Monthly Archives: April 2018

Why is That Scene There

I have a Shudder subscription by way of my Amazon Account and through it I experiment with horror films I would be unlikely to rent individually. This weekend one of my video experimentation was an Italian exploitation film with the English title Night Train Murders. The film had been compared to The Last House on the Left, but set on a train as two young women travel from Germany to Italy but face a night of assaults, murder, and depravity.

Night Train Murders, like most films of its genre, is short scarcely more than an hour and a half in length and yet at the 35-minute mark I found myself bored and stopping the playback. Why?

Than a third of the way through the story nothing of consequence had yet happened.

The young ladies had made their train, smoked when they shouldn’t have, flirted with the wrong boys and then due to a border issue I didn’t quite understand (my attention by this point had wandered) had not switched trains to a nearly empty one. The two thugs who were to be the cause of so much horror and grief had mugged a street Santa Claus, evaded capture, jumped aboard the train, and one had experienced a cliched sexual encounter with a bad woman. (We know she’s bad because she has sexually graphic photographs of herself.)

Mind that paragraph of plot is essential to setting up the following events but it should have never have taken more than a third of the movie’s limited running time. The problem is that most of the scenes leading up to this point, while establishing the players and their positions, did nothing in terms of conflict, nor did they do more then sketch out the most basic aspects of anyone’s character. Because they lacked conflict and character the scenes themselves were boring ultimately killing any tension in the story until I stopped the movie and switched to 1983’s Scarface.

This is a critical element of the craft of storytelling; every scene needs to do more than a single function. The author, either of a screenplay or a novel, has to advance plots, display character, dramatize conflict, and establish critical elements for future use. Given any story’s limited resources, time and or pages, the best scenes serve multiple masters simultaneously. There may be time when your hand is forced and scene is only about a single aspect but those need to be the exception and not the rule.

When creating a story an essential question in your mind needs to be ‘Why is this scene here?’

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Movie Review: Avengers: Infinity War (Spoiler Free)

10 years. We have been building towards this climax, this resolution, for a decade. Infinity Stones, teased in a handful of the previous 18 movies now movies take the principal McGuffin position and the villain hinted at in Marvel’s The Avengers, Thanos, mounts the stage in all his regal glory. Nearly every principal hero of the cinematic universe mans the field, a field that stretches from the boroughs of New York to the furthest end of the galaxy, in a bid to thwart Thanos’ mad objective. A couple of major heroes miss this fight and their absence is dealt with in a flash of dialogue that is all too easy to miss, but in general the mightiest team ever has been assembled, and they will be tested.

Infinity Warstarts shortly after where Thor: Ragnarokconcluded. The film blasts into the action and the terrible stakes at risk. There is very little fat or heavy exposition in the script; people who are not familiar with the MCU will undoubtedly be ‘at sea’ trying to understand the various threads that weave this tapestry. However, those who have been following the experiment since Iron Manin 2008 will be rewarded with a rich, intense, and highly emotional rollercoaster. Where other films in the MCU may have seemed a little light in the coasts to the heroes, Infinity Wardoes not flinch from the central concept that war always brings a hard, heavy, and terrible cost. There are moments of humor, many which are born of the alchemy created by clashing characters from the desperate domains of this vast canvas. There are appearances from nearly aspect of the MCU, except the television franchises, included one that very nearly elicited a cheer from me. (A quick check of IMDB indicates the original actor did not return but that was no evident in the performance.) There was also a major actor introduced a new character in the MCU and this character’s stature plays out as perhaps the subtle joke performed in an MCU movie. There is of course and obligatory Stan Lee cameo, but the directors correctly dispensed with this obligation quickly so that the beloved tradition would not break the movie’s spell at more important and a dramatic moment. (Yes, I am looking at you X-Men: Apocalypse.)

Originally this film was title Avengers: Infinity War Part 1, with next year’s release Part 2.The structure of the pair of films appears to be same with only the titles changed. So what is started here in the massive blockbuster will be concluded in 2019. Like so many franchises of late be prepared for an ending that while completes the plot of this particular franchise entry leaves much more unresolved than resolved. I will say that the ending is a bold risky choice and I have tremendous respect for Marvel Studios in rolling those dice. (Though the early box office is showing that Infinity Warhas already broken box office records.)

In effect Infinity Waracts as the culmination for a decade long narrative experiment and the real risk the studio ran was that it may have come off as anti-climatic. With this much build up it would be very easy of fail, fall short, and leave the audience with a sensation of ‘really, it was all just that?’ That is not what happened. Playing their best villain fully to his cosmic best, Infinity Warfulfills the promise when we started this journey. It is grand, it is fantastic, it is emotional, and the MCU has changed. The status will never be quo again.

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Thinking about Villains’ Motivations

Prompted by a discussion on the NPR Podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, I have been thinking about the motivations of heroes and villains and the troubles that arise when these are not well considered.

One of the podcast’s panelists, and I am not sure if it was Glen Weldon or Stephen Thompson, commented along the lines that if a villain’s motivation became too relatable then the filmmakers, though I am sure the tracks with other narrative arts, run the risk of making the villain into the protagonist. I think a strong argument can be made that is precisely what happened to some degree with Walter White in Breaking Bad. He never transitioned to an antagonist but remained a protagonist who was evil. This idea of keeping the villain’s motivation at arms length was used as a reason for why so often the villain’s goal is one of massive destruction.

The problem with a massive destruction goal for your villain is that it reduces your hero to a negative goal and one that is inherently impersonal. If the monstrous big bad wants to end the world so it can start a new then anyone with the ability will oppose that villain if for no other reason than self-preservation. The hero’s goal is simply to prevent something from happening and that goal has no direct connection to the hero’s character. Another effect is that it is only the villain that really wants something. This has the effect of stripping your protagonist of individuality and reducing your story to plot and spectacle. If this is part of a franchise it will always start the dreaded ‘raising stakes’ inflation spiral; save a person, save a group of people, save a city, save a nation, save the world, save the galaxy, save the universe, following that chain leads into absurdity.

The path of avoid this trap is to give your hero and the villain positive goals that are mutually exclusive. Now, particularly in the super-hero genre, too often writers will take an easy shortcut to a positive goal, save the girlfriend. A weakness in the Sam Rami Spidermanmovies is that all of the third acts revolve around rescuing Mary Jane Watson. This is a lazy shortcut; usually the villain grabs the girlfriend as a method of putting pressure on the hero and it rarely raising the stakes in a meaningful method. (Yes, I am looking at you Iron Man 3.)

When crafting a plot and story make sure that your protagonists has something that they want to achieve and make that goal incompatible with the antagonist’s and not simply preventing something and you’ll have a stronger story.

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Scaring Myself

Among my writing friends I have a bit of a reputation for turning out dark short stories. This is not at all unearned. For my long form fiction the ending tend to be more upbeat with the protagonists generally achieving their goal and those goals not being dastardly. (Noirs are of course an exception to that general rule.) With my short form more unsavory characters and failed endings are far more common.

I mention this because lately a new story has been creeping around in my thoughts. This new untitled tale is part of that peculiar sub-genre of fantasy/horror where a character is an agent of grand dark powers hunting down those souls that have escaped hell and damnation. Usually these hunters are working towards an atonement, to clear their own ledger and earn redemption.

The idea that won’t go away is one so dark with a topical ending so dismal and cynical that I not only fear showing it to any editor I fear writing the piece itself.

I have never been afraid of writing a story. This is novel.

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Another Spree Killing

Here we are again, another horrific incident when a man killed strangers in a terrible tantrum. This time the event took place in Toronto, this time the weapon used was a motor vehicle, but the dreadful results are the same.

Though I have not yet read it I am sure there are those who have already gravitated to the position that this undercuts the argument for gun control in the United States. While that position is not entirely without merit it is generally used only as a barricade the gun legislation itself as it is rarely, if ever, followed up by specific actions that might be taken to prevent these sorts of cowardly murders.

Conversely while ink and electrons are focused on the coward’s motivations, the senselessness of his hatred, and the toxic ideology surrounding his lethal tantrum this too rarely moves into any sort of concrete plan of action.

Tragically I think we have decades of the cultural calamity ahead of us. Stripping away the particulars of any single incident, the weapons used, the precise history this or that coward, reveals a deeper trouble in our culture. We are in a cultural phase change, like water going from liquid to ice the result to be something dramatically different. For too many people this phase change strikes at their sense of entitlement, identity, and social standing, all elements that human history has repeatedly demonstrated that people will kill over.

I wish I had some easy answer.

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Thoughts on Alien Color Perception

So I was watching a video on color television and it prompted a few thoughts. Now as many of you know monitor color comes from the additive properties of Red, Blue, and Green. Mix Red and Green and you get yellow, Red and Blue creates purple and mixed in the correct ratios every color can be generated from just Red, Blue, and Green. This works because in your eye you have ‘cones’ that are sensitive to those three colors but with a bit of an overlap, so that for example yellow light activates both the red and green cones in your eye, thus you see the yellow.

However the process is a little different the colors created by the RGB method. That monitors is not actually creating yellow light, but rather is emitting Red and Green light in a specific ration activating the red and green cones in your eye to the same degree that actual yellow light would have and your brain detects that level of activation and interprets it as yellow light, even though there is no yellow light present.

So if there is an alien that has a different method of color perception, a different mix of cones, or their vision system reads wavelengths directly, a human monitor would never appear to them in full color, but always in a mix mash of Red, Blue, Green.

This is something I will need to keep in mind as I craft stories with aliens.

 

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My Weekend

This weekend here in San Diego we host the 9th annual Kingdom-Con a gaming convention. Last year was the first time I attended and then only for a single day to scope it our and see what it was like. This year I purchased a full weekend pass.

1500 people attended the convention and they played role-playing game, card games, board games, toy based games, and miniature games. (And probably others that I never saw.) My sweetie-wife and I played mostly board and card games, though after She went home in the evening I stayed for more until midnight on Friday and Saturday including one role playing game session when the mechanic to determine if your character succeeded or failed at a task was pulling a block from a Jengatower. (I died first in that one.)

One game we played that I very much enjoyed was Nefarious, a comedic game of mad scientists creating insane inventions in their quest to take over the world. I also thought very highly of the Steve Jackson games Port Royaland Mars Attacks! The Dice Game.

Overall it was a pretty fun weekend.

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Comments Are Closed

Last week the President signed into law FOSTA/SESTA a piece of legislation hoping to curb sex trafficking but that aims for that goal by weakening a core prevision of the Internet.

In the 1996 Communication Decent Act one provision, Section 230, basic laid out that a hosting website could not be held liable for what other parties posted on that website. If an act of libel occurs on a website such as Facebook it was not Facebook that faced legal peril but the person who placed the information on the web. This was a necessary update as things like libel laws had grown in an environment where publication was complex, expensive, and there for acted as its own gatekeeper.

In order to go after scum that was using internet ads, personals, and other posting to traffic people coerced into the sex trade, FOSTA/SESTA makes an exception that hold the hosting sites responsible for the ads and such that they host. Overnight personal ads have vanished for most of the Internet. In theory this legislation is used only for sex trafficking but government powers in theory are often quite different when placed into practice. A number of sub-reddits have already vanished and I have heard reports that a number of dating sights have also gone dark. Sites that were principally about people making connections and not prostitution, but small site with limited resources that cannot fight any sort of legal battle. Massive companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook can hire scores of lawyers to protect their interests but smaller one cannot.

Now my site has very few commenters, 90% or more of the comments come from just one person so my exposure is quite low. However there is another elements here, spam comments.

Since I launched my site and engaged an application to block spam comments there have been nearly 179,000 attempts to post spam as comments on my blog. Some have slipped through and I deleted them manually.

But what if some bad actors start using comments to traffic? Now the people hosting blogs on their personal sites could be held legally at fault. I cannot ignore that possibility and so I am closing comments indefinitely.

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Pilot Review: Lost in Space

It appears that no one still has cracked the code for producing a decent version of Lost in Space.  My friends and I sat down after board and card games and gave the first episode of the rebooted series a play. Sadly, the episode did not work for any of the three of us.

There are numerous technical and scientific errors throughout the episode and while I was willing to overlook a number of these, media SF does a terrible job of getting its science correct, the sheer number coupled with poor story telling crippled any enjoyment.

In the rebooted franchise Earth has suffered a disaster that prompts a mass exodus and colonization effort of which the Robinson family are but one that have left for a new lift on another planet. Okay that’s much better than the original idea of a single family founding a colony. The genetics of that colony are truly terrifying to comprehend. Now instead of a devoted couple John and Maureen Robinson are teetering on the precipice of divorce. Where many married couple barely managed to stay together ‘for the kids’ and often that is a bad call anyway John and Maureen plan to live the rest of their live in the hard existence of a new colony while dealing with their marital strife. The children this time around are presented a little more realistically a little more naturalistically and that is an improvement.  The colonization effort is sabotaged en route and the families are forced to abandon the main ship in smaller craft with the Robinson’s naturally getting the Jupiter 2. The survive the destruction of the mother ship, the reentry and crash on an alien world only to be confronted by a series of bizarre implausible threats that seem to occur simply because the screenwriters were unable to craft an actual story. Will, separated from the others, by chance encounters an alien robot that by saves their lives and provides a deus ex machinaresolution to the pilot’s initial threats.

The scientific and logical failings of the episode are numerous and here are a few that bothered my friends and me the most.

It is very curious geology that leaves a lake at a mountain’s peak.

It takes a LOT of heat to change water’s phase state, either going from ice to liquid or from liquid to ice.

If the Jupiter 2’s reentry melted the ice, so much that ship ends up fully submerged, then there is simply no way the Robinson’s could have scrambled across its hull.

The speed with which the ice became water and the water became ice was simply far too fast. It is a sad commentary that a movie like Volcanopossessed a better understanding water’s heat capacity than Lost in Space.

Magnesium in it’s natural state will be combined with other elements, must likely as Magnesium Oxide and the amount they harvested would be far too little to melt the volume of ice required.

The travel times to reach a distant peak harvest the ‘pure’ magnesium tumble from the glacier’s peak to the tree line all stretched credibility for within 5 hours.

Fire gives off a lot of heat and poisonous gas. Someone suspended above a raging out of control fire is quite literally toast.

Even if we set aside these and other issues with liberal amount of hand waving we are still left with a script that has very little story. Story flows from character and the choice that the characters make but this script is almost purely events and characters reacting. The characters are not driving the story but rather are driven by it and very little of what they do emerge from their nature. Repeatedly during out watching felt that events occurred only because ‘the writer said so.’ Events did not flow naturally from cause and effect but rather simply just happened. The filmmakers tried to hide the weakness of the script by presenting the events in a fracture narrative, but the juxtaposition scenes and flashbacks did not enhance the experience and played to no greater theme or atmosphere.

Overall this was a disappointing premier and I have better shows to watch with my limited time.

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The Return of Sensurround

Sunday night when I took in a showing of A Quiet PlaceI also experienced for the first time Dolby Cinema at the local AMC Theater. During the sound and visual system demo reel my mind harkened back to the classic Simpson take on the THX sound promotion that ended with Grandpa Simpson, after everyone else’s head had exploded scanner style, for the theater to ‘turn it up.’

Dolby Cinema certainly presented the images in a vibrant and highly detailed manner and the full spectrum audio sounded quite good, but when my seat shook with every bass note I could not help but to think back on Sensurround.

Back in the mid 1970s, as movie ticket sales declined and Hollywood continue to fend off new challenges from this thing call ‘cable t.v.’ and HBO one of the attempts to lure people back into theaters was Sensurround, a system of low frequency sound reproduction intended to shake the audience and create a more immersive movie experience. Developed and deployed for the big budget all-star disaster epic Earthquake, Sensurround was meant to mimic the sensation of the earth tremors. The process was employed for the big budget all-star war epic Midwayand less than big budget and not all-star terrorism inspired thriller Rollercoaster.Intended for the grand movie palaces that still existed at the time, Sensurround was ill suited for the coming of the multiplex and their smaller auditoriums.

With the threat of massive home monitors, 4K source materials, and elaborate sound systems Hollywood is continuing to battle for the hearts, minds, and wallets of America with systems such as Dolby Cinema as part of their arsenal.

I honestly cannot remember if I experienced Sensurround when I went to the theater for some of the above mentioned films.  Certainly do not remember my seats shaking like the old trip to the moon ride at Disney World. During the screening of A Quiet Placewhenever there would be a ‘jump scare’ my seat with vibrate. Instead of enhancing my experience it detracted from my immersion in the story, pulling me out of the story to remind me that I was sitting in a theater. (Albeit quite comfortably in a plush leatherette recliner.)

In the future I suspect I will be avoiding Dolby Cinema whenever possible.

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