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.

This post is a movie review for The Dark Knight, so be forewarned: spoilers be here.

I’m not calling it “The Dark Knight Returns” because The Dark Knight Returns is a comic about an aging Batman coming out of retirement, and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is about a young batman whose still establishing his role in Gotham. Also, because I try to avoid lame puns whenever possible, but primarily it’s my pedantic comic geek nature.

I’ve been talking about this movie with a friend of mine who’s been insanely psyched for it for months, and his level of excitement has scared me, because while I wanted to see the movie, I wasn’t salivating over every morsel of footage. I wasn’t re-watching each and every trailer growing more and more in love with the movie. And now I know why: in my mind, The Dark Knight being a great movie, and probably the best superhero movie ever, was a foregone conclusion. I left the theatre after seeing Batman Begins knowing the Christopher Nolan knew what to do with Batman. He knew where to take him and he knew how far he’d go. There wasn’t a whiff of worry about the sequel so I didn’t need to constant reassurance. And I was right.

At two and a half hours long, this movie could’ve easily been filled with extraneous action shots and unnecessary subplots, but every moment felt necessary. Beyond that, it left me guessing. Last week, when I saw Hellboy 2, I thought it was a great movie, but many of the beats were predictable. A predictable plot doesn’t mean that the movie won’t be enjoyed, because it’s all in the way a story is told, but when a story draws you in so much that you fail to notice the common threads that run through it… that’s something special.

Gordon’s fake death is something I should have seen through, mostly because killing Gordon would’ve resulted in comic fans literally killing Christopher Nolan. And yet, it felt like it could’ve been real, the film played it real so you felt it was real. Similarly, Rachel Dawes’ death felt temporary; a comic book death. But when I look back at those beats, I don’t see illusion, I see inevitability.

Of course Gordon had to fake his death. The silent partnership he founded with Batman was crucial to Batman’s belief that there were still good people in Gotham. We had to see just how far Batman would go when pushed to the brink. We had to know that while he is the Dark Knight he is still a knight; murder is never an option for him. And of course Rachel Dawes had to die. Without her, there’s no catalyst for Harvey’s fall; Gordon’s death may have been enough, but Rachel’s is much more compelling as a catalyst. And beyond that, without Dawes, Batman has a tragic lost love to add to his tragic past. Now, not only is he haunted by his fear and inaction, but also by the consequences of his courage and conflicts. In this way, we can see how Batman Begins was not the origin story, but rather part one. Both of these films work together to create the complex psyche of Batman and they don’t sugar-coat his deep-seated issues.

But as much as this movie was about further developing Batman, Harvey Dent’s downfall was the centre of it all. Aaron Eckhart’s performance sells you on the earnest DA hoping to take the city away from the mobsters; someone who hopes to one day raise a family in that city. And the scars, both mental and physical, caused by that horrific fire both realistically and tragically showed him that what the Joker espoused was in many ways the only sane way to live in a city as crazy as Gotham.

Rachel Dawes, whose life with Harvey and her inevitable death which push him over the edge, is played perfectly by Maggie Gyllenhaal, though I was not offended by Katie Holmes’ performance in the first film. She is strong and secure, and at the same time deeply and vulnerably conflicted by the two loves of her tragically short life. Michael Caine’s work is also a great boon to the film. The storied past of his Alfred give him a greater depth and allows him to provide insight which elevates him above being a mere butler to a member of the silent force behind Batman; the group who inevitably suffer yet fight on despite that certainty.

Of course a review of The Dark Knight wouldn’t be a review without discussing Heath Ledger’s Joker. It goes without saying that Heath Ledger embodied the role perfectly, but it wasn’t just his performance which solidified the Joker as a classic film villain. This was exactly what Joker should be: malevolent, violent, brilliant. The closest thing he has to a rationale is to prove to the world that anyone can be torn down. That a city can be torn apart through terror. The fact that he is so mysterious is his greatest strength. He has no name, he has no past, he has no reason. Of all the versions of the Joker that I’ve seen and read, this one was the best. The tattered clothes he made himself, the warpaint, the scarred smile, his anarchistic aims. I can’t think of a better way to portray that character, and that’s both a testament to him, and to every other person involved in the character’s creation, from the costume designers to the writers.

Some of the nice touches I liked about the movie ranged from the origin of Harvey’s “Two-Face” name which is foreshadowed in the early beats of the story to good effect, and the idea that Batman is “more than a hero” which I read as a subtle reference to Batman being a superhero. I also loved that copycat Batmen were dealt with in the film as they would inevitably arise in that world of burgeoning hope, however misguided.

My only complaint is the Batman voice. Bale’s efforts to differentiate between Batman and Bruce Wayne are admirable but troublesome. Kevin Conroy’s work in the Animated Batman stories is much better, because the difference between the two voices is noticeable but subtle. Here, the gravel in Bale’s throat distracts from what he’s saying, though only slightly and not nearly enough to detract from the major accomplishments of this film.

So based on the comment by Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox, another excellent performance in a film stocked with them, that Batman’s new armor will handle cats, I’m expecting Catwoman to play a role in the next Batman film, though that may have been an unintended reference. But forget about sequels and prequels and all of that junk. This movie stands on its own without any help. The stellar main cast, backed up by strong performances from the supporting cast members, make this not only one of the best superhero movies ever made, more than one of the best comic book movies ever made, but one of the best movies ever made.

My current url scheme means that every blog post I choose has to be very deliberate and thought out. I have to be sure that it won’t conflict with a previous post or one ruminating in my head. So I chose this title knowing that I’ve already reviewed the final episode of Angel before and most likely I won’t again. That said, it’s never easy to give up such a broad title, but this particular story is pretty freakin’ huge in my world.

Recently, JM Straczynski, (or JMS as he is known to awesome people) creator and primary writer for Babylon 5 — a show that I consider one of the best Sci-fi shows ever made, and arguably one of the best shows ever made — posted to his newsgroup a message that all Babylon 5 fans are reading with some pain in their heart:

So I’ve let everyone up here know that I’m not interested in doing any more low-budget DVDs. I’m not interested in doing any low-budget cable things or small computer games. The only thing I would be interested in doing regarding Babylon 5 from this point on is a full-featured, big-budget feature film.

I Love Babylon 5. I Love it with a capital letter and while this is a bit disappointing, I absolutely understand it, and I’m even more impressed by JMS because of it. He could have pumped out low-budget movie after low-budget movie straight to DVD for another decade and every fan would’ve bought it, but he saw that the low-budget was affecting the quality and he wasn’t willing to further sully the B5 universe with that kind of stuff. I never watched the Legend of the Rangers, but I did watch and own The Lost Tales; it was mildly entertaining but it was nowhere near as good as the show was. And the fact that JMS knows and is willing to admit that just makes me respect him more.

Well, the final schedule for the San Diego Comic-Con (or “Comic-Con” as it is known among certain circles) has finally been published. I haven’t written about it here, since my dedicated readership is ostensibly me, but I’m going to Comic-Con so this is a pretty big deal for me. Comic-Con is an epic event in the world of comics, film, television, sci-fi, fantasy, and it’s branching into mainstream entertainment as its fame grows. It’s a Mecca for geeks.

I’ve only given the two big days, Friday and Saturday, a cursory glance, but from what I’ve seen I’ve got a huge challenge prioritizing the various panels and events that I’ll be going to. Already I’ve run into a few painful decisions because of the sheer quantity of events. It’s rare that I run into situations such as these with a multitude of temptations. With the advent of PVR and bittorent, my TV watching habits have become much more open. Where I once stopped watching one show because a better one was on at the same time, now I simply watch the lesser of the two later on. I’ve gotten so used to the asynchronous nature of my media consumption that this schedule was quite a blow to me.

Now I need to go figure out what makes the cut. Wish me luck.

I don’t have them. I don’t understand why anyone would. A guilty pleasure is something you supposedly dislike liking. This is some form of public self-loathing that everyone seems to revel in. Liking The Spice Girls isn’t anything to be ashamed of; it’s just another part of who you are.

This is just another example of overspecialization our society encourages. If you like mostly rock music then you are a Rock Fan. Or maybe you’re a Post-Rock Fan. Or a Neo-Post-Punk-Rock Fan. The hyphenates only grow.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of categorization, in fact my recently started project is very much about deep and robust categorization of data. I simply believe that the fundamentalism many people employ when creating these categorizations is unnecessary.

It’s because of this fundamentalism that people simply decide that to enjoy a particular type of media, you must enjoy only that type and anything else is a “guilty pleasure.” It’s another form of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy; no true fan of Punk Rock could unironically enjoy The Backstreet Boys.

There’s a problem with this kind of mentality because it leads to division. As the breadth of information our world can offer is expanded by the Internet and mass media, we become inundated by more and more types of information and we need deeper hierarchies of data to be able to think about it coherently. But this doesn’t mean we need to apply such strict boundaries on what we take in, or prefer to, to simplify ourselves for the rest of the world.

In the end, everything we are is a part of who we are. Liking high-brow humour does not exclude you from enjoying low-brow humour, nor does enjoying scripted dramatic TV shows exclude you from enjoying Reality TV (though hopefully, having intelligence excludes you from the latter).

I can understand the mentality behind telling people that certain things you enjoy are guilty pleasures because it not only tells them that you like something, but it also tells them something about the thing you like; it’s a sort of implied metadata. But this particular snippet of metadata is grossly overused in our culture, exactly because we seem to have devolved into a world exclusive esoteric niches.

As this post has hopefully exemplified, I’m not a man of extremes; having a broad swath of interests, some overlapping, some seemingly contradictory is a good thing. But guilty pleasures sound ugly to me. It degrades you for saying that you should be above this but you aren’t, it degrades your audience by establishing false pretenses with them, and ultimately it degrades the thing you like. Liking something in spite of its origins or your initial perception is not a cardinal sin, nor should it be, so don’t act like it is.