Movie Log: Bee Movie

The point was to watch this as a "family movie night" over pizza Wednesday evening, but Thing 1 bailed out at the first sign of unpleasantness -- when the big, tough "Pollen Patrol" bees mildly intimidated Our Hero -- as he often does, so the family was reduced to three. But the three of us made it to the end of Bee Movie just fine.

It's a nice-looking kid's movie that has way too much message and a plot that follows its own logic to some weird places -- I appreciated the latter much more than the former. And the messages are so obvious and hackneyed that I have to take points off for that.

(I mean, "Being an individual is good"? "We must save the environment"? "There's a place for everyone"? Bleeeh.)

It's not embarrassing, like some kids movies I could name, but it's nothing special, and I don't expect I'll want to see it again. I sent it back to Netflix the next day, and neither of my boys have asked about it, so I don't think either of them want to see more of it -- not even to rewatch a favorite scene or poke through the extras on the DVD.

So, if you're looking for an adequate movie to entertain kids for about ninety minutes, and you don't mind heavy-handed vaguely left-wing messages, you could do worse than Bee Movie.

Movie Log: Sweeney Todd

I've always felt that I should be a Sondheim fan, but, for various reasons -- mostly having to do with being a hermit who doesn't get out to see shows all that often -- it's pretty much remained on that level. Whenever I hear a bit of Sondheim, or read reviews of new shows and revivals, I think "Yes, that certainly does sound like my kind of thing." And I leave it at that.

There have been at least two productions of Sweeney Todd on Broadway that I could have seen, and maybe more, but I've seen none of them. So this is my first substantial exposure to Sondheim -- once it's in a form that comes to my door, I'm on it.

The Wife and I watched Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd film last Saturday night, and I came away with a better impression of the material than of the execution. As usual with a Burton film, the visuals were stunning and the iconography amazing; this is a movie that looks spectacular.

The script is equally good, and most of the actors are excellent. (Jamie Campbell Bower, as the young lover Anthony, is a bit too much, but I suspect that's mostly the way the part is written.) Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are particularly strong in acting the lead roles of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett.

Unfortunately, neither Depp nor Bonham Carter are trained singers, and it really shows. They speak-sing most of their parts, and forfeit much of the potential power of the work along the way. (This is a movie that really calls out for an old-fashioned Hollywood solution -- have real singers, secretly and uncredited, sing for the inadequate actors.) They're not bad singers -- they're always adequate and occasionally better than that -- but these are songs that really good singers could have dug into and done something spectacular with.

So the movie of Sweeney Todd is quite impressive -- it's a work of real power -- but I was left wondering what it could have been if it had singers worthy of the material.

Quote of the Week

"When someone complains about making a living writing novels, what they really mean to say [is], 'I cannot maintain a bourgeois existence that matches the perceived social status of being a novelist by writing just the novels I would like to and at the rate I'd wish to.' "
- Nick Mamatas

Your Headline of the Day

Hulk doll's monster willy

Against: it's from The Sun (the UK tabloid).

For: there's a great photograph of the Hulk doll (with willy) and the six-year-old girl who discovered it.

Sloganeering

Today's meme is brought to you by...I forget, actually. I've seen it at least twice so far, but I forget who was doing it.

To make up, I'll do it twice. (And I do realize that statement doesn't make sense.)

The Wheeler Slogan:

Your Slogan Should Be

Wheeler. Live the Pleasure.

The Slogan Generator

The Hornswoggler Slogan:

Your Slogan Should Be

Hornswoggler. Stronger than Pain.

The Slogan Generator

Penguin UK Tells Stories

A colleague recently passed on a link to Charles Cumming's "The 21 Steps," an online short story told through Google Maps.

And I see that Penguin UK is in the midst of a series of online fiction experiments, called "We Tell Stories" -- the homepage has some more information. (The new stories are all related to classic novels that Penguin has just put into new editions -- Cumming's "21 Steps," for example, is a homage to John Buchan's The 39 Steps.)

The site is a little slow for me, particularly the homepage, so I don't know if I can spare any more should-be-working time on it, but the other stories also look to be told in distinctive ways -- the second one is a couple of blogs, and the most recent one is entirely a series of "infographics."

It's clever and inventive, a marketing device that creates something new and interesting instead of just trying to build hype. (It's also, clearly, a device that took a lot of time and effort.)

Life Sucks by Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria, and Warren Pleece

I'm a pretty geeky guy, so I usually enjoy manifestations of geek culture, and most of the usual maneuvers to get my interest or sympathy in a story along those lines work like a charm on me.

Unfortunately, there's one major area where I don't identify with the generic geek at all, and this book is set right in the middle of that territory. The stereotypical geek (young division; the old geek has his own troubles) is a weedy, scrawny, weak, ineffectual chap, whiny about his lack of success with women (or with anything, really) and always being pushed around by bigger, more confident men.

I'm six-foot-three, and my days of being bullied ended in eighth grade when I got into three fights within a month (with three different people). Getting the nickname "Psycho" the next year probably didn't hurt, either.

So when a book relies on audience identification with the poor-me sad-sack of a mid-20s male loser, I usually just can't do it. I have no more sympathy for those worms than the equally-generic surfer antagonists do.

Which is a shame when it comes to Life Sucks, since that's all its hero has going for him.

Dave is the night manager of a Last Stop convenience store, somewhere in a strip mall in Southern California. He's also a vampire; when he went to apply for the job, his boss Lord Arisztidescu ("Radu" for short) fanged him to make him loyal. (It's not entirely clear if -- or why --vampire masters pay their slave followers; the economics in Life Sucks is a bit fuzzy.) Somehow, the same thing happened to his friend Jerome, who is similarly a night manager at Kwik Kopy. (One begins to suspect these young kids are just too stupid to live.) How much of a loser is Dave? He rides his bike to work in southern California. Case closed.

Dave's convenience store is on the flight-path of a nearby night club catering to Goths, so, every night when the club closes, a swarm of attractive young women draped in layers of black wander through the area. One of them, Rosa, has caught Dave's eye -- he's smitten. She over-romanticizes vampirism -- of course she does, she's a Goth -- but our loser hero refuses to use that to win her, and just settles into the usual schlubby, needy, sad-sack, "just friends" mode.

(At this point my hands were itching for a nice wooden stake to put him out of my misery.)

And then there's Wes, another young vampire turned by Radu and the epitome of the evil blond surfer dude. (Except, he's a vampire, too.) And he sets his sights on the hot Goth chick, too. Dave, briefly abandoning whining for a more useful tactic, then maneuvers Wes into making a bet to see who can "get" Rosa first, without using any vampire trickery.

OK, that's all plot set-up. The thematic center of the story is that Dave is a "vegetarian vampire" -- he's never bitten another person, and survives on blood plasma. This has left him weaker than other vampires, and unable to use the full array of Kewl Vamp Trix (hypnotism, superstrength, turning into things, and so on). Life Sucks would like us to believe that this is a principled stand on Dave's part -- that he can be turned into a vampire, but not made to use other people for food -- but he's such a wimpy little loser that it's just another piece of his character. Of course he can't bite anybody -- if he could, he wouldn't be a loser.

The big confrontation at the end goes to the heart of the theme. The good options for an ending -- depending on how writers Abel and Soria wanted to go -- would have been either A) Dave realizes that he is a vampire, and he has to live like a vampire to survive among vampires, and so fully accepts his new life, or B) Dave stands by his principles and finds a way to win as a human, without descending to the level of the vampires.

Abel and Soria, however, pull a third, lousy ending out of the unfortunate plotting hat, in which Dave stays a loser when it counts, but caves in off-page after he's already lost at the important moment. It's the worst of both endings, and it moves Dave off to the side when he should be central -- if this is Dave's story, then it should be determined by his actions. The last five pages of this book are badly misthought and, frankly, a mess.

There's plenty that's good about Life Sucks: the art is well-paced, and deals with a lot of very talky scenes well, keeping everyone identifiable; the dialogue is smart and precise; it has a new and interesting take on vampire life. My problems with Dave are idiosyncratic; they won't bother most people. But the ending just doesn't work.

The Dreaded Middle-Book Syndrome

I faced it head-on at ComicMix today, with a review of three big whomping chunks of middle: Ex Machina Vol. 6, B.P.R.D. Vol. 7, and Queen & Country Vol. 8.

The Best American Poetry: 2007, edited by Heather McHugh and David Lehman

On my last trip to the library, I came across this and had one of my periodic attacks of high culture. I hadn't read any poetry in quite a while, and I felt like I should. So I grabbed The Best American Poetry: 2007 and prepared to better myself.

(By the way -- before I forget -- McHugh is the guest editor of this year's edition and Lehman the series editor. Don't ask me what that meant for their work-flow or about how all of the poems were chosen; they don't explain it.)

I knew I was in for rough seas when McHugh's introduction began thusly:

Poetry attracted me in the first place, fifty years ago, because (half gasp half gape) it seemed constitutively thunderstruck, wonderstruck. The oddity and opportunity of verbal life seemed not just a poem's object but its fundamental subject: In a poem, theme and instrument could not be told apart. Except insofar as verve or the vernacular refresh it, daily life wants language chiefly for a tool of will, to note the sorely needed or the merely known. But as soon as systems of words are wielded by intentions only, predictable and paraphrasable, they begin to bore me. A logophiliacal hunger craves amazement. And words can blaze! -- most brightly where (like fires) their logs are interlaid with airs. They can flow -- or flock -- or fluster! From their arrangement in measures, uncontainability pours forth.... (And so it is with us: We can't contain ourselves.)

Oh, my. Lookie, ma, I's writin' now! And that sets the tone for the anthology, in which a lot of people on minor-college shelves strive to be too clever by at least half.

Some of the poems are pretty good, but I see that American poets -- at least the ones McHugh and Lehman like -- have nearly abandoned meter and rhyme; there are only a few pieces in here with either. (Not that that matters all that much, or that I really care about a hundred-year-old controversy, but if I'm going to grump properly about a book of poetry, I might as well hit the obvious targets.) There's also quite a number of "prose poems," which I know is a time-honored term, but it makes about as much sense to me as "ocean desert." One or the other, writers -- you need to choose. You don't get to claim that you're doing both at once.

It also struck me as odd that the anthology is organized alphabetically -- poets are listed purely in the order of their last names. To my mind, an anthologist has two jobs: first to select the works (including editing, if appropriate), and then to organize them into an pleasing configuration. So it looks to me like Ms. McHugh (or maybe Mr. Lehman, or even both; again, they don't explain any of this) knocked off work for lunch halfway through the job and just never came back.

All in all, this left me seriously underwhelmed. Some of the individual poets are nearly as full of themselves in their notes as McHugh is in her intro. And, sadly, I've already returned it to the library, so I can't single out any poems, or poets, for particular praise or blame.

I do still have a shelf of unread poetry, so maybe it will soon be time to dig into Larkin or Bishop or even dive back into my giant Penguin three-volume Browning (where my bookmark is still in the middle of Collected Poems, Vol. 1 since an Arisia about ten years ago). But I doubt I'll go back to this series to see what previous years were like.

ComicMix Reviews

I've gotten behind in letting you fine folks here know what I'm doing over there...

On Friday, my "Manga Friday" column reviewed Kieli, Vol. 1 and Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 3, both from Yen Press.

Yesterday, my review of Paul Goes Fishing by Michel Rabagliati was published.

And today my review of Lars Martinson's Tonoharu: Part One went up.

Tomorrow will probably be a round-up of middle volumes of very different ongoing series, and maybe some kids' books for Thursday.

In Over My Head

Item 1: my regular mailman came back from vacation this week. Seven packages arrived yesterday and four today. (Including some really wonderful stuff, like Jim Butcher's Small Favor and the new Yoshihiro Tatsumi collection from Drawn & Quarterly, so don't think I'm complaining or anything.)

Item 2: baseball season has started, and with it the specter of overscheduling. The Wife had a bunch of Thing 1's Cub Scout compatriots over this afternoon after school to paint their Soapbox Derby car (a kid-sized brakeless, barely steerable cart on little wagon wheels), then ran off to Thing 2's first baseball game at 5:15. (And it's real baseball this year, after two years of T-ball -- girls shunted over into the parallel softball league, playing with boys one and two years older with some actual skills, semi-real pitching, and so on.)

I headed right over there after work, pausing only to grab a quick drive-through dinner and vote for the school budget. She left about 6:30 to take Thing 1 home to finish up his homework; I stayed until the end of the game at about 8:00. Then all the hurried bedtime stuff, The Wife rushing off to vote, and finally we get to settle.

So it looks like things are getting quite busy around here -- and the next game is on Friday...

J.K. Rowling Is Wrong

J.K. Rowling is currently in court in New York, trying to assert complete control over all critical or secondary works even vaguely related to her copyrights (and, more importantly, Time Warner's trademarks) in the Harry Potter properties, by suing the publisher of The Harry Potter Lexicon. She's trying to stop publication of the book, which, if I remember my Constitutional Law class from long ago, requires a much stricter test than an action after publication would.

To be blunt, I think she is absolutely wrong in her actions, and must lose the case if there is any justice in the world.

Reasons why Jo Rowling thinks she should get what she wants, in this as in everything:

1) Having someone write non-fiction about her fictional world makes her sad. "It has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month," she said in a New York Times article on the trial. Also compare to her sadness last year over early reviews; I'm half-convinced Rowling would outlaw all reviews or criticism of Potter if she could.

2) She is the only one allowed to decide who may profit, in any way, from Harry Potter. From the Times: "She said the book, which would cost $24.95, would compete unfairly with an encyclopedia she had been planning to create since 1998, the profits of which — possibly millions of dollars — she had planned to donate to a British charity."

3) Some of the entries steal her words. "She claims the author has lifted large chunks of her own language without quotation marks," reports the Times.

4) Some of the entries don't steal her words. The Times: "She complained that the entries consisted of words like 'Death' or 'Voldemort' arranged alphabetically, followed by what she considered bare-bones definitions."

5) Some of the entries say things that are original, and she doesn't like those, either. "She also objected to what she called the book’s “facetious asides,” like a comment about whether Hagrid could fit into a booth at McDonald’s," notes the Times.

Those reading carefully will note that only #3 is actionable in a court of law, but all five came up in her testimony yesterday. So what is she really saying? "I'm rich, powerful, and well-liked, with millions of zealous fans, so you have to do what I say"?

The bottom line: Rowling is demanding more power and control over secondary works than any entity should ever have. Judge Robert P. Patterson, who is hearing this case without a jury, should rule strongly and unequivocally against her claims.

[relying heavily on The New York Times's coverage]

Tiptree Winner

The annual James Tiptree, Jr. Award was recently bestowed upon The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall.

As usual, there was also an "honor list" of works which didn't win but were contenders. (I presume that's what "honor list" implies; these weren't the nominees or shortlist since they were only announced after the winner was selected.)

That "honor list" contains:

• “Dangerous Space”, Kelley Eskridge, (Dangerous Space, Aqueduct Press, 2007)
• Water Logic, Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom, Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
• The Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
• Interfictions, Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.) (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Glasshouse, Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
• The Margarets, Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
• Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
• Flora Segunda, Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

[via SF Awards Watch; it's not up on the Tiptree Award site yet]

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Every so often, I stare at my to-be-read shelves and a great lassitude falls upon me: I can't decide what to read, or think of a reason why I ever thought I might want to read any of those books. That is the time for Wodehouse.

That time came again recently, and so -- after dithering in front of those shelves for probably half an hour, picking up books and putting them back down -- I read My Man Jeeves.

This book, originally published in 1919, collects some of the very earliest Bertie-and-Jeeves stories: four of them, along with four somewhat similar stories about Reggie Pepper (another amiable upper-class dullard, adrift in New York as Bertie Wooster is in his stories, but without the steadying hand of a Jeeves). Comparing the two series of stories shows immediately how useful Jeeves was for Wodehouse -- Reggie had to be at least somewhat intelligent, to get out of his own scrapes, but Bertie could be sublimely incompetent so long as he had Jeeves to guide and save him.

Bertie is himself from the beginning of his first story, and even his background is pretty well worked out -- he's in New York to get away from his overbearing (and as-yet-unseen) Aunt Agatha. Several of the plots will be familiar to Wodehouse readers -- and not just because Wodehouse re-used the same plot motivators many times, but because he re-used the entire situations of some of these stories for later works. These Jeeves stories aren't as sublime as the best later ones, but Bertie and Jeeves are always good company.

This shouldn't be anyone's first Jeeves book -- I'd suggest Joy in the Morning, The Code of the Woosters, or the stories in Very Good, Jeeves! -- it could go quite well as the fifth, or tenth, or (even, sadly) last.

Am I Now Or Have I Ever Been?

Yet another meme-list-of-questions; Janni Simner invented it, and Gwenda Bond did it in public where I could see.

1. Have you ever killed a man? I have never been convicted of a felony in New York State.

2. With your own hands? I never use my own hands.

3. What, in your opinion, is the best way to transport contraband across state and country lines? State is easy -- trucking will do for most contraband. Country lines are a bit tougher, and generally require small watercraft.

4. Even if you're transporting explosives? I do generally prefer to send nuclear material via train, but trucks are just fine for everything else.

5. Really? Have you ever known me to lie?

6. Have you ever stolen a library book? Oh, yes.

7. On purpose, or only because you found it under your bed years after you reported it lost and paid the fine? Very much on purpose. Through defenestration, actually.

8. Where were you on November 1, 2007? Wouldn't you like to know?

9. Can you prove it? No. More importantly, neither can you.

10. You had to think about that, didn't you? Not for a second.

11. How much is it worth to you for me to pretend I didn't notice? The operative question is actually how much is your life worth?

12. Have you spent years building up an immunity to iocane powder? (And if you know a faster method, will you share it?) There is no such thing as an immunity to iocane powder, only a stubbornness to accept death.

13. Name three different ways to start a fire. Matches, calling on Zeus for a lightning strike, and begging the next campsite over.

14. Now try to convince me you only know that because you were a Girl/Boy Scout/Guide once. If you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do about it.

15. How many digits of pi can you recite from memory? Five after the decimal place.

16. Did you have to count out the digits on your fingers to answer that? No.

17. Did you check online to make sure you remembered right before answering? No.

18. Does all this talk about numbers make you uncomfortable? No.

19. Or are you just wondering what it has to do with the rest of the meme? One does wonder.

20. Seriously, where did you bury the body? Burial is for amateurs.

21. Where were you on March 16, 2036? I was at the opening of the Ruckheiser Center, but I will be assassinating the Anti-Pope. By the third time around, I'll probably be in Timbuktu.

22. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too? I would have been the one who pushed them.

23. What is the ninja replacement score for your life? -1

That was more enjoyable than most...