Movie Review: Wolverine

Wolverine : 2 out of 5 stars

So, I read film crit hulks 38,000 word screenwriting article, and now I'm like a carpenter with a shiny new hammer just looking for something worth pounding. 

And then I watched XMen Origins – Wolverine. It was like a gift from the heavens, really, because the movie is so very bad, mostly due to script problems.(By the way spoilers abound, but a) this movie is a like 5 years old and b) it's really bad, so don't worry about it.)

 Paraphrasing Film Crit Hulk, the most important aspect of screenwriting is that the elements of your screenplay (plot, characters, dialogue) serve to amplify and address your theme. 

Near as I can tell the theme of Wolverine is "revenge is bad." This is a perfectly fine theme, and certainly one that shows up frequently in comic book movies (including, to a certain extent in the far superior XMen First class). The problem is in how the theme is presented. We're supposed to come to the conclusion that revenge is bad when we discover that Wolverine's girlfriend isn't dead at all, that she faked her death to get Logan to volunteer for the Adamantium treatment. However, the effect that this actually has in the context of the movie is that all of a sudden the primary villain (Sabertooth) is no longer a villain at all, the secondary villain (Stryker) becomes the primary villain, and since he isn't really a fighter we have to introduce yet a third villain (Deadpool, wait, WHAT!?) to deliver the "satisfying" high action finale. 

But this doesn't make any sense. We have no reason to dislike Deadpool, and even if Sabertooth didn't do the VERY BAD thing of killing Silver Fox (Logan's girlfriend) he's still done plenty of just regular bad things (killing villagers, killing more villagers, killing the nice British lightbulb mutant, killing the nice teleporting cowboy mutant). So we can't really root for him, and we can't really root against Deadpool Logan no longer has any reason to be pissed off, so we don't really understand why we're still having this big fight. 

This is worth emphasizing because what I felt in the final act of this movie was confusion and anxiety, and that's not really appropriate for fun, escapist superhero movie. Because you know how we had a primary villain and a secondary villain? Well, up until this point in the movie, we've been given reason after reason to dislike them, not just the "killed Wolverine's girlfriend" twist. Realizing that she's still alive doesn't really change the fact that the movie has been making us hate Sabertooth and Striker for the last 90 minutes and so the fact that Wolverine now has to reason (and commensurately no ability) to enact revenge, doesn't change the fact that the audience wants an emotional release. Having the only person we're still allowed to really hate just wander off and get arrested doesn't provide that.* 

Furthermore, yet another serious problem with the movie is that when you're main character can heal any would within seconds, the only meaningful wounds he can take are psychological. Having the movie end with him losing his memory destroys even that. It's like the polar opposite of a tragedy. The failings of the hero cost him....absolutely nothing. 

Adding to the problem is the utter lack of sensible dialogue. For example, at the end of the film, Silver Fox hypnotizes Stryker, but rather than having him kill himself, forces him to walk away saying "I should have you kill yourself, but then I'd be just like you." Well, not really, Stryker kills anyone that gets in his way, sure, but his malevolence is in his hatred of mutants, and his hypocritical manipulation and use of them. Having Silver Fox kill him would be a kindness (for the world, for Stryker himself, and most importantly, the audience). 

Likewise, Wolverine himself can't seem to decide whether he's a animal or not. Throughout the "wolverine is living the dream as a lumberjack" portion of the movie he has to remind everyone that he's a mean mean person, when, really, he's not. If he was we wouldn't feel so badly for him when he girlfriend is killed and he's forced to go on a rampage. 

There are a bunch of other things wrong with the movie, of course. Gambit serves no purpose in the movie whatsoever. And I can hardly imagine an actor with a worse southern accent. Continuity errors (just within the films, I'm not that much of a comic book nerd) abound, particularly between this and XMen First Class. But the biggest of my minor complaints is that the tone is wrong. All of the other XMen movies were fun comic book romps, sure, but were grounded in a sort of physical realism. In this movie, people are batted across the room as if they were in a Sam Raimi movie. If only this movie were that good.

*This is another thing that X-Men First Class did fantastically well. Sigh.

Review: Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



My first exposure to Haruki Murakami was via Kafka on the Shore, when it was the hot new thing, oh, 6 years ago. I thought the language was absolutely beautiful, the emphasis on how music and literature give a life grounding entirely compelling, and the pervasive oedipal obsession completely offputting.

I'd always meant to read more Marakami though, since surely the latter problem was not a universal one. I tried to read Hard-boiled wonderland and the End of the World but got bogged down in the weirdness. It wasn't until I saw the trailer for the movie they made of Norwegian Wood that I was driven to reconsider Murakami.

I am tremendously glad that I did. The language is still beautiful, music and literature still feature prominently, and the themes (love, death, caring for those with mental illness, and growing up surrounded by these things) are things I care about much more than, erm, maternal relations.*

For all this, though, the book doesn't really hit its stride until the final third, when the main character finally has to make some hard choices. The fact that Murakami can carry this through to its devastating conclusion is great though, leaving the reader with the feeling that the final third is a remarkable accomplishment of literature, rather than dimishing the first two thirds.**

So, yeah, loved it. Thought the ending was amazing and perfect and beautiful. My only real complaint is that I didn't read it 10 years ago when the coming of age aspects would have resonated with me even more.

* For those of you that disagree, fear not, there are hints of things to come peppered throughout the novel and one scene that will give you all you want and more.

** I'm looking at you, Prince of Thorns.



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Review: Prince of Thorns

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



No. No, no, no, no, no! You can not write a book about self-determination and the philosophy of choices, and end it with a Deus Ex Machina! It compromises all of your hard work and makes the reader think that you don't actually care what your book is saying.

And, right up until the very end of the novel, I was pretty sure the author did care.

But first let me give some context. In the fantasy novel forum and blog circle, this book was trumpeted as dark dark fantasy; an experiment in how brutal and uncompromising a main character can be and still get the reader to care. Except it's not really.* As I alluded to in the first paragraph, it's really about the choices we make and the frameworks** we use for making choices, and how our values shape the choices we can make, and thus what we can do. And from page 146 to page 319 it's wildly successful, due to a very tight sychronicity between theme and plot, some quality world building, and some fantastic set pieces.

Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, it then completely falls apart at the end. One poor plot point trivializes the previous 150 pages of awesome. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the point is that no matter what your philosophy is, life ultimately comes down to a coin toss. I don't think so, though. If so, why would the author have worked so hard earlier in the book to tell a story about free will?

So here's my recommendation: Get this book and read it! But stop at the end of chapter 46. Put down the book. Imagine that it had the completely awesome, internally consistent and self-validating ending it was supposed to have. And then hope like hell that the sequel that comes out in August lives up to the promise of its predecessor.


* Actually, the first half is supposed to be this, but frankly, after the main character casually rapes and murders some villagers*** (not graphically, thankfully) in opening pages, nothing he does in the rest of the book even causes a raised eyebrow.
** I think the author would say philosophies, but I mean something more structured than that.
*** Which made me want to sit the author down for a long talk with the wonderful Jim C. Hines (http://www.jimchines.com/blog/)




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The internet, you're doing it wrong

As anyone who read my monster post on "Free Ride" knows* I have been thinking a lot about the creation and distribution of culture and content.**
That thinking came to a head last weekend when I attempted to watch the webcast of the Superbowl.

Some context, I haven't had cable since 2004***, and I also haven't bothered with a TV antenna. This works fine for me as nearly everything I want to watch is either streaming on-line or available on DVD. The exceptions are when the Red Sox make the playoffs and Superbowl.

And so I was really pleased that the NFL had finally decided to join the real world and make the Superbowl available over the internet. After all this is an event that is being BROADCAST FOR FREE, THROUGH THE AIRWAVES, and as such, there is no logical reason why they should try to restrict access. If anything, you would think they would want to encourage people to take advantage of the web broadcast because they could actually calculate meaningful statistics on viewership, instead of relying on Nielson ratings.

And, to be fair NBC's  heart was in the right place. You could see the vision for the Superbowl on line and it was a good and compelling one:　an online, fully connected event where you could choose the camera you wanted to view the action from; create and share your own instant replays by rewinding your chosen camera or synchronizing the various feeds, a live feed of social networking sites so you could keep up with the vast community of other people watching the event, and finally, the superbowl commercials available on demand so that you could rewatch your favorites, or watch them during a break in the action.

But, of course, as we all know, modern media companies suck at the internet.
Let's compile a brief list of how NBC and the NFL failed.

1) The usability was really bad. It's great that you can switch from looking at different cameras to looking at the commercials and vice versa, but it was totally not clear where you were supposed to click to get back to the previous screen. Plus, when you switched to full screen mode, the entire layout changed. Finally, at the bottom of the screen, where the new commercials were supposed to be, they had at most 3 available, at any time. They didn't update frequently, and more than half the time the links were to things that weren't even superbowl commercials. To get to the actual list, you had to click through to one of the commmercials, wait until the end, when you were presented with a much longer list of the available videos.
2) No half time show. Which is too bad, since the on the internet no one would have blinked at an errant middle finger.
3) They managed to choose the most inane set of twitter feeds you can possibly imagine. I stopped looking at it after 10 minutes and just looked at my phone. 
4) We didn't get anywhere near all the commercials. No Clint Eastwood, no Avengers Trailer, No OK GO. Instead we got the budweiser platinum add set to Kanye West's Runaway****, the sexist and tone deaf Fiat and Go Daddy commercials, and the trailer for Battleship. Enough said.  
5) Worse still, the webcast had its own commercial feed which would play both during the actual Superbowl commercial breaks, and when you would switch views, say, to watch one of the superbowl commercials. Yup, that's right, you had to watch a commercial in order to be allowed to watch a commercial. And it gets better. Most of the commercials in the webcast feed were these Chevy commercials that started off by insulting you for watching the webcast, and then invited you to go online to watch their commercials. Yeah, that's right. You had to watch commercials, for commercials, in order to watch commercials. (And they insulted you to boot.)

I want to emphasize points 4 and 5)***** NBC is making it as difficult as possible to watch a video that they are broadcasting for free, over the airwaves, that is supposed to make me want to buy the products of the companies that gave them a lot of money. Near as I can see, NBC would have been better off if I'd watched a pirated UStream feed of the Superbowl. Seriously, the culture business doesn't need pirates to destroy their industry--they're doing a fine job by themselves.  



* I am aware that the number of people who read my monster post on Free Ride is, at most, 3.
** Spoiler alert, I hated Free Ride and think its author is an idiot.
*** The author of Free Ride would think that I am an enemy of the culture industry and actively contributing to its deminse, but I refer you to footnote **.
**** A toast to the douchebags, indeed.
***** I know I said "enough said" in point 4). I changed my mind.

Review: Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying The Culture Business, And How The Culture Business Can Fight Back

Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying The Culture Business, And How The Culture Business Can Fight Back by Robert Levine

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



I really tried. I really tried to give this book a fair shake, to read it with an open mind and to try to understand the author's perspective. I read the whole thing in order to be able to review it completely and not just form an opinion on the first two or three chapters.

This book is beyond awful. The writing is terrible. It might as well be a summary (maybe concatenation) of file sharing, media technology, and copyright writing from 1999 - 2010, annotated with snarky (and unsubstantiated) comments about how duplicitous and self serving American technology companies are. The author also trips one of my personal writing pet peeves in his prodigious use of decimated to mean "reduced by a large percentage" as opposed to "reduced by 10%". I am aware that the dictionary agrees with him, but I am still going to mock him for saying that a particular newspaper reduced its staff from 190 to 170 and then several pages later saying that that same newspaper would have better luck competing with the rest of the internet because it "hasn't been decimated by layoffs, as so many others have been. (33% in according to my kindle)"

Frankly this book isn't even about piracy. It's about tech companies whose product is the internet, or things on the internet, or devices which access the internet and who want these things to be available as cheaply as possible (to maximize their profits). And it's about the media companies who want to sell things as expensively as possible (to maximize their profits). That sounds less like "how digital parasites are destroying the culture business" and more like.....basic economics.

The problem is that it's kind of hard to make an argument in favor of the companies that are trying to charge the consumer more. And it's even harder to make this argument when you're forced to admit, every time you quote a statistic on how bad piracy is, that that statistic was probably exaggerated and that really no one has any idea what the economic cost is of piracy (or cheap kindle books, or boxes that have audacity to try to connect your TV to the internet).

Let's look at a specific example.

According to the author, newspapers are dying because tech companies (those evil, evil tech companies) pressured newspapers to put all of their content online, and then news aggregators run by the tech companies (t.e.e.t.c's) stole all the web traffic. Well, maybe. Or maybe newspapers are dying because people would rather get their news from a talking head on the t.v. Maybe newspapers are dying because people get their classified ads for free on craigslist. Maybe because those evil tech companies can report sports scores more conveniently than a daily paper. Maybe because last time I checked there were 1.142857 good syndicated cartoons (Pearls Before Swine and Foxtrot on Sundays) and quite a few truly outstanding webcomics available, sorry Robert Levine, for free online using alternative business models. So yeah, I'll concede the point that the internet is killing some previously healthy businesses. But I don't think we have enough data to conclude that it's because of piracy (or even has anything to do with copyrights*...)

There are about 8 stories like this, one or two for each industry: music, movies, books, television, newspapers. Each has some adorable nuances. For example, this is the first time I've ever heard someone argue that the DMCA was a reasonable let alone overly permissive piece of legislation! And even as I read these stories, (the source articles for which I had mostly already read, such is the value of the internet!) I was genuinely curious about the second half of the subtitle.

So how *can* the culture businesses can fight back? Well, Levine offers two suggestions:

1) Blanket licensing for content. Ok, I actually think this is very reasonable assuming it's reasonably priced and provides the same conveniences that file sharing does (i.e. unlimited downloads, playability across devices, etc.) Of course, his only example where this has been successfully done is an Irish ISP who created some sort of hybrid between Spotify and emusic (back when emusic was cool...) Somehow I don't think that's going to help.

and, wait for it,

2) Do nothing. Now that so many people are paying for broadband, it's in the ISPs best interest to stop people from donwloading so much and so those companies will naturally start to try to curb piracy.

I don't buy any of it**. Jonathon Coulton had a wonderful post-Megaupload, post-SOPA-protest*** blog post about stuff like this: you can read the whole thing here,
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/, but here's what I took away from it.
People have been making music for a lot longer than people have been making money for making music, and if the record labels all fold because of piracy, or because of bad PR (more likely in my opinion) people are still going to make music.

Maybe the author is right and the internet will kill the culture business, but it's certainly not going to kill culture****.

And maybe all it will mean is that culture will get cheaper. In all of his hand wringing about the fate of the music, movie, newspaper, and television industries, the author doesn't even acknowledge that by making culture cheaper, people who maybe couldn't afford it otherwise will be enriched by it. I am inclined to believe this will have a more profound effect on the future of "the culture business" than the bottom line for the mega-corporations and media conglomerates.




* This book would have been infinitely better, maybe even good, if it had taken the Freakonomics approach of gathering data, testing some hypotheses and then presenting the results of the analysis. Of course, since there's no data to support the assertion that piracy is bad, it also would have been infinitely shorter... (See Tim O'Reilly's (in my opinion excellent) posts on the subject. https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r and https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/5Xd3VjFR8gx. Hey look! I can regurgitate opinions as fact and provide citations, too! I should write a book!)

** I shudder to think what this book would have been like if it had been written post-SOPA blackout.

*** I also didn't buy this book. I didn't pirate it either, although that would have been funny. I checked a digital copy out of my local library and read it on my kindle. The author conveniently neglects to note that people have been getting free media from libraries for hundreds of years.

**** In one interview, someone claims that the protection of copyrights is a national security issue because of how effective movies and music are at spreading and promoting American culture and values. Um, wait a minute, if that's the case then shouldn't we encourage foreign piracy in order to influence more people?




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