Category: random

The Snyder Cut Trailer (Hallelujah!) – Part 2

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, reviews, ruminationsLeave a comment

So, having explained my complicated thoughts on Zack Snyder, my uncomplicated thoughts on Joss Whedon, and my perception of the theatrical cut of Justice League, here are my thoughts on what we see in the Snyder Cut trailer:

  • 1. First, the choice of music. I was a little offput by the choice for two reasons. One, “Hallelujah” doesn’t seem entirely in tune with the operatic scif-fi-fantasy environment…. and two, Zack Snyder used this before. In Watchmen. During an absurd sex scene. Erm. Okay. I guess he likes the song.

But as the trailer went on, I minded it less and less. For one thing, the new footage we’re seeing is actually edited pretty well to flow along with the music. For another, the music kind of complements both the warmer, more human moments we see, and the grander, more epic moments as well. So… yeah, the music is all right with me.

2. Then we see Darkseid right at the beginning of the trailer, which… well, people are a little divided about how he looks, but as I understand it, this is Darkseid before he actually became Darkseid. I’m cool with that, and want to see more.

  • 3. The movie seems to have a lot more alien-attack aspects than the theatrical cut, which I am absolutely on board with. Honestly, the scope of the theatrical cut never felt as big as it should have – most of the fights were relatively small skirmishes, and Steppenwolf just sort of boom-tubes in and out of wherever he is with a handful of Parademons. Even the climax, which overruns a Russian town, feels small because… it’s just a town, not even a big city.

So I was glad to see some big alien ships raining destruction on major cities, and signs of their actual destruction in the Justice League HQ. Which, hopefully, will not be Wayne Manor as in the theatrical cut, because that was stupid – if Bruce is going to openly turn his house into the JL clubhouse, he might as well just announce to the world that Bruce Wayne is Batman.

  • 4. I perked up considerably when I saw the football game being shown, presumably either in flashback or an early scene set shortly before Cyborg is turned into, well, a cyborg. And this is because Cyborg’s story is probably the most bungled part of Josstice League.

Hear me out: in any story about a character forced to undergo traumatic change, you need to see both a Before and an After. We need to see the transition, the change in this person to feel how much their circumstances have hurt, traumatized and altered them as a human being. But in Josstice League, we only see the After. We see Cyborg angsting about his inhumanity and his robotic body… but we never see what he was before. Was he happy? An extrovert? How did he interact with others? How did he see himself? Did he have friends? What precisely has he lost?

We never see. We don’t know the “old” Victor Stone. There are only a few seconds of pre-Cyborg Victor seen, and in those, his body is mostly obliterated. How can I be emotionally invested in the change this character has experienced, when I don’t know what he used to be BEFORE the change? I couldn’t, and honestly Cyborg was my least favorite character because by the end of the movie, all I had seen was pouting and angsting. They didn’t really dive into his feelings and his trauma; they just had him bro out with a couple of other guys, and get over his pain at the end.

The Snyder Cut looks like it’s going to be rich with Cyborg – we see him struggle, we see him losing someone he loves, ripping up a grave, and we’ll see him when he was just an ordinary college guy playing football. I expect to like Snyder Cut Cyborg much better than the theatrical cut’s.

I also wonder what is up with the image of Victor (still in his human form) redirecting a sky full of missiles.

  • 5. There’s also some superheroing for Barry Allen, who is shown rescuing a young woman – I assume it’s Iris, given how the camera lingers on her face – from a car crash.

This seems to be part of a more serious, less “look at how quippy and quirky I am! I’m written by Joss Whedon!” take on the Flash. You know, a Flash who has a serious part to play in the plot, rather than a Flash who faceplants in Wonder Woman’s boobs (such feminism, Joss!) and rambles about brunch. I admit I found the Flash amusing when I first saw the theatrical cut, but time has changed my opinion.

I’m not entirely sure what the Flash’s place in the Snyder Cut plot is, but the glimpses we have indicate that he is going to be doing something more cosmic, more important, more GRAND.

  • 6. Batfleck… sigh. I am going to admit my bias right out of the starting gate: I do not like Batfleck. This is partly because I disagree with Zack Snyder’s handling of the character in Batman V Superman, but it’s also because I dislike Ben Affleck as a human being and as an actor. I just have never seen a good performance from him; he always seems incredibly wooden and douchey to me.

And honestly, Batfleck was a weak point in Justice League. I do not say this because I dislike either the character or the actor – I say this because I love the character of Batman. Batman’s whole point as a member of the Justice League is that he can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the overpowered superhumans like Wonder Woman or Superman, because he uses his brains and his technology to compensate for his lack of superpowers. He is their equal.

But in the Josstice League cut, Batfleck feels like a liability. He seems to spend most of the action scenes bouncing around at the end of a grappling hook, avoiding getting attacked by others. When he does go up against someone else, he gets hurt physically in ways that the others do not. He seems less competent, more fragile, less capable. You’re left wondering why this guy is even going into battle if he contributes so little compared to, say, the butt-kicking Wonder Woman.

But he looks like he’s actually holding his own in the Snyder Cut trailer, where he’s using his body armor to block blasts of energy. So I have real hope that Batfleck is actually going to demonstrate that he’s an asset in these fights, not just a guy who swings around a lot.

Oh, and I’m looking forward to Batfleck’s Whedonisms like “I don’t NOT like you” and “something’s definitely bleeding” being excised. Batman should never sound like a Whedon character in a life-and-death situation. NEVER.

  • 7. A few of the scenes look familiar, if you’ve seen the theatrical cut, but they’re definitely different. It looks like the conversation between Martha Kent and Lois Lane is different, and probably going to be less painfully cringy. Martha is apparently going to pop in during the cornfield scene. And Aquaman’s encounter with Mera looks like it will be somewhat different, given his defiant attitude and her look of distress.

8. Desaad! At first I thought this was Steppenwolf in another outfit because… well, I’m only a moderate comic-book geek with gaps in my knowledge, and I only know about some of the residents of Apokalips. But I’m told it’s the character Desaad, and I’m very curious to see what he is all about. It certainly makes the movie feel more expansive and operatic to have multiple people from Apokalips appear.

  • 9. It also looks like a very different fate is in store for Silas Stone. If you remember from the theatrical cut – you probably don’t – he gets captured and then rescued, and at the end everybody is happy and smiley. But in the Snyder Cut, it seems that his exploration of the Motherbox has some unfortunate results. I smell character development for Cyborg!
  • 10. The redesign of Steppenwolf. Oh, man, this is beautiful to behold. I don’t know what they were thinking with his design in the theatrical cut, but it was terrible. Nobody liked it. It was partly that it didn’t feel finished, as if they literally did not have time to finish rendering the character properly.

But it was a bad design at its root. It was just some grayish guy in a big hat, and he wasn’t very intimidating or impressive at all. I can only assume that WB didn’t want anything too scary, so they insisted on this dumbed-down design. There were other designs, oh yes. You can google them and see the much more intimidating version that was originally conceived.

The Snyder Cut’s design… actually looks menacing. He no longer just looks like a creepy guy in a big hat, but a truly alien creature encased in rippling living armor. There’s some influence from the Destroyer robot featured in Thor, but you know what? I’ll take it.

Oh, and there’s a really dynamic imagine of a black-clad Superman punching Steppenwolf in the face.

11. Speaking of the black-clad Superman, I find myself wondering where the suit comes from and how he’s wearing it. I mean, when we last saw him, he was buried and presumed dead. Does his normal costume turn black when he needs to soak up some yellow sun rays? Does someone in the cast recover this for him? Are we going to have a post “Death of Superman” scenario where his body vanishes, and he later turns up alive and well?

I’m sure this will be explained in the movie. I’m just very curious.

  • 12. Batfleck’s final line is perhaps the one thing I wasn’t enthused about in this trailer, just because it’s a very clunky line. But you know what? If that is the only problem the Snyder Cut has, I will be a happy viewer.

So anyway, those are my thoughts about the trailer for the Snyder Cut. Overall, it looks like a vast improvement on the Frankenstein cut, and I am going to give Snyder a legitimate chance to wow me with his vision.

The Snyder Cut Trailer (Hallelujah!) – Part 1

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, reviews, ruminationsLeave a comment

So I’ve been watching the new DC Fandome trailers and… I’m actually kind of getting stoked about their forthcoming releases. The Batman looks pretty good so far, and Robert Pattinson is living up to my expectations of his considerable talent, and The Suicide Squad looks like it will put being fun and weird above being dark and gritty.

But I think the most buzz is about the long-waited, long-rumored Snyder Cut of Justice League, which fans nagged and screamed and demanded for so long that eventually WB threw up its hands and gave in. So now we’re getting what seems to be an entirely different movie, with all of the material that Joss Whedon filmed ripped out and replaced with Zack Snyder’s original plot.

Let’s be frank here: the theatrical cut – which some are naming the “Josstice League” – was a mess. They took a film that was more or less complete, ripped out giant chunks of it, and then gave it to a completely different director to patch back together with his own material, to the detriment of some of the storylines (especially Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, who has made his distaste for Whedon very clear).

Whedon and Snyder… each makes the other’s style look bad. Whedon makes Snyder look dour, pompous, colorless and grim. Snyder makes Whedon look flimsy, insubstantial, obnoxiously self-satisfied. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a film whose two disparate styles are actively fighting against each other. It simply could never succeed artistically as what it is, and I almost feel sorry for it because of that.

Now, I am as critical of Zack Snyder as anyone. I don’t like his unheroic take on Batman, and I disagree with the constant deconstruction of superheroes through Superman. I do understand what he’s trying to do, but I don’t think he’s doing it well or with the right characters – Batman V Superman had many things that were done wrong. However, I do think he’s a talented filmmaker. I love Watchmen, 300, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (very underrated, definitely watch it), and I like Man of Steel despite its flaws. He does have vision and a unique style, and that’s increasingly rare in the movie world.

So… I’m glad he’s getting the chance to show the world his vision for Justice League. I don’t think it will be the Holy Grail of superhero cinema, but I do think it will have a consistent narrative and style and tone, which already puts it leagues above and beyond the Josstice League cut we got in theaters. I expect it won’t have the bipolar mood swings that so bothered me, with characters talking seriously about world-ending threats before having the Flash babble about something inconsequential.

It will also not have Henry Cavill’s CGI upper lip, which was hideously distracting, especially as it was the very first thing you saw in the film. Goodbye, CGI Upper Lip. We won’t miss you.

And I admit some bias in my interest in the Snyder Cut as well. I have mixed feelings about Zack Snyder, but I have never had the feeling that he’s an unpleasant person. And he’s been done dirty by WB. Whatever my issues with Batman v. Superman, I’m honestly glad for him that he can show people what he was building up to, what he dreamed up. He’s had a rough few years, so it’s nice that something good is coming out of it.

But I don’t like Joss Whedon, and I never have. I disliked Joss Whedon long before it was cool to dislike him because he was found to be “problematic,” because I always got an asshole vibe from him. Furthermore, I was somehow never charmed by his writing. I admit that there were jokes in Avengers that I laughed at, and I acknowledge intellectually that he is an objectively talented writer. But I’ve never been dazzled by Buffy or Firefly or any of the other shows he’s produced, because I always felt like he was waving keys in front of my eyes to cheaply elicit my approval.

I’ve always felt that Whedon is completely in love with his own cleverness and his quips and one-liners and his self-serving feminist cred. And he crafted an image that allowed people to think they were cool and smart if they were fans of his… sort of like a cult. He’s always seemed incredibly smug, intolerant and superior to me, and so it did NOT surprise me that he was eventually outed as a cheating hypocrite who has been using fans and feminists for his own ends for years.

And he’s a colossal asshole to his actors, apparently, as revealed by Ray Fisher. Fisher didn’t specify how, to my knowledge, but I wonder if racism was involved since Fisher (the one black member of the cast) is the only one who has spoken out.

So yeah, considering how badly flawed the Josstice League movie was, primarily because of the needs-to-be-annulled marriage of Whedon and Snyder’s styles… I’m more than ready to see what Zack Snyder has crafted. I’m fine with saying adios to Whedon’s mediocre contributions.

To be continued…

Aquaman and the power of cliche

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

So I was watching the Cosmonaut Variety Hour, which is a great show by a very dryly clever man who reviews various geek media. I don’t always agree with his conclusions, but I do always enjoy watching him reach those conclusions, and it’s also fun when he joins forces with his friends to riff on things.

Go watch his show. It’s good. His reviews of the movies Ax ‘Em and Bright are especially good.

Anyway, a recent video he made was about the movie Aquaman, which I am rather fond of. It’s not high art, but it is a big shiny blockbuster with good direction, dazzling visuals, some silliness, some horror, fairly likable characters, and a plot that more or less makes sense. But Marcus (the guy who makes the show) has often held up Aquaman as a bad film, although in his latest video he kind of softens towards it and gives it a middling grade.

And one of Marcus’ main points is, quite simply, that Aquaman has a lot of cliches (although sometimes I think he means tropes, or derivative content). It has the whole King Arthur archetype of the true-king-with-the-magic-weapon-he-needs-to-ascend-the-throne, it has the relatives fighting for the throne thing, it has the Indiana Jones sequence in the Sahara and Italy where a strange mystical item paired up with a particular statue will show the exact spot… you get the idea.

And… strangely, I don’t really care.

And I think that is because it takes these tropes, cliches and archetypes, and does them pretty well… or at least, it does them better than other movies that try to do the same thing.

For instance, think back on movies that have ripped off the Indiana Jones films. Most of them… are very bad. Even the ones that are considered good are actually quite bad.

But I enjoyed the Indiana Jones portion of Aquaman, because it fit neatly into the movie as an organic part of the plot development, and it was the sort of wildly improbable thing you would find in those films.

Or take the King Arthur angle. Do you know how many good King Arthur movies, miniseries or TV shows there have been in the last twenty years? Not very many! We have stuff like Transformers: The Last Knight, Mists of Avalon, Cursed, Camelot, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword… poor King Arthur hasn’t had a good time lately. I haven’t seen Merlin, but I’ve heard mixed things.

And in YA fiction, they’re trying to either turn him into a teenage girl or make him irrelevant because of a teenage girl (Cursed), because YA fiction. No, I am not reading those books, and you can’t make me. I tried to read Cursed, and it was… unpleasant.

But the Arthurian overtones and the trajectory of Arthur Curry’s growth into a king is… both familiar and satisfyingly different. Yes, it’s the familiar arc of an unknown True King acquiring a legendary weapon in order to become a powerful king, which has been around in European-influenced media for many centuries. But it’s also unique enough with stuff like the Karathen and the actual combat with the tridents — which grows naturally from another fight earlier in the story — that it doesn’t just feel like someone copy-and-pasted DC comics names into a legend.

Complete originality is virtually impossible in storytelling. Even Shakespeare made a lot of adaptations and remakes. Seriously, look into the history of many of his stories, and you’ll find that most of them were derived from existing tales, including other plays. Bring that up when someone moans about rebooting some movie franchise from thirty years ago and how nothing is original like in the good old days.

But the lesson here seems to be that if you can’t be original, then at least handle your cliches and tropes with skill and talent, and make them more entertaining than other films/books/TV shows/etc. that handle the same content.

That’s part of the appeal of My Hero Academia. It tackles a lot of things in comic books that are taken for granted, and examines them while fleshing them out. All Might is obviously a Superman-like character (different backstory, but quite similar to early Superman, including jumping instead of flying), which makes him a superhero cliche. He looks like a cliche, he sounds like a cliche, he acts like a cliche. But it’s because he’s a walking cliche that the story can subvert the cliche with his successor (a scrawny crybaby), examine him in greater detail and reveal different sides of him that you wouldn’t expect.

So I guess the lesson is… avoid cliches if you can, but if you need to use cliches, tropes and archetypes in your work, just make sure that you make it really entertaining, and add enough spice and twists to your characters and world that the audience will feel rewarded for going down a familiar road.

Tony Stark and Asshole Heroes

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

I was watching a review of Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, and it really reminded me of what a contemptible piece of crap Cade Yeager was. Sam Witwicky was arrogant and annoying, but Cade is both those things, plus… just horrible and selfish to everyone he comes across, especially the employee he leeches money from and the neighbors he steals from. Plus, he violently attacks some innocent people with a baseball bat, just because he’s failed to pay his mortgage because he’s a terrible inventor who refuses to get a real job. And somehow, we are supposed to be rooting for this selfish maniac.

And I kind of wonder… if that is because of Tony Stark.

Because I can think of another movie with a similar protagonist from a few years later, in 2017: Tom Cruise’s Nick Morton from The Mummy. This guy is also a character with zero redeeming characteristics; by the end of the movie, he has done ONE good thing, grand total. The rest of the time, he’s a selfish ass who hits-and-quits women he’s stealing stuff from, sells artifacts on the black market, and… really doesn’t do anything to make us like him. Like, at all. The movie acts as though we care whether he lives or dies, but I for one couldn’t have cared less, because he never said or did anything to make me care.

Back to Cade Yeager for a second, the way he’s shot and his “inventor” persona makes it pretty clear that they wanted us to get a Tony Stark vibe from the movie. As for Nick Morton, the entire Mummy movie was a blatant attempt to copy the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s formula…

So, were these characters DELIBERATELY made into assholes because Tony Stark is an asshole? And Hollywood, being Hollywood, missed the point and thought that the public was just dying to see more assholes?

Because yes, Tony Stark is kind of an asshole. He is arrogant, and a pretty awful person at the beginning of the MCU. Just remember that: at the beginning. Now, Tony is a good asshole protagonist for four reasons:

  1. He changes. His character evolves even over the course of the first movie…
  2. … but even then, he was never an asshole as much as these guys were. Tony has good qualities and a good heart underneath it all, so he’s not just an asshole.
  3. He’s an entertaining asshole. He’s witty and clever and wildly intelligent, and this causes us to like him despite his bad behavior.
  4. Robert Downey Jr. A lot of the character’s charm is due to Downey, and it can’t just be copy-pasted with any actor.

So let’s examine these other two protagonist assholes.

First, neither of these characters change. The closest we have is that Nick does a sorta-unselfish thing at the movie’s end, but it’s for a woman he wants to bang, so it isn’t very impressive. Oh, and Cade decides it’s okay for a creepy guy to bang his underage daughter. That was apparently his arc. Very impressive.

Do either of them grow and develop from their hardships? Do we see them becoming less selfish, more caring, moving away from the bad behavior we saw at the movies’ beginnings, recognizing that they were assholes? Nope. Never.

Second, Tony is depicted as a selfish womanizer who sells weapons at the movie’s beginning. But he’s not shown being actively cruel to anyone, violent towards the innocent, and he sells weapons to the US military because he incorrectly believes that they’re the only recipients, and that he’s doing a good thing by selling those weapons. When he discovers otherwise, he immediately shuts down the weapon development, and works to help others.

Despite his external assholery, Tony Stark is shown from the very beginning to be someone who does want to help others and do the right thing. He doesn’t always succeed in knowing what that is, but a consistent behavior through all his MCU movies is that he wants to help and protect others.

Cade Yeager… doesn’t show any signs of that; he’s a violent thug who leeches off everyone around him. Nick Morton is just a literal soldier of fortune who wants to steal stuff for purely selfish reasons.

Third, neither of these characters are as impressively witty as Tony Stark. Not witty at all, really. Therefore, they do not entertain us.

Neither one is very smart, either — we’re told constantly that Cade Yeager is an inventor, but he’s not a very good one. He just makes wobbly robots that don’t do anything very well, as evidenced by the hilariously bad “painting” robot. There’s nothing to dazzle us and make us go “wow, he’s so smart.”

Nick Morton? Not smart at all, really.

Finally, Robert Downey Jr. Downey is a genuinely great actor with immense charisma and personal charm, and the Tony Stark character — as a lovable asshole — really only works because he is so charming.

Mark Wahlberg? Not a great actor, not charming. Tom Cruise? Well, people tell me he has charisma, but his giant toothy grin and staring eyes creep me out. And he certainly doesn’t have the talent or charisma to make anybody like Nick, since absolutely nobody was impressed by his performance.

So, just my rambly thoughts about how these asshole protagonists absolutely failed at trying desperately to be Tony Stark. All I can assume is that some Hollywood nitwit saw Iron Man and concluded, “Audiences love Tony Stark! He’s an asshole! That means people love assholes! And the bigger an asshole a hero is, the more people love him!”

Thanks, Hollywood. How about you un-learn that little lesson?

Artemiss Foul: A Rant

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminations, UncategorizedLeave a comment

This movie is so bad, such a failure in every level of moviemaking, that I’m thinking about writing a review of it even though Amazon doesn’t have a whisper of a DVD/Blu-ray release. It is that bad.

It is so bad that when the trailer came out, I was aghast. I had not even read the first book in full, but I knew that this was an utter betrayal. My sister, who has only read the first CHAPTER of the first book, could see that it was a betrayal.

It’s a failure as an adaptation. They gutted it of the central premise that made it so unique and interesting, because Kenneth Branagh figured that kids couldn’t relate to a super-genius villain kid who doesn’t go to school.

Yo, Kenneth: lack of relatability is frequently a flaw in the audience, not in the character being adapted. If a person can’t relate to someone who isn’t exactly like them, then they’re not very imaginative and probably shouldn’t be watching a fantasy movie. If not going to an ordinary school somehow makes a child character unrelatable to real children, then they’re not going to be able to cope with ideas like fairy folk.

Except real children AREN’T like that — and I know this because quite a few of them read the books and had no trouble relating to Artemis, so I’m not just projecting my weird dark past-child self on the population at large. Because children are not dainty little angels who can’t comprehend things like greed, ruthlessness, anger and so on. They can comprehend why Artemis does things the way he does, even if they wouldn’t do it themselves.

And they LIKE the idea of a child criminal mastermind. They like seeing a kid being the haughty, smarter-than-everyone-else genius who can wrap even powerful fairies around his finger. They love that. The fact that he’s a criminal doesn’t matter to them — they love that he’s the smartest, which in the books is SHOWN rather than simply told to us.

And Branagh also gutted other parts of the story. In the book, Holly Short is the first and only woman in the LEPrecon force, and she has to fight against sexism and the heightened expectations that come with being a trailblazer. Does the movie show this to children? Nope! It decides to fill LEPrecon with female officers, because why show children that sexism is bad when you can just pretend it doesn’t exist?

Then they added the Aculos. What is the Aculos? It is a MacGuffin that serves to fix everything at the end, and nothing else. It was made up for this movie because Disney is stupid.

And there are a billion other changes that either don’t make sense or change things for the worse. Artemis’ mother being dead, because children are dainty angels who cannot cope with subplots about mental illness. Artemis just being told about the fairies instead of deducing it for himself. Cramming in Opal and other elements from the second book. Changing Artemis’ motivation from simple filthy lucre to “I must save my daddy!”

And for some reason, they decided to make the Eurasian Butler… the servant born to be a servant, from an ancient clan of servants… black. There is simply no way that that doesn’t look bad. Also, Butler is supposed to be a terrifying mountain of a man who can snap you in half with his bare hands, and the actor in the movie… looks kind of tubby. He’s not intimidating. And the blue contacts are very distracting; in some lights, they make him look blind.

They also decided, for no apparent reason, to have two different fairy characters talk like Christian Bale’s Batman. It sounds ridiculous, especially coming from Josh Gad’s Mulch Diggums, who looks like (to quote many reviews) a discount Hagrid and sounds like he’s about to tell us that he is the night. And Dame Judi Dench, for some reason, sounds like she smoked ALL the cigarettes and followed them up with a few gallons of whiskey.

Oh, and they removed God from the text of the Irish Blessing, because Mickey Mouse forbid we have even a hint of Christianity in anything. Feck you and your intolerance, Disney.

There was one thing… one thing in the entire movie that they kept, unadulterated and unalloyed. And it was the ONE thing that nobody actually wanted them to keep.

Did they somehow think that changing the very bedrock of the story was essential, but the one part that they COULDN’T change was having Mulch unhinge his jaw like a python and shoot dirt out of his ass? That was just ESSENTIAL. We can have a Artemis Fowl movie where the protagonist is an earnest good boy who surfs, but not have an Artemis Fowl movie where Mulch doesn’t poop large quantities of dirt while we sit there in agony.

Just… why? It was pretty gross and weird in the book, but it’s a thousand times worse when you actually see it in all its terrible CGI glory. Why? Why? Why?

Congratulations, Disney. First you absolutely molested A Wrinkle in Time (where they also erased any hint of Christianity), and now you’ve done even worse to Artemis Fowl. And the worst part is, you’re not going to learn a thing from those failures. You’re just going to conclude that the IPs are bad and unprofitable, rather than admitting that you screwed them up.

I’m going to get some sleep.

Where Susanna Clarke led me…

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, recommendations, ruminationsLeave a comment

I am old enough to remember before Google effectively ran the universe and Wikipedia was the main source of information, meaning that by Internet standards, I am pretty much Methusaleh. I also remember when phones plugged into the wall. But that means that I remember the days before you could go into a rabbit hole of information that could lead you to strange new obsessions in a matter of minutes.

Which brings me to Susanna Clarke. If you haven’t heard of Susanna Clarke, she is the brilliant author of the fantasy known as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a story about feuding magicians in Regency England, with fairies and the Napoleonic War. If you haven’t read it, give it a try. It’s like if Jane Austen decided to collaborate with Diana Wynne-Jones – if that sounds good to you, you might enjoy it. Also, the miniseries the BBC adapted from it is quite good as well.

But that book is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Piranesi, her not-yet-released third book/second novel. The book is apparently about an infinitely large and complex house with an ocean within its walls, and it sounds like there may be something about parallel worlds or something like that. The summary is a little blurry, but that’s probably because it isn’t a “regular” fantasy novel, and there’s an element of mystery.

But I decided to google “Piranesi” to learn more. And lo and behold, I found very little information about the novel, and quite a bit about one Giambattista Piranesi, who lived in the 18th century.

Unlike some, I am not going to pretend that I knew all about Piranesi in order to sound more sophisticated. I freely admit that there are artistic spheres, genres and disciplines that I know virtually nothing about, because I either have very little interest in them or have not had the chance to study them extensively. Etchings are one of these areas.

But I really was swept away by Piranesi’s artwork.

I don’t know about Clarke’s creative process, because to my knowledge she does not have a website or social media. But I wonder if these etchings in some way inspired the novel Piranesi. Not necessarily in the sense of the plot, because as far as I can tell, Piranesi’s etchings don’t really have a “narrative” that you can discern…

… but more in the sense that some of these etchings give a sense of structures with immense space, age and complexity. Sometimes they feel downright fantastical or otherworldly. And that sounds like the aesthetic for the House in Piranesi.

So nothing too deep, just me sharing that I like Piranesi’s etchings, and I wonder if Clarke was inspired in some way by the aesthetic of his architectural studies.

Also, check out Piranesi when it comes out. And read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. That’s all.