Just The Caffeine Talking

Movie Review: Color Out Of Space

Well, there's no "U" in "Color" so I guess it sucks.

Actually, it doesn't. Color Out of Space is a sincere and competent attempt to film a completely unfilmable story. As a horror movie, it succeeds at its most basic task: scaring the audience. My wife spent about half the run time in the theater vestibule, peeking in when she thought it would be safe and pulling back when it got too scary.

I say "unfilmable" story, because of course the source material, the short story "The Colour Out of Space" (note the U!) is about a meteor which brings an indescribable color to a New England farm in the late 19th century. Over the next year or two the inhabitants of the farm are driven mad and physically debilitated by the mysterious color, which poisons the entire surrounding area. 

In the real world, a color film can't be about a color which doesn't exist, so they made it magenta. Ah, well.

To pump up the thrill factor the moviemakers made some choices which made for more immediate scariness but had the overall effect of weakening the story, in my opinion. They added psychological elements, including a mild case of what looks like ghost possession, which felt very out-of-place. They tossed in a generous dose of Cronenbergian body horror. And there were a lot of plot threads and themes which were introduced and then abandoned — one character seems to be recovering from cancer, which is mentioned several times, but that more or less gets lost in the more immediate issue of an alien presence draining the life out of everyone. There's a little contrived isolation for plot purposes — the cars won't start but nobody thinks of walking out until it's night, and then they're too scared.

But there are chunks of dialog and narration straight out of the story, and everything comes to a proper Lovecraftian conclusion. Lots of fun shout-outs to HPL's greater "mythos" of towns and family names.

The acting is all good and believable. Nicholas Cage hams it up, but he kind of has to. The rest of the cast are good, even when they're assigned more or less stock character roles. ("You're the little girl from Poltergeist, only you're a boy. Got it?")

I give this movie a solid B. It does exactly what it attempts. Lovecraft fans should see it.

 

For a story about otherworldly presences and invisible horrors, check out my new novel The Initiate, in stores next week!

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 3

Sunday was my final day at the con. Most conventions are three-day affairs: show up Friday afternoon, do stuff Friday night and Saturday, maybe a few things Sunday morning, then head home after lunch. Not Arisia. Taking advantage of the MLK Day weekend, it stretches into Monday. That means Sunday is a busy full day rather than the tag end. 

I started my day moderating a panel on "Ringworld at 50," celebrating half a century since the publication of Larry Niven's landmark novel Ringworld. Opinions of the book among the five panelists varied, but we all agreed it's one of the most influential books of that era — not to mention a turning point in Mr. Niven's own career.

Slight pause after that, while I busied myself getting checked out of the hotel and finding a place to stash my stuff. Arisia may be a four-day convention, but I had prior commitments on the 20th and so couldn't stay to the end. 

I did manage to sit in on a couple of panels. The first was on book to film adaptations, and how one's impression of a work is affected by which version one experiences first. There are some cases where the film is actually better than the novel — my personal example is Carl Sagan's book Contact, which is full of plot holes the movie version avoids.

Another very useful panel was about crowdfunding and tabletop games. I may be dipping a toe into the Kickstarter world with an upcoming roleplaying game project, so it was all very informative. Watch this space for more information!

At 5:30 I participated in the panel "Writers React to Bad Writing," which might well have been called "Writers Forget Their Homework." We were all supposed to bring examples of bad prose to pick apart, but a minority of the panelists actually accomplished that simple task. I had selected a passage from Dan Brown's thriller Inferno, but cleverly left my copy at home so I had to reconstruct it from memory.

During the empty slot between that panel and my final event I taped an interview for Tyromag TV, which will probably appear in a few weeks. I don't think I picked my nose on camera.

I wound up my participation in convention programming by moderating the panel on "Hacking D&D," in which five panelists suggested rules tweaks or entire game mechanics from other games which can be ported into the most popular roleplaying system. In most cases they can probably be used in just about any game system without much tweaking. At least a couple of the examples are things I plan to use in games from now on.

With that done I could drop my name card into a recycling bin and join some other CSFWites at the ongoing "House of Toast" party. I had kind of assumed "Toast" was a euphemism, or maybe an acronym for something, but no, it was a party with about half a dozen toasters working full time popping out bread, and tables of exotic stuff to spread on them. We crunched down our toast and left the con. I got a lift to where my car was parked, and drove through a cold night back home.

 

A secret order of wizards rules the world, and one man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate arrives in just two weeks!

Godzilla Movie Update

It's always those damned Lannisters messing everything up, isn't it?

A Curious Omission

Like most people, I went to see the Disney/Marvel super-epic Avengers: Endgame a couple of weeks ago. It was good; I give it an A overall. This post isn't a review or analysis of the film. It's just one question.

The question is this: during the Big Final Battle with all the heroes against the villain's legions with the fate of the Universe at stake (again) . . . where are the U.S. armed forces?

Seriously: the battle takes place in upstate New York, on American soil and within range of at least two Air Force bases, three or four Air National Guard bases, two Army bases, and an Army National Guard division dispersed around the state. This doesn't even include any local assets of the fictional military/intelligence agency SHIELD.

Now while the battle might well have ended while ground units were still rolling down the New York Thruway, there should at least have been some aircraft overhead. It's especially odd given that three of the Avengers are current or former Air Force officers themselves.

This isn't the first Marvel movie in which major military forces have been conspicuous by their absence. The climactic battle of the previous film, Avengers: Infinity War, took place in central Africa — but there was time for various superheroes to reach the scene and prepare for battle, which means "mundane" military forces have could been involved. However isolationist the rulers of Wakanda may be, they surely wouldn't turn down outside help in the face of an invasion by aliens bent on destroying half the Universe. Ethiopian Air Force MiG-21s could show up, or U.S. Marines in Ospreys from Djibouti, or carrier-based planes from the Indian Ocean.

No doubt the fictional, "in-universe" explanation is that the conventional military units simply couldn't arrive in time, or were engaged off-screen, or something. But why didn't the moviemakers at least acknowledge the existence of real-world armed forces?

After all, the trailer for the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters shows the big G stomping into battle against King Ghidorah with an escort of F-35 fighters. (As I commented to my family, the only thing cooler would be if Godzilla was riding a Harley and holding a big American flag. Maybe they're keeping that for the sequel.)

I think Godzilla provides a clue. Real-world military forces are very powerful. A couple of A-10 Warthogs can turn a column of tanks into scrap metal. A B-52 can rain down 70,000 pounds of bombs in a single sortie. Compared to that, even a mighty hero like Thor or the Incredible Hulk seems kind of redundant. And the more human-scale heroes like Hawkeye or Black Widow become simply insignificant. What can a guy with a bow, or a woman with a Beretta pistol and a taser wristband do when there's serious firepower around?

Godzilla, at least, is an indestructible city-sized monster with atomic fire breath. He's in the same weight class as a military force. So he won't be overshadowed by some jet fighters. They can join in the fight without reducing his star power. Superheroes get left in the shade. So the armed forces have to stay off-screen in Marvel movies.

Still . . . just a couple of computer-animated jets in the background, or a line about the army being half an hour away, would have satisfied my nitpicker's soul.

Hollywood Insider Gossip!

According to my Hollywood sources the actual title for Star Wars Episode IX will not be The Rise of Skywalker, but rather

Everything Rian Johnson Told You Was A Damned Lie

A Film by J. J. Abrams

 

 

A Cinematic Contradiction

Recently I was watching a video bemoaning the current state of Hollywood. I won't bother linking it — you've seen it before, or read it in print. Hollywood has no creativity left, it's all remakes and adaptations of older stuff. You know the drill.

I don't really disagree. I do think that we forget how much Hollywood has always relied on remakes and adaptations. It's possible to acknowledge that and still be a bit put out by how poorly Hollywood is doing it nowadays. When a film like The Martian or Arrival faithfully adapts its source material, I am almost shocked.

However, one point in the particular diatribe I was watching made me puzzled. The critic mentioned that one cause of the "dumbing down" of cinema is the increasing reliance on foreign markets. For big movies, more than half the revenue now comes from Asia. That means the films have to cross cultures easily, so no subtle depictions of social class dynamics in a mostly-black Catholic private school in New Orleans in the 1970s, because nobody in Shanghai really gives a damn about that.

Okay, fine, and true enough. Globalization is real and ongoing. One reason so many films are about punching aliens is that aliens don't buy movie tickets and won't boycott or ban your movie for showing them getting punched.

BUT, this made me wonder about a seeming contradiction. If Hollywood wants to make movies for a global audience . . . why are so many films based on old American TV shows, toys, and cartoons? How many adults in China right now remember playing with a Hasbro Battleship set when they were kids? How many moviegoers in India have fond memories of watching Lost in Space? Heck, how many people outside the United States have read any Marvel comics lately?

Can someone explain this seeming contradiction? If you want to appeal to a global audience, why not just make movies about new characters and save the cost of buying rights and the grief of complaints from fans? Surely there must be some rational economic motive underlying this, but I can't see it.      

 

If you want an exciting adventure which is entirely new and different, check out Arkad's World, from Baen Books. Currently on the shelves in your local bookstore!

Disaster Excuses

One common thread running through science fiction, almost since the beginning, is a concept I call "Disaster Excuses." A Disaster Excuse is some awful event used to justify what would otherwise be an unlikely technological project, journey, or social change.

For a long time the standard Disaster Excuse was nuclear war. From 1945 up to the 1980s, nuclear war could justify almost anything. The most obvious was a return to medieval or even stone-age society — too many examples to count. It was also used to explain oppressive future religions, paranoid underground civilizations, secret time travel, and fertility cults. As with most Disaster Excuses, it was a prime mover for the colonization of space.

But it wasn't the only one. Beginning in the 1960s, pollution and overpopulation became equally prominent Disaster Excuses. Again, an overcrowded Earth was often the justification for colonizing other worlds or voyaging to the stars. Draconian population-control regimes served as the rationale for any number of dystopian futures.

Overpopulation waned a bit as a Disaster Excuse, for a couple of reasons. First, the trend lines have gotten less worrisome as the birth rates in country after country drop to replacement level or below. Second, once writers realized that most of the population growth was coming from outside North America and Europe, it was hard to ignore the kinda racist aspect of that particular apocalypse.

Pollution morphed into Climate Change, and is still going strong. It also seems to have spawned an odd backlash against space colonization. Because various writers over the years used environmental destruction on Earth as the pretext for terraforming Mars or settling planets of other stars, somehow the idea got around that this was a serious proposal. Consequently I've seen a number of critiques of space colonization centered around the idea that "we can't run away from Earth's problems!"

Astronomical disasters occasionally crop up as Disaster Excuses — most notably in When Worlds Collide. They do lack the social relevance of other excuses, since you can't really show off your political bona fides by taking a stand against colliding planets or interloping black holes.

All this does raise a question, though: why do we need a Disaster Excuse at all? Surely colonizing Mars or sending spacecraft to other stars are things worth doing even if Earth is a perfectly swell place to live. I'd even argue that a peaceful and prosperous society is actually more likely to tackle large projects like those. A starving or war-torn world is too busy struggling for survival. The Apollo program was launched in the booming 1960s; the leaner 1970s saw massive cutbacks in space budgets. Right now we're in another boom era, so that eccentric billionaires can afford their own space programs. I think I prefer that to fighting over my next Soylent ration.

SEE THIS MOVIE

The new Apollo 11 documentary is amazing. There's footage I've never seen, and I've probably watched every space documentary made in the past forty years. Skip this week's crop of comic book heroes and see a film about real ones. 

Art Forms of the Future

Despite the portentious title (or pretentious, your choice), this is actually just a link to a video. Here are some musicians performing in zero-gee, courtesy of a plane flying parabolic arcs. I call this art of the future because I suspect in a few years' time we'll see something like this filmed in orbit.

Retro-Review: Cabaret

This weekend the family sat down to watch Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret, adapted from the famous 1966 musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb. It was a first time for all of us: my wife hadn't seen it, nor had my son, and I had only seen a heavily edited-for-television version in my youth — or so I thought. I had, however, read Isherwood's Berlin Stories, one of the fictional inspirations for the musical, and some histories of the era.

Our reaction: baffled disappointment. It wasn't a very entertaining musical, it wasn't a very interesting depiction of Weimar-era Berlin, and none of us ever gave a damn about the characters.

When a legendary choreographer and musical director like Bob Fosse films a movie based on a long-running hit Broadway show, you expect some amazing dance and music numbers. But . . . the movie cut out half of the stage show's songs, and the dance numbers are all staged in a basement nightclub which looks about the size of Bob Fosse's living room. The dancers can't do much but shimmy and pose in place. Now, I don't need every number to look like Cab Calloway and the Nicholas brothers, but it's odd that Fosse — of all directors — chose to focus on the drama of the frame story at the expense of the musical elements.

This focus is especially weird because the talking-and-dramatic parts of the movie aren't very interesting. Fosse had Weimar-era Germany to work with and wound up making a movie that was pretty tame. I thought I had only seen the PG-for-TV version, but I was wrong. That was the whole film. There is no shocking Berlin decadence. Some girls wear slightly revealing outfits, a dude dressed as a chick uses the urinal next to Michael York in the bathroom, and Joel Grey wears false eyelashes and makeup. Oh, and Michael York's character is gay, sort of.

Christopher Isherwood, who wasn't "sort-of" gay at all, described the decadence of Weimar Berlin, which he observed first-hand, as "nauseating." Icons of the era were people like Anita Berber or Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich's The Blue Angel is a hell of a lot more authentically decadent than the Sixties posers in Fosse's film. Even Joel Grey's Master of Ceremonies isn't as cruel or sleazy as he should be.

The Kit-Kat Club and the Berlin rough-trade gay scene should be nightmarish, so that when the characters go hang out in a rural beer garden and a fresh-faced kid starts singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" the audience should feel a sense of relief and hope . . . right up to the moment when he puts on his Hitlerjugend cap.

(I would also have preferred actual period-style jazz performance to the Sixties Broadway style arrangements in the film. If you've ever heard a sinister old recording of "Mackie Messer" from Kurt Weill's German Threepenny Opera, it just blows Joey Grey right out the window.)  

Finally, I have to say I couldn't believe the main characters. Michael York plays his character as rather aristocratic and very comfortable in himself. We never really see that his main reason for coming to Berlin is to hook up with anonymous male partners, or that he feels any sense of self-loathing for doing so. The only man we do see him sexually involved with is a nice, well-scrubbed young aristocrat — what a charming place Berlin seems!

And Liza Minnelli is utterly wrong as Sally Bowles. Sally's the embodiment of her era, and is heading for an equally apocalyptic end. She needs to be more obviously self-destructive, a true addict who gives up everything for the next fix. Liza-as-Sally comes across as far too down-to-earth and resilient, a jolly 1970s party girl having a bang-up time. Nothing a stint in rehab won't patch up.

So . . . now I'm looking for a better movie about Berlin between the Kaiser and the Fuhrer. It's an incredibly rich period for storytelling. Any recommendations?