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Movie Review: Annihilation

3/3/2018

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Movie Review:
 
Annihilation
 
C+
 
Note: Like most of my movie reviews, this one is intended for readers of the source material and analyzes the movie as an adaptation rather than an independent work. You can read my C- review of the book here.
 
The Basics:
 
After her husband returns home sick and mentally altered from a classified mission, Lena volunteers for the next expedition into “the shimmer,” an expanding area of dangerous and unexplained phenomena, to figure out what happened to him. As the biologist on a small team of military scientists, she finds the shimmer to be a place where DNA coding sheds all rules, to both beautiful and horrific results.
 
The Upside:
 
The visual medium is used to great effect in exploring both the fascinating and gruesome corners of the premise. A lot of fun was clearly had designing DNA mash-ups like the shark-gator and floral deer. The tension of the dwindling group slowly coming to understand the magnitude of the danger and strangeness around them works in a B-movie sort of way, when the movie allows itself to bask in that potential.
 
As in the book, there’s also the defaulting of the main characters to female instead of male, which is nice, and praiseworthy, but the fact that it remains such a remarkable novelty as to require praise really says more about the state of the world and the arts than about this work in particular.
 
The Downside:
 
It’s the kind of movie that makes one list “great visual effects” as foremost among its virtues. As an adaptation, it’s neither faithful to its source material nor confident in its own direction. It throws away most of what didn’t work about the book (and some of what did), but fails to replace it with… much of anything, really.
 
There’s no hypnosis here to rob the characters of natural motivation, so instead they experience missing time apparently caused by the shimmer, in an unexplained one-time effect that has nothing to do with any of its more consistent properties over the course of the rest of the story. There's no evil hypnotist mole on the team, so instead the character who seems like a growing human villain ends up wandering off and coming to no particular purpose. There’s no “Crawler” writing endless gibberish on the walls of an underground structure, so instead there’s… a psychedelic boss fight with The Thing? It’s an amorphous blob that replicates people, which Lena later defends as a reflection of her own violent nature, but which very clearly displays violent intentions it never had a chance to learn from her.
 
Lena’s relationship with her husband is given more prominence, but the original nature of its self-destruction is left out, along with everything else that was complex or interesting about the biologist’s character in the book, replaced with a simplified absence-and-infidelity plotline. This leads to one of the most baffling scenes in the movie -- a monologue by Lena’s illicit partner that’s as unsettling and incomprehensible as anything that happens in the shimmer, wasting an opportunity to contrast the forestory with a dose of flashback normality.
 
If there’s one element of the book that’s perfectly preserved in the movie, it’s the sense that it’s trying to convey some deep and momentous meaning, but what that meaning might be, if any, is lost to inscrutable coding.



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Movie Review: It (2017)

9/8/2017

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Movie Review:
 
It
 
2017
 
Grade: A-
 
Note: Like most of my movie reviews, this one is primarily intended for readers of the source material and analyzes the movie as an adaptation rather than an independent work.
 
 
The Basics:
 
Deep in the sewers of Derry, Maine, lurks the insidious It, an ancient, shapeshifting evil that poisons the minds of the locals, feeds on fear and children, and often takes the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Following only the past timeline of the novel, seven kids, all self-confessed losers in various ways, must come together to defeat It and protect others like themselves.
 
The Downside:
 
While the use of fairytale logic and the power of belief won’t bother fans, a single line of exposition would have been polite to help newcomers understand certain tactics the kids use against Pennywise as magic rather than continuity errors.
 
As could be easily feared and expected, the character of Mike comes off as a bit of a peripheral afterthought, which was often the case in the book, but made worse here by the transfer of the historian role to Ben. Meanwhile, the circumstances of the finale are oversimplified by the patently lazy damseling of Beverly in a way that was not in the book, although it must be noted that some much more extraordinary ill-use of Beverly was in the book, and is thankfully removed here.
 
An attempt is made to give her some dignity even in her damsel function, by having her resist Pennywise’s fear-inducement powers, but this only serves to muddy the heroism of the losers, by implying that an absence of fear is necessary to defeat It, rather than the willingness to do so in spite of their obvious fear, which is what makes the whole group of them so easy to root for most of the time.
 
This change to the structure of the finale also removes some of the purpose of Henry Bowers, the lead bully character who’s given just enough focus and development to make his ultimate insignificance (at least within this volume) disappointing.
 
The Upside:
 
As can be said for all the best Stephen King adaptations, this one makes the absolute most of its scares, while taking the best of the underlying framework of the characters and breathing life into them.
 
The performances of all the young actors are stellar and amazingly natural. When not being paralyzed by the Deadlights, Beverly oozes every ounce of cool she’s supposed to, mixed with all the world-weary vulnerability and, yes, fear that’s forced her to become that cool. The friendship of the whole losers’ club feels vividly authentic, and with the wise removal of any explicit mentions of cosmic forces compelling them to follow the group, follow the leader, follow the plot, their bond is forced to form and sustain itself on an entirely human level. They’re given the freedom to fight and disagree and determine for themselves that they still need each other.
 
Without that cosmic bestowing of unquestioned authority upon Bill, his leadership is made to stand on its own, and (who’d have guessed it?) it does. His relationship with his lost brother is played up to a heart-wrenching degree instead of simply stated, adding weight to everything he does. He’s even allowed to be wrong, prioritizing his revenge story over his friends, and he’s all the more likeable for his fallibility.
 
And then there’s Pennywise himself.
 
This Pennywise doesn’t spend the course of the movie idly threatening and taunting and waiting for his moment. This Pennywise is an unrelenting onslaught of world-warping terror. He’s powerful in his use of the kids’ specific fears, but also as a creature of darkness beyond charted reality.
 
The jumpscares are sparing but perfectly timed, and taken far beyond the usual startle that’s over before it starts. If you’re not scared by a loud music sting, don’t worry, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of screams you’re hurtling into.
 
Altogether a terrifying, heartfelt, and quite reverent adaptation given the time allotted, and a seasonal must-see for fans of both the book and horror movies in general.



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

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Five Female-Led Comics to Read While Waiting for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Get It Together

11/28/2016

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So, is a Black Widow movie ever going to get out of early development?
 
Will Disney ever get over its fear of having its new superhero sub-department contaminated by the female market segment, and give girls everywhere the stories and toys they’re clamoring to pay good money for?
 
Will our daughters’ daughters someday be able to live in a world where a movie that lists a female hero’s name second in its title isn’t considered radically progressive?
 
I don’t know.
 
But in this particularly difficult time of setback for women, I’d like to take a moment to recognize the fact that we’re living in a renaissance of actual, paper-and-ink comic books that respect and celebrate female power.
 
I’ve written before about why Harley Quinn is an important character for women in spite of being a terrible role model, and I continue to enjoy her antics, flaws and all, in the New 52, but thankfully, she’s far from being all we have.
 
So, while you’re waiting and campaigning in righteous frustration to end the shut-out of women in the mainstreamiest of mainstream storytelling, remember to take occasional, much-needed refuge with…


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5: Bombshells
 
This alternate DC timeline follows some of the most prominent female characters of the universe as they develop their identities – independent of the often male-mentored circumstances of their main universe origins – against the backdrop of World War II.
 
The sexual prejudices of the forties exist here to be faced but never hold the characters down for long, especially once Amanda Waller begins to earmark superpowered women for her alternate universe, Hitler-fighting Suicide Squad – The Bombshells.


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4: She-Hulk (Charles Soule)

Sadly, this title didn’t run for long, but I highly recommend grabbing the two volumes that exist.
 
Jennifer Walters (a.k.a She-Hulk) is the professional woman’s hero. After leaving a prestigious law firm that expected something different from her than good legal work (ostensibly because of her superpowers, but the parallel to her gender is clear), she’s determined to start up her own successful law firm. Naturally, her first solo case drags her into a far-reaching conspiracy that tests her skills, her principles, and most importantly, her ability to count on her substantial brains instead of her physical talent for smashing.


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3: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
 
This is possibly the funniest and most good-hearted comic in existence. It’s self-aware and optimistic, and Doreen Green’s confidence and genuine kindness are wonderfully infectious. She loves her curves, she loves her friends of both the human and squirrel variety, she loves her work helping people, and she goes out of her way to love her villains.
 
She’s the unbeatable Squirrel Girl, because she’s the hero who takes the time to chat with Galactus about his eating habits, after a discussion on the evolution of gendered pronouns that warms this English major’s heart.
 
She’s exactly what’s needed for both young girls looking to get into comics that welcome them, and for adult readers who need a break from the doom-and-gloom of other comics.


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2: Jessica Jones: Alias
 
…Then again, sometimes you need a hit of the grown-up dark and serious. That’s where Jessica Jones comes in. She’s the gritty anti-hero with all the flaws and baggage of her most popular and fascinating male counterparts, which makes her refreshing in her own way, because flaws are exactly the critical character component that’s so often lost in the effort to make female characters “strong” enough.
 
Jessica’s a hardboiled private investigator with a drinking problem and a past made of horror and failure. She’s an inconsiderate, self-destructive mess, and she’s exactly who you want on your side when you need to get to the bottom of a mystery for the right cause. She’s crude and sad and smart and infuriating, and utterly compelling on every page.


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1: Ms. Marvel (G. Willow Wilson)
 
There are no words adequate to express the importance or coolness of Kamala Khan (a.k.a. Ms. Marvel). She has the kind heart and optimism of Squirrel Girl in the #3 spot, but with far less insulation from serious, real-life issues.
 
Kamala is the new hero of Jersey City, somewhere people like the Avengers don’t tend to pay much attention to protecting. She’s also in the thick of growing up a millennial Muslim girl in the U.S, facing challenges both universal and specific, and always complex and relatably presented.
 
She’s new to her powers, bringing back the superhero metaphor for the combined terror and empowerment of puberty, and through everything from family fights to bad dates to chaos-sewing visits from Loki, the reader gets to watch her grow into a hero for a new generation.



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Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

11/20/2016

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Movie Review:
 
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
 
2016
 
Grade: D
 
 
Note: Most of my movie reviews are intended for readers of the adapted source material. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, while sharing its title with a short, mock-textbook companion piece to the Harry Potter series, cannot honestly be said to be an adaptation of anything, so much as a screen-original spinoff. Even so, as an attempted extension of the Potter-verse, I count it worthy of a reader’s perspective review.
 
The Basics:
 
English wizard naturalist, Newt Scamander, is illegally carrying a case of magical creatures in 1920s New York when they inevitably escape, requiring the help of Tina, a disgraced local Auror, her Legilimens sister, Queenie, and Jacob, a muggle who happened to be in the way, to recover them. Also there’s some growing anti-magic sentiment stateside, and some havoc being wrought by repressed magic as a result.
 
The Upside:
 
One or two jokes land, and both the magical creatures and the flirtation between Jacob and Queenie occasionally border on cute.
 
The Downside:
 
In spite of J.K. Rowling’s sole writing credit, there’s hardly a glimmer of her usual spark here, none of her signature whimsy, humor, terror, adventure, or deep friendships to be found. The characters are flat, their relationships largely forced, their motivations fickle and underexplained. The importance and urgency of both containing the creature infestation and keeping muggles out of the loop are subject to change at the drop of a hat, and the wonder of the magical world is shown only through often destructive scenes of creature spectacle, divorced from character and plot. The effect is less a curious desire to be a part of magic and more a questioning of whether the muggles are so wrong to fear and resent it.
 
The plot is beyond slight, or rather, both plots are. Newt’s search for his creatures and the unrest between the magical and non-magical communities barely intersect, except for a brief scene in which our heroes are abruptly condemned to death by corrupt officials and just as abruptly forgotten about and apparently pardoned immediately after escaping the execution chamber. When it comes time for the finale and its potentially city-ending stakes (born of the non-Newt plotline), the task of saving the day falls to local magical law enforcement, while Newt and company contribute nothing but reaction shots, getting beaten up, a little bit of “I told you so,” and a poorly foreshadowed memory-alteration-by-creature.
 
The ten second glimpse of the dark wizard Grindelwald at the end gives a by then unwelcome reminder that this is only the first installment of a spinoff series, an idea made all the more clearly inadvisable by this failed attempt to stretch the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them concept into even one movie’s worth of story.




Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Movie Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

10/12/2016

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Movie Review:
 
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
 
2016
 
Grade: D
 
Note: Like most of my movie reviews, this one is intended for readers of the source material and analyzes the movie as an adaptation rather than an independent work. You can read my B grade review of the novel here.
 
The Basics:
 
After the death of his grandfather, Jake goes looking for the children’s home that was the center of his many fanciful bedtime stories, in the hope of separating fact from fiction. Spoiler alert (not really): It’s all fact.
 
The Upside:
 
The movie recognizes the need to bring the story to the titular home for peculiar children sometime before the halfway point, and to make the most of the children’s dynamic superpowers.
 
The Downside:
 
It does this at the cost of making any sense whatsoever.
 
The children’s freedom to leave the shelter of their loop of repeating time without aging to death is reduced from several hours in the book to a few minutes as explained in the movie, and yet the long, disjointed climactic sequence takes place completely outside the loop, including travel across great distances, without any of the children showing any adverse effects. Enoch’s power over life and death is primarily used to make flashy skeleton armies, rather than to solve any mysteries, leaving the island’s one human murder victim completely unmentioned after his initial discovery.
 
Jake’s family’s fortune is never mentioned, making a psychiatrist’s suggestion that a drugstore stock boy travel to Wales as part of his therapy seem laughably out of touch, and everything is neatly fixed in the end, even things that really shouldn’t be, by thoroughly unexplained time travel.
 
The dysfunctional relationship between grandfather, father, and son, the most compellingly developed aspect of the book, is boiled down to a few scenes of painfully stilted, generic clichés, as is everything else that can be. While the book struggles somewhat to assert its differences from the many teen and middle-grade low fantasies like it, the movie seems to try actively to avoid any possibility of distinctiveness, shoehorning in an unnecessary love triangle and adding plenty of talk of chosen-one destiny, where the theme of the original emphasized personal choice.
 
The cosmetic swap of Emma and Olive’s peculiarities does allow for a more magical scene in the sunken ship, but has the unfortunate effect of giving the most prominent female character the less destructive, more feminine power set, causing her to spend long stretches of the movie literally on a leash. It’s hard to say whether the swap draws more attention to the movie’s lack of regard for the book, or to the flatness of Emma’s character and the unimportance of the children’s peculiarities in the book in the first place, when she, as the most important peculiar child, can have her peculiarity completely changed with little to no effect on the plot.
 
Altogether a poor adaptation of a pretty okay book, and a waste of some excellent actors.



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


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Book Review: Black Widow: Forever Red

7/5/2016

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Book Review:
Black Widow: Forever Red
By Margaret Stohl
 
Marvel, 2015
 
B-

 The Basics:
 
Ava Orlova is a teenage orphan living out of the basement of a Brooklyn YMCA and dodging the “help” of S.H.I.E.L.D’s witness protection division. Alex Manor is a hothead from the suburbs who has haunted Ava’s dreams for years before the two finally meet in person at a fencing competition. Before Ava and Alex can begin to understand their strange connection, Natasha Romanoff (a.k.a Black Widow) crashes the tournament on a mission to find Ava before Russian mad scientist, Ivan Somodorov, can. Fiercely self-reliant ever since Natasha rescued her as a child from Ivan’s cruel experiments and then dropped her into S.H.I.E.L.D custody without a backward glance, Ava wants nothing to do with her former hero, but the best chance all three of them have of defeating Ivan is by sticking together.
 
The Upside:
 
This is a perfectly adequate and enjoyable, if forgettable, spy adventure novel set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, containing a particularly amusing Tony Stark cameo. The inter-chapter frame story, a mission debriefing with Natasha regarding an unspecified death, adds a nice level of tension.
 
The Downside:
 
This is not a Black Widow book.
 
That’s her name and her image on the cover, her perspective in that first chapter, the one a person might flip through before buying, but this isn’t her story. Natasha plays the aloof mentor to Ava and Alex, with said aloofness acting as her sole defining character trait for much of the book, and taken to extremes which, from our vantage point outside her mind, appear to border on pettiness.
 
It must be acknowledged, of course, that anything related to movie-verse Black Widow comes with seriously loaded pressure. She’s become the symbol of women in Marvel movies, superhero movies, and blockbusters in general, and the snubbing thereof. The very existence of a Black Widow YA prose novel licensed within the movie-verse does reek a bit of an attempt to placate and/or cash in on the demand for more exploration of the sole original female Avenger, and a review of the book is not the place for an exhaustive discussion of the movies or whether a novel was a wise form of patch for their shortcomings.
 
What can be said about the book itself is that it thoroughly fails to deliver on its back cover promise to “reveal the untold story of Black Widow.” No advantage is taken of Natasha’s central billing in this story, or of the introspective potential this medium lends itself to, to allow us to know her any better. More superficially, there are also a surprising number of proofing errors for a large publisher’s release, albeit one that doesn’t specialize in prose.
 
In the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Widow: Forever Red is a severely unsatisfying bait-and-switch. Viewed in a bubble on its own merits alone, it’s B-minus, three star popcorn.


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Why Trying to Measure the Darkness Is Holding Superhero Movies Back

6/20/2016

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Okay, fiction rant time:
 
Can we stop arguing over whether superhero movies are too dark or just dark enough, as if level of darkness is a single defining aspect by which these movies can be quantified and catalogued?
 
Can we please talk instead about whether these movies are good?
 
I don’t demand that superhero stories make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I don’t demand that they make me feel sad or disturbed. All I ask is what I ask of every story:
 
Make me feel something. Well, something other than bored, insulted, or ironically amused. Make me feel something on purpose.
 
You want to tell a superhero story that will make me laugh? Make me laugh. You want to rip out my heart and drag it through the mud? Do it. I dare you. I will thank and respect you for it if you can.


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Nope, that’s not it.

Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman utterly fail in this attempt. Why? Because they pile up the mud as high as they can, and they pull with the power of a freakin’ locomotive, but what are they pulling on? It’s sure as hell not my heart, because no part of these movies ever bothered to put the hooks into it first.
 
You can knock over as many imaginary buildings as you want. No one’s going to shed a tear if we haven’t had the chance to care about anyone inside them. You can put Superman through an endless gauntlet of public scrutiny and criticism, but if all you ever show us about your version of Superman is how much he has it coming, who cares?


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One shot of playfully falling fully clothed into a bathtub does not a character make.
 
Deadpool works because it knows what it wants to be; a smart, biting, R-rated meta comedy, and that’s what it is. It goes all out with its humor and does it well, but it lets in the darkness where the character development calls for it.


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Ditto Kick-Ass.

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Ant-Man
and Guardians of the Galaxy work on a similar principle, starting with the fun and letting in the dark when it fits.
 
Civil War manages to make it mostly work in reverse, by starting with a very serious storyline, but still taking the time to show us some of the lighthearted, banter-filled friendships that stand to be destroyed by said storyline, making the darkness mean something.


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Plus a lighter new heart.

Different people have different tastes when it comes to ideal level of darkness, and an argument can be made that certain existing characters, like Superman, aren’t compatible with the dark end of the spectrum without losing their inherent spirit. That’s a valid criticism, but it doesn’t come anywhere near covering what’s wrong with the new big screen Superman. Take any pre-existing attachment to any particular ideas of Superman or Batman or comics in general out of the equation, and these still aren’t good movies.
 
Darkness does not equal substance. Absence of darkness does not guarantee fun. Darkness does not correlate or inversely correlate with quality. Darkness is one dimension among many that make up storytelling, and when it’s the only dimension your formula accounts for, guess what? You get one-dimensional stories.
 
So that’s your answer, DC movie makers. Your problem isn’t that you need to make your movies darker or lighter. Your problem is that you need to stop fixating on that dimmer switch and make them better.

Rant complete.


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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #1: The Glass Lampshade

5/30/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

Fiction Pet Peeve: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!


Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Am the Parent, Therefore I Disapprove."

This is a simple one. It’s that moment when a character points out and possibly even protests the terribly insulting thing the plot is doing… to no effect.
 
Example? Why, I’m glad you asked.
 
In the final season of Angel, a series of shifts in the show’s focus and one actress’s pregnancy resulted in the main lineup of evil-fighters looking like this:


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That’s five men (the green demon is a white actor underneath if you’re keeping score on that front) and one woman. The woman, Fred, is brilliant and thoroughly lovable but also the only member of the team without either superpowers or some level of combat training, making her the go-to damsel.
 
In the lead up to the series finale, Fred gets implanted with a demon, which is slowly killing her as it gestates and prepares to take over the world.
 
Desperate to save both the world and herself (because who wouldn’t be?), Fred works long hours in her laboratory looking for a cure, in spite of her deteriorating health. When Wesley, one of her many doting male associates, comes to tell her to rest, she objects with, “No! I’m not just the damsel in distress!”


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“I’m better than that!”

Yay! Fred’s reclaiming her agency! Surely the writers have noticed how they’ve been treating her and are about to rectify the problem, and-
 
Oh, wait, no.
 
****Spoiler Alert****
 
Fred’s attempts to save herself come to absolutely nothing, and her soul is eaten by the demon who takes over her body, providing lots of angst for her many admiring male survivors.
 
****End Spoilers****
 
This peeve isn’t about the general practice of pointing out problems with fiction from within the fiction (known in storytelling jargon as “lampshading,” hence my little title joke).
 
It’s a technique that can do wonders under the right circumstances, ideally when the story pointing out the writing sin is a work of meta-satire that successfully manages to be smarter than most stories that commit said sin.
 
Sidney in Scream makes a complaint of this sort that works, because her respective story takes it to heart, when she tells Ghostface that she doesn’t watch horror movies because the victims are an insulting bunch of busty blondes who “run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.”


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I really AM better than that!

Sidney says this shortly after Ghostface finishes with his busty blonde first victim of the movie (played by Drew Barrymore), but Sidney herself remains competent throughout, outsmarting and outmaneuvering Ghostface, at one point running upstairs to escape through a second story window only after he blocks her attempt for the front door.
 
Even that opening scene with the death of Casey subverts the tradition Sidney is calling out by actively desexualizing the violence. Casey remains fully clothed in a baggy sweater throughout, and as soon as the scene transitions from flirty meta-banter to physical threat, it turns deadly serious, focusing on audience sympathy for Casey over the more typical creative dismemberment.


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This part of the scene is not FUN.

Lampshading can also work when it’s used to write off a practical issue that’s standing in the way of the best possible story.

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“Hey, didn’t we used to be a delivery service?”

In the case of this Futurama joke, the show is completely guilty of the sin it’s pointing out, that is, inconsistent accounting for how the characters spend their time and make their income. It works, though, because the strength of Futurama comes from the variety of its zany, episodic plotlines.
 
No one’s mourning the fact that we don’t spend more time watching the cast delivering packages. This isn’t something that’s central to the point of the story, and there’s no real-life social context attached. It’s an oversight that doesn’t ill-use or insult anything except, mildly, the audience’s long term memory, so once we receive this nod of acknowledgement, we can move on to enjoying the crew's more interesting spacefaring hijinks, satisfied that our intelligence is respected and the creators aren’t trying to slip anything past us.
 
The lampshade only becomes pointless, worse-than-nothing glass when a work of fiction commits a more real-life serious or story-integral sin and then points it out without doing anything to remedy it, apparently with the mistaken belief that pointing at the problem is the same thing as fixing it.
 
There’s a scene in City of Bones in which the Shadowhunters have to sneak into a church to raid a secret stash of anti-demon weaponry. So as not to imply that Christianity is the only viable avenue for fighting evil, Jace quickly explains that all organized religions are secretly in on the cause.


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“We could just as easily have gone to a synagogue or a mosque.”

Yeah, but you didn’t though, did you, Jace? The lampshade line is there, but Christianity remains the only religion we actually see involved in fighting evil.
 
Okay, religion is an extremely delicate subject, and if an artist doesn’t feel qualified to represent a real-life culture in fiction, steering clear can sometimes be the wisest course of action, so maybe we can give that one a pass.
 
Not so much this little gem of a moment in the Twilight book-verse:


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“You know, I saw this story on the news last week about controlling, abusive teenage relationships.”

Jacob throws this out there in Eclipse, the book in which Edward disables Bella’s car and physically prevents her from visiting other friends. The joke of this line is presumably intended to come off something like, “Ha ha, Edward and Bella sure are easy to mistake for an abusive relationship, aren’t they? But they’re not, though.”
 
Except they completely are, and this lampshade does nothing to change how unhealthy they are or how reprehensibly the story romanticizes that abuse.
 
Should we even touch how bad the Marvel movies have gotten with this lately? Eh, why not, we all know these, right?


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Remember that party scene where the Avengers men all acknowledge that, back in their solo franchises, most of them had love interests? They talk for a while about what the ladies are up to and try to one-up each other with stories about how smart/independent/tough/generally awesome their girlfriends are.
 
That’s really sweet, guys. It’s great that you’re so supportive. Sounds like some of those women are having pretty cool adventures!
 
…Which we’re never, ever going to see any of, are we? Not a snippet of any of them ever doing anything remotely relevant to any movie that we’re actually watching, ever again. Nope, the narrative follows the men, and the men alone, wherever they go.
 
But at least we’re going to get some new costumed women soon who might get some narrative focus of their own, right?
 
…Right?


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“It’s about damn time.”

So sayeth Wasp when Hank Pym, her movie-universe father, finally bestows on her her mother’s supersuit, indicating that he’s done being demeaningly overprotective of her.
 
Yes, Marvel. It is about damn time Hope’s father acknowledges her power (see last week’s peeve). And yes, we get the meta-joke that it is about damn time Marvel movies likewise acknowledge female supers collectively.
 
It was "about damn time" a long time ago. It was "about damn time" before this post credits tack-on in Ant-Man, and it continues to be "about damn time" far more urgently and dramatically than a 2018 release of a movie titled “Ant-Man and The Wasp” (emphasis mine) can come anywhere close to addressing.
 
Lampshades alone don’t make problems go away, not if the problems are big enough. Self-deprecatory humor can only buy you so much leeway. Sometimes the only patch for that insulting plot is to just do the thing right in the first place.



Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #2: I Am the Parent, Therefore I Disapprove

5/24/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

Fiction Pet Peeve: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

As this is a list of fiction pet peeves, and we're approaching the top, it’s probably not necessary to start out by noting the intensity of my loathing for this habit of fictional parents, but I’m going to anyway.
 
Hate it.
 
Swinging at it with a red-hot mace hate it.
 
Okay, let’s get on with this.
 
I’m talking about those fictional parents who unilaterally and selfishly disapprove of their children growing up and pursuing happiness in any way (especially romantically), while asking us, the audience, to sympathize with their pathologically unreasonable dehumanizing of said children, who often aren’t children at all.


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Pictured: A disapproving father and a goddamn assistant district attorney superhero!

Let’s just say it, one of the biggest problems with these fictional parents is that they’re almost always fathers obsessing over maintaining control over their daughters.
 
This assumption that girls have less of a right or desire to make their own choices and mistakes in the pursuit of adulthood (and sex) than boys do, or that it’s somehow cute and fitting for fathers to feel a sense of possession of their daughters that doesn’t apply to sons or mothers, is a massive real life issue of inequality that fiction more often than not plays for cheap laughs.


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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.


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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

Oh, wait, I decided I like my adopted daughter’s husband after all. Guess I better musically sign over the lease and title. Cue the awwws.

Shudder.
 
This kind of parental disapproval also gets used, bafflingly, in attempts to make villains sympathetic by supposedly proving that they “care” about someone other than themselves, in spite of the fact that their possessiveness usually demonstrates the exact opposite.


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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.

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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.
 
And as horrible as the gender stereotyping is in all these, that’s not to say that the mother-son, mother-daughter, and father-son versions don’t exist, or that they can’t also be hugely problematic.
 
Lois’s behavior toward her sons on Malcolm in the Middle, for example, is notoriously nightmarish.


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She disapproves of almost everything any of them do, including most of their relationships, plans out each of their lives from beginning to end down to the smallest detail, and applies techniques banned by the Geneva conventions to make them comply with her vision. And yet, Lois as a character is not only played for laughs but played for sympathy, with her actions repeatedly excused and justified as tough love.
 
As with many overused and oversimplified fictional motifs, there’s of course a tiny grain of truth in here that occasionally gets explored with some actual care. It’s no secret that parents and their children fight, or that parents (ideally) want to protect their children. Sometimes parents are overcautious or slow in recognizing their children’s maturing capabilities and needs, or they project their own experiences on their children beyond the point where it’s helpful, and often parenting mistakes are made with the best intentions.

This is all real, exploration-worthy stuff.


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Edna from Hairspray is a perfect positive example of a disapproving fictional parent, one who tries to veto her daughter’s ambitions in an attempt to shield her from reliving her own disappointments, but who eventually learns to trust in her daughter’s self-confidence, becomes her biggest cheerleader, and comes out of her own shell, inspired by her daughter’s example.
 
King Triton from The Little Mermaid follows a similar pattern.


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He certainly crosses a major line when he destroys all of Ariel’s stuff, but he doesn’t do it out of a blanket disapproval of the concept of his daughter growing up and falling in love. In fact, when he first hears the rumor that Ariel’s in love, he’s thrilled for her and can’t wait to meet the object of her affections. There isn’t even a mention of any political restrictions on whom Ariel should marry, being a princess and all. He doesn’t break out a shred of disapproval until he finds out that Eric is human, at which point he flips out over that very specific prejudice, instantly feels horrible about it, and ends up growing to accept Ariel’s choice and celebrate her happiness.

Parents placing a different level of value or different expectations on boys and girls is also a very real issue that can be depicted responsibly. Park's parents in Eleanor & Park are a great example of fictional parents who do this but ultimately learn to accept and respect that their son isn't what they once assumed he should be.
 
Of course, not all fictional parents have to work out their issues and end up supportive allies of their children by the end. Real life sadly holds truly terrible parents as well, parents who exert control over their children for entirely selfish reasons, without wanting to see them grow into self-reliant adults with happy romantic relationships and full lives. Fiction has a place for those parents too.


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Ahem.

That place is not smiling in the opening credits of a show about a heartwarming, would-be appealing family.
 

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The Secret Life of Bees does the extreme negative of the gender issue well, because even though Lily's father is given a slight, grim sort of pity toward the end, he’s fully acknowledged as a bad father. Treating a child as a possession rather than a budding human being due to gender (or for any reason), is bad parenting, and he’s a bad parent. No arguments there.

There’s nothing wrong with unhealthy relationships in fiction, as long as the work doesn’t ask us to believe that they’re anything else.
 
The point where the disapproving parent triggers this peeve is where a story shrugs off this kind of bad parenting as “just the way parents are,” or, more commonly and insidiously, “just the way fathers with daughters are.”
 
I’m looking at you, Arrow/Flash/Legends of Tomorrow TV universe.


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If you’re a dad with a daughter on these shows, you automatically hate any man she might be romantically involved with. You hate any possibility of her doing anything dangerous which, given the superhero universe, means doing anything at all. In fact, you usually hate the possibility of her ever hearing about the existence of anything dangerous or meaningful or plot-related in any way, unless, in the case of Merlyn, you need to use her for some part of your own scheme which you’ll later claim had something to do with loving her. You fully endorse the use of guns and dishonesty to keep her under control.
 
Oh, she might call you out on it on occasion, but don’t worry, less than an episode later, she’ll tell you how right unconditionally forgiven you are, because you were “only trying to protect her.”


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Then you’ll make a condescending, off-the-shelf joke about how all fathers want to keep their daughters helpless and isolated forever and you just can’t help it and couldn't possibly be expected to.
 
…Bull…. Shit.
 
This dysfunction is not inevitable. It is not healthy, and it is not cute. Respecting your adult daughters as human beings is not too lofty an ideal to aspire to. There are plenty of wonderful, supportive parents in the real world, who want their children, daughters included, to chase their dreams and their dream partners and live real, adult lives.
 
This is what good parents want for their children. The same things they’d want for themselves.
 
There are even a few of these parents in fiction, though not nearly enough.


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Know what I think, Lance, West, and Merlyn? I think if you couldn’t be motivated by disapproving of everything your daughters do for no reason, your shows wouldn’t know what to do with you.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #3: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

5/17/2016

0 Comments

 
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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

If you already know what I’m getting at based on the title above, Horror geek kudos to you. Double kudos if you happen to remember the 2009 3D remake of My Bloody Valentine, to which I will be taking a sledgehammer in this article.
 
Oh, and for which there will be spoilers, in case you care.
 
Now, to explain this peeve to anyone who hasn’t guessed it, I’m going to turn the mic over to my good friend, Annie Wilkes.


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"The bad guy stuck [Rocketman] in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out, but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned, and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting, 'This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!'"

Thanks, Annie!
 
In the book version of Misery, Annie expands on this by contrasting it with a different week of her favorite serial, in which the cliffhanger left Rocketman in a crashing plane, and the start of the next episode showed him finding a parachute under his seat.
 
Maybe not the most likely thing to happen, she admits, but she finds it acceptable. And that’s the real point of this peeve. Drawing the line where manipulation of the audience crosses over into just plain cheating.
 
That line is crossed when the story lies.
 
A couple of my favorite movies sadly nudge their toes over this line. Sorry, Ex Machina and Saw II, you’re in the hot seat this week.
 
Overall, Ex Machina is a seriously smart and intense Sci-Fi thriller, and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend skipping the spoiler section here and watching it asap.
 
But it does have two little lines in it that drive me crazy…
 
***Ex Machina spoilers ahead***


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"Ava isn't pretending to like you."
 
Nathan says this to our hero, Caleb, about the flirtation he’s developing with Ava, the artificial intelligence they’re testing together.
 
What Nathan means in that scene is that he programmed Ava to be capable of sexual interest as a human would be, not to flirt with Caleb in an artificially pre-scripted way.
 
But later on, when Nathan is trying to ease Caleb out of the head game he’s put him through for the purpose of testing Ava, he proposes, as an alternative to Caleb’s debate between believing that Ava likes him and believing that she’s an imitation of a person liking him, the third option that, “She’s pretending to like you.”
 
The pause after this suggestion might as well include a "dun dun DUN!" music sting.
 
What Nathan is saying this time is that Ava is not imitating flirtation because she was programmed to, but because she is conscious and intelligent enough to view Caleb as a means of escape from Nathan’s lab and is manipulating him for this purpose, which turns out to be exactly the case.


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It’s a great twist, mostly, but it’s undercut by the She’s not pretending to like you/She is pretending to like you contradiction.
 
The most satisfying twists are the ones that were hiding unnoticed under our noses the whole time. Twists that come out of nowhere can be okay too, but twists that come out of a place we were explicitly told not to look, those feel like a cheat.
 
***End Ex Machina spoilers***
 
Saw II pulls almost exactly the same gambit.
 
***Saw II spoilers ahead***
 
The premise of Saw II is that Detective Matthews and a full S.W.A.T team have John Kramer (a.k.a “Jigsaw”) cornered in his lair while one of Jigsaw's deadly games plays out, with Matthews’ son stuck inside it. The twist is that the game has already finished, the monitors in the lair are showing a recording, and that Matthews’ son was being protected throughout the game by a Jigsaw accomplice and is now inside a time-delay safe that will open and reunite him safely with his father, if Matthews can only wait around that long without doing anything rash.
 
It’s my personal favorite of all the obligatory Saw twists, enough so that it actually topped my list of favorite underrated twist endings.
 
There’s just one teeny little line you have to ignore, or it ruins everything.


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“[You can waste time here until your son] starts to bleed from every orifice he has. Oh yes, there will be blood.”

Jigsaw is referring to the sarin gas that kills the losers of the game, and he’s explicitly stating that this will happen to Matthews’ son in the near future, as if the game is still in progress.
 
All the other cryptic gibberish Jigsaw feeds Matthews throughout the movie makes sense in retrospect, knowing that the sarin game is over and Matthews’ own game only requires him to sit still while the timer runs down, but this one line has no alternate interpretation that works that way.
 
It’s just a flat-out lie.
 
***End Saw II spoilers***
 
The Ex Machina and Saw II offenses can be somewhat defended by the fact that Nathan and Jigsaw are both untrustworthy characters. They damage the sanctity of their own experiments by lying to their subjects the way they do, which doesn’t seem to mesh with their motivations, but they’re imperfect, not entirely sane people. Jigsaw’s even dying of a brain tumor. It can be rationalized that they’d make a few mistakes and occasionally fail in adhering to the scientific method.
 
What can’t be excused is when the story lies directly to the audience, without a fallible character as an intermediary.
 
Your turn, My Bloody Valentine 3D.
 
This one’s simple. It’s a whodunit slasher movie with a shrinking cast of suspects. Classic! Let’s all try to guess who the killer is before our friends can!
 
Wait a minute, let’s not.
 
There’s really no point, not when the culprit, Tom, is effectively absolved not too long into the movie by being locked in a cage while more killing happens outside his reach.


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It’s a killer-with-multiple-personalities twist, so some moments can be explained away as an unreliable narrator. Tom interacting with the masked killer, for example, is written off as a hallucination, but this doesn’t work on the cage scene.
 
The cage is not a hallucination. The pickaxe that the the killer uses to bend the door, trapping Tom inside, is not a hallucination. The big reveal montage showing how everything was done has Tom using the pickaxe to bend the cage shut from the inside, but… Annie, would you like to field this one?


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THE PICKAXE WAS ON THE COCK-A-DOODIE OUTSIDE OF THE CAGE!!!!

You’re the best, Annie. Please don’t hurt me.
 
We enter into fiction expecting to be misled and misdirected a little, sometimes more artfully than others. When we go to a movie called My Bloody Valentine 3D, we should probably expect tricks as tacky as a parachute under Rocketman’s seat. But we always deserve better than the Cock-a-Doodie lie.
 
It means the difference between a cheap, cheesy good time and the joyless futility of playing a guessing game with Chris Griffin.


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Chris: Guess what word I’m thinking of. And it’s not kitty.
Meg: Is it kitty?
Chris: GET OUT OF MY HEAD!


Hey, audience! Guess who the killer is. And it's not Tom.

It's Tom! Betcha didn't see that one coming, did you?

I don’t want to play anymore, do you?


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


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