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Fi's Five Favorite Male Action Heroes #3: John McClane (Die Hard)

4/19/2015

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(Click the links to read Favorite Male Action Hero #5, #4, and Fi’s Five Favorite Female Action Heroes)

Next up, we've got my favorite hero of holiday mayhem.
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Well, one of them.
If you haven't seen at least the first Die Hard movie, here's how it goes:

John is in LA to visit his kids for Christmas. He's been kinda-sorta separated from his wife, Holly, ever since she took a promotion that moved her to LA from New York, and John stayed in his position with the NYPD. He's still pissed with her for giving him up in favor of a job and knows she's probably feeling exactly the same way about him, but he wants her back and is hoping the trip will give them the chance to reconcile.
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We learn all this from another artfully efficient opening scene, between John and Argyle, the limo driver who's been sent to bring him to Holly's office. Argyle used to be a cab driver, which apparently falls into the same category of jobs with therapists and bartenders (this LA local wouldn't know), and he drags the story out of John one telling answer at a time, without a single improbable expository monologue.
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Holly's company is in the middle of their holiday party, and while John is cleaning up from his flight in one of the upstairs bathrooms, a group of extensively prepared and armed terrorists led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman with an attempted German accent), storm the building and take the entire party hostage.
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Using only his wits and whatever else he can get his hands on, John has to foil the bad guys' plot from inside the building, save the hostages, and win back Holly, who's the acting supervisor among the captive employees, playing liaison to the terrorists and watching with grim amusement as they get progressively angrier and more terrified as John picks them off one at a time.

John eavesdrops on them, finds out that (mini-spoiler) they're actually after the contents company's vault and their political posturing is a cover, signals the local police by throwing a corpse out the window onto the hood of a cop car, and finally stops the super-thieves from escaping in the helicopters included in their demands in a showdown on the roof.

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Sounds like a pretty basic action movie setup in a lot of ways. You've got a good guy, bad guys, high stakes, and plenty of guns.

What makes John special is how seriously outnumbered and outgunned he is at the beginning of that setup and how creative he has to get to compensate.

Die Hard arrived right on the tail of the '80s action movie equation of more guns + more muscles + more fire = better, and it takes a different technique. 


John doesn't get to come into the action fully prepared, guns blazing. When things first go to hell, he doesn’t even have shoes on. There's a scene where the bad guys have him cornered, notice his shoelessness, and nearly catch him by shooting all the glass in the room onto the floor.

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No, I didn't mix up this picture with one from Saw.
And of course, there's that beautiful, tide-turning moment when John takes out one of the thieves who wanders off on his own and then announces himself to the rest by sending the body down to them in the elevator,
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…with the words, "Now I have a machine gun, ho-ho-ho" written on its chest.

The John vs Hans conflict is a duel of wits that involves guns and explosives, rather than a simple duel of guns and explosives. John spends most of his time hiding from the bad guys until just the right moment, giving him time for radio conversations with both Hans and the police outside that don't happen under fire. In other words, he has time to be a person instead of a walking death machine, and that humanity carries over when the action does happen.

And there's no lack of action or suspense. I point to John trying to navigate between floors through the empty elevator shaft by using his gun as a rappelling anchor, or stealing the bad guys' C4 and tossing it down that same elevator shaft after them. And that's the simple stuff. Just because John doesn't start the game with all the cheat codes on doesn't mean he doesn't end up taking part in some spectacular crazy. The difference is that he's smart and human enough that when we in the audience start to think "no way, come on!", he's thinking it to. And lucky for us, he likes to think out loud.

Who hasn't dreamed of pulling off a stunt like that and then realized that this is exactly what you'd sound like actually doing it?

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: If I Stay

4/14/2015

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Book Review:
If I Stay
By Gayle Foreman

Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2009

B+

Yes, I’m catching up on one I missed!

The Basics:

After a terrible car accident leaves her an orphan, Mia is trapped in a place between life and death in the ICU, reviewing her life and knowing that her death or recovery hangs on her finding the resolve to push one way or the other.

The Downside:

There's no forward momentum or storyline to speak of. After a few chapters, there's no real question what decision Mia is being led to. The back and forth between the hospital drama and flashbacks to Mia's life have a vignette quality throughout, without much of a progression connecting them. It's a stretch for Mia's indecision to last the full length of a narrative that is made entirely out of pieces of her life that beg to be salvaged, and the need to rationalize that indecision to preserve the premise renders her a very passive protagonist.

The Upside:

What the vignettes lack in suspense, they make up for in atmosphere. A hopeful melancholy permeates and unifies the flashbacks and the present. The reflections on Mia’s slow awakening of confidence as both an artist and a person have a beautiful YA authenticity to them. Mia's family, friends, and relationship with her boyfriend are subtly drawn and believable, functional yet flawed, neither flat nor caricatured. The theme of music and the way Mia and everyone who matters to her experience it differently add a flavorful frame of reference for her meditations, which may not give cause for suspense, but do succeed in making Mia's life and recovery feel powerfully important. A pleasantly moody, rainy day sort of read.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Male Action Heroes #4: Macbeth

4/12/2015

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(Click the links to read Favorite Male Action Hero #5 and Fi’s Five Favorite Female Action Heroes)

While we're on the topic of modern classics, I can't resist tossing in one classic classic action hero, and it's not going to be Beowulf.

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I killed a monster, his mom, and a dragon. Am I a character yet?
Or Achilles.
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I'm not coming out of my tent until my friend brings back the sex slave he borrowed!
Or the original Jason.
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I have a feeling I upset you, honey, but since Titus Andronicus hasn't been written yet, I can't imagine what that has to do with dinner.
Oh no, spot number four goes to the "hero" so dark that the artists of his medium still fear to speak the name he shares with his grisly story.

Let me know if I'm laying it on too thick.

If you haven't seen or read Macbeth, here's how it goes:

We first meet Macbeth with his friend, Banquo, returning from a successful battle.
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He does know how to use a sword for more than making his name look cool.
They run across the three witches, who recognize them both by their full names and titles and offer them a series of suitably cryptic prophesies, including that Macbeth will become king.

They're skeptical at first, but when the small prophesies start coming true, Macbeth starts picturing himself on the throne. He mentions the incident to his wife, who jumps on the idea, and the two of them plan and carry out the murder of King Duncan while he's staying in their castle. 


Macbeth loses his nerve in the middle when he sees the blood (killing a sleeping guest is a lot different from a battle, he explains to the audience), and Lady Macbeth has to finish setting up the scene to frame the guards they drugged, but with the first murder committed, so are the Macbeths, like it or not. When the guards wake up, Macbeth slashes their throats in front of the king's gathered entourage in a fake fit of rage to stop them from contradicting his version of events. The princes run for their lives, not sure who killed their father but sure that whoever it was will want them dead too, and with them out of the way, Macbeth seizes the throne.

That's when the next part of the prophecy starts to seem important to him. The witches told Banquo that his descendants will be kings, though he will never be one himself. To avoid his line being usurped, Macbeth has Banquo killed, but Banquo's son escapes, and Macbeth's paranoia keeps growing. He goes back to the witches to demand clear answers and only gets more cryptic prophesies, including that no man born of woman can kill him.
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Sadly, this is not the loophole they're hinting at.
Also a warning to "beware Macduff." Macbeth orders the entire Macduff family wiped out, and his people get them all... except for Lord Macduff himself.

This is how vendettas happen.

This is also around the time when the guilt starts eating Lady Macbeth's brain, and she starts wandering around and saying incriminating things in her sleep that would make monologue-seeking actresses very happy for centuries to come, and then stabs herself offscreen.

She was the one holding things together while Macbeth wrestled his own doubts and the only person in on the coup with him. On his own, he starts to wonder if death would be better but can't bring himself to give up completely.

Macbeth stays on the throne until an army led by the survivors of the families he's destroyed comes to remove him, including Macduff, who (spoiler alert) was born by C-section, because apparently that counts, and who ultimately cuts off Macbeth’s head.

Okay, two words that probably don't immediately come to mind in relation to Macbeth are "action" and "hero." 


I'll start with the first one.

Macbeth is definitively horror and tragedy, but as a writer of action-y sci-fi-y horror, I'm a big fan of calling things everything they are.

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As a matter of fact, this list spot almost went to a much later horror icon.
Macbeth doesn't directly take part in that much of the action, but that's mainly due to the practical limitations of Jacobean theater, which cause the largest-scale scenes to be summed up in dialogue after the fact instead of shown. Without those confines, it would be easy for Macbeth to give us quite a few more reminders of his ability with that sword. As it is, he goes down fighting, as well as pulling that double-throat-gouging move, and the play is altogether one bloody, corpse-racking thriller of its time.

As for hero....

Well, by Aristotelian definition, Macbeth is a classic tragic hero. He's a larger-than-life protagonist with larger-than-life problems who self-destructs under his own tragic flaw. In Macbeth's case, power-lust.

What makes him unusual is how utterly, unforgivably unheroic his flaws are.

When asked to name the darkest hero you can think of who still counts as a hero, chances are you'd think of someone like this.

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Okay, maybe Sweeney only occurs to theater dorks like me, but the point is, they all have at least some noble intentions, at least a thoroughly justifiable revenge story, and then carry things too far. They're broken people who do terrible things for good reasons, or good things for terrible reasons.

Macbeth does terrible things for terrible reasons. He doesn't have anything to avenge. He's not protecting the people he loves. He has the suggestion made to him that he could be king, and he starts slaughtering people to make it happen.

There is the question of whether the events of Macbeth are destiny, because the witches do accurately foretell them in advance, but there's no indication in the text that the witches can influence Macbeth's mind or actions other than by speaking to him like anyone else, and scholars generally agree that they can't. 


Maybe their prophecies would have come true no matter what.

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Maybe King Duncan would have become increasingly corrupt until Macbeth felt compelled to put a stop to it. Or maybe the princes would have turned out to be psychos, and Duncan would have decided to name Macbeth his heir. The second set of prophesies are even vaguer and are only made after Macbeth's started his murder spree. Maybe Macduff would eventually have led a coup against him that would have been unsuccessful if Macbeth had started being more careful and hadn't added so much fuel to the fire. The witches only said to beware him, not that he would definitely kill him.

Maybe Macbeth would have died at a ridiculously old age after the treeline encroached naturally on the castle.

We don't know, because Macbeth doesn't try any of those things. We don't know the bounds of what was fated to happen, but whatever it was, it doesn't change the fact that Macbeth took those prophesies and chose the most horrific possible way to react to them. It doesn't change the fact that it took only the slightest verbal hints on the witches' part to make him a serial killer.

Lady Macbeth has her hands in things too, of course. She's at least equally horrible and has to coax him into carrying out the plot, but she has no way of forcing him, and Macbeth lets himself be persuaded. The way he brings up the prophesies to her can even easily be interpreted as him hinting that he wants someone to talk him into the conclusion he's not comfortable coming to on his own, and he commits the first three murders with his own hands.

The only reason we're able to feel for Macbeth is that Shakespeare's soliloquy-heavy style lets us into his head, where all his horribleness is so frighteningly human. His story is about wanting more, more power, more recognition, more respect. It's about fearing that his own weakness is what holds him back and will forever, and that decency and weakness may be the same.

I'll bet that any non-sociopath who claims never to have felt the same is a liar.

It's as if Shakespeare set out to see how reprehensible a serial killer he could force the audience to identify with, without giving him any absolution.

It's that creep factor that wins him the serious spot on this list.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Male Action Heroes #5: Captain Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean)

4/5/2015

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You didn't think I'd forget you, did you, boys?

In honor of Women's History Month, I devoted my March countdown to my favorite female action heroes. I also promised that the absence of DC and Marvel characters on the countdown would make sense this month.

Have you figured out why yet?

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Because the internet already runneth over with analyses and gushing rants about the awesomeness of Batman, including a few of my own. And with good reason. So with DC/Marvel characters in the running, the guys' list would be a countdown either to yet another such rant, or to an article on a superhero conspicuously filling the spot that should have been Batman's.

Yes, Batman wins this category. No, I'm not going to write about it. Hence, no DC/Marvel. Sorry.

So first up, Captain Jack Sparrow.

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If, like me, you were a teenager at the peak of Jack Sparrow's popularity, something about the mention of him probably still rubs you the wrong way. The second Pirates movie took him from a character to an excuse to sell Johnny Depp's presence to moviegoers, and beyond.

The thing to remember is that what becomes overplayed usually gets that way for a reason, and Jack Sparrow definitely falls into that category.

His popularity comes from being an unforgettable modern classic of an antihero. If you haven't seen at least the first movie, here's how it goes.

Jack is a pirate. He's a hedonist and a criminal, in love with the adventure of sailing, oozing with charm and unbound by any traditional sense of honor. While our standard hero and heroine, Will and Elizabeth,

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...focus on trying to save each other and confront their daddy issues, Jack's busy playing everyone and anyone against each other to get himself closer to reclaiming his ship, The Black Pearl, and getting revenge on the mutineers who marooned him and left him to die.

His first appearance is a shining case study on how to set up a character in record time.

We first meet him on a boat. A small, sinking boat, and he's alone. He's occasionally bailing himself out, and when he passes a trio of hanged pirate skeletons left out as a warning, he takes off his hat and salutes them. By the time he sails in to port, his boat is completely underwater, and he rides the sinking mast right up to the dock, steps off comfortably when it reaches exactly the right height at exactly the right moment, and then bribes the dock worker to pretend he was never there, with a smile on his face.

So right off the bat, we know this is a pirate, a loner, but with a certain sense of respect and camaraderie for others of his kind. We know his fortunes aren't the greatest right now, but he's a master of improvisation and relies on style and confidence to get him through.

That's Jack Sparrow in a nutshell, in about a minute and a half of visuals and three lines of dialogue.

So we're dealing with a figure of moral grayness. How bad is he exactly? Well, that's one of the great questions of the series.

We learn pretty quickly that he's no psychopath. Still within the first several scenes of the first movie, he's broken out of prison and trying to remove his handcuffs using the smith shop of our hero, who feels compelled to stop him.

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After the two of them have the chance to show off for a while in an over-the-top cool fencing scene, Jack gets tired of following the rules of a deadly game he's going to lose and pulls a gun.
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He's not into rules of honor, particularly arbitrary ones, and particularly those that get in his way. He could have done this at any moment. He's been toying with Will the entire time.

But he doesn't pull the trigger. Even when Will does his painfully noble standing his ground against all odds and re-capture is imminent for Jack, he'd rather stand there and beg Will to move than kill him and be on his way. Jack's more inclined to run than fight, and he gets no pleasure out of violence.

He also got a lovable open-mindedness and lack of hypocrisy that comes into view more slowly. He feels no particular malice toward any group of people who haven't personally, directly harmed him.

The Pirates series certainly isn't a shining example of sexual and particularly racial sensitivity,

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No, no it's not.
But Jack himself isn't one to discriminate.

It sounds strange, if you know his reputation. Isn’t he a womanizer and an all-around scumbag? Aren’t we reminded of this repeatedly by the endless string of angry exes and prostitutes out for his blood?


Yeah, Jack’s certainly someone you never want to date. Yes, he flirts with literally every single woman who crosses his path, but he's never threatening about it, and it's indicated that his wrongs against these exes come down to lying and stealing, so all this really proves is that he's hypersexual, heterosexual, and an equal opportunity scumbag. After all, he lies to and steals from men all the time.

Hell, he once spends a night alone on a deserted island with Elizabeth, both of them blind drunk, with her trying to flirt the secret to escape out of him and still harboring a bit of a childhood crush on his legend, and what happens? He puts his arm around her, once, while on the verge of passing out, and immediately backs off when she appears uncomfortable.

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Granted, not coercing or taking advantage of our then inexperienced and emotionally vulnerable heroine is about as low bar a test of decency as you could come up with, but for all his lechery, he also doesn't expect women (or anyone) to follow society’s rules any more than he does himself.

Whenever he draws attention to someone who's not an able-bodied white man for defying social convention, it's because he's trying to manipulate someone else by playing on their expectations, never because he particularly cares about people meeting his own expectations.

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Will wants Elizabeth. Elizabeth wants Will. Anna Maria wants a ship. Fine. How can I exploit this?
Altogether, that’s more than can be said of any of the other characters in his universe.

So we've got a colorful rogue with a quirky personal code, but a code that exists clearly enough to make it more than comfortable to identify with him and ride along with the fantasy of living outside the rules, doing what you want, chasing adventure, forever being one step ahead even if you're making things up as you go, and having the wit and confidence to come off sounding cool even when you're losing. Include guns, sword fighting, convenient swinging ropes, and even some magic, and that's an irresistible action icon right there.

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What could make him any better?

Well, if I had one complaint (other than the second movie revolving around Jack plotlines that didn't go anywhere, with the assumption that his pure Jack-ness would make them worth watching), it would be that the same moral mysteriousness that makes him so intriguing to begin with also makes it difficult to connect with him as a long term character.

Oh, we know he's not evil enough to want to hurt innocent people, but how much evil will he allow to happen if it suits his interests?

After a few movies of trying to figure this out and never reaching the answer, it can start feeling hopeless, ever getting in his head as far as we like to with our heroes.

Well, that was almost addressed. It was addressed, in a deleted scene from movie three. You only need the first twenty-six seconds of this one to get the point.

That's right, Jack became a pirate because he refused to be a party to the slave trade. That's where he drew the line. Question answered.

I like to see this clip as part of the character. I love the slow progression of real insight into the character that it concludes, after the all-at-once snapshot we get in the first movie. If you prefer to keep the mystery perpetually, the theatrical version provides that.

There's a perfect Jack Sparrow for everyone.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Read for a Good Cause: Thorn, by Intisar Khanani

4/1/2015

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Proud to welcome Intisar Khanani to Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of), to spread the word on a good deal for a good cause. She's discounting her bestselling first novel to 99 cents from April 1st through 7th, all proceeds to fund the adoption of the pair of brothers you see below.

Sorry for any layout glitches, my poor blog's HTML capacities are limited!

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Nab Amazon bestselling YA Fantasy novel Thorn by Intisar Khanani for 99 cents April 1- 7 and help bring these two young brothers home. Described as "unflinching and exquisite," Thorn is a story of choice and betrayal, justice and compassion. Recommended for fans of Robin McKinley and Mercedes Lackey.
About Thorn
Thorn_CoverFnlRevFNLF_low_resFor Princess Alyrra, choice is a luxury she’s never had … until she’s betrayed. Princess Alyrra has never enjoyed the security or power of her rank. Between her family’s cruelty and the court’s contempt, she has spent her life in the shadows. Forced to marry a powerful foreign prince, Alyrra embarks on a journey to meet her betrothed with little hope for a better future. But powerful men have powerful enemies—and now, so does Alyrra. Betrayed during a magical attack, her identity is switched with another woman’s, giving Alyrra the first choice she’s ever had: to start a new life for herself or fight for a prince she’s never met. But Alyrra soon finds that Prince Kestrin is not at all what she expected. While walking away will cost Kestrin his life, returning to the court may cost Alyrra her own. As Alyrra is coming to realize, sometimes the hardest choice means learning to trust yourself.
Amazon Worldwide | Barnes & Noble | Nook UK | Google Play
About Evan & Raymond
This sbrothers2ale is also about Intisar's good friend, Jamie, and the two little boys she and her husband are in the process of trying to adopt. Evan (age 7) and Raymond (age 9) are biological brothers, both born with Saethre-Chotzen Syndrome--a condition that results in brain damage if left untreated. They were each given up at birth, and were unable to receive treatment for their condition. These brothers have lived in an orphanage in Eastern Europe their whole lives. As boys who are older and struggle with developmental disabilities, it's almost impossible to find adoptive families for them. But Jamie has her heart set on bringing them home, and this sale is about helping that happen.
All of the proceeds from Thorn's 99 cent sale are going towards that adoption. Our goal is to raise $2,000 over the course of the week. International adoption is prohibitively expensive (often over $20,000), so every dollar makes a difference... You can find out more about the boys and Jamie, and link to their blog, here: http://reecesrainbow.org/83163/sponsorallison-3
And today, your help can make this goal a reality. Please share, tweet, and/or re-blog this post, and buy and give "Thorn" as a gift to friends and family! You can also invite your friends to the "Thorn Flash Sale" event on Facebook. Help us bring Evan and Raymond home.
Thorn is currently on sale for only 99 cents at all of these e-retailers:
Amazon Worldwide | Barnes & Noble | Nook UK | Google Play
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