three things i like

1. I'm already liking Brave on the Page. I went right away to the "flash essays" and found a bunch of things that seemed like they should be the beginnings of conversations.

Robert Hill wrote a good essay callled, "Why I Write Out Loud'" which reminds me that there's nothing like hearing words out loud. Of course, when I hear my words out loud these days it's my Kindle reading to me, but I've learned things from that.

Steve Denniston wrote this great paragraph:

My church has been an endless source of material. Recently at coffee hour I overheard someone say, "That gun I bought last month? That thing shoots better than i do." I wrote that down because I instantly knew which of my characters would say it and even the chapter it belonged in

My two comments would be:

"So, I'm guessing you're not a Quaker. I don't remember ever hearing anything like that at coffee hour when I was growing up."

and

"I do know the feeling, despite my complete lack of knowledge of guns. I had to borrow a guitar once, when mine was in the shop and we suddenly got a gig we hadn't expected. I borrowed a Strat, from the best guitarist I've ever met face to face. That thing played better than I did, that's for sure. After the gig, he said to me, 'I liked how you played my guitar.' Nicest thing anybody ever said about my guitar playing."

A piece called "Fish Lake, Yo" by Bart Kind is funny all through. I won't quote it. If you buy a copy of the book, check it out.

Emma Burcart has a piece callled "Wherever I Am." That's where I write, too.

Brian M. Biggs writes "It's All Right to Write and Not Publish." Very true. If you write, you're a writer. People have been telling stories for millennia. The idea of being published is comparatively recent. In a century or two, people may not even remember what "being published" means. But they'll still be telling stories, in some form or other.

Stevan Allred loves Lamy pens. So do I. Pretty much every word I've written for the last ten years (or more) has been written with a Lamy pen.


2. I really liked reading this article: "Dial M for 3-D: Hitchcock’s primer for depicting the third dimension."

This was my argument when Avatar came out and people said 3D was a gimmick. It can be a gimmick, of course, as anything can be, but it doesn't have to be, and Hitchcock demonstrated that in 1954. Seen in 2D, the movie is rather small and stage-bound (I'm trying not to say "flat"). Good and entertaining, yes, but definitely second-level Hitchcock.

In 3D, though, as it was made to be shown (and in a theater, as I was lucky enough to see it a couple of decades ago), everything works and everything makes sense. It is probably still a smidge below Hitchcock's best (what isn't?), but it is a major work of art.

The other pleasant surprise at the end of the article linked to above was this: "There are a tiny handful of modern movies that use 3-D effectively, often those that linger in or return to a fixed set of environments: Henry Selick’s Coraline, Chris Butler’s ParaNorman, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, James Cameron’s Avatar, even a few sequences in Resident Evil: Retribution."

I thought I was the only person noticing how Paul W. S. Anderson (the director of the last two Resident Evil films, in 3D, and not the same Paul Anderson who directed The Master) has taken to 3D and how well he's using it.

Of course, nobody devotes any critical attention to the Resident Evil films, but there have been really strong sequences in both of the last two, utilizing both 3D and slow motion very effectively.

This movie (Retribution, #5) has some very effective sequences. The beginning gives you pretty much what you expect – a resolution of the cliffhanger that ended the previous movie – but it delivers this in reverse and in slow motion (and in 3D), which could be a gimmick but it's not. And there is also an excellent chase scene (in which Alice rescues the crew of guys who had been sent to rescue her). If you've ever looked at an escalator and wondered what it would be like to drive down one in a car – this is the chase scene for you.

Also, as I talked about before, the RE series has always had a wide variety of female characters, and this movie extends that to include a villain (two, really), a liberal suburban housewife, and a mother. And a daughter. But the problem is the men, who are really not a very interesting lot at all. So, that's a weakness.

But it is a worthy addition to the series, which is (from what I read) going to have one more installment, which is probably about right. It's clearly building to a climax, and you can't sustain these things forever (a series like Star Trek or james Bond is one thing – where each movie is basically a self-contained story – but five or six movies is a long series for movies which basically tell one long story).


3. I read all the time about writers who love writing first drafts and hate editing (or who bravely assert that they love editing, but you can tell they don't).

So, it has come as somewhat of a surprise to me that what I really want to do now is edit. I have an idea for a new story, I have some scenes, I even have an idea of the shape, but I'm not really ready to start. There are two things you need to start a serial story. One is a title, the other is a point of view. I could come up with the former, but I'm still working on the latter.

And, as I think about the new story, what I find myself really thinking about is editing the Jan Sleet mystery stories. I have a lot of great beta feedback, and I know (finally!) what order the stories should be in. So, I'm going to start polishing them up a little ahead of schedule. I know I said I'd wait a year, but the first one ("The Hospital Mystery") was written in 2008, so that's way more than a year.

So, coming soon, "The Hospital Mystery."

movie news and plans

Have you ever written a post and then wondered why you haven't had any comments on it, only to discover that you forgot to hit the "Publish" button and it's been sitting as a draft for a whole day?

Yeah, me neither.


Before I start on movies, let me plug Stevie One. The beginning of Part Three has been posted here.


I just saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the Hollywood version). I enjoyed it, but I was never involved in it. I just watched it and ticked off the things which were done differently compared to the original, and compared to the book. Some of the choices were (IMHO) good decisions. Some were not. Other than that, the credit sequence is really great.

The biggest problem for me was the casting. Rooney Mara is good as Lisbeth Salander, but Noomi Rapace has already drilled her way into my brain, and I don't need another Salander any more than I need another Ethan Edwards, Tracy Lord, Atticus Finch, or Charles Foster Kane.

The surprise was how much I missed Michael Nykvist (the original Mikael Blomkvist). With Daniel Craig playing the part, Blomkvist was just as grim as Salander, which doesn't work, and he never seemed to be in any danger no matter what was happening. He's James Bond, for goodness sake.

I've written about the Millennium books and movies a few times before.


Anyway, I had my year in movies all planned.

First I was going to look forward to Underworld Awakening (which I wrote about here).

Then I was going to look forward to Dark Shadows (in May), then to Resident Evil Retribution (September), then to The Hobbit (December).

Well the problem is that the first Dark Shadows trailer has revealed that it is going to be (I find it difficult to face this even now) a... wacky comedy. It looks like a remake of Love at First Bite.

Sigh.

I'll still see it, of course. I've seen every movie Burton and Depp have made together, plus this one has Michelle Pfeiffer and Chloë Moretz, so I'd see it no matter what it was. But I'm not getting my hopes up.

So, I've changed my plan and now I'm looking forward to Prometheus (in June). Ridley Scott makes another movie about the Alien universe, starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, and Charlize Theron? I'm there. Check out the trailer.

Then Resident Evil Retribution, definitely. This one may wrap it all up (based on indications in the first trailer), carrying through on hints from the last movie, including bringing back some of the best people from the earlier movies (Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr), despite the fact that their characters are (or were) dead. In the RE universe, death is not necessarily permanent, but it will be interesting to see where they're taking this. For a real geek analysis of the trailer, go here (though I can't believe they're confused about who the people dressed in white are – that's from the end of the last movie, which wasn't really all that long ago).

Then The Hobbit. I probably don't have to tell you about that one. 🙂


(Oh, and I admit I swiped the first two paragraphs up there from this post by Jo Eberhardt. Obviously, I only delayed this post so she wouldn't feel like she was the only one. 🙂 )

storytelling lessons from the zombies and vampires

Continuing from my earlier post, "Storytelling Lessons from the First Class," I decided to post about some things I've learned from watching the Underworld and Resident Evil movies. These lessons apply mostly to writing series, but the last one applies more generally.

For those who may have not seen the movies in these two series (and why not?), I'll say this in brief: The Underworld movies are about a centuries-long war between vampires (who are very aristocratic) and the "Lycans" (werewolves) who used to be their slaves. There's a Romeo and Juliet angle, and some plot elements which seem to have been borrowed by the Twilight books (based on what Wikipedia tells me).

The Resident Evil movies are based on the popular video game series, and they portray a world gradually taken over by zombies.

Both series are centered around strong female warrior characters: Selene (Kate Beckinsale) in the Underworld movies, and Alice (Milla Jovovich) in the Resident Evil movies. Both series have now gone to four movies, with the most recent one in 3D, and the fifth Resident Evil movie is coming in September.

Here are the lessons I've learned by comparing the two series:

1) A series shouldn't be a series of the same thing over and over.

I just saw the current Underworld movie recently, and it had advantages over some of the predecessors (better direction in the action sequences, for example), but it was clearly More of the Same. You liked the earlier ones? Well, here's some more. We might refer to this as Iron Man Syndrome (AKA "don't rock the boat"). Even the look of the movie is the same, that nearly black and white (or black and dark blue) color palette that has been there since the first movie.

The new movie is set in the U.S. for the first time, but everything still looks the same, and also the change is less striking than it might be because it was never clear where the earlier films were taking place anyway. There's less romance and more ass-kicking than in the first two movies (the third was a prequel, not featuring Selene, and so it sort of sits by itself), but it's still just a continuation.

The Resident Evil films have each been quite different. The first was almost all underground, very claustrophobic. The second was in a city, over the course of one night; the third was in a desert and mostly in bright sunlight; and the most recent was in a variety of settings. Throughout the series, the zombies have become less and less of a plot element as the series has transformed into an action-adventure story. So, not just more of the same.

2) Who am I rooting for again?

With the Underworld movies, sometimes it seems we're rooting for the vampires (because the main character in three of the movies is a vampire), though the vampires are pretty rotten to the Lycans and their entire power structure is based on lies. In the third movie, about the slave rebellion where the Lycans freed themselves, we're clearly rooting for the Lycans, but with the new movie we're back with Selene. It seems that ultimately we're rooting for whoever is the star of the movie.

From the beginning of the most recent movie Selene kicks mucho ass, including killing a lot of people (she isn't called a Death Dealer for nothing), but, aside from the badassery of some of the fights, I did start to wonder if all the people getting killed actually deserved it. The whole thing works better if you don't think about it very much (even apart from the fact that the plot of the most recent movie was very confusing – at least until I figured out that they were using the same plot as the movie Ultraviolet, which made it much easier to follow 🙂 ).

With Resident Evil, it's much clearer. The Umbrella Corporation (a huge multinational corporation specializing in consumer products, medicine, viral weapons, and general nastiness) are evil. They (admittedly somewhat accidentally) wiped out most of humanity, and are still experimenting with the same viral weapons that turned most of the world into a zombie disaster area. So, they're evil. Alice (and whatever few survivors are grouped around her in each movie) are generally good, though not uniformly. As for Alice herself, she's my answer when people complain (with reason) that all the current superhero movies are so boy-oriented. Where are the female superheroes? Well, here's one. She doesn't wear a cape and she doesn't have a letter on her chest, but otherwise she fits all the criteria.

3) Challenge your protagonist.

As I say, the action in the most recent Underworld movie was the best so far, but at this point Selene is so powerful (and so pissed off, and now even immune to sunlight) that there's not much tension in the fights. The Lycans she's fighting get bigger and bigger, but you know she'll kick their big shaggy asses sooner or later.

The smartest thing the Resident Evil people did with the most recent movie was de-power Alice right at the beginning. She was originally one of the Umbrella Corporation's bio-weapons, with all sorts of special powers, but this also made her increasingly difficult to challenge. So, Umbrella "took back its property" and left her as an extremely capable soldier. This was, as I say, a really good idea.

This applies more generally. In mysteries, for example, the reader loses interest if the detective is never stumped.

4) Remember the Bechdel Test.

In some ways the most striking difference between the series is that the Underworld movies are basically "Selene and the boys." There are no other strong female characters, and (as far as I can remember) movies #2 and #3 have no significant female characters at all other than the leads.

(By the way, one of the weird thing about these movies is that we never see any female werewolves at all. And nobody ever mentions it. At least the Lord of the Rings movies mentioned the Entwives and the apparent lack of female dwarves.)

The Resident Evil films always have a variety of female characters: scientists, soldiers, a TV reporter, a student, a doctor, a nurse, an actress, a cop, and a girl named Kmart. The women in these movies have many conversations, about many subjects other than men. One of my favorite scenes in Resident Evil: Apocalypse is on a deserted street, in a disabled bus, where three women basically analyze their desperate situation and their limited options, each one bringing different expertise to bear, while the only male character protests in vain that things aren't really as bad as they actually are.

This is not a scene you're going to see in the upcoming Avengers movie, or the last X-Men movie, or pretty much any other mainstream superhero movie that I'm aware of.