Words by Frances Rowat
I understand that there’s going to be an announcement about the Hugo voter packages very soon. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a coherent list of links to what’s available online, you could do a lot worse than check out John DeNardo’s roundup at SF Signal. It’s huge.
Myself, I’m keeping a list here, Continue reading “Hugo helpfulness”
I saw The Last Unicorn tonight. On the big screen, with Peter S. Beagle in attendance and answering questions, and signing books afterwards (and taking pictures with people! I have a picture of myself with Peter S. Beagle now). And before I get any further I will note that tour dates are here and it would be lovely if you could pass that along to anyone you know of who’s interested.
I thought I might not cry this time, which is foolish. I never forget that I cry when I hear the theme song. But I always forget how sure it is, the tears coming up as smooth and sure as a stone drops down through water, and I thought that since I listened to the music last night as well the effect might be somewhat muted, and so I was sitting down to watch and thinking maybe this time I wouldn’t cry, and…
Yep. Tears. 🙂
(Did you know that the composition of your tears differs based on the emotion that evokes them?)
But yes. Peter S. Beagle was answering questions before the movie, and Connor Cochran[1] was… was maître d‘-ing or toastmastering or whatever the term is, and interjecting little anecdotes. And one of them was that when he first met Peter thirteen years ago, Peter thought he was a failure.
I… just hearing that was like the split-second of freefall confusion when our dog once yanked me off our front steps. Not the moment where I landed on the edge of the step and bruised myself purple-black for weeks. But the sudden absence of ground where there’d been that solid unquestioned presence only a second before.
Peter S. Beagle ever thought he was a failure.
Peter S. Beagle.
I would expect that sentiment no more from him than I would expect it from Ursula K. LeGuin.
I came home with more books than I went out with, and they are signed. And I am happy, and teary, and a little giddy, and so very very glad I got to tell him thank you for everything he’d written. And I’m sitting here, doing a little reading and being glad that things seem to be going better for him, and trying to wrap my head around how he could ever have believed…
I hope things keep getting better for him. I truly do.
—
[1] I am 95% sure this is the man, but I checked with the light of my life, and he never gave his name, and I meant to ask. Actually I am 99.8% sure, and I would be surer except it takes me a while to learn people’s faces and I did not see him for long. But 99.8% sure is not bad, so I set it down.
We went out to dinner tonight, and there was lovely happy fluffy conversation, ranging from Star Trek Online to the lives of various actors and former actors to BraveStarr (does anyone else remember that? I mean, without Googling?), and along the meandering way Mark Ruffalo came up.
He did not come up for long, but he is on my mind. Specifically his role as the Hulk.
(Okay, I hate having to do this, but: I am not speaking for all crazies. I am, in fact, speaking for myself, as a very lucky crazy, in terms of my privilege and support system.)
I love Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner.
I love the way he’s so careful. I love the way he measures his speech. I love the way you can see him holding his own hands, so cautious; I love the way that when he’s dealing with people who know about and might want to use the Hulk his speech and body language, over and over, codes as a human being who has learned to second-guess himself, and to be hesitant.
I love this scene. I love how at 0:25 Cap–a good guy! A decent, fairly perceptive guy!–says it might be a good time to get angry.
How he actually thinks he might need to speak up and tell Banner it’s a good time to get angry.
(Oh, Cap. I’m sure you mean well. I know you mean well. I know you’re speaking up because you’re nervous, because you don’t understand how someone who is so calm and quiet could possibly be anything close to as angry as they need to be. But… shhhh. We’ve got this.)
And Banner doesn’t even blink. He explains, like it’s an obvious thing (and it is!), and then he unfurls.
(The Hulk is fundamentally a good and well-intentioned creature. This makes the Hulk different from, say, depression. But this isn’t about the Hulk, except in terms of how the Hulk casts Bruce Banner’s accomplishment into proper relief.)
Banner lives with this all the time. This thing inside him. This thing that is always there, that means that even when he is angry he has to manage himself, he has to not show it, because if he starts indulging himself and turns into Mr Shouty the way all the others do, it will go badly. Because his anger, released, is so much worse. It is terrifying. It is an annihilating force that results in a level of destruction that is incomprehensible coming from a normal human.
This is not fair. Banner has been robbed of the catharsis of expressing small, normal amounts of a negative emotion, in safe ways.
Banner is angry all the time. But he cannot let himself indulge. And so he looks hesitant, and he acts weak. And sometimes he lets go, and he’s the Hulk. And that’s cool, because this is after all the Avengers movie.
But the rest of the time, that quiet hesitant man? That still figure in the corner speaking in soft tones?
He’s holding back the Hulk.
With all he’s been through, while he was frightened and hunted and alone, dealing with unimaginable pressure, he has learned to hold back the Hulk.
I love Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner.
Apparently “watch all the Freddy Krueger” is this week’s recipe for decompression. The first few were watched after work, and today has been a marathon of terrible puns, body humour, body horror, and an origin story which cheerfully has more and more gingerbread added to it every other movie or so. (Child murderer! Who was the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs”[1]! Buried in ground that was deconsecrated by a dreaming dog peeing on it! And who was chosen by dream demons as the most evil person ever and given his powers! And who’s actually something greater and older than all these things–)
(Oh, Freddy.)
(Also, I’d apparently somehow completely missed seeing the sixth movie until earlier tonight. No idea how.)
And yet, I get why he appeals. I think, if I looked at the movies now, if I saw them in a vaccuum, I might not see enough to prompt the level of weird creeped-out fondness for the character that I currently have. But I’m not in a vaccuum, and that’s Freddy Krueger. When I was a kid waiting for the schoolbus, I picked up what must have been (I have determined through looking it up since) Freddy Krueger’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was a black-and-white comic, and I mostly just remember someone choosing the path that led away from flowers and fluffy bunnies and towards gross icky stuff, and that it ended with this page.
I would had to have been, I think, no older than eleven. That comic was not something I could afford, and it was not something I would have thought of actually owning anyway, I think.
But it was unspeakably neat. I mean, monsters and bad dreams! And the bad guy was telling jokes! And the art was much cooler than Archie comics and a lot more polished than the horribly cheesy B&W science-horror comics I had seen to that date. So I read it in dribs and spurts, sneaking it off the shelf at the corner store and going through a few pages and then putting it back on the rack when the school bus got there.
And that was how I met Freddy Krueger. I didn’t see any of the movies until years later, and the first one I saw was actually Dream Warriors, which I think was not the best of the bunch. But I knew who he was, because everyone knows who he was. Oh, not in a super-important way; I don’t think I ever even heard him mentioned as a topic of discussion for years. But he’s part of the background radiation of cultural consciousness.
It’s been interesting, deliberately concentrating on the source material instead of simply settling for what I already know.
—
[1] Oh don’t get me started. But anyway.
So, as I have been reminded, I actually get to nominate works for the Hugos this year.
I think I am okay with coming up for nominations for written work. However, I would love a few more suggestions for art/artists, for graphic story, and for best dramatic presentation[1], both long form and short form.
Will cheerfully take suggestions that are either direct nominations or that are in the vein of “hey, did you know that a whole lot of people are listing their qualifying works over at this webpage?”
(And now I’m going to go have my quiet conniption fit because oh god, I have flight tickets and a hotel reservation and a con membership and it’s all real. Eeeek.)
—
[1] (Usually that’s movies or TV shows, with the 90-minute mark being the divisor, but it also applies to radio, live theater, computer games or music).
So, despite a lot of the movies I spend time going on about, I actually do watch and enjoy movies that are commonly recognized as “good”. A couple of nights ago, I was rewatching The Cooler, which I think was one of the first movies I saw with William H. Macy.
A brief summary of the starting premise: Bernie Lootz is a “cooler”, a guy whose luck is so bad that a casino keeps him around to ruin other people’s winning streaks, which he does by standing next to them. As the movie opens, he is planning to leave in just a few days. The rest of the movie is absolutely worth watching, but this is not the point I am currently discussing.
It’s absolutely clear that Bernie’s luck is a real force. And the way this is handled is weirdly fascinating to me. One person mocks the idea of having a cooler as old-fashioned, but there is never a Mulder/Scully moment about how This Is Too Silly To Be Believed. And on the flip side, there is never a huge deal made about it. Forget the commodification and classification of bad-luck joes you might expect in a garden-variety urban fantasy; you don’t even get the organized underground betting you find in Intacto. (A decent movie, but not quite as awesome. More interesting concept development; less brilliant acting and characterization.) His luck is simply there, affecting things as luck might; plain and clear and true as a well-cut suit.
I think this is magical realism. The Oxford Companion to English Lit (apparently) describes magic realism as often having
a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic merges with the unexpected and the inexplicable and in which elements of dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence.
That is a little weirder than The Cooler gets–I think luck is so plain that it doesn’t reach quite the heights of strange you can find in dreams or fairy tales–but the way the real events go through the story in sync with Bernie’s luck, that seems about right. Refraction and recurrence.
It’s interesting to me not (just) because of the subtlety or the low-key fantastical elements, but because of the lack of self-consciousness. I can think of several written stories that have those qualities, but it’s a combination that’s pretty rare in movies. Would like to see more of it.
Because I’ve been discussing female characters with people recently:
The first character I ever remember wanting to be was Sarah Connor. Continue reading “When I was younger than I am.”
There’s an article in the Balder & Dash section over on Roger Ebert’s site. Written by Laura Bogart, it’s called The Trouble With Carrie. It’s thought-provoking, to say the least, and I’m still processing it.
Short version of the article, which you should go read: Carrie is remarkable because she does not kick ass for anyone else. She does it for herself. Sarah Connor–oh, my god, please understand this isn’t an indictment of Sarah Connor, who by the second movie has become a brilliant and much-beloved-by-me character in what is assuredly one of my favourite albeit not watched-to-tatters movies–does what she does for her son. Ripley is unremarkably motivated by survival (does not count; this is about doing more than what you need to do to survive), but goes above and beyond that, moving from rescuing cats to the iconic “Get away from her, you bitch.” Laurie Strode is babysitting children she needs to take care of. Kick-Ass does what she does because her father tells her to. When Nancy Thompson is done being motivated by survival, she comes back to help the other children.
But Carrie, as of the latest version, does it because this should not have happened to her, and it was not fair, and she has fucking had it.[1]
This sounds selfish.
And kind of glorious.
Scott Lynch once quoted H.L. Mencken as saying “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Not for someone else’s sake. Not because it’s easy to afford. Not because other responsibilities demand it. But because sometimes, dammit, you just want to say that it’s not okay to need to eat so much shit.
I am working a lot harder to make time for this movie, now.
—
[1] To be clear: this “it is not fair” motivation is not unique. It happens a lot in the rape/revenge subgenre if the victimized woman survives. I generally don’t watch that genre, because Reasons I Do Not Feel Like Unpacking Now; I just wanted to note that Carrie is not something utterly new (and no, I’m not saying her movies are an example of r/r either, and now I’m getting back to the main post).
I have had a kind of upsetting day, and am finally getting a chance to relax. Part of this is putting a familiar movie on, specifically Trick ‘r Treat, a sort of adorable little Hallowe’en portmanteau[1] movie which I am just now feeling really weird about calling adorable because I started adding up the number of people who die in this thing (after getting lines, even!) and it is in the double digits, even if you only count ones who get lines.
(I have included a picture of the movie’s mascot in my post! Look how cute he is.)
I mentioned this to the light of my life, in terms of how it struck me as odd that this kind of movie would be relaxing. Part of it is the familiarity, sure, but it’s not like I’m putting on Threads[2] to relax. Or even Splinter, which is actually a really good movie. Either of those would be weird. And he pointed out a couple of things:
First, I like short stories. I like anthologies. This usually only comes up with books, possibly because there is a sort of terrible lack of movies that do this (I can think of a handful, sure, but they are in a definite minority), and no TV shows that do it to my knowledge. Getting different distinct stories with the same presenter is not the same; you only get one story per episode, still, and then the media slice is over and you are done for the nonce. Tales from the Crypt is adorable in its way, and it’s an anthology series, but the individual episodes are not anthologies.
Second (speaking of TftC), short stories within movies are overwhelmingly of the “bad things happen to bad people” genre, and given what I’ve been dealing with today, that connotes a universe with a moral framework and an active justice that it is kind of reassuring to see. I think it was Eric Burns who, speaking of the classic pulp protagonists–the Shadow and the Spider?–said that he wanted to see horror turned against evil instead of for evil.
It’s a very comforting kind of story, and that is nice right now.
—
[1] I was going to say “frame story”, but I really don’t think there’s a single surrounding frame story. Instead, there are at least four stories (I usually count five) weaving in and out of each other.
[2] A BBC movie about the aftermath of nuclear war which is about the most appallingly bleak thing I have seen in… uhm, actually, in ever. There are more depressing or upsetting movies, but I have not seen any others which leave me feeling so throughly that the universe does not care and humans are just clinging sadly to a worldful of tired gritty dust that will not care one whit when we are gone.
Back in December, I mentioned that I’d picked up a collection of eight horror movies for five bucks. The recognizable one[1] is the original Night of the Living Dead, so I’m not going to be putting that on. However! There is also Colour from the Dark, a movie which instantly raises the burning question “Did the writers read “Colour out of Space”, or is this a direct rip-off tribute derivative of the very-understandably-forgotten The Curse[2]?”
A family accidentally frees something from the Earth’s womb while drawing water from their well and now a sinister glow is seeping into their lives.
Really, it could be either.