For today’s dip into the table of contents of this anthology (hey, we’re halfway to our goal! KEEP GOING!) I have for you Uranus Calling by Devyani Borade.
As you can imagine, with an opening line like No shit there I was, we got a number of submissions from writers who took it a bit literally. And I’m not going to lie, the best of those stories are represented in the anthology. I’M ONLY HUMAN, PEOPLE, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME.
Devyani went a step beyond though, a free association from shit to farts to butts to the planet Uranus, and the results are hilarious. (In our heart of hearts lives a five year old child.) The gassy heroine of Uranus Calling, Tina, receives an urgent distress call from Uranus (no, really) and must produce a Clever Plan to save the planet from a terrible fate after flying there in her inflatable spaceship with her obnoxious cousin Tommy.
The absolute charm of this story goes far beyond giggling at some well-timed fart jokes. If you, like those of us on the anthology crew, grew up reading Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, there’s an immediate mental connection between Tina’s tale and the Adventures of Spaceman Spiff. Tina and Tommy’s trip out to Uranus has that same feeling of imaginative illogic that we found with Calvin, and you’re never quite sure if the adventure is real, or if any moment Tina’s mom is going to come out of the house and yell at the kids to come in and have dinner, and please stop farting on each other, it’s not funny.
(Mom’s wrong. It’s very funny.)
Uranus Calling pins the silly end of the tonal spectrum for the anthology. It’s all in good-natured fun. I’d say it was clean fun too, but you should probably wash your hands first.
And that’s how I ended up at the gambling table with a motley collection of aliens.
Wait, let me back up and tell you the whole story.
I knew Wren Wallis‘s The Storyteller’s Sleight was special from the first paragraph. This is not a story that tentatively dips its toes into the world or winks coyly at being space opera. You get thrown right into a colorful, rich universe full of myriad aliens and people and cultures without apology. You know you’ve only just scratched the surface as you follow the plots and tales of Esmat, the titular storyteller. There’s an incredible amount of world building depth visible in less than 5000 words.
(One thing I asked Wren right away is if there are more stories about Esmat, because I want to read more about her and the fascinating universe around her.)
And all that? Is the sumptuous backdrop for a heist that takes place during a game of chance, one that keeps you guessing about just what Esmat’s plan is until the end. I loved this story because it drew me in and kept me guessing–and I loved all of the players in it, sketched out with dialog and action. I have to give a shout out here to Captain Pham, the host of the game, who spends the entire story Done With Everything. (“The next person to ask me why anyone else at the shitting table got invited can show themself out the shitting airlock, right?”)
I’m a sucker for this kind of technicolor space opera, and for fun heist stories, and for clever storytellers. So no shit, there I was. And there you can be too, if you support the Kickstarter!
Bill actually goes back to the very inception of this anthology–no shit, there he was. I mentioned my idea for getting a bunch of science fiction and fantasy writers to do stories with this classic starting line at a panel, and he said he thought it was a great idea. “Okay,” I said. “But you’d better submit something if I do this.”
He said, sure he would, in that laughing way that I tend to assume means actually no. But then he did. Bill’s a man who puts his story where his mouth is, and he spun me a tale of two wisecracking guys who are basically space auto mechanics, trying to retrieve Mariner 10 from its orbit near the sun.
There’s a wide range of stories in this anthology, and my slush jackalopes and I mentally arranged them on spectrums between two poles. From the moment I read Bill’s story, Steal From the Sun, I knew I wanted it. And I knew it would pin down the “hard scifi” end of the spectrum. It’s got everything I could want out of a hard science fiction story in the style of the classics–space ships, physics, witty banter, and people solving engineering problem after engineering problem as the hull temperature slowly creeps up and threatens to cook the intrepid heroes.
Oh, and a flirtatious news anchorman who is adorable.
And unlike some hard SF that has left me cold before, Bill balances his elements in a perfect mix of cheeky wit and engineer porn that I was doomed to love. I jammed Steal From the Sun into the “I WILL HAVE THIS” file so fast I probably gave the pixels friction burns. It was almost–almost–the first item in that file, only the necromantic weasels got there first.
As promised yesterday, I asked the great god RNG to pick a story for me to tell you about today, and it has. That story is: The One About Jacob, by Tyler Hayes.
The One About Jacob is one of the few dark/horror stories that made it into the anthology–we didn’t get a whole lot of horror submissions, and that’s just fine, because I’m not that big of a reader of horror either. And it’s one of those stories that I didn’t read and immediately body slam onto the YES I WILL HAVE THIS list–because it did its work in a much subtler way. It crept up on me, day after day, and I found myself just thinking about the story, and the eerie nature of it, and the creepy final lines, until I finally had to beg: “Look, if I put you in the ToC, will you please stop whispering in my ear when I’m trying to make my morning tea?”
And Jacob smiled, that game, preternaturally likable smile of his, and said “Sure.” (He was lying.)
The One About Jacob is a story that’s about the power of stories people tell each other, both positive and negative. The way stories can bring the wounded together, and the way they can warp and twist and become something truly awful without anyone ever intending the end result. It’s also about the tenuous nature of free will, and how it’s a bad idea for anyone to have the power to change peoples’ minds in a permanent way, but an even worse idea when we’re talking pissed off, lonely, fucked up teenagers. Because this is what happens when people can literally create their own perfect friends, when perfection tends to hide something monstrous and ugly beneath.
It’s an excellent, creepy story, and it’s in No Shit, There I Was. Reason number 1 of 24 to support the Kickstarter so you can read it!
The Boss isn’t getting very good reviews. As of right now, it’s at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. (For what it’s worth, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is only at 19% and I thought that was pulpy fantasy fun, so maybe I just have terrible taste.) But I decided to see it anyway, for exactly one reason: the cookie seller street fight scene.
I don’t know if it’s because I was a Girl Scout for years, and put in a lot of time selling cookies, but to me, that alone was worth the price of admission.
The Boss is about Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy), who has made a ton of money doing nebulous business things and screwing over everyone, including her former flame Renault (Peter Dinklage). He turns her in to the FTC for insider trading and gets her thrown in white collar country club jail for five months, during which time she loses all of her assets. She emerges, deposits herself on her former assistant Claire’s (Kristen Bell) doorstep, and comes up with a new scheme quickly: selling Claire’s amazing brownies with a knock-off, capitalistic version of Girl Scouts.
This is definitely not the most well put together comedy movie I’ve ever seen. It’s got its problems with internal consistency, has some weird pacing hiccups, and at times feels like a loose collection of sketches for McCarthy to ad-lib her Michelle Darnell character. The plot at times doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, and the Michelle Darnell character arc is incredibly predictable and pat, something that feels steered by script beats rather than organically developed.
It also, I’m sorry to say, has the Lazy Trans Joke. Bleh.
On the other hand? It had a lot of really funny moments. I never really bought Claire as a character or her muddled arc, but her love interest Mike (Tyler Labine) was delightful. The interplay between Michelle and Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) had some great moments. And Chrystal (Eva Peterson) the resident “giant” for Darnell’s Darlings was the MVP of every scene she was in. And Renault? Fucking hilarious, I thought. And Lazy Trans Joke aside, like many of McCarthy’s movies, it showcases women being hilarious with other women in an expansive rather than self-hating way.
I’ve heard from a lot of people that Spy is superior in every way to this movie, and I’m looking forward to watching it. (Still mad that I didn’t get a chance to see it in the theater.) Hopefully it’ll be On Demand with my cable company, I just haven’t had a chance to check yet. But I’ll probably write a little post about it when I do and let everyone know they were right. As for The Boss, I’m kind of on the fence whether to recommend it or not. If you really love Melissa McCarthy and did your time in the Girl Scouts, you might find it suitably amusing, but your mileage may vary.
I mean, just LOOK at this cover. My first ever anthology’s cover. HOW AWESOME IS THIS?
That’s right, everyone. The No Shit, There I Was speculative fiction anthology is THIS CLOSE to becoming a reality. A reality in which you get 24 amazeballs stories that I would wrestle a roid raging great white shark for, no shit. I’m excited and a little bit terrified, and I may be reloading the Kickstarter page every five minutes, so if you’d like to help my productivity level, please throw in your support and tell all your friends about my ridiculous anthology. Because the sooner we get completely funded, the sooner I can stop obsessively F5ing.
(Though let’s be real, I’m not going to be satisfied until we get line art and pay the writers even more, because trust me, they deserve to get paid more.)
But here’s the plan. Just in case you need convincing about how super double whip fudge velociraptor delite-filled this anthology is, I’m going to spend the next month(ish) telling you about the stories you’ll have access to once your have a copy of this anthology in your hot little hands. Just about every day, I’ll RNG the table of contents and write you a little blog post about whichever story comes up, to tell you why I loved it.
As half-prequel, half-sequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, The Huntsman: Winter’s War pretty much nails everything that was fun about the first film (namely, the Huntsman and the Evil Queen Ravenna) and leaves behind the less arresting bits (eg: Kristen Stewart’s Snow White). If you liked the first movie, you’re going to like this one. If you didn’t, then I’d be shocked if Winter’s War changes your mind.
The beginning of the movie explains the origin of Eric the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) and identifies the source of his deep font of manpain, Sara the Huntsman (Jessica Chastain). It also brings us a new evil queen, Ravenna’s little sister Freya (Emily Blunt), who has her own utterly tragic reasons for being evil and wearing some incredibly beautiful costumes. Freya, driven into the depths of despair by the murder of her infant daughter by her would-be husband, decides the best way to deal with all that pain is to conquer the entire north (lots of planets have a north) and take all available children so she can craft them into an army of badass, leather-jerkin-wearing super soldiers who are admonished that only chumps believe in love. Eric and Sara are among these children and as they grow up, they develop a forbidden love for each other, which Freya Does Not Take Well.
Fast forward seven years to after the events of Snow White and the Huntsman, and we find Eric once again living in the woods and apparently avoiding baths if his hair is anything to go by. He’s dragged back into the world of having to interact with other humans when he’s told that Ravenna’s mirror has gone missing, and sets off to find it before Freya does.
This movie is utterly gorgeous, far more so than the first. There’s actual color, and lots of it. The costumes that Freya and Ravenna wear alone deserve to have a shrine built to them. The story is pulpy fantasy fun, as are the action sequences. The comic relief dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon) are well overmatched by the absolutely delightful she-dwarves (Sophie Cookson and Alexandra Roach). It’s predictable in places, and a bit weirdly discontinuous with its own mythology in others (more on that later), but all in good fun.
And it’s actually a fantasy movie that manages to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, believe it or not. Ravenna and Freya manage to have some evil queen back and forth that does not center around men. The main casting is delightfully female heavy: two male dwarves, two female dwarves, one male huntsman, one female huntsman, and two evil queens. Lovely! I was also charmed by the equal partnership between Eric and Sara–and Sara’s fierce independence as she tells Eric, “I choose for me, not for you.” She has an excellent speech about how their relationship is not determined by the man passing some test and then she has to love him. It’s a nice jab at fairy tale tropes when that normally is what it boils down to. Ravenna remains the most compelling character of the franchise, though I’m not sure I’m on board with the implicit statement that both evil queens have their magic because they have eschewed love and family for various reasons.
Winter’s War is ever so slightly less lily-white than Snow White and the Huntsman. There are non-white background actors in Freya’s kingdom, which is… something. Sope Disiru plays another of the Huntsman, Tull, who has a speaking role and feels curiously like he should be much more vital to the movie than he really is. I came out of the film wishing I knew more about him, his motivations, his relation to Sara and Eric, because he feels like he must have been pulling some narrative weight that ultimately (and disappointingly) fell to the cutting room floor. I’m also not really sure about the depiction of goblins in this fantasy land as midnight-black, savage, horned gorilla-like creatures with tar for blood.
I also could have done without the aggressively heterosexual ending, in which every male-female couple possible shows the audience that they will be getting together happily ever after, because love conquers all and saves the day if you’re straight and monogamous, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being straight, I get that it’s not a choice or anything, but do they have to flaunt it like that?
Not flawless but fun, worth a watch if you want to see Chris Hemsworth run around in leather pants and be cute. As you do.
I was legally required to see this movie, because Tom Hiddleston. Well, and because I actually really like Hank Williams, so I was excited about a biopic for him, even if my initial reaction to the announcement was oh dear god but Hiddleston sounds so British.
Silly me.
I’m not a native of the south (and I’m also not great at accents), but Tom Hiddleston made for a convincing enough Hank Williams. More importantly, I think he did justice to the music. For example, Move It On Over (original) and Move It On Over (movie), even if it never sounded quite twangy enough. (Though how much of that is due to differing recording quality is open to question.) When I have some extra money (sob), I’ll probably see about picking up the soundtrack. It’s on the list at least.
I Saw the Light covers about eight years of Hank Williams’s life, from his marriage to Audrey in 1944 to his death in 1952. It’s a simultaneous career ascent and personal descent that ultimately kills him, and the movie’s not shy about the fact that the man had some serious substance abuse problems and was no angel. In many ways, it plays out like any other biopic of an artist tragically dead at a young age because he (or she) is pulled in too many directions at once, has no stable home life, and is enabled in the abuse of drugs by so-called friends and doctors-in-name-only.
There’s a lot to like about I Saw the Light. The principle cast–Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams, Elizabeth Olsen as Audrey Williams, Bradley Whitford as Fred Rose–all turn in excellent performances. It’s a very nicely shot movie. The sound is excellent. There’s a different tone here because the artist in question did country music rather than rock, which lends some extra interest. Country music (and its fans) don’t get a whole lot of love in film, so it’s refreshing to have a movie that seems to really get why this music speaks to people.
But–and this kills me to say this because I wanted to like this film so much more than I did–it feels like a collection of at times disconnected scenes out of a man’s life rather than a movie. The music and the good performances aren’t enough to really pull together what suffers from a fundamental problem of writing and editing.
Books and movies are obviously two very different media that approach things in very different ways, and nowhere is that more evident than in biographical film versus biographical books. Human life generally doesn’t have a discernible plot arc or an overall theme. We’re far too messy for that. Good biographies in book form not only transmit the dry facts of someone’s existence, but find a way to weave together events to show the whole person, their development, the way they touched the world, the way the world touched them. But it’s not something that’s generally going to fit ye olde three act format. And you can get away with that in a book because you have so much more time and space to build.
In a movie, you’ve got about two hours, and the need to hold someone’s attention for that entire time. Part of it is a matter of audience expectation–I go into a movie with much different expectations than I have going in to a documentary film. You expect a story out of a movie. That’s the reason biopics infamously play fast and loose with details, because reality bends to serve the art–and the art it’s serving is the story, the theme. I came out of 42 and Lincoln and Walk the Line feeling the satisfactory open and close of those stories, knowing what the director and actors were trying to say and how they felt the life of that particular person fits into the human experience both past and present.
And sadly, I Saw the Light misses out on that. I got some hints that there were dots the film was trying to connect, between the titular piece of music that makes its two appearances (the second in a heart-breaking and historically accurate way), the time or two Hank Williams talks about darkness in his music. But it failed to gel into a coherent thesis from where I sat, never quite connecting the details to the music in a satisfactory way.
I think it’s a movie that’s worth watching if you like Hank Williams. Maybe you’ll like it more than I did and it’ll work for you where it failed to work for me. I’m just sad that a movie I anticipated so much didn’t stick its landing for me.
We’re back! As in my website is back up, after being down all weekend. Thank you so much to my wonderful hosting company, ElectricKitten, for resetting my bandwidth (and giving me a bit extra) with no extra charge. I love my host so much.
Of course, this shouldn’t have needed to happen at all, in a perfect world where people weren’t parasitic dickholes. Because you see, the reason my site was down all weekend was because on Friday around noon, a high traffic site called “celebfeednow” hotlinked to an Iron Man gif I put in a blog post three years ago. One of several gifs that I had found on tumblr, and like a responsible non-asshole, had then hosted locally when I wanted to use them. And let’s be honest, it’s not like tumblr is hurting for bandwidth, but it’s good internet hygiene.
But anyway, because “celebfeednow” is a bag so inconceivably full of dicks that I fear there will now be a world dick shortage, they hotlinked to an image and thus ate my site’s entire bandwidth allowance for the entire month in less than three hours, and my site got automatically cut off.
I have since renamed the image and turned on hotlinking prevention, so hopefully this will not happen again. But I cannot state clearly enough how upsetting and stressful this was for me. I’m unemployed now. I’m job hunting. My little website is one of the places I send people to for my publication list when they want additional writing samples. I didn’t know if I was going to have to cough up extra money when I’m suddenly freaking out about my income. This was one more fucking thing I did not need to deal with in my life when I’m already having hysterical ugly laughing fits every time I look at my freshly arrived COBRA paperwork.
And seriously, where the fuck does a site like “celebfeednow” get off on hotlinking to anyone? They have the bandwidth. Host your own fucking images, assholes. Pay your own goddamn bills.
Fucking parasites.
Don’t hotlink images. Unless they’re from something like XKCD, where hotlinking is specifically stated to be A-okay, DO NOT HOTLINK IMAGES. Pay for your own fucking bandwidth instead of stealing it from someone else. Particularly if you have a high traffic site. I didn’t know we had to start off the week with a reminder that stealing is wrong, but there we go.
Anyway, we’re back, hopefully to stay, and I have other things to write.
Hardcore Henry is a scifi action film shot entirely in first person. Unlike handheld camera movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield, there’s never an outside look at the protagonist; we’re supposed to be literally seeing through his eyes. It feels like someone’s taken a first person shooter game and rendered it in film, which is its strength as a gimmick, but also a major weakness.
First off, if you have any problems with getting motion sick in movies that have a lot of shaky camera movements, I do not recommend this one. That’s the number one problem with the first person format here. We’re getting all the shakiness of a mounted camera, which actually works counter to the first person shooter effect because it reminds us that we’re looking through a camera, not actually experiencing the film first person.
Let me explain what I mean.
When you’re running, jumping, doing whatever as a person, you’ll notice that your vision doesn’t actually shake that much, even if you’re really pounding ground. That’s because there are a ton of physical factors, from the stabilization of your neck muscles to your inner ears to the way your brain processes the visual input that work to make what you see relatively smooth. You experience, say, some bobbing motion if you’re running, but not a lot of the vibration or shaking even if that’s literally what’s happening to you. You’re compensating for it.
This is what makes first person shooter games work. The movement you get on the screen is very smooth, with at most some up and down indicating running. (Here’s an example of gameplay from Destiny.) But you’ll notice a lot of the indicators of physical motion we get are from seeing the arms move, for example. So in a weird way, a first person shooter looks more real than something like Hardcore Henry because it more closely apes how we visually experience movement. Even if in a technical sense, Hardcore Henry is more real because it’s literally a camera that is strapped to someone.
This is something that the people who made the Doom movie really got when they shot the film’s famous first person shooter scene. (Though arguably, they made it a tad too smooth.)
Unfortunately, with Hardcore Henry, we’re spending an entire movie watching a camera get flung around rather than perceiving what’s going on in a much more stabilized way, like the character Henry would. This works against the movie, because while I’m sure a lot of the action sequences were extremely cool, I couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on in most of them. There was too much unstable movement for me to be able to track it. So it’s an interesting gimmick, but I wish it had worked better.
As far as the actual plot goes, it really does feel like standard video game setup. Hello, player, here is your cipher character that you occupy, here’s your goal (save your wife Estelle), here’s the major antagonist, here’s your contact Jimmy who will give you the various missions you need to run to level up. The fight at the end certainly felt like Epic Final Boss Battle. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some fun stuff in there if you’re a fan of action movies and just want to see some badguys get punched. There’s also a couple little twists to be had, including the deal with Jimmy (Sharlto Copley) apparently being the master of disguise, and the denouement with Estelle.
On the other hand, I really could have done without the extended bordello scene, which highlighted the fact that other than Estelle, there really weren’t any women in the movie who weren’t gun-wielding prostitutes. (Guys, you do realize that many a non-dude-bro plays FPS games and thus might have an interest in your film, right?) And I still don’t know what the deal was with the villain, Akan, other than he just wants a private army of cyborgs because reasons. Reasons only an albino with psychic powers could possibly understand and doesn’t see fit to share with you, the viewer. Which is really another contributing factor to the FPS game feel, because let’s be honest, some of those games are pretty thin on the plot. Who needs reasons when you can grab the heavy ammo drop?
I think we’re pretty close to having a full, first person film that’s not going to make people motion sick. This just isn’t it. And here’s hoping that when that film finally comes out, we can skip the whorehouse scene.
