Category: ruminations

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…

On unnecessarily sad, negative, depressing endings

On By E. A. SolinasIn ruminationsLeave a comment

I am sick unto death of people responding to criticism of a needlessly dark, pointlessly depressing ending with “Well, in real life, sometimes you don’t get happy endings. That means it’s good!”

No, it doesn’t.

I am not saying that every story needs to have a happy ending, because that would be stupid. Since time immemorial, there have been stories with sad endings. One of the greatest SF/F movies is The Thing, where the best case scenario is that the only two remaining characters die in a few hours, and the entire Earth doesn’t get swallowed up.

The difference is, in that movie the realism EARNS a sad ending. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. The story whittles down the cast little by little, keeping them isolated and self-contained, highlighting the horrors they face, and making it clear that they’ll do whatever it takes to save the Earth. So it doesn’t feel out of place when the main characters are essentially condemned to death by their own actions, because that outcome naturally evolved from the stuff they had been doing and the place they had been.

Compare it to, say, the movie Justice League Dark: Apokalips War or the planned finale of the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (before Nickelodeon stepped in and declared it was another dimension or an alternate future or whatever). There was nothing to build up to those dark miserable outcomes. It’s the writing equivalent of “Rocks fall, everybody dies” — the people creating it simply decided to make everything go to hell so it could be crappy. They ultimately made everything that had come before MEANINGLESS for the sake of a dark, unhappy outcome, rather than writing a finale that actually feels satisfying for the audience and draws from what has come before.

Why? Do they think it’s “deep” if a story has a miserable ending, even if that ending isn’t earned and doesn’t naturally stem from anything? Do they think that happy endings “suck,” like some tiresome fourteen-year-old edgelord?

And as a final middle finger to the people who whine that “real life sometimes doesn’t have happy endings,” I ask you: why do you want the worst of reality reflected in fiction? Because when you introduce body-snatching alien parasites, mutant turtles and superheroes on the level of Superman, you have lost claim to “real life.” There are varying degrees of “reality” in any form of fiction, and sci-fi/fantasy is where it has the loosest control over the narrative.

Want to cure someone of cancer? There’s magic and alien technology for that! Want to leave your mundane job behind? That can happen! As long as it’s done with internal consistency and good writing, you can do all sorts of stuff that doesn’t happen in “real life.”

So why should “real life” have a stranglehold over the endings of sci-fi/fantasy TV/movie series/books? If your narrative conventions allow you to do all sorts of incredible unbelievable unrealistic things, why are you inexplicably determined to make “real life” the benchmark?

And considering that “real life” is incredibly sucky and there are no long-term happy endings because we all die, why the hell should our fiction reflect that? Why shouldn’t we have happy endings in fiction?

And again, I’m not saying every ending has to be puppies and rainbows. A good example of a satisfying finale would be Avengers: Endgame, which mixes the tragic with the triumphant. We lose characters we’ve come to love over the course of many years of movies, but it feels earned because their deaths MEAN something to the story. They weren’t killed off because “happy endings suck and we’re edgy,” and the overall feeling is that because they sacrificed their lives, the world has a chance to be a better place where the people they’ve saved can live on.

So a bittersweet or sad ending is not necessarily a bad ending, but it has to be based on something more artistically valid than “well, sometimes there aren’t happy endings in real life and the good guys don’t win!” That is an excuse, not a reason.

If you are giving your story an unhappy, depressing ending just to have it be unhappy and depressing, you are doing a disservice to your art, your characters and your audience. So don’t do it.

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

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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.

Dragging myself through Hellboy

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And before anyone gets mad, I am speaking of the 2019 reboot of Hellboy, not the excellent comic book series or Guillermo del Toro’s also-excellent movie (or its also-also excellent sequel).

This movie is genuinely hard to watch. And I don’t say that because it’s needlessly gory in a “I AM SO EDGY IT’S NOT A PHASE MOM” kind of way. It is hard to watch because there are so many “why” and “why is this in the movie” and “this is pointless” and “this person’s accent is very bad” moments. Why did they hire two Americans to play two English people, especially when one of those English people was an American in the comics? And neither of them is good at accents?

And there is so… much… infodumping. It feels like every person we encounter pelts exposition at us until the “welcome to the BPRD” scene from the 2004 film feels like a gentle breeze wafting over my face.

And why the hell is Lobster Johnson in here? Sure, I know who he is -because I have no life and my brain overflows with trivia that nobody cares about – but can you imagine being some ordinary person going to see a movie about a demon paranormal investigator, and then randomly this other character takes over for an important scene with no explanation? And you have no idea why he’s important, or why he’s in the movie. It would be like including Tom Bombadil in the Lord of the Rings movies.

So yes, this movie is a mess in every sense of the word. Also, the CGI in certain scenes is… disgracefully bad. Those giants literally do not look finished.

A rant about Transformers (Michael Bay edition)

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I am presently watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the second of Michael Bay’s unspeakably bad Transformers movies. It has taken me a week and a half to drag myself through even part of its two and a half hours, and I haven’t even gotten to the wrecking balls scene. Yes, the infamous scene that is considered one of the worst scenes in the history of mainstream film.

And honestly, one thing that these movies should never be is boring. They have giant robot fights, explosions, constant talking and action… but it feels like it drags on forever. I have watched all the Peter Jackson Middle-Earth movies, and every single one of them felt shorter than both of the Transformers movies I have watched, even though I’m pretty sure they’re all substantially longer.

And I think the reason for this is simple: I hate all the characters.

Michael Bay seems to write three kinds of characters:

  1. Soldiers.
  2. Hot girls who are really smart so objectifying them isn’t creepy.
  3. Violently annoying idiots who do stupid stuff in order to be funny.

Those are the only kinds of characters in these movies, I swear. And that last category accounts for 95% of the characters, including almost all of the giant alien robots.

I think I realized this when the Autobots first revealed themselves to Sam Witwicky, and they started saying stupid things for the LOLZ. For instance, Ratchet just randomly announces that Sam wants to have sex with Mikaela. He has no reason to do this. It’s incredibly cringy and stupid. He simply says this stupid statement because… it’s meant to be funny.

And unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Once Sam goes home to find his glasses, Optimus Prime and all the Autobots come over to his house while his parents are sleeping. Now, Optimus could have ordered the Autobots to remain in the street outside in their vehicle forms, waiting for Sam to uncover the glasses and bring them out to them. That would be the kind of intelligent decision that you would expect from the wise, calm leader of the Autobots.

But that wouldn’t have provided several minutes of irritating comic relief! So instead the Autobots remain in their giant-robot forms, bumbling around causing property damage, making noise, and Optimus jams his enormous face up against the windows just so he can nag Sam a little more effectively. This does not make Sam find the glasses any faster, by the way – it actually slows him down considerably, because he has to stop to tell Optimus to stop doing what he’s doing. Because it’s funny when Optimus acts like a doofus!

And of course, almost all the human characters are annoying comic relief – the biggest perpetrators, of course, being Sam’s parents. I wanted to shrivel up in the second movie when Sam’s mother eats pot brownies and, like all stoned people, becomes hyperactive and loud, and starts yammering about him losing his virginity to total strangers. Because haha funny.

And I swear, it feels like every character is like this.

I’d be okay with the characters doing funny things if it were like the comic relief in the Marvel movies. At least nine times out of ten – excluding the Fat Thor gags in Endgame – the jokes are in-character and do not involve the characters doing stupid things in order to produce the joke. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark was absolutely hilarious, and he didn’t need to constantly do stupid things that make no sense in order to entertain us.

But in Transformers, it isn’t like those. Most of the jokes require people to be stupid and act like morons. And if it doesn’t amuse you to watch people running around screaming…

… or stuffing their faces with doughnuts…

… or jabbering at each other…

… or making juvenile sex jokes…

… or farting…

… or humping…

… or leching on underage girls…

… you’re going to sit there like a stone, getting progressively more irritable as this seemingly endless parade of annoying idiots are flung in your face. Some of these characters literally have no personality aside from their stupidity – I can identify exactly one thing that Ratchet did in Transformers aside from make that stupid sex joke. And that’s not just because I have trouble identifying anybody aside from Bumblebee and Optimus Prime.

And apparently this type of writing is contagious if you want to copy Michael Bay. It is an integral part of his storytelling, it seems. Years ago, I saw the movie Battleship (and have been regretting it ever since), which followed the Michael Bay formula so closely that many people thought it should have been a Transformers movie. What stuck out at me was that except for the Japanese commander and the veterans (only two of whom speak), I loathed every person in the movie. They weren’t constantly doing idiotic things for comic relief, but they were so obnoxious. The main character could not have been less endearing if he had worn a necklace of baby heads and a dead puppy for a hat.

Anyway, the too-long-didn’t-read edition of this rant is simple: the Transformers characters are as likable as scabies, and as funny as a wildfire. If, as I do, you find them to not be amusing, then these movies will be absolute torture.

A good sci-fi day

On By E. A. SolinasIn ruminationsLeave a comment

Today is a good day for sci-fi… or at least a good day for me, as I acquire sci-fi books.

Specially, I’ve just gotten the new Aurora Cycle book, Aurora Burning, and I am dying to see what happens in it. Aurora Rising is an excellent book and everybody who sees this should go get it. It’s not devoid of issues – for instance, I really didn’t gel with the relationship between Aurora and Kal; it never felt real or natural to me the way the other budding relationships did. But I loved the sci-fi mystery at the heart of it, and the eventual revelation of what is really going on. There’s romance, there’s action, there’s comedy, there’s tragedy… and so I really want to see what happens next.

And then there’s Murderbot. Murderbot is the central character of four novellas that have been written over the last few years by author Martha Wells, about a self-hacking robot who loves soap operas. It’s a prime example of how a character/perspective/writing style can save a story from being depressing or grim, and I defy you to read these stories and not fall completely in love with Murderbot.

So I’ve got some reading to do. Toodles.

Confession time: I do not like Stanley Kubrick

On By E. A. SolinasIn ruminations1 Comment

There are certain directors that you are pretty much required to like, professionally speaking. Steven Spielberg. Alfred Hitchcock. Martin Scorsese. Akira Kurosawa. Ingmar Bergman. Fritz Lang. And, of course, Stanley Kubrick.

I don’t like Stanley Kubrick.

Let me make it clear that I am not saying that his body of work is artistically deficient. Sure, 2001: A Space Odyssey moved slower than a stoned snail, and probably is best watched when you’re on psychedelics. But I fully acknowledge that it is a masterpiece of cinema that still holds up pretty well today (even though we’re almost two decades past 2001, and we still don’t have spaceships), it’s iconic, and the shot compositions are absolutely masterful.

Or take The Shining. Again, so iconic that they basically remade it for The Simpsons (one of my favorite episodes of all time) and just about any part of it is instantly recognizable, and an objectively great horror movie with beautiful cinematography, direction and atmosphere. I really don’t like the fact that there is a lot of subtle disrespect towards the original novel, but that’s not a judgement of the movie’s quality itself.

I have seen other Kubrick movies, by the way, such as Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, and so on. These movies are also iconic (except Eyes Wide Shut, which has some flaws that others have expounded upon), each in their own way, and also objectively good (again, opinions divide upon Eyes Wide Shut).

So let it be known that I do not think that Stanley Kubrick was a bad director. Nor do I dislike him personally – I honestly don’t know much about his personal life.

But I don’t like his work.

It took me a long time to wrangle out why I feel the way I do, and I think it comes down to empathy with the characters. Kubrick’s characters always feel very cold to me – there’s no moment where my empathy snaps into place and I feel identification or strong core emotion from them. Even if I intellectually know that I should feel for a character, I just don’t. I feel like I’m watching extremely talented mannequins being moved around.

(Except maybe Shelley Duvall, who I understand was tortured by Kubrick during the making of The Shining… but that knowledge doesn’t exactly make for enjoyable viewing either)

Compare, for instance, to one of my favorite movies, Psycho. I personally feel a very strong connection to both of the sisters in the movie – for instance, Hitchcock conveys Marion Crane’s sadness, her desperation, her almost savage glee when she thinks of the rich man’s anger, her twitchy palpable fear when she believes the cop is following her, and her sad determination when she decides to give the money back. People just think of her iconic shower scene, but Marion Crane is a character that I think we can all identify with to some degree. Even if we wouldn’t actually choose to steal a giant heap of money, I think we all know we would be very tempted, and we would feel the same loathing towards a sexual-harassing rich jerk, and we would be afraid if we committed a crime that we were pretty clearly going to get caught for.

And I find that I feel that way about the majority of Hitchcock’s movies. I feel a warmth and a connection to the characters in The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rear Window, Rebecca, To Catch A Thief, Notorious, Frenzy, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, both The Man Who Knew Too Much movies, Family Plot… hell, I felt more personally less cold towards the characters from Rope, and the main characters of that movie were literal murderers who strangled a man just to prove that they were superior humans.

Steven Spielberg is also a master of creating characters that you feel an immediate and strong connection to, even if they themselves are very different from you. Peter Jackson is also very good at this in his Tolkien movies, and so are many other well-known directors. They don’t always produce the same bond with the audience – a Quentin Tarantino character is going to connect with you in a very different way than a Spielberg character – but there is something almost palpable there to pull the viewer in and make them feel.

And with Kubrick… I don’t feel that. His movies are like mathematical equations to me – perfect in their correctness, but without a certain artistic soul. They feel cold. I watch them and I don’t feel empathetically connected to the characters, and thus I feel removed from the story.

And I’m not saying that you have to be super-invested in the characters and their inner lives to enjoy a film. I am capable of appreciating the mechanics of a book, movie or video game, and I can appreciate a character being presented this way or that way for artistic rather than emotional reasons. In fact, I wish the latter would happen more often, with characters developed in a way that makes them more interesting and compelling rather than just exploring the director’s personal issues.

But to me, watching a Kubrick movie is like trying to free-climb a tower made out of smooth, polished diamond. I am tackling an objectively lovely and masterful piece of work, but I am also slipping off the side and unable to get a grip on it.

To reiterate, I have no professional or personal hatred for Stanley Kubrick. I know the attitude of the current day is that if you dislike something, you are expressing hatred and obviously a terrible toxic person. This is idiotic. Watching Stanley Kubrick movies is simply not a pleasurable experience for me the way watching a Spielberg, Hitchcock or Kurosawa movie is.

And that’s okay.

It’s also okay if you enjoy Kubrick’s movies, if you feel deeply invested in what happens in them, and you feel fulfilled when the credits roll. I’m not saying that, because I dislike his work, that is the “correct” way to feel and that people who like his work are wrong to. That’s just the way that I feel, the way that I experience one artist’s work.