The Castlevania series is not progressing as quickly as I had hoped

Even the closed captioning agrees. 

Two episodes in.

Flying Medusa heads: 0

Protracted jokes about intercourse with a goat: 1

Beauty or the Beast: Which is better, the original or the remake?

The second weirdest thing in the world is the fact that Disney is remaking its animated classics as live action films. They remade Beauty & the Beast. Perhaps you've heard about it? It got a little bit of press when it came out.

How does it compare to the original?

The Live action Beauty and the Beast reminds me of nothing so much as the director’s cut of Aliens.

Yeah, that Aliens

The theatrical release of Aliens was a taut action thriller with some inexplicable decisions by its protagonist. The director’s cut explains those choices (Ripley went back after Newt because her own daughter died when she was in suspended animation) but at the expense of the pacing. It’s rather uneven and herky-jerky compared to the claustrophobic horror of the original.

Which one is better?

If you had asked me twenty years ago, I would have said the theatrical cut.

If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said the director’s cut.

If you ask me today, I’ll say I don’t know. They scratch different itches.

I wrote about the original Beauty and the Beast here when we saw it in 3D. It was a classic, but one with some huge plot holes and some seriously problematic elements.

It would seem that in adapting the film, the creators sat down with a list of every criticism ever leveled against Beauty and the Beast and resolved to address every single one of them.

Issue: Belle is kind of a whiny jerk.

Solution: They made her less of a whiny jerk. Look, I like Belle. But in the original, she is literally stepping over people who are doing their chores while singing her song about how she has nothing to do. As the Offspring tells us, it’s cool to hate. (I hate a lot of things/I hate a lot of people that are lame/I like to hate stuff/cause then I don’t to have to try to make a change.) Hey, Belle, your dad goes to invention fairs. Maybe you want to check that out? Look, I grew up in a small redneck town and I didn’t have a lot in common with the people around me, but I didn’t spend all my time telling them how much they suck.

Issue: The Beast was transformed for a decision he made as an eleven-year-old boy.

Solution: They aged him up.

Issue: Belle falls in love with her captor

Solution: They twist themselves in knots to justify this, and really, they’re only halfway successful. Maurice wasn’t arrested for trespassing; he was arrested for stealing a rose. The Beast gives Belle a chance to say goodbye to him, but she locks herself in the castle tower instead. That’s great, but it’s a symbolic act, as I’m pretty sure the Beast has a key. It’s still his call to allow her to take her father’s place. The Beast comes off looking a little better, but it’s so clearly an after the fact justification that I have difficulty accepting it at face value, and the fact of the matter is that she’s still his prisoner.

Issue: We don’t know how Belle’s mom died.

Solution: They explain it in excruciating detail.  We get an explanation of what happened to Belle's mother, but who gives a shit? She's dead when the story begins and how it happened is outside the scope of the story. Are we going to get an extra special edition in twenty years where Cogsworth shoots first and we have an extended flashback to Maurice’s apprenticeship as a junkyard slave?

Issue: LeFou is ambiguously gay.

Solution: LeFou is not ambiguously gay.  To the extent that I thought about it at all, I always figured that the animated LeFou was sublimating his feelings of attraction towards Gaston into a form that his society would accept. I’m not saying that this was what they intended, but I do think it’s a valid read. Listen to the song he sings about Gaston.

Issue: The unconscious Beast is too heavy for Belle to lift him on the horse.

Solution: More than any other change, this infuriated me.  It’s done so gracelessly. The Beast is unconscious and nearly dead after defending Belle from the wolves. Belle kneels down and says, “You have to stand up for me.”  I can not imagine a less elegant solution.  I’m surprised he didn’t mug for the camera.

Issue: It sure was shitty of the Enchantress to punish the staff for the Prince’s actions.

Solution: Mrs. Potts explains that they ARE to blame, because they didn’t raise the prince to be a better man. Weak. I just don’t think they were in that position to effect that kind of change.

 Issue: Not every inanimate object in the castle was once a human

Solution: Talk about a solution in search of a problem. Apparently, some people at the internet looked at the wreckage in the west wing and decided that those chairs were a bunch of transformed servants the prince murdered. I always figured that they were just chairs. That was the case, but Lumiere spells it out specifically after Belle tries to make friends with a hairbrush.

Stuff they didn’t address:

Wolves rarely attack people. When Jen and I were first dating, we watched this on VHS. When the wolves attacked, Jen remarked, “What a negative portrayal of a predator species.” Maybe they’re magical wolves, but since nobody explained to me at great length that they were magical wolves, they’re probably not.

Mrs. Potts is too old to have a child Chip’s age. They lampshade this when someone takes him for her grandson, and I suppose it’s possible that’s the case. Emma Thompson is only 57 and it’s possible she could have a child Chip’s age, if unlikely. I think a more probable explanation is that she’s raising her grandchild as her own because something happened to Chip’s parents.

Bottom Line: Jen and Lily loved it, but I prefer the original. It was very nearly perfect, but it had some problems. They fixed the problems, but without addressing the rest of the narrative and watching the movie felt like looking a wall where someone had plastered over a hole. It's just as conspicuous as what it's intended to conceal.

Despite my gripes here, I don't think it's bad at all. New songs were solid and it captures the essence of the story admirably. I think it's close enough to the original that any choice will come down to a matter of personal preference and I happen to prefer the original.

To the writers of Rogue One

I am including a helpful Venn diagram for your reference. Please note the lack of overlap and considerable distance between the two data sets.

I hope this proves instructive.

Fantabulous Beasts and Where to Find Them

That's right! Fantabulous Beasts!  That will do wonders for my Search Engine Optimization.

I was working at Dreamscape Comics when the Phantom Menace was released in 1999, and in the run up to the release, everyone wanted to talk Star Wars. After the premiere, not so much.  There were one or two guys who half-heartedly defended it as not as bad as everyone was saying it was, but even they conceded the basic point that nobody would think twice about trashing it if it had been a generic sci-fi movie instead of the first Star Wars in decades.

The same thing is true for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but to a lesser extent. It’s not bad, but it’s not really very good, either. Take away the nostalgia the audience has for the Harry Potter franchise and you’re left with a thoroughly average movie that would probably not be able to stand on its own.

We open with spinning newspapers straight out of Batman informing us that future Magical Hitler Gellert Grindelwald is on the loose after his latest tomfoolery.  We then transition to Newt Scamander arriving in New York.

Eddie Redmayne is appealing as Newt Scamander.  He’s got a suitcase full of monsters, and one of them, some kind of greedy platypus (I know it’s called a Niffler, nerds. Put down your tweets) escapes into a bank. While trying to capture it, Scamander briefly crosses paths with Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a man there to get a loan in order to open a bakery. Hijinks ensue! The Niffler makes its way into the vault and Newt and Kowalski are discovered there by the bank manager, who triggers the alarm. Scamander paralyzes the manager, and escapes with Kowalski.

I think the Harry Potter series peaked with Prisoner of Azkaban, and slowly declined from there, but I’m not going to argue that Rowling is anything other than a brilliant author. However, she is not a good screenwriter, because this is a very sloppy script. The manager is never Obliviated onscreen, and later events (such as the fact that twenty-four hours later, MACUSA had no idea that Scamander was in New York) imply that he never had his memory wiped, as that’s the kind of thing that would have been uncovered in the course of the investigation.  The manager knows who Kowalski is, and sees him apparently robbing the bank. You’d think that would be the kind of thing where he’d want to follow up on it?

Kowalski slips away before Newt can wipe his memory, and he and Newt accidentally swap briefcases, shocking those members of the audience who have never seen a sitcom. Before Newt can catch him, he is apprehended by Sam Waterston’s daughter, disgraced former Auror Tina Goldstein. (I’m surprised that magical law enforcement officers are still called Aurors in America, seeing as they have different names for almost everything else over here.)

She tries to bring him in the to the President of the Magical Congress, who holds important staff meetings in grungy back rooms, but is dismissed. Meanwhile, Kowalski opens Newt’s suitcase, but is attacked by one of the critters inside, allowing a bunch of them to escape. Goldstein and Newt find Kowalski and take him back to Goldstein’s apartment, where they meet her sister, Queenie.

Holy crap, Queenie is the best part of this movie! I just want a good parts version, which will be nothing but scenes of Queenie and Kowalski driving around in his Dodge Charger being cute.

Meanwhile, a newspaper magnate’s senator son is killed in full view of hundreds of credible witnesses by some obviously magical force.  Okay, then.  Maybe I missed some throwaway line about mass Obliviations in a later scene, but unless MACUSA got right on top of that immediately, it kind of looks like an irreparable breach of the Masquerade right there. (And seeing how the publisher recognizes the beast that killed his son in a different scene that takes place at least twenty-four hours later, this mass Obliviation doesn’t seem to have happened.)

Newt and Kowalski sneak out of the Goldstein’s apartment in order to attempt to recapture the escaped creatures.  There is a cute set piece where they break into a jewelry store because they see the Niffler grabbing stuff inside. It’s effectively the same scene as the Niffler stealing stuff from the bank, but better. But here’s the thing. We don’t need both of those scenes.  The movie has entirely too many set pieces like this that do nothing to drive the plot forward.

That said, I did like it, and I found it legitimately funny when Kowalski, bedecked in a jeweled tiara that fell on his head when they captured the Niffler, points down the street and tells the responding officers “He went that way.”

The officers are distracted by the arrival of a lion, which escaped when one of Newt’s critters broke into a nearby zoo in order to find a mate. Newt takes advantage of this to disapparate away with Kowalski. So, what happens next here? Either the lion mauls somebody or the cops shoot it. That’s kind of a shitty outcome for somebody.

More wacky slapstick farce in the zoo. Kowalski spills magical critter musk on himself and the critter wants to mate with him! Newt tries to save him, but a money steals his wand! (He can’t  seem to perform any wandless magic to get it back, but as he’s canonically a Hufflepuff I’m willing to let it slide.)

Kowalski and Newt get trapped in the case by Tina after they catch the critter and she takes them to her old job. Her boss, Seraphina Picquery (Carmen Ejogo) is presiding over  a meeting that seems to include every one of the most powerful wizards in the world and they don’t even have a guard at the door. Tina walks right on it.

Ejogo looks like she’s cosplaying as a Young Eartha Kitt and the role comes directly out of the Useless Authority Figure from Harry Potter central casting.  She demands to know why Tina didn’t tell them about Newt and his creatures earlier, and Tina doesn’t even acknowledge that’s what she was trying to tell them earlier. It’s a bit baffling that she doesn’t even make the effort.

President Picquery turns them over the moustache-twirling Percival Graves. Colin Farrell plays him, and tend not to enjoy his work, but he gives a really entertaining performance in the film. Graves takes them to interrogation room, name drops Dumbledorf for the fans in the audience and then sends Tina and Newt off for execution in an acid bath.

Queenie has a flash of insight and she mounts a rescue operation where saves Kowalski, because Queenie is the best.  Newt breaks out of his restraints because nobody bothered to empty his pockets and our nebbishy Hufflepuff beats up a bunch of Aurors and rescues Tina. The two groups meet up in a garage and manage to defeat BOTH pairs of Aurors who try to stop them, in what was a remarkably easy escape. The MACUSA seems to have a serious manpower shortage. That hiring freeze must have hit them pretty hard.

Our heroes head to a speakeasy run by Ron-Pearlman-as-a-goblin. He’s basically playing Hannibal Chau from Pacific Rim, but not quite as understated.  It’s another interesting set piece, but it’s as unnecessary as many others. It seems like Rowling just wants to fit as many 1920s tropes as possible without worrying how the scenes come together to make a narrative.  Pearlman double-crosses them and the MACUSA Aurors apparate in, but Newt and company elude them by…crawling under the tables? That can’t be right.

I think it’s a mistake to graft what is for all intents and purposes a Harry Potter plot to a film with adults in the lead.  In Harry Potter, the kids were the heroes because they had information the adults didn’t and but the adults wouldn't act on it because they didn't take the kids seriously, so they had to save the day themselves. Rowling has preserved the same structure by making everyone but the protagonists thunderingly stupid and alarmingly incompetent. I think that’s a cheat.

There has been a secondary plot running throughout the movie. Calling it a B Plot is almost being too charitable, because it has almost nothing to with the main story. It’s almost like a second movie running parallel to the first. Only at the end do they intersect, and even then it’s almost incidental.

Samantha Morton plays Mary Lou Barebone, who runs an orphanage and an anti-magic activist group. The thing that killed the senator was a called an Obscurus, and such a creature is created when a young witch or wizard suppresses his or her magical powers. Is the Obscurus coming from the obvious red herring or Ezra Miller? (Spoiler, it's Ezra Miller)

So we have the big Captain Obvious reveal, Ezra transforms into the Obscurus and flees into the subway tunnels, pursued by Newt, Tina and Graves. They fight, but Tina succeeds in talking him down. Ezra starts transforming back into a human, whereupon President Picquery arrives with a couple dozen Aurors and they execute him right there.

Here's the most baffling part of the movie. Graves has it made. Tina and Newt were sentenced to death under apparently legitimate authority. As far as anyone knows, they're escaped fugitives. There is physical evidence, in the form of the Obscurus Newt had in his briefcase which supports Graves' narrative. If Graves had kept his mouth shut, no, if Graves has done anything short of OFFERING AN UNPROMPTED CONFESSION, it would have been "Well, back to the acid pits with you two."

I would have gotten away with it, if not for you meddling me!

Seriously, dude. Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, etc.

He rants, confesses and starts blasting dudes, but he's overpowered by a Hufflepuff, and it turns out that he's really a fat, blond Johnny Depp!

The President is like "Well, I guess we're boned. No way we're covering this up", but Newt is like "Not so, Madame President! I will seed the clouds with rohypnol, and those dumb muggles will forget everything!"

Ugh, listen. The Obliviate charm is problematic. Narratively, it's easy solution and Rowling overuses it. Morally, rewriting someone else's memories for your benefit is nothing short of abhorrent, but it's treated as a matter of course by almost everyone in the series. The hero's solution to the movie's final dilemma is to dose everyone in New York with a date rape drug and I find that...troubling.

The President tells our heroes that Kowalski is going to have to be brain-wiped too, but she lets them do it themselves. I figured this was going to be a "Yeah, we totally erased his memory" type situation, but everyone, including Kowalski feels like going ahead with it. Alright then. (Spoiler/Not Spoiler: He gets his memories back almost immediately. The last episode of Gravity Falls made us wait longer.)

It wasn't all bad.  It had plenty of Easter Eggs. The score sounded like John Williams composed it. I thought he had until I looked it up. It incorporates elements of the score from the original movies, and it's used to good effect throughout the film. The Harry Potter movies have a distinctive visual aesthetic and they draw on that to create a look that's both familiar and new. The individual set pieces are all neatly composed, but they lacked the connective tissue that would have tied them together into something meaningful. I watched Zootopia again in the time between when I watched Fantastic Beasts and when I completed the review, and I couldn't help but think how tightly written that movie was. The opening sequence is not only entertaining, but it gives us exposition AND it foreshadows the conclusion. We needed that kind of rigor here. There are too many scenes that do nothing to advance the plot.

Fantastic Beasts is not a bad movie. It’s fine if you don’t think too much about it. The thing is, it could have been so much better, but they didn’t even bother.

On one hand...

On one hand, we try to support local businesses on principle, it's within walking distance and the prices are reasonable.

On the other,

they spell sandwiches with a "z".

Don't do it for me. Do it for the gundarks.

I trust that you will make the right choice.

I hate May the Fourth

Mentees: The Freshmaker

I caught a an episode of WHYY’s Radio Times on the topic of mentoring. On the whole, Radio Times is generally a good show. My biggest complaint is that host Marty Moss-Coane is often unwilling to challenge guests on claims that are technically true, but deliberately misleading. That wasn’t my issue with today's show, however.

What Makes a Mentor?  Who in your life would you be willing to bestow such an honorific title upon? While there are many official mentoring programs that are devoted to helping people in need of guidance, there is also the more unofficial version of a mentor – a person at work, school, or elsewhere that takes someone under their wing and guides them to success. Today on Radio Times, we discuss these special people in our lives that, for one reason or another, feel compelled to enter into a mentor/mentee relationship. We’ll be joined by W. BRAD JOHNSON, professor of psychology at the United States Naval Academy, and by ALYSE NELSON, president and CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership.

Jesus Christ.

We already have a word for the junior partner in a mentoring relationship. It’s protégé.

If you’re going to replace a perfectly cromulent word, don’t do it with a word that sounds a billion times worse.

This was addressed when a caller asked much the same thing, just with less swearing.

The guests defended their use of mentee, and had two issues with the  use of protégé, neither of which I found convincing.

The first was of the etymology of the word. Protégé is derived from the Middle French, protéger, to protect, and their argument was that the mentor is not always, strictly speaking “protecting” the protégé.

The other issue with protégé was that it implies that the mentor is training an apprentice or a successor, and that they will never be equal.

Each of these arguments is rather specious, in my opinion.

It’s silly to be bound by the literal meaning of a word’s antecedents, particularly when they’re so removed in time and space.

As for the second, this strikes me as a distinction without difference. A protégé could equal or surpass his or her mentor, just as an apprentice blacksmith could do the same to his master.

Other than their nails-on-the-chalkboard use of mentee, it was a very good show. They addressed the question, should men mentor women (yes, because in a lot of companies, if men don't mentor women, these women won't get mentored, as there are few women in positions to do so) and they briefly touched on having a good relationship with children, so that they may develop the proper schema to profit from a mentor.

Thank you for being a friend: Teen Titans Go edition

All right.

In the latest episode of Teen Titans Go, Cyborg comes into possession of a Green Lantern ring, which he uses to create facsimiles of the Golden Girls

Well, of three of the Golden Girls. Where's Sophia?!

This is some Golden Palace level of bullshit right there.

Three days to stay off the Internet

March 14th, April 1st and May 4th. That is all.

Mother, Can I?

This is making that rounds, and it kind of annoyed me,  I'm don't know why I'm so grumpy; things are going well for me lately.

Teacher: Simmer down, Hermione. Are you talking to me or to that straw man you've constructed? I, and the rest of our present company would have understood that you wanted to borrow a pencil if you had pointed at it and grunted, but I think we can all agree that would hardly be appropriate for this setting.

I know you're in a rush to establish yourself as the smartest person in the room, but perhaps you should have paused to ask yourself if addressing an instructor in an academic setting was the appropriate context to use informal phrasing, particularly when you had reason to believe that this instructor would be inclined to correct you. Usage is dependent on context, and as the author of the original post identified me as "Teacher" for this tiresome bit of Kabuki, it would be irresponsible not to correct you.

If you still need additional reasons, think of it as being comparable to splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a preposition. They are not, strictly speaking, prohibited, but they sound like shit and mark you as a buffoon. Amateur sophistry is not going to win you any friends.

No, you can not borrow a pencil, smartass.

Worst XKCD ever:Are you ready for some sportsball?!

I generally like xkcd quite a bit. It's consistently one of the best sites on the internet, and the worst things I usually have to say about it are:

1. That was slightly less awesome than it usually is,
2. That was funny in a way that didn't appeal to me, and occasionally
3. I don't get it

However, this one bothered me. It's really uncharacteristically condescending and judgmental. 

I don't care about sports, and a lot of other people do. It's not some sense of ironic distance; they just don't interest me. Just the same, I tend not to shit all over them in front of my friends who do like them, because I'd like to keep them. That's generally good advice anyway.

The second panel sets up a bogus comparison by comparing enthusiasm about niche interests to aninterest in sports, as there exists a real possibility that a listener might not have been exposed to macrame meteorology charts or whatever, and there exists a possibility that by expounding on the subject, you could inform them why it means so much to you.

The same opportunity is not available when talking about sports, as discussion about them in ubiquitous in almost all aspects of our society, and it's very nearly cradle to grave exposure. Anyone who has an opinion on sports by definition has an informed opinion on sports.

It didn't ruin my life, or even my day, but I won't pretend I didn't find the chastising tone kind of insulting.

Five things that will not actually make your movie better

Wow, this sounds like the title of a Cracked article.  This is my humble list of concepts that pop culture believes merge flawlessly like peanut butter into chocolate with any other property, but in fact, do not.

It's not a list of things that are bad. It's not a list of things I don't like because they're popular. Disliking something because it's popular is a particular trait of geek culture, and it's just as ridiculous as liking something because it's popular.

This is a list of things that I can enjoy in moderation, but they've all become so ubiquitous that they really hold no surprises anymore, and I'm less interested when I learn that one of these things will be present in a story.

Usually Bad 

1.) Zombies: Sorry, Jeremy, but oh, boy.

 Let's do an image search for "Sexy Zombie".

100 + more. Sweet, merciful Romero.

I've argued in this post about zombies and in this one about Berserkers that zombies work best as an environmental threat, something that's only dangerous if you're careless or screwed by your fellow humans. I like zombie movies, but I think zombies are only scary in the absence of a functioning society. Even the granddaddy of them all, Night of the Living Dead, recognizes this. The dead were spontaneously reanimating, and a couple people in close proximity to a cemetery had a really bad night, but by the end of it, a bunch of rednecks were making a game of killing the zombies.

Also, if all else fails, use bears.

The exception to the zombie rule is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book shamelessly plagiarized by that hack, Jane Austen.


2.) Tesla: Not the band.

(Well, okay, the band. They suck, but they're not awkwardly shoehorned into every property imaginable.)

Need 22nd century technology in the late 19th century? Nikola Tesla did it!

He's the patron saint of geeks. He was unquestionably a brilliant scientist. Like the other items on the list, he's not good or bad on his own, but he's ridiculously overexposed. I blame Elon Musk and the Oatmeal.

3.) Steampunk: Close cousin to number 2. Sometime a steampunk aesthetic can work. The Legend of Korra is outstanding example of building a steampunk look organically. It's mixed with a 1920's Shanghai vibe that gives the series a very cool look and feel. Unfortunately, for every cool Korra mecha tank (see below),













we have three Abe Lincolns with minigun arms.

"Looks like you brought a derringer to a minigun fight, Booth."
From the awesome site, Unnecessary Steampunk.

4.) Knight Templar: Ugh, these guy. I think that each of the above properties work well in their own milieu, but I can't say the same for the Knights Templar. They never work, and they're fucking EVERYWHERE,

We still use swords in the 21st Century. 

5.) Benedict Cumberbatch: The Mary Sue used to be an absolutely outstanding site until they abruptly merged with Geekosystem. Quality fell off a cliff, and now every other article is a warbled squee of "Maisie Williams/Joss Whedon/Benedict Cumberbatch did something!!!!!"

The Internet seems to want to cast him as everyone from Luke Cage to Sharon Carter, and while TMS is hardly the only offender, they are certainly among the most egregious.

Borderline

Bill Murray: A friend sent me a link with this message: "Did either of you see that Bill Murray has a movie out in which it looks like he just plays Bill Murray?"

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/stvincent/

I replied: I think we're nearing peak Murray. I love the guy, but dang, is he everywhere! I would hate to see the day when I see a headline about him and think, "Ugh, him again?", but, unfortunately, such a future is no longer inconceivable.

Usually Good

Cthulhu: The Cthulhu Mythos  is something that gets mashed up with a lot of stuff. An old acquaintance from my time at the comic store (and Jen's time at her church. You thought I was joking about Unitarians worshiping Cthulhu) wrote the 463 page Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance. It was published in 1999, and, due to the explosion of online publishing, I'd bet that it would be twice that size if it were written today.

Opinions will differ, but I think the reason that the Mythos meshes with other properties better than the other things I mentioned is because it's not just one thing. Read the Lovecraft eZine's submission guidelines to get an idea, or Wikipedia's piece on the Cthulhu Mythos as a whole. It's more than just monsters with unpronounceable names and lots of tentacles; it's broad enough to encompass a number of interpretation, and that's why it's not a red flag like so many of the things listed. Are there terrible Mythos stories? Of course there are, but in general, it's not the Mythos elements that make them bad.

Phone Home

I'm not old yet, but I'm not young either, except in the sense that, were I to die tomorrow, people would (hopefully) say "He was too young to go!"

The Lidless Eye

I am old enough to have grown up in a world without ubiquitous cellular phones. I was thinking of this when I was trying to figure out why my phone kept rebooting. I googled my problem and tried the various solutions I found.

Nothing worked. I'm not eligible for an upgrade until the end of the year, but the phone, while not quite bricked, was so unreliable as to be unusable. I was considering transferring my account to the phone I'd had before the upgrade when I solved my problem. I deleted apps, one by one, and when I got rid of the Weather Channel app, my problem stopped.

There's always the possibility of coincidence, but I'm proceeding under the assumption that it was in conflict with something else on the device, and removing it resolved the conflict.

And I was thinking that I still need to replace the phone, since the number two thing I use it for (after checking the time) is checking the weather (Making telephone calls is about seven or eight on the list) .And the thing is, I can still check the weather. It's just slightly less convenient to do so.

It just struck me how dependent I'd become on the stupid thing.

Review: in the world of ROGER ZELAZNY'S AMBER: Seven No-Trump

I used to lament that there wasn't that much out there other than books themselves for fans of Zelazny (Zelaznyphiles? Zelaznians?). Where was my Corwin t-shirt, my Flora legwarmers, my Merlin urinal cake?

However, if Seven No-Trump is any indication, I may have dodged a bullet. There is so much wrong with this book that I barely even know where to begin. ("Beginnings are always difficult. Wherever I begin, something preceded it.")

In the order that I encountered them, the problems with this book are:

The Rules

There are sixteen pages of them, with dice rolls, ability scores, items to track. You have an arbitrary limit of four items, which cheeses me off more than most of the problems with the book. The rules section was written by Bill Fawcett, and, though I haven't read the other Crossroads Adventures books, I assume this section is the same in all of them. I appreciate that Amber was adapted using an existing system that had to accommodate a large number of fictional worlds, but this set of rules seems like an especially poor fit.

The Stats

Each character has the same six stats as characters in Dungeons & Dragons,  Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom/Luck, Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma, and they're measured on the same 3-18 scale. Random, the Prince of Amber who lifted a Mercedes, is given an 11 strength, which corresponds to "An average 20-year-old man." Random, the Prince of Amber, of whom it has been written, "My brother Random looks and acts, on occasion, like an asthmatic, teen-age hood-but once we had fenced together for over twenty-six hours, to see who would call it quits." has a Constitution score of 14, slightly above average.

Also, some of the examples given are weird. The table for each score lists who might have the trait at this level. It's generally real world examples for lower levels, veering into fictional characters as the score gets higher. A "Five-year-old child" has a strength of 3, "Doc Savage, or Mr. Spock" have an Intelligence of 17, etc. However, Magnum, P.I. (that's topical) is an example of high Charisma, beaten only by...Henry Kissinger. Lee Iaccoca has the highest Wisdom of any real world person. I'm not disputing that he's a smart guy, but surely there are better examples?

Careless mistakes 

Of Neil Randall's other works relating to Roger Zelazny, I found Black Road War flawed in some ways, but still engaging, but I rather liked the Visual Guide to Castle Amber, and I'm one of the few people who will admit to holding that opinion.  I thought he was a fellow fan, man.

I've always thought it especially clever for Zelazny to introduce the Trumps early on, so that the the reader could reference them when the character in question was introduced later in the story. As a result, I have a vivid visual picture of the Amberites. I assumed that most other fans, particularly those who wrote books about the property, did too.

How then, do we explain Random's "blue-black hair" (rendered with "eerie accuracy" in his Trump, no less), Flora's black hair, Caine's green eyes and Brand's blue ones?

In one sense, these are minor details, because they don't affect the story, but in another, these are mistakes that Randall shouldn't have made. I'm sure he had an editor (though, maybe not. More on this below), but the editor probably wasn't looking for loyalty to the source material as much as the structure of the prose, so this is all on him.

Characterization all over the place

It's not like we don't have an idea of what Random would be as a narrator. We get a chapter from his point of view in Sign of the Unicorn, and that Random, and this Random sound nothing alike. 

Benedict gets it the worst. He's "angry"? There are several passages in 7-NT talking about how Benedict wanted to be king, and set himself up as king in Avalon. No, he didn't. He called himself the Protector. Fiona, of all people, placed him above suspicion:  "Benedict, in my opinion, is above suspicion. If he wanted the throne, he'd have it by now, by direct, military methods. With all the time he has had, he could have managed an attack that would have succeeded, even against Dad." (Benedict from the book:  "I've never had any use for fairness, if I want something badly enough, And I want you, brother. I want you dead!") 

We have some possible scenes where Random outsmarts Brand and outfences Bleys and Benedict at the same time?  (And Brand is the tougher fight!)

Flora is "mischievous"?

Random had always liked Deidre? 

Corwin is "honest"? Which dovetails into...

Random's mancrush on Corwin

If I could choose one brother to be standing here beside me at this moment, I would choose Corwin. The man is truly one of a kind. As striking as he looks in his black and silver clothes, his cloak clasped by a broach in the form of a silver rose, his looks have nothing on his brains. 

We get more than a few passages like this, but this is the first and had nothing to do with the matter at hand, so I chose it to serve as an example. Yeah, Corwin is the main character of the chronicles, but Sheesh! 

Sloppy editing

Sections 14 and 22 are almost identical. I don't know if Randall was being lazy and thought that no one would read it more than once and never catch on, or what, but it sucks. There's also a section where Random's name is substituted for Brand's, making the conversation seem like one scene in Jack of Shadows.

Conclusion

The villains are...Dworkin and Llewella? The fuck?!

This book was irredeemably bad. I even have the occasional kind word for the Merlin books, but ugh. Having read the book, and reread Zelazny's blurb: "Neil Randall has shifted some shadows in an intriguing fashion. I am pleased with the results.", it strikes me as rather tepid praise, and now I know why.

Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 4: Listen

We open with the Doctor meditating cross legged on the TARDIS with his eyes closed. Will they open so he can say something needlessly portentous?

"Listen!"

Survey says yes. Moffat, you fucking hack.

The Doctor muses on why is there no such thing as perfect hiding? I don't know, jackass. Ask the Visians, or the Spiridons.

Jump to Clara and Mister Pink on a date, and it's is awful.Painful. Ugh. On this very special episode of Blossom, Clara learns that soldiers are people too. She couldn't find a taxi, so Clara leaves in a huff. This scene was just so bad. You can take the misogynist out of the sitcom, but you can't take the sitcom writer out of the misogynist.

The Doctor shows up at Clara's place and starts babbling about Russell's teapot, as explained by a third grader. "Clara, what if there if there were an invisible, inaudible, intangible, undetectable companion following everyone around?"

Clara doesn't say, "Well, you belonged to the most advanced civilization in the history of the universe. If such a thing existed, I imagine that your people would have devised a way to detect it."

This is absolutely what I hate most about Moffat's writing. Hey, I had a thought, and I'm going to write it directly into a script without time for introspection or investigation. It's bullshit, footnote to sophomore philosophy, tide goes in, tide goes out you can't explain it, magnets how do they work sophistry. It's like a Michael Bay movie without the explosions.

This worked in a comedy episode like Robot of Sherwood. It doesn't work in episode expected to be taken seriously.

The Doctor belittles Clara's appearance again throughout the episode. This is beyond shitty. We also get this.

How wacky.

Near the end of the episode, Clara says she can do "a thing". More talented writers have tried this phrase, but they only got away with it because they used it in passing, not as the crux on which an episode hinged.

And she winds up in the Doctor's bedroom when he was a Time Tot. Fortunately, the people on Galifrey decorate and talk exactly talk like sitcom parents from the 80s, enabling this misunderstanding.

I can't think of a worse episode of modern Who. This was just atrocious.

Magic Tree House: Lamey, Lamey, Lamey

Lily skipped second grade, and went directly from first into third. This is unusual for the school district, and the decision wasn't finalized until the end of the school year. Consequently, there were some issues. One was that she got the summer reading list for kids heading into the second grade. It wasn't until Jen managed to find the principal at a community function that we learned what books she needed. (He got them to us very promptly, too, because he's a great guy.)

Unfortunately, that encounter came late in the summer, and Lily had to read a number of Magic Tree House books in a short period of time. Whoever selects the curriculum must really love the Magic Tree House series. That's unfortunate, because Lily fucking hates the Magic Tree House series.

I don't blame her. They're bland, boring, insipid, and the worst kind of edutainment.Yoona Park over at yoonanimous said it best in this post, worth reading in its entirety: "Those books are so bad that they will make you start hating things you used to think were cool, like time travel, Morgan Le Fay, and trees."

Cyborg from the Teen Titans hates them too.

They

Are

So

Lame

When Jack and Annie went to the moon, I wanted them to explosively decompress, with their heads exploding, like that dude in Scanners.

Magic Treehouse: 'Sploding in Space

When they visited dinosaurs, I wanted to see them eaten by a T-Rex.

Magic Treehouse: Dined on by Dinosaurs

When they visted cowboys, I wanted them shot dead

Magic Treehouse: Killed by Cowboys

I wanted them to be neutralized by Ninjas, but I couldn't find a gif for that.

I really, really hope that the Magic Treehouse is not going to be a big part of this curriculum.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Pacific Rim, Snowpiercer and Mr. Nanny

My friend Tim visited over a long weekend and we watched three movies of note. I'll review them in the order that we watched them.

The Bad: Snowpiercer

I didn't know a lot about this movie, other than it was getting positive buzz, and that it had Chris Evans in it, which is usually a very good sign. I was somewhat favorably inclined towards it, and under such circumstances, I tend not to dig much deeper. I'd rather be surprised. 

Hobos on a train

Snowpiercer was awful.

The biggest problem was that it was entirely by the numbers. It was your basic dystopia movie, where the have-nots revolt, and they're defeated, but the big bad likes their gumption and offers them a position among the elite. Stop me if you've heard this before. No surprises at all.

Among the lesser problems with the movie: I haven't read the comic on which its based, but some of the scenes are framed so artificially that I have to assume that they are reproducing specific panels from the comic, a la Sin City or Scott Pilgrim. It's particularly egregious near the end, where close up shots of Ed Harris cutting his steak are interspersed with those of him calling Captain America "Dear Boy". A lot of it is just bad. Tilda Swinton's speech about the shoes is just fucking dreadful. There are lines that work in comic books, and lines that work on screen, and Bong Joon-ho needs to learn the difference.

I could have enjoyed the idea of a train powered by a perpetual motion machine, on a track that loops around the world, if they had fun with it. But no! It's important! It's social commentary! The movie wants to be taken seriously, but it never thinks through the ramifications of what it presents. I've seen defenses online along the lines of "That's not a plot hole! It's dream logic!" or "It's a thousand car supertrain powered by a perpetual motion machine! Your argument is invalid!" I tend to think that "Don't think too hard about it" is rarely a good excuse for crappy plotting, and doubly so when the movie wants to be taken so seriously. Bong Joon-ho wants to be treated like Terry Gilliam when his skills are closer to those of Brett Ratner.

Additionally, everyone jumps to most extreme resolution possible:

Captain America: I am hungry, so I am going to eat this babby.
Other Guy: Don't eat that babby! I will cut off my own arm and you can eat that instead!

Ed Harris: We've noticed that the population keeps growing beyond the point where the ecosystem can suppport it. We could institute some family planning...or I could just send my goons in with machine guns to murder a bunch of people at regular intervals. I have been doing this for 18 years.

The ending is dreadful. Terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad. Ed Harris has a dark secret. Fortunately, one of the characters is psychic (and the only instance of any kind of supernatural power in the movie) and just magically knows his dark secret and uses it to undo him. I can't imagine a lazier resolution, barring some kind of actual wish-granting genie.

(The dark secret is that he's using little kids as slave labor. When Cap sees the kid performing maintenance on the mechanisms below deck, he sticks his arm between some gears to stop the train, which, I remind you, is big enough to house every remaining human being in the world. Fortunately, the presence of his puny little meat and bone arm is enough to stop the entire train. He saves the kid, but causes an avalanche that derails hundreds of cars and presumably kills many, many other children.)

The survivors, all two of them, exit the wreckage and see a polar bear, which I suppose was supposed to be some kind of hopeful sign, because it shows that life has returned to the frozen wasteland,  but what it said to me was they're either going to be eaten by a polar bear, or that the the two of them, who spent their entire lives eating protein bars on a magic train, will be competing for extremely scarce resources with an alpha predator adapted to that environment.

There's a line on an episode of 21 Jump Street, when Richard Grieco goes undercover in a performing arts school. He's challenged about what his talent is, and he spouts some off the cuff stream of consciousness "S&M Haiku". Later on, one of the students who saw it, and saw through it, comments that's what he likes about art, that it's hard to tell the difference between art and bullcrap. I was reminded by that while watching Snowpiercer.

Chris Evans is pretty good, it looks nice, it has one or two well put together scenes, but it's not the thought-provoking science fiction movie that the advertisements suggest. The Emperor really has no clothes. The best thing I can say about it is that the title gives the folks who make porn parodies of mainstream releases a lot to work with.

The Ugly: Mr. Nanny

Rather miraculously, Snowpiercer was not the worst movie I saw that weekend. That distinction would go to Mr. Nanny. While we were driving home, Tim put on the How Did This Get Made? podcast. That week's episode covered Mr. Nanny, and they made it sound so hilariously awful that I had to see it.

This image tells you everything you need to know about the movie.

Ayup.

It's the poor man's Pacifier. Ponder that for a long moment.

I guess I kind of assumed that Hulk Hogan would be a better actor than he was. (Hell, Rowdy Roddy Piper was the best thing about They Live. "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I am all out of bubblegum.") We all know that professional wrestling is fake, but it does require an awful lot of physical skill, and no small amount of stage presence, and I thought the latter would translate to the Silver Screen.

Um, no. He's terrible.

While the movie has some moments of unintentional hilarity, it's mostly just bad. Sherman Hemsley gives a respectable performance, but he can't save this movie on his own. And to add to the squick factor, the cute little kid in the movie

grows up to have sex with David Duchovny in Californication. Ew.

The Good: Pacific Rim

I had always intended to see Pacific Rim, but I had just never gotten around to it.

How do I love this movie? Let me count the ways!

Idris Elba: Idris Elba is awesome in everything he does, and he delivers here. But other than Ron Perlman in a small role (It's a Guillermo del Toro movie, so he's practically obligatory), Elba is the biggest star in the production, and he's really not that famous. Well regarded, sure. A superstar, no. Apparently his role was originally offered to Tom Cruise, which just strikes me as insane. He's called Stacker Pentecost, which is a delightful name.

The rest of the cast: We get Burn Gorman of Torchwood and Charlie Day (of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia). The supporting cast is consistently excellent, and ethnically diverse, which is always a plus.

No Artificial Romance: It would have been the easiest thing in the world to write a predictable romance subplot between Mako and Raleigh, but they didn't. Dredd is one of the few movies to avoid this, and I'm extremely pleased that Pacific Rim did too. Del Toro said of Mako: "I was very careful how I built the movie. One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead who has the equal force as the male leads. She's not going to be a sex kitten, she's not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it's going to be a real earnestly drawn character."

It's a new property: I'm sick of sequels and revivals of 80s properties. It's nice to see something new once in a while. Del Toro said that his intent was "The film was to honor the kaiju and mecha genres while creating an original stand-alone film, something 'conscious of the heritage, but not a pastiche or an homage or a greatest hits of everything'. "I didn't want to be postmodern, or referential, or just belong to a genre. I really wanted to create something new, something madly in love with those things. I tried to bring epic beauty to it, and drama and operatic grandeur."

Internal Consistency: Snowpiercer, take note. My buddy Tim said that Snowpiercer's biggest problem was "A complete non-adherence to even its own flimsy logic." Good stories, even ones about giant robots fighting alien kaiju from another dimension, tell a story within the framework they've established. You can break these rules in the service of the story, certainly, but breaking them willy-nilly because you couldn't think of a better resolution is just lazy story telling.

Background: There is a tremendous amount of thought and detail put into the design of the Jaegers and the Kaiju. I'll steal this from wikipedia: Gipsy Danger, the American Jaeger, was based on the shape of New York City's Art Deco buildings, such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, but infused with John Wayne's gunslinger gait and hip movements. Cherno Alpha, the Russian Jaeger, was based on the shape and paint patterns of a T-series Russian tank, combined with a giant containment silo to give the appearance of a walking nuclear power plant with a cooling tower on its head. Crimson Typhoon, the three-armed Chinese Jaeger, is piloted by triplets and resembles a "medieval little warrior"; its texture evokes Chinese lacquered wood with golden edges. Striker Eureka, the Australian Jaeger, is likened by del Toro to a Land Rover; the most elegant and masculine Jaeger, it has a jutting chest, a camouflage paint scheme recalling the Australian outback, and the bravado of its pilots.

It reminds me of something Hemingway said, that the author should know more about the story than he reveals to the reader. It hints at a deeper world, and adds to the verisimilitude of the story.

"Hannibal Chau": Ron Perlman is Hannibal Chau. When the character was introduced, I said to Tim, "I don't think that he was the first choice for the role," and they do kind of address that, when the character says he took his name from his favorite historical figure and his second-favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn. He's a lot of fun.

And this is absolutely glorious

The Message: The movie reminded me of Robotech, at not just because of the giant robots. Robotech actually had a pretty strong anti-war message, which I would sum up as "War is shitty, but sometimes it's the least of evils." Del Toro said:  "The pilots' smaller stories actually make a bigger point, which is that we're all together in the same robot [in life]... Either we get along or we die. I didn't want this to be a recruitment ad or anything jingoistic. The idea of the movie is just for us to trust each other, to cross over barriers of color, sex, beliefs, whatever, and just stick together."

The Movie: It's just fun. (And it looks beautiful) It doesn't have any pretensions about being anything more than giant robots punching giant monsters in the face, but somehow it's a more believable and understated study on the human condition than the bloated and self-important Snowpiercer could ever hope to be.