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Just finished watching Unbreakable, which I stuck near the top of the Netflix queue right after we saw Signs — Suanna for the first time, me for the second. This M. Night guy, he’s one to watch.
My clearest memory of Unbreakable from when it first came out was storming out of the theatre at what seemed like a cheap ending — surprise twists evidently being Shyamalan’s schtick since hitting the big time with The Sixth Sense. I had forgotten that up until that point he is a masterful director, crafting each scene in a slow, stately style that rewards every moment you spend savoring his shots. The weight room scene can stand as an object-lesson of his genius. Its tension builds, subtly but powerfully. Camera work is innovative but not obtrusive. The whole scene is humorous in a way that’s so understated you almost miss it.
And, perhaps because I knew it was coming, the ending didn’t bother me quite as much either. I don’t think unveiling Mr. Glass as the villain is cheap any more, though it is inelegant. I imagine he’s going for the same effect as in Sixth Sense, where the twist leaves you racing back through the movie mentally, but still rounds out the plot nicely. In Unbreakable, he gets the impact but misses the closure. We’re still left with too many questions about what the end revelation is going to do to David Dunn — will his family hold together? Will he actually continue on fighting evil?
I haven’t cried at a movie since watching E.T. when I was a kid. And I still haven’t — I don’t get very emotional at movies. Shyamalan’s the only guy in recent memory who has even managed to get me a little choked up. In Unbreakable it’s the moment when Dunn’s son reacts to seeing him nod from across the kitchen table, letting him that he’s the hero in the paper. (It’s a open question how much of my response was due to brilliant direction, and how much was due to the emotional vagaries of impending fatherhood.)
M. Night doesn’t make “pretty good” movies. He makes ambitious, amazing movies that have big flaws. One of these times, every piece is going to fall together for him, and he’s going to make a truly great movie and earn a place in film history. I’m looking forward to it.
Via Neil Gaiman’s Journal: this message thread has some interesting speculations about the Marvel identities of various people in 1602, Issue 1. Most of them are obvious, though I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t pick up on the Fantastic Four / Four Elements connection in Dr. Strange’s vision. Or that Murdock’s ship captain was in fact Foggy Nelson.
Most interesting speculation so far: Virginia Dare = Thor, i.e. his human vessel. (You have to scroll down the messages a bit to get to that one.) Fits with the whole weather control thing, and coming back from America as she is, dovetails with the whole Norse-settlement-of-America schtick that played prominently in American Gods.
Looking at all the references this way is fun, and even nudges up my estimation of the comic, albeit all on grounds of intertextual games and not loftier aesthetic accomplishments. (For more chitchat on such things, see the comments of this entry.)
When writing the previous entry, I originally described Matt Sahr as “wise and devious.” But seeing the words next to each other made me wish there was a word that meant both things, and on a lark I conflated them into “wevious” just to see how it would look.
That’s when it hit me that not only is it not a bad-looking word, but it also carries an association of “weave” that fits very nicely for a blog of twists and turns. Therefore I would like to officially coin the word “wevious,” which probably just means “wise and devious” though its exact definition will remain nebulous for now, subject to clarification through usage. I’ll try to find clever ways to use it until people tell me to knock if off.
You may well ask, “What’s the beginning of the cable saga, then?” It goes back several years and predates Polytropos, but I’ll give a quick rundown for those unfamiliar with the tale.
When we moved to Arlington, Polytropos HQ needed to get bare-bones cable service in order to get any sort of reception at all. The guy who put it in installed an ugly piece of 1980’s tech, the Cable Box, on top of our television. Because the TV signal had to be piped through the box, it prevented us from taping one show and watching another. Worse, the guy put these little plastic cylinders over the spots where the cables went into the back of the box, effectively preventing me from removing them – and, since the cable eventually disappeared into the wall, also preventing us from ever moving the TV if, say, we wanted to rearrange the living room.
After a couple calls to shifty cable customer service people, I discovered that this box wasn’t actually helping us – it was their kludgy way of giving us only the bare-bones channels we had paid for, by filtering out the other ones. On and off for the next several months, vanquishing the Cable Box became a obsessive goal of mine. My tactics proved futile – they included trying to make custserv reps appreciate the fundamental problems of the Box, and even of getting a cable guy out to the apartment and trying to talk him into getting rid of it. (He probably would have if I had bribed him, but that would have been admitting defeat.)
The solution came from the wevious* mind of Matt Sahr, who at the time was working for the then-bankrupt information infrastructure company Teligent. All sorts of cable catalogs crossed his desk, and in one of them he found the special tool, the one that all cable guys must have on their belts, the one that defeats the nefarious plastic cylinder. So I ordered one, and it worked, and for a couple of years we enjoyed cable without the box, which gave us some extra channels that we probably weren’t supposed to have, though not the whole suite of “standard cable” channels.
As I mentioned earlier, our local cable company upgraded their system a few weeks ago, and we suddenly found ourselves with all the standard cable channels. Then, last week, it all went kaput, and the only channel we could get was Snow Without Sound. This was a pain in the butt, because I’d have to call the cable company to come fix it, and consequently I’d have to yank the cable box out of storage and re-affix it. I did this anyway just to see if it automagically made cable work again – it didn’t. Then I realized that I had lost the plastic cylinders.
“Lost” isn’t quite accurate; I don’t recall what I did with them exactly, but at the time, getting them off had represented the culmination of a months-long struggle. I probably performed some sort of victory dance and ritually desecrated them with an Xacto knife before hurling them from the roof. But there was nothing I could do about it now – hopefully it wouldn’t be a big deal, and I could fast-talk the cable guy if necessary.
From here on, it’s all anticlimax. The customer service lady was quite friendly, actually. I explained the problem to her.
CSL: Do you have a cable box?
ME: (ruefully) Yes.
CSL: Are its buttons on the top or on the front?
ME: On the top.
CSL: Yeah, we’re not using those anymore. That may be the problem. Are you able to remove the box? Have you tried plugging in without the box?
ME: (trying to sound nonchalant) Uh, yes, I tried without the box too. Still doesn’t work.
CSL: OK, we’ll have to get someone out there. I can do a Thursday all-day appointment, or Friday 12-3.
ME: What does “all day” mean?
CSL: Any time between 8 AM and 9 PM.
ME: (laughing) Seriously?
CSL: (seriously) I’m very serious.
ME: Uh, OK. Friday then.
So the cable guy arrived earlier today, and he flipped a doohickey in the cable box down the hall, which made the TV work again. He also noted that the Cable Box was defunct, and took it with him. It all seemed too easy. My assumption was that the cable company had simply got its act together, and now didn’t need a box to filter in only bare-bones channels. Which was fine. Foregoing Jon Stewart seemed like a small price to pay for getting being rid of the dread Box once and for all.
After he had left, I took up the remote and surfed up and down the channels, just to see what was there.
We are still getting all the standard channels. This time, though, it’s not through anything of my doing, and thus nothing that might be construed as f-r-a-u-d – which is why I feel reasonably safe putting the story here. Thus the saga of the Cable Box ends in total victory. Until, that is, our next cable bill shows up charging us for everything we’re getting. Time will tell.
—
* see above entry
I finally got around to reading 1602. I mentioned before that I hoped to quibble with Jim about its merits, since he found it quite wanting. No quibbles yet. My overall response was a bit more positive than his, though we agree that the first issue was awkwardly paced and full of inelegant exposition. A knock-your-socks-off opening would have been much better, of course, but there’s still plenty of time for the story as a whole to pick up speed. I liked the art very much – it has a painterly, saturated quality that fits the setting nicely. Overall, the jury’s still out – I’ll hold off on more commentary until there’s a couple more issues out there.
Part of 1602’s charm is the interplay of familiar characters and superhero topoi with a new setting. But is this sort of coy self-reference a well that’s been drawn from a few too many times? Its central to classics like Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. Alan Moore has practically made a career out of it – witness League and Top Ten. It’s not the basis of Planetary, though that comic is constantly engaged in sly homage. Even a great, straightfoward superhero comic like Ultimate Spider-Man is getting some of its juice from the fact that we like to see how familiar characters are re-imagined.
The odd thing is that I ought to be annoyed at this rash of self-referentiality, but none of the above examples suck. What makes them good isn’t their metacommentary, but old-fashioned stuff like strong characters, deft art, solid dialogue, and engaging plots. Navel-gazing by the craft’s top practitioners isn’t limited to comics – it’s commonplace in twentieth-century literature, and I’d wager a guess that you’ll find the same dynamic in other art forms as well. In comics it seems more pervasive and yet less egregious, somehow. Still, I’d like to see more excellent comics that stand without referring to other comics. I’m sure it’s out there and I’ve just overlooked it – examples?
Computer games are a varied breed. Some will keep you occupied for a few minutes; others will demand all your available free time, and some of your work time too if you can get away with it. Which is which depends on you. The world is full of folks for whom Solitaire and Minesweeper are tantamount to crack — I just don’t get that. But give me something with a big thick manual and sub-sub-menus, and I can disappear for days.
Recently, that game for me has been Medieval: Total War. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is a game about commanding massive armies on a big 3D battlefield. It is, but what really rocks about it is the campaign details between the battles — developing provinces and moving armies and diplomats and spies around a big historical map of Europe. Gameplay here will be familiar to anyone who’s played Civilization or Master of Orion. At some point, though, the designers of Medieval must have decided that those games and others of their ilk were all big wusses. So they made a tech tree that makes all other tech trees look like tech shrubberies. Then they layered in all sorts of other details above and beyond how kick-ass your armies are — the loyalty of your generals, the happiness of your populace, their religious beliefs, the vices and virtues of your rulers, the state of sea power, and so on. (This is a game for which you can download Farming Amortization Charts from fansites. I haven’t gone that far yet.)
To top it all off they decided to really hit the books in terms of historical accuracy. You start the campaign as one of a dozen or so medieval kingdoms at one of three different years, holding all the territory that that kingdom actually held at that time. Europe gets peppered with historical events, some of them mere window-dressing, but many of them having a big impact on the game. An example: Late last night, my Egyptian forces had the East sewn up as far north as Novgorod, when out of nowhere the Mongol Hordes rolled in and churned my peaceful rear provinces into butter. Smelling blood in the water, the Pope declared a Crusade against me, and Spain and France happily obliged. Hours of careful warmaking were obliterated in a few turns, but I couldn’t have been happier. If I had just remembered my medieval history a little better, I could have been ready.
This is the sort of game that demands a certain amount of mental effort and brain hurt. People who play computer games seem to be starkly divided around this issue. Some prefer games light and mindless, or that challenge their reflexes and not their planning horizon. Others, like me, dig games that are projects. I don’t have any big insights into why that is, but it does point out a point of diversity among computer gamers, and suggests that there’s a wide variety of reasons why people game. Interesting.
As noted earlier, I just finished listening to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the other day. It held up very well — the stuff that bothered me about it the first time through didn�t so much this time, and it definitely stands out as superior to Book Five. At the same time, I noticed a lot of foreshadowing as well as groundwork-laying, both thematically and plot-wise, for stuff that happens in Order of the Phoenix. Sirius has a conversation with the kiddies on p. 526-7, talking about Barty Crouch, that prefigures a lot of the political foibles of the Ministry of Magic in Book Five. One particular passage leapt out as a haunting evocation of some of our post-9/11 missteps, even though it was written well before then. Call it a memo to John Ashcroft:
“He’s a great wizard, Barty Crouch, powerfully magical — and power-hungry. Oh never a Voldemort supporter,” [Sirius] said, reading the look on Harry’s face. “No, Barty Crouch was always very outspoken against the Dark Side. But then a lot of people who were against the Dark Side . . . well, you wouldn�t understand . . . you’re too young . . .”
“That’s what my dad said at the World Cup,” said Ron, with a trace of irritation in his voice. “Try us, why don’t you?”
A grin flashed across Sirius’s thin face.
“All right, I’ll try you . . .” He walked once up the cave, back again, and then said, “Imagine that Voldemort’s powerful now. You don’t know who his supporters are, you don’t know who’s working for him and who isn’t; you know he can control people so that they do terrible things without being able to stop themselves. You’re scared for yourself, and your family, and your friends. Every week, news comes along of more deaths, more disappearances, more torturing . . . the Ministry of Magic’s in disarray, they don’t know what to do, they’re trying to keep everything hidden from the Muggles, but meanwhile, Muggles are dying too. Terror everywhere . . . panic . . . confusion . . . that’s how it used to be.
“Well, times like that bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. Crouch’s principles might’ve been good in the beginning — I wouldn�t know. He rose quickly through the Ministry, and he started ordering very harsh measures against Voldemort�s supporters. The Aurors were given new powers — powers to kill rather than capture, for instance. And I wasn’t the only one who was handed straight to the dementors without a trial. Crouch fought violence with violence, and authorized the use of the Unforgivable Curses against suspects. I would say he became as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark Side.”
Book Four’s end fell into a pattern that was fresh in my mind from Book Five — riveting climax followed by altogether too much verbiage and exposition in the descending action. Its nature, as I’ve noted before, has more in common with the detective explaining how he caught the culprit in a mystery novel than it does to anything in epic fantasy. But in terms of pacing, it slows things down to a crawl. But it’s the sort of detail that, as a kid, I would have been perfectly content to read for pages and pages. In my first readings of Fellowship of the Ring long ago, my favorite chapter was the Council of Elrond, where the representatives of the races all get up and tell the stories of how they got there. I could have cared less about pacing and the forward momentum of the plot — I could have read a book’s worth of that stuff. OK, OK, I still feel that way when I read it today. But you get my point. I was ho-humming toward the end of Goblet, but probably wouldn’t have been near so much if had I been a member of Rowling’s target audience — or if I’d been reading it for the first time, for that matter.
Jury’s still out on whether Book Three or Book Four gets my blue ribbon. The answer will have to wait for my next road trip . . .
Here’s more stuff worth reading from the weekend:
Over at Making Light, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has been doing a great job filtering and reporting developments in the whole Fox vs. Al Franken debacle. Take a look at this entry especially for some great summary and quotes. Today she observes that, at long last, Fox has dropped the suit.
Via Neil Gaiman – the folks at BBC are going to make something called the Creative Archive:
Mr Dyke [Director General of BBC] said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.
The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added.
I assume he’s talking about archives of older shows only, though that’s not immediately clear from the article. Whatever the case, this is tremendously good news, not just because of the cool shows we’ll have access to, but more importantly because of the example it sets for Cool Things To Do With Copyrighted Material. Fly free, information, fly free! Why hasn’t Lawrence Lessig written about this yet?
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is in fine form with this entry on language, policy, and the Bush Administration. Just a taste:
Just as vague and abstract language makes for bad prose, it is also the handmaiden of bad policy and the abettor of buck-passing.
For months now, Jim Henley has been regaling us with weekly tales of his journey on the road to fitness. His goal: to be able pull off (that is, not be embarrassed in) a proper superhero costume in time for Halloween. I see him every week or so for roleplaying, and his progress has indeed been impressive. This week, he turns all his experience into advice for the rest of us:
Weight Loss for Geeks: You love books and games, Cartoon Network, fantasy, sf, animation, comics or some sizable combination thereof. You live on Pepsi and pizza, know what’s inside your computer. You are a geek. Maybe, you’ve decided you weigh more than you’d like to weigh, maybe by a lot. You may have felt this way for some time, but now the matter has acquired an urgency it didn’t have for some reason – a sober consideration of your sexual prospects, anxiety about interviewing in a soft economy at your present weight, some health concern that tips the scales (in my case, a gnawing fear of Type II diabetes). It may have taken a lot to get you to this point. Among other things, your appearance may have long represented to you a rejection of false values: shallow standards of beauty and glamor. Losing weight and gaining fitness might mean, on some level, becoming more like them, the jerks in high school with big muscles or bubble butts, empty heads and vicious mouths.
That’s a lot to overlook or overcome. But like I said, the time, you have decided, is here. So how to do it?
Answer: make a game of your body. Turn the venturesome intellect and sense of play that have stood you in such good stead in the one direction they’ve never really focused: your physical form and prowess. Become curious about what you can become capable of doing. How fast? How long? How hard? How much? What can you decide not to eat or drink after all? What do you need in the way of macronutrients and micronutrients? Which of the schemers, visionaries, nannies and charlatans in bookstores or bureaucracies gets how much right and how much wrong?
There�s more; check it out. I�ve recently come up with a more concrete reason to lose weight than just “it’s healthy” or “down with love handles” — a lot of the yoga I’m doing (or trying to do) right now would be a heck of a lot easier if I was twenty pounds lighter. The problem is the same as it ever was � food is so darn yummy.
I�m back from a lovely weekend at the Outer Banks. Food, friends, poolside ping pong, croquet, backgammon, Age of Mythology. The only downside whatsoever was the five-hour drive there and back, but even that was made tolerable and even mildly pleasant thanks to the magic of audiobooks.
I didn’t fully appreciate the advantages of having a book on the road until my recent trek to Gencon. With a borrowed copy of the unabridged Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as my constant companion, the nine hours (one way) felt like about six. And the book was so dang long that I only got a chance to finish it, at last, on the road home yesterday. The rest of the time, Suanna and I listened to Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.
A good audiobook sinks or swims by who reads it. A few years ago I checked out an unabridged version of Mason & Dixon from the library, figuring it would serve us on the long haul to the Upper Peninsula. At first I thought the reader was just being dry, but it quickly became clear that he barely understood what he was reading, and in any case didn�t really get that it was supposed to be funny. We barely made it through one chapter of that one.
The Bestest Reader Ever Award of course goes to Martin Shaw for his reading of The Silmarillion, but Jim Dale, who reads the Potter books, gets very high marks as well. He does everybody in different voices, which is a delightful perk, but on occasion gets a wee bit strident with his portrayals. It�s all well and good if Hermione sounds shrill, but it shouldn�t literally hurt your ears, is all I�m saying. Still, dramatization goes a long way toward alleviating the dreaded Space Cadet Effect. S.C.E. is when you�re cruising along and something gets you thinking about something else, and suddenly you realize you haven�t been paying attention to the story for ten minutes or more. If you�re alone you can just skip back, no problem, but if somebody else is listening along, you�re screwed.
Carry On, Jeeves was done by Blackstone Audiobooks, which seems to be quite a class act. Frederick Davidson, the reader, did the voice of Jeeves with a little bit more basso profundo than you�d expect if you were used to Stephen Fry in the televised version, but it works. He only falters when he tries to do American accents in some of the New York stories. We�re so used to having all these Commonwealth actors � especially the Aussies � hit American speech perfectly in movies, hearing it done poorly is surprising. It was actually pretty funny � his �Midwest� accent was more of a Brooklyn, and for actual New York accents you could tell he had watched and rewatched The Sopranos for his research.
I wish there was an it-place to go to online for audiobooks reviews, especially notes on which authors are any good. Google proved unhelpful in this respect, turning up business site after business site. (Top of my Google wish list: a function that lets you filter out all sites that are trying to sell you something.) If anybody knows of a good site, or has some other audiobooks recommendations, feel free to throw �em in the comments.
