Monthly Archives: February 2017

Oh, the Horror

So I have been working on a presentation that I intend to pitch to our local SF conventions, a history of zombie films. I’m treating the movies like an evolutionary tree and it’s been a challenge, a fun one, putting the presentation together.

Here is one of the slide to give you an impression of how the thing is looking.

The downside has been some of the research. Now mind you no one at all is making me watch any film. It’s just that your host and narrator is a bit of a masochist.

Hell of the Living Dead, a low budget Italian rip-off movie, (they even steal who music cues from the 1979 Dawn of the Dead)truly tasked me. I couldn’t watch more than 20 minutes at a time and so it was over several night before I completed that one. From the look of it I’d say the producers couldn’t afford to have more than 8 zombie extras in any single scene. It also boasted the least convincing military special forces unit ever. From their equipment, their ‘tactics’, and utterly non-uniform hair, nothing about these men resonated as anything other than second rate actors trying to look tough. Besides insulting the military the film also offended anyone with a care for the social sciences. Truly I had never heard of naked anthropology before. It was the second most gratuitous nude scene I had witnessed. (The first goes to the Roger Corman production of Forbidden World where two female characters have a shower in order discuss what to do about the rampaging killing monster.)

I also watched Shock Waves, an early film with NAZI zombies and Peter Cushing wishing desperately he was back aboard the Death Star. Really, given nothing to do but repeat bad exposition that had already been given in a prologue voice-over, Cushing still performed like a champ and a professional. However this film was a load of slow nothing with aquatic NAZI zombies who can apparently be killed by having their eye-gear removed.

Oh well, this Sunday I go the Universal Studios Hollywood and tat will be fun and relaxing.

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Whose Story is it Anyway?

Usually it looks straight forward as to who is the protagonist of a story, but that’s really something that can be a little slippery.

Many people, writers included, easily mistake a viewpoint character for the main character or protagonist. George R.R. Martin has said in interviews that he was inspired by the movie Alien, which kept the protagonist hidden in plain view, for his epic series  A Song of Fire and Ice. Who’s the main character in A Game of Thrones? We don’t know yet and that is because we have such a large number of point of view characters.

But even when there is a very limited number point of view characters identifying the protagonist may still be difficult.

In the film Ferris Buller’s Day Off there is no doubt that the viewpoint character is Ferris, aside from a few scenes here and there everything we see and hear is from Ferris’ viewpoint, but he’s not the main character. He’s just the person telling us the story.

To my way of thinking the main character is the person, or persons as it can be more than one who, over the course of the story, goes through the greatest change. I think ideally the character should take an action that would have simply not been possible for them before the events of the story, In Ferris Buller’s Day Off I think it is clear that Cameron is the main character. His actions over the car and what that represents in his relationship with his father are a dramatic change and growing for his character while Ferris leaves the story exactly the same as he entered it.

When you are looking at your story think about what the character can and cannot do. I do not mean physical powers or ability either, I mean what actions do their nature inhibit and look there for the real center of the story and for your protagonist.

A word of warning however. Do not be too slavish in the application. Rules in art are rarely unbroken. For example in most detective fiction the continuing characters rarely change. Holmes and Watson remain Holmes and Watson, at least for the most part in the original source material, and are not subject to a great deal of character change.

 

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Movie Review: Hidden Figures

Because I had to stay home Tuesday to over the installation of our fiber optic ISP I has the rare chance to go see a late film at the theaters on Monday night. Hidden Figures is a historical drama about the early days of the space program when we strapped men to rockets and launched them into space with the figure worked out with pencil and paper.

Figures that it turns out were worked by a group talented, dedicated, and unsung of African-American women. Told through the point of view of three women, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, the movie is a rocket ride of emotions.

Set in the early 1960s the film I think strikes exactly the right tone in capturing the racial injustice of the era. There aren’t characters hurling crude and insulting insults using verboten words, but rather the film captured the daily indignities the are principally unquestioned by most of the white characters. The grace, intelligence, and perseverance shown by the three women are levels of maturity I doubt I will ever achieve.

As a writer there are plenty of things that can be learned from the screenplay. One lesson I think is that simple human dignity is a high enough stake for your drama. It would have been easy to further fictionalize the story by maker some of the secondary character more militant, a militancy that would not be without cause, but the truth is this story had all the drama it needs.

One of the principal emotions that swept through me as I watched was anger. Of course it’s is no great thing to be anger at the racism and injustice, at the betrayal of the nation’s ideals, but I also became enraged over the waste then and today.

A nation is only as great as its people. To waste human potential is to throw away a nation’s most valuable resource. The human capital it what drives innovation, growth, and invention. Not simply in the areas of science and technology, but in the arts, in ethics, in government. To make our nation stronger, richer, wiser, and better we need people who can do that. I weep thinking about the geniuses we shall never utilize because a foolish shortsightedness.

Is Hidden Figures Oscar™ bait? After last year’s diversity controversy I don’t doubt that in part this film was approved and produced to answer those charges, and it has all the hallmarks of a movie made for the award season, but that takes nothing away from the power of the story, the talent of the filmmkaers, the emotional heft of the performances, and the importance of the themes.

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