Movie Sequels You Are Unlikely to See

It's a major holiday today, which means the Internet is quiet. And the basement, where I'm typing this right now, is too cold. So I'm going to go somewhere warmer and leave blogging for tomorrow. But, just so I have a post dated today, I'll pull something frivolous out of the archives. 


The Straight Dope Message Board, where I hung out a lot at the beginning of this decade, had more than its fair share of silliness. And one of the particular bits of silliness was a thread about unlikely sequels to movies -- or, to be more specific, unlikely titles for movie sequels. These were my contributions:

The Eighth Sign
The Sum of All Fears Divided by The Sum of the Hypotenuse
Black Monday
Red Dragon With A Yellow Racing Stripe
Leaping Tiger, Revealed Dragon
Nicholas Dimeby
The Other Hours
Married for a Little While
Darn, You Caught Me
Some More About Schmidt
Two Weeks Notice 2: Resume Hell
Star Binding Arbitrations
Monsters, LLC: Going International
Raiders of the Ark That Got Lost Again
Landing Some Miles Away When the Wind Dies Down
A Thing That's Common To Both Guys and Girls
Re-Adaptation (a novelization)

and, finally:

The Lord of the Rings: Isn't There Some Way We Can Get a Fourth Movie Out of This?
(Formerly known as The Amazing Adventures of Beren and Luthien)

Incoming Books: 23 December

Yesterday was a very quiet day in the office. No, quieter than that, even. I managed to get done everything I'd wanted to accomplish before the holidays, and even the usual torrent of e-mail slowed to one corporate announcement every hour. And so I left early, in part so my assistant could also leave to catch a train, and in part to hit a comics shop in Manhattan on my own way home.

And here's what I found there:

Awesome 2: Awesomer, an anthology published by Top Shelf, edited by (it says here) "Charlito and Mr. Phil," and benefiting the Center for Cartoon Studies and the Indie Spinner Rack podcast. I'd never heard of it, but Midtown Comics had it on their sale shelves for less than a third of the regular price. It has a lot of short strips by many people -- including Alex Robinson, Miss Lasko-Gross, Julia Wertz, and Jeff Lemire, just on the first page of the table of contents -- so I'm sure it'll be worth at least what I paid for it in reading time.

Dungeon Parade, Vol. 1: A Dungeon Too Many by Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim and Manu Larcenet. I've been thinking lately that I need to gather all of the scattered "Dungeon" books -- I already have three or four of them, though some are probably in my sons' rooms right now -- and read them through, so I'm planning to gather the ones I'm missing to do that.


Ex Machina, Vol. 8: Dirty Tricks by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. It's been so long since I read Vol. 7 that I thought I might have missed one, but, no, this is the next book. Hope I haven't forgotten everything....

B.P.R.D., Vol. 11: The Black Goddess by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and Guy Davis. I don't know if this has been published as long as I've been looking for it -- I may have been jumping the gun -- but I finally found it. (And there's a new Hellboy collecting coming in a couple of months, too!)

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. by Dash Shaw. It's a collection of shorter comics stories (plus storyboards and other materials for an animated something-or-other of the same title) by the author of Bottomless Belly Button, which was definitely last year's major debut. (If not one of the best graphic novels of 2008, or of a longer period than that.) I don't know where Dash Shaw came from -- he seemed to me to come out of nowhere -- but I'm definitely keeping an eye on him now.

Alec: "The Years Have Pants" by Eddie Campbell. It's finally published! This is a massive omnibus of all of Campbell's "Alec McGarry" semi-autobiographical comics, from the original '80s Alec strips to brand-new material. Campbell is easily one of the best creators working in comics today, though he doesn't always get credit for that, and I expect this is one of the best comics volumes of the year...though I wonder how many of us will manage to read it before it's 2010.


And last is Bryan Talbot's new (and very odd-looking) graphic novel Grandville. I managed to miss seeing it in stores until yesterday, even though it came out a few months ago. But that's OK, since Midtown had it on their sales shelves already, so I got it for half price. (I wonder if comic shops are a little too eager to mark things down? Or perhaps that's what you need to do when you buy non-returnable.) Anyway, from what I can tell, Grandville is a furry Victorian murder-mystery thriller. And Talbot is definitely talented enough to make that work, so I'll see if he did.

Movie Log: Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock is a deeply amiable movie, a loving depiction of the best sides of the spirit of the '60s that suggests that, indeed, all you need is love.

It ambles loosely through the summer of '69, with a focus on Demetri Martin's Elliot, the son of a motel-owning couple of Eastern European Jews (Henry Goodman as Jake, who works and rarely talks, and Imelda Staunton as an only slightly modulated Jewish-mother stereotype). Elliot is the head of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, and already has a permit for a summer music and arts festival, so he realizes -- when the already-planned Woodstock festival gets kicked out of its first venue, a few towns away -- that he can step in and bring all that business to his town.

It all goes on very predictably from there -- the townspeople are opposed, there's a damaged local 'Nam vet, we meet Eugene Levy as a local farmer named Max with a field to rent, Elliot gets caught up in the planning for the show, and then the hippies descend en masse for the promised three days of peace and music. But it's endlessly good-natured, capturing the essential spirit of the cultural moment, when it seemed as if peace and love would win out against all odds.

On the other hand, you have to already know what Woodstock was and what it meant -- and have some sense of the history of the late '60s, the war and the protests -- to really understand Taking Woodstock; this isn't a movie that explains itself. It would make a fine bottom half of a double-bill with the old Woodstock documentary, though -- that might feel as long as a day at the concert back in '69, but would, at least, have far less mud.

E-Book Pricing: Attack of the Consultants

Seth Godin was famously dismissive this week of Carolyn Reidy's call for publishers to battle the current market trend for bestseller e-books to be priced lower than their wholesale cost, declaring that this is a matter of "competition" and "the market," which -- as all good little capitalists know -- cannot be fought.

There's two problems with his assertion. The first, and most obvious, is that it's not "the market" that is creating this artificially low price, it's one particular retailer, which has a long history of undercutting the competition on price to gain market share before increasing prices, and which is generally believed to be losing money on each sale under the current pricing structure. And businesses, despite what Godin might believe, are not obliged to help individual customers gain power over them.

The second problem is more basic: books are not an unfettered free market. Books do compete with each other for consumer dollars, but they are not competing evenly. The reader who wants Under the Dome will not be satisfied if he finds The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society at an amazing price. Each book creates its own market, only loosely tied to the market for any other book. So publishers do have quite a bit of leeway in setting a price for a particular book or format.

Or, to put it another way: Godin reportedly charges at least $30,000 for a speaking engagement. (And that number is from 2000; it's likely he charges much more now.) Many other speakers, who talk about the same subject, receive much smaller fees. If capitalism worked the way Godin claims it does, he would have no income, since there are cheaper, equivalent goods in the market. Given that Godin keeps making wrong-headed pronouncements, I expect that he's still finding plenty of people to pay him lots of money, even when his advice is the business equivalent of "lie back and think of England."

In short: the fact that Godin has a career proves that he's wrong.

[Godin link originally seen via GalleyCat]

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

There's a breed of writer that produces more words than they consume, and Chuck Klosterman is their king. Most of his lesser compatriots are sportswriters, with some other kinds of old-fashioned newspapermen for spice, but Klosterman came in through a different door: he was a professional music critic before leveling up to being a Chuck Klosterman, whatever that means. He's produced six book-length works so far, all of them except last year's Downtown Owl non-fiction, and nearly all of them deeply based in his own life and perceptions of the world.

Eating the Dinosaur appears to have been planned as a whole; there's no sign that any of the baker's dozen essays here appeared anywhere else first. Even then, most writers would try to place the short pieces elsewhere for a quick extra buck -- I'm not sure if that's a statement about Klosterman's integrity (or laziness), of the horrible state of the magazine market, or something less clear. Klosterman has his now-traditional interstitial bumf between the essays -- which, as always, aren't as smart or fascinating as he thinks they are -- composed mostly of Q&As with a vague relation to the essay immediately following.

Klosterman, it must be said, is still a very lazy thinker, and finds himself out of his depth when he even approaches low culture. (He also has the unsettling tendency to seem more and more ignorant and scattered the more the reader knows about his subjects, so it's possible that he's equally as unreliable on basketball and heavy metal.) His work here is mostly in a sophomore bull-session mode, sometimes taking two things with little to do with each other (Nirvana and Waco, Weezer and Werner Herzog) and making them seem parallel, and sometimes just circling around one thing (ABBA, TV laugh tracks, Vertigo, the basketball player Ralph Sampson, Garth Brooks's In the Life of Chris Gaines record) until he exhausts himself.

As always, he's superficially convincing -- up to the point where the reader knows about the pop-culture item in question, at least -- and has that quotable, snappy all-American magazine writer style that's harder not to read than just to go along with. He's not a great writer, but he's an entertaining writer, for as long as his line of patter is tolerable.

I'm tolerating Klosterman less and less, I'm afraid -- I avoided his novel because the fictional part of Chuck Klosterman IV was dull, and I enjoyed the non-fictional parts of that less than the similarly random Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. I still have good memories of Klosterman's more unified books -- Fargo Rock City, the story of his teenage years as a hair-metal fan in the ass end of nowhere; and Killing Yourself To Live, a long road trip to the sites of rock-star deaths -- but I'm afraid to re-read them and find that Klosterman was always this self-satisfied and full of kookish ideas.

Klosterman really needs to get out of his apartment and let his weird theories bounce off of other people; he's the kind of oddball who gets too hermetic when left alone for any length of time. He opens the first essay in this book, "Something Instead of Nothing," by writing "For the first twelve years of my adult life, I sustained a professional existence by asking questions to strangers and writing about what they said." He really needs to go back to that, or something like it.

Kindle Sales Percentages: A Query

Jeff Bezos said, in a recent interview with The Washington Post:

today, for titles that have a Kindle edition, Kindle book sales are 48 percent of the physical sales.

From the Kindle numbers I have seen -- admittedly, those are still somewhat scanty, and come substantially later than physical books-sales data -- I would not characterize that to be the case, and I work in business books, supposedly one of the hot areas for e-books. (Not to say that e-book sales aren't growing well; they are.) Are any of you seeing Kindle editions selling at close to half the sales of the paper book?

I just did a spot-check on my long-time bestselling book on Amazon, which is on a wonky topic that I'd expect would appeal to early adopters and business road warriors -- for the past few weeks, Kindle sales seem to be rising as a percentage of print sales, but only in the 10-12% range.

And the essay question is, of course: how much of that sales growth is entirely due to Amazon's very aggressive Kindle pricing strategy for bestsellers? If they sell Under the Dome for $14.00 in hardcover and $7.99 in Kindle, isn't it surprising that they're still selling fewer of the Kindle editions?

R.I.P. Borders UK

Speed readers: please note the "U.K." in the title.

The Borders U.K. chain shuts its doors for the last time today, after a failed attempt to sell the chain as a going concern.The Bookseller reports today on a "wake" for the Books Etc. chain, which was bought by Borders UK and rebranded as Borders Express; I haven't heard if a similar event will memorialize the larger chain.

I don't think I ever shopped in a Borders U.K. store -- the only time recently I was in their trading area was the Glasgow Worldcon, and I did my book-shopping on site then -- but it's never good for an entire bookselling chain to go out of business.

I hope the British public are finding the books they want to read at the other outlets remaining, and will support those outlets that do offer the books they value. (You can read that as a slam against the supermarkets, if you want, but I really don't know the local situation, and I'm not sure who is the best current bookseller in the UK. I suspect the online retailers are running away with the market.)

Racing Against the End of the Year

I managed to write a review for the Charles Burns-edited The Best American Comics 2009 before the end of the year in the title (always a plus), and the ComicMix squad has just posted that.

I hope to have two more reviews up in this shortened week, though I haven't yet decided if Manga Friday should go on time, early or late this week. (And, no matter what I decide, it will take someone at ComicMix actually pushing that button to make it happen...hmm, perhaps I should ask them?)
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Listening to: Josh Ritter - A Country Song (original recording)
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: World's Greatest Dad

Robin Williams has not completely become an unfunny showboating motormouth, no matter how much it may seem so when his big movies are being advertised every three minutes on TV. I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that World's Greatest Dad makes up for Old Dogs (shudder), but it does show that Williams still does have talent and smarts -- not to mention balls, for choosing a movie like this.

This is a dark comedy, with Williams as Lance Clayton, a mediocre high school English teacher who can't seem to attract more than a tiny handful of students to his poetry class. His teenage son, Kyle (Daryl Sabara, gleefully showing he's not just the Spy Kids kid), is a complete jerk. Actually, that might not be going far enough -- Kyle is an asshole, of the kind that only a self-absorbed (and slightly dim) teenage boy can be, but his father loves him, even when it's impossible to like him. Lance is also sort-of dating fellow teacher Murphy (Morgan Murphy, in one of a good half-dozen major parts going to first-time movie actors -- whoever cast this movie also had balls, and did a fine job), who hides their relationship at school. But she's also flirting with more successful English teacher Mike Lane (Henry Simmons), which grates on Lance.

There's a big event in the movie that most reviews and descriptions of this movie give away, but it happens close to halfway through, so I don't feel that I should mention it. On the other hand, I did say that this is a dark comedy, so perhaps that heavy-handed hint will work. Things get dark, and there's a scene I found remarkably emotional and true, even set to music and coming in the middle of a black comedy. And then it gets quite funny, in sly and lacerating ways. Throughout it all, Williams underplays his role, just like a real middle-aged man -- I hadn't thought Williams could still underplay anything, but he's quite good here, occasionally stuttery and tongue-tied and always slightly forlorn and knocked about by life.

The end of World's Greatest Dad -- the big reveal and the moments afterward -- don't work quite as well as they could have; it's solid but doesn't push the movie upward the way it should. There's another moment tied to music, and it's a good call-back to earlier in the movie and almost creates the catharsis we want...but not quite. The movie doesn't make the case strongly enough for that moment, and so it feels refreshing rather than transcendent.

Still, this is a fine black comedy, and there's few enough of those. And it's great to see that Williams still knows how to act, and is willing to do it.
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Listening to: The Long Blondes - I'm Going To Hell
via FoxyTunes

Nick Mamatas Sums Up Avatar

"The funny thing is that the filmmakers probably thought they were making a kick-ass movie about the depredations of capitalism (you know, like the BUDGET of this monster!) and the horrors of genocide, but they really just made one about how Hollywood liberals are the most obnoxious assholes in the world."

There's much more at the link; Mamatas, as always, is excellent when fulminating about lousy movies.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/19

Another week has come and gone, and I've gotten the usual pile of mail. Actually, it's a fairly small pile; this month has been light in general, probably because a lot of people have better things to do than to worry about sending out review copies to bloggers. But there's still more than enough to write about.

And that leads me to the usual disclaimer: I may sound knowledgeable about these books (or I may not, actually), but that's due to my innate intelligence and cunning, honed by years of publishing experience. I haven't read any of these books yet, and anything that appears to be factual below might be somewhat in error. (Though I generally try to stick to things I already know for sure, or what can be gleaned from the press release and back cover of the book.)

This week is entirely SF/Fantasy, and almost entirely mass-market paperbacks. First among them, and probably the book that I have the most personal interest in reading, is Doppelgangster by Laura Resnick, the first in a new contemporary fantasy series. Resnick wrote an excellent traditional fantasy sequence -- it's not quite "epic,"and was loosely based on the history of Sicily and involved a long-time occupying power and the rebels trying to oust them -- starting with In Legend Born. Doppelgangster sounds like it could be generic -- young woman (actress Esther Diamond) in the big city (New York) with magic (friend Max the Magician) in a relationship with an unbeliever from law enforcement (detective Lopez). But Resnick's earlier books could have sounded equally generic boiled down that far, and she brought a surprising amount of depth of characterization and uniquely realized setting to that series. Doppelgangster will be a January publication from DAW.

Another January mass-market -- this one from DAW's corporate sister Ace -- is Julie Kenner's Turned, third in her "Blood Lily Chronicles," about a young undead woman in the middle of pre-Armageddon scheming by both Good and Evil. The first two books in the series are Tainted and Torn, but I haven't read them. On the cover, our heroine is mostly sensibly dressed, though we can see her lower back tattoo and she's got a leather jacket draped over one shoulder. (No high heels though, and the weapon is a sensible sword with a guard.

The woman on the cover of Deadtown is doubly well armed -- flaming sword in one hand, smoking semi-automatic in the other -- and has both leather pants and heels. However, her shirt actually covers her lower back, so she loses Urban Fantasy Points for that. (And she's doing an odd chicken-wing thing with her shoulders.) This one is set in Boston, the heroine is a professional demon slayer, and her boyfriend is a lawyer/werewolf. The author is Nancy Holzner, attempting to launch a series for the second time (her first novel, Peace, Love, and Murder, was a straight mystery that did not generate sequels), and this is also from Ace in mass-market in January.

Continuing the urban fantasy-ification of everything is Faith Hunter's Blood Cross, first in a new series about Jane Yellowrock. (She's a vampire hunter and skinwalker, check, in New Orleans, check, but there's no mention of an occult beau and she's fully dressed and armed on her cover -- though she does have a serious biker-chick vogue going on, with all her chains, leather, and spikes.) The story sees Jane hired by vampires to kill a vampire, which leads to the usual divided loyalties and danger for those she cares about. This one is from Roc -- but still mass-market in January.

Death's Mistress by Karen Chance is #2 in its series, after the series-titling Midnight's Daughter. Her heroine, Dorina Basarab, is a Dhampir (half-vampire) whose uncle was Dracula. (Blended families can be such trouble, particularly now around the holidays.) There's no sign of a boyfriend in the copy, and it's not clear what she does for a living -- though she is off searching for a "magical Fay relic" in this book, which may be a clue. The cover shows Dorina in a leather bustier, but from the front, so we can't tell if she has a tramp stamp. She is wielding the inevitable smoking gun, and standing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. This one is from Onyx -- an imprint that tends more to the romance than the fantasy in the urban fantasy-paranormal romance spectrum, and is yet another arm of the Penguin/Putnam/Pearson empire from 375 Hudson Street -- and will be in stores in January like all the rest.

Hastur Lord is the fifth Darkover novel co-authored by Deborah J. Ross, and the sixth Darkover book to be published after author Marion Zimmer Bradley's 1999 death. (2009 also, coincidentally, marked the twentieth anniversary of the last book in the series that Bradley wrote alone, The Heirs of Hammerfell.) It will be published by DAW in January, and, perhaps because of the time since Bradley's death, it contains a dedication (date 7/26/98) and a short Note from Bradley, to prove that -- even if they are digging very deeply into Bradley's notebooks and papers at this point -- that there is still a decent reason to list Bradley as co-author of the book. Hastur Lord continues the current series, slotting in right after The Alton Gift, and presumably continues the story of the telepathic red-headed aristocrats who can eat as much as they like. (Let no one say that Darkover isn't wish-fulfillment!) This one is a hardcover.

And last for this week is a mystery novel from Ballantine -- Charlie Huston's Sleepless. Huston is the author of the Joe Pitt Casebooks --a five-book series about a very hardboiled vampire in New York, which owe much more to crime thrillers and noir than to urban fantasy or any prettier (let alone sparkly) vampires -- and this is another book with a speculative theme. A plague of sleeplessness has spread, leaving millions permanently insomniac, and driving demand for the one thing that can help them rest -- an illegal drug called Dreamer. Huston's main character is a LAPD detective (and ex-philosophy student, the flap copy insists on telling me) working undercover to trace the flow of Dreamer. This one will be a hardcover on January 12th.
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Listening to: Pink Floyd - Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
via FoxyTunes

More Things I Don't Get

My two sons -- currently aged eight and eleven -- spend massive amounts of their free time these days watching YouTube. And that's fine.

But what they mostly watch is videogame walkthroughs, for games they don't own. And that's fine, too -- it's less fun than playing a game yourself, but I can see the appeal in finding out how it works.

Except that, a lot of the time, they seem to be watching walkthroughs by teenagers -- only slightly older, though much whinier, than they are -- who aren't any good at the game. After several jump-cuts, to obscure the fact that "TtlDminor07" just got killed three times, and repeated voiceovers like "Wait, what's that doing there. Ah, man, stop it! I'm down to seven guys! Just stop, OK? I'm going to have to do this part again...", I begin to wonder why my boys are watching this.

Is there any point to watching bad walkthroughs, or are my boys just still so young that they have seemingly infinite free time and nothing constructive to do with it?
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Listening to: The Long Blondes - I'm Going To Hell
via FoxyTunes

Bad Lessons

Tonight, once again, as I dug through a giant pile of old bound galleys that I keep intending to sell or give away or otherwise dispose of, I felt that life was teaching me the wrong lesson.

Because I found my copy of The Best American Comics: 2008, and, if I had been more organized or quicker to cull, I wouldn't have.

The good news is that I can keep working on my review of the 2009 book; the bad news is that I have ever more incentive never to get rid of a single book.

Movie Log: Intolerable Cruelty

The Coen brothers' comedies are intensely mannered movies -- I'd compare them to the Coen's dramas, but I realized that I've been avoiding their dramas for pretty much this entire decade (not the black-and-white one, certainly not the Cormac McCarthy adaptation that tried to bring back the pageboy for men), so I can't actually do that. This saddens me, since there was a time (about ten years ago), when I'd seen all of the Coens' movies, and really liked their weird, precise voice.

Well, anyway, I caught up with Intolerable Cruelty last week, mostly because I realized that George Clooney is an amazing leading man -- probably the best pure leading man we have today -- and that I hadn't seen nearly enough of him. Catherine Zeta-Jones is good in this movie as well, though she's given somewhat less to do.

Clooney is Miles Massey, a world-class LA divorce attorney. (His "Massey pre-nup" is legendarily ironclad and unbreakable.) He finds himself on the opposite end of a divorce case from Zeta-Jones's Marilyn, who is trying to get rid of a philandering (and train-obsessed) husband but retain as many of his assets as possible. Massey gets her cast out with nothing, but is intrigued by her -- and she vows revenge on him.

The movie goes on from there, constructing its own cartoonish parody of the legal system along the way. As with many comedies, the viewer has to realize the cartoon rules -- here, that a Massey pre-nup is utterly unbreakable once signed by the poor party unless it is destroyed by the rich party, and a few other rules, equally bright-line and clear and utterly unlike the real give-and-take world of litigation -- and accept them, to avoid questioning every plot twist of the movie.

There are the expected reverses and double-reverses, with a few lines of dialogue ("You're exposed! You're a sitting duck!") repeated several times, and a great time is had by all. It's not really a laugh-out-loud comedy -- the Coens' style doesn't run that way -- but it is very funny, deeply odd, and a lot of fun for nearly two hours.
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Listening to: Basia Bulat - Little One
via FoxyTunes

Twelve Days of Commerce # 17: A Full-Court Press for the Book-Killer

You're hip. You're au courant. You keep up to date with the most intensely modern currents in every aspect of your life. And it pains you -- physically -- to still be reading anything as old-school as ink on paper.

You want to spread the news of e-ink -- of spending hundreds of dollars for a gadget that almost but not quite replicates the experience already included (and priced into) a physical book. But the countdown has begun, and you don't think you can get your chosen gadget in time.

But wait! There's a Christmas miracle! Amazon is offering free two-day shipping on their Kindle book-murdering device.

So now you can convert your friends to the glory of being tied in perpetuity to a single retailer for all of your reading needs. C'mon, do it! Remember that Big Amazon loves you.