firefly

do not put shepherd book in your book

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

[Internet access is back. 🙂 I would have posted this tonight anyway (I wrote it on my phone), but since I'm doing it on the computer I'm adding italics in the appropriate places.]

I've written before about how much I'm influenced by movies (and radio drama), but like everything else there are dangers. Novels are not movies (though there are connections and similarities).

Shepherd Book was a character in the TV show Firefly. He was a preacher ("Shepherd" is a title), and he came on the ship Serenity as a passenger. He had left the abbey where he had been living, and he was apparently eager to travel and see the universe again.

He boarded the ship as a passenger, and he just stayed through the rest of the series, somewhere between a passenger and a crew member.

He turned out to have a lot of knowledge of the criminal world – both its methods and its inhabitants.  He also had a lot of knowledge of the government, including its covert operations, and he carried an ID card that got him immediate medical assistance from a government facility when he was shot. And he was obviously very experienced with firearms.

None of this was ever explained (though the other characters certainly did ask). In the movie Serenity, the captain says that Book has to explain how he knows so much.

"No. I don't," was his reply.

This would be very problematic in a novel. Too much unexplained (and almost always convenient) knowledge, too many disparate character elements. Not that you have to explain everything that your characters know, as I've written about before, but you do have to explain some things, and the more incongruous the elements are the more you might want to consider explaining them.

On the show, though, the character works just fine (and better than fine – Book is a wonderful character). But the writers of Firefly had one advantage that novelists don't have: Ron Glass, the actor who played Shepherd Book. Glass made the character work and seemed to be having a great time doing it.

I don't say this as a criticism of the show's writers, by the way. They knew who they were writing for (the great advantage of writing episodic television) and they knew what he could do. But people who write on paper (or in pixels) don't have that, so we have to do things a bit differently.

um… forgot my anniversary :-)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 6 Comments

So, even though I was thinking about it ahead of time, I completely missed my blog’s seven-year anniversary. Ooops.

Now I’ll definitely have to get a nice gift. Seventh anniversary gifts should be copper or wool, from what I read. Hmmm.

I know. What about a cunning hat? It’s made of wool, and it’s partly copper-colored.

a cunning hat, as worn by Jayne on Firefly
When you walk down the street in this hat, people know you’re not afraid of anything.

prometheus seen

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

Following up on my earlier post. I did finally manage to see Prometheus.

Well.

On the positive tip, there are some incredible scenes (no spoilers, but I'm referring to a scene of heroic self-sacrifice, and a scene with a surgical procedure). Fassbender, Theron, and Idris Elba are very good, and Noomi Rapace is great. I think the movie's many flaws would be more apparent with another actress in that role.

Many things look great, but that's mostly because they look like Alien. (Oh, and by the way, this is a prequel to Alien – you can see the pieces shifting into their proper alignment – and I think that Ridley Scott's comment that it wasn't a prequel but that it "shares some DNA" was intended as a joke, given how important DNA is to the film.)

The problem is that, common DNA aside, this movie loses the great virtues of Alien (a defined space, a discreet and clearly-defined group of characters, a hidden menace, and a clear connection between the plot and the underlying meaning) and replaces with with a lot of different elements that don't hold together.

Do you want to enjoy it as a scifi adventure film? It's constantly poking you with its "I have deeper meaning!" stick. Do you want to think about the deeper questions? Some of them the movie doesn't answer, and others it is clearly leaving for a possible sequel, where (I have the feeling) they won't be definitely answered either.

When I failed to see this movie the first time, I saw The Avengers instead, and they have an interesting difference, and an interesting similarity.

The difference is that The Avengers has basically two ambitions: to entertain you for two hours, and to get you to want to see all the various movies which will follow it (more Iron Man, more Thor, more Captain America, I guess possibly some Hulk, possibly some Black Widow, and more Avengers). In that, with the caveats I wrote about before, it succeeds. Prometheus has more ambitions, but it succeeds at some and fails at others.

The similarity, and this has application to anybody who does serial storytelling, is that neither movie stands alone. The Avengers has to follow the four movies which preceded it, and lead into the ones that follow, and that constricts the options at every turn. Prometheus has to leave things in their proper alignment for Alien, and it also has to leave the audience wanting Prometheus II. [Later: and as was pointed out by a commenter here, Prometheus is also apparently trying to be a remake of Alien itself (there are quite a few plot points which are clear echoes of the earlier film).]

This is possible to do well, however (and a good thing, too, for me 🙂 ), and thats illustrated by Serenity (which is a better movie than either of these). Serenity had to follow a failed TV show (Firefly), so it has to take up plot threads and characters from the show, but it also has to bring in the audience that never saw the show (presumably the majority). It doesn't do this perfectly, but it does do it very well (I saw it before I saw the show, and am now backtracking to watch the episodes). The ending leaves the door open for more stories, but it does end, and quite satisfyingly. And, like Prometheus, it raises big questions, but it is comfortable with them (as opposed to Prometheus, which always has one foot in and one foot out), and it's clear how the themes relate to the plot.

One final point, which is that Joss Whedon and Ridley Scott are very different types of filmmakers, and therefore comparisons are difficult. Many people, including me, have compared The Avengers to Rio Bravo, and Howard Hawks is a good comparison for Whedon. Characters, timing, dialogue, acting, those are where he's focused. There is only one really memorable visual moment in Serenity, and it's an image of a person.

Ridley Scott is a different type of artist. There are some incredible visual moments in this film, and some sequences of sustained action and suspense that are beyond anything in The Avengers (or Serenity).

Joss Whedon will never give you the first few minutes of Blade Runner, and he wouldn't try. But Blade Runner holds together a lot better than Prometheus, partly because back then you could make a science fiction movie that didn't have to lead into sequels. (And, it should be said, Alien produced sequels, but it doesn't set things up for them. There's nothing in Alien that says, "Hey, we're leaving this in place for the next movie!").

At some point I may write about Prometheus and Avatar, which is an interesting comparison, but I think I'll have to wait, since it wouldn't really be possible without spoilers.

prometheus unseen

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 8 Comments

As I've said before, I've been looking forward to Prometheus. Ridley Scott, the Alien universe, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, etc. Guy Pearce. What's not to like?

So, I got to the theater in good time. Took my seat. Watched ads, and then watched trailers, and then put on my 3D glasses for the 3D trailers. Saw a few reminders to turn off my cell phone, which I did. Saw a little ad about how much better it is to see movies in a theater as opposed to on a TV set. Then I watched the screen. For a while.

As we, the audience, are all sitting there, looking at the blank screen, I'll tell you about the trailers. Battleship looks moronic, in that way that a lot of movies look moronic these days. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter looks moronic in more unusual way. The Tom Cruise movie where he plays a rock star looks like a bad movie adaptation of a bad Broadway show about bad rock music. It looks like they've invented entirely new ways to be bad, ones that no movie has ever used before.

Total Recall might actually be good, or maybe it's that I generally like movies where Kate Beckinsale kills people.

So, meanwhile, I'm still sitting there. We're all sitting there. The lights go on, they stay on, theater employees come in and tell us various things. I wrote a few pages of the last part of Stevie One (today's lesson: always have paper on you).

They turn off the lights and try again. We see the Abraham Lincoln trailer a few more times (each time giving thanks that it's not the Tom Cruise one).

We see the thing about how much better theaters are than TV sets a few more times. We were, by this point, not a receptive audience for this message. In fact, some guy yelled, "My DVD player works better than this theater!" (Oh, yeah, that was me, and I got a laugh, too. It's all about knowing the crowd.)

Then they gave up and gave us passes. I could have seen the next showing of Prometheus, but the next showing was in 2D, and I've heard the 3D is good, so I decided to see The Avengers instead. There was about 45 minutes before it started, so I sat and wrote more of the last part of Stevie One.

The Avengers was good. The comparisons to Rio Bravo are pretty accurate. A villain is established, then captured, then there's a ton of fun byplay and arguing and so on between the heroes until things have to start getting "interesting" again. Basically, everything you will remember fondly about this movie is in the first two-thirds (though the fight between Thor and Iron Man is stupid). Then things get blown up for a while (and by the way, this movie definitely goes above and beyond my desire to see familiar parts of Manhattan get blown up – but maybe that's just me), and various characters who aren't possibly going to die seem like they're about to be killed.

The best parts? Robert Downey, Jr., of course. Mark Ruffalo is a great addition to the group. Chris Evans is fine as Captain America, but he was a lot more fun as the Human Torch. Samuel R. Jackson does his thing. And I have never been a big Gwyneth Paltrow fan, but I'm realizing that I do like her as Pepper Potts, and it is nice when she shows up. The bickering between Pepper and Tony was about the best part of the second Iron Man movie (or at least I guess it was, since it's the only part I can remember). The villains here are tedious and generic, but so were the villains in Rio Bravo. With certain types of movies that really doesn't matter.

And, of course, there is plenty of snappy Joss Whedon dialogue. But I will say this: if you want to see a really good Joss Whedon film, see Serenity. I just saw it, and it is quite excellent. Now I'm backtracking and watching the episodes of Firefly (the show that preceded Serenity). Whedon is a better writer when he can create his own characters and cast his own actors and have a story that goes where it should, not where it has to go to lead into four more upcoming movies.

But, that being said, there are a lot of pleasures in The Avengers. And then, after that, a lot of explosions.