In this film we learn various lessons, including the inadvisability of picking a fight with people who have a munitions plant, and the inadvisability of letting Professor Moriarty provide your tea. Minor spoiler alert. I’m not certain Irene Adler is actually dead, and I wonder if the French police of the 1890s would not have been capable of distinguishing death by gunshot from death by bomb blast … little niggles like that kept popping up throughout the movie, but I didn’t care. It was too much fun watching Holmes ruin Watson’s honeymoon, then generally misbehave across Europe. Plus Stephen Fry was hilariously fun as Mycroft, especially in the at-home scene between him and the new Mrs. Watson.

The whole thing was a slam-bang fest of nigh epic proportions, with loads of period piece fun and games for the Victoriana and steampunk fans among us. Much as with Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol [ imdb ], the plot doesn’t merit much if any intelligent interrogation. It’s simply meant to be watched and enjoyed.

scalzi

What drew me to Ghost Protocol was a desire to see the Burj Dubai stunts on the big screen. Really, that was about it. Somewhat to my surprise, I was actually quite entertained by the whole movie. Including the Burj Dubai stunts, though they triggered my age-related vertigo hard. If I’d been watching this movie in 3D instead of hi-def digital (which is sort of IMAX-lite), I think I’d have thrown up. That’s a compliment, by the way.

You don’t ask many plot questions of a movie like this, because the answers never hold up on sober consideration, but I did finish the movie in a state of serious puzzlement over one in-story issue. (Mild spoiler alert.) How did they get from a railroad car in Moscow to the Dubai desert, with all their gear, given that the entire Russian state security apparatus was hunting the MI team, and their own IMF support was completely flatlined? The script doesn’t even pretend to address this question, just cuts us from one scene to the next with no resolution. (Not to mention which everyone involved in the Dubai business started out in either Budapest or Moscow — they could have met up in Warsaw and saved themselves a lot of hassle.)

If you like action/caper/thriller movies, this was a lot of fun. There were some snowmen in the movie for me, but they never quite took off flying. And pay no attention to the stupidly egregious product placement from Apple and BMW. Turn off your brain, turn on the popcorn bucket, and watch the pretty people do dangerous things.

Really, brain? This is what you find to regret about having cancer? That you might not be alive in December, 2013 to see part 2 of The Hobbit?

On recommendation from bravado111 I tried renting Elf [ imdb ] via iTunes, as it wasn’t available on Netflix Streaming. This is only the second or third time I’ve rented to watch from iTunes, and it was a bust. Six minutes into the movie, the sound cut out. Nothing I could do could bring it back. I do not see how this could possibly be user error, though I have considered the possibility given my current mental state. There’s no apparent path for either tech support or a refund of my $3.99 rental fee, though I will try calling Apple’s customer service line today. (There didn’t seem to be much point in calling on Christmas Day.) The iTunes rental customer experience was obviously designed with the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong. Which is idiotic on the face of it. As big a fan as I generally am of most things Apple, I’m very disappointed, and not looking forward to the hassle that almost certainly won’t be worth the value of my perhaps eventual refund. I call fail on Apple and iTunes for this one.

Yesterday on a whim, the_child and I watched Mary and Max [ imdb ] via Netflix Streaming. I hesitate to call this film underrated, since I’d literally never heard of it and therefore there was no rating to be under, but it was a wonderful movie. It’s a claymation feature from Australia, told in something like an epistolary style, of the friendship between a sad, strange little girl Down Under and a rather sad, strange man in New York City. To be clear, this is a sad, strange movie. There is abuse and mental illness. There is a great deal of loss. But there is also completely appropriate redemption at the end. It’s one of those movies you just have to go with and stay with. Netflix billed this an ‘indie comedy’, which I think is highly misleading, but it certainly has dark, quirky humor. A soul-touching film, and well worth your close attention.

Okay, Star Trek (the original series) [ imdb ] isn’t a movie, but I’ve been watching it on Netflix Streaming as well. I didn’t grow up in the United States, and thus missed the endless reruns of Star Trek on tv in the 1970s. There are episodes I simply never saw that I’m finally getting to see now. It’s charming and hilarious and fun, and watching them in close sequence is letting me glimpse the gelling of the ensemble cast, the shift in characters as they found their footing, and the direction, such as it is, of the show. But I have to ask, knowing I’m almost five decades late to the party, did these people never hear of continuity? At least in the first season, each script seems to invent its own terminology and technology for Enterprise, her crew and her operations. It’s like the writers never talked to each other, and the show runners never read any two scripts in a row. This randomness has actually become annoying to me-the-critical-watcher, probably because as a writer I agonize over precisely these issues in my books. I’m fairly ignorant of television history, was in-show continuity just no big deal back in the 1960s? It seems to me to be such a basic cornerstone of building a believable SFnal universe, the glaring lack of it in Star Trek is very odd.

Today, more Star Trek, continuity or not, maybe mixed in with some season two Black Adder [ imdb ] for variety. I’ve Day Jobbery tomorrow, but I’m off the rest of the week, so surely there will be more William Shatner and Rowan Atkinson in my near future.

mlerules

the_child

On reflection, one of the things the movie lacked was the fundamental charm that I associate with the Muppets. To some degree, the movie acknowledged this with the Moopet spoof characters. Also, I’m not particularly fond of Amy Adams’ acting (I found her downright irritating in Julie & Julia), while Jason Segel if anything overplayed the essential goofiness of his role. So while there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, especially with respect to the music editing (in a sort of “the eighties, you had to be there” way), the movie never really gelled for me.

Still, if you’re a Muppet fan, it’s worth seeing. Go for the matinee, though, or wait for the dollar theatre showing. This movie doesn’t merit an evening of your time and full priced movie ticket.

the_child

My advice to you is that if you have any love whatsoever for movies, stop what you’re doing, go to the cinema, and see this pronto. I’m very afraid it won’t last long, given the broad tastes of the American film-going audience, and if I’m right, that will be a crime. Then come home and make notes for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. I certainly plan to nominate Hugo for a Hugo Award.

This movie is a love letter from Martin Scorsese to the early history of cinema, and specifically the films of French director Georges Méliès. Méliès made some of the first science fiction and fantasy films, so it is topical to our field (and its award processes) in that sense. Furthermore, the movie itself while not a fantasy per se is decidedly inspired by the breath of the fantastic. It’s also got some glorious clockpunk, cool steam trains, Paris in the years between the wars, and a heart-rending story. I wept at the end.

Hugo is a visual feast, and also talks a lot about the creative process, both explicitly in the film’s narrative and implicitly in the way the film was made. I cannot recommend this highly enough, and I suspect the movie will need all the audience support it can get due to a lack of explosions, car chases, star destroyers and whatnot so beloved of holiday films. I very much I hope I am wrong about this last.

the_child

In a sense, it was the bastard child of Logan’s Run and Gattaca. In another sense, it’s a filmic adaption of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”. The production design is elegant and slick and really serves the story well. (I want one of every damned car in that movie, too.) If you just surf along with the action and don’t think too hard about the underlying logic of either the world or the plot, it’s pretty entertaining.

Of course, in the car on the way home, the_child was all over the inconsistencies in the worldbuilding, the “how it works” questions, the various plot holes. We talked about it all for a while, what the movie meant to us and to the characters. That the movie did take questions of privilege and mortality head on (at least up to a point) is very much in its favor, though there were odd echoes to my current cancer woes.

As a special bonus, there was a display in the lobby of the theatre for which @plunderpuss must have been the model:

The movie is Arthur Christmas [ imdb ], should you be wanting more info about @plunderpuss‘s career as an animated character.

the_child

(What is it with director’s cuts and theatrical releases, anyway? I’ve rarely seen a director’s cut that wasn’t a significant improvement on the edited-down full release. Immediately leaping to mind are Bladerunner, Dune and Lord of the Rings.)

Every time I watch it, and last night was perhaps my tenth viewing, I see new details in that film. At a minimum, the sheer density and crunchiness of the production design is well worth studying. The way that the background details in almost every shot foreshadow and feed the story can be breathtaking, if one watches with that critical eye.

the_child has a pretty good critical eye. We’ve always watched movies with a fair amount of discussion where warranted, and she is a long-time aficionado of the bonus discs that come in DVD packages. But Watchmen was a funny case because of all the political and cultural loading circa the movie’s alternate 1985 setting.

In 1985 I was in my junior and senior years of college. My direct political and cultural memory stretches roughly back to Watergate and very end of the Vietnam War, while the entire post-WWII/Cold War era counts as recent history to me. This is the dialectic of the movie. Everything from the music of this movie to the Woodward and Bernstein reference midway through pushes my buttons bigtime. But that dialectic is absolutely opaque to a fourteen year old who was born in 1997 and is only now beginning to develop meaningful wider political and cultural awareness. Her buttons don’t exist to be pushed.

So we spent a lot of time pausing or talking over the movie to discuss who the historical figures were. Why was it so unnerving to have a world where Richard Nixon was still in office in 1985. What Woodward and Bernstein had done in real life and what the Comedian meant with his throwaway line about them. Why I love the song “99 Luftballons” so much. Not to mention all the story-specific issues such as tying Rorschach to the little man with the end times sign, discussing why the heroes had gone underground, parsing the rape scene between the Comedian and Sally Jupiter and how that in turn fed the complexity of Laurie Jupiter’s life, what the possible significance is of the Gunga Diner blimp and why a pokey little restaurant could afford such a thing, how Dan Dreiberg managed to both locate and afford to keep such a huge underground complex beneath a normal townhouse. And so on and so on and so on.

It was a weird kind of double vision, walking through the politics and culture of my childhood and the first years of my young adulthood with my daughter while simultaneously breaking down the film’s plot, setting and design elements. She asked a lot of smart questions, and had some good insights.

Times like this, I really love being a parent.

• Transmit Kalimpura to my editor for formal turn-in
• Respond to an email interview
• Draft a script on metastasis for a science podcast
• Participate in a podcast interview
• Revise and submit a short story currently in draft
• Write a committed short story I haven’t yet been able to focus on
• Doing some editorial work on an anthology proposal
• Make initial notes on a proposal/outline for a mooted collaborative novel project with urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts

Plus I drafted the blog post on cancer, coping and terminal diagnoses, which I’ll run tomorrow morning when more than three of you are reading.

The revised to-do list looks something like this:

• Draft a script on metastasis for a science podcast
• Participate in a podcast interview
• Await reader comments then submit a short story currently in draft
• Write a committed short story I haven’t yet been able to focus on
• Do a bit more editorial work on an anthology proposal based on feedback received
• Make further notes on a proposal/outline for a mooted collaborative novel project with urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts based on feedback received
• Review Sunspin feedback from one of my readers
• Begin process of collating my last 3.5 years of cancer blogging into a book proposal

As I remain the boy in the bubble for a few days yet, thanks to my immune system doing a scarper, I have plentiful time today. It’s more a question of mental energy and focus, which despite yesterday’s productivity is still a bit iffy.

Also, watched two movies with the_child and mlerules yesterday.

One was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [ imdb ], a movie that needs no introduction for anyone between the ages of 40 and 50something. This is one of the truly great movies of its decade, alongside The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and a few others, and deeply funny in a way that holds up well today. I’d forgotten Charlie Sheen was in it. Also, it was interesting to see how much the entire plot as-written would collapse once cell phones and caller ID were introduced. Many of the shenanigans in the early part of the film involved playing games with phones that would make no sense today, and most of the film’s plausibility (such as it was) revolved around people simply being out of touch and unable to contact one another. These were things I had to explain to the_child. In a weird way, this makes Ferris Bueller a historical. As always, very highly recommended for a re-watch or for showing for the first time to your younger friends.

The other movie we watched was the recent release Hanna [ imdb ]. That is a damned good movie that I don’t think anyone ever heard of. Spy thriller involving a teen-aged girl, so vaguely connected to La Femme Nikita and films of that ilk. It was taut, very true to the title character’s deeply warped perspectives, much more emotional than such movies usually are, and exciting as hell. As the_child pointed out, Hanna and Green are basically the same character. The movie also did a lot of really good stuff at the layer of production values, camera work and sound design. Frankly, I’d like to see it up for an Oscar for sound design and scoring, it was that good. And if you’re fan of Cate Blanchett, this was a strange and fascinating role for her as well. Very highly recommended.

And now I’m curious. What’s your favorite ’80′s movies?

kenscholes

mlerules

Read through went fine. I know what else I need to do to the script, and he has some work as well. It’ll be fun and funny. And it was nice to be cooking through it. I plan to spend today’s writing time, after work, making the revisions we discussed, then I’ll maybe hit the WorldCon critique some more. That puts my start date on finishing Sunspin to tomorrow, but I’m okay with that.

As for Captain America, I was entertained, but it never engaged my suspension of disbelief. We saw it in 3D, because that was what was running at the time we wanted to see it. Unlike Avatar, which I saw in 3D IMAX, Captain America didn’t really benefit from the 3D. It was like a children’s pop-up book. So not worth the money.

Slightly spoileriffic things follow here

Also, I kept wondering how Hydra could run an entire production economy and transportation/logistics system within Nazi Germany without the Nazi government noticing it or doing something about it. And why so many of their military vehicles were Vietnam-era. And what Agent Carter was doing participating in a frontal assault by an American military unit, something that I’m pretty sure would have been inconceivable for a woman to be doing during WWII. And so on and so on and so on.

On the other hand, the Red Skull’s roadster was pretty damned cool. I’d like me one of those.