"because it's really obviously a shit idea."

and now we get to the rip o' the week for the deservedly ignored "zombie" film of late 2009, carriers.

i thought about going to see this in the theatre. i am so glad i didn't.

i was chris pine'd out after living through the great publicity storm of 2009 about the new star trek movie. i had seen just about enough of his chin and eyes -- and certainly read enough colorful descriptions of the rest of his physique -- to leave me feeling perfectly contented that i hadn't seen star trek and had no plans to do so.

but...i really just couldn't resist carriers. it looked so perfectly my type of thing, right?

CARRIERS Trailer #2 - Watch more Funny Videos

right?

yeah -- it's an almost total loss. the trailer is the coolest thing about it. hell, the dude from csi or law and order or svu or whatever the hell one of those police procedurals that i don't watch who is in the trailer is more worth watching than any of the putative "leads," none of whom are intelligent or likeable. i can't even say that chris pine does his best because i have no idea what his best looks like; i only hope it isn't as wooden and half-dimensional as this. if it is, the star trek movie must either have been a total joke or totally depended on the secondary characters.

in theory, the story is quite simple: the movie opens with four young people -- two men; two women -- fleeing south, trying to escape a nameless "disease" which has apparently decimated the rest of the population of the united states.

straightforward, right? steal your vehicle of choice; load it with goodies; head south; lock yourself down 'til the bad stuff is over sounds like a plan to me. and it is -- it's a good and a great plan and it has worked well for movies as diverse as road warrior, waterworld, and resident evil 3. you'd think it was pretty much paint-by-numbers now -- and i think that's part of the problem here.

it is paint-by-numbers: there's the "studly older brother with a troubled past and a bad temper;" there's the "intellectual younger brother;" there's "studly older brother's girlfriend who is the only one who can keep him under control;" and then there's "selfish random chick we picked up 'cause younger brother thinks she's hot." i may be being a bit crude -- and cruel -- here, but, really, the characters don't lend themselves to any deeper interpretation. they're pretty much that. and it was more fun to watch the same group of characters fight off over-friendly german shepards in the breed.

one of the major problems with this movie is that at no point did the screenwriter (or writers; i understand they are brothers) sit down to figure out the details of this dread ailment that's meant to be killing everyone. or, if they did, they didn't let the rest of us in on it. is it airborne? air and blood? just blood? blood and other bodily fluids? does it die in the air? does it survive on surfaces? do you have to be touched? or does it take something like a scratch or a bite? if humans are infected at something like 100% infection and 99% mortality, what about animals?

it seems from the beginning of the movie that it would take direct contact with an infected person or with something they have touched in order to be exposed; but these rules get looser and looser as the movie goes on until they're finally just a joke. the characters wear gloves and masks most of the time (the kind of light air filter masks you wear when you're cleaning out a dusty attic), but they're more like fashion accessories than actual anti-viral aids. no-one seems to have thought of the problems of using regular household equipment to kill or protect from a hitherto unknown virus; you'd've thought that doing some research into the early days of aids, hanta, or ebola work would've fixed that problem. and that's the sort of thing that can't happen if the movie's going to be any good. while i agree absolutely that you can make this kind of movie 100% to formula (the first resident evil movie is a prime (and enjoyable) example), the formula has to be followed; there have to be rules and you can't decide you don't like them just because it isn't convenient right now.

the other problem is that the movie shies away from anything too serious. it sets itself up with some serious considerations right in the beginning -- with the man and the girl in the car asking for help; they turn out to be a "clean" man and his infected daughter, trying to get to an army base where they hear there may be a cure -- do our "heroes" help them? avoid them? kill them and take their stuff? but it dodges all of them, right down to becoming absolutely laughable when our four "heroes" stumble into an abandoned condominium complex and decide to stay the night. the complex turns out to be inhabited by a bunch of radiation-suited survivalist geeks who decide that the boys can leave -- but the girls have to stay.

part of the issue with this is that it's a really obvious rip of the same damn sequence -- except soldiers, not survivalists -- from danny boyle's 28 days later and it's always better not to remind your audience of your superior competition. in 28 days later, the situation is sober, meaningful -- and treated that way by writer, director, and performers. there is a real threat to selena and hannah when they arrive at the army-fortified house outside manchester; the commanding officer, major west, isn't quite out of control of his men, but he has promised them free access to any un-infected women they find. selena and hannah are the only two so far, so they're for it as far as he's concerned. the only other member of the party, jim, is given a choice: he can either accede to what's going to happen to the women he's been travelling with, or he can be put under restraint and, eventually, back outside with the infected.

in that movie, the sexual threat to the women is part of a larger picture of how the world has broken down under stress; we have to believe that none of these people would behave this way "in real life" but under these circumstances they feel excused or justified or allowed to indulge themselves any way they can. action at the fortified house run by major west takes up about the last quarter of the film and some major character development for selena and jim, particularly. there's serious physical threat to both the women -- but next to no nudity. what there is -- very little, as selena and hannah are forced to bathe -- is awkward, humiliating, coldly lit, not sexual or enjoyable. several of the soldiers even seem to be increasingly uncomfortable; none of them going so far as to argue with the arrangement, but instead edging out of the room, fading into the background, or finding urgent tasks to do elsewhere.

in the case of carriers, the absolute same scenario means nothing. it's rubbished. instead, it's used as an excuse for cheap titillation when the survivalists in the condo make the girls strip -- ostensibly to check for signs of disease; really obviously to show off piper perabo's six-pack. (and it is painfully obvious as the camera lingers on the breasts and hips of both girls -- inasmuch as they have any.) one of the girls proves to be infected and everyone leaves, despite guns, stress, and adrenalin-levels on all sides that should have turned the parking lot into a bloodbath.

there's more and it does get worse -- right down to a closing voice-over that should have been strangled at birth, but there's really only so much energy i can muster for razoring apart something that was such clear and obvious crap it really just mocks itself.

time clogging

so i dithered a bit about writing posts for this week, particularly after pondering in my post on repo men last week -- another rip of which can be found on tor.com if you're into that sort of thing -- about why genre fans insist on getting respect, yet refuse to play nice with their own genre.

and i dithered because, really, my temptation for this week was to write at least one juicy good rip of a movie, but that seemed a bit hypocritical, so we're starting instead with the book review which is at least slightly more positive.

a few weeks ago, i wrote about steve cash's the meq and made a subsequently totally unjustified comment about the second book being due out this year. it isn't. it's been out for several years. i'm a dork and should have checked my facts more thoroughly first! i swear that i did read something about a new book of his being out sometime this year -- perhaps it's the third in the series since the second volume ends with a cliff-hanger so blatant it barely justifies being called one. it's so obvious by about half-way through the book that nothing whatever is going to be resolved in this volume that the cliff-hanger is more anti-climactic than anything else.

as sequels go, time dancers isn't bad. but that's about as far as it goes. it isn't bad. i was really hoping for quite a lot more. since the first novel, the meq, was a pretty ambitious gambit with quite a lot of charm to it, i was willing, so to speak, to give cash quite a lot of rope to hang himself. after all, not everyone can write heart-shaped box, neverwhere, or garden of iden right out of the gate.

the story for time dancers is pretty basic: without giving away anything critical, i can say that it takes the characters from 1919 to 1945; they're still searching for answers about "the Remembering" (which also has some rather spiffy sound meq word that i can't recall); the villain is still out there being villainous; and there's an awful lot of running around. seriously. these people do more transatlantic/pacific travel in about two months than most of us do in a friggin' lifetime. and they do it fast, too. no storms, no customs hold-ups, no lost luggage, nothing. you want to go to paris from st. louis? boom. fastest trip you ever had in your life. and in 1923, too!

what i really wanted from time dancers was character development. some enlargement on the plot would have been nice; a sense of where the meq stand -- or have stood -- in terms of the regular human history of the world would have been good, too, but what i really wanted out of this book was to see zianno and his other meq companions do some growing up even if they can't grow up.

i wanted to see them deal with watching their human friends age and die; with their own inter-relationships; with sex, for heaven's sake! there was this big deal made in the meq about the "one for one" nature of relationships between the meq -- is that it? is that the only type of long-term "adult" relationship they ever have? never a passing fling with the odd regular human? and, if that's the case, then how does that work? how do two twelve-year-olds go through the world as lovers when the rest of the world sees them as children? are they actual lovers or just "good friends" until they decide to end "the Itxaron" and enter the real flow of time to have children? and just how lame is that: you have to choose to die in order to reproduce? don't we have enough stories about immortal characters who have to do that already? and there were just enough almost-answers to my questions to keep me reading, but they were thin enough to leave me disappointed.

instead of character development -- or even deeper plot development -- time dancers is really one long rush of action in which nothing really happens. some characters we've been familiar with since the meq die -- but since they haven't been fleshed out at all since the meq and since zianno's narrative voice hasn't changed at all in how he describes or relates to them, it's a little hard to get worked up about it. the characters seem to have retreated to be bad caricatures of themselves: carolina is always caring and welcoming; sailor is always mysterious and serious; owen is always helpful and competent. characters become more like strings of unchanging adjectives and physical characteristics than actual people. it's a shame, really, because cash had some great characters and he doesn't do much with them.

the rush of the action is almost enough to let you forget this for about half the book; then i, at least, started to find it really annoying. that, and the habit almost all the characters developed of never answering a straight question: "well, what happened with [fill in the blank]?" "now is not the time for you to know that." i wanted just one person to say, "well, obviously i think it is, you doorknob, so how 'bout we try it my way for once and see what the hell happens?!" and, as a trick to increase tension and delay revelation, it got to be obvious when it happened in every.
single.
conversation.

so, yes. i wasn't unreservedly thrilled with time dancers. cash's trick of dropping in historical figure to spice up the action got old more quickly this time. more than that, though, i was really disappointed that the characters were still essentially the same as they had been in the first volume. i was hoping for some deepening of the vision, some sense that perhaps not all of the meq zianno hangs out with are trustworthy (there's a couple i wouldn't trust as far as i can throw a dead rat), or even a feeling that perhaps not everyone tells the truth all the time.

i'll read the third volume, but i'll read it for the villain. so far, he's the one i'm still most interested in!

on the other hand, cash does just get a whole crap-ton of points for lugging in -- almost entirely without reason or need -- leon bismarcke "bix" beiderbecke, a 1920s jazz musician, a cornet player. and why is this, you ask? it is because i am a complete devotee of the alan plater beiderbecke series: affair, tapes, and connection. i tried to find a youtube clip of the opening or even a decent trailer but all i could find is what you see below which is a rather random collection of clips from the first series, the beiderbecke affair. if you like what you see -- and, really, what's not to like? -- i strongly suggest finding the series to watch; they're all about equally weird, random, and charming, but i personally like the first series best.

friday fun times

so here's 10 minutes of pure mental relaxation for your friday; consider that all the puppets in this were hand-knitted by the animator's wife and the animator did all the sounds himself...apparently his animation studio was a shed at the bottom of his garden. :)

thumbnail review: "repo men"

the morning before i went to see repo men, the reviews from the first day release came out. i read two of them, one from the sf signal blog and one from scifi wire. had either of them said the same thing about the same thing at the same time, i might have taken them seriously; as it was, they both complained about diametrically opposing things. which actually brought up another question:

the f/sf/horror community bitches like mad whenever they feel they're not being "taken seriously" (witness last year's hooferaw over whether or not heath ledger would win an oscar for dark knight and this year's complaints over oscar nominees; see also any debate over book top 10 lists and genre inclusion or exclusion thereupon), but yet when something like "repo men" comes out which isn't brilliant or world-changing, but is a pretty solid piece of dystopic sf, that same group of bloggers, writers, reviewers, fans, etc., descend upon it like harpies to rip it into shreds? how, exactly, do you expect to get respect from someone else when you clearly don't respect what members of your own group produce? i realise there's a valuable conversation to be had about producing good stuff rather than just random crap, but surely knocking everything that comes down the pike because it isn't blade runner or a george romero movie (most of which are pretty darn low-quality, despite their endless amusement value) or whatever asimov/heinlein novel is top of the pile this week is just as foolish as exalting every f/sf/horror production just because that's what it is.

i don't know as i had any particular answer to this question but, in spite of the bad reviews from both the wire and sf signal, i enjoyed the movie. the previews were wretched; the only good one -- for predators -- i'd watched the day before; i'm actually anticipatory enough about it that i've linked the trailer down there. the others just made me feel as though i were losing brain cells by watching them. kick-ass, i admit, looks intriguing, but not enough to make me pay $6 to see it in the theatre, much as i like how matthew vaughan puts together a movie. the uber-clever woman/man-child trope is a bit...motion-sickness inducing to watch every now and then. it was pleasant to see mark strong showing up in so many things although i'm really sorry that he's in the new russell crowe robin hood, 'cause, man, that just looks fucking hilarious and not in a good way. ridley scott has clearly simply lost his marbles.

anyway, the actual movie was pretty good. it could have been a gorebath -- one of the reviews cited above actually complained that it wasn't bloody enough -- honestly, i'm somewhat relieved it wasn't worse. it could have been very, very nasty indeed given the nature of the story which, in case you don't know, follows two repo[session] men who work for the union, a company which has taken over the production and sale of artificial organs of all kinds. if you can't make the payments on your new liver, the repo men take it back. they don't give you another one in return. anyone with a vivid imagination can see really quickly how this could just turn into a saw-style bloodbath. it didn't -- on the other hand, i think the "surgery" scenes could have been done even more effectively and showed next to nothing. as it was, you were never quite sure if you were going to see blood 'n guts or not -- and when you did, the makeup effects weren't that good. a couple of times, they looked very fake indeed. so, really, the producers could have saved themselves a headache, done a little lateral thinking, and rescued the entire situation.

what i really wish they had done is hired one of matthew vaughan's editors (and soundtrack editors, too -- the music needed a serious poke in the ass). the entire film just begged to be edited like lock, stock, and 2 smoking barrels -- it desperately wanted to be a rock video and, instead, it was put together sort of like a star trek movie: plenty of slow pans, close-ups, unnecessary walking scenes, etc. really, a lot of stuff that just slowed the story down and gave you too much time to think about plot holes. of which there are, by the way, plenty. don't think about it too hard, and you'll enjoy the movie much more.

and, really, it's worth enjoying. jude law looks like he is having the time of his life (i retract my previous statement: he makes a pretty fair badass) and there is one beautiful fight sequence at the end of the film -- about 10 minutes from the end, i'd say -- that makes it worth the wait. i love a man who's willing to use a ballpeen hammer as a serious offensive weapon.

plus, i have to say, i approve of the female lead, beth, played by alice braga who is also in the new predators. she was intelligent, independent, clever, resourceful, resilient, and armed: much closer to the alice/jill valentine/selene model of the genre heroine. the script also didn't use her too much for t&a -- no more than they did jude law, anyway, which at least makes the unfairness somewhat fairly distributed.

i'm a fan of "fuck you" endings, so i enjoyed the ending of this. i won't spoiler what happens here; suffice it to say when you start to think, "really? this is really happening? wouldn't that, y'know, kill you?" pay attention to that little voice.

all that being said, with georgia rule as the all-time low of "movies i have paid for in the theatre," this was nowhere near that bad. :)

"i don't want to go."

okay, so no-one can cry foul later: this post is about the end of time, the last of the david tennant specials closing out his final season as the doctor. there are spoilers. don't read if you haven't seen -- no, really, i mean it. i will ruin it for you and i don't want to. on the one hand, i'm not going to do a blow-by-blow synopsis of the episode for a number of reasons including -- well, i just don't want to; i'd probably do it badly; and i don't want to watch the show again in order to be able to do it well. on the other hand, i'm never quite sure what details people consider show-killer spoilers and what are just details. so better safe than sorry, yes? just bookmark the post and come back later.

first off, i should say that i went through two tissues watching the second part of end of time. really, to understand the uniqueness of this, you have to know me -- but suffice it to say that i have people in multiple states and time zones who will vouch for the fact that i never cry at movies. movies, songs, tv shows -- i just don't tear up. i don't know why; it honestly doesn't reflect a lack of feeling or emotional involvement -- it has been suggested by a co-worker that i am an alien robot and the best i can do is to say that i don't think that's true. (but if i were an alien robot, isn't that what i'd be programmed to think?) russell t. davies should be able to put in his resume that he has brought me to tears four (count 'em: 4) times: torchwood, "reset" and "exit wounds;" doctor who, "journey's end" and "end of time."

in case you've been a doctor who fan under a rock, "end of time" is a two-parter -- probably because davies enjoys torturing us. there's a fair amount of overacting: tennant and john simm, playing the master, just about split the honors between them, but it's only really distracting overacting in the first half of the first part. after that, simm, at least, calms down a bit and gets down to some serious character development. the master, i have to say, comes off as seriously awesome in this. damaged -- oh, my god, yes. damaged beyond belief. but there is some long over-due character development work and his relationship to the doctor and (big picture time) to the other time lords who...cast him out? exiled him? sent him to prison? gave him a going-away party? waved goodbye with chocolates? we don't really know -- is finally explored. i'd've loved to have seen more, but there were some great moments between simm and tennant as they tried to find some kind of middle ground where they could both, quite literally, continue to exist.

if you remember the last time we saw the master -- the whole issue with the valiant and the doctor being turned into something about the size of your average parrot and lots and lots of jack-torture -- he was complaining about a rhythm in his head, drums in his head -- well, there is an explanation for this and i love it: after all this time, the time lords want to come back and they are just the tiniest bit pissed off. so their method of self-rescue is to plant a signal in the master's head, literally driving him insane over centuries of accumulated time, until he figures out a plan to get the signal out of his head and figure out what it does. which is to haul the time lords out of their chronological dead end and back into real time.

the idea that the time lords, after all this, are villains, controlling, manipulative survivalists who would do anything to get themselves out of the dead-end time vortex they were trapped in after the doctor "ended" the time war is fan-fucking-tastic in my book. if you're a long-time fan, you know that portrayals of the time lords have wavered wildly from being benign, uninvolved observers (although never as "uninvolved" as they liked to claim), to actively interfering busybodies. (and this is just the time lords as a group, too, without taking into particular account the individual time lords we meet like the rani or the meddling monk, as well as the master. or, for that matter, susan or jenny.)

i love this solution. the idea that they would plant a signal in the master's mind, using him, forcing him to do what they want in order to open up a route for them to return and exact revenge on the entire fucking universe so that they can ascend and become gods is just fucking fantastic. i love pretty much everything about it. the time lords and gallifrey are no longer a deus ex machina that can save the world at any time; instead, they are now the biggest fucking danger to traffic that was ever created. yes. i like it. i like the master's reaction to his discovery that he has been used. i like david tennant's reaction to it. i like pretty much every little damn thing about it.

in all of this, too, there's a tempting, tantalizing, teasing suggestion as to the origin of the "blink" angels. as rassilon (rassilon, for god's sake! rassilon is a bad guy! oh my lord, that is cool!) and the other time lords materialize out of the vortex, rassilon makes some comment about the two women behind him (you can see them up there in the still) who have chosen to disagree with the senate's decision (a senate apparently entirely made up of prydonians which just explains so freakin' much) as having chosen to become "weeping angels." and, really, who would have more hunger or desire for quantum energy than a pissed-off time lord cut off from the congress of other time lords? but, while this is a great suggestion, i don't really want to know what the solution is and i'm really afraid, from the look of season 5, that steven moffat has the explanatory itch.

so there is a lot of great stuff going on here -- there are cameos from all the people you'd expect to see cameo, including martha, mickey (mickey the idiot has come so far!), jackie, rose, sarah jane, luke, and jack. bernard cribbins does a(nother) great turn as donna's grandfather, really providing the companion for the show and doing a fantastic job at it, too, keen to see the doctor again, eager to help, but also desperate to understand why the doctor abandoned donna and why the doctor, seemingly so lonely and at loose ends, won't just take donna back travelling with him.

so here we come to one of my big problems with the two-parter; in fact, now i think about it, my biggest problem with the two-parter. and it's really a beautiful example of how over-invested i can get when i choose to become over-invested!

i had hope -- such faith! -- that davies would use donna to some good end. she had to have been saved at the conclusion of season 4 to do something awesome, right? there was all that hoohah about her having "mindmelded" with the doctor and whatnot and now she was back on earth and could she remember or could she not and what could she do and what might she be able to do-- yeah.

no.

davies pissed all that up a fucking rope and i hope he's sorry for it.

instead of doing anything at all interesting with donna, she is left by the end of the story to precisely the life she begged the doctor not to return her to at the end of "journey's end." she has come full circle and is back being the person she was when she started. it is horrible to watch and i hope davies regrets it. he threw away one of the best characters he has created to date, plus a great performer in catherine tate, and it shows. it is a weakness throughout the story and it is painful to watch in the end. all i could think of was "journey's end" and the doctor's cruelty there is compounded by what i can only describe as davies's willful refusal here to rescue the character. instead, she is left stranded in the version of her life she fought so desperately to escape.

yeah, i feel warm and fuzzy: how 'bout you?

i was also disappointed that jack had nothing more to do with the show than a minute cameo at the end -- it was great to bring back the russell tovey character from "voyage of the damned" and it'd be great to see the two of them again but -- since the bbc seems to have unofficially axed torchwood and i have little faith in any american version -- i'm really dubious about this.

there are some other great things in this two-parter: the ood reappear -- they have to be some of my favorite aliens from the new series. it's sweet and very sad that they show up in the last few minutes of the show to sing the doctor to his death, essentially. it was great to see a doctor confronting the dissolution of his personality; none of the previous ones have done that. giving the tenth incarnation time to reflect on his "mortality" and "death" is unique, as far as i know, and definitely an interesting new twist.

but, really, i'm going to be stuck for a long time on donna.

friday fun times

for your friday fun and entertainment, some animated shorts which i cribbed (mostly unashamedly) from irene gallo's regular saturday morning cartoons feature over on tor.com.

the first is...well, either the weirdest or the grimmest, depending on your point of view.

...and then it gets slightly cheerier, but still weird but i love rats and this is kind of like rats meet the matrix...sort of...

...and who can resist dave mckean, really? i mean, i bought the hardcover version of the graveyard book, okay, yes, because it was new neil gaiman, but also because it had marginal drawings and chapter sketches by dave mckean.