Star Wars: The Liberal Cribbing From The Books Awakens

So. I loved the new Star Wars movie even though it had a few problems. And it had a few problems. One of the problems that I didn't have but a friend did was that it kept cribbing from the Star Wars movies.

And, yeah, it did. But it was like GoldenEye; cribbing from Ye Olde Bygone Better Days to lure people back for three awful sequels and then a recast and reboot that similarly schizophrenically tried to be "the same but different" and wound up stuck up its own bunghole with a truly shit villain and no plot save for a mishmash of homages to previous entries and...

...oh.

But, no, I'm willing to give The Force Awakens a pass for its liberal cribbing of the earlier films. It was reassuring. What was annoying was how it threw out the old book canon... and then kept cribbing from it.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Spoiler-Free Version

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the GoldenEye of Star Wars films. It hits a lot of familiar beats, but it does this in the name of dragging the franchise out of the shadow of recent failures and reigniting it for easy public consumption. There are a lot of spoilery nitpicky problems with it, starting with the fact that I can't decide whether Adam Driver was horribly miscast or the best casting decision in the film, but that's for the VERY SPOILER HEAVY post.

Oh, and speaking of Bond/Star Wars comparisons, Daniel Craig has a hilarious cameo in it.

All right, on to as much substance as I can give you without giving any major plot points away. I love the fact that, right after the title crawl, the camera pans down to a Star Destroyer. None of this ships-that-aren't-Star-Destroyers nonsense that we had to suffer through in the prequels.

The Force Awakes: Spoilers Everywhere Version

The Dalton Dilemma
There's a phenomenon in movies that I call the "Dalton Dilemma." A review of The Living Daylights, starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond, complains that Dalton's impatience with the script seeps through his performance, causing him to stomp about in permascowl mode because the whole proceeding is completely beneath him. I thought that this more accurately summed up James Bond the character rather than Timothy Dalton the actor.

What does this have to do with The Force Awakens? Well...

SPOILERS

I have now played one hour of Fallout 4

Granted, most of this time was spent on a really choppy framerate at low graphics quality because I, being a moron, did not have my computer set up properly. And by "did not have my computer set up properly," I mean "I plugged the monitor into the motherboard instead of the video card."

So, anyway

My character can finally aim!

The Daniel Craig Films Are Just Darker Regurgitations of Pierce Brosnan Ones

So this is a post that is kind of due the political (warning) blog, Ace of Spades, which did a post on The Man From UNCLE - the recent box office flop starring the Great Lost James Bond Henry Cavill. By the way, it's a great movie and you should see it, but that's not why we're here. In discussing the film, Ace said the following:

Napoleon Solo, on the other hand, is essentially inhuman in his absolute detachment from the world. If you read the reviews for the early Bond novels and films, critics were scandalized at how amoral and nihilistic and sadistic James Bond was. That's largely what made the movies popular, of course: It just felt more adult and "real" that a professional killer would be emotionally cold and unburdened by the weight of conscience. 

Over the years, they've lost that aspect of Bond, though they try sometimes to reclaim it. Sure, Bond says "The bitch is dead" at the end of Casino Royale, but we also had this embarrassing exchange in Goldeneye: 

GIRL: So there you are in your armor again.
BOND: It's what keeps me alive.
GIRL: It's what keeps you alone. 

In fact, they returned to this armor metaphor in Casino Royale, having Bond tell Vesper that all his armor was now gone, and that he was absolutely naked to her and ready to fall in love. 

Well, that didn't last long. 

But anyway, while James Bond is often said to be amoral, the movies actually do spend a lot of time trying to "humanize" him. I suppose they have to. Hell, it's been 22 movies; you can't spend all that time with a total sociopath.

Hrm.  Not entirely sure that even the Connery Dr. No Bond, thumping that extra bullet into an already-dying Professor Dent, was ever quite as much an heroic sociopath as Napoleon Solo was presented in UNCLE, but anyway. That got me thinking about my usual James Bond formulation, how Connery, Moore, and Brosnan all play Boring Invincible Superagent 007 and Lazenby, Dalton, and Craig play Actual Human Being James Bond, and actually what a total crock that theory is.

Because even in the Lazenby and Dalton films, Bond's humanity was presented as a weakness: in OHMSS, Bond is captured because he spends more time chasing tail than he does trying to figure out what Blofeld's up to. And then he falls in love For Realz and takes his eye off the ball and that causes him no end of emotional grief - or would have, if Lazenby and/or his agent hadn't been so short-sighted. The entire final act of The Living Daylights only happens because Bond gets too close to the girl he's supposed to be, ahem, pumping for information. And of course Licence to Kill is a case study in just how bad revenge and obsession can be, as Bond bolloxes up the plans of not one but two allied foreign intelligence services.

But since then, we've had eight films in a row where we've tortured Bond's psyche for the audience's entertainment, starting with making his friend and comrade the villain in GoldenEye and ending with making his friend and adopted brother the villain in Spectre. Bond's Feelz have suddenly become sources of Drama, not Weaknesses That Must Be Suppressed.

Anyway, back to the title of this post:

GoldenEye and Skyfall: the villain, a blond ex-MI6 agent, was betrayed by Britain in the past and wants revenge, which he shall achieve via The Power Of Hacking. Bond's relevance in the modern world is questioned at length, the answer ultimately being "yes, because $."

Tomorrow Never Dies and Quantum of Solace: Bond in mourning. Bond Out For Revenge. The most "pure" action film of the lot. Bond Girl murdered and left on a hotel bed. Villain is physically weak but politically well-connected. The only one of the era that withstands repeated viewings, sadly overlooked in favor of its flashier siblings.

The World is Not Enough and Casino Royale: references to OHMSS. Bond develops Genuine Feelings for the girl with the most screen time, but she turns out to be evil and ends up dying.

Die Another Day and Spectre: Retro nostalgia tour. Over-the-top villainy. Bond brutally tortured, shrugs it off, demonstrates heretofore unmentioned ability to stop and restart his heart/ignore severe brain damage. Gets in a car chase where his Aston's special features malfunction.

Spectre

A hot mess.

Spoilers below.

Le James Bond

I have finished re-watching every James Bond film (the EON ones, I mean, so not Casino Royale 1967 or Never Say Never Again), and the verdict is...

So what the hell is going on with Daniel Craig?

There's this story running around about him saying some really, really stupid things. I guess he was strung out from what was an exhausting shoot, but f*ck's sake man you're an actor, you're the face of the brand - The Brand, the hugely-grossing, fifty-years-and-counting franchise that has basically become to action movies what Doctor Who is to science-fiction television, namely That Thing That Defined It In The Sixties And Then Refused To Die. (Oh, there are so many parallels between Bond and Who - they started within a year of each other, both franchises did Things They'd Never Done Before in 1969, their longest-runner started in the early-to-mid-70s and did seven films/seasons, 1987-9 saw a darker and edgier take on the character and the "death" of the franchise, followed by a wrongheaded dead-ended revival in the mid-90s and then a proper quasi-reboot circa 2005 with that short-haired amusingly-eared actor from Our Friends in the North.)

Anyway... Daniel Craig had some extremely unflattering things to say about the role that made him a household name. And these comments frankly veer straight into the realm of utterly unprofessional. I'm shocked, actually.

Of course this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened.

Mad Max: Furiosa Road

If you wanted a film that was basically a ninety-minute version of the tanker chase in Licence to Kill with a proper budget, then look no further.

More random politics

Some people like Ben Carson. I can't get over his deer-in-the-headlights debate performance. The cold, calculating Clinton or the delusional raving Sanders will tear him apart.

At this point my first choice is Ted Cruz because

• He's conservative (putting him ahead of Bush, Trump, Kasich, and Christie)
• He's not a bloviating psychopath (putting him ahead of Trump)
• He gives a rats' about the Constitution (which is basically my way of saying he's not running on Being A Social Conservative, a la Huckabee, although he certainly does care about the Constitution more than any other candidate save - arguably - Paul)
• He didn't embarrass himself in the debate (putting him ahead of Walker, Carson, and Paul)
• And finally I trust him slightly more than Rubio on immigration.

A debate between Trump and Bernie would basically be word salad, a never ending stream of verbal vomit as two delusional twits spew out jibber-jabber envincing a total disconnect from reality. They would be the highest-watched debates in history, but purely for the entertainment value; Finnegan's Wake would be more coherent.

Kingsman: The Secret Service: The one-sentence review

With the possible exceptions of The Spy Who Loved Me, the non-racist minute or so of Live and Let Die, and, God help us, Moonraker, the James Bond franchise has never been as balls-to-the-wall deliciously entertaining as Kingsman.

An incomplete list of Godfather 2's plot holes

Every once in a while there's a fortuitous intersection of two unrelated stimuli that provokes a profound reaction and inspires the incredible, viz., this blog post.

Point the first: I'm watching Godfather 2 with my folks. Because they're old and have early bedtimes, we don't get very far through the film each day and I have a lot of time to think about it.

Point the second: this chart, purporting to claim, among other things, that The Matrix is a better film than Jurassic Park or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, that the bloated mess that is Judgment Day is better than the original Terminator, and that Godfather 2 is better than Godfather 1.

All of those claims are wrong, but I'm going to focus on the last one.

I have some predictions about SPECTRE.

SPLOILERS

Man of Steel

False advertising: not a Stalin biopic.

Independence Day not-so-liveblog

The nearly-20-year-old movie. The holiday can take care of itself.

Weekend Song, Independence Day Edition

Of course it's an American band this week.

Metallica - Don't Treat On Me

Jurassic World

The audience knows the truth. The world is simple, miserable, and solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder. And you get to see something very special[...] the look on their faces.

-Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), The Prestige

When Christopher Nolan wrote those words, he wasn't talking about just magic tricks. He was talking about moviemaking in general, but it especially applies to special effects - which are kind of like magic tricks.

The original Jurassic Park should be required viewing for anyone aspiring to direct action films (also on that list: Aliens and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. More to come as I think of them). Spielberg hit the sweet spot, showing off the dinosaurs as necessary to tell the story (and elicit the impressed oohs from 1993's movie-goers). That film could not have been made without CGI, and yet that was not a film about CGI. 

In Jurassic World, CGI dinosaurs have been a mainstay of movies theme parks for 20 years. The people running the show need more impressive effects dinosaurs to keep the money coming in. Eventually the CGI is substituted for an actual story with actual characters park breaks down again and a lot of people leave rather disappointed get eaten.

Jack from Mass Effect is my spirit animal.

The Confederate (Battle) Flag

So we're arguing about this, are we?

Season Five: The Autopsy

Game of Thrones Season Five was the biggest disappointment since my son.

Said Tywin Lannister.

A few more thoughts about the Game of Thrones finale

I'm on my other computer and can't merge the two posts on this account. Might do later.
Anyway SPOILERS

And now a word on the interview where (Spoiler)'s actor says he's not coming back.

SPOILERS

Some thoughts on the Season Finale of the Ramsay Snow Show

Spoilers

Och, I forgot one prediction

ARYA prediction below

A bunch of stupid predictions about the Ramsay Snow fanfic called Game of Thrones

Spoilers, obviously.

Why Burning Shireen Is The Worst Change From THE BOOKS, Ever

No, there's no fucking spoiler tag on this one, and no, I don't care if that offends you.

See, I defended the Sansa Rape Scene, because I don't think it's beyond a reasonable doubt that Littlefinger will try to rape Sansa in the next book. I thought the show was moving the pieces around while still getting to both "Sansa has an awful sexual experience" and "Sansa stops trusting Littlefinger."

I defended Jon going to Hardhome because hey, why not, Show!Jon is more an action hero than his book counterpart, and Tormund could reasonably want him to give his word to the Free Folk before they showed up at the wall hoping for passage.

But this?

This?

The Stannis Baratheon in the novels would never burn his daughter. No. Never.

What the hell is wrong with these people? I might as well start rooting for Villain Sue, because it's clear as all fuck that the showrunners do.

Times when it makes sense to go to Winterfell: a handy guide for the more logically-challenged members of House Stark (and a few other people)

Spoilers.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan turns 33 today.

Here are some reasons it's the best space opera film.

• The theme music. Holy crap, the theme music.
• Kirk's whole "space cowboy" schtick is deconstructed, he's given a midlife crisis, his overconfidence gets a lot of people - including his best friend - killed. Meanwhile, the best Star Wars was ever able to manage was cutting off the hero's hand and having the villain tell him they were related. No contest.
• They actually killed off a popular regular (yes, they brought him back in the next film, but this is not a post about that).
• They actually damaged the Enterprise model.
• They gave the characters proper uniforms.
• KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
• They seamlessly integrated a new character and let her bounce off Kirk and Spock flawlessly (seriously, try to imagine this film without Saavik. No Kobayashi Maru test, so no discussions of the no-win scenario; nobody willing to second-guess Kirk when he's obviously wrong, etc.)
• The special effects - and especially the nebula battle - still hold up today.
• And at no point is an effect or an explosion gratuitous. Because they were willing to damage the Enterprise model - and because the script conspires to never have either ship get shot at while its shields are up - every shot does damage. Every shot gets people killed. 

A couple of other thoughts on "Hardhome"

Spoilers.

Below the fold is a MASSIVE spoiler for this season of Game of Thrones

Consider yourself warned.

Game of Thrones 5x08

In which the Bastard of the Dreadfort goes full-on Villain Sue, Sansa is reduced to the role of Theon's confessor, the Sinbad Skeletons make an unwelcome reappearance, and a zombie mom shows up. No, it's not Stoneheart.

The best album of my lifetime turns 15 today.

I speak, obviously, of Iron Maiden's Brave New World.

A Blog of Ice and Fire (Chapter 61) Daenerys VII: It’s Just A Flesh Wound

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, we wondered What Would Ned Do? Because this is a question worth asking, apparently. Well, buckle your seatbelts, dumplings. We're going for a ride.

Admin: test

I'm publishing a post under a separate account. Because reasons. Ignore this.

Character development is more than a costume/name change

See this analysis of the most recent Sansa chapter.

Yes, dammit, Littlefinger is playing her, both in the books and in the show.

5x07, take 2

Let's put a more positive spin on things.

Game of Thrones 5x07

Way too lazy to check the titles, because they really don't matter, do they??

I mean, this week we had an episode titled "The Gift." Now, in the holy and sacred text of Saint George of House Martin, "The Gift" is an area of land south of the Wall and north of Winterfell. It's conceivable that Stannis is doing the Big Napoleon in this stretch of land, so all told, tonight's episode spent about five minutes there. Hurrah.

Spoilers.

An alternative way That Scene might not be totally derailing

I want to spend yet another post yammering about That Scene.

It's the people who saw it coming but were still outraged - and specifically the book-readers(!) - that I want to talk about here.

The last word on That Scene

Detractors are complaining that nothing like it happens to that character in the books.

You. Don't. Know. That.

There are at least two more books to go through, and if you think they're all sunshine and roses, I wonder what series you've been reading, because it ain't A Song of Ice and Fire.

What if that last scene was exactly what Alayne wanted Ramsay to see?

Spoilers, trigger warning, etc.

Game of Thrones 5x06

SPOILER ALERT

TRIGGER WARNING

Reflections on the First Half of Game of Thrones Season 5

Some parts good, some parts bad, some parts ugly.
SPOILERS

Age of Ultron review

Avengers 2: Avenge Harder was the biggest disappointment since Avengers 1: Look What Our Lawyers Accomplished. 

Or it would have been if I'd actually been stoked for Avengers 2. But I would like to highlight something I said in that earlier post:

If that's the case, then Whedon comes off as the MCU's version of the Pierce Brosnan Bond: a that'll-do personage who can't live up to the hype, but that's okay because it's not like you could realistically expect someone else to do better in his constraints.

I'm repeating that here because that's basically my opinion of this movie. It's like GoldenEye. It's well-put-together and hugely entertaining, but at the end of the day it's totally mindless and nothing actually happened.

Actually that's not true. They did spend some time setting up both Batman v. Superman Captain America: Civil War and Avengers 3: The Magic Mitten Thingy. In fact, what was going on in this film was almost incidental to what was the film was doing in service of the MCU. What's going on in this film is that Tony Stark gets mind-raped into building a new robot - because JARVIS and the Iron Legion wasn't enough, apparently, but because he hasn't seen 2001 or The Terminator or The Matrix or played Mass Effect, he forgets to give it a soul and it starts trying to solve humanity's problems by ending them.

Ending humanity, I mean.

The Avengers re-assemble and fight a lot and there's some blatant CSO (green-screening, if you want to use the oft-inaccurate lay terminology, you peon you) and CGI and at the end a small team of heroes is able to overcome a legion of soulless monsters. And this is supposed to be a surprise, I guess. This is what I mean when I say it's like a middling Bond film; you know all the beats, and there's never any tension because - sorry - writer/director Joss Whedon's reputation for tearing your heart out by murdering your favorite characters is totally undeserved. Maybe I'm spoiled by Game of Thrones doing that much more brutally and regularly, or perhaps by the fact that all of the Avengers are signed up for at least one more movie, but the fact of the matter is that at no moment in this film did I seriously believe that the heroes were either going to a) fail or b) die.

SPOILERS

Imperial Double-Post, Part 2: Fighting for the Empire

So you probably know that the game Skyrim has as one of its major plots a civil war between the Empire and the rebel Stormcloaks. And the player character can only join one side. So just about everyone has at least one "alternate" character who joined the other side.

And having played through both campaigns, I keep going back and forth. One the one hand, Ulfric Stormcloak's cause is just - when the Empire surrendered to the Aldmeri Dominion and outlawed Talos worship, it lost its right to rule. (And on top of that, literally the first thing the Empire does in-game is try to execute you without a trial.) On the other hand, Ulfric himself is no better; with one exception (Markarth), no Stormcloak Jarl is better than their Imperial counterpart - and even in Markarth, "better" is a stretch (the Stormcloak is in league with the local underworld, while the Imperial is oblivious to the fact that he's a complete puppet). And Ulfric is ultimately a thug whose obsession with tradition trumps any respect for the rule of law.

(And no, the fact that Jarl Balgruuf sides with the Empire doesn't really have a bearing on my opinion. The community likes Balgruuf more than I do - the man's reaction to a half-starved ex-con wandering into his palace to bring word of a dragon attack is to send him to crawl through a zombie-infested dungeon.)

It's an annoying dilemma. My current solution is to take the Thomas Theisman approach (see the previous post), and save the Empire while at the same time decapitating it by, ah, "removing" its (here weak, there evil) ruler. Hopefully something better springs up in his place. General Tullius would have my vote, so long as you keep him away from his evil Cylon wife.

Imperial Double-Post, Part 1: Rooting for the Empire

I mentioned a while back that I'm reading the Honor Harrington novels, and yeah, now I'm at the point where everyone starts rooting for the "bad guys" because the "good guys" have their heads up their asses. (Book 10, War of Honor)

Basically the series, for those of you who don't know, is Horatio Hornblower In Space, kind of like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was, except with much more "hard" science fiction. There's "Space Britain" - the Star Kingdom of Manticore, the ostensible good guys - and there's "Space France" - the People's Republic of Haven, the ostensible bad guys (clue's in the name). There's also "Space Germany" and "Space... Um, Not Sure, Really. Conservative-Version-Of-The-UN?*" but they're kind of side acts, at least so far.

*By which I mean it's utterly massive, utterly inefficient, and the warring parties kind of tiptoe around it without it doing anything.

Now, here's the thing - there are some pretty blatant parallels, especially on the Haven side, where Robespierre and Napoleon both have pretty clear stand-ins. But... (SPOILERS)

Baltimore

Dear my friends on the right: I do not care how long Freddy Gray's rap sheet was. This is America, not Putin's Russia, not Iran, not North Korea. Even if Freddy Gray was the fucking Boston Bomber, I'd have a problem if he just keeled over and died in police custody. That is not how our system is supposed to work.

Dear my friends on the left: Everything Else.

The Hunger Games, Part 2.5

I finally circled back to this franchise about a young woman brutally exploited by a vicarious-thrillseeking society. And also the character she plays.

So in this third film of this four-film trilogy, we have a couple of new locations. We get to see District 13, which as best I can tell is comprised of a futuristic hospital set; a completely untouched high school cafeteria; the gathering room from Alien 3; a 1980s missile silo; and a big, poorly-lit stairwell. I guess I should clarify that the stairwell is EXTREMELY poorly lit, because most of the film is in fact poorly lit. And oddly edited. And unnecessarily padded. Why did they need to do this?

$

"Go play Game X, because it's a precursor to Game Y, which you really love."

Eh.

Mass Effect 2 and Skyrim might be the two games into which I've sunk the most time (an accomplishment, given that I've only owned Skyrim for less than a year). I also own Knights of the Old Republic and Morrowind. And do I feel the same way about those games?

Uh, no.

SACRILEGE! HERETIC! BLASPHEMER!

Yeah, okay, okay. It's not the graphics (although good grief, Morrowind's draw distance is godawful). I'll gently knock their soundtracks for being "of their time" in the sense that there's no rhyme or reason behind why they transition from one piece to the next - but having said that, they're both great, and I was under the impression that I owed Jeremy Soule an apology for saying that the Skyrim theme ripped off the Pirates of the Caribbean theme when in fact Soule's theme debuted in Morrowind, one year before the first Pirates film, but I can't actually find the post on this blog where I said that.

Rah rah worldbuilding and storyline and all that - yeah, okay, but the thing is, these things aren't storybooks (something that BioWare seemed to understand for the first two Mass Effect games and then forgot again for the third one).  Player interaction is kinda what makes video games, you know, video games. And I don't care how well-constructed your little fantasy world is if interacting with it is a major hassle.

I'm not even complaining about Morrowind's lack of quest markers here, because I thought they held your hand in Skyrim and I didn't really miss them. (Also, Morrowind still gives you a compass, without which you'd be totally f*cked.) But if anyone can tell me how to read a book in Morrowind without first taking it out of my inventory and dropping it on the ground, I'd appreciate it.

I'll also complain that my health and magicka don't regenerate. The hell is this, survival horror?

Now, I admit that my Morrowind experience was a bit tainted by the fact that my very first character (and the custom class I created for him) are gone forever because I died in the first dungeon I found and didn't realize that the game doesn't autosave as often as Skyrim does. That was a bit obnoxious. But I will say that my first hour of Skyrim was much more enjoyable than my first hour of Morrowind, even aside from that.

I shall now pre-judge Avengers 2: Age of Marketing

I could try to keep this fair and balanced and not let the fact that Joss Whedon is an uninformed jackass running his mouth to his millions of mouth-breathing fans too lazy to fact-check about GamerGate influence my opinion of the things he does, but I'm not going to.

So anyway the greatest accomplishment of Avengers 1: Look What Our Lawyers Can Do was putting six superheroes on a team together. The film was written and directed by a man who primarily did ensemble-show-style television as well as a really good Space Western movie that completely failed to recoup its budget at the box office. Unsurprisingly, the film lacks a single protagonist and the guy who gets the most character development is the one a) whose superpower is anger, and b) who's played by a different actor this time around.

Compare Avengers 1 to Captain America 2 and the shortcomings of the Whedon approach become rather obvious. Even though Cap 2 is supposed to be a standalone film, not only did it flesh out more of the MCU world, but it also changed more of the MCU world than Avengers 1 did. The reason why they were able to do this might be because they were focusing on a much smaller group of characters, and actually had a few themes to explore, rather than the old "group of badasses having pissing contests" that everyone got sick of midway through Buffy.

The good news is that in Avengers 2, there are going to be even more characters to crowd out each other. All so that Marvel can sell more toys. Now, maybe this is Marvel's idea, in which case, yeah, the guy famous for long-term character arcs in ensemble shows might make a bit of sense to write and direct. If that's the case, then Whedon comes off as the MCU's version of the Pierce Brosnan Bond: a that'll-do personage who can't live up to the hype, but that's okay because it's not like you could realistically expect someone else to do better in his constraints. (I mean, Casino Royale is basically TWINE done right, but it's not like changing Bonds was the only thing they did.)

But serious question, given that Whedon's magnum opus was and in my opinion remains Buffy the Vampire Slayer, why haven't they assigned him the Black Widow movie?

Seriously, though, I wish they'd stick to the Cap 2 style approach of having one or two other Avengers guest-star in the title character's film, rather than try to mash everyone together and run through the obligatory "let's find something for everyone to do at the expense of everything else" sequences.

My latest Skyrim character

is a Thalmor plant.

"How does this work?" you might be asking. Well, I'm here to tell you.

It's that time of year again, where we gather 'round the TV to watch a vain, sanctimonious, incompetent, cuckolded harridan muster her forces to try to control the land. Yeah, I could be talking about either Game of Thrones or Hillary Clinton's campaign.

The various stages of the various stages of Bond Films

Right! So:

Connery: "Working out what the franchise is going to be and then blowing it up to one billion."
Lazenby: "Making a proper movie but bungling the transition."
Moore: "Nailing the transition but bungling proper movies."
Dalton: "Grr."
Brosnan: "Extremely idiotic villain plots."
Craig: "Giving Our Hero yet another psychological scar."

Alternatively:

1962-1967: "Setting up the formula and pushing it as far as it can go."
1969-1974: "Getting burned, falling back on proven routines, and going inane."
1977-1979: "Spectacle."
1981-1989: "Increasingly cheap-looking decline that not even a recast can save."
1995-2002: "JAMES BOND, isn't that enough?"
2006-present: "Not Yo Momma's Bond Film."

Alternatively alternatively:

Before watching it: "It's getting overhyped."
While watching it: "They ripped that part off from Thunderball and that part off from Live and Let Die and that part off from TWINE, where it was ripped off from OHMSS..."
After watching it: "Well, it wasn't terrible."

Weekend song XVIII

Yeah, shocker, I know.

50 Shades of Moondust?

For those of you who don't know, my three favorite novels are Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, and Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

The last of those three is getting an adaptation. And they're changing the title.

Now, if you look at a certain recent adaptation of a certain recent book, and then immediately go to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, you'd be forgiven for imagining Luna dressed up as a dominatrix (and for those of you whose thought processes didn't go there, who lead saner, more normal lives: you're welcome). I can understand why you wouldn't want that image.

But come up with something at least as provocative, idiot!

Oh, wait, this is Hollywood, they're going to f*ck it up anyway. A big big big big big big big big BIG plot point of that novel is how gravity is different on the Moon (and before you ask, yes, Heinlein, like Clarke in Rama, had an obsession about what low gravity does to boobies). Ask yourself if they're really going to go through the expense of portraying that realistically.

Meantime, go check out Moon, a totally fantastic no-budget sci-fi thriller that pretty easily earns a slot on the Best Five Films Of My Lifetime list (it didn't address the gravity problem, but that's okay; it wasn't crucial to the plot). Or, go check out Moonraker, an over-the-top farce that is nevertheless hugely entertaining. (Or go read the book, which is probably my favorite Bond book.)

...his was the most... human.

There's a rumor, I honestly don't know how true it is, that goes like this:

The "Kobayashi Maru" scenario at the beginning of The Wrath of Khan was thrown in there because Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, wanted to quit the franchise, and word had gotten out that Spock was going to be killed off. So the scenario was thrown in at the beginning of the film, fake-out killed not only Spock but the entire crew, and (apparently) threw movie-goers off the scent.

I don't believe that story. Or, rather, if that story is true, then it certainly wasn't done at the last minute. The Kobayashi Maru is essential to all the goodness of The Wrath of Khan. Kirk is this space-cowboy character who laughs in the face of danger because he, as Saavik tells him at one point, has never actually faced death. Kirk cheated on the KM test, survived the Original Series on luck and balls (see, e.g., "The Corbomite Maneuver"), and thought he was invincible. By having the KM test, the film can incorporate the fact that Kirk cheated - has never faced the no-win scenario, ever. He straight-up says he doesn't believe in it. Even when he's in the Genesis Cave right before the final battle, Kirk still thinks he can simply outsmart Khan again.

He can't.

He got lucky with the computer codes during their initial encounter. But it's Spock's idea to run to the Mutara Nebula. It's Spock's observation that Khan has mistook space for an ocean and is just operating in two dimensions. And it is, of course, Spock who sacrifices himself at the end.  

The Wrath of Khan is so great because it shows never-grow-up Kirk* coming face-to-face with mortality, both in the "midlife crisis" subtext running throughout the film, and in Spock's death at the end. Cut out the references to the Kobayashi Maru, the no-win scenario, and all of that is cheapened.

*Let's not forget that Kirk's final line in The Undiscovered Country - and therefore in the entirety of the Original Series adventures - is a quote from Peter Pan.

So as I said, I don't believe that story.

The Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite movies ever. One of the things that's particularly (sorry) fascinating about it is that even though it's Kirk who has/suffers all the character development/deconstruction over the course of the film, Spock is the film's actual hero. (Another think I like, not particularly pertinent to this post, is that because they thought it was going to be the last one, they were willing to do two things they'd never done before: damage the Enterprise model, and kill off a major character.)

Leonard Nimoy, 1931-2015

He lived long, and he prospered.

Well, that's sad.

Google's changed its policies, and won't allow pr0n.

Now, you may have noticed, this, despite its title, is not a pr0n blog. Still, this troubles me.

Note: We’ll still allow nudity if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.

Oh, good. What, precisely, is an "artistic" context? See, it used to be (and will be until fairly late in March) the case that "adult content" blogs had a little warning screen, and you had to click "I am 18 and I wish to continue to this adult material page." That was good. It allowed consenting adults to see what they wanted to see, and afforded The Children more protection than, say, Tumblr does.

I can't claim to like this "artistic" qualifier. Come on, The Children know where to find the pr0n if they really want it, and adults should be able to decide what they do and do not want to see.

Will I migrate this blog to Wordpress or something? Probably not. But I'm starting to not like Google. I've been frustrated with Chrome in these last few months and will probably start using a different web browser, for all the symbolic good that does.

March 11th would have been Peter Hunt's 90th birthday if he was still alive. As you might know, I'm a wee bit of a fan both of his editing style and his masterpiece. I'll mark the occasion, probably by live-tweeting the film. Details eventually.

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 60) Jon VIII: Jon, I Am Your Great-Great-Great-Uncle

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, I ran out of ways to say what Catelyn's doing is really really shortsighted and dumb.

No, James Bond is not a sodding Time Lord

Every few months I end up doing a post like this.

So there's this (old) post on Tor about how Bond evidently must be a Time Lord because the car from Skyfall is the one from Goldfinger.

Sigh.

Mansplaining female protagonists, part 1: "Female Characters" versus "Characters With Ladyparts"

Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
-As Good as It Gets

Okay, so, there's an article on Polygon (archive link) saying, essentially, that only women can write great female characters "in gaming."

Now, I personally wonder what makes a female character in a video game different from a female character in a film or a TV show. The only difference I can think of is that a male audience can interact with her, either by directly controlling her if she's the PC, or via his virtual avatar if she's an NPC. I don't think that really matters.

From the article:

Yes, writers are required to create convincing characters who are different from themselves. But in video games, writers have tended towards idealized versions of themselves.

1) citation needed, and 2) that's a case unique to video games all of a sudden?

So let's talk about female characters.

Hold up. In order to talk about female characters, we're going to have to talk about "female characters." I know that sounds kinda circular, but bear with me. In typical male-viewpoint binary* form, I think there are two kinds of female characters: female characters, and characters who happen to be female.

*A note to all sociology people: I'm sorry-not-sorry for interchanging "sex" and "gender" throughout this piece. Deal with it.

Let's do some case studies:

No, but seriously, Brianna Wu's favorite videogame character is a violent psychopath who, in terms of characterization, is completely indistinguishable from her male counterpart.


Addendum: are you fucking kidding me with that Mario question? Yes. Yes you fucking are. Because anyone who looks at that scenario for more than one picosecond understands that there is no choice there. Either the Mass Relay explodes and takes the star system with it, or the Reapers arrive and destroy the entire galaxy, including, you know, that star system. It's not an either-or scenario. It's a scenario where in one outcome you have three hundred million killed, and in the other outcome you have exty zillion killed, including the three hundred million who would have died in the other outcome! THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY TO SAVE THE BATARIANS IN THAT SYSTEM. THERE IS NO GOOD CHOICE OR BAD CHOICE. THERE IS THE UGLY-BUT-NECESSARY "CHOICE" OR THE FUCKING RETARDED ONE. SO DON"T TELL ME THAT MARIO WOULDN'T HAVE DONE IT. FUCKING SUPERMAN WOULD HAVE DONE IT!!!!!!!!!!

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 59) Catelyn IX: It’s a Double castle, over a Crossing. Get it?

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, Ned Stark ruminated on some terrible life choices. Today on A Blog of Thrones, Catelyn makes a terrible life choice.

I'd be willing to bet that various online forms people need to fill out for various ends are deliberately obtuse and complicated because the gatekeepers of those ends want to weed out those who aren't "serious" about obtaining them.

E.g., the Illinois Bar admission forms.

I seriously hope that's not the mentality surrounding access to "essential" (government) services.

This is what happens when you willingly exile yourself to a niche demographic.

Nintendo slashes operating profit target.

I had a feeling when I bought my Wii that it was going to be the last Nintendo console I purchased. Nintendo made a choice to play up the "family" "fun" angle, and got mashed out of the market by Sony and Microsoft.

Now all it's got left is the intellectual property rights in the Mario, Zelda, and Metroid franchises. And Super Smash Bros., of course. Sorry, Nintendo, I'm kinda done with platforming, and Skyrim and Mass Effect kind of cover the other two titles.

Pack it in, Hollywood

I have just heard that they are going to remake The Magnificent Seven, which is itself a remake of The Seven Samurai. Now, I'm going to be honest here, I didn't think that highly of The Magnificent Seven. It was all right, I guess, a better team-up movie than The Avengers (that none of the characters had baggage from previous films was a major plus).

Still, I don't see the bloody point of remaking it. Does Hollywood think people suddenly love Westerns again? Or are they just looking for anything with name recognition?

Yeah, I'm going with "B" there too.

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

Zany fun that never takes itself seriously.

My parents always host my mother's side of the family for Easter and Thanksgiving at their house. They have a pretty sweet sound system, and I'm the one in charge of putting together the playlist (let me tell you this is just about the greatest responsibility I could ever want, aside from possibly the responsibility of Watching All The James Bond Films). 

Anyway, right now, the first three songs on the 2015 Easter playlist? Two metal songs and a hard rock song.

Yeah, go on, ask if that's still the case when I get to the final draft.

"It's a good idea to have your hero and villain meet some time before the climax to heighten the emotional stakes." - Conventional Dramatic Theory

"A pox on that." - William Frickin' Shakespeare

I feel like there's the potential for a post titled X Times Joss Whedon's Shows Would Have Come Under Fire From Anita Sarkeesian But For The Fact That He Gave Her Nerd Cred.

Off the top of my head (spoilers for stuff that's at least 5 years old):

• Turning Willow gay instead of Xander on Buffy, because lesbians are hotter.
• Firefly - while both Mal and River are shown naked, Mal is totally cool with it, but River is all vulnerable.
• Dollhouse. Like, f*cking all of it.
• All of the (mortal) female characters on Angel die, while at least one mortal male character is still kicking at the end of the finale. 

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 58) Eddard XV: Loved I Not Honor More

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, we changed the title of the post at the last minute. It was originally going to be "Meet the New Boss," but that's a line from a song called "Won't Get Fooled Again," and, well...

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 57) Sansa V: Barristan Selmy Quits Like A Boss

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, we met the Lannister patriarch, talked about hair, and posted a picture of Daniel Craig for clickbait.

In which I torture meself

Here are the Billboard Top 50 Mainstream Rock Song list for 2014. I was going to actually subject myself to the whole list, but it turns out that only a select group of songs are playable. And I'm too lazy to actually plug a bunch of crap I don't care about into YouTube's search feature. So I'm not going to do that. Instead I'm going to talk very briefly about the number-one mainstream rock song of 2014.

(By the way, just looking at this list, "mainstream rock" has apparently become an absurdly fat synagogue, hasn't it? Anyway...)

Who's gonna be the next James Bond?

There was a big to-do a few weeks back because a certain Big-Name Right-Winger said Idris Elba can't be the next James Bond cuz he's black, and Fleming wrote Bond as white.

Fun story: Fleming pitched a fit when some brute Scotsman was cast as a character he'd imagined as David Niven or Hoagy Carmichael.

Then Fleming turned around and made Book!Bond half-Scottish because the films were Just That Good.

Days of Future Past

I saw the first two X-men films and barely remember them. I watched this one because of four words: Jennifer Lawrence in body-paint.

Sploilers

I'm old enough to remember...

Reminder to Disney: I'll go to see Star Wars Episode VII: Feed Our Money Tree if and only if you release the original trilogy, completely untouched, on home video before the film's theatrical debut.

See, I like choices. They did this thing on the Doctor Who DVDs for at least a little while where you had the option of watching either with new special effects or the old crappy ones. If some no-budget TV show can do that, so can frickin' Star Wars.

In which I rant about something only tangentially related to James Bond, Post I

Captain America: The Winter Soldier isn't really a superhero film, is it? It's more like a political-thriller-slash-Bond-film, right?

Well....

Let's think that one through. The Bond stories TWS borrows the most from are GoldenEye (baddie is an old friend back from the dead, they end up fighting as a signal's about to go out), Quantum of Solace (evil organization has penetrated deep into the "good" governments, easy to get the good guys and the bad guys mixed up), and the novel version of Moonraker (a new super-defense program is actually a plot to destroy freedom, the super-patriot in charge of it is actually a Nazi).

Well, Quantum is hardly "a" Bond film, innit? (Might be why I like it so much in spite of itself.)  Moonraker's elements didn't make it to the screen, and GoldenEye's plot isn't entirely original (cough The Third Man cough - and note that there are a bunch of dots ready to stop moving near the end of TWS...)

But still it does feel like it's really not A Superhero Movie.

I suppose part of that is because - and this is basically true throughout the MCU - there are no secret identities. Everyone knows who Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff and Sam Wilson (and Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and, well, Thor) are. Captain America's mask is there to protect his head, not his identity. There's none of that "you can't know who I am because you'll be in danger" stuff that infects the Batfilms and Spiderfilms. Cap is a smidge broody but not because his parents/uncle were murdered or his city is hunting him or whatever the reheated Spiderangst was, but rather because the world suddenly got a lot more cynical while he was on ice.

So what do I mean by "Bond film?" Maybe that's a good place to start. Cap doesn't seduce a lot of women or drive expensive gadget-cars or even visit exotic places; The first film took place in a studio backlot the Western Front and the second largely unfolds in D.C. There's a fair amount of covert ops going on in TWS, but James Bond ain't exactly covert. Cap never visits a casino, and his super-constitution basically precludes him drinking expensive martinis since they're not going to get him drunk.

Hrm.

2015 Bond Ramble #2: Is Moonraker Terrible?

No.

Longer answer: define "terrible."

It has a tone that isn't exactly on par with Yer Average Bond Film's tone, Bond does stuff he wouldn't normally do, he's not played by The Sean Connery, and the villain's plot is bonkers. But enough about OHMSS. Or Skyfall.

Moonraker is, if nothing else, hugely entertaining. I'm certainly not going to claim that it's one of the best Bond Films ever made: it's clear that the three locations were stitched together out of a desire to visit those locations rather than because anything there was unique to the plot, "Holly Goodhead" is the worst/best-worst Bond Girl name in history, Jaws' return was ill-advised, etc.

Perhaps it's the blatant Star Wars cash-in. Perhaps it's the commingling of a horrific scheme with an over-the-top execution of that scheme. Perhaps it's the lack of resemblance to the Fleming novel (a pity - Captain America 2 is a more faithful adaptation, and check out the praise that film got).

Whatever the reason, Moonraker gets a lot of ire. You weirdos. The score is fantastic, the visuals are astounding, and it's a testament to the screen presence of Roger Moore that he never looks swamped by the amusing and outlandish things that happen around him. Moonraker is great entertainment (admittedly, sometimes unintentionally, but so what?) You need a certain mindset to appreciate it, yes, but that's also true of OHMSS.

Jim's Bond Rant Of The Day

Courtesy of TvTropes:

• For a long time, the Timothy Dalton movies were seen as a Dork Age, with Licence to Kill being so gory and violent that many felt it barely resembled a Bond film. Nowadays, however, the Dalton movies are seen as prototypes for the Daniel Craig era, having had the bad luck of hitting about twenty years too early. In addition, the Bond that Dalton portrays is much closer to the Bond that Ian Fleming wrote: a stone killer and a womanizer with a hinted-at lust for violence. (Well, okay, all the Bonds are womanizers, but whereas Connery is the archetypal Bond-As-Playa and Roger Moore's just... well... Roger Moore, Dalton comes across as a sexual predator.) Craig himself can be seen as a Dork Age by the Moore or Brosnan fans since the plots had no science fiction plots by the villains for monetary gain which is seen as a detractor to some.

 (Emphasis added)

I don't even.  What?  WHAT?