the setup. Midichlorians are not the cause of Force powers, they are a parasite which feeds on light side Force powers, a parasite designed by the Sith long ago. In addition to feeding on the light side, midichlorians die in the face of the dark side.

So what does this explain? Well, when a Jedi comes up against a Sith they always seem to lose the battle for a while before coming back and winning the day. Why? Well the Sith’s dark side Force powers start to kill off the midichlorians and eventually the Jedi’s powers increase because of the decrease.

What’s more, because of the universal pairing of Force powers with midichlorians — and the Jedis’ failure to understand that correlation does not equal causation — the Jedis have this idea that if you don’t have a midichlorian count you cannot have Force powers. And so the Sith are able to operate in plain sight by merely exerting their dark side powers to limit their exposure.

It’s a really clever theory and there are a few more nuances I’d encourage you to read about at the original post.

There’s been a lot of backlash¹ over the way vampires are being handled in new stories, but the criticism I’ve read seems to suffer from a lack of imagination if anything.

Vampires were, I suppose, a horror tale in the beginning, and then when Bram Stoker created Dracula they became a symbol for seduction and sex. But they were still scary.

But, so the critics say, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer² we’ve had a slow pussification of vampires. They are no longer ravenous beasts who view humans as nothing more than a slow moving meal, who use their overwhelming sexual charisma as a mere tool to entice humans into their arms (and fangs).

I understand that to a degree, especially in light of Twilight³, but I respectfully disagree. Vampires were made to evolve along this path.

Zombies, werewolves, and vampires are the holy trinity of supernatural horror. Zombies are mindless horror, and any expansion of zombies beyond that is likely to be seen by connoisseurs as no longer being zombies. Werewolves are generally seen as a Jekyll/Hyde scenario with the werewolf half being uncontrollable so any shift away from that changes the definition of werewolf. But vampires are at their basest level undead creatures of the night who drink blood for sustenance. You can make a harrowing tale based around the premise of that creature, or you can tell a story of addiction, or a story of human empathy, or a story about the power of free will over base desires.

Basically, there’s much more wiggle room for what’s acceptable for a vampire story by virtue of their base properties. There’s nothing inherently primal and horrifying about vampires, it just so happens that those were the tales told most frequently until recent history.

So, when people make fun of Bill Compton of True Blood for being a “wet blanket” or some similar term because he desires to live as human a life as is possible as a vampire they’re missing the point. Vampires are homogeneous but not in the way everyone thinks. They’re not universally unfeeling unsympathetic sociopaths. Even looking at their source material can show you that.

Humans are not all the same. And vampires are made from humans. Some, when given eternal life and superhuman power, will forget their humanity and become a darker creature something akin to what we imagine as the prototypical vampire; others may shrink at the very thought of being a creature they previously imagined as an affront to God and may very well consider suicide; and many more will see their new powers not as an excuse to behave inhumanely but as a curse they must reject to retain their humanity.

The other supernatural beasts we’re familiar with don’t have this breadth. Zombies become mindless seekers of brains⁴, and werewolves become a creature who is a regular human most of the time but transforms to an uncontrollable monster during a full moon. Vampires don’t follow either of these paths and so they have a much broader palette from which their personalities can be painted.

So Bill Compton being a self-hating vampire isn’t a failing of True Blood, but rather it’s a sign that people are willing to be more complex with vampires in stories. Much like the wise stoic Native American, and the Magic Negro faded away with time replaced by more natural characters, the monstrous vampire stereotype has found itself a mere permutation in a panoply of perspectives⁵. And this isn’t a bad thing.

But with this in mind, we have to accept that a global shift from one persona to another in vampires would be a weakening of the whole. If everyone began to write all vampires as effeminate waifs afraid of human contact, that would be a terrible fate for vampire lore. But if those original sexual seductive monsters are not supplanted but supported by these new unexplored aspects of vampirism, I can hardly see that as a bad thing, for vampires or for storytelling.

1. I should probably be less lazy and find links to the numerous “Vampires are being made lame” articles and blog posts and essays I’ve read over the last few months, but seeing as you’re reading this endnote that clearly didn’t happen [↩]
2. Again, maybe there were pussy vampires before then, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire comes to mind though I don’t know enough of the details of that novel to include it as a canonical example pussy vampires [↩]
3. which has vampires that twinkle rather than smolder when doused with sunlight [↩]
4. Well, not really. The brains thing is sort of a stereotype that everyone knows but for which there’s remarkably little backing in pop culture instances of zombies. [↩]
5. Sometimes, I think I like alliteration too much [↩]

A movie that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to when it first came out was Ghost Town. Now, me not paying attention to a movie is fairly unremarkable: I watch considerably more television which leads to me lagging behind the movie world with respect to most movies, especially when it comes to hidden gems.

That said, I usually hear about the movies I need to see through the internet or my real world friends, but sometimes those networks fail me and in this case it led me to watching Ghost Town without any preconceptions or prejudgement.

I’ve seen Ghost Town twice now and the acerbic wit of Ricky Gervais’ character, Bertram Pincus, remains as entertaining and the romantic arc of the story — pairing Tea Leoni with Gervais in an odd yet effective combination — still feel far more natural than most romantic comedies. Having only seen it twice, I hesitate to place it into my much-vaunted collection of so-called “perfect films,” a collection containing Groundhog Day among others¹, but I think it’s nonetheless one of the finest films I’ve seen in recent memory².

Truthfully, Gervais is barely playing a character here. He is playing Ricky Gervais, for the most part, but that works to the movie’s benefit. The character Bertram Pincus is supposed to be unlikeable but not really; any other actor wouldn’t have been able to walk that delicate line between protagonist and prick.

Of course any romantic comedy wouldn’t work if the relationship didn’t mesh, but in this movie it works perfectly. Both Gervais’ and Leoni’s characters have the appearance of incompatibility but grow together in a very natural method. Despite the initial conceit of the dead husband (Greg Kinnear) playing Cyrano to Pincus’ Christian, almost all of the scenes that play out between the two leads are unencumbered by Kinnear’s shtick, leaving the relationship to come together naturally.

I often deride romantic comedies for leaving out the mundane moments that solidify relationships, the beautiful banality of love, and this movie gets it perfect. From Leoni’s character spotting the price tag on the back of Gervais’ newly bought shirt as they share some hard candies, to the jokes they crack with each other as they confide sadnesses from their past, this movie gets the little things just right. There’s a particularly poignant line from Leoni, responding to Gervais’ confession of what he considers his ‘boring and ordinary’ breakup, that gets my point across:

It’s not boring and ordinary, by the way. We just get the one life, you know. Just one. We can’t life someone else’s or think it’s more important just because it’s more dramatic. What happens matter. Maybe only to us, but it matters.

Unlike other romantic comedies that emphasize the grandiose nature of their story, this one revels in the ordinary. Yes, the trappings of the romantic comedy are all there: the initial deceit, the subsequent relationship, the truth revealed, and the final redemption. It’s all there in fairly formulaic structure, but romantic comedies have this structure for a reason, and in this case it’s, in my opinion, a necessary structure to connect the audience to the story which is playing out in such a subversively naturalistic manner.

What it comes down to though — ignoring all the little nuances, ignoring the growth Pincus undergoes, ignoring the side stories that emphasize the main premise³, ignoring even the path the two leads take to their ultimate relationship — I think the movie is made brilliant by the closing lines “It hurts when I smile,” followed by “I can fix that for you.” So subdued, yet perfectly aligned with the characters and the bond they’ve formed. If more romantic comedies were like this, the world would be a better place.

1. Though they’re certainly not all romantic comedies despite the example given [↩]
2. I’m not claiming that it’s better than all the other movies I’ve seen recently, but for a romantic comedy it is moving without being (too) heavyhanded, romantic without being saccharine, and has sincerity without cloying sentimentality. In other words, it does its job remarkably well. [↩]
3. The ghost stories are mostly filler, but I still found them moving and they certainly emphasized the idea that the simplest acts can mean so much. [↩]

The Chronicle of Higher Education published recently what some might consider a screed against Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style — or Strunk and White as it is often referred — in honour of the semicentennial of the original 1959 release. I’m a great lover of English, and Strunk and White was incredibly influential in codifying my initial sense of good taste when writing, so I had to see what could be so bad about it.

One of the “rules” of Strunk and White the author of this article, Geoffrey K Pullum, notes chidingly is “write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs,” except it’s not a rule; it’s what the book calls an approach.

The book is separated to five segments: Elementary Rules of Usage, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style. That last section has some questionable advice, some which I consider outdated and therefore ignore, or rather I put less weight on them when I make my decisions.

On the other hand, I, to this day, agree with all the Rules of Usage and following them does indeed generate more pleasing sentences. In the rare cases when those rules can be broken, they should be broken knowingly and by someone well versed in their proper usage. For example, splitting up a sentence into briefer, less grammatically correct, sentences can affect the reading of a line of a novel, giving greater urgency to the words. Overall, those elementary rules are truly elemental to good writing. Pullum criticises little of this section, and I’ll save my response to that for later in the post.

Following the Rules of Usage, there are the Elementary Principles of Composition. The one rule in this section Pullum derides in particular is “use the active voice.”

We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

Pullum failed to notice the subsequent paragraph which discusses that very point:

If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”

My first visit will always be remembered,

it becomes indefinite: is it the writer or some undisclosed person or the world at large that will always remember this visit?

Which is absolutely correct. And completely unaccounted for by Pullum. He then criticises the book for three of its four example passive sentences in its “Passive vs Active” sentence pairs not actually being passive sentences. At least not grammatically speaking. Of course, that’s not really what that section is about. What is specifically stated at the start of the section is “the active voice is usually much more direct and vigorous than the passive.” While some loose grammatical terminology is discussed, the crux of the argument centred on the passivity of the sentence. And no one can deny that “there were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” is considerably more passive than “dead leaves covered the ground.” It was the indirect way in which these sentences got their point across that chafed Strunk and White. Perhaps they could’ve done better in their description of the difference between their examples, but the advice is no less valid; nitpicking the difference between grammatical passivity and semantic passivity seems childish.

Immediately following this minutiae-obsessed drone about passive voice comes an attack of another rule of composition: put statements in the positive form. The critique of this is once again a case of nitpicking. Because Strunk and White wrote the sentence “the adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place,” which includes a dreaded negation, Pullum calls them out as hypocrites and purveyors of inaccurate advice. Naturally, while doing so, he completely ignores the actual content of the section.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, not as a means of evasion.

So, because Strunk and White wrote a sentence which definitively asserted that adjectives cannot replace well chosen nouns — that is, as a means of denial — they are hypocrites.

And when Pullum isn’t misrepresenting Strunk and White’s advice, he cherry-picks from the collected vocabulary of English to refute their supposed arguments.

For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive “should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb.” The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk’s original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split.”) But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on the adverb. It is completely wrong.

Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like “The dean’s statements tend to completely polarize the faculty” places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, “The dean’s statements tend to polarize the faculty completely.”

I am an avid supporter of the split infinitive, primarily because the arguments against it are rooted in the limitations of English’s progenitors. And “to polarize completely” does place more emphasis on the completeness of the polarization than “to completely polarize.” But the example which Strunk and White use — “to diligently inquire” versus “to inquire diligently” — is the exact opposite. (And really, is it placing more emphasis on the boldness of it to say “to go boldy” than “to boldly go?”) Strunk and White note the difficulty of split infinitives later on when they write that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split,” and describe the decision the author must take as “a matter of ear.”

Beyond these childish criticisms, none of which carry any real persuasive power, though, is the deeper problem: Pullum is a linguist, and an idiotic one. Following these “scathing” criticisms, he moves on to a different tact: the appeal to popularity.

An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.

Consider the explicit instruction: “With none, use the singular verb when the word means ‘no one’ or ‘not one.’” Is this a rule to be trusted? Let’s investigate.

• Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for “none of us.” There is one example of it as a subject: “None of us are perfect” (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.
• Download and search Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of “none of us” with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural (“I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset”).
• Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural (“None of us ever do”).

It seems to me that the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.

The naïvete here is a little baffling, to be honest. How a linguist can claim a style guide published in 1959 should not only mirror the style of how text was written fifty years hence but also remain completely valid fifty years later is beyond me. Language is constantly changing. Maybe it was considered archaic to write in the manner of Oscar Wilde or Bram Stoker in the wake of the scores of literature-changing novels that emerged in the intervening fifty years. We don’t suggest using the term “help meet” to refer to women anymore, either.

Despite this utter lack of understanding of how languages change — from a linguist, no less — Strunk and White once again have preempted this false criticism:

A plural verb is commonly used when none suggests more than one person or thing.

None are so fallible as those who are sure they’re right.

And yes, the appeal to popularity should carry some weight when writing a book like The Elements of Style, but I’m sure that there are just as many examples of “none of you is perfect” that Pullum either ignored because they weren’t written by authors as famous as Stoker and Wilde or simply to prove his point.

But, for the moment, let’s ignore the appeals to popularity, and the straw men arguments he attempts to construct, and the cherry-picked sentences; there’s one sentence that, in my opinion, discredits any analysis Pullum may proffer.

There are many other cases of Strunk and White’s being in conflict with readily verifiable facts about English.

The Elements of Style is not a formal description of the language and its syntax. It is not there to describe what is possible in English. It describes one way to write well, not what can be written.

Many sentences can be written which meet the grammar of English and make no sense at all. Even further, only a limited subset of the infinite permutations of possible sentences that can be written will read well.

To talk of the “facts about English” in this way, when the subject matter is explicitly discussing the style of English, is absurd. It borders on dishonesty. It’s true that some of Strunk and White’s advice isn’t universal, but to claim that they considered it such is farcical. Strunk and White offer up intelligent guidelines while admitting that “the shape of our language is not rigid; in questions of usage we have no lawgiver whose word is final.” Pullum seems content to throw the baby out with the bathwater, choosing to ignore all of Strunk and White’s inestimable advice because of a few outliers in our complex and beautiful language.

Note: I don’t claim to be a porn historian (more of an archivist, really) but I don’t think porn attained any level of mainstream notoreity before Deep Throat and its ilk. If I’m mistaken about the history of porn, I would love any and all corrections.

Porn will never be a truly mainstream form, but it will never be a completely ostracized form again. Pandora’s Box, as it were, has been opened. When porn first lept from the dirty underbelly of America and made its way into mainstream cinema in the late 60’s and 70’s, a part of it was that porn stars were struggling actors who showed up for auditions and found themselves wondering whether or not they should shave their pubes. And so there was a generation of porn stars hoping to make the leap to mainstream cinema. Deep Throat wasn’t made with any particular mainstream success in mind, at least not from what I’ve read, but the tongue-in-cheek plot, the satirical writing, and the general sexual freedom being examined by the public at large at the time made it a mainstream sensation.

For a brief period, porn and regular film even intermingled with cult hits like Deep Throat and big epics like Caligula. But ultimately the stars of Deep Throat accomplished nothing of note in non-pornographic film, and mainstream cinema slowly moved away from the explicitness of the X-rating. Porn would continue on with the cheesy plots and soft focus camera work of the 70’s for many subsequent years, but ultimately the conservatives won: Porno Chic was dead.

But now, in the past four years or so, the porn industry has introduced many a pervert to a new breed of porn star. Women like Sasha Grey, Bobbi Starr, Joanna Angel, and many more. These women don’t have the aspirations of the old-school porn stars. Just a little over a decade ago, with stars like Jenna Jameson, porn was merely a means to and end, which often meant mainstream success. But these women have no such desires.

There has always been a sort of underground fetish for extreme acts in porn, but it has always remained lingering in relative obscurity. But now, this new generation of porn star revels in expressing themselves through the sexual boundaries of both them and their sex partner. Much of their work has gone towards revolutionizing the sterilized sex scenes of the past — moving beyond the decades-old blowjob, missionary, doggie-style, facial pattern seen in most porn of the past — but their dislike for the pointless “Please fix my car, Mr. Mechanic. I’ll do anything” stories of yore is also quite well known. Sasha Grey recently worked on James Gunn’s PG Porn, which satirizes ridiculous porn plots, and her distaste for these old cliches was noted in her interviews regarding the project.

Some might say that this is nothing new. The Gonzo genre of porn — wherein the camera is a character in the scene and the actors don’t act but merely fuck — has been on the rise for quite some time. But this new brood goes beyond that; they bring passion to the job. For quite some time, porn relied on large silicone-filled breasts to distract viewers from the look of complete disinterest on the faces of the stars and the middling moans of mock pleasure. The new generation is much more natural looking, and uses experimentation and enthusiasm to arouse their audience; smiling, which was once essentially verboten, has become a staple of the porn starlets repertoire.

It’s true that some of these porn stars will attain mainstream celebrity by virtue of porn’s relative integration into the mainstream, but none of these women seem to have that as a goal. Sasha Grey has discussed what her future goals are and they consist of eventually starting her own porn company and continuing to push sexual boundaries on film. Obviously, she didn’t turn down Steven Soderbergh when he cast her as the lead in his upcoming film The Girlfriend Experience, but it hasn’t changed her goals by any appreciable amount.

Bobbi Starr, another new starlet whose work is also primarily adventurous extreme scenes, has different goals. From her wikipedia page:

As of 2008, Starr is a student studying pre-med, with the aim of becoming a gynecologist. Her intent is to work within the adult entertainment industry, where she has identified a lack of female gynecologists.

Joanna Angel runs her own studio, BurningAngel, which focuses on so-called Alt-Porn films. She also contributed a chapter to the book Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography and like all the women who inspired this article, they are changing porn. Most of these women are not what you would expect of a porn star. They’re intelligent, highly motivated, and love their job. To me, there’s a perfect storm of change happening in the porn industry. The women who keep the industry alive are taking an active interest in the managing of the industry, and they feel no stigma; they want more than to be successful within the industry, they want to improve the industry.

And that’s ultimately the key here. President Obama said in his address to the joint session of Congress “I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” People were quick to correct him that American did not invent the automobile, but they did invent the automobile industry. Henry Ford, for all his flaws, saw an industry and wanted more than to succeed within it, he wanted to improve it.

Did I just compare Sasha Grey to Henry Ford? You’re damn right I did.

I admit that I’m going a little overboard with this hagiographical ode to porn, but at the same time, there are many feminists who still cling to the idea that porn is little more than rape and a means of sexually demeaning women. Neither is the truth, but mine’s a little closer to it. The chauvinism of the porn industry is dying if it’s not already dead. The industry is changing. The women are taking it back.

I watched Coraline last night and it’s going to stick with me for a while. The movie was really well done overall — though the structuring of the final adventures reminded me a little too much of the classic video game structure — but what really worked for me was the 3D visuals. I haven’t seen any of these new generation 3D movies before so it was a totally novel experience and was also completely mind-blowing. It went far beyond the gimmicky “ooh something is poking out of the screen” shots that permeate old-school 3D. Those are there to be certain, but the much more breathtaking and beautiful sites are the simple scenes augmented by the third dimension. Beautiful scenery shots transform from paintings to giant dioramas with an almost unreal depth that both unnerves and comforts. Things in the background are not merely smaller, but farther away. It adds to the surreal environment in which Coraline is set, but even for more traditional stories it could drastically alter the movie-going experience and the depth of the visuals available to the director. I don’t see it supplanting traditional two dimensional filmmaking but it’s nevertheless a remarkable vision and, now that I know what I’ve been missing, given a choice between a 2D and 3D playing of a film I’d almost certainly opt for the latter.

Dan Meth posted his Trilogy Meter and because I’m a pedant and a geek I thought I’d raise a little umbrage over a couple of points.

First off, a lot of these aren’t trilogies. Trilogies need to have a consistent narrative and at least some semblance of progressive story. If the next Batman movie isn’t by Christopher Nolan then those three movies put together are not a trilogy; at least, not necessarily. Back to the Future is a trilogy because the story is consistent throughout and each movie sets up the next. Going back to my point about films changing hands mid-trilogy belying the term, the X-Men films switch from Bryan Singer to Brett Ratner for the final film. But, and here’s where it gets tricky, they are still a trilogy because the second one sets up the Dark Phoenix storyline that the third one carries out, however poorly.

I honestly can’t say much about Rambo, because I haven’t seen any of them, but at the same time my intuition regarding Rambo is that the films merely follow the same character. Are any three consecutive Bond films a trilogy simply because the same character heads the film? I give the Die Hard movies a pass because the third one involved Hans Gruber’s brother, but it was different from the previous two in almost every other way. Similarly, I have trouble considering the Indiana Jones movies a trilogy; but there is a tenuous theme that runs throughout the movies regarding the growth and development of Indiana Jones that qualifies them, but I flip-flop on this subject.

We tend to have this desire to collect films into sets of three, even when they’re not a set of three. Which brings me to my biggest question about this chart. Which trilogy does it mean when it rates Planet of the Apes? Does it mean the first three Planet of the Apes movies? Because I don’t see how you could interpret those as a cohesive trilogy. The second one ends with the world being incinerated by a doomsday bomb. The third, fourth, and fifth movies are a wholy different animal and are in fact a consistent trilogy with an overarching storyline threading through the three films.

Not everything is a trilogy, but our pattern matching monkey-brains still have a fascination with the number three. The same circumstances don’t make movies a part of a trilogy. The same actors don’t make a movie a part of a trilogy. The same characters don’t make a movie a part of a trilogy. A consistent theme or ongoing story does. I know I’m being finicky about this, but people throw the term trilogy around for any set of three films and they’re not all trilogies.

There’s been a lot of Heroes hate ever since the season one finale disappointed everyone. I fell out of love with the show a few episodes earlier than that but because I’m a TV junkie I kept watching. And watching. And watching.

Most recently the hate has been pushed onto Hiro, and here’s why. The show sucks. It has nothing to do with Hiro, or his current journey. At least not in particular. What’s wrong with Hiro, is what’s wrong with Heroes.

Abuse of Awesomeness

During season one, one of the recurring characters was played by Richard Roundtree. AKA Motherfucking Shaft. So obviously he was playing a badass with awesome powers. Wait, what?

Shit. Well, he’s in a coma but he can wake up and reveal his awesome superpowers and kick all sorts of ass. Wait, what?

Fuck. Well, he’s dead — and it appears the only thing his death accomplished was to get Peter laid — but Hiro is all about the time travel, so Shaft can still show up in the past and be even more awesome because we didn’t see it coming!! Wait, what?

Oh, come on! You bring the guy back so that he can tell Peter that Love Is The Answer?! And what was his power anyways? Talking to the future? That’s a retarded power, and I don’t even think it was him doing it so it’s especially crappy.

And then, following their atrocious treatment of Shaft — not to mention the purposeless character Charles Deveaux’s very existence — they pump up the awesomeness by casting Bruce Boxleitner for a recurring role during season three. Except that he’s in two fucking scenes in total and they were pretty close to useless in the long run. My point is they’ve got a huge problem with follow-through. And not just with their stunt casting. Everybody remembers that most unheinous moment early on in season one of Heroes where time stops for Peter Petrelli and Ninja Hiro From The Future shows up to deliver him a message.

Future Hiro was fucking sweet! He spoke English without the accent; he carried around a katana; and the slimming lines on that leather trench coat really worked for him. He came from five years in the future but now three years later — possibly four given the sporadic time jumps the show does — he’s still a dweeb who talks in broken English and wears the office clothes for the job he hasn’t been to in years at this point. When Lost showed Jack depressed, addicted, and bearded up three years in the future, they followed the fuck through.

Discontinuity

Retcons are a staple of the comic-book world from which Heroes steals its ideas draws inspiration, but in the comic world, retcons typically come about because of universe altering events or because the story is being reimagined for a new generation. But changing the dynamics of the foundations of your characters doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In the series premiere, Angela Petrelli is arrested for shoplifting socks because she “wants to feel alive.” Presumably because the six months she’s lived without the love of her life, Arthur Petrelli, have left her feeling alone and empty; without her better half. No wait, she poisoned him and was planning on killing him even further just to make sure he was dead before her son walked in mid-homicide. It’s these emotional discontinuities that really kill Heroes.

Does Peter ever think about Simone Deveaux? Or the Irish chick he erased from existence? Does Hiro think about Charlie? Do any of these characters think about the consequences of their actions, or the pains in their past? I don’t see any of that in the performances or in the writing.

The characters perform as the plot requires. Their emotions exist to serve the plot. Their powers shift to drive the plot. Everything about the show is hollow and meaningless. You can change the pronouns of the last four sentences to refer to Hiro and the statements would stand, but the show, and how it treats its characters is the real problem.

I just finished watching Speed Racer, so I thought I’d jot down a few notes about it. First of all, I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Some of the pleasure was at the badness of it, but overall it was a good little movie. The critics are right though, it’s mostly a mess. A pretty mess though.

The reasoning of the bad guys is never fully fleshed out — there’s some sort of merger in the works but why it’s so essential that Speed Racer not win the final race is really left unclear — but for the most part that’s not crucial. The movie might think it’s better than it is, but as long as you ignore that conceit you get to watch some really colourful and crazy car racing.

The visual style is distinct and consistent, it’s just really fucking insane at the same time. While talking back and forth during a race there’s a particularly interesting set of shots where the (virtual) camera quickly pans from Speed to Trixie who is behind him. It’s a little disorienting, and almost certainly would’ve caused some nausea from those susceptible to that sort of visceral reaction to visual insanity, but it’s also refreshing to see a director exploring what novel visuals can be accomplished with green screen filming rather than simply using it as an excuse not to build sets.

Frankly, the movie is weakest when nobody’s racing. There’s a scene here and there outside of the races that handles itself well enough — Racer X’s discussion of why he continues to race despite the unending corruption in the racing industry in particular that’s reminiscent of some of the themes of the final season of Angel, though obviously not as well done — but overall this movie is mindless but pretty racing.

But racing is what Speed Racer is all about, right? Did anyone go into that movie expecting anything beyond a paper thin plot designed to get Speed into the Mach 5 as many times as they could? If they did, they probably hated the movie. Luckily, I had lower expectations. I wanted pretty racing, and I got it in spades.

The races often confused due to rapid and frequent jump cuts which have become common in fight sequences over the past decade, and the vomit of colours on the screen certainly didn’t help comprehensibility, but it still made enough sense to enjoy the races. As I sat slightly tensed with Speed edging toward the finish line I had to wonder if NASCAR fans see those 3 hours of turning left they enjoy so much as exciting and tense as the races of this movie.

Ultimately though this movie is forgettable; not offensively bad or impressively good, a little too long for its own good, but perhaps worth the time to see it once for the impressive visuals and unique driving style the virtual cars employ.

There’s been a bit of talk about Tom Cruise’s new movie Valkyrie and how Tom Cruise speaks without a German accent despite playing a German character. I don’t understand that really. Having your characters speak in outrageous accents didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why exactly is it offensive to have a Chinese character say “Me so solly” and yet it’s expected for a German character to speak like “Zis und Zat”? Aren’t those really the same thing?

I’d understand those sorts of accent in a film which is based on English speaking events, but the events of Valkyrie all took place in the real world in German. The fact that those events have been transcribed to English means that the audience should simply accept that some invisible translation has occurred for their sake. (Also, I know that many Americans during World War 2 spoke German fluently as a disguise, why couldn’t Germans have done the same thing?)

A couple reviews I’ve read — mostly through blogs, traditional media wouldn’t dare be so glib about a WW2 movie — essentially cast aside the movie because of the “unauthentic” accents. The people the film is based on spoke perfect and unaccented German. It was their native tongue. So it makes sense to me that any retelling of this story in the English speaking world would either be entirely in German (unfeasible for commercial reasons) or use English as the primary language and treat the characters as if it was their native tongue (what seems to have been done). Then again, I haven’t seen the movie so I should probably just shut my mouth until I can decide how distracting the American accent is.

Oh boy. I was on the IMDB message boards early last year because someone was talking about how weird it is when male actors get grossed out about kissing other men for their roles. Here’s my response.

It’s called preference. I don’t want to kiss guys and I think it would be gross. Just because you accept other people’s homosexuality doesn’t mean you have no problem performing homosexual acts.

In some ways it’s right, but at the same time going back to that thread now I see myself as woefully ignorant. Actors are paid to perform roles. And most of the actors who get interviewed about kissing against sexual preference (truthfully, no-one ever asks NPH how weird it is to kiss hot chicks all the time) are famous enough that if they didn’t want to kiss a guy, they wouldn’t have to. And really, even if you’re a struggling actor desperate for a role and you’ve got an audition for a gay character who goes through an intense and intimate sexual awakening (not that I’m working on a screenplay or anything) why wouldn’t you do it? A kiss is only as intimate as you make it. A kiss is only as sexual as you make it. And all of that happens in your mind. It has nothing to do with how deep your tongue goes down their throat or how hard you push your face onto theirs.

Beyond all of that, I’ve grown up a fair bit since then. I’m not wet in the pants to make it with a dude, but it’s not something that disgusts me any longer. And there’s always a chance the dude’s a good kisser.

The cool thing to do now in TV and film is to go “dark.” That is, to take a character down a turbulent, depressing, and possibly disturbing path to bring greater depth to them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something wrong with the idea that merely having “dark” stories brings character development or that it improves the quality of your stories. (There is also the implied assumption that to bring depth to your character you need to take this darker path; if you need an example of excellent character growth without the trappings of “dark” storytelling just watch The Office.)

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.

Lots of people are railing against Marvel Studios and Jon Favreau for replacing Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle for the upcoming Iron Man 2 film as well as The Avengers. You know what? As much as I strive for continuity in sequels, this isn’t really fazing me.

I don’t know much of Howard’s other work, but I do know that his portrayal of Jim Rhodes in Iron Man was one of the weaker aspects of the film. It wasn’t a bad portrayal by any count, but it wasn’t great and it certainly wasn’t the best interpretation of the character. So as much as I want to yell at the studio and Favreau for holding out on cash or some other reason, I have to believe that they had similar misgivings about his performance and decided to go in a different direction.

One particularly moronic guy on the Ain’t it Cool News talkback said “Empire would have been great with a replacement Han, eh?” Let’s replace 1) Empire with Dark Knight 2) would have with was 3) Han with Rachel Dawes. And then replace that question mark with a fucking period. It depends on the fucking situation moron! And I think that in this instance it might have been worth it. Obviously we’ll see, it’s always a gamble, but I’ve seen a decent amount of Cheadle’s work so I’m pretty hopeful about the whole situation.

Star Trek Captains have a heavy weight to burden; they not only have to carry the responsibility of the welfare of their entire crew, but depending on the week they could be making first contact with a new species, infiltrating secret Cardassian strongholds, or bolstering security back at home. And with all of this, they have the constant awareness that they are being compared against the greats of the past with every action and decision. Luckily, ever since Captain Kathryn Janeway came back from the Delta Quadrant, every Star Fleet Captain has one less burden. Because they’ll never be as bad as Janeway.

I know that sounds like a pithy remark with nothing behind it, but it really isn’t. Every other Star Trek captain in the canon of Star Trek (which excludes the novels thankfully) is better than her. Even that douche that got Kirk stuck in the Nexus in Generations. Even that shitty I’m-so-goddamned-evil captain in the episode of Voyager where the other Starfleet ship lost in the Delta Quadrant shows up and much more worse for the wear.

Now you might think that her ship is in such good condition because she’s managed to avoid conflict and stayed out of interplanetary politics in this backwater ditch of a quadrant. If you thought that, clearly you’ve never seen the show.

Janeway didn’t survive because of her natural leading ability, like Kirk; Janeway didn’t survive because of her subtle politics and ability to empathize with opposing views, like Picard (among other reasons); and Janeway certainly didn’t survive because she had a deep spiritual connection with the plight of those around her and was destined to play a part in shaping the worlds and future before her. Janeway survived because every week, there was a new particle discovered, or existing one exploited for purposes completely unrelated to all previous known usages, that was exactly what her ship needed to get out of the Tight Jam of the Week.

And her ship wasn’t pristine because of the military strategies she employed in her frequent needless battles, but because the budget required exterior shots of the ship to be repeated in new episodes to make the CGI department cost-effective. Every single battle that Voyager went through in those seven years in the Delta Quandrant — always 75 years away from the Alpha Quadrant even though every season they would find at least one shortcut that shaved five to ten years off their journey — was more destructive than anything the Enterprise D suffered but every week the ship was in tip-top shape once again. Even Enterprise made some lame attempts to show that not everything can be repaired without a starbase and some dry dock time with their body-snatching space station episode. But Voyager doesn’t need things like ship repair and shore leave.

Admittedly, some of these complaints are about the show in general, but the fact is the captain is the show. People will prefer The Next Generation if they prefer Picard. But even ignoring the completely unrealistic journey that Voyager took, there are plenty of things wrong with Janeway.

She was a hypocrite of the highest degree. The very first episode of the show, Janeway barters with a tribal species known as the Kazon for some information. What does she barter with? Water, something she can generate unlimited supplies of through Alpha Quadrant replicator technology, but is incredibly rare on the dying desert planet on which those Kazon reside. Eventually Neelix, her tentative ally up until now, destroys all the water they brought just to fuck with the Kazon. Any other captain would have kicked that rat-faced little shit off their ship then and there. But she keeps him around because he knows his way around the Delta Quadrant. If she had seen the rest of the first season already, she would know how little Neelix actually knew about the area, but even without that foresight, trusting someone who acts so duplicitously is an idiotic move.

That’s not completely hypocritical, although her over-the-top reactions to lesser crimes later on in the series show that she has absolutely no memory of past actions; what’s truly mind-bogglingly hypocritical is when she next runs into the Kazon, instead of offering replicator technology and a sincere apology for the actions of one fool under her stead, she claims moral and intellectual superiority by telling the Kazon that they shouldn’t have fucked with Voyager and that she couldn’t give them replicators, or even replicate supplies for them, because it would violate the Prime Directive: noninterference in undeveloped civilizations.

The closest the Prime Directive ever got to noninterference with already space-faring species was when Picard refused to repair the rickety shuttles used by the two planets to deliver the “medicine” for a long-lived plague from one planet to another. Not only was that an exceptional situation where Picard used the Prime Directive to stick it to the planet of smug drug dealers, but it was also exceptional because their ships were actually inferior. The Kazon had warp drives, a massive interstellar pseudo-empire, and could hold their own in battle against virtually every adversary in their midst, Voyager included. That’s hardly an inferior species. No-one would begrudge her for making peace with the Kazon through a cultural and technological exchange.

But that’s all semantics and law interpretation, right? We know now that Janeway has a very strict interpretation of the Prime Directive, so everything’s good. Right? Well, it is until the Hirogen show up and beat the living snot out of Voyager (another instance of the reset button enacting miraculous repairs) and after two episodes of pointless World War 2 holodeck simulations with the Hirogens as the Nazis (why they wouldn’t chose to be the allies is left unclear) Janeway gives them holodeck technology and databases of pre-existing holodeck programs to give them a head start! But at least she’s consistent. Within an episode. (And even that isn’t a guarantee, I just don’t have the time to do more than vaguely recall the idiocy of this show.)

I recall when a lot of people would get angry at disliking Janeway because she was a female captain, so she’d have to be a little tougher. First of all, Star Trek is supposed to be a colour-blind, gender-blind, species-blind co-operative of planets, so why exactly would the sexism of our society be relevant to her? Second of all, she wasn’t a little tougher, and she wasn’t just being an assertive woman. Her character changed depending on the episode, for the sake of a plot. One episode she’d be a tough-as-nails take-no-prisoners hardass, and the next episode she’d be a soft demure lady-in-waiting who had fallen for the Brave Man of the Week. It’s not that people can’t be both those things, or that people can’t change and grow over time, it’s that these disparate aspects of her personality don’t complement each other and they don’t mesh together naturally.

When we see Picard get stabbed by a Nausicaan as a rebellious youth, it’s not a sudden jarring discontinuity in the character, it informs the character we’ve come to know and love. Picard was a complete character, as was Sisko, but Janeway is woefully outgunned here, both by the calibre of the acting but also by the writing and characterizations. Again it’s not that her characteristics couldn’t work together, or couldn’t work together in a female character; Voyager could have been the best Trek up until that time if done properly, but it wasn’t so we’re left with the piece of shit that unfortunately stinks up the rest of Star Trek canon.

I could go on for much longer (I really really could) ranting and foaming at the mouth about all the things that Voyager did wrong and why Janeway is at the heart of most of these problems, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t know of anyone who genuinely enjoys all or most of Star Trek — that is, not just Voyager — and doesn’t dislike Voyager, and Janeway herself, to a certain degree. And it’s not hard to see why. She was an egocentric and fickle, yet stubborn, captain who, despite years of efforts on the writers’ parts, never became a sympathetic or respected character.

It was Voyager and Janeway (and we’ll never forget the horror that was Seven of Nine) that degraded the image of Star Trek to the world. Deep Space Nine was never as popular as The Next Generation or Voyager, but it was consistently better than the latter and was at least as good as the former. With each new year Voyager got worse, and DS9 got better. But when Deep Space Nine left the airwaves, Voyager had to stand for all of Star Trek on its own. It took only a year, but without the credibility of Deep Space Nine to bolster the weaker Voyager, Star Trek was soon tarnished and that scar remained for Enterprise’s entire run. Enterprise didn’t do much to repair Trek’s image until its later years but it was still better than Voyager on its worst days.

I sometimes wonder what the landscape of Star Trek would be like right now if Voyager and to a lesser degree Enterprise hadn’t failed their progenitors so horribly. Would we still have a relaunch movie coming out next year? Or would Enterprise be closing off its seven year run with a Deep Space Nine movie coming out and a new series exploring the troubled lives of intergalactic starfleet explorers as they journey to our nearest neighbour galaxy. Who knows what wonders they would have found in that deep void. And what terrors.