Movie Review: Arthur Christmas

Every so often, everyone in England decides to get together to make a movie.

In 2003, it was Love Actually.

In early 2011, it was Gnomeo and Juliet.

And in late 2011, it was Arthur Christmas.

I started a post about Gnomeo and Juliet in April, then shelved it a couple days later. The movie was fine, but so astoundingly bland and inoffensive that I just couldn't think of anything to say.

Arthur Christmas, also starring James McAvoy (Jesus, he's in everything) is cut from much the same cloth. Bill Nighy also stars. Did I say James McAvoy was in everything? Nighy makes him look like a recluse.

Those last two paragraphs? I wrote them three weeks ago. I feel that I should write something about this movie, but having seen it, it's left me with nothing to say. It's no more substantial than cotton candy.

That shouldn't be the case. It REALLY seems to want to to say something. Damned if I know what it is, though. It's just bland, tepid, and raises the kind of points idiots think are thought-provoking. Gnomeo & Juliet suffered from the same problems, though to a lesser extent. It wants to be edgy and clever, but stops just short of being so.

I think that's my real problem with the movie. I can enjoy treacle. I watch My Little Pony with my daughter. I can enjoy the darkest, most subversive movie out there.

Arthur Christmas is the worst of both worlds.  It wants the cred for being clever and edgy, but never works for it. It tiptoes right up to the line but never takes any real risks.

I was watching some old Muppets with Lily. We watched the one Christmas special, not the Muppet Christmas Carol, which rules, but the earlier one, where a bunch of Henson Studio characters like the Fraggles and the Sesame Street Muppets get together on Christmas. There was a subplot where another Muppet wants to hook up with Camilla, Gonzo's chicken and get down with some "scratchin' and squawkin'", and another where the Swedish Chef wanted to kill and eat Big Bird. The Muppet Show had heart, but it also had bite. It's quietly subversive in a way that Arthur Christmas is not, and never has the guts to be.

You know, I think that's the moral of the movie. Arthur Christmas is the lovable fuckup son of Santa Claus. His brother Steve has modernized the operation, but...well, I'm not sure what the problem is with Steve. Apparently it's that he's modernized the operation and we're supposed to hate him.

Anyway, one toy fails to get delivered, and there is a madcap scramble to deliver it. Everybody is kind of a dick but Arthur and he winds up as the new Santa because he's the most inoffensive character around. Not because he's qualified, but because he's the least disliked of all the characters.

And that's how I feel about the movie. It takes care not to offend anyone by being  too provocative, which ensures that it can advertise on Webkinz, which is where we saw, but also makes certain it will never rise above the level of a movie that advertises on Webkinz.

It reminds me of a line from the Last Unicorn: Offering no true magic, he drew no magic back from them...

Book Review: Shada

At the beginning of the month, I was shopping around for something on which to spend my monthly Audible credit, when my friend Jen suggested a Dr. Who book. So I looked in that section and Shada was their featured selection. Okay, that's kind of cool. I knew it was a Douglas Adams story, and I was always fond of both his Doctor Who and Hitchhiker's stuff.  Also, it was read by LALLA WARD.

Yes, this Lalla Ward

John Leeson voices K-9 in the story.

By staggering coincidence, the picture I use for K-9 also has Lalla Ward.

For me, celebrities as narrators for audio books are not necessarily a good thing. It's often no more than a gimmick. John Hodgman does a great job, but Tina Fey, to take a very surprising example, read her own words as if she were unfamiliar with them.

But I couldn't pass up Romana, the very best of the old school companions.

Sorry, Sarah Jane.

Shada is a bit of an odd duck. You probably know at least some of the story behind it if you're reading this post, but in the unlikely event that you're someone who reads everything I write simply because I write it and has never heard of Shada, here goes.

It was supposed to be the final episode for Season 17 of Doctor Who. (Season 17 was the one with City of Death, which I personally think was the finest serial of the original series) But there was a strike, and various other complications and filming was only partially completed. Some of the footage was cannibalized for Five Doctors and used to explain why the Fourth wasn't there. I had the vague awareness that there was some of version of Shada with Paul McGann, the 8th/US Telemovie Doctor, but it's not like I was going to go out of my way to seek that out.

I had read that Douglas Adams was unhappy with the script for Shada. I don't know how true this is, but the story I've heard is that he couldn't get permission to write the story he wanted, he kept pushing for it and finally, as they were running out of time, he dashed it out in four days.

I liked the novelization quite a bit. Gareth Roberts completed it and he has a pretty impressive Doctor Who pedigree himself. He wrote Doctor Who novels during the long period between Classic and New Who and also wrote or co-wrote a couple episodes of the new series.

Thought Roberts says he didn't deliberately set out to emulate Adams' writing style, if I didn't know better I would have thought that the prose was Adams' own. It has that jauntiness and turn of phrase peculiar to his style. (Or perhaps I'm just associating Adams with absurdist British sci-fi, since I know his work best, and Roberts is simply drawing on the same inspirations that moved Adams.)

Shada is such a Fourth Doctor story. Had there been time to polish the script and film it properly, I think it could have come to rival anything of that era. The Doctor and Romana are visiting Cambridge in the late 70s when they receive a distress call from an old friend of the Doctor's, Professor Chronotis.

The 1979 setting would have been contemporary had the story aired as intended, and now it kind of makes it a bit of a period piece. That's an aspect I really like about it. I don't think it would have had quite the same charm if we had gotten a Fourth Doctor story set in 2012. (It also enables neat tricks, like a character discovering a Bonnie Tyler Greatest Hits cassette the Doctor brought back from the 1990s)

My friend Jen and I are both old school Doctor Who fans from back in the day. (She's got this weird thing for Patrick Troughton, but that's not important right now. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that no conversation about Patrick Troughton is ever important. Hi, Jen! ) My friend Tim is only familiar with the new series, though we've talked about the old one to him and he's watched City of Death.

It's hard to recommend the old series after watching the new one. It had energy and charm and it seemed like anything could happen, but it also featured endless sequences of running down corridors, dodgy special effects, wooden acting and some serials were padded beyond belief. By the time you get to the good parts, it's sometimes hard to appreciate them, because you've been so numbed by the bad ones.

Gareth Robert's interpretation of Shada strikes me as an old school Who story told with the techniques of the new series. The best of both worlds.

At one point in the story Romana mentions other renegade Time Lords, Drax, The Master and the Rani, Morbius, The Corsair  and The Meddling Monk and the The Interfering Nun.  That list is awesome for several reasons. The first is that it references renegades they've recently encountered, like Morbius. The second is that it draws on material that has been written since the story was originally written, such as the characters of the Rani and the Corsair.  It's a small detail, but it makes it seem like those characters existed all along and didn't spring into existence ex nihilo the first time they were encountered on screen. The third is the Interfering Nun. That rules!  That's an Adams-esque character if I've ever heard one! It also emphasizes what I like about the old show. Moffat is on record as seeing the Doctor as someone without peer, but I think he's at his best when he has old friends and rivals of his caliber to play off of.

ha ha ha, Fuck Matt Smith

I also like the slow reveal of the plot. The pacing was very good. The audio book is over eleven hours long, and I looked at the time left, thinking I had only an hour or two remaining, but it turned out that were EIGHT hours left!  It reminds me of George Martin's early Ice & Fire books. They were long, but something happened every chapter. Same deal here.

To digress for a moment, I like the new television series okay. (It's seven years old now, so I guess it's no longer all that "new".) The direction in which they took it, with the Doctor as the last of the Time Lords, is not what I would have done, because I think it closes off the avenue to my favorite kind of stories. I like the Doctor, the fourth Doctor in particular, as a C-student made good, a member of an almost mystical society who couldn't reach his potential until he left it. He's tremendously smart and has loads of experiences, but he's not absolutely the most brilliant mind in all creation, which seemed to be increasingly the case in the new series as it progressed. 

I like the Fourth Doctor who makes stupid mistakes, who gets captured, who has to come up with plans on the spur of the moment that sometimes work and sometimes don't.

As I said, I listened to the audio version and I bookmarked certain segments that I especially liked.

At 4:42: When the annoying human says of his fellow human "...earthlings, I suppose you call us." Romana answers "Among other things." 
 
At 5:18: "A talking spaceship? Skagra must be pretty hard up for friends," the Doctor muttered, conveniently choosing to forget K-9.

At 7:20:  Dude rescued by the Doctor: "You're a good man" The Doctor: "No I'm not. I'm flippant, boastful and terribly disorganized!"

At 7:32: There was a whole long bit with the computer on the villain's ship. It was programmed to believe him infallible. The orders were given to destroy the Doctor. The Doctor survived, but managed to convince the ship that he must have been killed, since Skagra is infallible.  Later on, the self destruct is disarmed and the Doctor convinces the ship that it has been destroyed. It's silly, ridiculous spurious logic that would annoy me to no end if it had been coming from anyone but the Fourth Doctor. (Ward also does a great job with the voice of the ship.)

I don't like the Doctor as the smartest guy in the whole universe, but I am cool with him talking a ship based on Time Lord technology through the reconfiguration of its own circuitry in order to increase its performance so they can make it to their destination on time.

Later on, the ship suspects it might not really be dead:  "I've combed my databanks for legends of the afterlife..and I can't find a single one where things carry on after death rather suspiciously as they did before." "Don't you talk to me about life and death! Don't you realize this is a matter of life and death?!"

This leads in to the amusing exchange at 7:54: Romana: "You're alive!" The Doctor coughed " Well, there's been a certain amount of debate on that topic of late, but generally speaking, I think I'd agree with that statement."

8:23: Lalla Ward's reading of "Well, DUH!!" has to be hard to be believed.

It's tons of fun. It reminds what I loved about the old show.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: No Award

I like trivia. It is by definition, trivial, and knowing a lot of it is not to be mistaken for intelligence, but I like learning random facts, because chasing them down the rabbit hole and learning if they are true, and how the circumstances that conspired to make them so is often an interesting trip.

Last month I send my best friend an email that said "Did you know one of the blue dudes in Akira was supposed to have polio?" (He replied with "I love it when you say the most incredibly nerdy things to me.")

The thing I liked about Zelazny is that he seemed to have the same enthusiasm, but in his case, he went further, and on reading something interesting, he seemed to say, "Hey, I could write a story about this!"

(Or perhaps I'm projecting here, though a number of the remembrances in the COLLECTED STORIES speak of his boundless curiosity, so I don't think it's a huge stretch, and if is, it's a positive enough trait that I hope I'm not disparaging his memory with this line of speculation)

No Award strikes me that it could have come about in such a way. It's the story of a Manchurian Candidate by way of a corpus callosotomy.

Our narrator enters the hall where the president will be giving a speech.

I glanced at my watch. Still some time. Some other people were smoking. Seemed like a good idea. As I reached for my cigarettes I remembered that I had quit, then discovered that I still carried them. No matter. Take one. Light it- (Trouble. Use the other hand.) I felt some- what tense. Not certain why. Inhale. Better. Good.

The thing that dates this story is not the smoking, but just how small the venue seems. Modern campaign rallies are attended by tens of thousands of people, and the impression I get here is that there are a couple dozen people. It takes place in a "hall" as opposed to a stadium.

Anyways, our narrator, Mister Mathews had been kidnapped, brain-surgeried and brainwashed into becoming the perfect assassin to elude the president's telepathic security.

It's kind of a silly idea for a story (that is one Rube Goldberg assassination attempt) but I admire the effort Zelazny puts into making it seem at least plausible, with the second half of the story being concerned with explaining how the first half could have come about.

All right. I feel like—myself—at any rate. Why did they do this to me?"

"To turn you into the perfect modem assassin," Arthur said. "Half of the brain can be put to sleep while the other hemisphere remains awake. This is done simply by administering a drug via the carotid artery on the appropriate side. After the surgery had been performed,  you—the left hemisphere—were put to sleep while the right hemisphere was subjected to hypnosis and behavior modification techniques, was turned into a conditioned assassin—"

"I had always thought a person could not be hypnotized into doing certain things."

He nodded.

"Normally, that seems to be the case. However, it appears that, by itself, the emotional, less rational right hemisphere is more susceptible to suggestion—and it was not a simple kill order which it received, it was a cleverly constructed and well-rehearsed illusion to which it was trained to respond."

"Okay," I said. "Buying all that, how did they make what happened happen?"

"The mechanics of it? Well, the conditioning, as I said, was done while you were unconscious and, hence, unaware of it. The conditioned hemisphere was then placed in a state of deep sleep, with the suggestion that it would awaken and perform its little act on receipt of the appropriate cue. Your hemisphere was then impressed with a post-hypnotic suggestion to provide that cue, in the form of the phrase you spoke, at a particular time when the speech would be going on. So they left you out in front and you walked into the hall consciously aware of none of this. Your mind was perfectly innocent under any telepathic scrutiny."

Most reviews of Zelazny's work focus on the poetic imagery or the fantastic concepts in his work, but something that seems less appreciated is how meticulously he explored the ramifications of his "What If?" stories.

I can't imagine anyone saying "No Award is my favorite story!" (or even "No Award is my favorite story by Roger Zelazny!" but it's fun and quick.

Tenzin never goes down like a chump

Lily has recently gotten into the Harry Potter movies and when we were watching the Prisoner of Azkaban, she asked, "Who's your favorite teacher?"

And I was like, "Duh, Snape," but she didn't like that answer, so I went with my runner-up, Professor  McGonagall.

I've always had a soft spot for the "reasonable authority figure" and I've always liked McGonagall much more than Dumbledore. She's strict, but treats all of her charges equally in a way that Dumbledore doesn't. I lost any kind of respect for the character at the end of the Order of the Phoenix, where Harry runs headlong into an obvious trap, after being warned it was a trap, and Sirius is killed in the rescue attempt. And Dumbledore absolves him of all guilt, ("It is my fault Sirius died...the blame lies with me and me alone." (The argument can be made that Dumbledore said this as part of his effort to manipulate Harry, but I don't think that's the case.)) That's not something that McGonagall would do.

Also, it doesn't hurt that she's played by Dame Maggie Smith, who radiates awesome into the infrared wavelengths.

I was up at a party a couple years ago with my friend Tim. I didn't know anyone, so I spent the first hour smiling awkwardly while they all told stories about people I didn't know. But Tim's a cool cat with a bunch of awesome friends and I got talking to a girl who used to work with him.  Anyways, she said that Timmy turned her on to some bands she likes, and that's the case with me too. I mentioned that I had seen Juno recently and that the soundtrack was like a Josh mix tape. She casually replies, "Oh, my cousin's in that." and I said, "Oh, really? Which part?" and she said "He's the dad." and I was like "J.K. Simmons?" and she like yeah. So we talked about him for a while. He's one of my favorite actors, so that's cool.

The Legend of Korra has a ton of wonderful characters, and J.K. Simmons voices my favorite, Aang's son Tenzin. Shockingly, he's not on tvtrope's list of reasonable authority figures, but as it's user editable, I think someone should rectify that soon. He is named, I believe, after the current Dali Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, who also gives his name to Monk Gyatso in the original series.

Tenzin has the same traits I love in McGonagall. He's quietly competent, stern, but loving. And like McGonagall, he's a stone cold badass when push comes to shove.

He acquits himself better than the Avatar herself in the final episodes. Chi-blockers ran all over Korra for most of the series, but Tenzin first fights off an ambush, defeating his attackers even after they bind both of his arms.

Then, he makes his way to police headquarters, where he keeps those present safe within a sphere of clean air after the Equalists launch a gas attack,

and then he fights off more of the mecha tanks before finally being overwhelmed.

That last fight has two of my favorite Tenzin moments too. The first is when the mech fires a grapple arm and Tenzin deflects it with a quick blast of air, and the clang! sound effect is perfectly matched to the action.

 The other is when they finally get him and even as he's falling, he airbends a cushion of air to lessen the force of his impact .

I also like him because he loves his family. He's just a good dad.  There's a bit of an interesting backstory too. He used to date Lin Beifong, the chief of police and the daughter of Toph, from the original series. They were already growing apart when Pema, Tenzin's future wife approached him and told him how she felt towards him. ("Pema didn't steal me, Lin and I had been growing apart for some time. We both had... different goals in life- Why am I even telling you this?! It all happened a long time ago and we've moved past it. )It's a really interesting dynamic, and one you rarely see on TV, much less kid's TV.

And while we're on the subject, of characters I love, there's Asami Sato. She's the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Her mother had been killed by a bender several years ago, which drove her father into the arms of the Equalists, but she never let her grief poison her. She was dating Mako, but he fell for Korra, and even in light of this revelation, when things are at their worst, she screws her courage to the sticking place, puts her personal issues aside and pitches in to help any way she can.

Book Review: Bossypants

I recently reactivated my Audible membership.  I've mentioned before how I enjoy audio books and since I have time to listen to them at work, I've mostly burned through my meager collection already. So I re-enrolled to see what I could get. For my first month, I picked up Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes. She reads her own works and I love her voice. I think I like Assassination Vacation and Partly Cloudy Patriot a bit more, but it was an engaging book about a subject about which I knew nothing. (The history of the encroachment of American civilization in to Hawaii and the consequent fall of the Hawaiian monarchy, up to its transformation into an American territory.)

Something Audible recommended was Tina Fey's Bossypants, and I thought that looked neat, so I bought it with my credit and started listening. I like Tina Fey's work a lot. She's a funny writer and a great performer with excellent comic timing. I still think that's true. However, after completing the book, I like her a lot less as a person.

Joe Matt writes a semi autobiographical comic book. Another artist who became his friend after reading the comic said that at first when reading the comic, he figured that Joe was exaggerating his foibles for comic effect. After they started hanging out for a while, he now thinks, if anything, Joe is being too kind to himself.

And while watching Tina Fey on 30 Rock, I understood that she was not in fact Liz Lemon, and but as she was playing a woman in a position very similar to one she once held, that she was drawing on her real world traits and experiences, but exaggerating them.

...

Do you see where this is going?



As said above, I like listening to Sarah Vowell, and also David Sedaris. (What can I say? I have a soft spot for public radio personalities with funny voices.) They have a certain quality to their writings. Self-deprecating isn't quite the right word, and neither is humble. I think it's the awareness that all people are fundamentally ridiculous and they are no exception. Tina Fey's writing doesn't have that quality. At several points, she uses her book to take pot shots at people who were mean to her. She saw this guy Tom something on Cable TV and she can't remember his name, but she can remember in perfect detail everything he said? Seems legit.

Gosh, Oprah Winfrey tells her that she looks tired?

Also, there's persistent undercurrent of nastiness to the whole thing. We get a lengthy chapter on her dad, who's totally not racist you guys. We get an account of how she undermines a woman whom she works with in order to get a better job.

Wikipedia says she was nominated for a Grammy for the audio version of the book, but I can't see how. Despite liking her less as a person, I do think she's a great comedy writer and a great performer. But the reading of the book is not good. She seems unfamiliar with her own writing and her reading results in a very uneven delivery. Also, they cut her off too soon. At the end of certain sentences, they end as soon as she she finishes speaking, often clipping off the very end of a word. It doesn't ruin the book, but it makes it seem like a very amateurish production. If I had to guess, they probably did it under tight time constraints.

There are some very, very funny parts in it. The Mother's Prayer For Its Daughter was insightful and deeply funny. The Introduction was nice too, though the memoir segments were boring. I really liked it when she talked about improv, though. It's the only time in the book where she seems to show  genuine enthusiasm for her subject, but she clearly has a passion for it, and I always enjoy it when people share what they love.

She's touted as a latter day Gloria Steinem but when her advice on How to get ahead in Show Business as a Woman amounts to Step 1: Find a powerful man to mentor you. Step 2: Profit!  then I think her reputation has been exaggerated.

I'm afraid she's going to turn out to be a latter day Dennis Miller, because, though she's been elevated to the status of a progressive icon, her positions seem poorly articulated and brittle, and it feels like they're ready to shatter at any moment.