BORIS LAYUPAN'S LUCKY ALBATROSS FICTION & FILM BLOG

2009-11-15T23:35:00.003-05:00

Sit Rep

Interzone hasn't responded to my sub nor my query, so I assume they've rejected my "Ra-Gho-Zu" story.

I didn't hear till lately that Interzone doesn't necessarily respond to submissions they reject.

I will see what other markets I can sub to as I eke out some fiction and film stories during my scant free time.

I will also be taking a break from blogging. I don't know at this point when I'll post on this blog again.

2009-07-28T22:28:00.002-04:00

Sit Rep

Today I got form letter e-mails telling me that my script entries to the Nicholls Contest didn't advance to the next round.

I'm eking through with my script rewrites and still waiting for Interzone to respond to my "Ra-Gho-Zu" story, which is apparently buried in a pile at the editor's desk.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-07-14T22:42:00.003-04:00

Sit Rep

Today I finally finished the rewrite on my Steven Decatur "Stars and Stripes" script.

Woohoo!

Now I have two more script rewrites to crawl through....

I still haven't heard anything from Interzone about my "Ra-Gho-Zu" story. Either they're seriously considering it, or it's buried in a pile and the editing staff hasn't gotten to it yet.

I'm going for the second.

I still haven't made the time to find another market to submit "The Automatic Pen" to. But I will. Just very busy with several things.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-06-11T22:49:00.003-04:00

Sit Rep

I got an e-mail last night that I just read tonight.

"Automatic Pen" got rejected by the Cheer Up, Anthology.

I'll figure out the next market I can submit to.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-06-10T22:39:00.005-04:00

Sit Rep

Yesterday I got a rejection for "Automatic Pen" from F&SF.

I then submitted the story electronically to an anthology tentatively called "Cheer Up, Universe," edited by Ahmed Khan. It calls for comic SF and Fantasy short stories. Hopefully, my lil' tall tale will fit the bill.

The submission deadline is June 30, 2009 (which I beat) and the response time is 1 day to 3 months.

A day's gone by and I haven't heard anything yet. =)

Hailing freqs closed.

picture

2009-05-30T21:38:00.004-04:00

Sit Rep

On Wednesday, I got a rejection by Strange Horizons on "Ra-Gho-Zu."

Today, I mailed "Ra-Gho-Zu" to Interzone over in the UK. I also mailed "The Automatic Pen" to F&SF.

It'll take about 1-2 weeks at first class mail for "Ra-Gho-Zu" to make its way to England. Priority would've taken about the same time at a more expensive price, while Express was a small fortune that wasn't worth it. The response will come by e-mail.

Whenever my stories arrive, hopefully, either or both magazines will like 'em.

I'm plugging away, meantime, with my reading and writing.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-05-16T23:07:00.003-04:00

Sit Rep

Today I got a rejection from Asimov's for "Automatic Pen."

When I get the chance I'll mail the story to F&SF.

I'm reading some novels and prepping to rewrite another script.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-04-29T22:21:00.002-04:00

Sit Rep

I just subbed electronically "Ra-Gho-Zu" to the e-magazine Strange Horizons.

It's nice to save on postage and time and gas going to the post office. The response will be electronic and speedy.

We'll see.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-04-27T23:07:00.003-04:00

Sit Rep

Today I got both the reception postcard and the form rejection from Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF for "Ra-Gho-Zu" in the same mailing. Van Gelder did me the favor of typing my name at the top of the rejection and signing it.

He apparently looked at all of one paragraph then rejected the story right after an office aide sent off the postcard.

Can't say I'm surprised after meeting him at Clarion 2004.

I'll figure out who next I'll submit to.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-04-18T22:50:00.001-04:00

Sit Rep

A few days ago, I got a form rejection for "Ra-Gho-Zu" from Asimov's. Since it's my impression that Sheila Williams has literary tastes, I wasn't shocked.

Today I mailed "Ra-Gho-Zu" to the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy. I'll see how Gordon Van Gelder likes the story. He has literary tastes, too.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-04-15T23:12:00.005-04:00

Sit Rep

This evening I subbed online two film scripts to the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting.

The Nicholls is the most prestigious film script contest there is. Placement even as a quarter-finalist could get a body some attention and script read requests. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

The deadline was May 1, 2009. Ideally, I would've liked to have subbed the scripts in January 2009 when competition first opened, but I hadn't been planning on subbing to begin with. When I finished rewriting the scripts, I felt they were damn fine. Hopefully, the judges'll think the same. :-)

I subbed "Ra-Gho-Zu: Heaven's Sword."

Storyline: A peacemaker descended from samurai sworn to protect the innocent must save the Empress Apparent from the galaxy's deadliest shadow assassin, an immortal spirit.

It's based on my short story "Ra-Gho-Zu," which placed in the semifinals of the 1st qtr of the 2008 WOTF contest and is currently being read at Asimov's. I plan on novelizing the script before I market it.

The second script is "Destiny."

Storyline: When Eris, Goddess of Strife, saves Alexander the Great, Lucius Julius, an obscure ancestor of the famous Caesar, must save Rome from antiquity’s mightiest conqueror.

I plan on novelizing this script, too, before I market it.

I now have some novels to read for recreation, 3 more scripts, and 1 fantasy short story to rewrite.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-04-13T23:13:00.004-04:00

Sit Rep

Last week, I got a rejection by Analog on my "Automatic Pen" story. Unlike the other one, which was a preprinted form, I got a word processed letter with a single two line sentence saying the story wasn't suitable for Analog and it was signed by Stanley Schmidt himself. A sheet with the standard Analog submission rules and the first page of my story were also included. And the envelope was taped, though it was a self-sealing one. I wonder why so much care was put into sealing a rejection?

Anywho, I mailed on Saturday "Automatic Pen" to Asimov's, which also has "Ra-Gho-Zu." Sheila Williams can get to contrast a Mark Twain-type 21st century tall tale with a space drama. I hope she likes one or the other.

On the screenwriting front, I finished my newest draft of "Ra-Gho-Zu: Heaven's Sword," where my protagonist gets to play on a larger stage. I plan on subbing it and a Rome-Alexander alternate history epic to a major screenplay contest soon, called the Nicholls Screenwriting Competition. It's something of a mega WOTF for screenwriters. Extremely prestigious. The submission deadline is May 1, 2009, but I'll fire off these two within the week. I'm just doing some editing and final quick reading.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-03-18T20:34:00.003-04:00

Sit Rep

I've sent "The Automatic Pen" out to Analog today.

Hopefully, Stanley Schmidt will like a 21st century Mark Twain type tall tale about a country hick genius who builds a wormhole to meet aliens who can fix his automatic pen.

I'm continuing to eke out an SF script rewrite. It's like pulling teeth, but I halfway get the feeling I'm onto something.

Hailing freqs closed.

2009-03-14T16:20:00.003-04:00

Sit Rep

Today I finally mailed off "Ra-Gho-Zu" again after it got rejected by Analog in late January 2009. I've been busy, but I sent it to Asimov's. Hopefully, Sheila Williams will like my SF opus better than Stanley Schmidt did.

Then when I got home, I found my "Automatic Pen" manuscript waiting for me in the mail with a rejection sheet from WOTF.

Nichevo.

I'll mail the "Automatic Pen" to Analog by the middle of next week.

I'm crawling through a film script rewrite now and reading a novel or two--when I have free time from work.

I'll see how this year turns out.

Hailing freqs closed.

2008-12-20T20:30:00.004-05:00

Sit Rep

I've been busy with work, but I've managed to send out two stories today (after more rounds of periodic revisions than I'd like to count).

I've sent "The Automatic Pen" to the Writers of the Future Contest and "Ra-Gho-Zu" to Analog.

With the help of different readers from different sources, I made some changes to "Automtic Pen" to address a few logic issues and considered changing the title but kept it. Hopefully, it'll go farther than the Semi-Finals, where "Ra-Gho-Zu" placed.

Speaking of which, I made some editing changes to "Ra-Gho-Zu," I was going to fire it off to Analog, then held it for the Federations anthology, where it got rejected. I was gonna fire it off to Analog a few weeks ago, then got a suggestion to cut short the beginning (which the WOTF judge thought was perfectly fine) and the story is actually faster paced. In hindsight, the Federations rejection helped spur the new draft. The version I sent to the anthology was the one I was going to send to Analog at first. Hopefully, the Analog editorial staff will like the newest draft.

It's all in the laps of the gods now.

I must eke through script rewrites now, when I'm not exhausted by work.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2008-11-19T15:13:00.002-05:00

I got a rejection e-mail today from John Joseph Adams for his Federations anthology.

Nichevo.

I'm moving on to another market and with another story.

Fortunately, an acquaintance of mine with a great reader's eye, who'd been indisposed has gotten in touch with me and wants to read my latest fiction stories. Return time is a few weeks.

When she's done, I'll fire it all off. I'm eking away at film script rewrites now.

Signing off.

2008-11-09T23:35:00.006-05:00

I just subbed via e-mail an improved version of my WOTF Semi-Final story "Ra-Gho-Zu" to a major anthology market called Federations.

Very hopeful.

The anthology is edited by John Joseph Adams, (quoted from his site) "the editor of the anthologies Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, Seeds of Change, and The Living Dead. He is also the assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and is the print news correspondent for SCI FI Wire (the news service of the SCI FI Channel)."

The reading period is from November 1, 2008 to January 1, 2009. Rejections will be sent out quickly, but stories being considered may be held till January 31, 2009.

I was gonna fire it off on November 1, 2008, but I got an e-mail in late October saying that my Odyssey grad crit group was being revamped and seeking submissions. I thought I'd give it a shot and run it by the group to see if it'd pick up on a bug I might've missed.

The story was subbed along with one more to the Odyssey crit group on November 1, 2008. Me and another person critiqued the other story, but mine hasn't gotten a crit so far. The Odyssey crit group works on a free choice basis. I may choose not to participate with it any more.

I got tired of waiting, I know the story is good, and I didn't want to wait too long before subbing to John Joseph Adams, who has already been receiving submissions.

I was going to sub the story to Analog a few weeks ago after being rejected by Jim Baen's Universe. But I learned about the Federations anthology, and so I waited.

It's finally out now. Woohoo!

As Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he is often misquoted as saying "The die is cast."

The more accurate quote is "Let the dice fly high!"

I'll be subbing another story to WOTF soon, then I'll put my screenwriting cap on for several months and work on some scripts that've been neglected for too long.

Hailing freqs closed.

2008-11-05T12:16:00.008-05:00

It's interesting to live in one of those moments where history is being made.

I have been quiet for a while. Slogging through rewrites, work, and following the election on the Live Journal of Larry Hodges, where I've posted quite a few replies.

I will be sending out my "Ra-Gho-Zu" story to a major market some time next week. I'm just waiting on a final round of crits from people in an Odyssey grad critique group. And I'll be sending a short SF story, "The Automatic Pen" to WOTF about a week later after I get comments from the same crit group. I've decided to put my teen fantasy on hold for next year, while I read some teen novels and get back to some scripts waiting for my loving attention.

Work and the election have been taking up my time. Looking back, I suppose I could've commented a time or two on the election, but I'm not usually a political person and I'd set this blog up for chronicling my fiction/film pursuits.

Nichevo.

Anyone who's periodically checked my blog will have noticed the debates, SNL skits, etc. that I'd embedded. I hope that in some small way, I'd disseminated information that passing web surfers needed in order to decide on what to do for the 2008 election, which I believe is the most momentous in America's history to this point.

I'd debated on whether to vote early or show up on Election Day yesterday. After I'd decided to show up on Election Day, I came across articles that talked about waiting lines at early election polls of anywhere from 3-6 hours and that some polls would likely be mobbed on Election day.

Doh!

In my case, a large and spacious Greek Orthodox church that's right next door to my backyard is my local election poll. Built about 10 years ago, the church has all the frills and is rented out for weddings and parties all the time. I could've walked over, but I drove in order to be prepared to motor out of the place for work in case I had a three or so hour wait.

It took me only an hour all told of waiting, registering, and filling out my ballot. The poll opened at 7 A. I'd forced myself awake at 6 A after only 5 hours of REM time, got ready, and arrived at 6:55 A. A line had formed that stretched around one end of the church. I jogged to get a place, and the line kept forming behind me to reach around another wall.

The pace was decent, though. After about 25 minutes of waiting, I got to the front door, where volunteers were dividing the line into two for each of the two districts that could vote. The line for my district was a lot shorter and I zipped in, did my part, and drove back home to chill before work for an hour. I should've gotten a nap, but I got through the day.

I voted for Obama/Biden and a full Democratic ticket nationally and locally. First time ever. I'm an Independent and I'd voted for both parties in the past. But I voted for Obama as much as I voted against McCain and Palin. The Republican party has vowed to reform and change in order to regain the trust that George W. Bush has shattered. I am extremely skeptical of that when I consider how the GOP faithful has embraced Sarah Palin rather than be insulted at her selection by McCain as a stunt to draw disaffected Hillary voters.

Now the United States has its first black president, who has reached across age, ethnic, and other lines to gain the presidency. I believe he promises as well to be a global president as well with an Indonesian childhood, a Kenyan parentage, and a Middle Eastern name.

The honeymoon period will be sweet, but short since Obama is entering the presidency in circumstances possibly more dire than those that faced FDR: two expensive and mishandled wars in the Middle East that were needless to begin with, a skyrocketing national debt thanks to Bush Jr., rifts with the global community from Bush's "diplomacy," and sundry other issues. The Democrats also have, I believe 56 senate seats and two Independents aligned with them. Not quite filibuster-proof, but still a pretty strong position for passing vital legislation during Obama's presidency.

I believe Barack Obama promises to be an inspirational and capable executive. He'll need to be in order to fix the mess that Bush Jr. has plunged the nation into.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2008-08-29T22:58:00.003-04:00

WHY YOU SHOULD OR SHOULD NOT DECIDE TO BE A WRITER

By MICHELE WALLERSTEIN
Screenplay & Novel Consultant
www.novelconsultant.com
email: novelconsult@sbcglobal.net

Writers write for all sorts of reasons. Some of these reasons are perfectly right and reasonable but many are heartbreaking mistakes.

There are people who go to movies and say to their friends and families: “I could have written a better movie than that!” Come on, admit it, you’ve all said it a few times. But if that is your only real motivation, it is pure ego and narcissism. Writing well is tough, grueling work. It takes years to become a really good writer, to be recognized in the film community and to make a living doing it.

There are many, many reasons that bad movies get made. Many of them start out as good screenplays. Perhaps the Producer uses the wrong casting director and the Star wants the dialogue changed to fit his mood, then the Director steps in and wants some changes to fit is “vision” of the film. Then the Producer has some problems with the financier so the film must
be set in Lithuania but it must look like Chicago. By now the original writer has been replaced many times by cheaper writers who are just happy to have some work and will do whatever they are told by anybody. There are so many permutations of the above-mentioned scenario that you can’t even imagine. Everyone starts out trying to make a good film. That’s a given.
What happens after that is a real crap shoot.

No one sits down and simply writes a terrific script. It doesn’t happen that way.

Another reason some people choose to write is to get something personal out of their system and off their chest. They feel that they have to get their story told. Perhaps it is their relationship with their mother or father. Maybe there has been abuse in their family or some other family drama that they need to explore or expose.

Again, this is not a good reason to write a screenplay. This is a very personal situation that may need to be told, confronted, and worked on in therapy, dealt with with loved ones or written about, perhaps, in a journal. It most likely is not a movie.

There are people who think that writing is easy, or that it’s cool, or that it’s fun. There are those who love to read so they think they can write. There are others who don’t know what else to do with their time.

To write a really good screenplay you need to take professional writing classes. You need to go to as many seminars on writing as possible. You need to read as many books on script writing as you can get your hands on. You need to write three or four screenplays then stick them in a closet and really start writing. Screenwriting is like learning how to play the violin or baseball, you have to practice, practice, practice.

A real screenwriter has to love the movies and has to be a real storyteller with a great imagination. This person must understand plot, character development, the three act structure, know what audiences love to see, understand what drama and comedy really are. The great screenwriter understands that any genre must touch upon the inner soul of their audience and make that audience feel something special, learn something special and come away with something new inside of them.

Becoming a professional writer is a long and serious road. It is not for the feint of heart. The rejections are horrible, but the rewards are great. Be sure you are devoting yourself to this process for all the right reasons and you can make it.

2008-08-05T22:54:00.005-04:00

Baen's Universe Submission Update: Rejected

I got a short form letter via e-mail from Baen's Universe, saying "Ra-Gho-Zu" was rejected.

Nichevo.

I know the story is good. All I can do is sub to the next market on my list and move on with other stories.

I'd have thought that "Ra-Gho-Zu" would've been up Baen's Universe's alley, though.

Hailing freqs closed.

2008-07-31T22:37:00.006-04:00

Sit Rep

It's been a little while...

I've been dark for the last few months, working and writing.

I just electronically posted to Jim Baen's Universe my revised WOTF 2008 1st quarter semifinalist story "Ra-Gho-Zu." Who needs snail mail when a likely market's website offers internet browser uploads?

The Jim Baen's Universe submission deadline for this current window is 11:59 P EST. Talk about cutting it close.

Very interested in hearing the response.

I have rewritten "Ra-Gho-Zu" more times than I care to count. I have to thank the many, many people who looked at the most recent draft I just fired off. It wouldn't be as good as it is without the interest they took in my story and their thoughts.

Now I'm gonna rest up, then work on another short story or two for WOTF and a whole bunch of film scripts languishing from want of attention.

I hope to comment on a film and/or TV show in the near future.

Hailing freqs closed.

2008-05-05T21:59:00.006-04:00

Review: “Iron Man”

One cool comic book superhero epic movie.

I didn’t (and still don’t) spend much time reading comics as a kid, but I watched all the cartoons--including the bad ones. Even though Iron Man doesn’t have the same iconic recognition as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, the X-Men, etc., I knew who he was.

From what I’m told, he started out in Marvel Comics in 1963 as an anti-communist hero, then moved on to fighting evil in general. Unlike most other heroes, he’s not from another planet nor did he get his powers from magic or genetic mutation. He’s self-made from American technological know-how.

His alter ego, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), is a playboy billionaire weapons manufacturer and genius inventor modeled after Howard Hughes. After watching this film, I wished I had an aptitude for pushing technological boundaries.

Downey, while not the prototypical actor for a comic book superhero (which usually goes to young heartthrobs) is an actor of intelligence who draws from his own checkered past to initially play Tony Stark as a boozing, womanizing genius. Stark runs Stark Industries, the company he inherited from his father and the world's leading weapons manufacturer. Life is good. He blithely glosses over the death and destruction in which his company plays a major role. “They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire,” he says before demonstrating his latest missile, the Jericho. “I prefer the weapon you only need to fire once.” Downey delivers a knockout performance that by itself is worth the price of admission to watch. Fortunately, I got in at $7.95 with a student ID--and saw it twice on opening day.

“Iron Man” starts in the present, or recent past. With superb direction from an unlikely Jon Favreau (“Made,” “Elf,” and “Zathura,” none of which I saw), the movie opens in Afghanistan. There, Tony Stark displays his Jericho missile system for top US military and allied Arab brass. The Jericho test firing demolishes half a mountain, insuring big orders on his latest product of mass destruction. Afghan guerrilla insurgents, using Stark-issue military spec, then capture Stark and wipe out his Air Force escort.

Seriously wounded with shrapnel in his chest, Stark is brought to a cave where the gun-toting insurgents have set up shop. A Gandhi-like Yinsen (Shaun Toub), saves Stark with beyond next generation heart surgical skills. Yinsen implants a cylindrical electromagnet into Stark’s chest that keeps the shrapnel in his from reaching his ticker and other vital organs, resulting in instant flatline. Once Stark is saved, the insurgent leader, a chrome-domed thug named Raza (Faran Tahir), wants Stark to build him another Jericho missile.

Or else.

Under closed circuit surveillance, Stark doesn’t build a missile, but a miniature Ark reactor (fusion?) to power his chest electromagnet and an armor suit with mechanical arms and legs, and a weapons system featuring Gatling guns, flamethrowers, and missile launchers that fire out of his arms. Topping it off is an iron mask that’s a cross between a welder’s helmet and a goalie mask. When the amazingly stupid insurgents do catch on, it’s too late. Yinsen sacrifices himself to buy Stark time to power up his MacGyvered suit, which he uses to blast their camp to smithereens and fly--sort of--out of harm’s way.

Stark returns from three months in captivity a changed man. He's seen the horrors he has helped perpetrate. No more weapons manufacturing for Stark Industries, he says. Against the wishes of his ambitious No. 2, Obadiah Stane (a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges), Stark sets a new agenda of redemption and keeping the world safe from his weapons, aided by his trusted assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow with red hair) with whom he shares a budding romance and his best friend, U.S. Air Force Col. Jim “Rhodey” Rhodes (Terrence Howard). Everyone thinks he’s lost his mind, though.

The pieces of the first Iron Man lie in the Afghanistan desert, soon to be reassembled by Raza’s insurgents. Meanwhile the suddenly pacifistic Stark rebuilds a new and improved Iron Man suit (amid several funny snafus in the trial stage) , sleek red and yellow and looking like a 1952 Buick Roadmaster. As he pushes ahead with his quest for redemption, Stark uncovers a diabolical plot against him set in motion by a hidden enemy and makes full use of his new gold titanium plated alter-ego.

Despite being worked over by four screenwriters, the story is smart (though the insurgents could use more development), the dialogue features witty lines mostly from Downey, and the CGI is first rate with viewers hard pressed to tell where the effects end and a real suit is brought in.

For all the effects, Favreau thankfully doesn’t forget the man in “Iron Man.” A mark of his indie roots. Though brilliant and rich, Stark is a man with “character defects,” as he himself puts it. His enemies are men, too, corporate raiders and militants living in caves in the Middle East. This might be the most relevant superhero tale we have yet seen.

"Iron Man" is by far the highest profile outing for both Favreau and Downey. Downey, who was once uninsurable, has led a career much like Johnny Depp's--acclaimed for quirky roles in interesting movies, but never breaking through as a draw at the box office. “Iron Man” could be his “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Compared to other recent superhero movies, I’d say “Iron Man” is a notch below “Batman Begins” (the reigning king of comic superhero movies), but on par with the second installments in the “X-Men” and “Spider-Man” franchises. With a few developments hinted at, like Iron Man’s partner, War Machine, and a big bad (he wears ten rings), the pieces have been set for a hopefully stellar sequel in, I believe April 2010.

2008-03-31T22:13:00.002-04:00

Sit Rep

I've been quiet for a while...from writing.

I finished revising my YA fantasy, "The Dance," which I'll sub to WOTF. After I put it through an extensive round of critting. Hopefully, my readers will agree with my assessment that it's a good piece for its kind. :-)

I will soon start revising my 1st qtr 2008 WOTF Semi-Finalist tale "Ra-Gho-Zu" before subbing it to a likely market. I can hardly wait.

I finished rewriting the first of my five script rewrites and am waiting to consult with my script reader, who's been on the road.

I expect that after I finish my fiction, I'll dive back into the other script rewrites.

Some will be tougher than others. :-/

And if I find the time and energy, I will write a review on a TV episode and/or film in the near future.

Later.

2008-03-27T19:36:00.002-04:00

K.D. Wentworth Crit

At last I got my long-awaited crit from SF writer/WOTF judge K.D. Wentworth of my 1st qtr WOTF story, "Ra-Gho-Zu."

She packed a lot of info into one page.

I expect to model my short crits after this one.

My story received consideration as a Finalist, but the second half didn't quite mesh well enough with the first half.

Doh!

I'll rework the story a bit and then shop it around to likely markets.

I'm working now on a fantasy YA story for WOTF, and aiming to make it good as others of its kind go. It's doing better than I expected, especially since I'm not a fan of this genre. But I thought it'd be good to stretch my wings a bit rather than confine myself to favorite territory.

It'd be something if my YA story placed higher in WOTF than my SF story, which is also the pilot for a planned saga of mine. My YA tale may also be my last short story for a while, since I want to get started on novels that I've put off for way too long.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2008-02-24T00:06:00.008-05:00

Stargate Atlantis: "The Kindred" Part 1

Not my favorite storyline
We finally see Kanan--no Kanaan onscreen.

The father of Teyla's unborn baby finally appears.

In "Be All My Sins Remember'd," he was Kanan (the same name as the Tok'ra symbiote Jack O'Neill was blended with in SG-1 Season 6 episode "Abyss"). Now he's Kanaan (a belated last second spelling tweak?)

Tomato. Tomatoe.

Not having met Kanan--er, Kanaan until this episode, he didn't strike me as being particularly memorable or charming. Intellectually, I know he's supposed to be important to Teyla since she reveals that she's known him since childhood and he shares the same ability to detect the Wraith as she does. Emotionally, he wasn't built up for me to connect with him.

Teyla receives dreams of Kanaan (an ability she's never had before), telling her to search for signs of him on the planet Croya. The dreams are so lucid and clear that it feels like an oversight when Kanaan doesn't say where he actually is. I wonder how the dreams would've been if Teyla and Kanaan had walked walked through a marketplace that she vaguely recognized and Kanaan had said something cryptic about how important the planet Croya is?

At the same time, Keller reports to Carter and Team Atlantis that a new illness is spreading througout the Pegasus galaxy that kills 30% of the humans it infects and all the Wraith who feed on them. Keller also knows already that it's a variation on the innoculation developed by the Hoffan people in Season 1 "Poisoning the Well" to make humans toxic to the Wraith.

Teyla goes to Croya, where she finds a man selling Athosian jewelry. She gets him to show her where he found the trinkets, but a dart beams her up on the way to the stargate. A set up.

Meantime, Todd the Wraith sets off a subspace beacon to signal Sheppard to come to a meeting, where they trade info on the Hoffan protein for the location of Michael, the Wraith-Human hybrid, who by process of elimination must be behind the latest attack on the Wraith.

Teyla wakes up on a Wraith ship, where she finds Michael staring at her. He shows her that the feeding orifice on his right hand is gone thanks to genetic engineering and tells her he sent the dreams, posing as Kanaan, has plans for her baby, says he created a new uber race to replace the Wraith by mutating the Athosians, and displays Kanaan, who's a brainwashed Wraith-human hybrid.

With Todd's help, Sheppard and Lorne take their teams to a planet, where Michael may have a base. Caldwell transports them on the Daedalus. After he beams them to the base, a Wraith cruiser jumps out of hyperspace, and he commences to skirmish with just conventional rail gun batteries. Sheppard and Lorne's teams have an average fire fight with some Wraith worshipping humans armed with single shot hand stunners. No contest.

The Wraith cruiser (presumably with Teyla on board) flees into hyperspace when the Daedalus belatedly uses its Asgard beam weapons and Sheppard and Rodney find Beckett in a holding cell.

Beckett is wondering what took them so long, and things cut out at this point to be continued next week.

Lots of telling and infodumping in this episode with no drama.

Kanaan, unseen for 4 years and newly invented this season, has no impact and is a victim rather than an active character.

Beckett is supposedly the real Beckett even though he was killed in Season 3 "Sunday." I'll wait for the explanation on how this is possible.

It was nice to see Beckett again, but I don't feel that he should've been "killed" in the first place.

Carter and Teyla had a small bonding moment when Carter let Teyla go to Croya even though she thought it was a trap, telling Teyla to call her Sam. Moments like this were few and far in between this season. And ultimately irrelevant since Carter was around only part time and will not be a regular character next year.

Compared to other season finales and two-parters, this story leaves me uninvolved and skeptical.

2008-02-23T22:22:00.003-05:00

Stargate Atlantis: "Midway"

Average
Teal'c versus Ronon Smackdown

I hadn't been looking forward to Teal'c and Ronon coming together because I was more focused on Daniel Jackson coming to Atlantis and the Weir-Carter debacle of Season 4.

I'm not necessarily against Teal'c and Ronon meeting, but Teal'c's character doesn't have a dramatic need to come to Atlantis. With SG-1 supposedly disbanded (again), Teal'c's priorities lie with taking care of the Jaffa nation.

Anyhow, Teal'c comes to Atlantis to coach Ronon on handling a xenophobic IOA interview. The two share some fisticuffs, end up in a draw, and then get caught up in a Wraith attempt to take over the Midway Station and infiltrate the SGC. When Teal'c and Ronon follow the first Wraith wave to Earth, Sheppard and Rodney come onto Midway with a few teams of marines and swap the station with Wraith reinforcements a few times before blowing up the station and escaping in a puddle jumper. On Earth, Teal'c and Ronon save the SG-C. Ronon then passes the interview of the IOA stiff who originally wanted to find an excuse to get him out of Atlantis. And Ronon flies back to Atlantis on the Daedalus to pick up Sheppard, Rodney, and a few survivors who were going stir crazy after a couple weeks in the puddle jumper.

On a surface level, this episode was a definite step up from the fillers of the last few weeks, full of superficial action and thrills. But that's just it. I feel this episode has little beyond the surface.

After three years of Teyla faithfully serving Atlantis and Ronon for two (not to mention Teal'c's 10 years on SG-1), there's suddenly one man, Coolidge, who's taking it on himself to review whether nonEarth humans can serve on Atlantis/SGC teams.

When Teal'c and Ronon meet, do they have to fight? What interpersonal conflicts do they have that'd motivate the fight? And when they do, how can they go one hour when full contact matches usually end in a few minutes? On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the highest, why do the Atlantis marines spar with Ronon at a 4, while Ronon revs up to 12?

Teal'c looks trim and his new long hair-style is dashing. But he didn't seem like himself in this episode, particularly when he told Ronon he would "very much" like to have a blaster such as Ronon's. As Master Bra'tac taught, it's not the weapon, but the heart that makes a Jaffa.

Kavanaugh, a recurring scientist character, who was formerly stationed on Atlantis returns to demonstrate that he's not only cowardly, but incompetent. He somehow doesn't know that using the system bypass feature to override the lockouts put in place by the Wraith trigger Midway station's self-destruct.

When the Wraith first come onto the station, Dr. Lee and the rest of the staff do nothing to seal off the control room and send an alert to the SG-C and Atlantis. There are no anti-intruder defenses and hardly any Air Force airmen stationed to resist a hostile take over.

Since the Wraith are capable of jury rigging a Pegasus stargate to access Midway and then override a security lockout of Midway's systems to reach the SG-C, why bother pumping Lee for the password? When did the Wraith learn how to read English? The Wraith commander who took over the station had a not so clever conversation with Sheppard in which he promised to bring Sheppard "a world of hurt." Would a Wraith channel an ECW smack-talking wrestler?

When Sheppard took back the station briefly, why did the Wraith open the control room and how did the Wraith who had Sheppard and his team in a crossfire miss?

The Atlantis marines and Wraith exchanged a lot of weapons fire without worrying about damaging sensitive equipment and causing breaches in the Midway station hull that'd bring on explosive decompression.

When Rodney and Lee decide to vent the atmosphere, the Wraith commander who'd gotten the information on Midway from Todd who'd hacked Rodney's database in Atlantis attacked Sheppard before getting shot and suffocated. What did the Wraith commander (with no name and personality) hope to accomplish? With the oxygen also totally vented while he fought the Wraith, how did Sheppard get himself into a pressure suit that requires the help of at least one other person and several minutes to enter?

It would've been nice to see Carter leading a team onto Midway at Sheppard's side, but that's not in keeping with her impersonation of Weir. It was strange seeing Walter in the SG-C control room without Landry (or SG-1) hovering over his shoulder.

If the Wraith had taken over the SGC, what could they have expected to achieve without the support of a fleet of hive ships in orbit? How would they have held out when the US military realized that the SGC was compromised, sealed it off, and directed a nuclear strike at Cheyenne mountain?

As Teal'c and Ronon swept the base for Wraith, they came across Coolidge, who unlike everyone else in the base was reviving from the Wraith stun wave that knocked everyone out. How? And why did Teal'c and Ronon listen to Coolidge when he demanded to be taken to a radio to contact the US military, which decided to set off a tactical nuclear warhead at the base. What did Coolidge hope to accomplish?

Even though the Earth episodes of Season 4 strike me as SG-1 installments with the Atlantis cast, the Wraith seeking to reach Earth is a legitimate Atlantis storyline. "Midway" struck me as being rushed, though, and in need of more development, providing enough material for two episodes, like the Genii take over of Atlantis in Season 1 "The Storm" and "The Eye."

Additionally, I find the IOA to be a weak and annoying antagonist on the homefront unlike the NID when it was run by Colonel Mayborne, who tried to take over the SGC during the first few seasons to aggressively exploit the Stargate and acquire alien technology at all costs and no scruples. I constantly find myself wondering what the producers find so fascinating about the IOA?

It was good to see fallout from Todd's collaboration with Atlantis earlier this season. With the conclusion of this episode, we know there's at least one faction of Wraith with sensitive information on Atlantis and likely the SGC as well. Until the Midway station is rebuilt, its loss will complicate the movement of personnel and supplies while Atlantis' one ZPM is at less than full capacity.

If one overlooks the superficial characterizations and logic loopholes, then "Midway" is definitely a popcorn blockbuster of an episode.

2008-02-23T19:52:00.003-05:00

Supernatural: "Jus In Bello"

"Series classic"
The stakes ante up...

A couple of Season 3 plot threads begin to come to a head in this episode.

Trailing Bella for her theft of the Colt in "Dream a Little Dream of Me," the brothers Winchester track Bella to her latest hideout. Except it's empty--and Agent Henricksen comes busting in (thanks to a tip from Bella) with backup to finally nab 'em.

As the brothers cool their heels in the local hoosegow waiting for transportation to maximum security prison, over 30 demons come to kill them. After Henricksen is possessed and freed, he becomes a believer in demons and other things that go bump in the night.

It was interesting to see how Henricksen bonded with Dean and Sam, which made his death at the end more tragic and poignant. Henricksen would've been a great ally and convert to the hunter ranks, but now the brothers'll have to get by on their own, like they always have. Thegood thing is the Feds now think they're dead, giving them room to maneuver without pesky law enforcement stiffs trying to arrest them.

As the brothers, Henricksen, and the local cops struggled to stay alive, Dean and Henricksen focused on keeping safe the sheriff's secretary, Nancy. A sweet girl and a virgin.

When Ruby came to help out, she was understandably upset to learn that they'd lost the Colt. But she comes up with a plan, cast a spell to destroy every demon in 1 mile, including herself.

The cost?

Cutting out the heart of a virgin.

Sam considers it (another sign of his slipping to the Dark Side), which bothers Dean to no end. But Dean and Henricksen veto that course, making Ruby leave 'em to their fates and bemoaning that she picked the wrong side in the demon war to support.

Dean strikes on an alternative plan, let the demons into the jail and fight 'em off.

Brilliant?

Somehow it works. The brothers and friends break the demon seals--then reseal them and cast a spell that offs all the demons and saves their hosts. Except for one who got away before Nancy could finish laying down a line of salt.

After Sam and Dean leave, a little girl comes in, looking for them. When Nancy asks her name, she says "Lillith" and casts a bright white light that blots out everything.

Ruby visits Sam and Dean, bringing to their attention a newscast of the jailhouse being blown up with the presumed loss of everyone there. Ruby gives the brothers charms to hide 'em from Lillith and warns they better listen to her next time and be willing to do what it takes to come survive.

"Jus In Bello," acceptable practices while in war, is the perfect title for this episode.

The only quibble I had with this episode was the demon possessing Henricksen's boss (the first one on the scene), Deputy Director Steven Groves. He kept up the FBI director act--until he tried to blow Dean away with a silenced 9 millimeter. Nice play on Dean and Sam playing law enforcement, but why pretend when he had the brothers alone and why not fry 'em with flame from his fingertips, snap their necks with a snap of his fingers, etc.?

I can hardly wait to see what'll come next in the next few episodes. The brothers have to decide how ruthless they have to be in fighting the demon war and Sam may have to consider stepping up to take Lillith for the role of the demon messiah in order to "save" Dean from going to hell.

If Dean does, though, I feel the writers are talented enough to get good mileage out of this storyline and keep it going for a lot of episodes. Maybe all of Season 4?

Here's hoping the CW renews the series for next year.

2008-02-17T20:11:00.007-05:00

Breaking WOTF update:

I got a voicemail today saying I'm actually a Semi-Finalist eligible to get a crit from K.D. Wentworth.

This was a surprise...

I'm looking forward to poring over K.D. Wentworth's thoughts before I fire the story off to Baen's Universe--or Analog. :-)

Hailing frequencies closed.

2008-02-16T16:07:00.011-05:00

WOTF Results

I just got a letter in the mail today telling me that my "Ra-Gho-Zu" short SF fiction story placed as a quarter-finalist in the 1st qtr of the WOTF 2008 contest. My name will be posted in the WOTF blog sooner or later.

They're calling quarter-finalists "Honorable Mentions" now. It's still the same thing. We don't get anything except a credit on a short story/novel cover letter to an editor at the most.

Quarter-finalist in 2006 and a quarter-finalist in 2008 again... Unlike the first time, I also get a certificate (and a footnote mention in the WOTF blog).

I could keep on submitting to WOTF except I have to move beyond short stories and onto novels I need to write. Short story publications don't earn fiction writers very much. Reputations are made with novels, which pay better (even though few novelists earn enough to go without a day job). I will go to plan B now: shopping my story with likely short fiction markets (one at a time since simultaneous subs are frowned on).

Two candidates that stand out to me are Jim Baen's Universe and Analog Science Fiction & Fact.

On with the grind.

2008-01-26T22:35:00.000-05:00

Stargate Atlantis: "Harmony"

"Filler episode"
Rodney finally gets the girl. She just has to grow up.

Overview: Two gorgeous princesses, Mardola and Flora, on a medieval Pegasus galaxy human world sweet talk Sheppard and Rodney into accompanying their preteen sister, Harmony (aka Adria at 7 in SG-1 Season 10 "Flesh and Blood"), on her rite of passage as queen to nearby Ancient ruins.

Sheppard and Rodney must protect Harmony on their journey from a "Beast" and some Genii hired by Mardola, I believe, who doesn't want Harmony to become queen and is after a Genii alliance. Along the way, Harmony develops a crush on Sheppard like pretty much all the other Pegasus women he's run across. She also proposes to him to be her king.

At one point, when Sheppard decides to head back to the castle, Harmony slips off to continue on her own. Sheppard and Rodney go searching post haste. When they find her, she's roasting a bird over a spit. Impressive, but how did the Genii not find her? Since they're closer to the ruins, which the "Beast" doesn't enter according to local lore, Sheppard agrees to push ahead.

Sheppard and Rodney eventually work out that the "Beast" is actually a defensive screen of Ancient microdrones that take out everyone who doesn't have the Ancient gene. Harmony, who has the gene along with Sheppard and Rodney, is able to recharge her pendant, an Ancient data crystal of some sort, as Sheppard and Rodney repair the defensive systems to drive the Genii off. Harmony gushes over Rodney who took her down from a hail of Genii bullets earlier.

Back at the castle, Harmony storms into Mardola's room with some servants, who search her things and find a Genii radio, exposing her as a traitor. At her coronation, Harmony unveils a speedily crafted painting of a heroic-looking Rodney protecting her with Sheppard cringing in the background. Will she propose to Rodney, too?

My reaction to Harmony was conflicted. On the one hand, she was bratty and manipulative. On the other hand, she was also smart, precocious, brave, gritty enough to eat a bird's heart, and a good huntress and woodsman. The things she can do with her little pocket knife. It would've been interesting to see her do 'em. It was also funny the way how she played McKay and made him look like a villain to Sheppard, stealing a food bar from his backpack and giving it to Rodney for Sheppard to catch seemingly red-handed. LOL.

Something that wasn't clear as the episode went along was why Harmony was the would-be queen when she had two older sisters ready to take the throne? Who's ruling in Harmony's stead as she comes of age? And if Team Atlantis has been to Harmony's world before, why is it only now Sheppard and Rodney meet her for the first time?

At one point, Rodney and Sheppard theorize about how the Ancients must have developed drone technology on the planet (very coincidental and convenient), which is why there are people with the Ancient gene who can use the Ancient technology in the castle. What technology? There wasn't any sign of it in the castle scenes.

The pseudo-Arthurian light fantasy dialogue that all aliens on Atlantis and SG-1 speak in (except for Vala and Ronon who talk very Earth-like) was broken by modern-sounding dialogue lines such as:

Harmony (to Sheppard and Rodney): "We can go when the coast is clear."

Mardola (into radio to Genii field commander): "I need an update."

And Harmony's name is pretty hippylike compared to her sisters' monikers. I have to consciously overlook the conceit that the aliens and nonEarth humans on Atlantis and SG-1 speak English. It jars when the storytelling suffers, like it did in this episode. It would've been nice if the producers had SG-1 and Atlantis discover translator technology they can use in offworld contacts.

It also wasn't clear whether the Genii leader Ladon Radim sanctioned the Genii strike force or if they were rogues. What would Harmony's world have gained from allying with the Genii over Atlantis? And just what did Atlantis get from Harmony's world in return for all food, medicine, and help against the Wraith they offered over the last few years?

The Genii in this episode were anonymous and not very competent. In one scene where Rodney and Harmony were without Sheppard, a squad of Genii got the drop on them. The Genii squad leader disarmed Rodney, but rather than step up to pistol whip Rodney and take Harmony, he let Rodney ramble for mercy for a few minutes. During which time, Sheppard maneuvered in the background to take out the squad with one shot.

The unnamed Genii field commander was able to go between the castle to confer with Mardola and the forest search for Harmony without any apparent loss in time.

The Genii have been glaringly absent this season. When we last saw Radim in Season 3 "The Return" Part 1, he was trying to recruit Teyla and Ronon to join him as he was organizing a resistance against the Wraith. It seems that storyline's been forgotten by the Atlantis writers this year.

And there was no mention of why Sheppard and Rodney were offworld without the rest of Team Atlantis. It's just as well. I doubt Rodney can get a lot of stock out of beating Sheppard for the affections of a preteen girl.

This episode encapsulates a lot of the sloppy storytelling that's been plaguing the series. After the first two seasons, I keep expecting more, but the show has been falling short for me in several episodes this year.

I hope the showrunners turn things around before they get worse.

2008-01-24T18:33:00.000-05:00

WHAT AN AGENT DOES FOR YOU
By
MICHELE WALLERSTEIN
A screenplay & novel consultant

All writers know that they want an agent, but few writers know what to expect once they get one.

Agents, generally, are responsible for what’s known as the (3) three S’s of representation. They are: SIGNING, SERVICING and SELLING.
That’s it. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. First of all every Agency is different in its size, which means that the individual agents may have more, or less, personal responsibilities. You must change your expectations if you want to work the system well and in a productive manner.

Defining the 3 S’s is easy. The doing of them is complicated.

1. SIGNING requires a variety of efforts. The agent must research and find the writer he/she wishes to sign. Then they must launch an attack to lure the client. That means getting to them, taking them out to lunches, dinners, drinks, Hollywood parties, screenings and more. It requires a modicum of charm and deceit. The deceit lies in “stealing” a writer from another agency who may have been doing an excellent job. The new agent needs to assure the writer that they will be much better. Signing also requires knowing who all of the hot “newbie” writers are and trying to get them. That means going to screenings of independent film, film festivals, and new writer seminars. It means reading all of the new material that gets some heat. The charm lies in being able to sell a writer on signing a contract with an agency they may not need. As you can imagine, all of the above takes a great deal of time.

2. SERVICING means keeping your current clients happy. Wining and dining them is important. The agent must read all their new material. This includes going over new story ideas, treatments, spec scripts and pitches. Servicing often means listening to client’s personal problems, philosophies, interests etc. It may also include going to their weddings, their kid’s Bar Mitzvahs, confirmations and many other personal occasions. As you can imagine, all of the above takes a great deal of time.

3. SELLING means being able to get a huge amount of information as to what the town wants to buy at any particular moment. This requires great personal relationships with a large number of producers, studio executives, story editors, television show runners, assistants and development executives. Agents need to have good reputations with these people so that their material gets read quickly and with an open mind. Agents have to know how to close a deal, get the material to the right people, get buzz going around town about a new spec script and often they must have the ability to package a project with the right director, star and producer. Packaging in and of itself is very complex. As you can imagine, all of the above takes a great deal of time.

Once you understand the basic work of your agent you also need to know the differences between large and small agencies. Let’s start with the larger agencies. ICM, William Morris, APA, etc., are big and have many agents, employees, department heads, a legal department, an accounting department, various talent departments such as actors, music, literary, and more. All of this seems well and good until you realize that this means that your agent must go to endless meetings and be subject to the pressures of inside competition as well as outside competition. They are also under the pressure of doing what they are told by their department heads and the heads of the agency itself. However, they do have those helpful legal and accounting departments to work with them on negotiating deals and reviewing tedious contracts.

The smaller agencies sometimes don’t have the help of legal and accounting departments, but they do have a certain amount of freedom and time to better service their clients with more personally and with more thought. They are often people with more entrepreneurial spirits and creative bents.

Whereas in a large agency the client is more likely to speak to the assistants on a regular basis, in the smaller agencies you will be more apt to have a real relationship with your agent.

Certainly there are more differences within different agency structures, and I will deal with those in future articles. I hope this gives you the basics of what to expect and the knowledge of what your agent is doing when he/she is not on the phone with you.

Michele Wallerstein is a novel and screenplay “doctor” who was formerly an agent for writers, producers and directors in Hollywood. She was Executive Vice-President of Women In Film, is a member of the Academy Of Television Arts and Sciences, serves as a guest speaker at numerous seminars and Film Festivals and writes monthly articles on The Business Of Writing for various ezines.

For her consulting services and/or questions Michele can be reached at:
email: novelconsult@sbcglobal.net
Web site: Novelconsultant.com

2008-01-23T17:35:00.000-05:00

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: "The Turk"

"Average"
Is the series stretching thin?

This episode started on an interesting note with Sarah seeing the scientists of the US Manhattan project developing the A bomb, shooting them, and then seeing them morph into Terminators with weapons that they aim at her.

Sarah wakes up and sends John and Cameron off to school, while she begins sussing out other people who could've carried on Dyson's work after he died.

The main stories in this episode were: Sarah investigating a former intern of Dyson's, Andy Goode, for signs of whether his homemade AI, The Turk, had the capacity to become sentient, John and Cameron finding their niches in their unnamed high school, Cromartie coopting a molecular biologist into growing synthetic skin on his metal exoskeleton, and Agent Ellison bringing up the rear as he investigates the murders of the unknown Resistance team.

I felt that Sarah's time with Andy was filled with lots of good moral angst as she decided whether to kill Andy or not in order to stop Skynet's development. Along the way, she was being trailed by an unknown survivor of the Resistance cell, who is waiting for some unknown reason to make contact. It was a good twist resolution to see Sarah set Andy's home on fire, hopefully destroying the Turk, in place of putting a bullet in Andy's forehead.

It was puzzling to see Cameron lose the human touch she had in the pilot and channel a semi-lobotomized River Tam from Serenity instead. It would've been interesting to see what classmate relationships Cameron and John could've developed, but it didn't happen. Instead things focused on a girl whom River--er, Cameron talked to in a bathroom, who was upset over a hallway painting of a door with the letters "IDAN." The girl was so upset she jumped off the roof of the school gym. Without knowing her or the context, getting involved with her death was a bit tough. John tried to climb up the building to talk her down, but Cameron kept him rooted to help keep their low profile. It was nice seeing John begin to want to take action to help others, but I wondered what the first day of school established? I expect John and Cameron will be too busy with Cromartie and the other Terminators to get caught up in on-school dramas, though.

Cromartie steals several units of plasma from a hospital, goes to the apartment of a molecular biologist, and writes up a complex biochemical equation on the scientist's wall. It's apparently for skin generation. At the end, Cromartie sits up in the scientist's bathtub, which is full of blood, and he's swathed with new skin. The scientist cuts open the eye socket linings, letting Cromartie show us his bright red eyes. Thing is, we were shown an earlier scene in which Ellison and the police arrive at the scientist's apartment to find a guy (the scientist?) with his eyes removed. Was the bathtub scene a flashback? Also, why should Cromartie care so much about maintaining cover as a human? I'd think that his overriding imperative would be to continue seeking out John--and inform Skynet that John has jumped to 2007 to bring more Terminators into the hunt.

We see Agent Ellison playing catch up to Sarah and company. The police wonder why he's so interested in what they think is a drug bust gone bad. Ellison learns that one of the dead Resistance fighters has finger prints that match up with a 4-year-old boy living in Ohio. Interesting. It seems to me that Ellison is being set up into becoming a believer and ally. I wonder if it'll matter down the road?

Charlie was completely absent this time around. I wonder what role, if any he'll play in future episodes? I still don't see the purpose he played when John visited him in his apartment in "Gnothi Seauton."

Lots of dangling threads in this episode which I'm beginning to suspect aren't getting woven into a smooth tapestry.

2008-01-19T20:09:00.000-05:00

Moonlight: "The Mortal Cure"

"Above average"
A premature season finale... A bit on the open-ended side.

I understand "The Mortal Cure" wasn't meant to be the season finale. That said, I thought it could've been better when I consider the last few episodes that'd come earlier.

This episode was centered around Mick getting the "cure" and getting tangled up in the trouble Coraline got herself into with Lance, a powerful ancient vampire...and her "brother." The B-storyline of Beth grieving over Josh, learning that he was going to propose to her, and being angry at Mick for refusing to "turn" Josh wasn't complementary, but a distraction.

I felt that Beth's part could've been reduced to her receiving condolences for Josh, learning about the ring he was prepping for her, and blowing Mick off at the beginning and then meeting Mick at Josh's funeral when he got the cure towards the end. The rest of the episode could've been devoted to Mick and Coraline to better effect.

Anyhow, after Beth gives him the cold shoulder, Mick goes to his office, where he picks up a scent...

The older a vamp gets, the more rank? (if that's the right word) the vamp becomes. New "Moonlight" worldbuilding detail. Ergo Coraline and Josef must be musky. Mick's apartment is rank.

A tall, cocky-looking guy with a black eye stands on Mick's balcony, giving him a lordly smile. A thickset linebacker type stands at the tall guy's back like he's "an indentured servant." The tall guy proceeds to demonstrate that he knows everything about Mick, including the fact that Mick was sired by Coraline, who he wants.

Mick says he doesn't know where she is, and the tall guy and his manservant go leaping off the balcony into the night a la Spiderman, but without the webslinging. Nice.

Mick goes to Josef, who says the tall guy is Lance, an ancient vamp who makes Josef seem like a "pauper." Lance never leaves Europe, but since he has, Coraline must've done something major to draw him to LA. Josef warns Mick to stay out of things and look out for himself. Naturally, Mick doesn't take Josef's advice.

Mick looks through hospital video footage during the time of Coraline's disappearance to see that she was carted out by a vamp friend of hers, Cynthia. With the help of his vamp hacker friend, Logan, Mick tracks Cynthia to a LA hotel. Cynthia says Coraline took off for Europe. Mick doesn't believe her, he leaves, and she abruptly drops out. I wondered why she was brought into the episode in the first place?

Somehow, Mick tracks Coraline to a warehouse where she's running experiments on a "compound" with plants and monkeys. Lance comes busting in alone, dispatches Coraline's vamp lab tech, and is about to take her away with him when Mick intervenes--

And gets his butt handed to him.

Coraline runs off, then so does Lance. Mick stays to put out a lab fire and calls the cleaner squad in. The head cleaner, a lady vamp named Celeste, lets slip that the warehouse is a hot spot for her crew--and that Mick doesn't need a catastrophe to call her up. Mick barely gives her a nod and heads off. What purpose did Celeste's crush on Mick and knowing that she's been coming to the warehouse serve?

Mick finds Beth at his apartment, who wants to lean on his shoulder over Josh. Coraline then shows up, and Beth leaves. Coraline then reveals that King Louis, and several members of the French court before the French Revolution were vamps, making the French Revolution out to be a vampire purge. Coraline also infodumps on Lance being one of "seven brothers" among the vampire aristocracy, who used the "cure" to temporarily become human and avoid the guillotine. Interesting reinterpretation of history, but I'm on the fence about Louis himself being a vamp.

Beth tells Mick that she simply wanted to know what it was like to "live again" so that she could know love with him and give back a little bit of what she took from him. This sounds like quite a character struggle. Too bad we didn't see this on the series (and how she survived being burned alive). She cuts Mick's arm, dabs the "cure" (a reddish paste), and the wound stays unhealed.

As the two go off to hide, Mick goes on about how he starts to feel warm and human again. Which is when Lance reappears. With his manservant this time. (Why wasn't the bodyguard at the warehouse, too?)

Mick starts to go paranoid on Coraline, saying she stripped him of his powers so Lance could take him down. But Lance points out he can take Mick down any day of the week at his vampire best, and it's simply not about Mick.

Fisticuffs commence, and Mick gets tossed around like a rag doll. He does a good job staking the bodyguard, though. Coraline holds up for a little while against Lance. But when Mick bats Lance in the back with a pipe (why not take the baddie's head off?), Lance just shrugs it off and tosses Mick into the back window of a nearby car.

As Lance advances on Mick, who lies gasping on the pavement, to apply the final coup de grace, Coraline offers to go quietly with Lance and give him all the compound she stole from him. Lance accepts, but not before telling Coraline she's in for a world of punishment at the hands of "him," their sire no doubt. Somehow, Mick realizes that Coraline is one of the vamp aristocrat siblings. Lance stakes Coraline, tells Mick "Welcome to the family," and takes off with Coraline.

Mick staggers home, puts some bandages on, eats a couple loads of Chinese delivery, and sleeps on a couch for the first time in years.

He shows up at Josh's funeral, where Beth realizes that he's human again. But only temporarily. We see that Beth is wearing Josh's grandmother's ring even though she'd said earlier that she wasn't sure whether she'd have accepted Josh's proposal.

Mick and Beth give each other searching looks at the priest orates on how life is finite and we have to make the best of the time we have. But where will these two go considering that Mick being a vampire is their stumbling block and his "cure" is temporary?

Some interesting elements and issues were raised here, but not focused on. No doubt they'll be developed when the WGA finally gets its act together and works out a deal that'll end the writers strike.

In addition to the other nits I noted, I thought we could've seen Josef come to give Mick support--and get beaten down alongside with him to show what a good friend he is. After all he owes Mick for helping him out with the ex-military hitman in "Sleeping Beauty." And with Josef coming out to face Lance, we could've gotten to see some of the tensions between "modern" vamps and the more "ancient" ones. Moonlight is apparently going with the implication that older vampires are more powerful than newer ones like in Forever Knight and Buffy/Angel. I'm fine with that.

This episode wasn't bad, but I felt it could've been better.

2008-01-19T18:41:00.000-05:00

Stargate Atlantis: "Quarantine"

"They did this one already"
A "computer goes berserk" episode... It's been done better on Trek.

A computer medical quarantine program, either an Atlantean one or something written by Rodney, activates out of the blue and locks people into different parts of the city: Rodney and Katie in a bio lab, Carter and Zelenka in an elevator/transporter, Ronon and Keller in sickbay, and Sheppard and Teyla in Rodney's computer lab. The self-destruct sequence and a distress beacon that can alert the Wraith are activated.

Needless to say, Team Atlantis manages to save the city and shut down the beacon to keep the Wraith and Pegasus galaxy at large from learning Atlantis' new location. It's Zelenka rather than the usual hero Sheppard, who shuts down the power to the computer system to save the day.

The Atlantis producers have said they wanted to avoid reusing old plots, but they've already done it a few times this season and this week's installment was another retread. The premise of an old program coming out of nowhere to take control and wreak havoc is one of SF TV's overused standard plots. At least two others I can think of are: Trek TNG Season 5 episode "Disaster" and Trek DS9 Season 3 episode "Civil Defense."

"Quarantine" by comparison to those episodes strikes me as less dramatic. One tech bug I wasn't certain on was how the city's computer system shut down the Atlantis expedition's wireless communications, which I believe is Earth-based technology.

I will pass on a plot recap detailing the various situations. The main thing that went on in this installment was relationships: the likely start of a couple (Ronon and Keller), the ending of another (Rodney and Katie), a nonevent (Sheppard and Teyla), and a crush that'll likely go nowhere (Zelenka on Carter).

I'm not necessarily against Ronon and Keller coming together, but I feel that there could've been a lot more setup over several episodes to this relationship to help build up fan investment as in the case of Kira and Odo on DS9. I don't see at this point what those two have in the way of chemistry. For example, Ronon makes Keller feel safe and Keller makes Ronon feel like smiling for the first time in years because of a quirky sense of humor...

Ronon simply sniffs her hair, then the two lean in for a kiss as power cuts out, then comes back on line, and sickbay unseals as the city's computer system reboots.

Rodney goes through a major panic attack when he's locked into the botany lab with Katie just before he proposes to her. Katie finds the ring Rodney was going to give her and is thrilled, but Rodney is too preoccupied with predicting they'll both die. Needless to say, Katie realizes Rodney isn't marriage material and Rodney says it aloud at the end when the two wordlessly break off their relationship. Unfortunate. It seemed to me that Rodney was overreacting at the behest of the writer.

Sheppard and Teyla talk a little bit about how he came down hard on her when she finally came clean about being pregnant. Is Sheppard jealous? I'm not sure. He doesn't seem to be either. The writers don't seem to be clear on this either. A funny bit was Sheppard worrying about Teyla going into premature labor, seeing her react when the baby kicks, then climbing out of the lab to reach the control room just four stories up the spire they're trapped in. There was a tense moment when it looked like Sheppard would fall, but it was just a moment. This episode needed more.

Zelenka gave Carter a self conscious look in the elevator when she took off her jacket because of the apparently rising temperature. Is the elevator air tight and overheating from carbon dioxide buildup? Is Atlantis located on a humid ocean? Something else? We learn that Zelenka has pet pigeons (on Earth?), which contributes what?

For the main storyline of Season 4, would it have been a bad thing for the Wraith and the rest of the Pegasus galaxy to learn where Atlantis was roosting? With Carter having been absent during episodes where more major things happen, it was dissatisfying to have her appear in a filler episode where nothing really happened.

Season 4 of Atlantis is really striking me as hit or miss and in need of a direction with the premature demise of the Pegasus Replicators.

2008-01-14T23:35:00.000-05:00

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: "Gnothi Seauton"

"Character Development"
Quieter than the pilot, but a solid series arc setup for all that.

Being used to the breakneck speed of the flicks and the series pilot, I had to dial down my internal clock in order to stay with the pace of "Gnothi Seauton" ("Know Thyself" in ancient Greek).

I like the way how the title was used to reinforce this episode's theme, adding multiple layers to the story.

The central problem this go-around for Sarah and company is getting new IDs for themselves. We find Sarah and John "time-lagged" in a home they're likely squatting in. Looks like John's cobbling together a portable hacker computer interface.

Cool.

John's going stir crazy from being cooped up for 3 days, though. He wants his new ID already. Sarah tells him to be patient when Cameron walks into the living room and asks about new IDs. LOL.

John suggests Sarah track down Enrique, the "best fake paper guy ten years ago." Cameron lets slip that future John sent better ones into the past.

In no time flat, Sarah has Cameron taking her to a safe house manned by resistance fighters from the future with weapons, money, fake IDs, etc. Only when the ladies show up, they find some guys riddled with bullets. Sarah and Cameron set to examining the poor stiffs, but one stops playing possum and tosses Cameron around like a rag doll. This episode's Terminator.

The baddie's logic circuits decide on a tactical withdrawal to assess the situation, so he sets to running. Cameron gives chase and Sarah follows on a motorcycle which she gets from a guy after waving a 9 mil semiautomatic.

Somehow Sarah finds the Terminator and sends her motorcycle skidding his way to take him down. Just as Cameron comes to finish the Terminator off, she gets rammed by a car. When it brakes to a halt, Cameron tells a yuppie family to "Please remain calm," pulls her head out of the windshield, and climbs off the hood and runs off like she's right as rain.

When Sarah and Cameron head back home, Sarah asks why they had to jump since she could've used the last 7 years to get John ready. Cameron says it didn't happen when she died two years earlier from cancer. Interesting.

Sarah and Cameron then go to Enrique, who's happy to see Sarah alive again, but has retired. He points them to his nephew, Carlos who's very good, but not "a true believer."

Carlos is willing to offer first class IDs--for 20 grand. Sarah gasps at the nevvy's extortion and keeps Cameron from knocking off a cop, who's trying to figure out if she's a new drug running gang banger.

Meantime, John steps out to explore 2007 LA. He wanders into a computer store, where he discovers the internet, looks himself up, and finds a listing of Charlie, Sarah's fiance. John goes to Charlie's home to....I don't know what. There he runs into Charlie, applies a joint lock when Charlie gets too close, and runs off.

And a roadside worker who found the head of the Terminator from the pilot, Cromartie, deposits it in his flat, where its eye lights flash back on. Its body then busts out of a scrap pile in a junkyard and takes out a yard worker when he comes to investigate.

When we get back to Sarah, she decides to go back to the safe house to see if they can find money or anything else they can use. John joins her and Cameron this time around.

When they see a poster of a kitten hanging on the wall, they deduce something's off, rip the poster off, and find a safe. I couldn't help but wonder why the LAPD didn't notice the poster, too, or why the Terminator from earlier didn't use IR or something to notice the safe in the wall?

Anyhow, Cameron sets out to rip the safe open. Except she's short-circuited by a live current and knocked out for 2 minutes to reboot. John opens the safe and Sarah empties. They have to hurry since the Terminator is downstairs tracking for survivors. Sarah shoves Cameron out a window onto a waiting car and ushers John out just as the Terminator walks in. Seeing nothing, the cyborg heads off to logically find another hideout.

The road worker who found Cromartie's head is trying to wind down to TV and beer when a guy with a motor cycle helmet walks in. The worker raises the visor, sees a head attached to a robot chest, and gets dispatched. The "guy" picks up Cromartie's head.

Sarah and Cameron get the IDs from Carlos, who raps with his hermanos in espanol. We then find Sarah back in Enrique's apartment with a gun to his head. She says she picked up from the nevvy that Enrique is a "rat." Will he sell her and John out? Enrique pleads very eloquently that he would never do such a thing when Cameron pumps a few rounds into him.

Cameron points out that she did what Sarah knew she had to do, but couldn't. Sarah shoots back that she didn't know what she would've done and that Cameron wasted Enrique for "possibly lying."

When Agent Ellison comes to investigate the scene, he plays a phone recording by Enrique who promises to give him some very interesting information.

John and Cameron go to enroll in the local high school. And as Sarah goes in for a CAT scan in the oncology department of a local hospital, she winds things up with a monologue on how we have to know ourselves since we're all we have in a world that's going to go boom.

This ep didn't have the intensity level of the pilot, but it did lay down the situation and set things up for Sarah, John, and Cameron as they gain their bearings in 2007.

I'm hopeful of seeing a big payoff in the episodes to come.

2008-01-13T23:16:00.000-05:00

Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles: "Pilot"

"Series Pilot"
What a beginning! With a mega ending too.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this TV installment of the Terminator franchise, but this pilot rocked.

It starts off with a dream sequence in which Sarah picks up John at school to go on the run except cops nab 'em. Then a wooden-looking big guy comes along and blows most everyone away--including John.

I figured then something was off.

The next clue was when a mushroom cloud goes off behind the school, revealing the big guy as a Terminator, who grabs Sarah by the throat--

And she wakes up in bed with her fiance in 1999. It's obvious that she cares for the guy, which is why she cuts out on him when he leaves for work. She can't stay in one place too long and can't get close to anyone with robots from the future after John, humanity's future leader.

She tells John to get ready in half an hour. Pack one bag plus the guns. And she'll make pancakes. LOL. In an incongrous, serious kind of way.

Sarah's jilted fiance goes to the local cops to seek help in locating her. FBI Agent James Ellison shows up to learn what he knows about Sarah. Ellison gives the fiance (and us the viewers) the low down on how Sarah broke out of a mental institution to level a high end computer R&D lab and supposedly kill a top computer scientist, Miles Dyson.

Sarah and John relocate to a "hick town" in New Mexico. John's feeling out of place in school when a hot girl, Cameron, strikes up a conversation and basically insinuates herself in his good graces. Reluctantly, John parts company with her to report home to Sarah like a good boy.
Agent Ellison shows up in town fishing for Sarah.

The next day, John tells Cameron a little about himself (without specifics) in chem class. A wooden-looking guy comes in, saying he's the sub. We know who he is and he proves it as he takes attendance, hacking a gash in his leg as he works his way to John. He pulls a 9 mil out and starts blazing away at John.

Cameron takes a few hits, though, letting John dive out a window. Motor servos exposed and grinding in his leg, the Terminator says "Class dismissed" and busts out of the room on John's trail. Didn't think this AI would care about these kinds of niceties.

He has John in his sights, pauses a hair too long for dramatic reasons, then gets railroaded by Cameron, driving a 4X4. When John stares at her, she says "Come with me if you want to live."

John gets in and takes in stride rather well that Cameron, with several gunshot hits in her body, is apparently another "good" Terminator sent to protect him.

At the local diner, Sarah cuts out the second the local news reports gunfire at the high school. She shows up to find John when the wooden Terminator somehow sneaks up on her, takes her prisoner, and lures John to the house with a flawless impersonation of her voice.

The Terminator carries Sarah home over his shoulder and props her in a chair. A figure with his jacket hood up comes in, calling for Sarah in John's voice. The Terminator calls out to with Sarah's voice and pumps a few rounds into him. Except it's Cameron again. The two smash the house between 'em and shotgun blasts from Sarah, who grabs a holdout rifle from a hidey hole in a wall. I can't help but wonder why Sarah doesn't load up on grenade launchers and other heavier ordnance considering her attackers're robots constructed from highly refined metal alloys?

Sarah and John bug out in their 4X4. Cameron temporarily short circuits the big Terminator with a power line, then jumps into the back of their truck and climbs in the cab.

Sarah takes Cameron in stride, and they hole up to plan their next move and get supplies. John and us notice how humanlike Cameron is. Apparently she's been equipped with advanced behavioral subroutines in 2027--to provide John with some pleasant company? I'll be curious to see where this goes.

John then tells Sarah that he's not the future savior of mankind and that he can't keep running. She has to try to alter the future to make things safe for him. Sarah agrees and changes her mind from crossing the border into Mexico to visit Dyson's widow in LA.

After Sarah convinces her she didn't kill Miles and Cameron lights up the blue LEDs in her eyes, the widow says all the research on Skynet was destroyed as far as she knows. No joy there. And the Terminator tracks John down again.

Sarah and company drive away and blow him up, but not before she gets a bullet in the shoulder. When she wakes up after a patch job by Cameron, they all head for a bank where Cameron has a safety deposit box reserved since 1963.

Cameron relieves a 60-year-old security guard of his revolver and gets a teller to fork over the deposit box keys and lock 'em all in the bank vault.

I found myself wondering what Cameron's exit strategy was as the police made their inevitable appearance outside. Under Cameron's direction, John and Sarah open boxes filled with the pieces of an energy weapon. Cameron lets slip that an engineer went back to 1963 to build the vault and leave them certain resources should the need arise.

Nice.

After Cameron sets an isotope solution charging to red and gives the weapon to Sarah, she unseals a few more boxes and some beyond cutting edge computer panels extend into view. The controls for a time machine.

Looking a bit battered, the Terminator shows up, ignores the police who stare dumbfounded, and tears the vault door down.

Cameron sets the temporal coordinates as the Terminator approaches. Sarah blows him away just before they all vanish in a sphere of temporal energy.

The sphere reappears in a highway that stops evening traffic, depositing John, Sarah, and Cameron sans clothing. Drivers gawk and catch them on live video with camera phones.

A highway construction sign flashes "2007" as Cameron stops a car with guys who want to show her a good time. She thumps their heads and gets them to volunteer their clothes.

We fade out with Sarah and company poised to seek out Skynet before it's created and destroy it.

I can hardly wait to see what happens. It looks like the initial 12 episode order was complete.

This pilot was filled with nods to the films that all savvy fans can't not fail to notice. The ending went in an unexpected direction, which is always good. Hopefully, things won't tank after this pilot, like they did for "Bionic Woman."

2008-01-13T00:42:00.000-05:00

Moonlight: "Love Lasts Forever"

"Series Classic"
Josh-heavy installment. The show just keeps getting better.

I'm impressed with how the series producers are taking a familiar concept to a good place. Too bad the bloody writers strike is keeping production on new episodes from going ahead.

Just one more left after this episode.

Speaking of which, "Love Lasts Forever" opens with Josh pressing Chemma Tejada, an El Salvadoran drug lord, to either help bring in some Latin-American drug dealers in the US or face a grand jury.

Tejada tells Josh to do what he has to do and be ready for "a miserable future." Tejada took out the wife of the last prosecutor who went after him back in El Salvador. I guess the guys from the Colombian Medellin cartel don't have anything on Tejada. Josh's prospects aren't looking bright.

Mick and Beth are in her apartment kibitzing over a blood sample he got from Coraline before she vanished. They decide on a private lab when Josh shows up to warn Beth about Tejada. He also signs Mick up for her protection detail.

Some goons in mask beat on Josh in a parking lot as he goes from his office to his car. When they have him curled up on the ground, they leave a picture of Beth by his face and warn they'll see her next if he doesn't back off of Tejada.

Josh hightails it back to Beth to tell her that he's recusing himself from the case to save her. Beth then goes noble and selfless, saying how her safety doesn't matter against the need to put Tejada behind bars. Josh muses how he'd forgotten about how cute she was when she crusaded. A spark's rekindled, they kiss, and...spend the night together.

Tejada is holding his daughter's quinceanera (15th birthday party), a Latin-American sweet sixteen gala. As they dance, he tells his daughter nothing's too good for her. Too bad he's a ruthless thug. Josh crashes the party with Lt. Davis and a few squads of cops. Josh says Tejada shouldn't have made things personal. Tejada tells Josh he doesn't have much time left. Looking like bullyboys, the cops haul Tejada from his daughter's party. Ironic.

Josh goes ahead with pressing charges and gets a judge to set a bail of $5 million dollars.

Meantime, Nick and Beth're getting the low down on Coraline's blood, which is...normal.

Aside from the fact that it's like a child's sample, being free of toxins and free radicals that adults inevitably gather (unless they eat well). And the sample is A-negative, extremely rare. As in less than 15% of Americans rare. It's also Beth's blood type. Outside the clinic, Mick reveals that children's blood is the best for vamps, especially if it's the same type as the vamp's original blood. I'm speculating here, but I won't be shocked if Beth turns out to be a descendant of Coraline's. Another reason Coraline singled her out as a potential vamp daughter?

Mick comes up short when he hears a high-powered automatic rifle being assembled and loaded. Supersonic vamp hearing is so handy. A sniper targets Beth in the head with a laser scope and fires--

Nick drags her down at the last millisecond, then dodges superquick toward Tejada's goons, who bug out. Nick goes back to Beth, who only has a few scratches. She worries when she sees he has blood on his chest. It's not his blood. It's Coraline's. Damn.

The vial's crushed. But Mick and Beth have more pressing concerns right now.

At Beth's apartment, Josh makes sure Beth is OK and that her police escort has been suitably beefed up. He and Mick have a nice bonding moment over how they want to keep Beth safe.

Josh steps out to his car, where Tejada's thugs grab him and stuff him into their car's trunk. Pretty blatant. I would've nabbed him out of sight of Beth's police detail. Nick and Beth jump into her car and go chasing after 'em. But they're out of sight. So Nick calls a hacker friend (human?) to triangulate on the GPS locater in Josh's cell, which Beth calls. As she assures Josh, who's gagged, that she'll find him, Nick's hacker friend triangulates the return signal in a remote corner of Griffith Park somewhere near the observatory. Nick and Beth peel rubber and call the police to meet 'em.

Tejada's thugs pause in the park as they wait for a park ranger to drive away. They're just about to bump Josh off when Nick and Beth come barrelling. Nick shrugs off a few hits and takes the thugs down, while Beth keeps her head to the ground.

They open the car trunk and are about to get Josh out when a thug revives, gets a spare gun, and pumps a few rounds into Josh.

Nick knocks him out, gets Beth to call an ambulance, then does first aid on Nick, revealing he was a medic in WW II. In a sequence worthy of "House" and "Grey's Anatomy," Nick puts pressure on a belly wound, uses a neck tie as a tourniquet to bind Josh's leg, and cauterizes a severed artery on Josh's neck with a car cigarette lighter.

But Nick senses that Josh's leg wound is still bleeding, so he bums Beth's necklace to tie an artery off. But Josh goes unconscious and Nick hears his heart stop. He and Beth're doing CPR when Davis and the cops show up. Late.

The ambulance shows up even later. The medics put paddles to Josh, but no joy. As the cops cuff Tejada's thugs and the medics look 'em over, Beth begs Mick to "turn" Josh.

Mick can't, and Josh is gone. Beth glares daggers at Mick.

At the police station, Davis gives up trying to pump Tejada's goons for their jefe's whereabouts. With his back to Davis, Mick turns vamp, and asks the goon where Tejada is.

The goon freaks out and tells the "diablo" where to go to a bar. Mick sends Davis off on a wild goose chase and goes to the bar.

Nick himself monologues on how things go the same in every bar fight, like when the barkeep pops up with a gun in hand. He goes vamp, beats down the patrons, and gets Tejada's location in the oficina, where Mick finishes him off. We only get to see Mick start to bleed him dry.

Mick shows up at Beth's apartment to let her know Tejada's been taken cared of. He tells her he couldn't inflict the curse of vampirism on Josh (not to mention reveal his secret in front of the cops and medics).

When Beth asks why he keeps "living," Nick says to himself it's because of her. Aloud, he mumbles, "I don't know." She then asks if Mick would let her die, and Nick says "Yes."

Things don't end on the best note here.

Which is perfect.

How can one not feel for Nick and Beth?

Once the strike ends and the second half of season 1 (the first half of season 2 more like) kicks off, I do wonder how things can keep going at this pitch? I totally understand why Josh had to die, but there were some interesting possibilities here. If Josh had lived, it would've made things even more interesting for Nick and Beth.

And if Nick had "turned" Josh, we would've gotten to see Beth torn between two vamps--and gotten a whole new storyline with Josh getting used to being a vamp and Nick bringing him into the fold as his sire and maybe seeing those two come to blows over Beth.

I can hardly wait for the season finale.

If only it weren't for the bloody writers strike. Too bad no one can lock the negotiators for both sides in a room and keep 'em there on bread and water till they stop acting like kids holding their breaths and make a reasonable deal.

2008-01-12T20:37:00.001-05:00

Stargate Atlantis: "Spoils of War"

"Revealing"
The best Wraith episode in a long while. Maybe the best yet.

Carter is absent. Again. Nor is she even mentioned. And Team Atlantis got on just fine without her. It amazes me how the Atlantis producers have developed a Jekyl and Hyde tendency to mix in questionable character, plot, and other creative faux pas into the show. IMHO, the series has been better in the past and it would be stellar now if it weren't for the producers' constant tinkering. This is the episode I've liked the most since "The Seer." This episode's focus is much stronger than "This Mortal Coil" and "Be All My Sins Remember'd." One reason why I was dissatisfied with those two eps was because I felt they tried to juggle too many subplots at the same time. To use a hypothetical example, how satisfying would "Siege" Parts 2 & 3 have been if they'd been compressed into one episode?

Regarding "Spoils of War," we get to see what happened to Sheppard's Wraith "friend" after the Wraith went their separate way following the destruction of the Pegasus Replicator homeworld. We focus on Sheppard's Wraith "friend," who orders darts from his ship to go zipping about the Replicator city as the Replicator blob reaches critical mass. He keeps his ship in orbit till the last moment when the darts return and the Replicator homeworld goes boom. A Wraith then presents him with a ZPM.

Cool.

In Atlantis after the battle, Rodney points out to Sheppard that the locater beacon they'd implanted into his "friend" a few episodes back is active in an isolated region of the galaxy. But it's broadcasting well away from any Wraith activity, which is stirring up now that the Pegasus Replicators (sans Weir's secret faction) are kaput. Sheppard goes "hmmm," then decides to check it out see what's up with his "friend," who he nicknames "Todd" after an old friend. This moniker will probably stick when and if this particular Wraith resurfaces. I'm on the fence about it m'self.

As Sheppard's and Lorne's teams equip for their mission in the armory, Teyla shows up and tells Sheppard she wants to get back on the active duty roster. Shep tells her "No" and he and his people take a puddle jumper out to the location of Todd's beacon.

Apparently, the Daedalus and Apollo are in the Milky Way or zooming in between galaxies. I felt this would've been a good opportunity for more development of either Caldwell or Ellis, but it didn't happen.

Anyhow, Sheppard and the rest track the beacon's signal to a drifting Wraith hive vessel. They board and find Wraith bodies sucked dry and lots of battle damage. On the bridge, they find the beacon--without Todd attached to it. Apparently, other Wraith have jumped Todd's ship and taken him away for unknown nefarious reasons.

Rodney does some repairs. And Ronon (apparently intent on doing something about his lament in Season 2 "First Strike" on not being able to contribute in science/high tech situations) fiddles with some bioorganic panels. Without knowing how, he reactivates some virtual displays that flash on in midair. After Rodney's spate of surprise peters out, he starts to read the status readouts (without a translator program?) to see how spaceworthy their new hive ship is.

Sheppard flies back to Atlantis to pick up Teyla to help fly the hive ship. When she steps onto the bridge, she's magically able to activate and use the systems to her heart's content like what Sheppard does with Atlantean tech. Thanks to her pregnancy? She wasn't able to interface so easily before. I also can't help but wonder how she can plot courses through the Pegasus galaxy without formal flight school training in subjects like navigation and piloting?

Rodney comes up dancing with glee over some data he uncovered about a "facility" that was instrumental in helping the Wraith win the war against the Atlanteans. Sheppard and gang decide to go check it out. Hiding behind the moon of a Class M world, they find a hive vessel in orbit over the "facility." Teyla stays behind against her protests on the hive ship with Lorne and his team. Sheppard takes Rodney and Ronon with him down to the facility on the planet.

They pass a Queen, who's hibernating in a web harness of some sort. Then witness a larval adult Wraith warrior being taken out of its sac. Appropriately freaked out, they press ahead. At this point, I'm theorizing that this is a breeding facility, which is all well and good. But it was established in Season 2 episode "Instinct" that the Wraith start out as children.

Meantime, an apparent Wraith commander with guards revives the Queen. He says that everything's gone well with the latest brood of warriors. When the Queen orders her commander to bring their "prisoner," he says they may need to keep the "prisoner" around longer for his knowledge of the facility's systems. When the Queen asks if he's ready to offer himself as food in the "prisoner"'s place, he orders the guards to go get him. We find Todd in a holding cell. When the guards unseal the cell to fetch him, they get taken out by Sheppard and gang. Talk about good timing. Todd leads Team Atlantis to where the ZPMs are powering up the facility. They pass a chamber stuffed to the gills with thousands of maturing Wraith. Rodney rightly points out that a single Queen can't possibly provide enough genetic material for so many Wraith.

Todd says she can for those who serve as cloning templates. Wicked awesome. So that's how the Wraith got the numbers, which helped them win the war against the Atlanteans all those millenia ago. So how did they outproduce the Ancients in warships and other military materiel?

When Sheppard gives Todd an accusing look, Todd says he'd planned to create an army to wipe out the other hives except a member of his crew betrayed him. Nice twist but what motivated this betrayal? It would've been nice if the commander was also the Wraith who betrayed Todd. And I believe Todd, too. Apparently, being a prisoner of the Genii for who knows how long has given him a certain empathy for humans. (Speaking of which, when will the Genii return?)

The haunting alarm shriek goes off (I like it. Very otherworldly. Brings me back to the pilot "Rising.") when the Wraith realize Todd is missing. Todd and company hurry along, but get waylaid by Wraith warriors. Todd escapes while Sheppard and the team get stunned.

Back on the hive ship, Teyla frets about the Team when she detects a dart flying inbound from the planet. She and Lorne consider blowing it to kingdom come, but Todd makes contact and they let him aboard.

Todd urges they fly to Atlantis and come back with reinforcements to destroy the facility. Teyla and Lorne want to help the team, but Todd rightly points out they can't fight their way past the other hive ship and reach the team in time.

But Teyla says she has a way...

Sheppard and the team're dragged up to the Queen. She asks Sheppard how he learned about the cloning facility. When he resists her mental coercion, she's intrigued and switches tacks. Spill your guts or one of your friends is dinner. She chooses Rodney, who moans over being picked first for the first time ever. The Queen's about to suck Rodney dry when she stops, stares around, and orders the other Wraith to put Sheppard and the team back into holding.

Teyla's doing mental handstands back on the hive ship, where she's apparently taken control of the Queen's body. Nice, but since when did she have that kind of power. Teyla doesn't know how long she can keep it up and the other hive ship locates them...

Sheppard and the team stare dumbfounded as the Queen comes to their cell, unlocks it, and gives them their gear. It all comes clear to them when the Queen says, "John, it's me."

Meantime, Teyla faces off with the Queen in her mind. The Queen is impressed, but knows Teyla can't keep it up. She then realizes and shares with us that Teyla is pregnant and being helped by her baby. Since when can a baby boost Teyla's sketchy mental powers. The father is obviously being revealed out of the blue as being other than normal, which makes his absence during the first half of Season 4 more annoying to me. Teyla and her baby match minds with the Queen. The other hive ship comes to close quarters then, and commences with the pounding. Todd proceeds to fight back as best he can with his ship being damaged and all.

Before Sheppard and the team head off for the puddle jumper, Teyla via the Queen asks for help. Sheppard fills the Queen with a few shots and goes for the exit. Again.

Teyla comes out of her mental torture session with relief to find the hive ship falling apart around her. Todd wants to cut off, but Teyla and Lorne insist they wait for the team to come back in the jumper.

But it getting real close...

Sheppard makes contact then. Teyla and Lorne're ready to cut out the second he enters the dart bay, but Sheppard has an idea.

The Wraith commander in the facility receives a message that the damaged hive ship is headed his way. We then get a cool shot of the hive ship flying and crashing into the facility. No shields and ground to space defenses?

Sheppard and gang (sans Todd) view the explosion on the surface from the safety of the puddle jumper. Todd got away on his own in a dart. Too bad we couldn't see everyone's departure from the hive.

It'll be interesting to see whether he comes back as a friend or foe.

We need more episodes like this: tight plot and good character interactions. The dialogue of the Wraith and Pegasus humans can be sharper and less stilted, though. Only the Earth humans talk naturalistically (but then that's been a characteristic of Stargate: SG-1 from the beginning). And it would be nice to have story developments properly foreshadowed and fleshed out.

2008-01-10T23:09:00.000-05:00

Grey's Anatomy: "Lay Your Hands On Me"

"Average"
An episode about faith?

The final episode of Grey's Anatomy (GA) written before the strike.

The season started out surprisingly strong for me, then meandered to a relative plateau. The show opens with a monologue on life or some such by Bailey rather than Meredith. It was OK, but it didn't really do anything for me personally. Derek and Sloane're doing a morning run through some picturesque Pacific Northwestern woods, where Derek points out the spot on which he wants to build a house for Meredith. Meredith's not good enough to deserve McDreamy and the episode bears my opinion out as it goes on.

Derek tells Meredith in her mom's house he has a spot for their home, and she freaks out. Again. Everyone wakes up to the smell of "sulfur" for breakfast. I raised an eyebrow at Lexie rousing in the same room as George. Lexie and Alex have an awkward moment in which she observes that Ava didn't stay over. Alex reminds her that he said he was involved with someone else (who is married, has a daughter, and wants to throw her life away). Meredith lies to Derek about making breakfast for Lexie and the rest, who bite carefully into their..."fare."

Meantime, Bailey and her husband're having another argument as she goes out the door to work. I wondered why he hadn't moved out already after the tiff in "Crash Into Me" Parts 1 & 2?

At the hospital, Hahn gets Alex to help prep a woman for heart surgery when Izzie backs out. The woman happens to be a holistic healer who heals a man with heart problems (I believe) with the touch of her hands. She's wheeled back to her room, where she wants to have her procedure explained to her so that she can heal herself and avoid surgery, which is "barbaric." I agree myself, but till we get Star Trek-like medical tech, we're gonna have to go with blood n guts and drug-based medicine. Incidentally, Sloane teases Hahn about how she's using hostility to mask her attraction to him. I can see that, but not why he's attracted to Hahn at all. Except maybe as another notch on his bedpost? Naturally, Alex and Hahn don't put much stock in the woman's...um...approach. Hahn tells Alex to page her when the patient "codes." LOL.

George's mom shows up at the hospital and displays baby clothes for Callie's approval. Apparently, George has put off telling his family about his divorce. Callie skedaddles as soon as she can without spilling the beans.

Lexie goes around trying to scare up epinephrine (adrenaline) to deal with a rash from her allergy with the eggs Meredith made for her. Rose lets Derek off the hook for not following up on their kiss. And Bailey goes about the hospital ignoring her husband's constant paging--till he shows up in the ER with their baby, Tucker, crying and on a stretcher from having a bunch of books crash on him in their family apartment.

Bailey freaks and the Chief and the rest of the staff have to cajole and escort her out of the vicinity so they can diagnose Tucker's internal injuries and operate. Izzie stumbles across George's mom. When Mother O'Malley goes on about how hard a time George and Caliie must be going through (having a baby), Izzie spills her guts on how terrible she feels about breaking about George's and Callie's marriage. Izzie realizes she let the cat out of the bag and vamooses as George shows up to greet his suddenly horrified mother.

Mother O'Malley goes on about how sacred marriage is in the eyes of God, and George has to leave to answer a page. The healer's "healing team" shows up to start prepatory work. Alex looks at 'em like they all belong in strait jackets. Then they start pointing out how Alex has some dark chakras (nice touch) especially around the throat, which has him spreading the pain that turned him from a sweet boy to a not so sweet man. Mother O'Malley and Callie commiserate. Callie (and George later on) says that getting married in Las Vegas wasn't a promising sign for a stable marriage. I saw that coming right from the second those two came into the hospital newly hitched last year. Further, I still don't see why Callie was brought into the show at all and made a regular. Derek finds Bailey freaking out about whether or not she properly sealed a baby gate that Tucker toddled through. He gives her a great soothing spiel about how Bailey and her husband are good parents who love their baby, accidents happen, and nobody's to blame.

Meredith and George watch outside. As Meredith wonders over Derek's touch, George spills the beans about Derek's kiss with Rose. Meredith stomps away furious. Accidental revelations are in vogue in this episode. Things're said to happen in 3's, but there wasn't a third accidental one this time around.

The woman healer finds Bailey and her husband in pediatric ICU worrying over Tucker, who can't breathe on his own because of fluid buildup in his lungs. She asks them to find it in themselves to forgive one another and join her in giving Tucker a burst of healing mojo. And Tucker cries out later on, showing that his lungs're clear. But of course.

Izzie talks to Meredith about why she pursued cardio surgery to get some of Christina's faith in her ability and purpose for herself. But now Izzie apparently doesn't know what to do with herself. I lay that at the hands of the show's writers who've taken her (along with George, Alex, and Meredith) down some silly paths.

Alex then brings Izzie to the faith healer to explain the surgery because she's the "bright and optimistic" one. The healer and her team point out that Izzie certainly brightens Alex. The seeds of a renewed relationship whenever Season 5 gets going? If so, it's about time. It would've been nice to see if the healer healed herself.

Meredith finds Derek and says she can't trust him since he didn't tell her about Rose. Derek points out that she's making excuses and pushing him away again. He says he can't stay with her anymore and breaks things off. I hope they stay that way.

Derek finds Rose and asks if she wants to join him for dinner. I couldn't help thinking "Yes!" when she accepted. Hahn admits to Sloane that if they weren't working together she'd likely be all over him. Can't say I really care about this matchup. Can't say I'm really thrilled about Hahn replacing Burke on the cast neither. As unpleasant coworkers go, she's pretty one-note and dull about it to me.

George asks Lexie how her apartment search is going and if she needs a roommate. Another possible matchup which I theorized about earlier after "Crash Into Me" Part 2? I'd be curious to see how that goes.

And as Bailey watches over Tucker, she lets slip to Meredith that her husband went home to get some sleep and pack up before going to a hotel room. Pity they can't seem to patch things up. I'm concerned for Bailey's sake, but I can't say I'm too involved neither.

Bailey monologued at the end about how watching Tucker made life clearer (guessing that she sees Tucker is important) and people have to be there for one another (but her husband left and how does this relate to the rest of the cast?). Nothing much for Christina and the Chief in this episode. I liked the woman healer, but she struck me as a major deus ex machina device. If she hadn't been around, I wouldn't have cared to wager on Tucker's chances.

As this premature season finale wrapped up, I found myself wishing that Shonda and the writers had shown us the fall out from the other interns learning about George's repeater status after Alex spilled the beans and I wished that we'd seen more continuing storylines with Meredith's and gang's interns, who suddenly vanished in the last few episodes.

This wasn't a bad episode, but I felt it could've been better.

2008-01-05T21:23:00.001-05:00

Stargate Atlantis: "Be All My Sins Remember'd"

"Above average"
A season's worth crammed into one episode.

Compared to "This Mortal Coil," this episode was much better for me. Not nearly so flat and emotionless in dialogue and direction as the mid-season finale. And Carter's back from filming the SG 1 films to contribute. But like "This Mortal Coil," a couple of storylines which could've been material for at least ten other episodes were crammed into this episode.

We open with two of Earth's cruisers, the Daedalus and Apollo, dropping out of hyperspace to enter orbit around Atlantis' new homeworld. Colonels Ellis and Caldwell beam down to coordinate with our Atlantis cast on how best to chip away at the Replicator war machine. With the help of the tracking program they got from the duplicate Atlanitis team in "This Mortal Coil," Caldwell and Ellis set off to ambush and vaporize 7 Replicator Aurora-class vessels with the wicked awesome Asgard beam weapons that were given to SG-1 in the Season 10 series finale "Unending." The remaining 30 Replicator vessels then concentrate over the Replicator homeworld. Advanced Asgard energy weapons or no (and apparently no Asgard anti-Replicator satellite technology), Atlantis and the two Earth cruisers don't have the firepower to stick their necks into the Replicators' den and blow it to kingdom come. So the Atlantis crew sets out to broker an alliance with the Wraith (potential major episode arc #1) with the help of their Wraith friend. At one point, they're stunned, but they wake up safe and sound in their Jumper in space with their "friend." The Travellers conveniently show up (major episode arc #2) then. The Traveller female leader, Larrin, asks Shepherd via audio transmission why the Wraith left him in one piece. I wondered how she knew it was Shepherd before seeing him? Shepherd sets out to draw Larrin and her people into fold...

Meantime, Rodney constructs a "good" Replicator (major episode arc #3), FRAN (Friendly Replicator ANdroid), with Ancient blue prints to download a destructive program in the Replicators' midst.

Over the course of fifteen or so minutes, Team Atlantis brokers a grand alliance against the Pegasus Replicators. Sisko's DS9 and Sheridan's B5 crews took a couple years to line up their coalitions. And Atlantis' allies conveniently don't demand major concessions with consequences, like freedom to feed on humans or access to restricted Ancient/Asgard technology that's dangerous in the wrong hands. And Fran is gung ho about sacrificing herself. I wonder how things would've been if Fran had experienced doubts, had the chance to escape, then chose to fulfill her function? Trip's clone, who was grown to provide neural tissue for a life-saving operation, went through that ordeal in ENT season 3 episode "Similitude." Incidentally, Teyla reveals to Shepherd that she's pregnant by a Pegasus human, Kanan, not seen or referred to at all. Shepherd relieves her of active duty immediately. Ronon congratulates and cosoles her as she goes to gain her bearings. Why couldn't the father be from the Atlantis expedition? Will Teyla's child be important and relevant down the road?

Anyhow, the Atlantis task force and its allies number only about 15 ships, which have to keep the Replicator ships in orbit long enough for Fran to do her part and initiate a "blob" that draws all Replicator nanites into one mass on the planet surface. Rodney and Ronon beam down with a marine team at a ZPM control panel to generate a pulse that'll fry the Replicator "blob." The lack of technicians and guards was understandable, but there were apparently no security/safety measures Rodney had to override before the "blob" sank through the planet's surface to destroy the local power grid.

Sam in orbit then points out to Rodney that the planetary mantle has neutronium. It sets off a spate of Trek-like technobabble by Rodney, who sends some sort of signal to the blob? with his notepad (how?) to order it to contact with the neutronium so that (as far as I can figure) it'll condense and cause a chain reaction that'll make the Replicator world go boom. Rodney, Ronon, and the marines beam up to the Daedalus, which jumps away with the rest of the task force from the Replicator world as it blows up. The Wraith don't show up at the rally point, though, apparently intent on being enemies again.

And after Rodney removes the Replicator homeworld from Atlantis' database, we cut to the remains of the planet. There an Aurora ship sifts through the debris. When the sensor officer reports no sign of active Replicator nanites, we see Elizabeth Weir in the command chair, saying, "Good. We can begin work without looking over our shoulders."

Whether the new Elizabeth (and her Replicator? faction) is good or bad, an organic or Replicator copy, we can't tell at the moment. Whether Elizabeth will be used well, we'll see down the road. IMHO, the producers redeemed themselves by not killing her off completely. It seems to me they did that in part due to the fan backlash in some quarters over Weir's apparent death in "This Mortal Coil." But I find the use of out of the blue revelations on the part of the writers this season to be annoying and clumsy ploys at getting themselves out of plot holes.

The producers did a good job of hiding Weir's resurrection. In fact, Torri Higginson's role in this episode hasn't even been listed on her bio at the IMDB site (Internet Movie Database) as of this posting. And as the Replicator-Wraith war was built up during the first half of this season, it was stated that the Replicators had our favorite life-sucking baddies reeling back on several fronts. When we learn there were only 37 Replicator Aurora-class ships in the whole Pegasus galaxy, the Replicator "fleet" was suddenly revealed to be just a good-sized squadron.

The producers went into the episode saying the battle over the Replicator planet was the biggest spectacle they've staged on Atlantis. It certainly is the biggest space battle for the series, but not as engrossing to me as the Daedalus' engagements against the Wraith in Season 2 "Siege" Part 3, SG1's fleet action against the Ori in Season 9 "Camelot" or against the Milky Way Replicators in Season 8 "Reckoning" Parts 1 & 2 (where thousands of ships were involved). In fact, there are any number of space battles with at least hundreds of ships in "Revenge of the Sith," "Return of the Jedi," and several seasons of B5 and DS9 I can think of that make the battle over the Pegasus Replicator homeworld seem like a skirmish.

And there're quite a few battles on BSG, where the Galactica faced off against the Pegasus and Cylons at different times that fired up my blood even though the numbers weren't epic.

37 Replicator ships with no support vessels for a variety of missions don't strike me as being a large enough force to threaten the Wraith and all human life in the Pegasus galaxy. For example, the US Pacific fleet consisted of nine battleships, three aircraft carriers, 12 heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, 50 destroyers, 33 submarines, and 100 patrol bombers at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. To use a more current example, today's US Atlantic Fleet comprises over 118,000 sailors and Marines serving in 186 ships and 1,300 aircraft.

Notwithstanding my earlier nits, I feel that the largest casualty of this episode were the Atlantis characters themselves, who were caught up and lost in the summarized and rushed events. IMHO, Shepherd and Larrin, who may become an item, don't have a quarter of the chemistry that Rodney and his biologist girlfriend, Katie Brown, have. Teyla's pregancy has no emotional impact on me. Ronon had nothing to do. Will Shepherd's Wraith "friend" become Atlantis' Gul Dukat (and get a name?)? Gone is the tension Weir had with Caldwell over sharing power in Season 2. Carter should've been brainstorming with Rodney in the lab and I think she can have her own vessel to command like Sisko and Sheridan did. And now that Carter's in charge, what kind of interpersonal conflict will she have with Ellis and the others who wanted Weir gone?

I'm curious to see what the rest of Season 4 will bring, but most of the remaining episodes don't seem to center on the Wraith, who're the main baddies left now that the Pegasus Replicators have apparently been vanquished after a year and a half. The Milky Way Replicators were a threat for four years, though. Whether by design or accident, I see Atlantis starting to ape the kind of political intrigue, epic battles, and social commentary we saw in DS9 and B5. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel the execution can be better. And I question a lot of creative decisions, like ejecting Weir at all, then bringing on Carter (who I do love) rather than Daniel Jackson.

In a lot of ways, I feel Season 1 of Atlantis was the most exciting of the series when the expedition was cut off from Earth, exploring the city and the Pegasus galaxy. Of course they couldn't hold out indefinitely without support from Earth--unless they were able to manufacture on their own the supplies and technology they needed and get the Pegasus humans to join in, say, a kind of Federation based on mutual support and understanding. IMHO, reestablishing contact with Earth has had a mixed effect on the Atlantis series.

I see a lot of issues in this episode from the Atlantis producers' constant tinkering with the show. This review with my views and observations only touches the tip of the iceberg.

Lastly, whose sins were this episode centered on?

2007-12-29T16:12:00.000-05:00

Sit Rep

I've been busy...refilling my creative juices.

Before I commence with the script rewrites, I've been inching through a long reading list that's built up for the last several months. But there's light at the end of the tunnel. =)

And once I complete those, I'll start work on a planned novel or two (and squeeze in a new script here and there).

I expect to post thoughts on one or two of the fiction books I've read. December has surprisingly become a TV month. Must see if a new trend or two is developing.

I saw a few films, but didn't feel like writing anything up about 'em. Even though some studios (Paramount with $1 billion) raked in lots of money in 2007, most of the features released this year weren't very good, but served to lure people into coughing up their hard-earned dough. With theater prices rising and my time at a premium, I've been getting more and more discriminating lately.

The holidays were...OK. And I'm hopeful for getting my first fiction/film sale in 2008.

Only the gods know at this point (and any time travelers who can't share what they know without violating the integrity of the established timeline and bringing the universe as they know it to an end).

Hailing freqs closed.

2007-12-23T00:31:00.000-05:00

Journeyman: "Perfidia"

"Series finale"
The last episode...most likely.

Things kick off when Dan lands in a heap on the courtyard of a mental institution with a cut on his head. As he gets his bearings, it's clear that it's not too serious. I raised an eyebrow when a patient said it was 2007.

Evan, a patient, comes up to Dan, saying he saw how Dan flashed in and said he was a time traveler, too. Evan says he hasn't been jumping since he started taking some prescription meds the people with arm vests made him take. I wasn't sure at first, but I leaned toward believing him. Evan says he has to get out to see his wife. Though Dan isn't sure, he goes along, creating a diversion to let Evan slip out, then flashes back to the present. There he learns that Evan got hit by a car while jaywalking during his quest to see his wife.

As Dan researches Evan, Annette urges Katie to leave Dan and Jack tries to get Dr. Langley to spill what he knows about time travel. Annette served no purpose except to vocalize the doubts that Katie must be feeling. Katie chooses to stay with Dan by the end, but if the series had continued, I'm sure we would've seen more drama in that area.

It was nice seeing Jack work as Dan's strongest ally, but if Langley had admitted to being in on Dan's time travel calling, what would that have accomplished? And his pregant girlfriend is nowhere to be seen.

Anyhow, Dan meets up with Livia on his next trip back to September 2007 (about the time he started jumping?). Livia's extremely unhappy as she's prepping to get married back in 1946. And she made sure not to repeat her faux pas with Dan by telling her next fiance about her time travel calling. Dan wishes her well and decides to continue helping Evan, while Livia wonders if he's the mission and if he has all his marbles. Evan points out that Livia's shoes give her away as a time traveler. LOL.

Incidentally one wonders how Livia appears with modern clothes and hairstyles so often?

When Dan and Livia help Evan get to his wife, she doesn't know him from Adam. Evan then admits to our duo that he made an enemy during one of his missions, who killed his wife. So he changed things to keep them from meeting at Stanford to let her live. Then his past self saw him and things went on steamrolling downhill...

When Dan flashes back to the present, he learns that Evan got shot by the security detail bird dogging the new husband of Evan's new spouse, a San Fran council member. Dan tells Evan on his next jaunt, but Evan doesn't care. He wants to prove to himself that he hasn't been completely erased from his wife's consciousness. Romantic, but then what once he establishes he's right?

Evan triggers a spark with his wife at a fundraising event for her new hubby, who's campaigning for reelection, when he takes her for a salsa whirl on the dance floor. When they finish, the two're giving each other rapturous smiles when Evan spontaneously drops dead. Apparently he's not meant to live no matter what. But this death is more annoying (and contrived) than the first two. And Dan and Livia also have to two-step a couple times to avoid running into the past Dan to keep the timeline on track. It seemed to me that the only reason past Dan didn't see them on at least two close calls was because the show's directors and writers ordained it. Dan and Livia exit when they witness past Dan get into a cab and flash for the first time.

When Dan gets back to the present, he finds Dr. Langley waiting for him at the newspaper. Our resident scientist admits to Dan that he's part of a group that watches time travelers (shades of the Buffy/Angel and Highlander watchers). There's more depth here, but I'm on the fence about this.

The powers that be are unknown to the time travel watchers (and the time travelers and viewers), but the system seems to be breaking down (for unknown reasons) since Dan (along with Livia) is apparently one of the last time travelers on the watchers' grid.

Unknown people are watching the time travelers, who want to exploit 'em. Dr. Langley and his group of watchers want to help keep the secret, and he pledges Dan his unflinching support. The jury's out on whether Langley is who he says he is, but we won't know that since the series is virtually cancelled now.

Dan goes home to Katie, who wants him to take the pills that Evan took to put a kibosh on his temporal sojourns. Only Dan doesn't see his jumping as a curse anymore, but as a calling in which he has the valuable ability to "set right what once went wrong" ("Quantum Leap" quote). Couldn't blame him. I'd make that choice.

Katie then reminds Dan of his promise in the pilot episode in which he said he'll "always come back home." Good nod to continuity. When Dan gives the affirmative, she says she'll "keep the light on." Great show of support. And the final note of a promising series.

When I look back on the series, I feel that a number of things caused potential viewers to change the channel when the latest installment of "Heroes" ended. One is the predictable time travel plots of the earlier episodes and the (overly?) complicated love quadrilateral of Dan, Livia, Jack, and Katie. On another note, Livia was apparently an independent time traveler before she conveniently stayed in the "present" for several years, where she went to law school and met Dan and got engaged before leaping again. Then once Dan started leaping, she apparently leaped only to join him and play a poor man's Al Calavicci to Dan's Sam Beckett.

The second and more major issue was the incongruences througout the show (like Livia's modern clothes) and the lack of a "cause" generating the "effect": Dan's time jumps.

"Cause and effect." A major principal of science and science fiction. And good storytelling no matter what the genre.

The series established the "what" of its premise: Dan traveling through time a la "Quantum Leap"'s Sam Becket to help people.

But the dramatic "how" Dan is sent through time and "why" Dan being born during the passage of a fictional comet makes him a time traveler.

Without knowing the "how" at all and a part of the "why" until the next to last episode, Dan's jumps through time come across to me as contrived.

Only because I'm a SF fan (especially time travel) did I have the patience to stick with "Journeyman" through its growing pains. Unfortunately, the general viewing audience didn't have my kind of patience. Hence the dropping ratings and NBC's refusal to pick up the series' option.

In Hollywood, many self-proclaimed SF film/TV producers and writers say it's possible to do anything with SF. I would point out that the best SF stories work on internally consistent and logical rules that are effectively relayed to readers and viewers.

IMHO, "Journeyman" didn't do this and paid the price with its premature cancellation. Hopefully, others will learn this lesson.

2007-12-21T01:21:00.000-05:00

Journeyman: "The Hanged Man"

"Adventurous"
Good, but probably too late.

This episode started on an up beat with Dan and Katie starting to get...intimate when Dan gets zapped away to 1984 in the back of a mom's and son's mobile camper as it's teetering on the edge of the cliff.

Dan helps the two innocents escape, but gets trapped in the RV as it tumbles down a mountain. And, through no fault of his, Dan leaves a digital camera at the feet of the people he saved. Dan completes his tumble down the stairs of his newspaper's office building. He then goes home to regain his bearings, where he meets his daughter, Caroline for the first time. Zack's gone. First clue he did something to change the timeline. Cool.

Dan recounts with Katie the time they conceived Zack, but Katie sets him straight with the story of how Caroline was born. Katie doesn't remember Zack, and she doesn't want him to do anything to "restore" the timeline. Nice conflict. When Dan goes back to the newspaper, his boss holds up a digital video flimsy with info on a story assignment (2nd clue), and he finds a virtual 3D GUI in place of a pedantic solid screen and hard drive tower (3rd clue). I want my own hyperadvanced personal computer, but I expect to wait a decade or two for tech in this timeline to get to that point.

Dan does some research and sees that a computer company has been behind some major breakthroughs for the last 20 years, which everyone else takes in stride.

He flashes back, meets up with Livia, and try to recover the camera, which the son is trying to sell to the computer company his mom just joined. No joy on the first try.

Meantime, life continues as normal with Caroline instead of Zach. Dan's brother, Jack, is dealing with getting his girlfriend pregnant accidentally and Katie's sister, Annette, is urging her to leave Dan before he does something to hurt her. When Dan zaps back, he runs into a psychic, who Katie brought over to the house to ask about life, fortune, etc. The psychic gushes over Dan, saying she never met someone with his aura. Apparently, time travelers aren't too thick on the ground.

Dan sees that nothing's changed, and he's got an uphill battle. When he contacts the mom in the present, he sees that she's blind and her son is missing. Dan and the viewer put two and two together, realizing that the son was apparently offed for the camera.

He flashes back, meets up with Livia, and tracks the son as he mets with a company nerd to sell the camera to get enough money to help his mom, who's going blind from diabetes. It goes without saying that his buyers are dying to get their hands on "advanced technology that people will kill for." The company security chief, one very wooden lady, has some security guards pursue Dan and Livia when they take the camera. Dan tosses the camera into a trash compactor, where it goes CRACK, and he and Livia zap away as the security goons fill the space they'd occupied with lead--and nail their boss instead. The son runs off safe.

When Dan flashes back to the present, his Star Trek PC is gone, the son is on his way to inventing a digital ocular implant that'll give sight back to the blind, and Zach is back. Dan gives his son a squeeze that takes the blood from his head.

And the psychic reappears to tell Dan that he and one other (Livia) were born during the passing of the Joseph Lee Comet (fictional I believe).

Good drama throughout. Regarding the Comet, I would think that if it's passing marked and linked Dan and Livia as special, there'd be others who'd be part of the time travelers club. That angle hasn't been developed in the previous episodes and won't be in the future if NBC doesn't pick up the series' option. I also feel that this sort of info needed to be included in the pilot episode to help new viewers suspend their disbelief and buy into the premise. Too little, most likely too late I expect.

Rightly or wrongly, the show has bled viewers from the beginning, which led to a ratings plummet, and the series' likely death knell in NBC's eyes.

Too bad because I feel this "Quantum Leap"-like show has the potential to improve and overcome its shortcomings, but it'll never be.

Except in the alternate reality where the show's option has been picked up and a full first season is ordered. Being a leaper would be helpful about now.

2007-12-15T03:04:00.000-05:00

Supernatural: "A Very Supernatural Christmas"

"Another great installment"
Christmas a la Supernatural.

The Anti Claus. A demon St. Nick who goes around killing people when they hang special wreaths in their homes.

Only on "Supernatural."

I'm sorry I missed this series in the first season. But after watching a replay of the first season finale before the second season premiere, I've been watching ever since.

Bobby was mentioned several times in the "Present" and the flashbacks. Ruby and Bela were absent--again. Ruby does have a link with Sam and Bela is a riot, but I wonder if they merited being added to the cast? Too bad the CW execs're interfering with a dark show by insisting that female cast members be added, shooting the episodes during the day, and cutting down on the alternative rock score. If someone had to be added in, Jo from Season 2 would've been great IMHO. She would've been the Princess Leia to Dean and Sam's Han and Luke duo. Too bad the actress is unavailable.

About the episode, it's a hoot (in a dark, disturbing way) to see an evil Claus going around to collect people (adults not children) to snack on.

As the episode goes on, it flashes back to Dean's and Sam's boyhood. We see that they're living on their own with Dean looking after Sam while their dad and Bobby are hunting demons. Dean is trying to keep Sam in the dark about monsters and what their dad's doing, but Sam's a smart kid and he figures things out. Seeing Dean give Sam some presents he lifted--er, got from a nearby convenience shop was nice.

Dean and Sam catch wind of some Christmas time kidnappings around Ypsilanti, Michigan. The producers didn't show enough of the setting for those who know Michigan to see how realistic it was, but it wasn't too important. Anyhow, the brothers investigate, posing as FBI suits at the homes of the missing people. Very sharp looking when they're gussied up. They then go to a run down Christmas theme park, where they see if they can spot a demon among the part-time holiday workers. They focus on one broken-down, grizzled Santa who tells a kid he has something special for the kid. When he hobbles away with a hemmorhoid? limp, the brothers decide to follow "St. Nicotine." The brothers're in their car outside St. Nicotine's trailer house when they see the old man pull the drapes on his window shut, then hear a scream. They rush in with their sawed off shot guns loaded with salt, and see St. Nicotine watching a movie. They then start singing "Silent Night" off tune and wing it where they forget the lyrics. St. Nicotine joins in and they step out with uncomfortable smiles. LOL.

The brothers (Sam really) notice that the victimized homes have wreaths of meadowlark? (wrong spelling) hanging over the fire place. They trace the wreaths to the home of the Carrigan's, an older WASP-looking couple taken straight out of the "Beavers." Ergo they're the demons.

The brothers investigate their basement, find a red demon Santa suit, some butcher cutlery, and...a sack with body parts. Just as they're about to open it, the Ma and Pa Carrigan get the jump on 'em, toss 'em around like they're rag dolls, and knock 'em out.

Dean and Sam wake up in the Carrigans' kitchen bound to chairs. The Carrigans say they're pagan gods only taking their due. They've adjusted over the last 2000 years since Christianity kicked in, going down from a few hundred sacrifices per year to 2-3. And they've gone to great lengths to assimilate, playing bridge every week with their neighbors. They're readying Sam and Dean, taking some blood from both and a fingernail from Sam. When Sam swears, Ma Carrigan suggests he says "fudge," which he adopts. Frequently. Pa Carrigan's poised to yank a tooth from Dean's mouth when someone knocks at the door. Reluctantly they answer it to find a neighbor inviting them to go caroling. They beg off and go back to the kitchen, which is empty.

Dean and Sam lead 'em into the living room and go mano a mano with 'em again. They use branches from the Carrigans' real live Christmas tree to stake 'em.

Dean and Sam cap things by exchanging presents they lifted--obtained at a store, reflecting on how it may be the last Christmas for Dean.

If there was one thing I thought could've been done, it was to show Sam's growing darkside in the context of the episode. And maybe the confrontation with the pagan gods could've happened at night. And since they were defeated without special measures, maybe it would've been better to class 'em as pagan demigods. I'd think that gods would be untouchable for mere humans to take out with what's at hand.

Good episode all around, though. Hopefully, this season will be brought to a satisfying conclusion considering the WGA strike is upon us.

2007-12-15T01:36:00.000-05:00

Moonlight: "Sleeping Beauty"

"Series Classic"
The best "Moonlight" yet!

Having watched "Forever Knight," "Buffy," and "Angel," I was curious about "Moonlight."

I'm glad I decided to give the show a chance because it's been getting better with each week. David Greenwalt (ex-"Buffy," "Angel," etc. producer) helped provide early development for the series before he had to leave for health reasons. Hopefully, the producers who stayed on, Ron Koslow and Trevor Munson, keep up the momentum that Greenwalt helped build. Many critics were skeptical at the start of the season, saying that "Moonlight" is just another play on a tired old theme. Problem is every story has been told, so there are no "new" plots. It's up to the producers/writers to provide viewers with interesting characters in difficult situations. I feel that they're passing that test--so far.

Regarding this episode, we've got two parallel storylines: an old man on life support in NYC who hires a pro assassin to take out Mick's best friend, Josef, a 400 year old vamp, and Coraline back as a human, hanging on for dear life from a stake to the heart she got courtesy of Beth in the previous episode "Fleur de Lis."

Mick and Beth overlook Coraline, who's just breathing. Luckily Beth only nicked her heart, but she did puncture a lung. Unfortunately, Coraline has a major infection. She tells Nick she came back from the dead as a human for him (a la Angel's Darla). Should we be touched or freaked out? =) Unfortunately, she doesn't spill the beans before she goes unconscious.

Meantime, the hitman sneaks up on Josef in his office as he's playing poker with two other vamps, lays down a hail of automatic weapons fire, and tosses two incendiary grenades to blow out the office. Nice job.

Mick and Beth show up to investigate. No signs of remains. Josef is dead to the world. Mick is grieving and Beth is so torn for him. Except Josef's waiting for our budding couple when they show up in Mick's apartment and asks if they're ready to help find out killed him. LOL. I knew he survived. But I didn't mind.

Thanks to video surveillance and IR imaging records they got from the security system in Josef's business building, Mick and Beth ID the hitman and learn from a hacker friend of Beth's that he's an ex green beret and black ops specialist. If one is merely mortal and doesn't have an army of guards with the latest military spec, it'd be wise to worry.

Despite Mick's warning to stay low in his apartment, Josef gets stir crazy and goes back to his office to claim some cash. Unfortunately, his security chief calls in the hitman for a payoff and gets a bullet in the forehead for his trouble.

Meantime, Josef is opening a fireproof safe in his bombed out office. He picks up a few wads of cash, then lingers over a heart-shaped pendant. The hitman shows up behind him with a semiautomatic 9 mm complete with silencer.

But Mick comes in the nick of time to toss the guy around. The hitman's very good. He gets in some good punches and stabs Mick in the gut with a smooth special ops knife move. If only he weren't fighting an undead opponent with the strength of 4 (or so) men who could regenerate. Nice tight fight sequence. A few of the cuts were a bit too abrupt, though. Anyhow, Mick has the the guy hanging over a balcony, gets the name of his employer (John Witley), then bangs his head against a column to knock him out. He turns to Josef for help in carrying the guy out, but Josef has vamoosed.

After Mick hands the hitman off to the police, Beth shows up with info. Witley's a 93 year old real estate developer with a daughter who disappeared in 1955. We cut back to the hospital, where the doctor wonders why Coraline doesn't have a fever from her infection and how her body has lost 2 degrees fahrenheit. A nurse checks on Coraline. As she leans in close, Coraline's eyes go grey and her fangs extend. But Coraline fights off the bloodlust and the nurse walks out none the wiser. I knew the "cure" she took was temporary.

Beth is packing to go to NYC when her boyfriend Josh shows up. He asks her to look him in the eye and say there's nothing going on with Mick. As she averts her eyes, Mick shows up to pick her up. Josh leaves and Beth looks after him, heart struck.

Somehow, the hitman, while handcuffed in the back of a LA police squad car, is able to take out two cops and escapes. (He's really good.) The hitman then goes back to Whitley in NYC. He inserts a hypodermic into an IV line, ready to inject an air bubble in Whitley, and asks him how Josef could've survived the hit...

Josef shows up in an apartment at NYC.

Mick and Beth arrive at Whitley's residence, where the old man gives them the diary of his daughter, Sarah. Seems that Sarah met Josef back in '55, fell in love, and vanished.

Mick and Beth track Josef to the apartment, where they find Josef--and Whitley's daughter. She's lying in a coma, not a day over 21. Josef says he met her one day in Grand Central station waiting for a train (like in any classic movie) and fell in love against his will. Josef tried to hide being a vamp from her, but somehow she knew and she didn't care. She then kept after him for months to "turn" her so they could be together. Reluctantly, he does. But she didn't revive. So he kept her cared for till maybe modern medicine could do something for her. I couldn't help wondering if Dr. Crusher or Dr. Bashir could beam in and run a sensor scan.

That's when the hitman crashes in through a window, wearing a harness and detachable line. As everyone jumps for the floor, he empties a gun clip into Josef, then stakes him in the heart. As he wonders why Josef doesn't die, Mick intervenes again. This time the fight's short and he breaks the hitman's neck to take him out for good.

Mick finally understands why Josef has been telling him that it can't work out between vamps and humans. But Mick insists that anything's possible.

As Beth catches a taxi for the airport to catch a flight to LA, Mick asks her to go out with him to enjoy a night in NYC. But Beth says no cuz she wants to settle things with Josh.

Coraline meantime seems to be reaching a critical point in her hospital room. Her're bloodshot when they open, then her heart monitor at the nurse's station flatlines. When a trauma team comes pounding in with paddles and a crash cart, Coraline's bed is empty.

I sense some foreboding developments down the road.

If only someone would kick the bloody WGA and AMTP in their collective backsides to end the strike, so that we can see the first season of "Moonlight" finish. I expect that when viewers are hit with rerun after rerun in 2008, more of a public outcry will build up to help those two entities get their acts together.

Fortunately, the inital order of 13 episodes seems to be mostly done from what I've heard. I like that we got to see more of Josef in this episode, who I felt was underused through the season so far. It wasn't essential, but I wouldn't have minded seeing him in action.

If there's one quibble I have, I wonder why the hitman, who has access to the latest military hardware didn't load up on grenade launchers, phosporous bullets, flame throwers, home made napalm, etc. once he learned that he was going up against vampires?

Classic shaolin kungfu and more modern aikido teaches people how to go with the flow and use the strength of another against an opponent. Problem is, it can take at least 20 years to master. Lacking 20 years, using explosives and incendiary munitions against vampires is the way to go. The hitman should've done more research and packed more than a stake before coming back for a rematch.

Great episode all around, though.

2007-12-15T01:08:00.000-05:00

The Batman: "The Metal Face of Comedy"

"Adventurous"
The mother of all Joker episodes. So far.

Because I've seen every episode of "Batman: The Animated Series" (BAS) at least once, I've been so-so about "The Batman's" Joker.

But he's been getting better.

When this episode opens, we see a masked figure flipping about an evening cityscape. I'm not up on all the comic book lore, but as I watch the guy, I'm wondering if it's Nightwing. And it is! Ergo this must be Bludhaven in the future with Robin/Dick all grown up.

Nightwing makes his way into a foundry? and finds a vat of molten metal?/chemicals?. A baddie, Captain Slash (never heard of him), shows up and the two commence with the kung fu fighting. Surprisingly, Nightwing gets his butt handed to him and is hurled into the vat. Before one can process that Nightwing is dead, a green skull flashes on the vat, which is on a screen. Then we see Robin in the Batcave moaning over losing another match with Captain Slash. Sigh of relief.

Bats strolls by and puzzles over Robin's Nightwing alias (nice allusion to upcoming canon here). Robin goes on about how the player behind Captain Slash must be the coolest guy ever.

Cut to a warehouse with Martin, a nerd jonesing on stomping all over Nightwing yet again. LOL.

Then he answers a call from Joker, "Slacker!" Our clown prince asks Slacker--Martin if he has a handle on some robotic joker in the boxes who're supposed to be robbing the bank he's capmed outside of with Harley and the twin goons. A techie working for Joker. Interesting addition to the Clown's ensemble of henchman. Undoutedly an animated series response to present times.

As a robo joker thuds into the gang's van, Joker decides he'd rather do something else. Feed Martin to the hyenas. But Martin pulls a rabbit out of his hat with a new gizmo: a video game encased in a helmet that lets one mentally download money into a bank account of one's choosing. If one accepts the helmet (doesn't question the illogic too deeply that is), the episode will fall into place. I'm not asking for Trek level technobabble, but I would like to understand how playing a video game (not clear what kind here) will let a user directly connect to a binary computer system (neural interface via RF transmission?).

Meantime, Bruce is showing some investors/business associates beyond cutting edge nanites that can bond together to form any solid object they're programmed to assume and self replicate when necessary. Bruce is about to expound on what an awesome new tech Wayne Industries has developed when he gets a Batwave on his portable scanner. Bruce adlibs, telling a nearby white coat to regale his visitors with all the specs and diagrams, and exits post haste.

We cut to a bank where Joker and the twin goons are pulling off a heist with Martin's helmeted skeleton key. Joker's accessing the money (where's the video game?) when Bats and Robin crash in. Robin takes out the two twins by himself (don't question this too hard) while Bats flings a batarang at Martin's helmet to cut Joker's withdrawal short. Only there's a short and a virtual Joker (don't question this too) is looking at our dynamic duo and Joker from a computer screen. Before Bats can contain virtual Joker, Martin downloads him away to the gang's home computer system. Bats deposits the real Joker in a hospital to recover from his helmet shock and goes searching for the virtual Joker, who tells Martin and the gang that he won't stand for being a digital bit. Martin says he's heard of something that'll fit the bill, but they need a diversion...

In the Batcave, Batman and Robin (along with the rest of Gotham) spy a surprise broadcast of virtual Joker on every TV, computer screen, and electronic billboard. The city watches spellbound as virtual Joker hangs out with Captain Slash in virtual Bludhaven. Nightwing shows up, deletes Captain Slash, and almost gets Virtual Joker, who downloads into the Bruce's company lab. He then assembles into nano Joker (or 2.0 as he called himself) a la Russel Crowe from the flick "Virtuosity." Coincidence? A similar idea developed independently? I wonder (but not too hard).

Anyhow, nano Joker breaks out of the lab and evades the Dynamic Duo by turning into a cloud and flitting away. Literally. Meantime, the real Joker (1.0) wakes up and checks himself out of the hospital by leaping out a window.

Both Jokers show up in the gang's warehouse, where Harley (haven't mentioned yet that it's great having the original Harl's voice in this series too) and the goons are wondering who to follow. Both Jokers promise to work together (and lie like rugs).

They go to knock off a major gem repository, but 2.0 double crosses 1.0, leaving him for Bats to collar. Except Bats focuses on 2.0, trying to shock him. Didn't work. Wasn't surprised. Actually I was surprised Bats tried that gambit.

1.0 and the gang take off during all this. 2.0 then goes after 'em with Bats and Robin on his trail. Bats summons the batmobile, and he jumps in with Robin. Only the batmobile starts shrinking on them since it's a nano copy. Bats deactivates the nanomobile with a handy EMP pulse (why didn't he use it on 2.0 earlier?). He then summons the Batmobile again (why didn't it show up before?) and they go racing after 1.0 and the gang. Bats also radios Alfred to send something "big" to help take on 2.0.

They're brought up short by a Gotham cop with his squad car blocking the road. The cop asks for Harl's license, registration, and 1.0, morphing into 2.0. LOL.

The gang says 2.0 rocks and 1.0 wonders how he picked such loyal henchmen. 2.0 also nabs the Dynamic Duo when they show up, rants about how he'll create a nano version of Gotham in place of the real one which he'll run, then catapults 1.0 and the Dynamic Duo (literally) out of the city.

The Batsuit comes zooming in then, and Bats acrobatically slips into it while in mid air and saves Robin and 1.0. He sets Robin down with 1.0 who's securely bound, and goes after 2.0, who replicates enough nanites to turn King Kong huge. Bats flits around, shooting and busting up giganto 2.0, who just reassembles and laughs him off. As 1.0 cheers Bats on, he cuts his bonds, then gives Robin the slip. He reunites with the gang, who all say they'd rather be with him than 2.0, who's too much. As Joker rejects 'em, Robin catches 'em all again.

Robin spies Martin's Captain Slash logo on his laptop pieces it together that they're each other's worst online enemy. As giganto 2.0 infiltrates Bats' suit with nanites, Robin and Martin team up to download virtual Joker out of Bruce's nanites.

To boost the download command signal, Bats hooks a rooftop satellite antenna into his suit and aims it a looming 2.0. In a nick of time, Robin initiates the beam.

The nanites fall to pieces and virtual Joker finds himself back in virtual Bludhaven, where Nightwing shows up and gives him a virtual pounding. LOL.

Bats and Robin then send the real Joker and gang back to Arkham, where they'll rest for a bit before breaking out again.

Fun episode if you don't harp on the fuzzy SF (like why didn't the Wayne Industry techs hardwire an abort code into the nanites?). It would've been nice to have Batgirl involved. She's been underused this year, and has missed out on all the super hero team ups except for the Martian Manhunter.

2007-12-09T01:06:00.000-05:00

Stargate Atlantis: "This Mortal Coil" Part 1

"Unoriginal"
The producers force Atlantis fans to say goodbye to Weir. And the show has developed a major case of Trek Syndrome: Recycled Plotlines.

We open with an Atlantis team that finds a duplicated Elizabeth Weir and learns they're duplicates living in a duplicate Atlantis so that "good" replicators can learn what it means to be human in order to ascend like the Ancients. Elizabeth Weir was killed (off stage months earlier) and so was her duplicate along with the rest of her duplicate team. The duplicate team learned very easily they were duplicates. They give the "real" team a Replicator black box that lets them track all Replicator Aurora-class warships (no evolution of new vessel types in the last ten thousand years?).

There's potential here to for a recurring plotline with Elizabeth learning what it means to be a duplicate amid the original Atlantis Team, but the Replicators show up to obliterate everyone. Elizabeth and the other duplicates don't have to struggle with a decision to sacrifice themselves as they let the "real" team escape. And when some Replicators find their crashed jumper, it's not Elizabeth who has the last line, but duplicate Sheppherd: "We fooled you (the Replicators). And we almost fooled ourselves."

This episode closes with tons of Replicator ship icons blipping all over a schematic of the Pegasus Galaxy and Rodney saying, "Oh, crap."

Carter was not only absent again, but the "real" Atlantis team functioned fine without her and neglected to even mention she wasn't around because she was, say, back on Earth making a report to the IOA (a poor man's malevolent NID).

"Mortal Coil, Part 1" leaves us with an impending doom to look forward to. (Good news). This episode has shades of robot duplicate SG 1 (Season 1 "Tin Man" & Season 4 "Double Jeopardy") and the Season 8 Amanda Carter replicant storyline. The bad news is that this episode isn't up to par with those it borrowed ideas from. I am a fan of SG 1 and Atlantis. I love the main storyline of the Pegasus Replicators being sicced on the Wraith and how the stakes have been raised by having the Replicators destroy defenseless humans to get at our favorite life-sucking two-legged parasites.

BUT, IMHO, many of the episodes are being produced in a flat, by the numbers, lifeless way in which there's no tension within the scenes, the dialogue is on the nose and expository, and there's little or no internal character struggle and external antagonist opposition. "Mortal Coil, Part 1" is the flatest of this new trend in Atlantis. I believe the writers of this episode were responsible for a number of equally flat SG 1 episodes over the last 10 years. AND Season 4 has been hampered by the questionable (in my view) killing off of Elizabeth Weir. Joe Flanigan's desire to keep Weir in the series and have the Atlantis team try to save her has been overridden by the showrunners to the detriment of the series.

Amanda Tapping was brought in to supposedly add a new character dynamic (blatantly bring over SG 1 fans more like): lead tactical missions and help Rodney and Zelenka pull off scientific miracles. Except when she sporadically appears from filming the two SG 1 films "Continuum" and "Ark of Truth," she acts exactly like Weir. If we're going to see Carter in charge, why not let her BE Carter? The one SG 1 member who wouldn't already duplicate the skill sets of the established Atlantis team AND would contribute to the mission is Daniel Jackson: resident expert on the Ancients, former Ascended human, archaeologist, and a living conscience.

Sadly, the producers seem to be ignoring the fans and aren't properly executing a mistaken change in the series' direction. I feel the series premiere was great. The first half of the first season was a shakedown. The second half of the first season through the end of the second season was the series' longest run of consistent development and drama. Season 3 was uneven, but finished with an exclamation point. Season 4 seems to be playing safe. With SG 1 cancelled and a new series still in development, the renewal of Atlantis for a 5th season is supposed to be great news. But if Season 4 keeps going the way it has been, I wonder how many people will stick around for next year?

I'm sad to see the show being sent stumbling in its new direction.

2007-12-08T23:43:00.000-05:00

The Batman: "Ring Toss"

"Above average"
Musical rings anyone?

In Batman's latest Justice League team up, we have Green Lantern (GL). Not Kyle Raynor. Not John Stewart. But Hal Jordan.

Fine with me.

This episode seemed to cram a lot in. Maybe too much.

It opens with Dick at grade school waiting for a pickup. Some kids invite him to play basketball, but when Alfred shows up in the limo, Dick slinks off embarrassed. He complains to Alfred about not fitting in with the other kids. Alfred reminds Dick that he goes winging through the night in tights, wearing a mask, fighting bad guys at Batman's side, and our Boy Wonder clams up.

Then Alfred mentions that Master Bruce is entertaining another visiting hero: GL. Dick gets psyched up, and we don't hear another word of feeling apart from the other kids at school. What's the point of bringing it up in the first place?

Anyhow, Bats is scanning the known galaxy from the Batcave (nice) in search of GL's nemesis who escaped from an interstellar jail cell to wreak vengeance on him. I'll give you three guesses--it's Sinestro. Who else? With merely 21st century Wayne Corp. technology, Bats can't find a trace of this week's Big Bad. Dick shows up soon afterward and gushes over GL. After weathering Dick's fanboy adulation, GL goes to the Gotham? Airport to step back into his secret ID and recharge his power ring--except Sinestro shows up to take his ring to get even more powerful and lays a hurting on him.

GL puts up a good fight, but yellow trumps green--and his ring still needs a new charge. Before Sinestro can take his ring, GL sends it away with instructions to find Bats.

Sinestro leaves Hal unconscious and goes searching for the ring, which bumps into Penguin who's on his way to crash Bruce Wayne's latest charity event. After bumping into Pengie's top hat, the ring lets Mr. Cobblepot try it on for size.

I raised an eyebrow at this. I thought that all green lantern rings were set up to 1) seek out only worthy users and 2) not perpetrate evildoing.

Penguin goes on to gleefully rob Bruce's charity, a bank, a jewelry shop, and an antique car dealership. When I compare this to the Season Five JLU episode "The Great Brain Robbery" where the Flash and Lex Luthor switched bodies, this character trait mixing episode seemed a bit flat to me. I thought we could see Penguin using GL's ring to create an illicit Cobblepot estate or something rather than use his newfound superpower to go on a stereotypical robbery spree. And this seemed to take away from the main? issue of the GL vs Sinestro battle.

Batman and Robin soon catch up with Penguin, who holds 'em off with a ring that still hasn't run out of juice. Then Sinestro finally reappears and chases after Pengie, who lights out like a chicken with its head cut off. Hal also wakes up and somehow stays on the periphery as Penguin zips all over Gotham with Bats, Robin, and Sinestro hot after him.

Penguin soon gives the ring up to Bats, who starts to give Sinestro a challenge--except the ring is starting (again) to run low on juice.

Bats then tosses the ring back to Hal, who charges it back up, and can suddenly stand up to Sinestro even though his ring isn't supposed to be able to handle yellow projections.

Bats steps in to pickpocket Sinestro's yellow power ring and put him down for the count. Hal then soars heavenward to deliver Sinestro back into his "stasis field" to cap this week's adventure. What's the moral of this episode except to show that Hal and Sinestro aren't too extraordinary without their rings?

Batman on the other hand showed a nice touch with GL's ring. It woulda been interesting to see what he would've done with it for a full twenty minutes, except it wasn't his "style" and he doesn't need it to be a hero. This wasn't a bad episode, but I felt it could've been better.

2007-12-07T01:39:00.000-05:00

Grey's Anatomy: "Crash Into Me" Part 2

"Pivotal"
Another great two-parter.

I have something of a love-hate view towards "Grey's Anatomy" (GA). The show is very good, but it amazes me how Shonda Rhimes and the producers can have fine stuff come out almost hand in hand with questionable creative choices. I for one did not care for the backdoor pilot of "Private Practice" wedged into Season 3's "The Other Side of This Life, Parts 1 & 2." If Shonda wanted to jumpstart another series, why not just air it separately in its entirety and not at the expense of a good GA episode? I'm indifferent to "Private Practice" and won't miss it if cancelled.

Anyhow, I digress...

As in many episodes, contrivances pop up to conveniently ramp up the drama, but I feel "Crash Into Me, Parts 1 & 2" upholds GA's knack for two-parters. Our characters scramble to save patients in difficult surgeries that experience one complication after another and several people juggle personal issues while they're in their patients' innards up to their elbows.

Watching Lexie bond with Nick (Seth Green), struggle to keep his carotid sealed...and fail couldn't not pull at the heart strings. Something might've started if he'd lived. And I had the feeling he would've been better for her than Alex.

Seeing Bailey overcome her distaste to save a neo Nazi paramedic suffering from internal injuries while her husband announced he was giving up on their marriage... Talk about being caught on the horns of a dilemma. Her speech to George about telling her husband to take their "vows" to heart was riveting. George's line: "Can I just do charts?" Priceless.

There's Alex working on a patient with both Eva and Lexie watching. I expected more fireworks. We'll just have to see in later episodes what the fall out will be.

For the first time in a while, I found myself liking Meredith as she reverted to form as a caring doctor faced with a no win situation, sticking a needle into the expanding heart of a trapped paramedic before helping him get out of an upside down, crushed ambulance passenger compartment while his dead partner's body lies inches away (with the Chief guiding her along the way. And then she persuades the wife of the dead man's partner to stay and be there for his good as much as for her own.

The season long rut Meredith has been locked into of hating her likeable half-sister, Lexie, and running away from a relationship with McDreamy has been making her extremely unlikable to me. It would've been...interesting if Derrick and Lexie had built on their meeting at the bar. But then we wouldn't be able to enjoy watching Derrick and Rose come together. Where one door closes, another opens. I'm more than willing to slam the door on Meredith for Rose's sake.

Letting Lexie dance with her and her friends at her mom's house kinda announces that Meredith is softening. But it comes out of the blue for me. I'm afraid I missed what made Meredith ease up enough to include Lexie for the first time.

And Meredith telling Derrick that she's trying to overcome her fear and doesn't want him to date other people was nice, but I wonder if it's too little too late?

The sparks are starting to fly between Derrick and nurse Rose, who saved Derrick's operation by getting their computer imager to work again despite being "nervous and flawed." Thank god for those three semesters of computer science she had at Santa Barbara. Needless to say, Derrick was able to continue excising the tumor from the brain of the black lady ambulance driver (the neo Nazi's partner no less) who crashed her rig (extremely convenient for the two-parter's sake) into the ambulance that Meredith and the Chief were performing triage at.

I originally started as Meredith-Derrick shipper. But I won't mind if Derrick begins something with Rose. (In fact, I think Giselle of "Enchanted" is better for him.) Somehow, I doubt Shonda and her braintrust will let these two be, though. But that's one reason why viewers will keep tuning in: to find out what'll happen between Derrick and Rose.

Hopefully the writers strike will be settled sooner rather than later. There aren't too many more Season 4 episodes left in the can, which is a shame since I feel this season of GA is turning out to be one of the better ones.

A lot of interesting things happening in this two-parter. Just skimming the highlights is a long essay.

2007-12-02T01:15:00.001-05:00

Legion of Superheroes: "Message in a Bottle"

"Series Classic"
Best Superman (Kal El, that is) episode yet.

I've been really impressed with "Legion" this season. I latched onto it when the Cartoon Network cancelled "Justice League" (JLA) in all its pop culture wisdom. I was so-so on the first season of Legion, but saw flashes of inspiration, which made me stick with the show. Being produced by the team behind JLA helped, too. Regarding this episode, I felt it was virtually perfect in every regard. The only quibble I have was not adding Supe's 41st century clone, Kel El in this episode. Kel El has history with Imperiex, he'd love to see the Fortress (and Krypton), and he foreshadowed a dark path that Brainy is going to take (more on that later).

It's tough to play with established canon in any show, but I feel this episode did a great job of providing a standalone adventure and keeping the Superman mythos intact.

Imperiex leads Validus and a divison's worth of destructo bots to the Fortress of Solitude in the 31st century. Superman, Brainy, and assorted pals race to confront our baddie.

Imperiex, his cohorts, and Superman all get miniaturized and transported to the miniaturized city of Kandor, the surviving capital of Krypton stored in a bottle! Not having read every comic book there is has a bright side: getting great surprises in the animated series regularly. =)

I had no idea there was a "messenger" crystal created by Jor El that had been keeping Krypton intact before Brainiac 1.0 shrunk Kandor and removed it from the planet--spelling the end of Krypton. Of course Imperiex would want the "messenger" as a weapon of mass destruction to destroy planets that dare to defy him. Again I wish that Kel El had been included in this episode. He deserves to see Kandor (not to mention Krypton) as much as Kal.

The moment I saw the simulated red sun in the Kandor "sky," I knew Superman was in it deep against Imperiex. Seeing him wrestle with a failure of his he hadn't experienced yet (not restoring his fellow Kryptonians and their city to their normal size) was awesome. Brainy and company bringing up the cavalry and giving Superman a power suit was a nice development. Superman having his power suit broken just before the major confrontation with Imperiex was a great reversal in an episode full of twists and turns.

And watching Brainy face his demon (Brainiac 1.0) was the stuff of the highest drama. The second he input the info about restoring Kandor from his early generation "evil" ancestor, I knew there were going to be consequences down the road. Brainy's "smirk" immediately after the download and after he wiped Superman's memory to remove the temptation for Superman to restore Kandor in the 21st century and preserve the timeline established for the Legion.

The memory wipe is another great story twist. Watching the Kandorians supercharge and go mano a mano with Imperiex's goons when Brainy turns the sun yellow was loads of fun. And seeing Krypton restored and Kandor returned to the planet and back to normal was a fitting climax.

It's awesome when animated writers show they understand great characters and storytelling, better even than many film and TV writers.

The moment when Kel El confronted Brainy with the line "Once a brainiac always a brainiac" in "The Man From the Edge of Tomorrow, Part 1," I knew we were going to have a subplot to run in parallel with the main storyline of stopping Imperiex from creating a 31st century empire.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens in the rest of the season.

Some episodes are much better than others. This is one of the great ones.

2007-12-02T00:39:00.002-05:00

Battlestar Galactica: "Razor"

"Series classic"
Best BSG in a while.

Being hyped as a tele-event on Sci Fi for months, I found "BSG: Razor" to be more of a souped up season 2 two episode parter rather than a feature extravaganza. But by BSG standards, that's really good.

Two storylines were combined here: the first days of Lee Adama in command of the Battlestar Pegasus--with the backstory of Admiral Cain and the Pegasus spoonfed in--and an encounter with the Protectors, a force of active original mechanical cylons, and the hybrid organic cylon they were protecting. Admiral Adama almost stumbled across the cylon organic experiments 40 years earlier on the tail end of the 1st Cylon War in the recent SciFi miniepisode series (November 2007) on a young Bill Adama.

I won't go into too many specific plot spoilers here so much as speak on general story points and character developments.

Personally, I feel that Season 2 was the highlight of the new BSG series with Season 3 (especially the second half) being a disappointment. I want the the producers to prove to me and the rest of the core viewership who're left that Season 4 will be up to snuff. That said, "Razor" fit the tone of Season 2 perfectly and added another magnitude of drama to that chapter in the series.

It was great seeing Admiral Cain again, and awesome to see the events alluded to by Colonel Fisk in "Pegasus." We're tied into Pegasus' past following the Cylon attack that obliterated the Colonies and the "Present" of Season 2 through the character of Kendra Shaw. For those who want to know, the survivor count hints at the time of "Downloaded."

Watching Kendra go from raw aide to ruthless soldier under Cain's guidance is spellbinding to say the least. And watching her butt heads with Starbuck as Lee's new XO is a treat. Being "Cain's legacy," she wouldn't hesitate to do what Tigh only dreamed of in putting Starback in her place. It would've been interesting to see how her and Starbuck would've gotten along is she hadn't been killed off at the end (more on that later).

Seeing Lee command in his own right was a pleasure. I can only imagine what would've happened had the the producers decided to not have the Colonials settle on New Caprica and set in motion the events that led to Lee sacrificing the Pegasus. This "what if" of Lee's development as a battlestar commander tantalizes me.

Cain was what we expected her to be: equal parts hero and villain. Sequences that show us Cain as a girl who was left an orphan by the 1st Cylon War weren't shown with the telemovie. But they're part of the extended version on the upcoming DVD (12-4-07). These sequences help us understand why Cain turned out to be a military die hard who sees herself as an unflinching weapon. A razor (though she was holding a folding knife at one point while imprinting on Kendra in a dramatic speech). Seeing Starbuck holding the knife following Kendra's death hints that she's the current holder of "Cain's legacy" (which doesn't bode well for the remnants of humanity in Season 4). What I don't understand, though, is why Cain didn't have the nerve to go through with her assasination plan of Adama in "Resurrection Ship (RS), Part 2," but she shot her former XO (who she'd served with for years) in the head with his own weapon without a blink. What accounts for Cain's sporadic flashes of humanity (in "RS, part 2") and hesitation? Something that I missed also was why Cain was so inflexible in pursuing an attack on a cylon station against odds of 4 to 1 when she'd assured her command staff in private that she wouldn't waste lives and resources on "a mad quest for revenge." Either this is inconsistent character development or Cain was lying to eveyone--and herself. The fact that Cain was revealed to have a relationship with Gina, a version of organic cylon model number 6, didn't have any impact on the story and could've been omitted completely. Something not dramatized on the telemovie, but I'm sure will be included in the DVD version, is the torture (beatings and gang raping) of Gina. These events will show how a Nazi fascist state comes into being on Pegasus under Cain's aegis in contrast to the morally grey, but still humane family atmosphere that Adama preserved on Galactica.

The Protector cylons were pretty lethal for outdated models. The impression given is that there was one base star's worth of them, but it's mentioned once that a "fleet" attacked the Pegasus at one point. A slip I'm sure. The scene with the three cylon fighter pilots and a "By your command" line was priceless. When Kendra leads Starbuck and on team onto the old base star to rescue some human hostages, I found myself wondering how they could find their way around, how many cylons were guarding the vessel, and why all opposition on the ship had vanished as Kendra got a warning from the hybrid about Starbuck being the "destroyer" of humanity just before Kendra nuked the ship. The warning about Starbuck from the hybrid nicely foreshadows one of Season 4's main issues. I'm still on the fence about that, though. I wondered why the hybrid offered Kendra the heads up? It indicates to me that this particular model wasn't such a bad person. And I wondered why the Protectors didn't seem to be taking orders from the hybrid?

Kendra blowing herself up tells me that she feels remorse about what she did as a soldier under Cain's command, but her taunting the hybrid "You should be afraid" struck me as insensitive and contradictory. But then she's human--and flawed. So where's the line between humans and organic cylons? At the end, Adama tells Lee that without him, Tigh, and President Roslin keeping him honest, he might've done some of the same things as Cain. I can see Adama being darker, but not going quite the same route as Cain. For one thing, Cain ignored and then shot her former XO, Colonel Belzen for not following questionable orders. Belzen was the closest thing to family and a conscience she had. Adama shooting Lee, Starbuck, Tigh, Helo, the Chief, etc is unthinkable.

All in all this is a strong episode, tele-event, what have you. "BSG: Razor" was meant as an entree for Season 4, which was originally scheduled to air on Sci Fi in January 2008, I believe, but was pushed back to at least April 2008 because of the bloody WGA strike. (Hopefully the studios and networks will see reason before too long.) I expect it'll have to hold us over for a while.

2007-11-25T22:39:00.000-05:00

Review: "Enchanted" a royal treat

An animated Disney girl becomes a flesh-and-blood sweetheart
in this tongue-in-cheek homage to Disney fairy tales by Disney.

The first two-thirds of "Enchanted" is sweet, charming, almost-perfect, can't-wipe-the-smile-from-your-face fun. Simply put, it's endearing and, well, enchanting.

The movie works on a second level by lovingly evoking Disney's classic canon. "Enchanted" references everything from "Snow White" to "Beauty and the Beast," with gentle satire and sly references (pay attention to little details and character names). Helmer Kevin Lima ("Tarzan," "Enchanted") working with the script by Bill Kelly ("Blast From The Past"), takes traditional Disney fairytale animation and combines it with live action that forms a unique romantic comedy.

Narrated by Julie Andrews ("Mary Poppins"), the fun begins in the classically animated land of Andalasia. There we meet a young woman named Giselle
(Amy Adams, "Junebug"), a sweet innocent who, like Snow White, befriends woodland creatures; shares Belle's taste in gowns, and has Ariel's flowing red hair. She dances about her tree house and sings of a prince who will come and give her "true love's kiss." Her animal friends represent a Who's Who of Disney cartoon creature history: a chipmunk, blue birds, a baby deer, a gray rabbit, an owl, a warthog and more.

This sweet, idealistic beginning is basically a condensed all-too-familiar Disney classic. Giselle falls into danger when a six-storey green troll, drawn by her song, comes around to eat her and is saved by the brave, charming, and somewhat dim Prince Edward (James Marsden, "X-Men").
Having found in each other the one who completes their “heart’s duet,” Giselle and Edward finish the song about the magic of "True Love's Kiss", instantly fall in love and ride off to be "married in the morning!"

But not all is well. Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon, "In the Valley of Elah"),
Edward's wicked stepmother, knows that if he marries, she will lose her throne forever. So Narissa, magically disguised as a crone in black hood and gown, dupes Giselle, on her wedding day, to make a wish at a magical fountain with a sparkling waterfall. As Giselle leans forward to make a wish -- of course, to live happily ever after with her prince -- the crone gives her a shove and the would be princess falls into the fountain and lands in a place "where there are no happily ever afters." Where else but real life midtown Manhattan?

Giselle lands, in of all places, underneath a manhole cover in Times Square.
In classic New Yorker fashion, passers-by give the hoop-skirted belle barely a glance. In no time flat, her tiara is stolen by a homeless man and she's doused by rain, but hope reigns supreme when Giselle spies the 'Palace' she's been searching for (actually the billboard fronting of a run down casino).
That's where she meets divorce attorney and single dad McDreamy -- er Robert (Patrick Dempsey, TV's "Grey's Anatomy") as his young daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey, "Duane Hopwood"), recently denied the fairy tale book she'd asked for, spies a real live Princess asking to be let into the palace.

When Giselle asks for directions to a nearby meadow or hollow tree, Robert reluctantly lets her spend the night on his couch in his SoHo apartment. He finds the act of a good Samaritan difficult to undo and before he knows it his curtains have been turned into frocks
and his singing houseguest is cleaning house. She leans out a window and puts out her signature call: "Aahhh. Aahhh. Aaa -- ahhh."

But rather than cuddly blue jays, squirrels, rabbits, and the like, NYC’s finest urban pests come a running: rats, pigeons, flies, and cockroaches. Though taken aback, Giselle pushes on to make "new friends," orchestrating the clean up of Robert’s apartment with her happy pest cohorts to the tune of a "Happy Working Song" (a spoof on Snow White’s "Whistle While You Work"). As the apartment is tidied, birds get injured and plates are dropped. In the film's most hilariously inspired scene -- helpful cockroaches clean the tub! And at the end, a pigeon eats one of the poor roaches.

Of course, this domesticity
is misinterpreted by Nancy, Robert's girlfriend of five years (Idina Menzel, "Rent"),
who is nonetheless wooed back by a disbelieving Robert with Giselle's advice. And if he's surprised that works, imagine his dilemma when her prince, Edward,
really does arrive, accompanied by Pip, a most 'animated' chipmunk, Giselle’s best animated friend.
Emerging in Times Square with his high boots, puffed shirt, and sharp sword,
he attacks a city bus and refers to everyone as “peasants.”

Giselle and Edward aren’t the only ones to have traveled through the manhole, though. The Queen’s lovestruck lackey, Nathaniel (Timothy Spall, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"),
comes along. Somehow, in an apparently thinly populated Andalasia, Nathaniel kept Edward busy for years with hunting trolls and other adventures, while steering the young prince away from likely maidens. Nathaniel seems surprisingly New York savvy from the start, slipping into disguises, complete with international accents, and Edward is too self-absorbed to notice or care. When the two buy food in a cafeteria and get a motel room, I find myself wondering how they pay for it all? Gold coins?

Unbeknownst to everyone but Pip (who can’t speak anymore, just pantomime) is the fact that Nathaniel is spying for the queen and has orders to give Giselle a poisoned apple. But when Nathaniel fails twice to off Giselle, Narissa herself makes an appearance
-- right in time for the upcoming "Kings and Queens ball."

There's one other thigh-slapper song and dance production: a mock ballad called "That's How You Know," deploying hundreds of performers,
including rollerbladers and a mariachi band, at locations all over Central Park.
During it, Giselle runs up a hill arms outstretched, a la famous shots in "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Sound of Music."

It's a show-stopper in more ways than one, unfortunately.

Director Kevin Lima and credited screenwriter Bill Kelly are hard pressed to maintain the momentum over the next hour or so, which plays out a lot like a clichéd, tune-free Disney Channel movie.

The film tries to recreate "Sleeping Beauty"'s epic confrontation with the evil witch in gloomy, Gothic Forbidden Mountain. Here, Narissa poisons Giselle at the King and Queen ball. But Robert revives Giselle with a kiss just before the clock strikes twelve. The Queen then turns into a fire-breathing, six-storey tall dragon and takes Robert outside with her and up the skyscraper they’re all in. Giselle heads after them -- once she tosses aside her shoes.

The special effect is disconcerting, and not particularly special. It's as if in the final reel, it was decided to give the men something to do. I feel the ball could’ve been another song-and-dance set piece for Giselle, but it was Robert who ended up muttering a few lyrics.
And what exactly was the point of casting Idina Menzel, one of Broadway's leading musical performers, and not giving her anything to sing? Still, until then, the story is a winner. I expect the songs by Alan Menken ("The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast") and Stephen Schwartz (Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame") will be new classics and they're perfectly placed within "Enchanted."

A singer and trained dancer, Amy Adams is pitch perfect as the beautiful Giselle, both animated and live, giving her wide eyed innocence and wonder.
James Marsden plays the self-absorbed and flawless Prince Edward with goofy charm.
Patrick Dempsey has the tough role as the comedy’s straight man but he gives it his best as McDreamy, er -- Robert, a NYC cynical divorce with a buried heart of gold.
If nothing else, it's worth seeing just for the cartoonish performances of Adams and Marsden as the real-life versions of a classic Disney princess and her Prince Charming. Adams owns her character down to the faintest gasp, twirl, and smile, captivating the audience and carrying the film on her shoulders.
I won’t be shocked if she gets an Oscar nomination for this role.

"Enchanted" is fun most of the way, thanks in part to updates of familiar Disney scenes: like poison fruit comes in the form of a vile apple martini and the magic mirror being a motel television. But the film sends mixed messages about love as Adams' princess falls in true love with Dempsey's skeptical modern bachelor.

As Giselle waits for Edward to come for her, she discovers how the real world has a different view of love from fairytale land. She's confused by ideas like "dating"
and how Robert and his girlfriend Nancy could be in love for years but not yet married. Giselle's outright shocked by the idea of divorce, a discovery that drives her to tears. Giselle says, "Separated forever and ever?" when she learns a client of Robert's is divorcing her husband.

Burned by a former love, Robert is a calloused realist in love and unaffected by the divorce he’s overseeing. He views love in a practical, business-like fashion. The polar opposite of Giselle. Over and over, he explains to Giselle that love can't happen in a day, is not magical, and is a commitment that takes work. Giselle's lovey-dovey version of love, he explains bitterly, is mere fantasy. "Many marriages are happy if they just don't end," he says. "Forget happily ever after."

Giselle and Robert's discussions about love are intriguing and well placed in a Disney family movie. After all, Disney is a chief perpetrator of the Hollywood myth of easy, instant and magical love. The kind where fireworks ring out, cartoon birds sing and couples are magically connected in happiness. It's a breath of fresh air to find a movie stressing that love only begins with magical feelings, but from there, it's about choice and commitment. By featuring characters with very different and very incomplete perspectives on love, "Enchanted" is in position to explore what love really means. Giselle and Robert have the opportunity to learn from each other and apply in their respective relationships the truth that successful love needs both real-world commitment and fairyland romance. And for a while, it seems that maybe that's where all the love talk is headed.

Until the two-thirds mark hits.

The climactic scene changes Giselle. She stops singing and loses some of her innocence and joy. And while the film applauds this change as a positive step in her personal growth, it feels sad to me. Giselle is a strong woman, dynamic character, and great role model, one who’ll be the next popular princess in Disney lore, but the real world changes her, and I'm not sure all the changes are actually positive. For her sake, I almost wish Giselle would've stayed in Andalasia. But I guess then I wouldn't have had so much fun seeing her bring a little bit of that world here.

Instead of using Giselle’s and Robert’s relationships to show a realistic and affirming view of love, "Enchanted" sends mixed messages about what love is. It talks a lot about commitment, but chucks commitment out the window. It talks about the need for couples to get to know each other, but instead affirms the idea that true love is something magically discovered nearly immediately. "Enchanted" didn’t define love incorrectly, but left it unclear and confusing. It feels to me like the filmmakers took the easy way out with a crowd-pleasing resolution at the expense of its values and message.

Why wouldn’t Robert warm to Giselle? She’s sunny, has control of woodland creatures through her voice, and can inspire a couple on the verge of divorce to stay together. But what does Robert offer Giselle? A relationship in the real world where more than half of marriages don’t last? What chemistry does Giselle really have with Robert other than the fact that the story mandated her to become a "real woman" who fell in love with a real guy?

Although "Enchanted" doesn't fully take advantage of its unique idea, it's still a hugely entertaining, clever comic fairy tale. But when it ended, I wondered, Is Giselle better off now? What happens two years down the road?

2007-11-11T20:18:00.000-05:00

WGA Writers Strike

I don't normally care to talk about the fiction/film industries, but this seems too important an event to pass up.

Those familiar with the entertainment biz know that film/TV writers went on strike on Monday, November 5, 2007, to settle disputes over proper compensation on residuals for DVDs and other media like the internet. This strike, the first since 1988, has led to the stoppage of production of every American TV broadcast and cable show. Films are still ongoing, but as time goes by, they will be affected, too.

Studio reps say they're surprised that the writers chose to strike and are disappointed because they feel they've made strides in accomodating the writers' demands. Former studio head Michael Eisner for one believes it's a mistake to strike now because the incomes the writers seek aren't available now, but will be three or more years later since alternative media is still developing.

I have a hard time believing the position of the studios. Writers are lashed to the lowest position in the totem pole in the entertainment world. They get the least respect and earn the least, but all projects stem from written scripts. SciFi Channel for one forced webisodes of BSG, requiring the writers to write for free and without credits. Something I don't understand is why they were written and produced in the first place.

I for one prefer to see TV & film production continue, but with outrages like this happening, I'd be perfectly happy to see the established Hollywood system collapse under its own weight. If the strike has to go on for a couple years before the studios and networks see reason, so be it.

Vive la strike!

2007-11-11T19:49:00.000-05:00

Review: “Lust, Caution”

Being a fan of Ang Lee, whose “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” masterpiece is one of my top 5 favorite films, I couldn’t resist tracking down the small art house theater in my area that was showing his latest work, which is out only in limited US release: "Lust, Caution."

The Eileen Chang short story that's the basis for Lee's adaptation is as economical as a wound ball of silk thread: Chang packs a lot of emotional yardage into a very small space as she examines, without demystifying the complex relationship between a young Chinese spy in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and the dangerous collaborator she has been assigned to seduce.

Reactions to Lee’s film range from fascinated to bored. I fall toward the latter to my disappointment. I can see that Lee admires Chang's story. But I would say Lee and his long-time screenwriting collaborators, Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, have stretched Chang's delicate story into a thin, underfed epic.

The life of "Lust, Caution" is poured into the last third; most of what comes before is a long expository flashback buildup, which I felt could’ve been told from the beginning and shortened--greatly.

The picture opens in Shanghai 1942, in the home of Mr. Yee (Tony Leung, one of Asia’s top leading men), security head of the Chinese government that’s collaborating with the occupying Japanese, where his talkative wife (Joan Chen) is entertaining a mahjong party of well-dressed friends. One of them is the beautiful Mrs. Mak Tai Tai (newcomer Tang Wei), the wife of a Hong Kong importer-exporter. When Mr. Yee stops by the table, he and Mrs. Mak share glances that indicate they’re somehow involved. But it’s later revealed that she’s also involved with young Kuang Yu Min (Chinese pop star Wang Leehom), who’s in the resistance.

Mak Tai Tai makes an excuse to leave the game. She goes to a downtown cafe in downtown, where she makes a phone call to Kuang and a group of other men, sits down at a table and begins to remember the past, specifically events in Hong Kong four years earlier.

Cut back to 1938 Hong Kong, where the supposed Mrs. Mak is revealed as college student Wang Chia Chi, an idealistic, naïve girl, who’s enticed into a rebellious, anti-Japanese theatre troupe by Kuang. She develops a crush on him and finds an unexpected calling as a natural actress, who inspires audience members to tearful cries of “China will not fall!” in her troupe’s first patriotic performance. When Kuang gets the idea to turn their group into an unaffiliated amateur resistance cell, she goes along and allows him to persuade her to take the Mak disguise so that she can get close enough to Yee to lure the traitor to his death. But the plot fails when Yee leaves abruptly for Shanghai to accept a promotion, escaping the group’s assassination attempt.

Flash ahead to 1941, when after some difficult years Kuang approaches Wang to resume her role as Mrs. Mak to attempt to seduce Yee again for the same purpose. Under the official auspices of the Communist resistance, Wang goes to Shanghai and this time entangles Yee in a stormy, passionate affair. The outwardly stoic Yee seems on the verge of abandoning his usual cautiousness to his desires, when Wang comes to a crossroad.

Not only are the mission and her life at stake, but so is her real identity. Her role as Mrs. Mak is not only a facade for Yee, but also a trap for herself. And soon she must choose whether it's more valuable to play a false person who is trusted and loved, or a real one whom she barely acknowledges herself.

Defining oneself is a favorite theme of Lee's. In this film, he makes some of his most devastating observations about human nature, finding in his main character a woman who has no identity until she creates one for others. In an early scene, Wang sits in a movie theater crying while watching “Intermezzo”; it's a telling moment because it immediately precedes her emergence as an actress and speaks to the connection between the fiction of a "character" and the emotion it generates within her.

She becomes consumed by playing Mrs. Mak, not only because she completely believes the truth of her role, but because the Yees believe as well. It makes her self-delusion that much more powerful, and when she eventually sleeps with Mr. Yee, their sex scenes are charged with deep emotional intensity because he expresses a need to reveal himself to another person and she feels the gratification of finally becoming someone. To her, convincing him she is Mrs. Mak is actually being Mrs. Mak, and it empowers her--both emotionally and physically--as a fully-formed person rather than the discarded daughter of an expatriate or some street urchin playing with patrician-class values.

At the same time, the real world frequently imposes its unflinching gaze on her gambit and reminds her that she isn't acting in some assassination play, but part of a real plot. In an early sequence that concludes her first "performance" as Mrs. Mak, Wang witnesses her fellow actors clumsily murder another collaborator--a sight too real and unglamorous for her to stay "in character." Later, she receives a precious stone ring that reveals Yee's love, in the process unleashing her own buried feelings. Both events reconnect Wang with her humanity, corrupted by playing her role of Mrs. Mak, ultimately showing her how she not only betrayed those closest to her, but herself as well

Punctuated by several skillfully photographed and intense, even sadomasochistic, love scenes, “Lust, Caution” presents complex characters. Yee, on the surface, appears to be a harsh, even hateful man. But his feelings for Wang bring out another side of him. The relationship between Mr. Yee and Wang with her divided identity is the central dynamic of "Lust, Caution." Both people play roles within roles, engaging in intricate double and triple games that get so complex they become ensnared in entanglements neither one anticipates or wants.

The one place the protagonists are naked, both literally and psychologically, is when they make love, and the sex scenes in "Lust, Caution" are both explicit and essential to illustrating the intensity of their relationship. The sex is graphic and rough. While they might not admit it, this appears to be the only place where the protagonists are honest with each other, where the complex, tortured, ever-changing relationship between them plays itself out.

Wei, Leung and Leehom are all brilliant in their roles. Lee manipulates their characters to evoke sad, beautiful and profound human truths. He pits the two halves of Wang’s character against each other and positions them against her two would-be suitors, Yee and Kuang, creating a dynamic where two men are fighting for two different women in the same frail frame.

Leung's Yee is a man full of secrets, and he finds in Mak a person in whom he can confide--if not the sordid details of his business, at the very least his tormented feelings. Meanwhile, Kuang vows to protect the shrinking-violet Wang from harm, but fails to recognize her real identity until it is too late, as she has already succumbed to the reassuring validation of the Yees' acceptance. (Her question to him--"Why didn't you do that before?"--after he kisses her is one of the movie's most heartbreaking moments.) Lee exercises control of these shifting emotional dynamics to not only maximize the drama in the last third of the film, but to show the desperate and destructive ways that Wang has sealed her own fate.

Thing is, these character subtleties weren’t obviously apparent to me on first, second, or third reflection--and not just because I spent almost half my time reading the English subtitles. I wonder how well the casual viewer will pick up on the character nuances that Lee wove into the film? Something I also didn’t understand was how Wang, after being clumsily initiated into the world of sex by a fellow actor in her troupe, found the seductiveness she needed to entice Yee, particularly in the moments before her first sex encounter with him in which he raped her. And I found it coincidental that she could sing a very touching song to Yee about how they were “needle and thread,” who would never part. I found myself wondering about Yee’s reasons for collaborating with the Japanese, whether he was in it for his own gain or he sincerely believed that working with the Japanese would benefit China? I found it interesting that Wang could speak English, but it didn’t seem relevant to her character and the story, so the few English scenes could have just as well been done in Mandarin. And Kuang’s competing interest in Wang gets a bit lost by the wayside as the story meanders along.

The bones for a great movie are in the film: The tormented femme fatale, the lethal but alluring man she must seduce, the exotic locales, the political intrigue--all punctuated by startling sex between lust-struck hunter and prey. But Lee doesn't zero in on them. He allows long gaps of silence to insinuate themselves unnecessarily between lines of dialogue. He also lavishes a great deal of attention on several shots of Wang sitting in a cafe, dabbing perfume on her wrists: The detail is straight out of Chang's story, but there, it's fleet and concise; Lee stretches it out, crushing it by attempting to load it with importance.

What Chang wrote about eloquently and succinctly--how easily the noblest intentions can be corrupted by love, or at least the promise of it--gets lost in the film. The film focuses so much on the details--like a mahjong game that lasts forever, but we Westerners still don’t understand--we lose sight of the lead actors, whose relationship is all but buried till the last 40 minutes or so of the film.

"Lust, Caution" (shot by Rodrigo Prieto) does have a polished retro-dreamy look. And Lee couldn't have chosen better actors for the cast. It's always a pleasure to watch Joan Chen. She doesn't have much to do here, but playing an aging, possessive beauty, she casts a quiet spell over the picture. Tang, with her fine features and always-questioning eyes, plays Wang with a deft balance of delicacy and toughness to stand up to Leung.

Leung's performance is less moodily romantic than any of those he has given in his work with director Wong Kar-Wai (including "Chunking Express" and "In the Mood for Love")--but here, he pushes beyond romanticism into unsettling territory. His Mr. Yee is at first unreadable, like a distant danger signal at sea that we can't quite make out through the fog. But later in the movie, as Yee's relationship with Wang deepens, he slips into focus. This may be the most unlikable character Leung has ever played--he's such an appealing presence that you can't imagine any director asking him to convey the ruthlessness that this role demands. But Leung pulls off the nearly impossible, making us feel sympathy for a man driven largely by selfish impulses, a man whose cruelty is almost dissolved by love, but not quite as he lets Wang meet her fate--with anguish.

Rated NC-17 for its intense sex scenes (which were cut in the Far East release for Chinese authorities), "Lust, Caution" shows flashes of craft and poignance, teasing people with what it could have been in my opinion.

2007-11-04T22:00:00.000-05:00

Review: "American Gangster"

Inspired by an article profiling drug dealer Frank Lucas for “New York” magazine seven years ago, "American Gangster" really means business.

The film opens strong as Frank (Denzel Washington) pours gas on an unknown Puerto Rican man, sets him ablazing and then pumps a couple of shots into the guy as rough mercy. Things don't get any nicer from there.

Frank is the driver for Bumpy Jones (Clarence Williams III), the benevolent gangster-lord of Harlem. But Bumpy, incensed by a discount department store, mutters a final judgment before dying of a heart attack: "This is what's wrong with America -- it's gotten so big you can't find your way ... What right do they have cutting out the suppliers, pushing all the middlemen out, buying direct from the manufacturer?"

Bumpy's not long in the ground before Frank seizes on his dying mentor's words and spins them to his own benefit. He flies to war-torn Vietnam, making his way deep into the jungle and using his entire savings to buy a load of pure heroin from a Chinese warlord, which he then smuggles into the U.S. aboard military planes with the connivance of an army friend and sells in high grade at cut-rate prices on the street, branding his merchandise “Blue Magic” for quality and racking up sales. As he continues his unusual and brilliant import scheme, he brings his family up from Tar Heel country (The movie gets his roots wrong, saying he's from Greensboro, North Carolina: He grew up in tiny LaGrange, about 10 miles southeast of Goldsboro, which he left at 12 in the early 1940s.) to New York City, where he buys an estate for his gray-haired mother (Ruby Dee, just turned 83) and takes his brothers (including Huey, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) into the business; works out a distribution deal with his Harlem rival Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and Italian mafioso Dominic Cattano (Armand Assante); and weds a beauty contest winner (Lymari Nadal). Frank’s on top of the world, leaving no trace of evidence connecting him to his “Blue Magic” and underplaying the flashy gangland stereotype but ruling his empire when necessary with an iron -- and violent -- hand.

Of course, there’s the law to deal with, on the one hand the corrupt New York City special investigations squad led by chief narcotics detective Trupo (Josh Brolin), who menacingly demands his usual cut of the profits. But he proves less threatening to Frank’s business than Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), this film’s version of Eliot Ness, a detective whose squeaky-clean career is not mirrored by his messy personal life: a custody battle with his wife (Carla Gugino) over his son, womanizing, and financial troubles. But Richie gets appointed by his boss (Ted Levine) to lead a special narcotics federal task force, and he's determined bring down some major criminals, including Frank.

Richie faces his own challenges on the other side of the law. NYC police are, in general, so corrupt that an honest cop is a pariah. When Richie seizes and surrenders $970,000 to his superior officer, the cynical joke -- "Where's the rest of it?" is funny only because it's based in truth. Most of Richie's fellow cops would have taken the cash, and they can't trust someone so trustworthy. The first Ali-Frazier fight serves as a reference point for the film, which spans the years from 1968 to the mid 1970s.

Director Ridley Scott (whose “Gladiator” masterpiece is one of my ten favorite films) and screenwriter Steve Zaillian try to develop each character equally, though it's really Washington's charismatic crook who holds our interest. That's no knock on Crowe, who's solid. Zaillian's script works to portray Frank and Richie as mirror-image strivers -- Frank looking for new possibilities in dealing, Richie going to law school at night -- and shows us how innovations in crime are matched by innovations in crime fighting. Frank wants to work around the Italian mob’s established structure of heroin importing; Richie wants to work without the corrupt infrastructure of the local cops.

Eventually, Richie fastens on Frank and breaks up his brazen, all-or-nothing attempt to ship in one huge last load of heroin as the American effort in Vietnam is collapsing. Before long the two men are facing one another in jail, with Frank negotiating turn state’s evidence in return for special treatment, and Richie getting his opportunity to show off his legal chops in court.

As Frank’s and Richie’s stories gradually intersect, the film’s tone wavers between different themes. Is “American Gangster” a parable of American capitalism, where men like Frank sell narcotics because it's the most profitable work available? Is it a cautionary, rise-and-fall tale about a drug dealer's life and times? Is it the portrait of a dogged cop trying to crack a narcotics smuggling ring? Or of a cop fighting the more insidious evil of police corruption? Or is it just a riveting tale of cop-versus-crook, with two formidable foes circling each other warily, never meeting until their final showdown? The listed possibilities call to mind a host of other films, like “Traffic,” “Scarface,” “The French Connection,” “Prince of the City,” “Heat.”

There are many moments when Ridley Scott's epic feels like a patchwork made of other films, other images. One music cue recycles Bobby Womack's title song from “Across 110th Street.” Frank's twisted vision of the American dream ("This is where I'm from. This is where my family is. My business. My mother. This is my place. This is my country. This is America.") sounds like a paraphrase from “The Godfather.”

But there are also many strong moments where something unique flashes through “American Gangster,” which make you wish there were more of them. Frank's such a businessman that he considers how Nicky Barnes dilutes his dope to maximize street profit "trademark infringement." Richie only becomes aware of Frank's importance after spotting him seated many rows ahead of better-known criminals at the Frasier-Ali fight: "His seats were phenomenal. ..." In a devastating third act speech, Ruby Dee gives the movie its one resounding note of moral outrage. And in the film's most tense scene -- and the one that suggests what “American Gangster” might have been -- Richie's search of Frank's dope plane is derailed by a sneering U.S. Attorney (Roger Bart) because he simply can't believe the idea Frank's been able to get a direct connection, racism overriding police work.

Ridley Scott, who took over for Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day"), puts together a spectacular film on the production level. He and his crew get details right: the clothes, the look of a Harlem diner, the naked women assembling packets of "Blue Magic" heroin in an apartment in the projects, where a wild chase through the hallways caps the film. Scott treats us to many wide street shots and scenes in crowded clubs. Every element from the store fronts to the cars to the costumes look completely genuine. You believe what’s happening at every minute of “American Gangster” could be a very close recreation of what actually went down. There’s a legitimacy to the production that elevates it above what many other directors can do.

But the emotional fire burns only intermittently. We’re never given much of a reason to care about Frank or Richie and so the film becomes a vivid recreation without a dramatic purpose. Everyone involved got the "how" and the "what" of this story down great but forgot the "why." We never learn much about either Frank or Richie beyond their actions and it makes the whole piece shockingly cold and detached.

Except for one 30-second story about seeing a cousin killed by racist cops in North Carolina, we learn nothing about Frank’s past: He's just an empty-hearted killer with the shrewd instincts of a corporate head, and he's willing to get his fingers bloody when necessary. We learn more about Richie in comparison, who's portrayed as one of the few honest cops in North Jersey in the 1960s. But not how or why he turned out that way.

The last 40 minutes of "American Gangster" are as brilliantly directed, acted and action-packed as anything since, well, last year's Oscar-winning mob movie "The Departed," but the film runs long at 157 minutes. Washington and Crowe, two of today’s best leading men, have an easy chemistry when they collide. Still, there isn’t much to their characters. Scott is a great visual designer, but he has rarely brought full human dimension to his characters and I don't feel he does it here.

“American Gangster” is too well made not to enjoy, but it doesn’t get under one’s skin. It’s a good film that feels like it could have been great.

2007-10-24T19:26:00.000-04:00

Sit Rep

Today, I mailed out my "Ra-Gho-Zu" SF story to the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest (WOTF).

Woohoo!

Rewriting this story has been an odyssey that's taking a lot longer than I expected. I've lost count of how many times I've rewritten this story on and off. It's way different from how it first started. Good thing I believed in it because it never occurred to me to quit.

Three people who independently took an interest above and beyond in my story among the many who read different drafts were Scott Andrews (Odyssey alum and fellow Taos chum), Oz (Clarion alum and fellow Taos chum), and Larry Hodges (Odyssey alum and Critters chum).

Thanks guys! You all helped point out bugs that I missed because I'd gotten too close to the story.

I don't know what'll happen when the WOTF readers make their decisions, but this story is stronger than the submission of mine that placed in the 2006 first quarter quarter-finals. I'm looking forward to seeing what'll happen.

Now I'm going to put my screenwriting hat back on to tackle script rewrites for five screenplays. Ugh. It must be done before I move ahead with more scripts I wanna write.

Later.

2007-10-18T23:40:00.000-04:00

Day 8

I saw my final flick for my time at the 2007 Austin Film Festival (AFF): "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead."

A thriller about two brothers who rob a jewelry store--owned by their parents. They mess it up, and everything goes downhill from there. A simple story told in a nonlinear way. There were a few walking-through scenes, but the film still moved along. No happy ending with this flick, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I considered going to the wrap up party, but I decided to head back to my hostel before the main bus lines shut down and rest up for my pickup tomorrow morning.

AFF was an interesting experience. I didn't really learn anything major about the business or writing, but I got to talk to some other writers and emerging indie directors.

A lot of people here in Central Texas are very friendly and hospitable. Going to AFF was worth doing at least once. I'll know better what to expect the next time I come out to Austin. Don't know when that'll be as I don't plan on coming out to a film festival every year.

Must do some packing now and get ready for my flight home.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2007-10-18T02:16:00.000-04:00

Day 7

I can feel the end coming. Bittersweet. I do want to go home, though.

Fewer and fewer people are making it to the film screenings.

Today, I went to the Dobie theater by the University of Texas (UT)campus, which is the furthest theater used by the film festival while still being in hailing distance of Austin.

After getting off the free Armadillo shuttle, I reconnoitered the land, locating the theater, scouting out the bus stop, and determining which buses drove by and at what times.

That done, I walked around the UT campus. Nice place. At an hour before the 6 P, I grabbed a sandwich. Then it hit me that I probably could've audited a class, but film was on my mind today.

I caught "Year At Danger." Coming in, I somehow thought it was a feature, but it was actually a documentary shot by a Texan army national guardsman on his 2005 Iraq combat tour. It was very touching to see how he received his orders nine days after getting married and missed his daughter's birth as he protected the division headquarters of his forward operation base.

Needless to say, the filmmaker made it through random gun ambushes, mortar firings, and bombs to return to his family. Seeing the documentary made it clear that conventional forces are nothing more than targets for insurgents and that the Iraqi army was capable of policing its territory--with American supervision.

Intelligence, counterterrorist task forces, and political solutions at the grass roots level are what's needed rather than a military presence to solve the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I see I'm starting to digress...

"Year At Danger" gives people one man's perspective of the current war. It's worth watching.

The next film was "Superheroes" which tells the story of an Iraq vet with physical and psychologial scars who's documented by a college filmmaker. I thought this was a documentary, but it was actually a feature film. I'm afraid I walked out after seeing a third of the film. I felt for the vet, but the film wandered along at a crawl and I got tired of waiting to see what point it would make.

I took a Capital Metro bus back downtown to watch "Poor Boy's Game," starring Danny Glover and sundry unknown actors. A tale of class stuggle, racial tensions and boxing set in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I almost walked out on this film, too, but I was intrigued just enough by the puzzle of Glover's character help train the male lead for a boxing match against his nephew. The male lead just got out of prison for severely beating the son of Glover's character. Glover's nephew, who happens to be a rising Canadian boxer challenges the male lead, who happens to be a boxer himself, to a match. I did not see the ending coming. It was worth watching, but I feel the film needs to be cut by at least a third. And I thought the Nova Scotia setting was boring, though I can imagine that it was cheap for the filmmakers to work in.

Now as my grip on consciousness loosens, I'm debating whether to catch a film tonight before my Friday morning departure. If I do, I won't stay out late.

I'll see.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2007-10-17T02:47:00.000-04:00

Contest Update

I got news from the last two script contests I entered this year: the Screenwriting Expo and the Scriptshark Insider Contest.

Neither "Heaven's Mandate" nor "Stars and Stripes Forever" advanced to the quarter-finals of the Screenwriting Expo. They both finished in the Top 20%, though. It's something.

For the Scriptshark Insider, I entered just "Stars and Stripes Forever." It made it to the quarter-finals. Finalists'll be announced come mid/late November. I'll be curious to see what happens.

Anyhoo, I have changes in mind for the scripts, which I'll make and I'm working on at least one other script to enter in contests next year.

Looking forward to sending my "Ra-Gho-Zu" SF fiction story out to WOTF later this month. Must get back from Austin first.

2007-10-17T02:14:00.000-04:00

Day 6

No missing post.

I stayed in yesterday to recover since there were no film offerings that caught my eye.

Today, I ventured into Austin and hung out with the cool people at B-Side, checked out some stores and restaurants, then caught two flicks.

The first was "Trail of the Screaming Forehead": Spoof of every 1950s B horror movie there ever was in color. Creeping alien foreheads attach themselves to and possess the unwary folk of a small town--as a prelude to an invasion from space.

Helped pass the time for what I really came for: "Rebel." A Vietnamese martial arts epic.

I went to the scheduled theater, got my seat, and had a pleasant chat with another festival goer. Then when the local Austin Film Festival rep announced the film was moved to another theater at the last minute, I hightailed it to catch a shuttle to the new location. Got in just when the opening credits were through. :-)

A major player American audiences may recognize is Dustin Nguyen ("21 Jump Street"), starring as the baddie. The 1920s. Nationalist uprisings against French colonial rule begin to rack Vietnam. The French respond by having loyal Vietnamese agents infiltrate the leading rebel group, except one agent develops feelings for a comely young woman revolutionary and comes to question his loyalty to his French superiors.

The film is sure to touch heart strings with Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans. IMHO, some bugs in the plot and character development may keep nonaction audiences at a distance. Interesting flick, though.

Must rest up for today now.

2007-10-15T00:23:00.000-04:00

Day 4

Today was a light day. Relatively.

I chose a business oriented curriculum on the final day of panels.

11:30 A Attended a panel on "Packaging, Copyrights & Contracts."

1 P Attended a panel on "Financing."

2:30 P Attended a panel on "Budgets: Talkng to People, Working the Numbers."

No more panels. Woohoo!

I could go into some detail on what was said, but I don't feel like it. Suffice it to say, the more one knows about the business side of things, the better off one is when dealing with those who specialize in stuff like contracts, financing, distribution, production scheduling, etc.

Good thing I took that production company class earlier this year. It made everything the panelists talked about understandable.

I caught two flicks today.

First was "Juno."

Juno, a whip-smart teen girl (Ellen Page, "X3"), deals with an unplanned pregancy by her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera). With the help of her best friend Leah, Juno finds her unborn child a seemingly perfect set of parents: an affluent suburban couple Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman ad Jennifer Garner).

Dialogue was quippy and trendy, which means it'll be dated in a few years. The story didn't have a challenge or antagonist per se, but I was happy enough to follow it to the end.

Second flick was "Lars and the Real Girl."

Lars (Ryan Gosling), a delusional twenty something, starts a relationship with Bianca, a lifelike woman doll, Lars buys from the internet. Lars' family and friends go along with it to help him work it out. It's a real hoot watching everyone treat Bianca as if she were real. And the way how the relationship ends and Lars moves on can't be missed.

Now all that's left are films.

At first glance, the Monday line up doesn't really catch my eye. I'm definitely gonna sleep in, then I'll see how I feel about Monday's offerings tomorrow.

I'm definitely looking forward to some stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday.

A bunch of people are cutting out now that the panels are done, but I signed up for the duration for better or worse.

I'm gonna make the best of it.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2007-10-14T02:13:00.000-04:00

Day 3

Today didn't seem too bad.

Must be getting used to the rhythm. I expect it helped that I stopped lugging my laptop around after the first day.

On the way to the bus stop, I noticed a couple joggers padding by. Later on, Oliver Stone mentioned at his talk (more on that later) that he ran into waves of joggers. I guess a lot of Austonians get into fitness mode on the weekends.

At 9 A, I attended a "Doing It Yourself" panel where some indie directors talked about the hassles they faced while completing some recent and/or first productions. Useful to know when I cut my teeth on short films at the future directing workshop I'll take.

10:45 A, I attended "A Conversation with Oliver Stone." Shortly before then, a contest Finalist from NYC exchanged cards, saying he wanted to rap about stories. Very flattering.

As I waited for Oliver Stone to come up, a guy at the head of the room with a handlebar mustache and clothes out of the '70s, said into a mike, "Excuse me. Is there a Mr. Redpath in the room?"

A woman in the audience said, "Do you mean Reddick?"

The guy shuffled some big note cards and peered at 'em confused, "Maybe."

The woman said, "I hope it's not for anything bad."

Another guy straight out of the '70s behind the first guy grabbed a mike and said, "His dad died."

The first guy gave the second guy a shocked look. Then someone mumbled "No one died."

A guy with a camera and another with a soundstage mike than came up behind the '70s guys, and they repeated the sequence to a tee. Deja vu. For a second, I'd wondered if the '70s guys were trapped in a repeating time loop confined exactly to their spots in the conference room. Then an inner light lit up.

As the '70s guys left the room with the camera crew, I asked if their takes were for a short film? They said a pilot episode. For a cable show I'd wager. The short scene didn't really do anything for me.

It did pass the time, though. Oliver Stone came up, and talked about why he did the films he did. He pointed out how the presidency has become a "benign tyranny" and the press is a "fourth estate" that's supports Bush as he ignores the will of the people and circumvents Congress and the Supreme Court in contravention of the Constitution. Stone feels that it may be time to take to the streets and protest again. Unfortunately, if earlier protests are anything to go by, it won't do anything to influence presidential policy.

At noon, I indulged in an expensive hotel restaurant calzone with chicken, tomatoes, and gruyere cheese. I also got marinara sauce, which unfortunately, was nothing more than mashed tomatoe. Lacking change, I gave the waitress a larger tip than I needed to. Oh, well.

On my way to the B-Side lounge, I passed a grass roots march of flag waving locals calling out for people to support Texas' republican congressman (forgot name) for the presidency. I took a card from the first person who waved one at me to keep other people from pushing them on me. According to the card, this person champions many good and wholesome things, including freedom. How can he be a Republican? I'm an independent myself and don't care about either party, but it seems to me the Republicans are all about blindly supporting Bush and hanging onto every bit of power they can nowadays.

Anyhow, I got to the B-Side lounge, where I played some X Box "Halo" for the very first time. I was just starting to get the hang of the controller when it was time to get back to the Driskall hotel. Fun game. Good thing I don't have X Box. Too busy writing and doing important stuff.

2 P. I attended a "Writing for Animation" panel run by some Pixar writers, including Terry Rossio. They talked briefly about how they broke in and about the the good results that can come from collaboration. As they waxed on about the joys of working in a committee over as much as five years at a time, I wondered how they felt about the later "Shrek" films? Or for that matter, "POTC 2 & 3," "The Legend of Zorro," etc.?

3:45 P I attended a talk on "Writing a War Film" led by Oliver Stone. John Milius was there, too. Interesting talk. But then I found myself wondering about "Alexander," especially when Stone mentioned tongue in cheek that he may turn out a fourth version for DVD. I had a kick when Stone and Milius said they would've fragged Tom Hanks' Captain Miller character for going after Private Ryan.

I asked Stone (and Milius) how he felt about "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima." They said "Flags" was solid even if it overstressed how the US government used the flag raising to raise war bonds and that Clint Eastwood is a deeper and more interesting person since his "Dirty Harry" days. I agreed. Unfortunatly, neither saw "Letters From Iwo Jima." I was especially curious to hear their take on that flick.

Film screenings came next. I caught the "Made in China" documentary produced by a person who investigated the mountaintop where his father was born in China in the early 1900s. I was intrigued with the subject, but the focus of the documentary seemed to waver between the director's dad and a bunch of vignettes of other Americans who grew up in a vanished China. I also wondered what the director hoped to gain by going to the site of his father's cabin?

A short film was tacked on and played before the China documentary, in which an Austrian woman (auf Deutsch) detailed how her mother tried to pass on her family's religious piousness, but failed. I was relieved when it finished.

I then caught "Beyond the Pale," produced by Jennifer Howard of Friday's acquaintance. She neglected to mention that she had a part in it also. It was a hoot watching a 13 year PhD candidate scramble to finish his disertation paper to avoid getting expelled. It was like watching "The Office" on campus, complete with the moving handheld camera shots and speeches to the camera man. I didn't know that Harve, who drove Jennifer and me, to the Arbor theater on Friday night was the lead. Nice. If there was one thing I thought could be done, it would be for the film to be shortened by a third.

I capped things with the film "Control," a biopic about Brit rock star Ian Curtis who killed himself. Nice look with the black and white color and great performances, but I felt this flick crawled by at almost 2 hours and I wondered if I was supposed to feel sorry for Curtis when he fell out of love with his devoted wife, got attached to another woman, and didn't have the guts to break it off with either?

I declined going to the bar again to catch a late night bus to get back to the hostel and type this account up.

Must grab a few winks now.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2007-10-13T02:25:00.000-04:00

Day 2

Sigh...

Another 14 hour day over.

I had no idea AFF would be such an event. I may want to take a break when I get back home...which won't be till Oct. 19.

I attended 4 panels from 9-4P, 3 of which were for us Second Rounders. Two were the same, Q&A with producers, agents, and managers about the mysteries of the film biz.

Good thing I took my production company class earlier this year. I knew just about everything the panelists shared.

The other panel was run by working writers/directors, who answered questions about working in the film biz full-time. Very interesting.

The other event was the couch chat with writer/director Robin Swicord, who did among other things the adaptation of "Memoirs of A Geisha." Interesting to hear about how the old boys club in Tinseltown repressed women directors, film composers, etc. for so many years.

At lunchtime, I got some free food at the B-side lounge again. I expect to try a restaurant or two in the next few days since the JJ subs're wearing a tad thin now.
I also called up the cabbie, who said he didn't find my folder. I then called the movie theater, and they didn't find anything neither.

Dag gum it.

When the panels were over, I went to a Texas BBQ event and got some free viddles: turkey, beef, beans, and tater salad. Could've gotten more if'n I wanted, but I decided to not overindulge.

I chatted with some filmmakers about their films, including one Jennifer Howard, who lives almost in spittin' distance of me back home. I'm gonna make a point of seeing her group's flick tomorrow.

Today, I saw a documentary of the split and eventual reconciliation of a Vietnamese woman's family by the Vietnam war, "Oh, Saigon" Unfortunately, I missed the first half when the generous folks who gave me a ride got lost after a late start. The second half was plenty good, though. I hear tell this documentary will come out on PBS come next May. I'll look forward to seeing what I missed.

With the same people, I also saw an autobiographical indie feature called "Numb," starring Matthew Perry. He plays the director, who had a "depersonality"? problem or some such. Matthew done good, and without putting on his Chandler routine, too.

There was a party, but with the night progressin' as it was, I thought it best to ride my late night bus back to the hostel sober.

Must catch a few hours of sleep for this morning's activities now.

2007-10-12T02:56:00.000-04:00

Day 1

It's over. Finally.

I'm actually into the wee hours of Day 2 now.

Lots of walking (lugging my laptop along). Good thing I'm not a couch potato, but gods.

Having a car in Austin is a necessity. I walked from the hostel I'm bedding down in to a bus stop, then from the drop off point to the Driskall hotel...

I registered and picked up my producers badge. I attended two panels called something along the lines of: "Getting the most out of competitions" and "A Shot of Inspiration for Writers."

In the first, some past contest winners told us how they parlayed contest wins into becoming filmmakers, individual journeys that no one else is gonna copy.

In the second, the panelists passed whiskey shots around for...inspiration. They fielded questions on how a writer can stay encouraged, learn when they're writers,etc.

Then I walked to a lounge a few blocks away to grab some free food, then I walked to a party in an "industrial" bar where it was too loud to really hear what everyone else was saying. I tagged along with an English indie director, Michael Bartlett, and his mates. Salt of the Earth. I'll have to see if I can see his flick, "The Zombie Diaries," at least once.

With some regret, I cut the party to hike back to the hotel to catch an expensive cab ride to view a Vietnamese film being shown at a theater too far away to walk.

The film itself was quite good, though. "Owl and Sparrow," a tear jerker about an orphan girl who brings together a young woman flight attendant looking for love and a guy hurt by a past flame.

There're some other Vietnamese films in the next few days that I'll want to see...but they're all in that same theater.

I was able to get a ride from someone leaving, but not before the taxi came to pick me up. I gave the driver a tip, then learned later that I left a folder in his car with a copy of my flight itinerary and my ticket for my airport shuttle pickup.

I can check in at the airport, and I can give the shuttle driver a confirmation number, but I want my folder back. Since I have the cabbie's card, I can try calling him and asking him if he has the folder. But I think I know what he'll say.

On the way back, I had a nice conversation with an old-school veteran woman screenwriter, Harmony. Harmony regaled me and our driver, Sassy, about how Hollywood used to be filled with reliable and professional people, who have been leaving the place in droves for the last 20 years or so. Sharks mostly infest Tinseltown nowadays. One must keep an eye out when navigating Hollywood's waters.

I attended a late night welcome conference party at a nearby bar. Talked about film with some other festival goers, and I made a suggestion to some festival staffers that shuttle service be extended to all distant theaters for all the good that'll do.

I passed on free beer to stay awake and checked out of the party to head back to my hostel. I then spent 40 minutes walking in a circle to find a late night bus and ended up at the stop I started at.

Leastways, I learned about Austin's bus schedules.

Today, I have 4 panels to look forward to. Three of which are devoted to us Second Rounders. We can ask working producers and writers anything about the secrets of breaking in. :-)

The fourth panel will actually be a "sofa" chat with the writer for "Memoirs of a Geisha."

I'll be curious to see how today turns out.

Must drag myself off to bed now to catch a few hours of semisleep.

2007-10-02T22:38:00.000-04:00

Zen Pen Critique

This past weekend, I got a critique on my "Ra-Gho-Zu" story (formerly "For Kimi") from The Zen Pen, run by Carina Gonzalez, the former slush editor for Realms of Fantasy magazine.

She gave me an editor's view of the story and offered a few tips on further tweaking the story during an ongoing dialogue these last few days.

Her scoring scale is 100 maximum points achieved in three parts.

The first is 75 points for good writing and telling. The second is 15 points for the story itself. The third is 10 points for luck, researching publication personalities, and being at the right place and the right time.

I got:

~ 73/75 for the writing and telling.

~ 14/15 for the story.

~ Assuming I target the right market and the gods are with me, I have the highest possible score of 97/100.

Woohoo!

I'd already been working on the story for a while before subbing it to her. Earlier drafts wouldn't have scored so high.

Once I do make some final adjustments, my top 3 choices for my opus are WOTF, Jim Baen's Universe, and Analog.

I'm looking forward to WOTF. :-)

2007-09-30T22:11:00.000-04:00

Film Review: “Eastern Promises”

Directed by David Cronenberg, “Eastern Promises” jumps out of the gate with the most realistic, horrific throat slashing with a dull knife you will ever see. (How do they fake that kind of thing?)

You the audience have been duly warned and every scene after that is charged with pure danger. You don’t know what will happen because a character’s glance might be judged wrong and out will come an ice pick.

Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a part English midwife, who gets her last name from her Russian father, works at a North London hospital. We meet her as she struggles, but fails to save a young pregnant girl, Tatiana (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), who is brought to the hospital after hemorrhaging and collapsing at a pharmacy. The baby is saved, though.

Determined to find a relative with whom she can leave the baby, Anna takes the dead girl’s diary, which is written in Russian, to her Uncle Stepan (Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski). When he refuses to translate the diary, Anna takes a photocopy to a Russian restaurant owner, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose business card was in the diary. Seemingly inseparable from his kitchen, Semyon offers meals of czarist luxury to his customers in his posh Trans-Siberian restaurant.

Anna and the rest of us gradually catch on that Semyon is the patriarch of London’s local Russian mafia family, the Vory-V-Zakone (“Thieves In Law”), who’re involved in everything from selling teenage prostitutes to running weapons to murder. Tatiana, we discover by degrees, was forced into prostitution and drug addiction by Semyon. She was trying to escape when she hemorrhaged and ended up in Anna’s hospital.

Semyon’s heir apparent is his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) a vicious, out-of-control murderer. Kirill is the heir-apparent to the throne but his father doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge that. Moderating between the two family members is Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), a chilly, impeccably dressed “chauffeur” whose carefully groomed exterior masks a ruthless brutality. Bullied and ordered around by Kirill, Nikolai is being prepped to graduate from driver and enforcer to a mob captain with the tattooed stars to prove it. Semyon barely hides his preference for Nikolai over his own son.

Skillfully written by Steve Knight, we learn that Russian criminals have their careers tattooed on their bodies. Nikolai is covered with tattoos, but he needs two eight-pointed stars on his chest and tattoos on his knees to complete his body book that will show that he belongs to the highest rank of the Russian underworld.

Anna wants to find the baby’s relatives and agrees to exchange the original diary for a family address in Russia. When Anna finds out what is in the diary and who it implicates, instead of minding her own business, she steps deeper into the dangerous world of the Russian mafia and becomes entangled with Nikolai.

Assigned to “dissuade” her, it's impossible to guess whether Nikolai will add Anna to the collection of corpses he has already dropped in the Thames. Not once, but twice he warns Anna to stay away, though. But her need to discover who Tatiana was combined with her growing attraction to Nikolai makes it impossible for Anna to keep to a safe distance. And Anna forms an instant bond with Tatiana’s infant.

This is Mortensen’s second film with David Cronenberg. He was dazzling in Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” and has found his Martin Scorsese in the director. Mortensen, who can seem a little rigid and withdrawn, uses that stillness to create an unnerving presence. Nikolai says very little and displays an economy of movement. So what little he does say and do has even greater impact. Watts is best in the scenes with the actors playing her family--her mom, Helen (Sinead Cusack) and her disagreeable uncle Stepan. Cassel has the most difficult task as Kirill because he has to navigate the stereotypes of playing a character who is a drunk Russian and a closeted gay. Both groups might be offended with the role but Cassel is a good actor and he makes the character work within the context of this film.

“Eastern Promises” is written by Steve Knight, who also wrote “Dirty Pretty Things.” Knight again contemplates immigrant dreams that turn into nightmares. This time young girls made into sex slaves. Tatiana’s diary provides a view into how twisted those dreams can become. Knight also conveys little details that comment on the assimilation process of other immigrants whether it’s a Russian youth’s desire to go to a Chelsea football (soccer) game or Kirill’s attempt to explain that the slang “the coast is clear” has nothing to do with the beach or the periodic monologues from Tatiana’s diary that vocalize her desire to see the world and find a better life before she was forced into prostitution and drug addiction.

A key to the film’s success is the contribution of cinematographer and longtime Cronenberg collaborator Peter Suschitzky. The careful and precise composition of each shot, combined with the use of sound, insinuate something dark lurking below the often calm and polished surface. Suschitzky’s poised, objective camera records some of the violence with a surprisingly calm eye that makes the violence all the more disturbing. Violence on screen tends to be one of two things: so over the top it severs all ties to reality or so brutal it shocks. Cronenberg’s violence leans toward the latter category. The film’s violence stirs unease at the very least.

The ads for the film state “Every sin leaves a mark.” This draws attention to the way the Russian gangsters use tattoos to tell the story of their lives--each tattoo records something they’ve done. The tattooed hides of these Russian mafiozy is the surface they proudly reveal to others in their secret world and it defines them. Cronenberg also shows the surfaces the characters present to the outside world. Nikolai has two skins--his tattooed body which in turn is covered by slick Armani suits. He uses the outer skin to try and fool the public, while the skin underneath defines his rank within the inner circle of the gangster world. As the film progresses, we find that there is even another layer to his character. It’s appropriate then that in two key scenes Nikolai strips down to expose more than just his flesh. In some ways, Nikolai has much in common with Mortensen’s character in “Violence,” who hides one persona beneath another.

Anna may not have such obvious layers, but she also wears an outer mask--a pretty British midwife--who hides both her Russian heritage and her own baby’s death. Everyone in this film has one surface they want people to see as well as another one underneath. Semyon is the doting grandfather who harbors a much darker soul. And his son Kirill seems forced by the rigid codes of his mob environment to do a lot of macho posturing to hide the fact that he’s gay and a softie for children. Even Stepan, the bigoted old school Russian who disapproved of Anna’s past relationship with a black doctor, turns out to be a decent sort, who once worked back in the day as a KGB auxiliary against the Vory-V-Zakone in the Rodina (Mother Russia).

But then Cronenberg has always been interested in human surfaces whether it’s a body with parasites squirming beneath the skin (“They Came From Within”) or a blood-sucking phallus under Marilyn Chambers’ arm (“Rabid”) or bodies mixed with technology (“eXiztenZ”). These earlier films fall in the horror genre but both “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises” are more thrillers or violent dramas. Yet in a sense they too are dealing with horror, the horror of what people are capable of doing to each other. So although Cronenberg is not doing horror in a conventional sense, he’s still showing us horrors. The brilliantly staged fight in a Turkish bath house--where a naked Nikolai is assaulted by two knife wielding thugs--has all the horror and discomfort of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” shower scene. “Eastern Promises” is a horror film hiding beneath the more refined skin of a sleek Hollywood thriller.

Elegant in its ability to disturb, “Eastern Promises” demonstrates that Cronenberg is one of today’s top filmmakers. He serves up a twisted morality tale that flashes a fleeting and unexpected tenderness. His film gets better upon reflection and with repeated viewings. The more you consider the details, the more they add up to something smart and complex.

If there’s one quibble I have, the title brings to mind a mid-range perfume. This film is more a shot of blood with a vodka chaser.

2007-09-15T20:32:00.000-04:00

Sit Rep

After some major hair tearing sessions from Monday to Friday of this past week, I finished what I think may be the draft of my SF short story that I'll send to WOTF. Woohoo!

It's titled "For Kimi." Previous titles were: "Law and Order," "Justice," "Honor and Justice," "The Way of the Peacemaker" and "The Peacemaker."

This is a story I've banged my head against on and off for longer than I ever expected. But I just had to keep working on it till I got it right. Masochism comes with being a writer I guess.

I'm letting this story rest for a bit, then I plan on sending "For Kimi" out into the world to brave WOTF and/or the short fiction marketplace. If the gods are with me, I'll be able to write up an account of next year's WOTF award ceremony and workshop.

I have new fiction in mind, but I've also got some screenplays calling for attention, too. The curse of being interested in both fiction and film...

On the AFF front, I was able to clear time away from work, get an airline ticket, book lodging in a dirt cheap place, and get my discounted (but still costly) all access badge for the Austin Film
Festival.

I will be able to mix with Hollywood insiders over drinks and BBQ (though I don't drink and don't like ribs). As one of my screenwriting teachers advised me, though, "Hope for everything and expect nothing."

I won't have a problem saying "hi" and talking shop, but it's all in the lap of the gods now.

Later.

2007-09-09T21:01:00.000-04:00

Review: "3:10 TO YUMA"

The Western may be an endangered cinematic species nowadays, but every once in a while one comes along that’s good enough to make a body nostalgic for the days when they were churned out in droves. The ultimate American genre, a repository of frontier mythology with archetypal manly men who live by their own code of honor, James Mangold’s "3:10 to Yuma" shows that an Aussie and a Welshman can meet the requirements just fine. A remake of Delmer Daves' 1957 picture, the new version holds its own, operating on the border between chaos and civilization, law and abandon. The film is based on a story by Elmore Leonard, about a down-on-his-luck rancher who forges a curious bond with an outlaw as he takes the criminal to a railway line for transport to prison.

Mangold ("Walk the Line") has assembled a cast that has hardly a weak link and almost makes one not regret the absence of classic stalwarts like Ward Bond, Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Dan Duryea. Christian Bale plays Dale Evans, a sharpshooter and Union Army veteran who lost part of his leg in the Civil War. With the small pension awarded him by the government, he has moved his wife, Alice (Gretchen Mol, who somehow looks both luminous and careworn), and his sons, hot-under-the-spurs teen Will (Logan Lerman) and sickly Mark (Benjamin Petry), to a small Arizona ranch. A drought has nearly ruined Evans' livelihood, and the property's deed-holder, knowing the railroad is eyeing the land, hopes to drive him and his family off it.

Russell Crowe shines opposite Bale as outlaw leader Ben Wade. Crowe captures all the malevolent charisma of Wade, whose gang in a spectacular opening sequence, attacks a Southern Railway stagecoach defended by Pinkerton agents with a Gatling gun and a crusty bounty hunter Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda), an old rival whom he lets live despite the bloodlust of his right-hand man Charlie Prince (Ben Foster).

Evans and his sons observe the attack. They rescue McElroy and take him back to town, where Pinkerton man Grayson Butterfield (Dallas Roberts) and Marshal Weathers (Luce Rains) are waiting for the stagecoach Wade and his boys just robbed. There Evans helps capture Wade, who tarried too long with barmaid Emmy Roberts (Vinessa Shaw) while his gang vamoosed to safety.

Butterfield and Weathers then decide to take Wade from Bisbee to a town called Contention, about three days’ ride, to board the 3:10 train to Yuma prison, where he’ll be hanged for twenty-two robberies of Southern Railway’s cash deliveries. Desperate to save his ranch, Evans agrees to be part of the posse in charge of getting Wade there for a land-saving paycheck. Coming along for the ride are Butterfield, McElroy, Doc Potter (Alan Tudyk of the lamented “Firefly” and “Serenity”), who must care for McElroy’s wounds, and Tucker (Kevin Durand), henchman to the town despot who’s dispossessing Evans. But Will, who’s been left behind, shows up just in time to keep Wade from escaping in the first of several instances in which he outwits his captors. And hovering over the entire journey is the knowledge that Prince and his comrades are hot on their trail. They want their boss and won’t spare bullets to get him back.

In Daves' version of the movie, Evans was played by a drawn, weatherbeaten Van Heflin; Glenn Ford's Wade was a gentlemanly, sinister operator. They're both terrific performances, but Bale and Crowe match them, reinventing the characters in ways that honor, without imitating, the men who first played them.

Crowe's Wade is the type of roguish romancer we've seen him play before--his manly-man demeanor charms barmaid Emmy in something under two minutes. But he doesn't downplay Wade's ruthlessness either. Actually, his Wade doesn't seem to see ruthlessness and charm as contradictions. His eyes can be gently mocking or icily appraising, but even then you can't tell exactly what he wants: He's a man who's simultaneously looking for ways to connect and betray, as if he can't tell the difference anymore.

Bale, looking gaunt and haunted, is Crowe's match in every way, playing the quintessential broken man who's responded to life's hardships by doggedly insisting on doing what's right. Bale pushes his role out without ever appearing to push it at all. He takes moments that could be corny or overbearing and scales them down instead of blowing them up. The effect is something both casual and meticulous, a way of paying homage to the genre's past and nudging it toward the future.

Crowe’s and Bale’s scenes together are like acting master classes. Wade knows he's a bad man, and he tells his decent captor so. But he's a smiling villain, and Evans senses there's something more than bloodlust beneath his body count.

Mangold and his screenwriters, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, have taken Halsted Welles' earlier screenplay and fleshed it out, adding some interesting details (Wade's battle scars, both emotional and physical, are their invention, and they were probably added to lend some present day topical relevance to the picture) and some superfluous ones (the posse runs into a group of railroad baddies, led by Luke Wilson, that feels like padding the movie doesn't need). And Wade has an artistic bent, sketching out people, birds, and other things that catch his fancy and we learn he’d read the bible cover to cover once as a boy as his mother vanished while buying railroad tickets back East.

The supporting roles also help elevate the new version and play with the cliches of the genre. There’s Fonda’s laconic bounty hunter, Tudyk’s soft but nervously heroic vet-turned-doctor, Roberts’ haughty eastern detective, Rains’ leathery lawman and Tucker’s thuggish deputy. Not least of which is Wade's psychotic right-hand man, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), who has an unbridled, fury and dedication to his leader. Resplendent in a double-breasted Confederate gray leather jacket with brass buttons, his presence alone suggests bad things ahead. Meanwhile, the craggy rock faces and orange dust of New Mexico become characters in their own right.

Most important, though, is the expansion of the role of Will Evans, little more than a cameo in the original, who here becomes an important figure as the boy at war with himself--disappointed in his father, who he sees as weak, and seduced by Wade’s easy charm. His presence deepens the conflict at the center of the story by making the young man’s soul the prize that Wade and Evans are fighting for.

Mangold works throughout with finesse, paying homage to the old conventions without allowing them to seem stale and getting strong performances down the line. (The only exceptions are the women. Gretchen Mol barely registers as Dan’s wife, nor does Shaw make much of an impression, except on the eye. But this is a man-centered tale.) Technical contributions are top-notch, from Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography (showing us dusty, underpopulated towns and landscapes that hover uncertainly between bleakness and beauty, and even give us a stagecoach driver's eye view over the backs of a team of galloping horses) and Michael McCusker’s editing, which together mix energy and control, to Marco Beltrami’s score, supportive in both the action scenes and the quieter moments.

"3:10 to Yuma" hits a rough patch in the last reel, though, when the shift in Wade’s motivations remain as opaque as it was in the original, and the decision to go for a denouement both downbeat and uplifting doesn’t quite play. But those problems don’t take the movie off the rails. This is a great old-fashioned western that works in contemporary terms, a rousing demonstration that some people can make the kinds of pictures they supposedly don’t make anymore.

2007-09-07T20:13:00.000-04:00

Austin Film Festival Results

Earlier this week, I got the results for the scripts I subbed to the Austin Film Festival (AFF).

"Stars and Stripes Forever" didn't advance to the Second Round.

"Heaven's Mandate" made it to the Second Round and almost advanced to the Semi-Finals.

I'm told that Second Round scripts fall in the top 10-12% of the 4000+ scripts submitted this year.

And I'm told that if I'm able to attend the conference this year, I'll get a badge that'll give me producer-level access to panels, parties, film viewings, etc. and that us Second Rounders and higher will be feted by the AFF and we'll get a chance to say "Hi" to major Hollywood players.

Nice.

Two sticking points are getting enough time away from work (Oct 11-18) and getting the money. Even with the discounts I'd get from the AFF for lodging and travel, it won't be cheap. After going to Taos, I hadn't been planning on going anywhere for a long time.

I'll have to see if I can swing this AFF trip.

But since I have the feeling that "Heaven's Mandate" is more of a foreign film project that Hong Kong would like better than Hollywood, I wonder how benficial going to AFF will be for me?

2007-08-30T19:05:00.000-04:00

PAGE AWARDS UPDATE

I just learned that the finalists for this year's PAGE Awards Contest were announced.

I'm not one of 'em. :-/

Shigata ga nai.

I had a good run. At the very least, I can use it as a credit on a query letter. I'm told that some of this year's quarter-finalists and semifinalists will be approached by judges who're interested in optioning, producing, or representing them.

It'll be awesome if one of those fringe benefits spill over my way.

Anyhoo, I have ideas in mind for the next draft of my "Stars and Stripes Forever" script and I'm moving on with other stories.

Later.

2007-08-05T22:31:00.000-04:00

Film Review: “The Bourne Ultimatum”

If Alfred Hitchcock were alive and directing action films today, they'd probably look a whole lot like Paul Greengrass’ masterful spy thriller “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Those who enjoyed the first two chapters (Doug Liman’s “The Bourne Identity” and Greengrass' “The Bourne Supremacy”) will have a ball with this third and final entry. Forget that it's a sequel to a sequel and ignore the fact that the film has next to no connection to its Robert Ludlum source material -- “The Bourne Ultimatum” still stands as one of the most rousing action movies in years.

Need proof that $100 million dollars worth of digital and CGI trickery isn’t needed to create an action spectacle that will have moviegoers cheering? Here it is. How novel to find an action film that delivers thrills and intensity through character and story instead of eye-candy and explosions. Simple to follow but just twisted enough to sink your teeth into.

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is in constant motion, racing down streets and along corridors, leaping across rooftops. Intimate with many cities -- Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid -- and, incapable of hesitation, he runs without a stumble though their mazelike neighborhoods, markets, and railroad stations. No office or hotel-room door remains impenetrable; no safe remains locked. Robert Ludlum created the character -- in his 1980 novel, “The Bourne Identity” -- as a black-ops assassin whose brain had been wiped clean before he was programmed to kill. The writers who adapted Bourne for the screen (Tony Gilroy has been a regular, along with various collaborators) took over Ludlum’s notion for the character; they enhanced Bourne’s locomotive skills, and gave him a soul. This Jason Bourne is so anguished by his crimes that he develops amnesia, but he gradually remembers the bad things he has done, and is haunted by them.

Because the viewer actually cares about Jason Bourne's plight -- and, like him, craves some big answers -- the action moments feel like natural extensions of the story, rather than a collection of stand-alone set-pieces that were wedged into the plot wherever they'd fit. It feels good to breeze along with an extended action scene and actually not know where it's headed. The Bourne series has already shown that it doesn't always play by the rules (recall the fate of Franka Potente's character in “Supremacy”), and that adds another layer of flavor to the mayhem: some of the characters you like actually could die.

Hats off to producer Frank Marshall for keeping this trilogy moving ahead in confident fashion. Along with Liman, Greengrass, Damon, Gilroy, and hundreds of other contributors, the producer has done the near-impossible: He has delivered a trilogy that has no weak entry.

The film’s plot goes something like this: London journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) stumbles onto a hyper-secret CIA black op code named Blackbriar.

It's so sensitive the whisper of it on Ross' cell phone sets sinister surveillance technology abuzz an ocean away in midtown Manhattan.

There the Blackbriar leak sparks the attention of a Bush-league spook, Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), and Pam Landry (Joan Allen), the honorable but tough-as-nails CIA bureaucrat from 2004's “Supremacy” who, in the last moments of that film, told Bourne his birth name.

Thing is, that still hasn't happened yet -- “Ultimatum” actually kicks off in Moscow following Bourne's confession to a young Russian girl whose parents he murdered and his putting paid to Franka’s killer. Still racked by flashbacks to his vicious past -- filled with more post-9/11 imagery than ever before -- Bourne's search for his identity leads him to Ross and, consequently, to Vosen.

From here, Greengrass piggybacks jaw-dropping set piece on jaw-dropping set piece. When the ever-resourceful Bourne sets up a meet with Ross at London's Waterloo Station, he puppeteers the reporter through corridors and crowds to evade a rapidly-tightening network of operatives and video surveillance cameras linked via satellite to Vosen's hi-tech hub.

Yet the man unerringly pulling all the strings here is Greengrass, whose faculty for electrifying -- yet never disorienting -- chases and clashes is staggering. A mind-blowing mid-point chase over the rooftops of Tangier and an intimate hand-to-hand fight to the end that ends in stunned silence are among the film’s highlights.

Yet throughout, the director of “United 93” never loses his focus, or the emotionalism hard-wired into Bourne's search for both self and redemption.

By the time he locates his objective -- found amid the skyscrapers of New York -- we're as invested in finding the truth as he is.

And just as exhausted.

Bourne’s primary foe, Noah Vosen, who has a whittled honest voice, makes a devastating no-nonsense villain: he seems efficient, capable, a man born to lead people -- right off an ethical cliff. Landry has been involved with this Bourne caper long enough to know that Bourne isn’t a monster, just a ruthless assassin. She wants to hear his side of the story. True, he has a damaging tape that could blow the cover of a sensitive program. But, she reasons, “if he really wanted to hurt us he could have sent the tape to CNN.”

Vosen is forever urging and barking -- “He’s on the move, gimmee eyeballs on the street, let’s go”-- while his analyst Geek Squad storms their computers following Bourne around the world via surveillance cameras and intercepted phone signals.

In chasing the British reporter, Vosen orders, “I want his phones, his BlackBerry…I want to know what he’s gonna think before he does.” Half a second later, the thing is done.

A big pleasure is the fantasy that the CIA is a swooping, roaring, unstoppable force able to summon the darkest magic out of a clear blue sky -- when they need an “asset,” or assassin, at Waterloo Station in London, he’s there instantly, in just the right place, perfectly hidden, with his trusty sniper gear. Back in the real world, we have 50 years worth of reasons to suspect that the CIA is a place where bored nine-to-fivers in poly-blend shirts sit at crumb-covered desks silently calculating their pensions. Find Bin Laden? Track Al-Qaida activity Stateside? When?

The greatest of pleasures, though, is in watching Bourne work -- you can see him observing, thinking, planning, reacting, as CIA baddies swarm in from every direction. The script never cheats its way out by giving him a fancy gadget -- buying a prepaid cellphone is one of the smartest things he does -- and it doesn’t stop for jokey one-liners or cooing romance. Chasing the source who gave the reporter the story about him brings Boune to Madrid, where he again runs into the young CIA field support officer, Nicky Parsons, (Julia Stiles) who started to believe in him in the last movie. Emotions underlie the looks she gives Bourne, but shooting her a glance is as close as Bourne gets to undressing her. This budding romance may be saved for later if Marshall comes out with more Bourne films. I’ll watch ‘em if they’re all this good.

Bourne is no James Bond. Even though last year’s “Casino Royale” was a tremendously satisfying entry, 007’s films don’t stand up to the Bourne series’ brute velocity. As Greengrass thrusts his trademark shaky camera into his spies’ faces, stages gripping fistfights without music or unnecessary cuts, hurls you across the rooftops of Tangier or demonstrates the art of crunchily driving a stolen police car backwards off the roof of the Port Authority, he always makes you feel the temperature, and it’s boiling hot. A whiff of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo makes the film feel current, but Greengrass doesn’t quite dump us back in reality by overselling the parallel.

There isn’t a syllable of excess dialogue -- Damon seems to have about 10 lines in the whole movie -- and Bourne’s real-time scheming makes you smile with its brilliance, if not its plausibility. When a bomb exploded half an SUV length away, one wonders how Bourne bounds away without so much as a chapped lip? When he finally comes back to New York with score-settling on his mind and is trapped in a building overflowing with adversaries, Greengrass glosses over the escape plan and shows Bourne trotting out of the place.

Greengrass shoots the film’s scenes in tiny fragments, leading to an extraordinary gain in speed and power most other directors would have trouble matching. The camera trembles and shakes and hurtles in “Ultimatum,” as if we were trapped inside the moving Bourne, and yet, on the fly, we see what we need to see. Gathering the fragments, Greengrass keeps some of the chase scenes going for ten minutes at a time.

Summing up the first two films: the drama of “Identity” was existential (Who am I?), and the drama of “Supremacy” was moral (What did I do?). The drama of “Ultimatum” is redemptive: How can I escape what I am? This is illustrated when Bourne has a shot on a CIA assassin in New York who failed to kill him, but he passes it up. The same operative later comes back to hold Borne at gunpoint as he’s poised to dive into the Hudson River and escape. After asking why Bourne passed up the shot, the operative lets him jump.

The creators of the black-ops program that created Bourne are shown to have used such techniques as hooding and waterboarding to break down and remake his personality, and he wants to find them. Commenting acidly on current interrogation techniques, the filmmakers suggest that such games were played with Americans as well as with outsiders. This may be a fiction, but it’s a sinister thought.

Boasting more smarts, slickness, subtlety and character than all of this summer's action offerings combined, “The Bourne Ultimatum” (like its predecessors) is an anomaly in today's multiplex world. (The whole series has the “old-school” feel of John Frankenheimer's work around 1972 -- which is a good thing.) The flick builds on the foundation of its excellent predecessors and then ups the ante at every turn. “Ultimatum” may be the best of the lot. Probably the best Hollywood movie of the whole year. Greengrass has crafted a template for all future spy films and moved into the penthouse of top directors. If this is indeed the finale to the series, as Damon has suggested, the filmmakers have gotten out while the getting’s good.

2007-07-30T23:15:00.000-04:00

PAGE AWARDS 2007 SEMIFINALIST

Hey all,

I just learned that my "Stars and Stripes Forever" script advanced to the semifinals in the "Historical Film" category for the PAGE 2007 Awards.

Finalists will be announced on 8-30-07 and winners will be announced on 9-15-07.

I don't know how to feel at this point. I wonder if semifinalists will get script read requests from production companies, agents, etc?

I'll learn soon enough.

On the flip side "Stars" didn't make it to the quarterfinals of Blue Cat, Scriptapalooza, & Nicholls. I'd subbed "Heaven's Mandate" to Scriptapalooza & Nicholls also, but it didn't make the cut neither.

Interesting to see how different contests have different responses.

Shigata ga nai.

"It can't be helped" as a Japanese saying goes.

Must get on with my fiction now.

2007-07-21T23:16:00.000-04:00

Aftermath

Thanks to an impulsive decision to watch a few episodes on Geoffrey's, my roommate's, Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 DVD set, I got only 3 hours sleep.

The morning sky was really starry when I left with Scott, Saladin, and Geoffrey.

I dozed part of the way and chatted with the guys as Scott, the generous guy who gave me a seat in his rental, drove us to Albuquerque. We all split up outside the departure terminal at the airport.

After almost 7 hours of airport/jet travel hassle, I finally got back home. :-)

I was fortunate to go to Taos ToolBox 2007 when I did. Walter and Connie are fine writers and teachers who're also great to hang out with.

I received useful feedback in the critique sessions and had my understanding of writing and the business refined.

I also got to meet a lot of serious writers and kibitz with them. I'll look forward to seeing how far each of us goes down the road.

If Taos ToolBox 2007 will be the first and last to be held, it was a good one.

Thanks again Walter and Connie for having me.

On another note, being able to record an account of a writing workshop has been fun, especially since this will most likely be the last workshop I'll attend. The stories I could've told when I attended my other classes...

Having a blog then would've been nice.

I'm at the point now where I simply have to write and submit. If I do something else again, it'd likely be a film director workshop. Don't know when I can do that. I'll just have to see how the future turns out.

Ciao.

2007-07-20T18:10:00.000-04:00

Day 13

The final day of crits.

I got up early, exercised, ate breakfast, then went to the crit session.

We had only 3 stories. The sessions went well around lunch.

Walter and Connie then talked about a few things like getting close to our characters, cultivating our story ideas, the good fiction conventions to go to, and how not to act around editors and agents.

I sent Walter my evaluation of the workshop.

I'm going to pack this afternoon since I'll be heading to Albuquerque airport at 5 A. Ugh.

Too bad the Snow Bear Inn proprietors neglected to make the laundry available despite being asked and left messages.

Two people have left already.

We hung out for a few hours, then headed to a nearby Bavarian restaurant. I got a chicken and vegetable dish. We all chatted about writing, WW II, and other miscellania.

When we gathered to leave, Walter's car battery died. We all pitched in to jump start his car, then got back to the inn. There we all said our final good byes.

Ciao.

2007-07-19T22:38:00.000-04:00

Day 12

Busy day.

We critted 4 stories, then Walter and Connie talked about fiction careers.

Those who want fame and money should do something else. If one sticks at it long enough, one's career will go through more than one peak and valley. A body just has to keep writing novels.

The golden age of SF was the 1980s with Star Wars and Star Trek. Now there's fewer markets, publishers, etc. But it could emerge again.

A person just has to follow their passion--and keep their day job.

Some of us saw a Carey Grant film, "Father Goose". Funny. And we saw the first few minutes of "French Kiss." I'll have to see that sometime when I get back.

Oz, Traci, & Kim served potato chips, brownies, ice cream, etc. again. Couldn't resist. Damn. I'll be glad when I reestablish my regular diet.

Walter and Connie are the first fiction people I've met who use film examples to teach. Nice.

I have a final 3 stories to read and one last assignment: write a 100 page scene, character description, etc. with no adjectives and no adverbs. No problem.

Walter and Connie want to take the group to a nearby Bavarian restaurant. Hope I'll like the brautwurst.

Connie talked about showing "French Kiss" tomorrow night, but I have to pack early and get to bed in order to leave at 5 A on Saturday. Ughhh...

Later.

2007-07-18T23:56:00.000-04:00

Day 11

Busy again.

We critted 3 stories today. Connie and Walter talked about where they get stories. Walter also gave us some rules on alternate history and using magic and aliens.

Much of it is instinctive, but it's good to have the principles articulated.

We had another movie night in which we saw Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Great film--in a tragic kind of way. If the bad guy controls the cops and courts, the last option left is taking the law into your own hands.

Unfortunately, Jack's character was too devastated to do that.

Nichevo.

Now I have four stories to read and a little writing exercise in which I write the same scene three times with the same character, but in different emotional states.

Ugh.

2007-07-17T23:41:00.000-04:00

Day 10

Full day today.

We critted 3 stories (all the writers were happy with their comments) and had lectures from Walter and Connie.

Walter talked about worldbuilding for SF and fantasy. Nice and concise. He also gave us a great handout for generating random worldbuilding sheets. He'd added a writing prompt I used in my recently critted teen fantasy: a bowling ball. :-)

Our most recent assignment was to turn in a worldbuilding sheet based on 3 random prompts. I just turned mine in before blogging. Interesting exercise.

Connie talked about the use of the "past perfect tense" and "foreshadowing" in stories complete with techniques and examples.

More tools for my toolbox.

We got out a little earlier than normal, but the evening was full.

I got my endorphin fix, ate dinner with 3 ice cream sandwiches, then attended a birthday party for fellow Taos ToolBox workshopper, Kelly Robson. I had a slice of carrot cake, two pieces of chocolate cake, and a few scoops of French vanilla & chocolate chip ice cream. Having a sweet tooth can be bad. Good thing I don't indulge too much.

Anyhoo, the party was nice, and we all chatted for a while before reluctantly going back to our readings and assignments.

I took care of one story, leaving just two to read in the morning. I'll be able to polish those off quickly.

Signing off.

2007-07-16T23:12:00.000-04:00

Day 9

I woke up and critted 3 stories and squeezed in breakfast before today's lecture/critique session.

Walter kicked things off with a concise lecture and character. And he also gave us a great 4 page hand out on generating backstories for both minor and major characters.

We then had 4 stories critted. Mine was first: a teen fantasy about an ugly duckling girl who competes with a high school beauty queen for a Spanish exchange student with a love potion that's not a love potion.

Considering that I don't normally write YA fantasy or a lot of girl characters, the story went over well with a lot of people in the group. I got a lot of great suggestions on taking it up another notch.

The other 3 stories were also critted with five minute breaks and one 20 minute lunch. I'd say that today was the best session so far (probably thanks to the weekend break).

Hopefully people won't get too ground down as this final week goes by.

Connie capped things with a lecture on different character POV, like: 3rd person omniscient, authorial, stream of consciousness, etc.

Very interesting.

I did my fitness thing, but was a bit worn out when I did. Maybe the altitude's affecting me more than I realize. Being active for 7 of the last 9 days must also be taking a lil' toll, too. But one has to stay energized.

I've got 3 stories to read for tomorrow and another assignment: write a 100 word scene 3 times with the same character, but using a different POV.

I'll be curious to see what I come up with.

That's all fer now.

2007-07-15T23:46:00.000-04:00

2007 PAGE Screenwriting Contest Quarterfinalist

I just got the news that my "Stars and Stripes Forever," made it into the quarterfinals of this year's PAGE contest.

I was told that 3,411 entries were received. My script made it into the top 25% (a total of 872 scripts). Because so many excellent historical epics and biopics were entered, the contest created a new Historical category; so my story is entered as both a Drama and Historical script.

It's an American "Master & Commander" tale about a real-life navy lieutenant who struggles to destroy an American frigate captured by pirates before it's used against the United States.

Incidentally, I wrote the first draft of this script in a Winter 2005 UCLA screenwriting class under Jack Sowards.

Thanks Jack.

Semifinalists will be announced on July 30.

I've also entered a bunch of other contests. I'll look forward to the reports. :-)

Boris

2007-07-15T22:21:00.000-04:00

Day 8

Got up today.

Exercised, got some pancakes from Oz, Traci, & Kim, and did laundry.

We had a temporary electric shortage for 40 minutes. No biggie. Happens from time to time on the mountain, mostly during rain, snow, etc. It's been clear all day, though.

I went to Taos to with Walter, his wife, Connie, and just two other workshop people to catch a 12:30 P showing of the latest Harry Potter.

Can't go into detail for a review. It was OK. Pretty dark. But Ron & Hermione didn't have a lot to do in this film. I also had the feeling this was just a transitional film. Nothing much going on to forward the main storyline of the impending confrontation between Harry and Voldemort.

The book was compressed well enough into a 2.5 hour film, but some important stuff was cut, which would've explained why certain characters did this or that and what a portal or other object was. This was a bit more dependent than the other films on people having read the book beforehand.

It was still worth seeing once. I'll be curious to catch the next installment.

Afterwards, we went to a local pizza joint. Most of the rest got a huge pizza slice. I tried a calzone. It was OK, but had too much ricotta cheese for my liking.

I've been back at the Snow Bear Inn, taking care of chores, like a synopsis for an existing novel, which would be used to sell it. Then a case of fatigue hit. Guess I'll read the 3 stories Monday morning.

Later.

2007-07-14T23:18:00.000-04:00

Day 7

Full day today.

Got up early and exercised, then had a surprise treat of pancakes with blueberries cooked by some workshop classmates--Oz, Traci, and Kim (3 cool ladies) in the ski lodge unit next to mine.

Afterwards, Oz snapped a picture of me. I don't usually pose for pictures, so this is a rarity, and here it is, courtesy of Oz. Thanks a million!

Once I got my mug snapped, I went into Taos with Connie and some others to sight see, eat lunch, and buy groceries. I stocked up on breakfast and lunch for my last week here. I also found two books in a bookstore for two film scripts I have in mind. And on the same shelf no less. I wonder what the odds are?

We got back to the ski lodge in time to wait for George R.R. Martin to arrive. He got delayed by traffic piling into the "Pow Wow," a local Indian festival.

When he finally made his way up the mountain, he gave a talk that covered the reasons why people read fiction (to learn about different subjects, escapism, etc.), about how there's fewer readers and publishers, and how authors who aren't New York Times Best selling writers are becoming an endangered species.

The fiction field seems to be entering rocky waters.

I then rode with Connie, George, and some other people in her car as the whole group went to Taos to eat at a New Mexican restaurant. Two good meals in Taos today--for a price. Good thing we won't be eating in restaurants for the rest of the week.

Small note: Before I rode back with Connie and George, George mentioned that HBO was developing his fantasy book series "A Song of Fire & Ice" into a long running TV series. I don't have HBO, and don't plan on getting it. I'll have to wait for the DVDs to come out then. George said he told his agent that if anyone would produce his books, it should be HBO since a TV series would do a better job than a trilogy of feature films and HBO has produced some good projects. "Band of Brothers" (based on Stephen Ambrose's book) is one case in point. I love it myself.

Several (me included) are planning to go into Taos tomorrow on Sunday to catch a noontime showing of the latest Harry Potter. Looking forward to that.

I just have to find the time to write up a 2-3 page synopsis of a published novel and critique 3 of 4 stories for Monday. One of the four is mine. I'm planning on doing my synopsis on the alternate history novel "Gettysburg" by William R. Forstchen. Newt Gingrich's name is on the cover also, but I feel it's Forstchen's story.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2007-07-14T00:46:00.000-04:00

Day 6

Light day. No coyotes were scavenging through garbage and howling in the morning like yesterday (though I slept through it).

We had only 3 stories to crit, and I turned in a 4500 word teen fantasy story. It's about an ugly duckling teen girl who competes with a beauty queen for a Spanish exchange student with a love potion that's not a love potion. It's the third female protagonist story I've written, my third fantasy, and my first young adult story. Different from my usual work. I'll be curious to hear what the ladies in the group think.

Connie gave another talk on dramatic irony. Walter talked about literary contracts and outlines/synopses. All good stuff. Ironically, the dramatic irony wasn't something I'd had covered in my other workshops/classes. :-)

I exercised a bit, but cut it short to have a personal conference with Walter about my fiction plans. I was glad to hear I'd mapped out a good strategy for myself: get 3-5 pro short fiction sales, then go ahead with novels.

I've got an outline to do over the weekend, prepare to read some stuff for Monday, a George Martin talk to look forward to, and outings in Taos.

We had a grill cook out with hamburgers and hot dogs (along with brownies, potatoe chips/doritos, peanuts, and potato salad). I need to get more vegetables and fiber.

And we topped the evening with another movie night, watching a Carey Grant flick (forgot name) where we had things like clumsy exposition, raising the stakes, reversals, etc. pointed out to us.

Good times.

2007-07-13T22:58:00.000-04:00

Jack B. Sowards Tribute

I just learned that Jack Sowards, my main UCLA screenwriting teacher, passed away a few days ago on July 8, 2007.

Jack was 78 and had Lou Gehrig's disease. He wasn't feeling well during my final quarter, and I was concerned for him. Looking back, his passing was foreshadowed.

He was an actor and a writer from the 1950s to 1990. His credits include episodes for Bonanza, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, and Star Trek TNG episode "Where Silence Has Lease."

He'd also served in the military during the Berlin Airlift crisis of 1947 and the Korean War. He's survived by his several children and grandchildren. He had a full life to put it mildly.

Jack was the most memorable screenwriting teacher I've ever had. I was lucky to have him for 4 of my 6 quarters in the UCLA Professional and Advanced programs. He taught both my first class in 2002 and my last class in 2006.

Not only did he give great feedback on people's stories, he was also a fount of wisdom, experience, and anecdotes about life and his time in Hollywood.

I'll miss you, Jack.

Thanks for everything you've given me.

The following quote from today's CS Weekly newsletter was something he'd said in class one day. I'll keep it in mind always.

"In Hollywood people don't fail, they quit."
– Jack Sowards (1929 - 2007)

2007-07-12T22:59:00.000-04:00

Day 5

Critted 4 stories today.

There was no lecture, but Walter had us help plot out a partially done novel outline written by a person in the group. It took almost two hours.

The exercise was interesting, but the story idea didn't hook me, and I thought we could've completed it sooner.

I had to skip my fitness break today. C'est le vie.

I'm writing out my second week story right now. I think it'll be OK, but I'm a bit blocked now.

Oh, we're expecting George R.R. Martin this weekend. There was a little trouble finding him a room in the area since Bastille Day is coming up, and a lot of the local inns seem to be owned by Frenchmen.

Très curieux.

Later--

Oh!

I also turned in a summary of a restructured story. Walter bade us to do an exercise in which we identify a turning point in an existing novel/film, reverse it, and write what happened from there.

I chose Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.

Here's my reworked version:
-----------------------------------------------------------

Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (Revised)

At the beginning of the film, Anakin and Obi Wan board General Grievous’ ship to save Chancellor Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious). Count Dooku confronts them. Dooku knocks out Obi Wan, but Anakin cuts off both Dooku’s hands, takes Dooku’s light saber, and angles both their light sabers at Dooku’s throat. Palpatine urges Anakin to kill him.

Divergence: Rather than kill Dooku, Anakin spares him and lets him flee. Anakin goes on to save Palpatine and Obi Wan and land Grievous’ ship when it crash lands on Coruscant.

Dooku escapes with General Grievous to a Trade Federation battleship. As they clear the Coruscant system, Dooku tells Grievous of Palpatine’s treachery and Darth Sidious’ original plan to lure Anakin to the Dark Side and let Grievous be destroyed along with the rest of the Separatist leadership.

When Sidious contacts Grievous, the biodroid general pretends that Dooku isn’t with him and the Separatist leadership. Sidious says that Dooku betrayed him on the ship over Coruscant, so Grievous must kill Dooku on sight. He also orders Grievous to lay a trap on the planet Utapu for any Republic forces chasing him and relocate the Separatist leadership on the planet Mustafar.

Dooku has droid prostheses attached to his wrist stubs and contacts Master Yoda. Dooku tells Yoda that Palpatine is also Sidious and that he wishes to renounce the Dark Side. He also warns Yoda that Sidious seeks to lure Anakin into the camp of the Sith.

Yoda tells Dooku to dangle Grievous as bait. He assigns Obi Wan and Anakin to go after Grievous to keep Anakin away from Sidious. Yoda bids Dooku to give himself up at the Jedi Temple, but Dooku says he must attend to other matters first. Yoda worries, but orders Mace Windu to arrest Palpatine after Anakin leaves Coruscant.

Before Anakin leaves to pursue Grievous, though, Palpatine has Anakin come to his office. There he tells Anakin that he’s afraid of Dooku and treachery from the Jedi. When Anakin disbelieves him, Palpatine says only the Sith have the power to raise people from the dead, playing on Anakin’s forebodings of Padme’s death, then reveals that he is Sidious.

Anakin is torn. Dooku then appears to claim his revenge on Sidious. Anakin watches as Sidious and Dooku battle ferociously. Finally, Dooku has Sidious at his mercy. But before Dooku can strike the final blow, Anakin cuts him down. Anakin then pledges his allegiance to Sidious in exchange for his help in saving Padme’s life.

At Sidious’ order, Anakin attacks the Temple with clone troops. Sidious also issues Order 66 to all Republic clone forces to kill the Jedi across the galaxy. Mace Windu sacrifices himself to let Yoda and Obi Wan escape with their lives. They make contact with Senator Organa, who takes them to Utapu. There Grievous shelters them.

Sidious orders Grievous to abandon Utapu and await further orders on Mustafar. Unaware of Yoda’s and Obi Wan’s location, Anakin goes to Mustafar to destroy the Separatist leadership. But before he goes, he assures Padme that he is all right and that he will end the war once and for all.

After Anakin leaves, Obi Wan contacts Padme via Holonet transmission and tells her that Anakin has attacked to the Temple and killed many Jedi there. Padme disbelieves him, but flies after Anakin to confront him herself.

Anakin arrives at Mustafar and goes to the bunker, where the Separatist Council hides. Instead he finds Obi Wan, and the two men fight.

Grievous and the Separatist Council meantime attack Coruscant with all their remaining ships. Under cover of the assault, Yoda confronts Sidious in his chambers and battles him.

Obi Wan eventually gets the better of Anakin and leaves him with his limbs amputated and set afire by a lava river. Padme arrives then. When she learns of Anakin’s injuries, she goes into shock and collapses. Obi Wan takes her with him.

Back at Coruscant, the clone forces destroy Grievous, the Separatist Council, and their armada. Yoda also fails to kill Sidious, and steals away from Coruscant on Senator Organa’s ship.

Sensing a threat to Anakin, Sidious hurries to Mustafar. There Sidious finds Anakin and takes him back to Coruscant, where he is transformed into Darth Vader. Sidious founds the Empire and begins construction on the Death Star.

Meantime, in a remote medical facility, Padme gives birth to Luke and Leia before dying of a broken heart. Yoda, Obi Wan, and Organa split the twins to wait for them to grow up in safety.

The stage is set for Luke, Leia, and Han to lead the Rebellion against the Empire.

2007-07-11T22:02:00.000-04:00

DAY 4

Got up again and did my 3 crits. I was told that there was some rock blasting by a construction crew that happened to pick this week to come. I slept through it. Word is, the Snow Bear Inn proprietors told 'em to come back another week. We'll see.

Today's talk was about "irony" and how it's present in the best stories, whether fiction or film. Interesting.

After the crits, we had a breakdown of Samuel Delaney's "Nova" novella. Technically, it was written well and economically, though it wasn't in my taste. Generation thing, I suppose.

I've got 4 stories to crit for tomorrow. I hope to do at least one tonight and I have to start brainstorming on my 2nd week story. No movie night tonight. :-)

I suggested, and Walter seconded that the group go see the new Harry Potter movie. We set Sunday afternoon as the prospective day. I can hardly wait.

It was sunny earliery today, but we got a few scattered rain storms, so it's cloudy. That's not necessarily too bad since we have to watch out for UV rays in the mountains. The Snow Bear Inn is almost at 10,000 feet. I forgot to say that it hailed yesterday. All the snow is gone today.

Oh, this is also the final week for my film production class. I got the final lecture and articles. No assignments. Woohoo! Just final questions for the teachers on anything about the film biz. Now if I could only find time to read the material...

Later.

2007-07-10T23:59:00.000-04:00

Day 3

Got up early, read 3 stories, and got some breakfast. Before the crits, we got a lecture on information flow in a story and plot devices. All useful information, even if I heard most of it before.

We critiqued 4 stories today, one of which was my Peacemaker tale, which I'm prepping for WOTF. I'd say I got a mixture of fair, useful, and unperceptive comments. On the whole, I got an idea of what to do with the next draft. It's true when they say writing is rewriting. But I'm on the right track with this story.

I've begun thinking about the second story I'll turn in for next week. I would've done more if I hadn't succumbed to a temptation to watch Casablanca with most of the others.

I knew how it ended, but I've never seen the whole thing till now. A lot of today's Hollywood execs, directors, producers, writers, etc. would learn a thing or two if they watched this film. I'd say Connie picked it to reinforce some points in the lecture, like "reversals," "character convergence" (when characters that mix like fire and oil come together, that is), "plot twists," and sundry other good storytelling things.

Great film.

But I still have to do some background work on my next story.

And critique 3 stories when I wake up tomorrow...

Later.

2007-07-09T22:03:00.000-04:00

Day 2

Got up early, critted 3 stories, got some toast with jam, and showed up for an 11 A lecture on plot.

Connie and Walter brought up some good plot structures, many of which I'd heard elsewhere. The talk lasted for maybe 40-50 minutes. We then critted the 3 stories, with 5 minute breaks in between and a 15 minute lunch.

We wrapped up around 4 P. The people in the group offered the best comments they could, pointing out bugs and offering suggestions. Walter & Connie capped each round, each talking at length. The three writers seemed to come away satisfied. No one left crying.

I'm coming up tomorrow. I'll be curious to see how the session goes.

I'm getting used to the...unique layout of my half of the room I'm staying in: a bathroom light that has to be flipped down to turn on, a light switch by my faucet that turns on nothing I can see, a light down the hallway that turns on the faucet light, etc.

I just got a key for my room, but the TV in my half has no antenna or satellite box--not that I have time for it any way.

I did some active stuff to get my endorphins going, then chowed down on burned lasagna, rock hard garlic bread, and salad. I indulged in a little ice cream and soft drink, but I'll cut it out now.

Connie showed us excerpts of "Throw Momma From The Train," pointing out all the (slightly) exaggerated writer bits.

Now I have to crit 3 of 4 stories. The fourth's mine, so I'm off the hook there.

Later.

2007-07-08T23:19:00.000-04:00

Day 1

Thanks to procrastinating till the last minute on my packing, I got a whole 4 hours of sleep before going to the airport and getting on my flight to Albuquerque.

I dozed a bit here and there, read a novel, and ate a sandwich every four hours though I didn't want to.

Pretty warm when I got into Albuquerque, but it's a dry heat. My bag turned up at the airport ahead of me. That's a first for me. I noticed when I saw it by a baggage office rather than at the baggage claim terminal, where I waited for ten minutes and saw other people from my flight collect their stuff and leave.

I then boarded a shuttle van to Taos, New Mexico, and ended up being the last of 7 people dropped off because the Snow Bear Inn was the furthest drop off point. :-/

I did get to talking with the other passengers, one of whom was attending a mainstream fiction workshop in a motel in town. Caroline Chung-Wipff. We exchanged e-mails and promised to exchange short stories. I'm looking forward to reading her tale about... two Korean orphans caught up in the Korean War, if I recall correctly. I'll send her my Richard Takashima tale I'm prepping for WOTF after getting comments from Critters and Taos.

Anyhoo, after about 3 hours, I finally got to the Snow Bear Inn. The temperature fell something like 20 degrees fahrenheit. Bracing, a bit like the Rockies in Colorado. I can imagine what this place would be like with snow...

I found my room, chatted with Walter, Connie Willis, and some other people, and ate more food.

We have three presubmitted to stories to critique for tomorrow. I'm going to crash, then write up my thoughts in the morning. Fotunately, I'd already read all the manuscripts before coming. I just have to refresh myself on each one as I get to it.

I'm curious to see what Walter and Connie have to share with us.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2007-07-07T00:47:00.000-04:00

Sit Rep

Busy, busy, busy...

On the 4th of July, I managed to see: "Ratatouille," "Live Free or Die Hard," and "Transformers." Quickly, I'd say for each in order: "another cartoon classic," "better than I expected," and "glitzy pop corn fare." I don't know if or when I'll get a chance to write something more extensive about any of these, though.

I've completed the 5th week of a six week film production course. Big expense considering I was already going to Taos. I'm not complaining too much, though, since learning how to create one's own production company is handy. :-)

The class is offered by the ESE Workshops program. Two very knowledgeable producers/instructors are teaching it, Rona Edwards and Monika Skerbelis. I'd met Rona at an industry panel in LA last August, which helped prompt me to try her online course after she started it up.

I was able to get the Week 5 work done on Thursday after getting the assignments this Wednesday. Big contrast after spending something like 96 hours over the last week on my Week 4 assignments when I wasn't working and reading stories for my upcoming Taos workshop.

I wrote phone pitches for 5 scripts (though I needed to do only two).

Then for the two required scripts, I had to research for each 6 candidates for writers, directors, actors for two roles, all their reps, and prospective production companies/studios to submit to, their contact info, the list it all out.

Gods...

But I persevered and turned in my lists on Wednesday. And now I have a game plan for when I start marketing these scripts. :-)

This Saturday, I have to help out a bit at work, do some final chores, and pack.

I can hardly wait to go to Taos this Sunday. Assuming the wi-fi holds up, I expect to keep a daily blog of my Taos adventures from 7/8 to 7/21. So stay tuned.

Though I hope things don't fall apart on the homestead when I take my leave...

2007-06-27T00:53:00.000-04:00

Trek XI Script Is Done

Sy Fy Portal has recently reported that the writing duo of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orchi have finished the Trek XI script. This film will dramatize Kirk's earliest missions.

Those who've read my other posts on this subject are aware that I feel it's a mistake to reinvent Kirk and the rest of the original series gang rather than to press ahead with new characters in a new century.

Also, I'm skeptical of director JJ Abrams. When I review his work to date, he starts out with some interesting premises, then jumps to another project rather than stays to develop what he started and take it to another level.

Alias fizzled after the first two seasons and I feel that Lost is losing it. Six Degrees and What About Brian both got cancelled.

And if this one Trek film turns out to be half-way decent, what will Paramount do with the franchise? Rehash Kirk's adventures?

IMHO, Star Trek, unlike Batman, James Bond and other franchises is about the future, which offers a wider tapestry for stories than franchises, which are set in the present.

I'll be curious to see how the films turns out when it's released in Christmas 2008.

2007-06-27T00:26:00.000-04:00

Battlestar Galactica Tidbits

Sy Fy Portal recently reported on how actor Michael Hogan is unhappy with the decision of the Galactica producers to turn him and other characters in the Final Five. The Cylon gods.

I share Hogan's view of the direction his character was taken.

I feel that the device of revealing people to be cylons on the show has been over and misused.

That stemmed in part from the writing staff's inability to generate enough dramatic episodes in Season 3 because they had only the humans of the Colonial fleet and the cylons to work with. The ratings in the second half of the third season dropped with the filler episodes.

If aliens were introduced, actor James Olmos (Admiral Adama) would leave.

To work around this, I feel that the Colonial fleet could run into other humans over the course of their quest for Earth. That's a device the original series used with great success in its second season--before it got axed for being too expensive to produce.

I'd love to see what happen if the democratic Colonials, who were searching for another clue to Earth's location, were to wander into a sector of space controlled by an advanced human totalitarian empire that wanted to enslave them.

We'll never know since the fourth season will be the last, and I don't believe that the show's producers will go that route.

Nichevo.

2007-06-18T23:19:00.000-04:00

Larry Hodges Critique

This past weekend, I got a critique on my "The Way of the Peacemaker" opus from an emerging fantasy writer, Larry Hodges. Someone whom I met by chance on Critters in 2005 and have had the fortune of dealing with. He's had several short stories published and is working on his first novel. I'm looking forward to seeing what he turns out down the road.

Anywho, Larry pointed out some strengths and bugs that helped me fine tune the story for Critters and Taos before I shoot it off to WOTF. A few small changes, and it's so much better. I feel really good about this draft.

Thanks Larry!

2007-06-18T23:09:00.000-04:00

Sit Rep

Let's see...

I've recently finished writing the latest draft of my "The Way of the Peacemaker" short SF story for WOTF.

Woohoo!

It's 7900 words. I feel pretty good about this draft. I've sent it to Critters for critiquing and to Walter Jon Williams as the first story of mine to be read at my upcoming Taos workshop.

I'd also received a summons to report for jury selection on 7-13-07 for possible jury duty during the week of 7-16-07. Thing is the Taos workshop runs from 7-8-07 to 7-21-07.

So I faxed a letter explaining my situation and got in touch with the judge's clerk this morning. I've been rescheduled for either September or October.

Huzzah!

And I'm also coming up on the 3rd week of a 6 week course on how to create my own film production company. Very illuminating.

It's fun to see how one can begin to assemble the pieces of one's own fiction/film corporate entity devoted to one's own material.

Time to go back to the grind now.

2007-05-26T21:30:00.000-04:00

Not Seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean 3"

Coming into the Memorial Day weekend, I was planning on seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End."

But I'd been hearing some bad buzz about the latest Cap'n Jack Sparrow adventure. And a nonwriter friend of a nonwriter acquaintance who stayed up late to see the film on Thursday night said it was "stupid."

IMHO, Hollywood has entered a phase where story quality is even less imortant than in the past, while squeezing as much money as possible out of a film franchise has become an even higher priority. I believe that when a story is well done, other things, like box office success will come as a consequence.

Disney and the other studios seem to believe that all they need to do nowadays is slap together some special effects, a fast-paced music score, action set pieces galore, offer it to the masses who're starving for entertainment, then sit back and rake in the dough.

I for one want to save my $$$ and time. I've got DVDs of "Heroes," some other good TV shows, and any number of good films I can watch over the weekend--when I'm not working, writing, doing chores, etc.

I know millions of people in the US and around the world will flock to theatres and set new box office records (till the next big blockbuster gets released).

It'd be interesting to see what'd happen if the masses didn't see POTC 3 and other blockbuster flops. I'd imagine that the studios would start caring more about the quality of the films they're greenlighting then.

2007-05-23T00:20:00.000-04:00

Sit Rep

I've been busy...

I'm working on the latest draft of my space opera SF short story for WOTF. I spent about two weeks writing out the first draft of the current version by hand, now I'm typing it out (and making changes).

I'm up to page 15 and 2575 words. Feeling very hopeful.

I've also gotten my reading orders from Walter Jon Williams and Connie Willis to read the Turkey City lexicon for workshops and a bunch of short stories and 1 novella.

Here's the list:

"Nova," by Samuel R. Delany.

"Flowers for Algernon" (the original novelet, not the novel) in:
THE HUGO WINNERS, ed. Isaac Asimov
BEST SF 4, ed. Edmund Crispin
BEST FROM F AND SF 9, ed. Robert P. Mills
5TH ANNUAL OF THE YEAR'S BEST SF, ed. Judith Merril
THE MAGAZINE OF F AND SF: A THIRTY-YEAR PERSPECTIVE, ed.Ed Ferman
TEN TOP STORIES, ed. D.A. Sohn
SF HALL OF FAME, ed. Robert Silverberg (got this one)

"The Light of Other Days," by Bob Shaw.

"Lot," by Ward Moore in MY FAVORITE SCIENCE FICTION STORY,
edited by Martin H. Greenberg

BEST FROM F AND SF 3, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas
LOT AND LOT'S DAUGHTER with a new intro by Michael Swanwick

"Light of Days" was available free online. I bought the rest off of Amazon when a search of my local library coop turned up nada.

I paid $1.48 for 4 books with $3.99 postage for each. Bloody postal increases.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to reading. On top of my other stuff, my story, work...

Ugh...

Looking forward to "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" this weekend.

I guess.

I expect to review that.

Hailing frequencies closed.

2007-05-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

Laurie Hutzler Script Consultation

I just came off a consult with Laurie Hutzler on my Stars and Stripes script.

It was already good, but with the changes (so small yet so poignant) I have in mind, it'll be much, much better. There was an issue of making the protagonist more layered, which she helped me work out as we talked. Awesome process.

I'll look forward to sharpening the script, probably next winter since I have some fiction and film stories in the hopper to work on first.

The burdens a writer bears... :-)

I hope this script and my Chinese Joan of Arc tale will still do well in this year's contests, though. I'll see.

2007-05-06T21:10:00.000-04:00

Review: Spiderman 3

More is less.

Speaking for myself, I thought the first Spiderman was OK. The second installment hit it out of the park. No question.

I feel that Spiderman 2 raised the bar so high that director Sam Raimi overreached himself and tried to tell a grand story by mixing in too many subplots and characters competing with each other for screen time. He substituted scope and scale for the warmth and wit that made those two previous pictures so memorable. This lumbering third installment finds a trio of villains jockeying for screen time amid several half-developed storylines and a darker, self-serious tone that veers into the overwrought.

The opening credit sequence does a beautiful job of showing highlights from the previous two movies and gets you ready for this one, which is set an indeterminate amount of time after the 2nd one. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is living his dream life - he and Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) are going strong, he's at the top of his college classes, and much to the consternation of the Daily Bugle’s J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), Spidey’s become New York’s favorite celebrity. What could go wrong?

For starters all of this success starts to go to our favorite webslinger’s head. He becomes self-involved and doesn’t notice MJ's problems whose life is starting to go downhill after she gets fired from her Broadway show. To be fair, she doesn’t tell Peter anything. (One must ask why the critics hate her in the third film when she was loved in the second and was good enough to get hired in the first place?) Anywho, MJ gets jealous of Peter's platonic relationship with his colorless lab partner Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) when she gives Spidey the key to the city and gives him "their" kiss while he’s hanging upside down.

It’s a bad time to grow an ego, as there’s trouble brewing on several fronts. First, Peter’s former best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) has discovered his late father’s stash of Green Goblin super-soldier serum, and he’s suiting up for second-generation supervillian-hood with a personal vendetta against Spider-Man.

And speaking of personal vendettas, it turns out the man who murdered Peter’s beloved Uncle Ben wasn’t actually the guy we saw Spidey take out in the first film. In a strange little chunk of revisionist history, we see a bunch of reshot scenes illustrating that Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) was the trigger man. As if all this weren’t awkward enough, James Cromwell’s police captain calls Parker and Aunt May down to the station and explains it to them for no obvious reason.

The punchline isn’t only that Church just escaped from prison, but he also accidentally tripped and fell into a top secret science experiment out of Star Trek that, for some reason, was being carried out in the middle of the night—so suddenly he’s the Sandman.

Still not enough story points for you? Well there’s also the matter of this strange alien goo coming from a meteorite that lands conveniently close to the spot where Peter and MJ are stargazing in New York’s Central Park. The goo then attaches itself to Peter’s moped and hangs around inertly in his room for the first 2/3 of the film before attaching itself to Peter and spontaneously transforming into a shiny black costume. It’s a parasitic organism that makes Spidey a lot more aggressive, and causes Pete to grow his bangs out like he’s in an ’80s New Wave band and sway like he’s on Saturday Night Fever.

Then there’s Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a competitive freelance photographer, who’s trying to muscle his way into Parker’s gig at the Daily Bugle by Photoshopping forgeries of Spider-Man committing robberies so the people of New York will turn on their hero. And that’s before Brock gets up close and personal with the alien goo.

Whew! Raimi—who co-wrote the script with his brother Ivan as well as two-time Oscar winner Alvin Sargent ("Julia," "Ordinary People")-figures out a way to line up these events (sort of). For example, during the early fight between Spidey and Harry (the best action set piece of the film), Harry hits his head and comes down with short-term amnesia, so that he spends most of the movie being an amnesiac pussycat who’s nothing but sunshine and light. MJ hangs out with him for a bit to find some comfort from all her problems. Then Spidey figures out a way to stop the Sandman, but only for a little while. During these rest periods, Peter/Spidey can then deal with other problems.

On the bad side, the problems seem more artificial in Spider-Man 3 than they did in Spiderman 2. Each problem has less breathing room, less time to become organic with gray areas in the middle. The film eventually gets so tangled and top-heavy with its 20 million different plot threads, Raimi has to resort to Peter Parker watching television so news crews can helpfully recap at least an hour’s worth of off-screen events that set the final battle in motion. (Note to aspiring screenwriters: If your superhero needs to watch CNN in order to figure out what’s going on in his own movie, take it as a sign you’ve written yourself into a corner.)

There's the Raimi touch of having (Bruce Campbell) make another appearance, this time as a pseudo French Maître d' and the expected Stan Lee cameo (I'm not against him getting his due, but his cameos don’t seem to be adding anything). Then there's the typical moment where Spiderman does something in front of the cheering NYC crowd. Rather than get out of the way, the New Yorkers stand there and watch the battles when buildings and debris are falling around them. What would it be like to have Spidey fight ONE villain WITHOUT removing his mask in the middle of the brawl? It's amazing everyone in NYC doesn't know who he is by now.

McGuire seems to be a bit bored this go around. There's no spark or excitement in his performance except when he gets taken over by the alien goo and goes dark side—for Peter. He struts down the street dressed in black, accompanied by cheesy music, and women either give him the eye or look at him like he's a creep, goes to jazz clubs, and says "babe" a lot. Hilarious sequence.

Then there's the idea of bringing in the iconic Gwen Stacy, who many fans of the Spiderman comic book knows has a major impact on our hero's life. The problem is, Stacy's impact is felt early on in his career and introducing her into the film world this way and at this time makes absolutely no sense. If they wanted to introduce a woman to make MJ jealous then this character would have been fine, as long as she was called something other than Gwen Stacy.

I liked the Sandman character and the resolution at the end better than I thought I would, but I also hated the revisionist way they turned Sandman into the killer of Uncle Ben. The storyline was handled well, but it felt too much like the Batman origin story where they had to make the hero invested by saying "Hey, I killed your Uncle."

The stuff with Harry was actually very good. Here James Franco really gets to display a real emotional range. The new Goblin designs were real cool (in an edgy bad guy sort of way), everything from the black leather suit, to the mask, to the redesigned Goblin glider were fantastic. I had the feeling this was a guy who could kick Spidey's butt (and should have been the main baddie for the film). The main reason the 3rd film works is because of him.

As good as everything with the Goblin and the Sandman were, much about Venom was terrible. The way he moved in his liquid form, conveniently sat around inert in Peter’s room, to how he looked once it bonded with Brock. I like the cartoon Venom, but the film version got shortchanged and deserved its own movie. Why couldn’t Venom have been brought in for Spiderman 4? The studio will produce it after all, whether or not the original team stays on board. He's one bad guy too many. His introduction into the story causes everything to be crowded, rushed, and overlong. Spider-Man 3 feels like it should end around the 1:40 mark, but like the Energizer Bunny, it keeps going...

The CGI in this takes a step back to the cartoony animation that was in the first film, Spiderman swinging around town looked like a tiny animated spec. The stuff with the Sandman was about as good as it could be. Focusing on the grains of sand and then expanding to see him reassemble after the experiment—very lyrical.

Considering how overloaded the film is, Raimi does juggle the characters and storylines fairly well. People will line up to watch the film and set new opening weekend box office records. But everything is just a little off, or takes a step back. The ending was touching, but I’m stumped on where Peter and MJ are headed now. People love trilogies because it's said that good things come in threes, but this series would have looked better and felt more satisfying had the filmmakers stopped at two.

2007-04-28T23:55:00.000-04:00

Laurie Hutzler Script Consultation/Possible 1st Film Break?

Today I had a phone consult with Laurie Hutzler, the sixth I've had in about 3 years, the first I've had since starting this blog.

It was top notch as usual.

Laurie went over my Chinese Joan of Arc epic "Heaven's Mandate" and my rom com "Twice In A Lifetime."

I'll be restructuring both fairly heavily and taking them up another notch. I expect to get back to those next year, though, since I'm currently working on fiction and have other scripts to work on after that.

Laurie also mentioned that she knows someone who is starting up a production company in China and would be a likely person to send the rewrite of "Heaven's Mandate" to--provided it's up to par. She also knows someone who could help me translate the script to Chinese. :-)

When this script is ready, hopefully "Crouching Tiger" director Ang Lee will get attached and "Crouching Tiger" heroine Zhang Ziyi will be signed to played the heroine. :-)

I'll also look forward to sending my rom com out when it's ready.

I get the feeling something good started today.

Thanks Laurie!