Unless you're watching for the fashion.
But even then, not in an "Oooh" and "Aaah" sense, more like in the taking notes sense. I'm a strong advocate of dressing well, and the actors at the Oscars are almost without exception well-dressed. Of course, guys have it easy - evening dress or at least a suit with a bow-tie. Their tailors do most of the work. The ladies, egad, so many dresses that so totally look like bunched up old curtains.
Ahem - how about them Lions? Go sports team!
Football...FOOTBALL!
But since I don't live in a cave, I did know that the best picture nomination was supposedly between mega bank-breaker Avatar and his ex-wife's barely-seen but apparently awesome flick The Hurt Locker. I didn't see either. The Hurt Locker wasn't at any of the 8,000 multiplexes in my state, and Avatar was, as I've said before, a bunch of wishful thinking and Hollywood noble savage Liberalism that I will rent on DVD so that I can fast-forward to the power armor scenes.
I was lukewarm on my wholesale rejection of Avatar as ridiculous pop-lib crap, because I seldom reject a movie just on the basis of its politics. I love Tombstone and Red Dawn even if they are borderline fascist and jingoist, respectively, because they're great-looking movies that fucking rock, and frankly I'm half fascist myself.
Mostly on my dad's side, but I think my mom's great grandmother dated Mussolini.
But my problem with Avatar can be summed up in one non-word: Unobtainium. James Cameron, you needed a mineral that was hard to obtain and so you named it unobtainium. Your services are no longer required.
And that's just symbolic of the problem as a whole - blue "nature people" against the Eeeevil machine people who don't live in harmony with goddess earth mother gaia - look, it's just shit.
A lot of writers start out looking into Fantasy and Sci-Fi because they like being taken to dream worlds beyond human experience, and that's awesome. The mistake they make is that they get confused over which side of the writer/reader line they sit. It is fantasy, but it is not YOUR fantasy - that is, when it's time to make the work of fantasy art, your fantasy ends and the work begins.
So the problem with something like Avatar is that it makes a blatant and stupid allegory that anyone only buys because A) it neatly conforms to their own noble savage ideology or B) the bright shiny lights shut off anything resembling the logic portion of their brain. The allegory itself is one that movie makers have gotten away with for a long time - after all, people have called Avatar "Dances with Wolves in space" and "Billion-dollar Fern Gully," so clearly this idea that people who wear loincloths are better than people who wear pants is a popular one.
Avatar, circa 1600
But beyond being a stupid and obvious allegory, the world doesn't go very deep, and here just so I don't offend every fan of Avatar in the world, because there are apparently 10 billion of you mouth-breathers, I'll talk about fantasy and sci-fi generally. Plus, I hate being wrong and since I only know about Avatar from reviews, criticism, and eyewitness accounts, I'd hate for some Avatar fan to write me a caps-locked comment of misspelled vitriol and then pee their pants because they missed Saving Grace on account of my ignorance.
I could just as easily talk about Halo, the popular video game. in Halo, see, you've got this guy, and his name is Master Chief. And he never says anything, but he's totally cool, and so he's like an earth soldier, or whatever. And then there's these Covenant guys, and they're against Master Chief, so like, you know, it works on a lot of levels.
World Building has become less and less popular in hardcover fantasy - I don't mean that fewer and fewer fantasy writers are doing it, but I mean that what's getting published seems to be stuff like Harry Potter that is light enough to engage children and familiar enough to entertain adults. This isn't the kind of culture that would make Lord of the Rings a best seller - this is the kind of culture that thinks Achilles died at the end of The Iliad because they cribbed the whole thing by watching Troy.
A bright shiny nickel to anyone who knows what this image depicts beyond saying Achilles is fighting Hektor.
I'm a big fan of world-building. If you're going to write a fantasy book, I believe you must go back to square one and actually get down and do a cosmogony, important genealogies, all the kind of stuffy academic anthropologist shit. Of course I advocate this because I think its fun, and I get a flavor for the authenticity, but why shouldn't I encourage someone else to do this as well?
The answer is that big fantasy books with long back stories aren't best sellers. Modern airport readers want the familiar fed back to them - they want archetypes, they want action and adventure, and a sense of inclusion. Your big huge appendix with maps and charts and all that crap at the back of the book just makes them feel talked-down to. They don't have time for all your family trees and your lines of lineage and your fancy places that actually could occupy real time and space.
TL;DR LOL
But if you're reading this to make money, I don't know what to tell you - you should stop now. If you're writing to make money at all, you should stop now - it's probably not going to happen. It's equal parts luck, skill, talent, networking, ass kissing, and perseverance to have any success as a writer, and the luck and networking parts of that combination are getting slimmer every day as publishers sell less and less books, lay off more and more people, and are less willing to risk publishing esoteric genre fiction.
I can only encourage people to write what I think is good fiction - to that end, aspiring fantasy or science fiction writer, read your history, read your mythology. Look at maps, trace important genealogies through history (blood lines are still much more relevant than you think, and if you doubt it, wait until someone in your family dies to see the hullabaloo made over inheritance).
If you're going to include fantastic creatures, put them to work - If there's a terrible monster in the dark wood, how did it shape the trade routes and politics of the nearby towns? Do they go around it? Do foolhardy adventurers seek to kill it? Did the army adopt it as a unit symbol?
108th Airborne scores 10 points for Gryffindore.
Be consistent in your application of magic or super / psychic powers. "Magic" is not a keyword for "inconvenient problem goes away." There was a particularly bad example in the old X-Men animated series in which Storm, Rogue, and Gambit were all trapped in this crushing cube sort of thing and, rather than have him stand around like a feeb, the writers and animators decided that gambit should start shooting energy from his fingers. Even people who have only heard of the X-Men know that's not canon.
Did that sound like sniveling fanboy-ism? Get used to it - if you want to write fantasy or science fiction, a large part of your audience will be obese neck-bearded basement dwellers who obsess over continuity details. They are the reason that Star Trek is still popular, and you are trying to get a piece of that market share. Don't insult them - give them something to chew on, something worth reading, and maybe they'll consider it something worth buying.
Most appropriate image ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
ReplyDelete...big fantasy books with long back stories aren't best sellers.
TL;DR LOL
Heh. fail.
The Bible: The greatest single source of screenplay plagiarism since the invention of the screen.
This is pretty much my point, made in an oblique way - the number one best seller of all time is a big huge long book full of genealogies, history, geography, etc.
ReplyDeleteBut like LOTR, I get the sense that it's being purchased and not read, or alternately -has been purchased-.
Most bible-owning folk I know own one the same way that they would own a decorative wall hanging of big-eyed kids on black velvet. They own one like a relic or a charm, and not as a book.
That being said, the big joke was: best seller of all time is a lumbering tome of names, but most best-selling fantasy now is a rehash of old mythological themes.
RE the screenplay plagiarism, I would offer that those are pretty immortal stories that make up a huge part of Western culture and lend us many of our fictive archetypes - the messiah, the betrayer, the holy mother, and, oh, I dunno, god?
Of course, these stories are taken very much in form as well: C.S. Lewis Narnia has Lion-Jesus, but then Tolkein was mostly rehashing the Poetic and Prose Edas when he made up Middle Earth, so there ya go.
But then again, maybe I should ask - are you saying that the bible is a "...big fantasy books with [a] long back stor[y]"?
ReplyDeleteHeh. No, those were definitely your words.
ReplyDeleteRE: Screenplay plagiarism. Yes, the bible contains the fictive archetypes. But, I would add that there is also an inherent claim of precedence ("Genesis"), that would lay the groundwork for one helluva class-action lawsuit, should the author(s) exist/be alive/be so inclined to sue.
Agreed that most copies of the bible (and koran, and mao's little red book, et al.) are serving as electrostatic dust traps.
I see that with a lot of books. People will have everything they like in their bedroom, hidden away for fear of not appearing intellectual enough. Then somewhere very visable they have Shakespeare and 20 classics.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's why I keep my copies of chic and High Society right out in the open for all to see.
ReplyDeleteAs for biblical plagiarism, well, I'm happy that we have a public domain! Of course, that will just get me started on DRM, copyright, blah blah blah, so lets' just say I'm glad the whole thing is online for easy reference to anyone needing a quick three-act short story.
Avatar doesn't deserve movie of the year. It was good enough for me and my friends that non of us cared that we were watching Dances in Space. Everyone said the same thing at the end. I can't believe how corny it was, but hot damn, I didn't care.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen Avatar, but I'm pretty confident that the right movie won, and not just because I'm a big ol boner killer feminazi who wanted to see a woman win for fucking once but also because I did see The Hurt Locker and I *loved* it even though it's definitely not in my usual range of interests (war-time suspense action movie with only woman who speaks 8 lines? PASS. Except, not). It's a very butch movie but still has some interesting things to say about masculinity. You might really like it.
ReplyDelete(And maybe this is cheating, since you can see where the image was stretched/flattened but I think that piece is from an olden tyme greek amphora.)
But back to boner killer feminism for a moment: how annoying was all the jennifer aniston/brad pitt style coverage of the battle of the exes? Bigelow and Cameron were married for less than two years, if they're over it (as they seem to be) America should be as well.
The Hurt Locker is definitely on my short must-see list. It has been for a while now, which should tell you how often I see movies anymore...
ReplyDeleteI didn't see any of the battle of the exes stuff because I didn't watch the Oscars - that first paragraph was really a very accurate depiction of my evening, and not one of my playful exaggerations.
RE the image - it's from an Attic krater, but that's awfully close and it will get you a nickel. I was actually looking for some description of the action by way of comparison to the Illiad. There's two noteworthy things, to my eyes; one of which made it to the movie Troy, the other is a discrepancy between the figures on the vase and the story.
Oh! I misunderstood the challenge.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's been awhile, but shouldn't one of those figures be running away like an enormous weenie?
I think that's part of what is being depicted, Hector coming to an abrupt halt at the end of a pursuit. I was unclear above, by the way, in citing which point had a discrepancy where - too little coffee. In the movie, Hector didn't run, I think that that is what's being depicted on the krater.
ReplyDeleteThe other discrepancy? The Iliad is pretty clear about Hector wearing Patroclus' armor when he's fighting Achilles. Not the odyssey, the Iliad, nor the Aenead indicate lol dongs in the combat.