Stuff Josh Likes: Death Note

Back in my day, we'd have to drive twenty miles to the mall to get the latest anime release on VHS from Suncoast Video on VHS. I'd plunk down my thirty bucks for whatever shitty OVA they got as soon as they got it.

Kids these days have an abundance of anime to choose from. The biggest problem is observing Sturgeon's Law, and not watching the 90% of anime that, like 90% of everything, is crap.

I forget if my baby brother or my best friend originally recommended Death Note.  The idea is that a high school student namd Light Yagami acquires a notebook that will kill the person whose name is written in it if the writer also knows their face. He initially uses it to kill criminals, but, when he realizes that that he's being investigated, uses it to kill a umber of innocent people investigating him.

That's the thing I like about Death Note. Light is a monster, and the show never lampshades it, but nor do they flinch away from it.

There's a scene where Light gets an ID from an FBI agent investigating him after he murdered her boyfriend. The first thing he tried to do on meeting her was write her name in the Death Note and get her to die as a suicide, but that didn't work, because she had an idea of how things functioned, and she gave him a fake name.

He writes her real name into the Death Note, and she goes on to kill herself at his command, even when offered the chance to call the director of the investigation directly.

It's deeply disturbing, and intentionally so. Some shows say "Let's be bad guys," and show meaningless rebellion against impotent paper tigers. Death Note depicts someone monstrously, horribly evil, but he's never shown as a hero.

Guardians of the Galaxy review, part II: He'll have fun, fun, fun til Ronan takes the Soul Gem away

The second part of my review of Guardians of the Galaxy. The first part can be found here, and focuses on how the characters differ from their counterparts in the comic books.
 
I'll sometimes review the trailers I see as part of a movie review, because, hey, trailers are fun. I wasn't the only person to express the opinion that the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer was extremely well put-together.

Here's my capsule review of the trailer that aired with X-Men: DoFP

Guardians of the Galaxy: I worked three years in a poorly trafficked comic store, and mostly just read comics for eight hours a day. Never once did I read a copy of Guardians of the Galaxy. Ah, this is Firefly done right. This trailer, and presumably, the movie that goes with it, remember that movies should be fun.

I'm not going to rehash my dislike for Firefly as part of this review. It's a fun Traveller campaign, marred by an excessively literal interpretation of the Western tropes, coupled with the whole "You can't tell me what to do!" Libertarian jerk-off fantasy. Guardians of the Galaxy keeps the good parts.

I've enjoyed Jame's Gunn's superhero movies since The Specials, which has a scene that cracks me up every time. Two super-heroes are watching the news together.

The word that gets tossed about the most in reference to Guardians of the Galaxy seems to be "fun".

What makes something "fun" is, of course, extremely subjective.  We can both look at the exact same thing at the exact same time, but come away with very different impressions of it.

I'm reminded of the Village Voice "Harlot" review.   A female writer wrote a negative piece on Guardians, the usual suspects break out their usual misogynistic language in the comments (I know, "Never read the Comments") , but then the paper takes the unusual step of addressing this in a separate piece.

However, and the awkward thing is, it's a terrible review. It's glib, smug, condescending, frequently wrong on points of fact (Groot's catch phrase is "I'm Groot!" -  Really?! Come on, that's just inexcusably sloppy), and every paragraph seems to be a variation of her thesis statement, which was "This movie wasn't amusing in a way I personally find entertaining, therefore it is objectively bad."

However, it's still not cool to call someone a harlot. I can't imagine that the word itself has a lot of sting, by itself, it's too ridiculously strange and antiquated to take seriously, but the intent is there. Meaning, that even though Falstaff, sorcerer of Light chose a ridiculous and inadequate tool,  he was still trying to silence a woman by projecting a certain sexual identity on to her, and that should always be called out.

And there is no contradiction between defending the reviewer and trashing the review. She wrote a terrible review, but this doesn't make her a terrible person, and even if it did, it wouldn't excuse someone calling her a harlot.

Oops, that was a larger digression than I was expecting.

 We open with Peter Quill's mom dying of cancer in a hospital death. She tells him to take her hand, but he bolts away and is promptly picked up by a team of passing space pirates. Presumably, his space dad is Ford Prefect.

We pick up twenty-six years later, where Peter, now calling himself Star Lord, is stealing this metal sphere. He's confronted by bad guys as he succeeds, and anyone reading this has already seen this part in the trailers.

He goes to sell it on Xandar, but his buyer get cold feet when Quill mentions Ronan. Quill exits, is ambushed by Gamora, and she takes the orb. Nearby Rocket and Groot join in the fight, and everyone is arrested. I thought this was a decent scene, though I think Gamora  "The deadliest woman in the whole galaxy" should have had a better showing against Quill. Not that she should have double-tapped him in the face or anything, but simply taken some kind of precaution to ensure that he didn't get right back up and steal the orb back.

Everybody's sentenced to the Kyln, a super prison. (A lot of science fiction names are bad, but, ugh, the Kyln is a terrible name, even by these standards.) They team up with Drax and break out. Scenes in Guardians of the Galaxy never go on too long. My last thought before they abruptly ramped things up and escaped was, "That was fun, but I'm getting bored now."

They escape, and go to Knowhere.The Collector makes them wait, and Gamora and Quill have a chat. Seeing a clip of this scene is what convinced Jen to come and see the movie.  If I recall correctly, the act on Nowhere had two of my favorite nonverbal bits in the movie. One on them is how Rocket's having his meltdown, and it looks like he's going to shoot the other members of the group, Quill interposes himself between the gun and the other people. It's a symbolic act; he's pretty squishy as outer space superheroes go, but it's an understandable, human, act, too.

The Collector calls the group in to finish the transaction. He opens the orb informs them that it's the container for one of the Infinity Gems. Just as they're about to sell the orb to the Collector, his assistant (who has the same name, Carina, as the Collector's daughter from the comics) picks it, in an attempt to free herself from her servitude, but she's unable to contain the power it holds, and she blows up. (This was the other scene I liked a lot. I love Groot's body language when he picks up Rocket to escape the explosion. He did it instantly, and the way he cradled Rocket was so protective.)

Drax had previously drunk dialed Ronan to come on down for an ass-whupping, and Ronan arrives now.  His forces kick the crap out of everybody, and he personally manhandles Drax. Ronan get what he came for, so he leaves. Star-Lord and Gamora are picked up by Yondu and his band of space pirates, Rocket, Groot and Drax hatch a plan to rescue them. Star-Lord fast talks his way out the situation by convincing Yondu that they can still retrieve the orb, then they ally with Nova corps on Xandar to stop Ronan from blowing the place up. (Also, the Nova Corps uniforms looks much better on screen than I ever could have expected.

This was another well assembled action scene. I've read criticisms that the tactics employed by both sides are kind of silly, but I think that's true of almost any sci-fi movie. Modern warfare just doesn't happen on a human scale anymore, to say nothing of what we could expect in the future. This is something I'm willing to accept for the sake of the movie. (Iain Banks showed you could tell a "realistic" outer space battle with the Culture stories, but they feature space combat between AIs that is over in seconds, and first strikes from outside solar systems, which really wouldn't fit with what's been established in GotG.)

Another thing I really liked was that everybody worked together and did the best than could do. Nobody sells out/panics/drops the ball. They stick together until Ronan overwhelms them. There is some back and forth, and Rocket hits Ronan with his ship, making people who have never seen a movie before believe that Ronan is dead. As the damaged ship is hurtling towards the surface, Groot sacrifices himself to protect the rest of the team. I liked this scene, it was moving and all, but I don't think enough had been done to set it up, so it felt really forced.

They land, Ronan pops out of the wreckage, and is going to destroy Xandar, and he says something like "Behold! Your 'Guardians of the Galaxy'!" Ugh, that was so forced and unnatural and unentertaining.  It sucks that the two worst moments come so close to the end. But then we get Star-Lord challenging Ronan to a dance-off as a distraction, and Josh is right back to loving this movie. The good guys kill Ronan, they're given a pardon for their crimes, and they fly away off to new adventures.

Even Groot is back. Yay!

Most of the stuff I've complained about was "Stuff I would have done slightly differently" rather than "Stuff I thought was bad". I am very satisfied with the movie.

Monster-Mania 25: An Unexpected Journey

I was chatting with my friend Frederick last week and I asked about his plans for the weekend, as I usually do of my friends by the time the week rolls around to...Tuesday. He said he might hit a horror con down in Cherry Hill on Sunday. I replied "Great! When can you pick me up?!"

In retrospect, that might not have actually been an "invitation", but carpe diem and all that.

Jen and Lily were out of town and I was looking for something to do to keep me out of trouble on Sunday anyway, so this was just about the optimal solution to my problem.

Frederick has acted in a couple horror movies, so when he got to the house, I asked him to sign my Zombie Food shirt. Lily also signed it.

My first autograph of the day.

Jen and Lily took off for their trip and Frederick and I took off for ours. We wound up heading in the exact opposite direction initially, but through the magic of GPS, we made it there on time.

It was nifty. This is the 25th Monster-Mania. I want to say it's the 25th "year", but I see that Monster-Mania 26 is being held in September 2013, and I don't know if they've always been semi-annual.

I go to conventions now and again, but it's been a year, since I attended my last one, and that was small and local.

The thing that surprised me the most about this one was how focused it was. Comic conventions tend to cast a wide net and welcome anyone with even a fig leaf justification for being there. This was billed as a horror convention, and that's what it was, by God!

The only exception was a local TV channel. I don't know what they were doing there. The interns staffing the table never had any reason to look up from their phones, and their pile of literature had clearly not been touched. Here's a picture of their van.

The con had a pretty impressive guest list. Carrie Fisher was there, which, aside from the TV station, was their only dilution of its horror theme (though I assume that if Carrie Fisher accepts an invitation, you make whatever concessions you need to in order to keep her there), George Romero, Danny Glover, Christopher Lloyd, Malcolm McDowell.

George Romero (Most well known as the director of the original Night of the Living Dead and godfather of the genre) is of particular note, because Frederick and I were wandering around the hotel looking for a particular booth hosted by a friend of his, when Frederick looked past me at some guy. I was like "What? What? What is it? What?" and then the guy continued on his way, and I was like "Did he look a little like George Romero?" and Frederick was like "Yes, he did."

Then Frederick excused himself to jump on top of George Romero and yell "I'm going to keep punching you in the face until you start making good movies again!" He had to be pulled off by security. It was awkward.

Also in attendance was Gary Busey. It was weird, because he looked exactly like he does in the movies. The other celebrities there looked different, not being favorably lighted and airbrushed and made up, but Busey looked exactly the same.

R2-D2 was there, and he sure looks different when I saw him later without his makeup.

With makeup

Without makeup

We attended a charity auction to benefit Yorkshire Terriers, where Frederick picked up some nifty stuff, and then it was on to the screening of a movie called Baggage, by a friend of his. It was a short film and we came in a little late and missed a bit too much of it, but Frederick had won a copy at the auction, so we figured we could catch up at our leisure later. That was followed by a movie titled Déjà vu?

Frederick: Ah, man! I've already seen this one!

Me: *Baleful look*

We also did some shopping, and I'll show you pictures of my booty at the end of the post.

I'll probably have some pics of the stuff I bought, too.

Near the end of the convention, we saw some zombie face painting, which Lily would have loved. I said it was cute. A couple minutes later, I described something else as "cute", and this time Frederick called me on it.

Frederick: Did you just call two things cute in the last five minutes?

Me: Yes. And I don't know why it's suddenly my go-to word at a horror movie convention.

Frederick: ...

Me: Awww!!! That fetal pig is adorable.

We wrapped up our time at the convention and met with our friend Jen at the local Barnes & Noble. She got there shortly before we had, and was trying to browbeat the staff into joining her Jane Austen book club.

The pair of them immediately began harassing me, over all things, the clothes I was wearing. I had on jeans, sneakers and a shirt-sleeved collared shirt. It wasn't like I was dressed up for high tea. And yet, the man in the neon green Holiday of the Dead t-shirt was giving me shit about what I wore to the convention.

Actually, I did make a decision to dress somewhat conservatively. (We were going to wear our matching  "I'd rather be hunting zombies" shirts, in their garish shade of traffic cone orange, which my lovely and generous wife had picked up on clearance a while back, but Frederick couldn't find his.) I had asked Lily what she wanted for a souvenir, and she said one picture of a guy in a scary costume and one of a pretty girl in a costume. I wanted to come off as un-skeevy as possible, so I went with the collared shirt instead of a t-shirt.

(We did get some pictures, but few people were dressing up on the third day of a three day con.)

Had a nice time shooting the breeze with Jen and Frederick in the B&N. We walked around the plaza, before settling on the Wegman's as a place to eat dinner.  The conversation turned to the Superman movie and one of them asked if the "S" was really a symbol for hope. I gave the answer I used in my blog post about Man of Steel, that it's been canon for a while that Superman's "S" chevron represents the Crest of the House of El, but it's a newer idea that it also represents a symbol of hope.

Frederick: So, if the "S" stands for hope, what's the Kryptonian symbol for dickwaving?

Me: A bat.

Heh heh heh.

Also, Batman has fallen on hard times and is selling pictures with the Batmobile.

As promised, here are some of the pictures of our purchases. I bought a pillar of skulls for $5 at the pillar of skulls table.

Frederick bought a Jayne hat. Le Sigh.

 Pretend you're a Firefly fan.

 Make a face like a douchebag.

Douchier!

I said douchier!

Great!

Now spend the next 10 years bitching about how your crappy show was cancelled.

This is for Lily, Princess Leia as the Mona Lisa. It's from the Thirteenth Floor. Here is a link to their website, where you can buy their prints, which I found both very high quality and very reasonably priced.

I also liked Geek Boy Press but there seems to be a problem with his website so I can't link to it. I wasn't absolutely sure if that pig was supposed to be Waddles until I saw a Mabel pin too.

He had prints too, but I only spotted him near the end of the con, and was already approaching the end of my budget. I do plan to buy some more from his website, however.

Pretty great and surprisingly inexpensive weekend. Very happy with how it went.

"And for those who might be interested... a giraffe!"

Josh comes around

I know not everyone around here shares my opinions on Batman and Firefly, so you may find this Facebook status update amusing. This is what happens when you don't log out when your friends are visiting.

Three people who do their jobs better than Joss Whedon

It wouldn't be Josh's blog if we didn't have the occasional two minutes hate against Joss Whedon.

Joss Whedon is perceived as a writer friendly to women because he features a lot of women  in his properties. Sure, I'll buy that. What I don't quite buy into is the scuttlebutt on the internets that he's done more to advance woman's issues than any other human being who ever lived. And even I will admit that Whedon is pretty good in this regard. However, he's not perfect. Of note is that his brand of feminism involves a young woman getting punched in the face for seven years. When that is the gold standard, when all genre writing is measured by this yardstick, then I think there's a problem.


This piece sums up a lot of the problems with Whedon's brand of feminism.

See also, Strong Female Characters

Here's the list promised in the title:

The Writers on Scooby Doo, Mystery Inc
 

I don't hate everything Whedon's ever done. I think Seasons 2 and 3 of Buffy (Spike, Drucilla and Angelus and Faith and the Mayor, respectively and Season 4 of Angel were some of the best television that were ever broadcast, irrespective of genre.

Scooby Doo has come full circle in recent years with the kind of pop culture references, funny dialogue and clever plot twists that characterized Buffy back in its heyday. I think the most recent episode is better than Buffy.

Look, I'll even say something nice about Whedon. It's hard to write smart someone smarter than yourself. Larry Niven said that it would take him months to write the parts of his Protector books where the superhumanly intelligent protagonist was doing something. Plus, make it too smart and you run the risk of losing your audience. So, a trick that writers often use is to make the antagonists kind of stupid so that the heroes can seem smart when they run circles around them. Yeah, it's a bit of a cheap trick, but often it's the lesser evil, so we live with it.

Whedon's writing appears clever at first glance, but falls apart when you think about it. TV tropes has a term for it. Fridge Logic.

I think the scene that best exemplifies this is the part in the Avengers when the Black Widow speaks to Loki in his cell. He taunts her and she draws him out, and he mentions the Hulk in passing, so she's like "We've got you now!" and drops the whole charade right then and there. Except. they know he's seen Banner, and indeed, his whole conversation with Fury was about the Hulk.

Which part was clever, Joss? The part where the Black Widow acquires information they already through Fury's earlier conversation had or the part where she radios in a juvenile fuck you mission accomplished to Nick Fury in front of Loki, squandering the asset?


And then there's the stuff that's just dumb, like Saffron calling Mal by his full name when she's claimed she doesn't know him, thereby revealing her deception. That's the kind of mistake that tripped up Bugs Meany in the Encyclopedia Brown books. (Also, those books had Sally Kimball, who is a more fully realized character than any of the women on Firefly. (Or the men on Firefly, for that matter.))

But Scooby Doo manages to weave together a complicated narrative that makes sense, with both sides outsmarting the other at certain times.

James Cameron

Cameron didn't give us Ellen Ripley, as she was introduced in the first movie, but he gave us Sarah Connor, who was cast from the same mold. I'm going to focus on Ripley, however, because it allows us a direct point of comparison. Cameron gave us Aliens, for many fans the high point of the series, and Joss Whedon, when asked to write an Aliens movie, gave us Alien: Resurrection.

To hear his fans tell it, Whedon wrote Toy Story all by his lonesome, instead of being one of many screenwriters who contributed to the script. And as quick as he is to claim ownership of that, he's equally quick to blame other people for his failures. Whedon was all like "This is everyone's fault but mine!" about A:R. . ("It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.") Oh, the movie sucks because the actors said their lines exactly as I wrote them down, said Joss "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else" Whedon. I read an interview with Wired where he insists Dollhouse was brilliant (Dollhouse was the series, you may remember, where a bunch of pretty women are mindwiped and imprinted with whatever personality their clients want. Empowering!) but people were just too dumb to appreciate it.


And feminism is really only half the story about the Aliens series. The second one was awesome and influential and gave us lines that are still being quoted now. Resurrection...was a punchline.

Hayou Miyazaki:

I'll start with the first runner-up. Honorable mention goes to Avatar: The Last Airbender. The heroes are leading an invasion to stop the villains by defeating the Fire Nation leadership during the brief period of a solar ecclipse when Fire Benders will be unable to use their powers, and and their commander, the father of two of the kids gives a speech and says, "If we do this, this war is over." Not we win, not some dead-ender brownshirt "The Space South shall rise again!"  BS but the war is over, and we get to go back to our families.

Miyazaki began work in 1963, the year before Whedon was born, back when Whedon's father and his father were churning out sitcom scripts. Joss Whedon, as you may know, is a third generation sitcom writer, a factor that played an enormous role in his success. Plenty of geeks write well. Few of them have the connections he did.

My daughter returned to school today. She suggested a movie marathon the night before to celebrate the last day of summer. We eventually went with Teen Titans (which is another show that does a good job with its female characters), but we considered any number of things.  At one point she asked, "Can we watch the movie about the super strong princess?"

I felt the temperature rise as Jen turned her gaze on me.

"What movie is that?", I asked.

"The one where she's friends with the giant pill bugs."

"Oh," I said. "Nausicaä." Then I added, "They're not pillbugs, they're Ohmu."
 

Back before she was born, we decorated Lily's room with an underwater theme. We didn't want to go pink, because neither of us is thrilled about the whole princess culture (There's a great book with a great title called Cinderella Ate My Daughter about it), but if she has to be in to princesses, I think Nausicaä is just about the best one out there.

The name of the character comes from the Oddessy. She's the young woman who helps Odessyeus one of the seven or eight times he washes up on shore over the course of the story. I found this account while I was researching this piece:

Miyazaki's impression of Homer's Nausicaä came through an account of her in a translation of one of Bernard Evslin’s handbooks of Greek mythology. From Evslin’s description Miyazaki imagined a fearless, compassionate, beautiful, and spirited girl who delighted in nature and spurned convention—an image he admits being somewhat disappointed to see did not seem so splendidly displayed in the Odyssey

Other Nausicaa

 

She's such a great character. She's not super-strong either, but Lily was referring to my very favorite scenes in the movie and one of my favorite scenes in any movie.  Nausicaä  is out at the periphery of the village and when a bunch of airships land and start disgorging troops. She sees that they're heading for her father, so she starts running to his room. The scene cuts to him, an old man, sitting up in his bed. He unsheathes his sword and lays it on his lap. He tells his advisor to hide and she tells him that she'll be staying. We see the troops enter the room, and then the scene cuts to the outside, where we hear the sound of a gunshot. Nausicaä  hears it too, and she sprints up the final flight of stairs and when she bursts into the room and sees her father's body, she completely flips the fuck out and demolishes the squad with nothing more than the small staff she was carrying. When more troops arrive, these in full plate armor, she picks up a fallen sword and sets on them too. She's about to kill one of them when Master Yupa, her mentor, leaps into the room and intercepts thrust the blade of the sword with his arm. He has his knife ready to go through the neck slit of the commander's armor, and as his blood drips down the blade, he lectures the commander for violating the rules of engagement, then says to Nausicaä that if they fight here and now, the invaders will massacre the people of the village in retaliation.

It's not an attitude often found in American movies, where only quislings cooperate with the enemy and naked defiance and open violence are the only avenues to victory. It reminds me of two quotes I like:

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice. - Maya Angelou

Be patient. You are not winning a game called justice, you are living a life called justice. Bertolt Brecht tells the story of a man living alone who answers a knock at the door. There stands Tyranny, armed and powerful, who asks, "Will you submit?" The man does not reply. He steps aside. Tyranny enters and takes over. The man serves him for years. Then Tyranny mysteriously becomes sick from food poisoning. He dies. The man opens the door, gets rid of the body, comes back to the house, closes the door behind him, and says, firmly, "No."

It's certainly a more mature work than anything Whedon's ever produced. My other criticism of him is that his characters seldom have to make hard choices like that. They just do what they want to do and that coincidently turns out to be the best course of action. 
 

And just about all of Miyazaki's films have strong female leads, Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke (who, while great, is not actually a princess). Miyazaki also manages to write strong female characters without the rage against the machine anti-authority I'm a thirteen year old and I'm smarter than the grownups vibe. He even features a couple female villains, something that Whedon's never been able to pull off. In fact, best of Joss Whedon's work is not as feminist as the weakest of Studio Ghibli's.

Mmm...Maybe not Pom Poko.




 

Stolen words

I don't know how closely folks around read the comments. If you happened to read them over the weekend you would have seen that someone copied large portions of a post and passed them off on his own.  

It was kind of funny, because I saw a comment from an anonymous poster (Why is this 2011 article almost exactly like this article...? http://trebobslab.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-i-hate-firefly.html) and it looked like spam, which on blogger, tends to take the form of, "Can you believe this?! Click on over here to check it out!" I almost ignored it, but it seemed legit enough to bear investigating.  

The other blogger  had nested my post within his, and I had only skimmed it on the first reading, so I missed the plagiarized segments entirely. I actually left a comment on the post, saying something like, "Hey, someone on my blog thought you had lifted some segments I had written, but on review, I think the tipster is mistaken; we simply came to similar conclusions and used similar language to describe them. I'm glad I found your blog because of this and I look forward to reading it."  

And then I went off to do other things, because it was the weekend. When I returned, I checked to see if anyone had replied, I saw that the comment was gone. Either I had absent-mindedly exited the page without submitting it, as I sometimes do, or new comments needed to be approved first. So I went back to the original thread and replied to the tipster: "So, when I first saw that comment, I had dismissed it as spam, because spam tends to take that format around here, a claim that gets you interested followed by a link to a site. However, it turns out that it's legit. I don't think the person copied me, though. The opening lines are very similar and he raises a lot of the same points, but I get the impression that he arrived at them independently."  

The tipster replied with some quotes from the piece that I had overlooked on me initial read through and contrasted them with mine, and looking at them juxtaposed like that, it was hard to deny their providence.  So, it now seems pretty clear that someone plagiarized some of my work. I had left the comment, which by now I figured must have been deleted or never approved, with the account I use to post here, so I wouldn't be very surprised if the blogger over there had followed my comment back to the tip-off thread. I went to the post again just to make sure and I found that the blog had suddenly become invitation-only.  Shortly after that, it was gone entirely. 

However, nothing is ever gone on the internets. Google's cache remembers all! 

I mentioned this on Facebook and tried to figure out how I felt about this. Because, had someone asked me how I would have felt about this prior to it happening, I would have guessed angry.  But I'm not. My main annoyance is that I think his rewriting the post resulted in a weaker piece.
 

Friends had a couple suggestions, ranging from contacting blogger/google to scouring his website to see how much he had taken from other authors. That last part was interesting, because it got me to thinking that if I were in his place, I would have probably deleted the offending post, suggesting that he has taken other posts from other authors.  

That's assuming that he's in the blogging game for the same reason I am. I did most of my writing at a job that gave me internet access and lots of free time, and my goals were to write something that I would enjoy reading and hopefully spark some interesting conversation with other people who enjoyed reading it. I'm anonymous-ish around here, but otherwise I want to attract as wide an audience as possible of people who would enjoy what I write. I don't get anything out of it other than satisfaction. I suppose it's possible to monetize the blog, but that looks like a lot of work, and as my personal preference is not to have ads all over the place, I try to extend the same courtesy to people who visit here. 

Also, I'm not any kind of lawyer, but noncommercial reviews and commentaries are generally held to be good examples of fair use. If I were making any kind of money off the site, I'd feel much more uneasy about some of the longer quotes and pics I've used. (Though I suspect more significant reason is that I'm too small to attract any kind of attention and I like to think that the reviews I write, if they attract any attention at all are perceived to make the people more likely to purchase the products reviewed . Also, if lawyers sent takedown notices for every book cover taken off Amazon to serve as an image for a book review, they wouldn't have time to do anything else.)

 I generally try to be good about crediting my sources, and if I fail to do so, I'm consistent about it otherwise that I hope it's clear that any omission is an oversight and not an attempt to pass someone else's work off as my own. And it's very well possible that I've internalized something I've read somewhere only to write it down later, believing it my own creation, but it's hopefully not something I do often.

Mad for Mad Men

This post was supposed to follow the Mad for Mad Libs one, but I got busy and never finished it.

I first saw Mad Men about a month before my great aunt died. It fell to us to clean out her house, and it just struck me that the style of her place was firmly rooted in that era. The events were close enough together that whenever I watch the show, I think of her.

Jen and I are working through it on Netflix, and I like it and part of the appeal is figuring out why I like it. It's a show about an advertising agency in the 60s staffed by a bunch of alcoholic assholes. And I've mentioned that part of my dislike of Firefly is that I think that the characters are a bunch of assholes. So why do I like these assholes, but not those assholes?

I don't want to turn this into my usual rag on Joss Whedon, but as the show prominently features two Whedon alums, in the form of Christina Hendricks (Saffron from Firefly) and Vincent Kartheiser (Connor from Angel) I think comparisons are inevitable. And I'm not going to say whether Mad Men is a better show than Firefly*, but rather, try to examine why I like one and not the other.

The name of my blog comes from a line from one of Roger Zelazny's stories, and he wrote his Master's thesis on The Revenger's Tragedy, and made a career writing characters with "a hate so big it would burn the innocent to reach the guilty." So I'm not averse to works with borderline villainous protagonists.

I like another author named Glen Cook. He's probably most well known for his "Black Company" series, which chronicles the stories of a mercenary company of the same name. I discovered him at about the same time I did Zelazny, and I like him for a lot of the same reasons. He had a line in one of his later books that went something like "Most bad people aren't bad all the time, and when they are, it's mostly in small ways."

I think that's one of the best observations on human nature I've ever read. Most bad people are bad in mostly small ways, though those bad acts have a disproportionate impact on those over whom they have power.

The people in Mad Men are bad people. At times, Don Draper is straight up evil.

The people in Firefly are bad people too. But as I observed in my Avengers review,  the most thuggish criminal, if he's funny, nice to his friends, and allowed to present events from his point of view, will look like a nice guy.

I think the difference, at least for me, is that sympathetic point of view. We only see the crew of the Serenity at their best and that serves to color the audience's perspective. When someone in Mad Men does something bad, we see the people that it hurts. To put it another way, the characters in Mad Men don't get away with being bad, and they never seem happy except in small or temporary ways.

However,  that difference is by design. I'm actually even going to defend Firefly a little bit. My friend Eric says that Firefly is very archetypal in that the characters tend to be the sum of their profession, and that's a very western thing. Jayne is "The Mercenary".  Simon is "The Doctor". They have some distinguishing characteristics, but not a lot of nuance and at the end of the day, they're pretty much the same person they were when they began it. And I think that's a feature, not a bug.

I think it's the subtle truths of characterization and setting that sold me on the show. I particularly like January Jones, which is kind of funny, because I thought she was pretty awful when I first saw her in X-Men: First Class.  There's a certain je ne sais quoi to her performance. She talks with a kind of a flat affect, and given the way I speak, God knows I have no room to criticize anyone for that, but I like it in her. And I think her character is what I like about the show the most. I like taking things apart and seeing what makes them tick. She really makes me believe that there's so much more going on in Betty's head than what she says out loud.

Don is great for that too, when he cocks his head and squints, it reminds me of a line from (who else?) Roger Zelazny: "He photographed me with his magpie eyes in the following second, and I knew that the machine that lay behind them was already spinning its wheels like a demon on an exercise-bike."

Vincent Kartheiser is enjoyably deplorable as Pete Campbell, but I think the character I like the most is Joan Holloway played by Christina Hendricks. When I first started watching the show, I asked a friend if she had ever seen it. She said she didn't have any interest, because she had heard all about the casual bigotry of the era and she didn't think she could enjoy the show because there's still so much of that fifty years later.

I always think of that observation when Joan is on the screen. She's the office manager and head of the secretarial pool, and she's pretty, of course, but extremely professional, and whip smart. In an episode in the second season, she takes on additional duties proofreading scripts because the broadcast department is overloaded. She enjoys it, but she's so good at it, that her work  convinces the senior partners of the necessity of a full time position, and she's replaced with a guy who doesn't know what he's doing. The thing that gets me is that you only see the most fleeting disappointment cross her face, though she must be devastated.

But she's still a professional, so she congratulates the new guy, who knows nothing about the job he'll be doing, and agrees to assist him when he asks, and goes back to her old position.

Jen thinks that her supervisor felt threatened, but I think that it was done without malice, that it just never occurred to him that a woman could do the job for real. And I think that this is what my friend was getting at, that even smart, beautiful, professional women were relegated to menial roles back then.

I did enjoy her casual smackdown of one of the copywriters when he went to far with her. The previous night, Joan had met his African-American girlfriend at a party, and in the early sixties, interracial dating was very rare.
 

Kinsey: What did you say to Sheila?

Joan: Who?

Kinsey: Sheila. (Pause) My girlfriend. 

 

Joan: Describe her to me.

Kinsey: Very funny.

Joan: I know what's first on the list.

Kinsey: You're just jealous.

Joan: Because you're the one who got away? You, out there, in your poor little rich boy apartment in Newark or wherever. Walking around with your pipe and your beard. Falling in love with that girl just to show just how interesting you are. (Pause) Go ahead. (Pause) What part is wrong?

Bonus! Click through here for the Mad Men Alignment Chart!

*It totally is, though.

Geek Heresy

I self identify as a geek.

Obviously. People who don't think of themselves as geeks don't maintain a blog about a bunch of cartoons and the writings of a particular science fiction writer.

We're generally a pretty ecumenical lot, we geeks, being a loose assembly of fans of media outside the mainstream. We understand what it's like to be scorned and everyone is welcome under our big tent, role-players, cosplayers, furries; whatever weird thing you're into, your fellow geeks might not understand it, but we are, by and large cool with it. Credit (or blame) the geek social fallacies if you like, but there are few cardinal sins in geek culture.

But I'm going to commit one today.

What can I say that will get me excommunicated from the Church of Geek?

To digress for a moment, you may or may not like Aaron Sorkin, but he's generally considered a very good writer, even by people who don't share his opinions. He wrote A Few Good Men and won about a zillion Emmy awards for The West Wing, so by any objective measure, he really is a good writer.

Many genre fans feel the same about Joss Whedon, 

but Joss Whedon is not a good writer.

Oh, he can be, mind you. I still think Buffy Seasons 2 and 3 are some of the best genre TV ever produced. But he doesn't write like that any more. And sometimes I think, in light of absolutely everything that came after that, that those seasons were a fluke, an aberration, not representative of what we could expect from him.

I don't think that's true, though. I think there are two explanations.

Either, he's just pandering to the lowest common denominator or he's just fucking lazy.

...

Take a look at Avengers trailer. It's awesome...and it's everything that's wrong with geek culture.

 Oh, hey, Tony, you get to make a clever remark AND defy an authority figure? If there were a girl there you could touch, it would be the geek trifecta! 

The whole thing is just a series of softballs pitched at Stark.

Stark: And you, big fella, have managed to piss off [all of The Avengers]
Loki: That was the plan-
Stark: (faster and louder) Not a great plan.

-

Loki: I have an army-
Stark: (faster and louder) We have a Hulk.

It's like watching Mark McGwire hit home runs off a pitching machine. Did you see that?!  He knocked it out of the park! And he did it again!! Oh, and...again. This machine...isn't really much of a challenge, is it?

Years ago, I was watching some daytime TV with my friend Dave. It was some trashy Jerry Springer show, and the woman on stage yelled something and the audience started clapping and then Dave started clapping too, and said "Oh yeah! You raised your voice! All right!"

And that's all that I think of when I see this bullshit.

To return to Aaron Sorkin, he's probably even more liberal than I am (and that's pretty liberal), but at least he eschewed the use of straw men. His viewpoint certainly informed his work on the West Wing, but when writing lines for people who held opinions with he did not agree, he didn't make them stupid. Sure, he gave the better lines to his viewpoint characters, but it came across as a conflict between a smart person and a smarter one.

I don't have a problem with smart and smarter. I have a problem with "stupid"  and "average" pretending to be smart and smarter.

But, it's sure easier to write. Most writers are not, in fact, super intelligent.  So, like Thorton Melon told us in Back to School, "If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people."

But, look at Loki in that clip. I don't think he could be a shift manager at a McDonald's. He's rasping his barely coherent threats and Stark is batting them back, as anyone over twelve could. And I think that's the core of Whedon's appeal. The people in the audience are saying, "Fuck, yeah! That's what I'd tell 'im!"

And that's fine. Everybody loves a popcorn movie.  I could let it go without bitching about it, if not for Downey's smirk. I guess we're supposed to believe that his lines are clever.

People are, generally,  good at their job or they don't keep it for long.

Bad guys are good at their job too. I mean, Jesus, which is more frightening, a villain who is smarter than you are, or one who's a buffoon you handily best in an exchange of quips taken from back cover of The Beginner's Dictionary of Clichéd banter, First Printing?

This is what ruined everything about Whedon's work after 1999. The idiotic smugness that seems to suggest that minimal competence is actually transcendent brilliance because every else around you is even dumber.

Oh, hello. I didn't see you there.

I want to watch people I like overcoming obstacles. I don't want to watch people I dislike overcoming mildly strenuous situations, while smirking like backwards-cap-wearing douchebags from a Mountin Dew commercial.  

I don't like stuff that sucks: Firefly

New feature here at Josh's blog!

I hate Firefly. Google that phrase and you get some hits, but they're mostly variations on the theme of "I hate Firefly because it's so sublimely brilliant that it ruined science fiction for me forever, as nothing else can approach its transcendent genius. Watching Firefly was like experiencing the birth of my first child and eating a hot fudge sundae and having an orgasm all at the same time!"

This is something of a minority opinion, because among the geek community, saying you like Firefly is like saying you hate Jar Jar Binks or enjoy breathing air. I first heard about it when I was working at a mall book store. I met my friend Jen and her vervoid-loving husband Tom there, and I also met another friend named Kate. Kate was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. HUGE. The way she talked about made me want to see it, despite how stupid the premise sounded. So I had a couple bucks to burn after my birthday one year and the Buffy Season 1 DVD was on sale, so I picked it up and we LOVED it.

 

Then Kate started telling me how Firefly was even better than Buffy. We had Netflix, so I moved the whole series to the front of my queue and eagerly waited for it to arrive. It came, (not soon enough) and I threw it into the DVD player and watched the first episode, and thought, "That was meh, but they were simply introducing the cast. ( If you've somehow avoided being exposed to Firefly, there are nine main characters: a priest with mysterious past, a dinosaur loving pilot who wears garish Hawaiian shirts, his tough ex-soldier wife, a space pirate who is Han Solo without everything that made Han appealing, a space hooker, a young doctor, his idiot-savant sister, a cutie pie mechanic and a moronic mercenary), Mal Reyolds is a Browncoat from the Space Confederacy. They lost the Space Civil War after they tried to secede, presumably because the Space Union told them they couldn't keep Space slaves on their Space plantations. Or some such shit.  It's a ridiculously literal space western. They have a fucking cattle drive. More on that when we get to the appropriate episode, but it was absurd.

So we wrapped up the pilot and started up the next episode. 

"It'll take off from here!" I thought.

It didn't.

I'm not saying it's all terrible. Some episodes were downright tolerable (Though Shindig was just about the worst piece of shit I've ever seen) It was...okay.I watched it at first, didn't see the point and was largely indifferent to it and only slowly grew to dislike it every time somebody mentioned it as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It was a space western. (or Western in Space, if you're my friend Eric).  It was a middle of the road sci-fi show, but its pedigree and the circumstances of its cancellation have elevated it to the status of sacred martyr and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that began when it was yanked eight years ago have not even begun to subside. 

People at the Eden Studio's (publisher of the Buffy RPG) boards have mentioned that Joss Whedon's dislike of large organizations tends to show itself in his work.  I think this is true, but seeing it stated so starkly like this made me think of  the scene from Alien: Resurrection (which he wrote) where the people on board the research facility are scanning the visiting space pirates for weapons with a handheld metal detector. They get to the pirate in a wheelchair, and he has some kind of sassy comment, like "Are you gonna scan me?" and they let him through, and later on, he assembles a wide variety of weapons for his fellow pirates, based on stuff that had been hidden in the chair. I imagined Joss Whedon pumping his fist in the air after writing that, "Yeah! Stickin' it to the Man!" 

To digress for a moment, my friend Karen loves giraffes.

Actually, she doesn't. But I tell everyone she does. I forget why I thought it would be funny, but I started telling everyone that she loves giraffes, so now people send her links to giraffe-themed gifts and I send her giraffe cards on her birthday and hide stuffed giraffes in her apartment whenever we come over to visit. Karen has accepted this mostly with good grace saying, "I am neither a giraffe lover or hater but I think I will end up hating them if this keeps up!"

That's how I feel about Firefly. It's mediocre. I could forget about it entirely if people would stop telling me how brilliant it is. I get random fans cruising by this blog to tell me how great it is and how much I suck because I don't appreciate it.

It wasn't terrible. It plays like the account of a Traveler campaign run by an indulgent high school freshman. The plans the crew of the Serenity come up with are something you might expect from a smart sixth-grader, not totally idiotic, but not really brilliant either, though presented in-universe as incredibly clever.
 
Rodney Dangerfield tells us "If you want to look thin, hang around with fat people". And likewise, the only way Mal can appear clever is if Joss dumbs down the rest of the 'verse.It's not that they're smart; it's that their opponents are idiots. It's the Constantine problem. John Constantine is the lead character in the Vertigo series "Hellblazer". He's a more or less normal guy from Liverpool with some magical powers, but he manages to triumph against more powerful foes because he's smart and ruthless. In the "Dangerous Habits" storyline, he learns he has lung cancer, so he sells his soul to three demon lords, and if they go to war over his soul, they'll tear the universe apart. He does it because he knows that none of them will back down, so they're forced to cure his cancer to save face. And it's kind of a clever plan, but it's not so clever that supernatural beings that having been buying and selling souls for literally millions of years should be surprised by it. Nobody's ever tried this before? Really?

So I don't hate Firefly. It's an entirely unremarkable sci-fi show. It's just overrated, and I just don't care. 

In fact, I care so little that I'm going to be writing about how much I hate each and every episode.