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movies

A Christmas Movie or a Movie Set at Christmas?

During my Thanksgiving visit, my brother and I were talking about Christmas movies. He’s something of a traditionalist who has to watch White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life every year. I’m okay with It’s a Wonderful Life because I adore Jimmy Stewart and find that it gets a little more depth from the fact that he essentially used making that movie as a way to deal with the PTSD from his experiences as a bomber pilot in the war, but it’s not something I want to watch regularly. I could be happy never seeing White Christmas again. I remember being horribly disappointed when I finally saw the movie after having heard the song all my life.

I definitely disagree with my brother about his assertion that Die Hard is the best Christmas movie. If it makes you feel holly and jolly and gives you all the warm Christmas feels, then that’s great for you and enjoy it, but I tried watching it as a Christmas movie last year, and it didn’t work that way for me. I think it’s stuck in my head as a summer movie because it was a summer release and I saw it at the theater on my birthday in August.

But thinking about that, I came up with a test for whether a movie is a movie that happens to be set at Christmas or a Christmas movie: Could you move it to another time without changing the story? If you removed the Christmas elements, would the story still work? By that standard, Die Hard would not be a Christmas movie. All you’d have to do is give him another reason to be traveling — say, his daughter’s birthday — and another reason for the office party — like some kind of company milestone. That would even increase the tension with the wife if she had him come to the office so she could manage his reunion with the kids and then he found out she was staying late for a party rather than prioritizing the daughter’s birthday. But most of the action wouldn’t be affected at all and it would take only minor rewriting to change it from Christmas.

By this standard, one of my favorite Christmas movies, The Holiday, also wouldn’t actually be a Christmas movie. I used to watch this one every year on the evening before Christmas Eve, and a few years ago it struck me how small a role Christmas actually plays in the story. Christmas itself is mostly skipped over, with a brief montage of both women eating pasta alone while “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” plays. Most of the movie takes place in the week between Christmas and the new year. The main reason it needs to take place at Christmas is that you need a time both women are able to be away from work to travel for a couple of weeks, and the holiday time has to start for one of the women with a company-wide event. It being winter does help give the contrast between Los Angeles and England, but you’ll have at least some contrast year-round. Christmas is the most obvious, easiest time of year to do that. It would take some handwaving to set it up at another time of year. But the plot itself has nothing really to do with the holiday season. They don’t even do seasonal stuff. It mostly comes down to the vibes in the England side of the story, with the snow on the ground and the cozy cottage. I think I mostly enjoy that movie because a pile of books in a cozy cottage near an English village is my dream vacation. It was a little disappointing to learn that the cottage was a fake shell they built to film the exteriors and the interior was a set in California.

I’ve since moved this one to watch after Christmas. It’s a good thing for that dead week between Christmas and the new year when there’s not much going on and you can kick back and relax after the holiday craziness.

In contrast, most versions of A Christmas Carol would be Christmas movies because it would be difficult to move the story to another time. Scrooge’s attitude is a sharp contrast to the Christmas spirit and is fully illustrated by the way he reacts to Christmas. The ghosts take him to specific Christmas celebrations. There’s an emotional weight to the fact that it’s Christmas and there are societal expectations around it that you don’t get with other holidays. You’d have to do some serious rewriting to set it at any other time.

Now I’m going to be watching Christmas movies with this in mind to see how they measure up. Today would be a good day for Christmas movies because it’s snowing. We were supposed to get maybe three inches, with snow ending in the early morning, but it looks like there are at least four inches and it’s still snowing steadily at 11 a.m. I don’t know how it can clear before the weekend, but fortunately I can walk to the things I need to do. I’ll get to break in the snow boots I bought last winter.

fantasy, movies

Returning to The Hobbit

Earlier this week, it was Hobbit Day, the anniversary of the original publication of The Hobbit. I decided to celebrate by watching the 1977 animated TV movie version. For one thing, it’s about the only incarnation of the story you can get through in under an hour and a half, but for another, it was in some ways my introduction to that universe and even to fantasy fiction.

I was in elementary school then, and my teacher would read a chapter from a book to us every day after recess, I guess as a way of settling us all down. As the airing of the TV movie approached, she read The Hobbit. I recall there were some other linked lessons that tied it into the curriculum, but I don’t remember details about them. I did as I always did when she read us a book and got impatient with the chapter-a-day pace, checked the book out of the library, and read it much faster so that I was done well before the class was. When the TV movie came on, I told my parents that it was homework, so I had to watch it.

A stone coaster with the original illustrated cover of The Hobbit on it.
The edition my teacher read looked like this, so when I saw a coaster of it, I had to get it.

I didn’t remember much about the movie itself, not even whether I liked it or how I thought it compared to the book. I was in the midst of Star Wars mania at the time, so I don’t think it registered too much. It was a brief diversion from all things Star Wars, and I wasn’t interested if there weren’t spaceships and laser swords. I was too young for The Lord of the Rings at that time, so I’m not sure where else I could have gone with it if I had really gotten into The Hobbit and wanted more like it. I guess I could have found the Narnia books sooner (I had read The Horse and His Boy during my horse phase, but I read it more as a talking horse book than as a fantasy novel and didn’t know it was part of a series). I was reading the Oz books around this time. I don’t think I’d yet figured out the concept of genre. I just read the books I liked that were about things I was interested in at that time. I hadn’t realized that there were categories of books that similar books fit into.

It was a couple of years later before I got into the Narnia books and from there spotted The Fellowship of the Ring in the library and remembered that this was a follow-up to that book I read before the TV movie came on. Then I went into a big fantasy phase that I’ve never quite come out of.

It was interesting to revisit the animated movie after all this time, after having seen the bloated epic saga of the live-action version and having read and re-read the books. In a lot of respects, the animated version is more faithful to the book than the live-action version was. It doesn’t contain a lot of made-up stuff that isn’t in the book. It does skip some things, but I think it’s proof that they could have done a faithful adaptation in around two hours. I think Tolkien would have approved of all the insertions of folk-style songs into the soundtrack, though he might have been baffled by the disco synth sounds that often came up in the score, especially for action scenes.

If you’ve got kids you want to introduce to that universe, this would be a good option. They skim over any serious violence, like zooming out and showing dots on a map as a way of depicting the battle, and it’s very much done as though aimed at kids, focusing on the stuff kids would find interesting. It’s also a fun watch for adults who want to reset their brains after the live-action attempt at this story. Their Smaug and Gollum are a bit of a letdown compared to the live-action versions. They have a very different take on the wood elves and the dwarfs than we get in live action (no hot young dwarfs). On the other hand, their trolls look a lot more like the traditional Scandinavian depictions, and I like their take on the goblins. It is very, very 70s, so depending on your age it may be a blast from the past or so retro that it’s a bit campy.

movies

Old Favorite RomCom

Way back when I first started working on the book that became Enchanted, Inc., I did a kind of “retreat” on Labor Day weekend to prepare for writing it, which included watching romantic comedies so I could capture that tone while adding magic to it. That started a tradition I’ve called Chick Lit and Chick Flick weekend. I didn’t read chick lit for Labor Day weekend this year, but I did make a point of watching a romantic comedy. I thought about watching something new, but since rom-coms, especially new ones, can be so hit or miss, I went with a fairly obscure favorite, a British rom-com called The Very Thought of You (though it was originally released under a different title).

It’s hard to describe this movie in a way that shows what makes it fun without giving away the twists, but then the twists are hardly surprising, given that it is a romantic comedy and it’s fairly obvious which couple will get together.

The gist of it is that an American woman gets fed up with her life and decides to leave it all behind. She buys a ticket for the first flight she can afford, which turns out to be London. Then she meets a guy at the airport, and that sets off a chain reaction of events. We see things mostly from the guy’s perspective as he meets her, makes some grand gestures to be close to her, then loses her, and then he tells his two best friends about her. Next we see one of the friends run into her, realize it’s the woman his friend told him about, and he then flirts with her and loses her. And then we find out what was really going on around all this to explain the other events.

It’s not really a Rashomon thing where the story changes depending on who’s telling it. It’s more that the camera sticks with the guys, so we only see what they see and know what they know at the time, and so we get different information depending on which guy the camera’s with.

Joseph Fiennes is our romantic leading man, and this movie seems to have been made just before Shakespeare in Love. It’s interesting to consider how his career might have gone if this had been what established him instead, but I get the feeling he wouldn’t have stuck with romcoms even if he hadn’t become better known for costume dramas since his choices have been rather eclectic. He does make a great romantic leading man because he says a lot with his eyes. The movie also includes Tom Hollander and Rufus Sewell. Our leading lady is Monica Potter, who had a brief run at being the next big romcom heroine around the turn of the century.

I enjoy this one because mixing up the structure makes the standard girl-meets-boy fresher, and then there’s the underlying internal conflict with the guy having to choose between loyalty to his friends and love and then consider whether his friends really are his friends, so there’s some emotional depth to it. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in a couple of places, I actually want the main couple to get together, and we get some lovely London scenery.

I don’t think this one is currently streaming anywhere. I bought the DVD after seeing it on cable (or possibly a local station) one Saturday or Sunday afternoon years ago. I don’t know what kind of release it got in the US, given that it came out during a time when I was seeing a lot of movies and paying attention to what was coming out but I’d never heard of it. If you do find it, it’s good for the classic romcom feelings but with a few twists, as well as getting to watch some actors who went on to be much bigger stars at early points in their careers. There’s even an extra you barely spot who’s gone on to become much better known.

movies

Superman

Part of my birthday celebration last week was taking myself out to a movie — for the first time since the pandemic began. I went to the movie theater downtown to see Superman. This theater is vintage 1930s Art Deco, though with upgraded seating (recliners with footrests) and modern digital projection and sound. It seemed apt for Superman, like the kind of place Clark Kent would have gone to a movie in the earlier incarnations of the character.

Anyone who’s read my books would probably have guessed that I loved it because Clark/Superman here is basically an Adorkable Wizard. I’m naturally going to love a dark-haired guy with superpowers who’s still a bit dorky and awkward and generally good.

I’ve never been a huge superhero fan, mostly because I never got into comic books (no snobbery, I just never encountered them other than compilations of newspaper comics). I only knew superheroes through TV and movies, but occasionally really got into those. I remember running home from the bus stop every afternoon to get home in time for the daily Batman rerun, I watched the 1970s Spider-Man and Hulk TV series and the various superhero Saturday-morning cartoons. I saw the 1978 Superman movie and some of the sequels, then the Lois & Clark series in the 90s.

Out of all that, I’ve always been fond of Superman because I like the idea of the guy with great powers who isn’t dark or edgy and who uses his power to help other people. I tend to prefer the presentations with the idea that Clark is who he really is and Superman is merely an identity he puts on for his good deeds in order to protect his family and himself so he can have something of a normal life. I’m intrigued by the conflict inherent in that, when he gets all kinds of recognition as Superman but is ignored as Clark.

So, basically this movie was all the things I like about the idea of Superman, put together in one story, with Clark struggling with identity and purpose while remaining a ray of sunshine and an absolute cinnamon roll of a guy. I also love this version of Lois Lane and her being smart and snappy, the kind of dame you could imagine being in a 1940s movie. This version of Lex Luthor was a little eerie given what’s been going on with billionaires. You could think of him as Elon Bezos, though I think it would have been more realistic if he’d bought the Daily Planet so he could control the messages about both Superman and himself.

The way they used the 1978 John Williams Superman theme woven into the score brought goosebumps every time. That’s become such an iconic piece of music, so I couldn’t have imagined Superman without it, but it’s interesting seeing how they updated it. I just wish they’d also woven in the love theme from the 1978 movie because it somehow became an earworm after seeing the movie, possibly because I’m most familiar with the Superman March arrangement that incorporates it, so hearing the main theme without the love theme made it feel unresolved, and that made my brain try to resolve it. Oddly, it was the pop ballad version that really got stuck in my head, so I had to track that down on YouTube.

I don’t know if this is going to be a buy it on Blu-Ray kind of movie for me, but it was good for a smile and some inspiration. It was the kind of story that made me want to be better and do better. I don’t have superpowers, but what do I have the power to do?

movies

Snow White Live

I finally put up the light-blocking drapes over the sliding glass door in my den, so now I can watch an entire movie in a somewhat theater-like environment in spite of the fact that it doesn’t get dark at this time of year until after 9 p.m. So, last weekend I watched the new, live-action Snow White.

There was a lot of controversy around this film. It was hated and panned by people who were determined to hate it (and probably never ended up seeing it) even before it was released. There were people who were mad because of the casting, people mad that they were doing live-action remakes of classic animated films, and people mad that they changed things from the animated version.

It wasn’t a bad movie. It has some seriously weird stuff in it that almost ruins it, but for the most part I liked it. I’m not actually a huge fan of the animated version. I watched it a couple of years ago when my summer movie night project was watching as many of the Disney animated films as possible, and while I can recognize that it was a major achievement for its time and the animation is gorgeous, it’s not a great movie. The pacing is strange, the main plot gets very little screen time (they actually cut stuff out of a fairy tale that was already too short for a full-length movie) and there’s way too much time devoted to silly dwarf antics. The middle third of the movie is devoted to the dwarfs washing up for dinner. And that’s not even getting into how Snow White was depicted as a pre-teen but she still rides off to marry a prince and seems to have no thoughts other than to cook and clean for men and hope for a prince to rescue her. This was a story that needed rewriting.

And rewrite it they did. I’d say this one comes closer to what happened with the live-action Cinderella, where it’s not so much a remake of the animated version as it is a new telling of the same fairy tale. The main plot does keep the major beats of the story, but it puts it in a different context and adds a lot of new stuff. Unlike the live-action Cinderella, it is a musical, but most of the songs are new. They only keep a few of the songs from the original and weave some of the musical themes into the score. I like the new stuff. It makes for a more interesting movie and fixes some of the issues I’ve always had with the story.

The problem is that it isn’t new enough. The things that don’t work well are the things brought over from the animated version. One of these things is Snow White’s look. They tried to make her look like the animated version, and that just doesn’t look great on a live human. That hairstyle was a major anachronism in the animated version, something from the 1930s rather than from the vaguely Renaissance-like era some of the costumes suggest. There’s a line in the movie about how the evil queen cut Snow White’s hair on purpose so she’d be less competition, but it really doesn’t work. Even worse is the main costume that somewhat copies the outfit the animated character wears. Again, it doesn’t do well in live action. It also stands out as drastically different from the costumes worn by all the other characters. It’s not even a good version of the animated dress. It looks like the “totally not copyright-infringing the Disney version, but you can still tell it’s supposed to be Snow White” costume you’d buy at Spirit Halloween.

And then there are the dwarfs. The people who were determined to hate the movie ahead of time were sharing a picture of Snow White with a variety of roughly dressed people and claimed that these were the “woke” version of the dwarfs. They were not actually the dwarfs. They were different characters entirely. The movie would have been so much better if these characters had served the plot function of the dwarfs. No, the dwarfs are still there — and they’re live actors made to look exactly like the animated versions with the use of prosthetics and CGI. It’s so uncanny valley that it’s horrifying. There were these cartoons with human faces in the middle. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were small children who became so distressed that they had to be carried out of the theater. If I’d seen it on the big screen, I might have fled the theater. I did yelp out loud when they first appeared.

But aside from that, I liked a lot of it. Snow White is an adult instead of a child, so it’s less creepy, and she isn’t moping about, waiting for a prince to rescue her. Instead of her “I want” song being “I’m Wishing,” which is about wanting a boyfriend, she sings about wanting to set her kingdom right again to carry out the plans her parents used to have. Instead of a prince, we get a Robin Hood-like bandit who’s part of a group driven out of their homes and living in the forest, stealing food from the castle (they’re the people in the picture the haters said were woke dwarfs). Snow White coaches the dwarfs into cleaning their own house instead of doing it for them. Snow White actually gets to know the guy and they’ve fallen in love before the true love’s kiss. He’s not just kissing some dead chick he finds in the woods (after spying on her at the palace). The new music is really good, aside from one song. That song isn’t a bad song. It just doesn’t fit the situation. I even bought one of the songs. Rachel Zegler gets a lot of hate, which I don’t understand, but she has a gorgeous voice and I thought she was good in the role. I liked the guy, too.

I’m not sure I’m going to rewatch the whole movie very often because those dwarfs are unsettling and I hate her costume, but if she had a better outfit and they let the bandits play the same role as the dwarfs without trying to copy the dwarfs from the animated version, it would have been a better movie. I definitely like it better than the animated version. It’s worth a watch, but you might want to distract any easily frightened children when the dwarfs show up.

TV, movies

Revived Obsession

In addition to being distracted by trying to get my house set up to the point that it’s a livable space I can actually work in, I’ve had an additional distraction because the final season of Andor has been on, starting the day after I moved in. It ended this week, and I haven’t quite recovered because it’s reawakened and re-energized my Star Wars obsession that started when I saw the first movie in the theater when I was 9. It’s waxed and waned over the years since then, but this series is hitting me where I am now in a big way. It’s very much Star Wars for grown-ups.

There’s been a belief, promoted by George Lucas himself, ever since the prequel movies came out that “Star Wars is for kids,” but that’s as much of a retcon (retroactive continuity, when you decide something and claim that it was always true) as the fact that Darth Vader was Luke’s father and Leia was his sister (the idea that Darth Vader was Luke’s father was initially brought up as a joke by a friend at a dinner party when Lucas was outlining The Empire Strikes Back, then once they brainstormed it a bit, they decided it worked. The fact that Leia was Luke’s sister came up when outlining Return of the Jedi when they needed a reason Luke would drop his refusal to fight Vader, and protecting a sister was what they decided on).

The original movie was pure Boomer (and Silent Generation) bait. It drew on all the space adventure serials that played before Saturday matinees when those generations were kids, as well as tropes from the Westerns that were popular for those generations. It wasn’t kids clamoring to see that first movie. They were brought by their parents (like me — my family will never let me forget that I emphatically did not want to go see it). It was very kid-friendly in that the violence was fairly sanitized (in spite of having one of the highest body counts in all of movie history, given that an entire planet is destroyed). There’s no on-screen blood or gore. When Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed, we don’t see a decapitated body. He just vanishes. There’s comic relief from the droids, and Luke is young enough to be relatable and aspirational to kids without being an annoying kid character. But the main appeal to kids was that it was an adult movie we could see and enjoy and feel grown-up about seeing. It didn’t pander to kids. In today’s entertainment language, it’s “four quadrant entertainment,” which means that all the demographic groups can enjoy it together — fun for the whole family!

It wasn’t until later that they realized they had something kids loved. It took them nearly a year after the original release of the movie before they started making Star Wars toys. The Empire Strikes Back was even more mature and actually less kid-friendly. There was more on-screen violence that wasn’t the sanitized “pew, pew, pew” of blaster fire. Characters got injured and bloody. Han was tortured. Lucas was criticized for the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi for being ready-made merchandising, but I believe his rationale that it was about the story, that he wanted something small, primitive, and innocent helping bring down the Empire (and bonus if they’d make good toys). Even if there was a cute factor seemingly aimed at kids, the thematic issues in that movie are pretty deep.

It was only when they came back more than a decade after the original movies with the prequels that they went all-in with that “Star Wars is for kids” line, with elements that were deliberately aimed at child interest, and they then made animated series that were clearly targeted toward kids (even though they ended up going rather dark and with some heavy themes).

But when we got to Rogue One, there was nothing child-friendly about it. The funny droid sidekick is a snarky killer, and that’s really the only comic relief. I’ve called it the Saving Private Ryan of Star Wars. It’s serious, dark, violent, and brilliant. It stood to reason that the prequel series leading up to it would be similarly serious. It’s about surviving under an autocratic regime, the stirrings of rebellion, and just how hard and dangerous revolution is, requiring great personal sacrifice by some so that all can live free. It’s very heavy, and the deep political themes probably wouldn’t be of much interest to most kids. I doubt it would have caught my imagination the way the original movie did when I was a kid. It’s about sneaking around and conversations rather than space battles and the action sequences are riots that turn into massacres.

But it’s an in-depth look at the Star Wars universe and the ordinary people who live there, not just the princesses, politicians, and Jedi Knights that we’ve seen in other movies. It’s the mechanics, shopkeepers, farmers, bureaucrats, and other people trying to get by in an increasingly hostile galaxy, and it’s about the people who have to keep to the shadows to try to build their movement. We get a sense of daily life in that galaxy. We see their homes, their kitchens and bedrooms, where they go on vacation. It’s a chance to really wallow in that universe and see multiple aspects of it.

And that’s made the rest of that universe more interesting. It all has more depth and texture, and that’s why I’m getting back into it the way I was when I was 9-14 and the original movies were coming out, and it was all fresh and new to me. After this week’s Andor finale, I’ve rewatched Rogue One, which is even more heartbreaking now, and tonight I’ll go back to that original movie that started it all, knowing what happened to set up that whole situation and just what was sacrificed along the way.

Now we’ll see if this current wave of obsession has the same effect the first wave had, since that was what kicked off my wanting to be a writer and tell stories. Maybe it’ll inspire even more story ideas.

 

movies

The Wonka World

A few weeks ago, I watched the recent Wonka movie that’s a prequel to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (if you’re talking movies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in book form, unless you’re talking about the Tim Burton version, which I kind of try to ignore).

I really enjoyed the movie and found it utterly delightful. My face hurt from smiling by the end of it, and there were a few moments that brought tears to my eyes. They did a good job of making it look like it took place in the same world as the 1970s movie, where it was ambiguously sort of European, but also with American touches, and no firm European setting. And I could see this Wonka as a younger version of Gene Wilder’s character. I could see this becoming a comfort movie (I need to get the DVD) because it definitely made me feel good, and there were parts that made my heart soar.

I have an odd history with this story world. The original Willie Wonka film remains the only movie I ever had to be carried out of because it scared me too much. I made it through all the Disney films fine, but when I was about 4, the scene where the girl turned into a blueberry freaked me out to the point my parents had to carry me out of the theater (ironically, I now eat blueberries just about every day). I didn’t see the whole movie until I was in my 30s. I wasn’t avoiding it or afraid of it. It had just never occurred to me to watch it until I was visiting my parents and it came on cable, and we all watched it (since my parents hadn’t seen the rest of it, either).

I had, however, read the books. My fourth-grade teacher had a routine of reading a chapter of a book to us every day after recess as a way of getting us settled down, and I think she must have been a fantasy fan because most of what she read us would fall into the fantasy category. She really must have liked Roald Dahl because she read a lot of those to us, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I did my usual thing of getting impatient with the one chapter a day pace and checked the books out of the library to read for myself. I don’t think I knew there was a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory until she started reading that one.

So by the time I finally saw the movie all the way through, I knew the story and had my own mental images based on adding the parts I’d seen of the movie (and clips I’d seen over the years) to the imagery in the books, which made the movie weirdly familiar.

I’ve seen the Tim Burton one, but found it unsettling and not very much fun.

Now I kind of want to watch Wonka and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a double feature and see how they fit together, but I have to admit that I still find the original movie a bit unsettling. It might be even more unsettling with the whiplash from the much sweeter and less freaky prequel.

movies

The Fantasy/SF Specturm

Last weekend I watched the new version of Dune, both parts 1 and 2. I read the book when I was a teenager, and I saw the 80s movie, but I didn’t get into the series. I never read any of the other books. I didn’t remember much, just the litany against fear, the stillsuits, and the hand in the box test. I don’t recall being too impressed by the 80s movie, but I rather liked this new one, especially part 2 (mostly the stuff about riding the sandworms).

I did feel like we were getting a circle of influences, though. It’s pretty obvious that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Dune when he created Star Wars. We had that corrupt galactic empire, the desert planet, the quasi-religious mystical order, the bad guy on life support, and the drug called spice. But these movies also seemed to be influenced by Star Wars in some of the imagery, especially the way the empire looked.

I think both Dune and Star Wars also fall into the category of epic fantasy in a science fiction setting. Although both stories take place in futuristic worlds with spaceships and high technology, the plots are more fantasy-oriented. You could move these stories to a more typical fantasy world without changing much about the plots. The stories revolve around things like prophecies, destiny, a chosen one, and that quasi-religious order with mystical powers. In Dune, one of the things that makes “spice” valuable is that it’s what allows faster-than-light navigation, but it mostly seems to be a McGuffin, a reason why people are in conflict on this planet, which opens the door for the prophesied Chosen One to show up. The story isn’t about faster-than-light navigation, it’s about the prophesies, visions, and a reluctant Chosen One coming into his power, which is more a fantasy story than a science fiction story.

It’s similar in Star Wars. The original movie is about a farmboy learning about his heritage and finding he has a supernatural power, then going to rescue a princess and using his power to defeat the bad guys — a classic fantasy plot. There’s never really much science fiction in Star Wars, and their attempts at doing science, like finding a scientific explanation for why some people are extra powerful in the Force, didn’t work. Even the entries in the saga that are less fantasy (the plot doesn’t depend on the Force) aren’t science fiction. Rogue One and Andor are more spy thriller in a science fiction setting, so would be space opera.

If you’re looking at it on a spectrum with fantasy at one end and science fiction at the other, you’d have something like Star Wars close to the fantasy end, then Dune pretty close to it. We move into space opera when it’s more about the society, the adventure, or the characters than about the science, but there aren’t any mystical or magical elements. That’s where things like Star Trek would fall. There’s no supernatural stuff or mysticism, like in space fantasy, but the actual science stuff is often pretty sketchy. You could move a lot of their core stories to a different setting and they might still work — make it about explorers on earth during the age of exploration. Then there’s science fiction that’s really about the science and technology where you can’t remove the science from the story and still have the plot work. These would be stories about exploring other worlds where they really have to deal with alien life forms and environments, not just humans with odd cultures or funny noses. Or stories about how the use of robots changes human society.

At least, that’s my classification method. I thought I liked science fiction when I became a Star Wars fan, and I do like some of it, but after years in a science fiction book group, I realized that what I like is more space-set fantasy and space opera. Hard science fiction mostly bores me, though I do like books that get into how an alien environment might work, especially if I like the characters.

Some people even distinguish between hard and soft fantasy, with hard fantasy having a more codified magical system with clear rules — magic as science — and soft fantasy being more about the mystical, with magical things just happening and no one’s entirely sure how it works. With soft fantasy, the magic is more part of the setting (like the futuristic world being the setting for space fantasy) while in hard fantasy the magic is a crucial element of the plot. I’m not entirely certain I buy that, but then I haven’t read a lot of the stuff that people call “hard” fantasy. For me it all comes down to whether I like the characters and enjoy spending time in that world. I don’t care about knowing the various rules of magic, other than that I do feel like some limitations are necessary to make the story interesting.

As for Dune, it may be time for a reread. I’m basing this assessment mostly on the recent movies since I don’t remember much about the book. I liked the book but didn’t get too into it. Maybe it’ll hit differently if I’m thinking of it as fantasy. And I’m sure I’ll have a different perspective on the book now than I did at sixteen.

movies, TV, Books, writing

Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.

Books, movies

Out of Order

Last Friday, I figured I should celebrate Valentine’s Day with something somewhat romantic, but I wasn’t in a very romantic mood, so I ended up watching 500 Days of Summer, a somewhat anti-romantic romantic comedy. I’m not super-strict about my definition of “romantic,” so I’m okay with a hopeful ending, even if it doesn’t involve the main couple in the movie.

This is a rather unconventional romcom that questions a lot of the premises common to the genre. It’s told in a non-linear way, starting with a breakup and bouncing back to a first meeting, then ahead to an established relationship, then back to starting to get together, etc. Tom is a hopeless romantic who’s looking for “The One” who’ll complete him. Summer is a free spirit who doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t want to be tied down. Tom meets Summer and is sure she’s The One when he learns she likes his favorite band. They argue over the issue of love, and his hopes are dashed when she tells him she doesn’t believe in it, but then she kisses him, they start dating, and everything is perfect, until it isn’t and he doesn’t know what to do.

I recently saw some online discourse about the movie (which is probably why it caught my eye). Apparently there’s some debate over which of them is in the wrong and the bad guy. Is she bad for telling him she didn’t believe in love, then dating him anyway, or is he bad for expecting her to fall in love with him when she told him she wouldn’t? Is she a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or is he trying to cast her in that role? I would say they’re both at fault. She sent seriously mixed signals, saying one thing and then acting another way, but he was in love with an idea, and she happened to be the person he cast in that role.

But the main thing I like is the nonlinear structure that makes the audience have to piece things together, where we don’t see how it all fits together until toward the end. I love stories that do that sort of thing or that play with narrative structure in fun ways.

In the romantic comedy space, there’s Sliding Doors, which has parallel timelines — we see the heroine miss a train after losing her job, leading to her getting mugged, then because of that she gets home late enough that she doesn’t catch her boyfriend cheating on her, and her life becomes a struggle. But then we also see the heroine barely catch the train, so she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend, which leads to her starting her life over, starting a business, and starting a new romance. We cut back and forth between the timelines. Which one is the “good” one and which is the “bad” one, and how will it work out?

Or there’s The Very Thought of You, which plays with perspective. We see the same events multiple times through the perspectives of three friends who all meet the same woman on the same day, and we only realize what’s really happening when we put them all together and know what’s happening in the background of each of the scenes.

I’m With Lucy starts with the ending — the heroine is on her way to her wedding. She got there after a time when she said yes to every blind date. We go back to these dates and the relationships that came from them, jumping around a bit in time. Which of these guys is she marrying?

Getting away from romcoms, there are movies like Memento, which is told in reverse order, and Inception, with the lines between dream and reality blurred. The first season of Once Upon a Time had dual timelines, with flashbacks going mostly in reverse chronological order gradually showing how the present-day situation came to be, while the characters worked to resolve the situation in the present (the flashback format continued through the series, but it mostly became thematic, showing an incident in a character’s past that reflected the character’s present).

I haven’t seen it done so often in books, but there’s a time travel book by Connie Willis that plays with this, Blackout/All Clear. It’s a story in which time traveling historians from the future go to the time of World War II to study it, but something goes wrong, and they’re stuck there as the Blitz begins. But there were other previous missions involving some of the same people to different times in the war, and since they took on cover identities and the story is told using the cover name, we don’t know which characters are the same people at different times until later. There’s also the mix of what’s happening chronologically within the war era and what the timeline is in the “present,” which can mean that a person from earlier in the present might be later in the war than they are in the current mission that started later in the present. This is a kind of storytelling that would be less effective in a movie because it would be more obvious that they’re the same person. In the book, there are a lot of “ohhhh” moments of realization.

I have ambitions of writing something like this, either out of order or otherwise nonlinear. The closest I’ve come was my Christmas novella, which was similar to Sliding Doors, except the heroine was living both timelines and aware of both of them, so she had to figure out which life she wanted and how to stick with that one instead of living both of them. I have an idea that might fit into the nonlinear category, with flashbacks where you don’t know which present character is the person in the flashback, but the whole idea hasn’t really come together yet, and the concept is more ambitious than I feel up to tackling right now.