Monthly Archives: December 2020

Good Riddance to a Rubbish year

It is the last day of the year for 2020 and in just a few hours we will begin the first year of a new decade. I need not remind anyone that the year 2020 has been an unholy trash fire with few redeeming elements.

Personally, my year started off fairly well. I was optimistically looking forward to the publication of my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge from Flametree press and in February I spent the day with a dear friend at Disneyland pre-celebrating that novel’s release.

Early March saw me nervously preparing for my book launch event at the unparallel book seller Mysterious Galaxy, and signed copies of my novel are still available there. Then the world shut down.

Lockdowns, first here in California but very quickly across the country and around the world as people scrambled to deal with the emerging global pandemic.

At my day-job the staff were quickly given computer systems and monitors and sent to work from home while I volunteered to be one of the few office-working staff. We weathered the transition well and while there were bumps and issues, we continued to meet the needs of our member/patients and unluck so many people in worse situations fully employed. The wall calendar at my work where people record their upcoming time off still displays March 2020.

Vulcan’s Forge launched in the first week of lockdowns and naturally the sales were hammered like Thor beating on Thanos.

In June the pandemic took my dear friend of 40 years. We shall never see his like again.

Ealy fall I submitted a proposal for a second novel to my editors who professed great excitement at the story but the publisher, working from the pitiful pandemic slammed sales numbers of my first book declined any more novels from me.

That book that is already 60,000 words written and I’m quite happy with it so either through traditional publication or self-publication it will very likely see the light of day.

November brought the election of a sane non-corrupt man to the office of President of the United States and we can begin the very long process of rebuilding our nation’s reputation.

The final month of the year gave us not one but two vaccines utilizing new technologies to fight this scourge that had killed more than 300,000 thousand in America, 1 in every 1000, and so we have reason to see light in 2021 but that new dawn is still faint the there is much darkness to endure before we are warmed that that new day.

Share

A Strange Little Idea

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep an idea sparked in my head for plotting stories in a visual manner. This is not about discovering or working out the plot beats to a story but rather finding a way to show them visually as a potential tool for analysis and revision.

Using a spreadsheet, the idea would be to assign each chapter a value positive of negative for how the events in that chapter have impacted the protagonist for good or ill. Things better for the character would be a positive number and things getting worse would be a negative one with the size of the number reflecting just how much better or worse the event was.

Then these values could be graphed with the X-Axis being the chapter numbers and the Y-Axis the event values. This would produce a line going up with ever ‘good’ turn in the story and descending for every ‘bad’ one. The sections could be further labeled with the acts to see how well the written matches against the expectations of structure.

I’m going to make such a graph after the first draft of my new novel is completed and see just what it tells me, if anything. This idea may be a waste of time or it may be a new and valuable tool. We shall see.

 

Share

Quick Hits

Yesterday was the least productive writing day for me since October, after interrupted sleep Sunday night I managed just 500 words and an evening or mindless tube watching with a tv that has no tubes.

Via HBO Max I have been watching in bits and pieces Wonder Woman 84. It is quite the disappointment. It insults the audience’s intelligence by explaining the meaning of scenes, and not deep thematic meaning put plain here’s what happened meaning.

While the GOP engages in insane plots to subvert democratic rule in the United States my conservative friends rank rant about cancel culture apparently having forgotten the real reason the USSR was a threat was not their gun control laws.

On the brighter side January will bring Series two of Staged and the debut of WandaVision so 2021 doesn’t look entirely bleak.

 

Share

Season’s Review: Rare Exports

Season’s Review: Rare Exports

There are loads of traditional Christmas films that people watch each year, It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, The Muppet Christmas Carol and Die Hard to name just a few but in our household one of the movies on the season’s playlist is the charming Finnish Horror/Comedy Rare Exports.

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Rare Exports is a Christmas film from which Christmas cannot be removed without destroying the story and yet the film in absolutely not about the story or moral of Christmas in either the religious or secular senses. There is no learning to love your fellow man, no hearts grow three sizes larger, no understanding of the value of your life and all that it touches but rather to the simple tale of a young boy who discovers that origins of the winter holiday is much darker, much more fearsome, than the fairytale he had been told and that the Americans digging in the mountain are about to awaken ancient spirits that will descend upon the naughty.

Set in an isolated Sami border town in the frozen reaches of Lapland Rare Exports follows Pietari a young boy in the days before Christmas. Explosive excavations atop the nearby mountain of Korvatunturi has upset the local ecology and the reindeer herd that the Sami rely upon for their income is devastated threatening everyone’s livelihood including Pietari’s father Rauno. When Rauno’s illegal wolf pit captures something else the films turns from family dram to horror and the discovery of something monstrous in Mt. Joulupukki threatens more than just income.

Rare Exports is that exceptional film able to blend comedy, drama, and horror seamlessly into one story. Some have found the film to have jarring tonal shifts but that is not my experience. Each development of the story leads organically into the next as the characters are drawn into more dire and desperate actions trying to save their town and themselves. With gorgeous cinematography by Mika Orasmaa the film looks stunning and the now dated CGI effects match the tone and style of the photography perfectly. Director Jalmari Helander manages to make his budget of 1.8 million Euros look like a much more substantial production.  The bulk of the film is in Finnish with subtitles that as is common with Finnish production anytime characters of different nationalities are speaking English is the default tongue spoken.

I heartily recommend Rare Exports which is currently streaming on Shudder and Hulu.

Share

Thinking About Stakes

When crating fiction a common bit of advice to ‘raise the stakes.’ This is a suggestion of magnify the penalty for failure for the protagonist making the eventual success or failure that much more impactful for the reader or audience. However, this is usually or at least often interpreted as threaten more lives, make the potential explosions larger, the potential death toll higher but that is too simplistic a way to think about stakes.

In franchise material there is what I call the ‘Bond Effect’ where each adventure has to have more on the line than the previous adventure. Very quickly the writers find themselves in the situation where Bond has to save the entire world, from nuclear annihilation, a murderous madman with a secret orbiting space station of death, what have you, and once he has saved the world saving it again has less entertainment value We know there is never going to be a Bond film where the world dies, not even the 70s got that bleak so the combination of an assured outcome and devalued victory makes each world save less thrilling until they become boring. For this effect magnified beyond look to the UK program Doctor Who where the stakes have been repeatedly raised to the entire universe sometimes destroying and recreating the universe as their climatic conclusions.

What all this misses is that stakes are most potent when we are emotionally invested in them. Setting aside the ‘save the world or universe’ trope the protagonist is they fail should suffer deep emotional coast and or loss. This is a lesson well learned in dramatic fiction and too often not in genre stories. Marvel studios did this particularly well in a couple of films, notably Captain America: The Winter Soldier where after saving the world we got to the real stakes for Steve Rogers, saving his friend Bucky Barnes from Hydra’s mind control and Captain America: Civil War where the world was never in danger but rather at its heart it is the friendship between Steve and Tony Stark that is in danger and in that story ultimately lost. The cost of failure is the emotional damage to the characters, these are very high stakes that are intimately personal and emotionally compelling for the audience.

It’s easy to craft plots with larger and larger death star threatening planets and entire star systems it is harder but more satisfying into dive deep into character and find the thing that matters most to them as a person and make us the readers and the audience share in the terror of losing that thing. Then you will have stakes that really matter.

Share

Without Grogu is There a Story?

Light Spoilers for the Entire Run of The Mandalorian to date.

The Mandalorian is Disney +’s original Star Wars series set during the period after the fall of the Galactic Empire and before the events of The Force Awakens. Its central and titular character is Din Djarin an orphan raised in a Mandalorian creed that emphasizes warrior qualities and religious devotion to never revealing one’s face to another living being. Mandalorian in the lore of Star Wars are a people and a belief that are currently suffering a diaspora after the conquest of their home-world with many serving as mercenaries and bounty hunters. Din lives as a bounty hunter in a near sociopathic existence without compassion or remorse until a contract has him ‘obtaining’ an asset the child ‘Grogu’ or better known popularly as ‘Baby Yoda.’ Din forms a bond with the 50-year-old child and ends up forsaking his bounty hunter life with a quest to reunite the child with the Jedi that are responsible for Grogu.

Over the course of two season Din and Grogu encounter many characters, some original to the show some from other Star Wars properties until in the final episode of season two Grogu departs with a jedi master with Din revealing his face to the child before their farewell.

The Mandalorian has been a major success for Disney penetrating deep into the cultural conversation, drawing subscribers to their streaming service, and igniting fresh enthusiasm for a franchise more than 40 years old but I wonder what happens next?

I have enjoyed the series, but I also see that the episodes are often very light ion story while heavy on plot. An entire episode will be devoted to a single plot point, infiltrating an Imperial base to gain access to a piece of datum that moves the plot forward but in terms of character has very little to say. The only powerful story element of the series has been the transformation of Din because of his bond with Grogu and with Grogu departure what is there that is emotionally compelling about Din’s adventures? The series had first-rate action, ground-breaking visual effects, and a radical approach to placing actors and characters into fantastic settings that is going to change the industry forever but none of that is gripping emotional storytelling. Grogu is the reason the series has exploded culturally; Din is a cypher, and it is very difficult to make a cypher a compelling character. Not impossible mind you, mysterious samurai and gun slingers without names have carried film franchises for a few films but that’s a shorter run than a television series.

Only time and another season will show if the writers of the Mandaloriancan expand their show beyond spectacle, action, and ‘easter eggs’ of fan lore.

Share

A Substandard Giallo: The Corruption of Chris Miller

The streaming services Shudder added a number of Giallos to their line-up in recent weeks and my sweetie-wife and I put several on the queue for watching. This week it was 1973’s The Corruption of Chris Miller starring Jean Seberg.

Two women, Ruth Miller (Jean Seberg) and her stepdaughter Chris, live in an isolated Spanish estate when a passing vagrant who had slept in their barn, and I’m not making this up, named Barney, is taken in as a handyman and live-in lover for Ruth. Chris suffers from some undefined terror that when it rains causes her to turn violent stabbing everything in sight. Halfway through the film’s running time we are told that there are unsolved vicious murders in a 100-kilometer radius around the village and Ruth and Chris apparently leap to the conclusion that it’s likely Barney that is the culprit.

The Corruption of Chris Miller is meant to be a taunt thriller filled with mystery and dread, but it fails on all fronts. The flashback sequences leading up to Chris’ violent outburst make clear why she reacts the way she does, the languid pace builds no tension and the discord between Ruth and Chris is never fully explained of explored. Frankly by the end of the film I could not tell you how Chris was ‘corrupted’ as she and Ruth both exit the story pretty much the same characters as they entered.

While many giallos fail logic tests they usually possess a strong sense of style to carry mood and atmosphere but this fails there as well and I cannot recommend it anyone.

Share

Quick Hit: A New Podcast Discovery

I discovered a new podcast a week or so ago Cult 45 is a podcast devoted to cult and exploitation cinema. The name is a play on name of the malt liquor Colt 45 which of course is a play on a firearm so just from its title the podcast is meta.

The podcast is hosted by and comments on from an American black perspective and it is highly entertaining. So far, I have listened to episodes about the films The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Re-Animator, and a double episode on The Wicker Man commenting on both version of the movie. (And righteously they revere the original and mock the re-make.)

Here is their episode on the classic horror film that launched a franchise Night of the Living Dead.

Share

The Marvel Show That Sailed Away

The Marvel Cinematic Universe had run a fairly tight ship continuity-wise. There have been a few misstep and clues dropped that led to nowhere, such as The Ten Rings reference in Iron Man that never paid off but overall the studio has done a good job presenting its properties as taking place in the same share setting.

And then there’s Marvels’ Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. which ran on ABC from 2013 thru 2020 for 136 episodes and followed the turbulent lives of a few SHIELD agents as they navigated personal, professional, and powered challenges in a world suddenly infused with enhanced beings and aliens.

For the first season the program hewed close to the events of the MCU, the agents were dispatched to the UK as part of the clean-up and follow-up crew in the wake of the destruction unleased by the conflicts of Thor: The Dark Worldand the agency was toppled by the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But as the series progressed the connections between the feature films and the events the television characters encounter weakened until finally the most massive event of the MCU, Thanos’ eradication of half of all life in the universe, is never referenced and for all practical purposes never happens.

Agents of SHIELD did play with a number of concepts and characters from Marvel mythology with the introduction of Life Model Decoy, android replicas of characters, the best onscreen portrayal of the Ghost Rider character, and the introduction of the Inhumans as a stand in for mutant powered individuals as that ‘term’ for enhanced superpowered character was tied up with the right to the X-Men franchise with Fox studios.

All seven season of Agents of Shield are available for streaming on Netflixand I am currently doing a front to back re-watch of the series.

Share