Archive for movies

movies

Adaptation vs. Original

One of the movies I watched last weekend was The Fall Guy, a movie that says a lot about Hollywood today — not necessarily within the movie itself, but in the concept behind it.

I really enjoyed the movie. It’s essentially an action romantic comedy. It hits all the rom-com beats, but in the context of some pretty ridiculous action sequences, like the declaration of love during a chase with things blowing up in the background, or the big “misunderstanding” happening because of an attempted kidnapping that turns into a chase and fight scene. The cast is clearly having fun and well aware of what movie they’re in while still managing to play it perfectly straight. It’s pretty much the perfect popcorn movie or date movie. I laughed out loud several times.

But it’s also a sign of how utterly terrified Hollywood seems to be of anything original right now. Every movie has to be tied to or based on something else. It has to be a sequel, a remake, based on a book/movie/comic book/videogame, etc. In this case, the movie is supposedly based on the 1980s TV series The Fall Guy. I watched that series. I don’t remember much about it because it’s not all that memorable. It was the kind of thing that was fun to watch, but as soon it was over you forgot that you watched it.

But the movie actually has almost nothing to do with the series. There’s the title, the name of the main character and the fact that he’s a stunt man, and two of the stars of the series show up in cameos that have nothing to do with their series roles. The TV series was about a stunt man who worked as a bounty hunter in between movies. He usually used his stunt skills to bring in the fugitives, like fancy driving or fighting, but sometimes rigging something like a stunt as a trap. As I recall, a lot of episodes began with what looked like an action sequence with our hero in grave danger, and then we’d find out he was filming a movie stunt. Later in the episode, that same stunt would be key to bringing in the fugitive.

The movie is about a stunt man who got scared away from the industry (and everything else) when he was badly injured in a stunt that failed. Now he’s being encouraged to come back to double once more for a toxic action star who likes to pretend he does all his own stunts, and the director of the film turns out to be the woman he ghosted after his accident. Things get complicated when the star disappears, and the stunt man needs to find him to save the movie for the woman he loves.

The premise and the stories are so different that if they’d changed the name of the movie and the main character, they could have made this movie with no credit to the TV series without getting sued. The fact that the character is a stunt man isn’t enough similarity. The creators of the original series could have watched this movie without having a moment of “hey, this looks like our series.” The series was a hit at its time, but it’s hardly a classic. I’d totally forgotten about it until I heard about the movie. I don’t think I ever saw it in reruns on cable. I think it may be on one of the free streaming services, but it didn’t get any kind of big revival from streaming. In all my time on TV forums, I’ve never seen anyone bring it up. I don’t see what the benefit was to tying this movie to the TV show. It may actually have turned off more potential viewers than it attracted. It doesn’t have a huge fan base that would be lured to the movie, but there are a lot of people who are turned off by the remake fever and who won’t go see something that’s a remake of an old TV show.

I’d be curious to know the story behind this — was there ever an original idea for a movie about a stunt man that couldn’t get made until they linked it to an old TV show? Are they so afraid of not being linked to something else that they wouldn’t make a high-concept movie about a stunt man restarting his career without it being a remake of something, even if that was a nearly forgotten TV show?

I’m not against all adaptations. I often enjoy movie adaptations of favorite books. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some — I remember sneering at the idea of basing a movie on a theme park ride, but the Pirates of the Caribbean series was really fun (I’ve never been on the ride, so I don’t know how much it had to do with the movie. Was it yet another case of a movie that could have stood on its own without the tie-in and had little to do with the thing it was supposedly based on?). There have been cases of remakes that were better than the original when there’s a reason to remake it, like improved technology or a change in society. But I’m getting tired of the “Hey, you liked this thing, so here’s another version of it!” attitude when it crowds out everything else in the market.

movies

The Promise of the Premise

First, a bit of news: Audible has bought the audiobook rights for the first two Rydding Village books, and it looks like they’re planning to release in late January. It will depend on how well these do whether or not they do any other books.

Meanwhile, last weekend was a Despicable Me kind of weekend. The fourth movie was on Peacock, but I couldn’t remember anything about the third one, so I decided to watch that one first. In case you haven’t been bombarded by the product marketing from these movies, particularly the Minions, the gist of the series is that a supervillain who’s actually a decent guy deep down inside needs kids as part of his complicated evil scheme and adopts three girls from an orphanage, which ends up turning his life upside down so he’s no longer a villain. In the second movie, he meets a ninja-like super spy and gets married.

It turns out that the reason I couldn’t remember the third movie is that I hadn’t ever seen it. Nothing about it was familiar, and I didn’t get that, “Oh, yeah, this,” burst of realization that I usually get when I’m reading or watching something I don’t remember but that it turns out I have read or seen before. That movie is pretty forgettable, even if you have seen it. A week later, I can barely remember it. In that one, both Gru (our villain turned hero) and Lucy (his wife) lose their jobs in the Anti-Villain League after an operation goes wrong. When Gru hears from a twin brother he didn’t know he had (it’s a Parent Trap situation of each parent taking a twin, except for the part where they end up at the same summer camp), the family reunion seems like a good idea, except the brother is keen to learn how to be a supervillain from Gru, and Gru thinks he might be able to work with his brother to take down his enemy so he and Lucy can get their jobs back, but he doesn’t want his brother to know that he’s not really a supervillain anymore.

The thing that I like about these movies is the underlying sweetness. They’re about family bonds, whether by birth or adoption. Lucy is a good stepmom to Gru’s adopted daughters, not at all a wicked stepmother. She’s trying to figure things out because she’s not exactly the maternal type. Gru loves his family and is elated to be reunited with his brother. You expect the brother to be a rival, but it’s not a competition. But the execution of this plot is pretty blah. Even the Minions aren’t all that interesting or fun.

The fourth movie has a really fun premise: Gru and his family have to go into hiding after his nemesis escapes from prison and is bent on revenge, so they have to blend into a bland upscale suburb under fake identities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t use this premise at all, which is frustrating. I loved the idea of seeing this Eastern European-ish former supervillain and his quirky superspy wife, plus their eccentric kids and a few Minions, trying to blend in with posh suburbanites and their country club lifestyle. Talk about a culture clash!

In the Save the Cat screenwriting structure, the second quarter of the story is called “Fun and Games” or “The Promise of the Premise.” If you take the core premise of the story and list the things you expect to happen, this is when most of those things happen. You’re playing with the concept as the characters test the waters of the situation they’ve found themselves in. They usually cross some kind of threshold and enter a new situation at about a quarter of the way through the story, then things get really serious and make a turn at around the halfway point, so this part is about exploring the new situation. Most of the stuff in a movie trailer tends to come from this section of the movie, since it gives you an idea of what the movie is about without giving any real turning point spoilers.

It’s not exactly a huge mental exercise to come up with a list of things that can happen with Gru and his family in the suburbs, but they don’t really do any of it. Almost all of the situations they find themselves in come from the setup of their hiding being utterly incompetent. For instance, they give Lucy the cover job of being a high-end hairstylist — something she has no training or experience in. The big joke is that she screws up with her first client and has to flee when the client comes after her for revenge. That’s just bad planning, not a culture clash of a ninja-like superspy having to fit in with the country club suburban moms. I wanted to see her chaperoning a school field trip and having to use her skills to keep the kids in line and out of trouble but without getting caught doing something a normal mom shouldn’t be able to do. Or at a playdate with the youngest and fending off a bully or a loose dog on the playground.

They tell us that the oldest, a middle schooler, had a bad day at school, but we never see her at school. The problem with the youngest is that she doesn’t want to tell her fake name, since that’s a lie. Her dad just tells her she needs to lie without explaining why.

As for Gru himself, his main story isn’t about trying to blend in. It’s about the neighbor’s daughter being an aspiring supervillain who recognizes him and blackmails him into helping her with a heist. I do like the way her story turns out, but I still wanted something more for Gru, since a lot of his insecurity is whether someone like him really can be a good father. What happens if he’s in a place where the only thing he has going on is being a good father and keeping his family safe, but he can’t openly use any of his usual methods? The only culture clash moment is when his neighbor invites him to play tennis, and a Minion goes along and plays umpire, tilting the game in Gru’s favor. It’s funny, but it’s more of that hiding incompetence, as going out in public with a Minion is pretty much waving a giant “Here’s Gru!” flag.

The movie itself is actually okay and a lot of fun, but I found myself very frustrated by what it wasn’t. I’m surprised that with all the people in the movie industry who had to have been involved in creating it, no one said, “Hey, shouldn’t we be playing with the culture clash here?”

I don’t know what this weekend’s movie(s) will be. I’m not sure what I’m in the mood for.

fantasy, movies

Revisiting Stardust

Last weekend, I revisited the movie Stardust, which is one of my all-time favorites, as well as the ultimate example of that romantic fantasy road trip structure. I hadn’t watched it since I initially started developing that theory and used it to help map out the structure, so it was interesting to revisit.

First, to address a related issue: I’m aware of the disturbing allegations against the author of the book the movie was based on and don’t want to promote him. I’m not even sure I’d be able to read his books right now without being a bit uncomfortable. But I look at the movie as being its own entity. A movie is a collaborative effort involving hundreds of people. He didn’t write the screenplay, and the screenplay veers fairly significantly from the book in a number of ways. I’ve found that the things I like most in the movie aren’t in the book. The book doesn’t really fit the romantic fantasy road trip that well and is structured differently. So, I’m not letting the author of the book the movie is based on being an alleged creep ruin one of my favorite movies for me.

One thing I noticed was that the protagonist doesn’t meet the love interest/traveling companion until 28 minutes into the movie, which is approximately one-quarter of the way through. That’s pretty common in most of the movies that fit this trope, which is interesting, given that in a romance novel, you generally want the hero and heroine to meet as soon as possible, preferably in the first three chapters — if not the first chapter. These stories come closer to fitting the Hero’s Journey structure, in which the traveling companion/love interest is part of the “new world” the hero enters in the threshold crossing that comes when he takes on the quest. That usually is at about the 25 percent mark. It also fits the “Save the Cat” structure, in which the break into the second act and the meeting of the B-story (romance) character happens at the 25 percent mark, with the hero taking decisive action toward the goal and meeting the love interest at that point.

In this movie, we spend the first quarter of the movie with a bit of a prologue showing our hero’s origins, then we see the life he’s living and the fact that there’s something he wants that we as the audience can tell is not what he needs — he’s in love with a village girl whose only interest in him comes from her knowing she can manipulate him and get what she wants. We also get the setup of the big-picture plot in the magical world, with the king launching the ruby into space and declaring that the prince who finds it will win the crown. Then the ruby knocks a star out of the sky. Tristan finds his opportunity when he spots the falling star and swears to the girl that he’d go into the magical land on the other side of the wall to bring the star to her. His goal is born when she says if he brings her the star before her birthday, she’ll marry him — but his romantic rival is also planning to give her a ring, so if Tristan isn’t there with the star by then, she’ll marry the other guy (a young and unrecognizable Henry Cavill). Then we get the setup for the antagonist, with the witches planning to go after the fallen star, and we get Tristan learning about his history and getting the tools he’ll need to go to the magical land where the mother he’s never known lives.

The movie spends the next quarter on the phase I call “bickering,” as he and the fallen star, who turns out to be the woman Yvaine, travel together. She’s not at all keen on being presented as a gift, but he has a way to get her back home in the sky that he promises to give her if she’ll come with him as proof that he’s retrieved the fallen star. But a lot of this section is taken up by what the antagonists are doing, as the princes continue killing each other until they’re down to two and they both set out to find the ruby. Meanwhile, we see what one of the witches (an absolutely delicious Michelle Pfeiffer in a very different fantasy role from what she played in Ladyhawke) is up to in her quest for the star.

Which brings us to the midpoint, when one of the princes, Tristan, and Yvaine all show up in the trap set by the witch. This is the part I call “Attack,” and when Tristan and Yvaine escape together, we start to get the Bonding portion, where they start to get to know each other and find things they like about each other. In general, the bickering phase is when they’re focused on what they don’t like about each other, then surviving the attack together forces them to look at each other again, so they start to find things they like about each other. And there’s dancing. I’m not sure why there’s dancing at this point in so many stories. I had a friend who used to joke that the dancing in the Disney movies was a metaphor for sex, so she found it hilarious when Aurora says, “I don’t even know your name,” after the “Once Upon a Dream” dance in Sleeping Beauty. In the Hero’s Journey, this is a part called Seizing the Sword or Reward, which is often a bonding time. Dancing together requires trust and synchronization, so it’s a good visual shorthand for a growing bond if the characters can move as one.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I love this movie so much. I think it’s the combo of fantasy, romance, humor, and adventure. The main character has a solid growth arc. It’s a coming of age story — as the narrator tells us, it’s about how a boy becomes a man. There are secret identities and revelations. The villains get their comeuppance. People who’ve been separated are reunited. The cast is pretty astonishing. Even some of the minor roles are played by recognizable people, in some cases because they became famous later. Robert De Niro isn’t the sort of actor you expect to see in this kind of movie, especially not in that kind of role, but he seems to be having an absolute blast.

One fun thing about this viewing is getting to see something like Rydding Village. The village scenes at the beginning and end of the movie were filmed in the village that was the starting point for my mental model of Rydding. Once I started writing, I added, subtracted, rearranged, and changed elements, but my starting point was this village in the Cotswolds. I watched a lot of videos from people walking through this village to set the imagery in my mind, and it’s fun to see the village dressed for a different time period. Apparently, this village is often used for films, and years ago a film company paid for the village to get a central TV antenna on a nearby hill and underground cable from it to all the houses so there wouldn’t be any TV antennas in the town that they’d have to take down. Just about all they have to do to make it serve for anything from the 1600s through the Victorian era is dump dirt over the paved streets, change out the signs in shop windows, and add whatever set dressing they need for the story.

I have one personal connection to this movie. They based a lot of the look on the illustrations in the original illustrated version of the book, painted by Charles Vess. He was the artist guest of honor at the local science fiction convention back in Texas a bit more than ten years ago, and as the Mac expert on the convention staff, I helped him set up his new MacBook and get it ready for him to do his presentation. He gave me the chocolate from his guest gift basket, and I have a signed print of a painting he did for the convention. When I have a real office again, I’m going to get it framed to hang in there.

movies

Spoofing RomComs

Last weekend, I stumbled across a movie that looked like it might be fun because it was a spoof of romantic comedies, They Came Together. It’s basically giving romcoms the Airplane! treatment, and it was full of cast members I like, like Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Ed Helms and a bunch of other people you might recognize from NBC sitcoms like The Office, Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, plus some Saturday Night Live. I was curious to see what they did with this, since my whole Enchanted, Inc. series started as kind of spoofing chick lit/romcoms by adding magic, and then I did a more intense romcom spoof in book 7 of the series, Kiss and Spell, in which the characters were stuck in a magical romcom world in which they had to play out all the tropes.

The movie mostly mashes up You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally, with some Hallmark movie tropes thrown in and maybe some other things that I didn’t recognize. The gist of it is that a couple having dinner with friends tells the story of how they got together, saying that it’s just like one of those romantic comedy movies, and then we see the story play out — and it’s exactly like a romcom. She runs a cute little candy shop and he works for the big candy company that’s going to put her out of business. They hated each other when they first met but then when they run into each other in a bookstore they become friends, etc. Basically, all the romcom tropes play out.

I’m not entirely sure this movie works. I think part of the problem is that it doesn’t really interrogate the things it’s poking fun at, which means that it leaves a lot of potential on the table. For instance, there’s a sign at her candy store that all proceeds go to charity, and the only time we see her with a customer, she tells the customer the candy is free. So when she learns about the big corporation opening a candy superstore across the street and she visits her accountant to see how likely her business is to survive, I was expecting her accountant to look at her books and then point out that she might do better if she actually sold things and made a profit. I suspect that was more a dig at the Hallmark movies, where they never seem to actually sell anything in their bakeries/candy stores, rather than You’ve Got Mail, where we saw her ring up huge purchases, and I always want to point this out when the Hallmark heroines worry about getting driven out of business. Like, “Have you considered something wacky like charging for what you’re selling?”

It also doesn’t help that the movie doesn’t seem to be sure whether it’s going over the top with silliness or if it’s trying to be the spoof that’s still a good example of the thing it’s spoofing. I find spoofs work better if they’re still actually a good story under the silliness. For instance, Blazing Saddles has a decent underlying story even without all the wacky anachronisms and broad humor. You could make a serious western with that story of a black man sent to be sheriff of a racist town. The main characters are three-dimensional and interesting. In this movie, Paul Rudd mostly plays it straight, like he’s the leading man in a real romantic comedy. There’s even a scene that’s spoofing a typical emotional scene from this kind of movie in which he actually brought tears to my eyes. But Amy Poehler acts like she’s doing a Saturday Night Live sketch, playing basically a cartoon character who’s constantly winking at the audience. It’s like they’re in different movies even when they’re in scenes together. That makes it fail my romcom test of “do I want these characters to end up together?”

And while I’m nitpicking, it’s interesting that they’re genre savvy enough to say that their courtship was right out of a romcom, but during their courtship they don’t clue in to any of the things that are right out of a romcom.

There are a couple of things done late in the movie that are way over the top in a way that’s more uncomfortable than funny and seem entirely unnecessary, especially since these things don’t really go anywhere and pretty much ruin both main characters

I saw this one streaming on Peacock, and it’s amusing enough, but it gets pretty raunchy, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a first-date movie or something to watch with your parents. Now I need to watch Isn’t It Romantic, which is apparently also a romcom spoof. And I’ve found myself pondering how I’d do a romcom sendup, other than what I’ve already done.

movies

The Power of Story

A couple of weeks ago, I was feeling tired and stressed, so when I was looking for a movie to watch, I found myself turning to The Emperor’s New Groove, and I realized that it’s become my main comfort movie. I think I watch it at least twice a year. It’s short, sweet, and laugh-out-loud funny. But what makes it something I watch over and over again when I need to boost my mood? Since my life’s motto is “If it’s Worth Analyzing, It’s Worth Overanalyzing,” I put some thought into it.

For those not familiar with this movie, it’s an animated Disney movie that supposedly went through a really troubled production history and that flew under the radar to the point that I wasn’t aware it existed until I was babysitting for a friend and it was what the kid wanted to watch. It’s the story of a selfish, spoiled young Incan emperor who gets turned into a llama by his scheming advisor and has to rely on the peasant he’s planning to displace so he can build a water park for himself in order to get back to the palace and get turned back into a human. A buddy road trip story ensues.

One reason it’s a comfort movie is that it’s guaranteed to make me laugh. The humor is really densely layered, with a lot of subtle sight gags and sly references. No matter how many times I’ve watched it, I find some new little gem I never noticed before. There’s also fun in spotting and anticipating the running gags (“Wrong lever!”). I’m amused by the way they fit all the pop culture anachronisms into that setting. What would a diner look like in the ancient Andes? The whole movie is so funny and silly that by the end of it I’ve smiled and laughed enough that my mood actually changes.

But it’s also oddly profound, with one of the better redemption arcs I’ve seen. I guess it’s a spoiler to say that the emperor does get redeemed, but that’s pretty obvious for this kind of movie. I find that the transformation really works here because we see how hard it is for him to get over his selfishness and self-centeredness to gain empathy and realize that the world doesn’t have to revolve around him. The peasant (voiced by John Goodman) is a truly good person who is kinder to the emperor than the emperor deserves, but that sort of kindness is exactly what he needs. By the end of the movie, you believe the transformation really will work and last. The story is well structured to set it all up, with some full-circle callbacks so you can see how the character has learned and changed.

Meanwhile, the true villain gets a satisfying comeuppance and the slow-witted henchman figures out the difference between right and wrong. He’s never truly bad and messes up when he can’t go through with doing something wrong, but it takes him a while to come to the conclusion that working for the villain is a bad idea. On this latest viewing, I found myself thinking that I really need a Kronk, someone to cook me delicious food and do my bidding. (apparently, there’s a sequel about Kronk and a TV series, which I need to watch)

The good guys are truly good, honest people, and they don’t even try to harm the bad guys. The bad guys bring all their woes onto themselves. And yet it doesn’t feel like a black/white morality play, probably because the villain is humorously exaggerated and the good guy is just an honest working man, not any kind of great hero. He’s not trying to defeat a villain. He’s just trying to help someone who needs it and hoping that this help will change the emperor’s mind and spare his home.

The whole movie is like a warm hug, but with enough snark that it isn’t obnoxiously sappy. Now that I’ve realized it works as a comfort movie, I won’t have to scroll through the streaming service menus to decide what to watch when I’ve had a really stressful week and just want to laugh and feel good. I may need to get this one on DVD in case it ever gets removed from the streaming service or I decide to drop that service.

But thinking about this made me realize the power of story. This silly movie made for kids has a healing effect on me. It lightens my heart and makes me see the world in a more positive light. I can think of so many other stories, whether books, TV shows, or movies, that have a similar effect. They make me feel better about myself, make me want to be better, inspire me to create or dream. How many people have found and pursued their life’s calling because something in a story spoke to them and set them on that path? I’ve actually found that it’s the stories that might be deemed “fluff” that have had the biggest impact on me. It’s never the serious literary fiction that inspires me in a way that seeps into my real life. It’s the fantasy, the chick-lit, the animated Disney movies.

Considering this made me think about my work in a different way. I’ve always written to entertain, not necessarily inspire, but by entertaining the way I do, maybe I am a healer of sorts. I can make someone’s day better, comfort them, make them feel like a part of a community (even if it’s imaginary), inspire them to find whatever “magic” is within them, even if they’re utterly ordinary. Thinking this way about my work has been incredibly motivating. I’ll need to keep it in mind for those days when it’s hard to make myself open that document and start writing. I have to remember that someone out there needs this story, so I must write it.

movies

A New (to me) RomCom

Last weekend, I stumbled across a British romantic comedy on Peacock that I’d never heard of, Man Up. It has a really fun meet-cute premise, plus actual character growth arcs and one of the better “rom-com dashes” near the end that I’ve seen (if you’re going to throw in the cliche, you may as well have fun with it).

A terminally single woman gets mistaken by a man for his blind date at a train station. She’s getting tired of her sister nagging her to put herself out there and take chances to find love, so she impulsively decides to let him go on thinking she’s his date and goes off with him for a night out. But when she finds that she actually likes him she has to worry about how and when to own up to what she did and how he’ll react to the truth. And it turns out that he has his own hidden agenda behind this date as he’s recovering from a painful divorce.

My scoring system for romcoms is that they have to be both funny and romantic. I want to smile much of the way through and laugh at least one or two times, and I want to want the couple to get together rather than wanting to tell them to run. This one actually works on both counts. There are some cringeworthy moments where you feel secondhand embarrassment, but those are also really funny. Mixed in among the wackiness is some genuine emotional depth. There are times when you want to slap both characters, but then there are also moments when you want to hug them, and the ending is really satisfying because you feel like they’ve both learned something valuable and changed.

Lake Bell and Simon Pegg are the leads, and they seem to have tapped the National Theatre for the deep-bench supporting cast full of noted British actors. Even the room service waiter who appears in one scene is a recognizable actor. I’d say the tone is similar to Bridget Jones’s Diary, in that we have a somewhat hapless single woman in London who gets into scrapes, and it can get somewhat raunchy in moments. For the most part, it’s pretty grounded, like something you could believe would happen (apparently, the inspiration behind the script is that the writer was mistaken for someone’s blind date, and she wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t immediately corrected the guy), but then there are a few events that go over the top in a rather delightful way.

As I said, I’d never heard of this film, but it was exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wishing existed that they don’t make nearly enough of. It’s about ten years old, so would have come out during a time when I could walk to a movie theater and went to movies frequently. I don’t know if it got a wide release in the US or if it was just badly marketed. It’s on Peacock now, so if you’re craving a romcom, this one might be fun. It got me started playing with romcom ideas, like how could you take that premise and add magic to it?

fantasy, movies

The Journey’s Beginning

Last weekend, I decided to go back to where it all began and rewatch the movie that got me started thinking about that whole romantic fantasy road trip subgenre, which made me realize it was a thing that I like, which made me realize that a story idea I had long ago actually could fit into that, which led me to replot it and try to write it. I’m currently rewriting it (I’ve been working on it off and on, but I’ve also written seven other books and a number of novellas since then), so since I found this movie on Hoopla, I thought I’d rewatch.

Back in early 2021, I started watching a fantasy movie called The Crown and the Dragon on Amazon, and very early in the movie I knew that this was a kind of movie I’d like, so I stopped it to go make popcorn before settling down to properly watch it. It perfectly fit what I later identified as the romantic fantasy road trip story structure. I’d never seen it before, but I knew each major beat that would happen — not really predicting the outcome, just knowing where the turning points would be. It was interesting rewatching it after doing so much thinking about this topic.

This movie is just barely fantasy cheese. It looks gorgeous. There’s not a lot of info on IMDB, but based on the names of most of the production crew, I’m guessing it was filmed in Ireland. The cinematography is excellent, the score is good, and the acting is far above most fantasy cheese. The actors are neither wooden nor overdoing it. Most of them don’t have a lot of film credits, so I’m guessing they mostly cast Irish stage actors. The two things that drag the movie down are the effects and the plot. Any time a dragon shows up, it’s painful. It’s like someone taped a stick figure drawing of a dragon to the film, or else like a really bad Photoshop job where you can tell that an image has just been pasted into another image, without correcting the light angles, shadows, etc. Then there’s the plot.

Not that the plot is necessarily bad. There aren’t big holes or logical leaps. It just seems to be missing a lot of context. I’ve watched this movie twice, and I still don’t have a good sense of what’s actually going on. The heroine is on a mission to bring a particular item to a castle in time for a king to be crowned, while the bad guys are trying to stop this, and yet we never see the king and we don’t really know why he needs this item. The item’s actually needed for fighting a dragon. We don’t know who the bad guys are or what they’re trying to do. I know fantasy writers are encouraged to leave some of their worldbuilding off the page because you don’t have to explain everything, but you do need to leave the stuff that’s essential for understanding the story. This movie feels like it was based on an 800-page novel that had to be cut down to a two-hour movie, and then the movie had to be cut to under 90 minutes so it could be on TV. Given that this movie is just under 90 minutes and has transitions that seem like they were created to stick in commercial breaks, I wonder if maybe it did start as a longer movie, then the only distribution it got was on TV, so they ended up cutting the stuff that explained the plot.

But it really does fit my pattern. We have the hero and heroine striking the bargain for him to help her get to the castle. There’s bickering along the way, until they’re attacked by the bad guys and barely escape together, which leads to a bonding scene and later to dancing. At their destination, he’s ready to leave her to her destiny, but then he returns to her and helps her achieve her destiny.

The romance is satisfying (though a bit more development in the middle might have helped). The fantasy elements had potential if they’d been explained a bit more. They needed much better dragon effects because that was 1980s-level bad, even though this movie was from the 21st century. There are some continuity issues (that may result from things being cut), like the heroine falling in mud in one scene and the same clothes being pristine in the next scene, or the hero having nothing but the clothes he’s wearing, and then in the next scene, with no explanation he has on different clothes and a sword. Or the time he drops the sword and dives into the ocean to escape a bad guy in one scene, but then in the next scene he has the sword again after he’s out of the water. All in all I’d say the impression is good fantasy cheese that’s a bit frustrating because with a bit of work and a slightly bigger budget it could have been a good romantasy movie. The people making the movie did a good enough job with what must have been a tiny budget that they should have been able to get the chance to go on and do bigger and better things. I remain annoyed by the scarcity of good, big-budget fantasy films. There’s clearly an audience, but aside from the Lord of the Rings movies, it’s like the studios have no clue what to do with them. They don’t know how to pick projects, and they utterly fail in promoting them, which then creates the self-fulfilling prophecy that fantasy movies don’t do well enough to justify the budgets they require.

movies

Good Fantasy Cheese

I actually managed to watch a whole movie last weekend, something I hadn’t done since the move. It was one I thought might fit my fantasy road trip pattern, something in the “fantasy cheese” category that I originally saw on a Saturday night on the Sci Fi Channel. It’s currently streaming on most of the ad-supported services, but it’s also on the hoopla library system, without ads.

The movie is George and the Dragon, but it showed on Sci Fi as something like Dragonsword, and it’s a rather odd movie. To paraphrase a line from a book I had as a kid, when it’s good, it’s very, very good, but when it’s bad, it’s horrible.

The story is essentially a spin on the St. George and the dragon myth. War-weary Sir George returns home after the Crusades and just wants a plot of land where he can live a quiet life. He goes to the king to ask permission to buy some land and learns that the king’s daughter has disappeared on the eve of her wedding. The king says he’ll give George the land if he can find the princess. But the princess has other plans involving what may be the last dragon egg, and George isn’t a fan of dragons after one maimed his father (though he’s not entirely sure he believes his father about that).

When compared to the other fantasy cheese movies on Sci Fi, this one is a cut above. When compared to “real” movies, it’s on the B-movie end of things. It’s very tongue-in-cheek in a lot of places. I got the feeling the filmmakers were trying to do something along the lines of The Princess Bride, with some self-aware humor. The fact that the closing credits are bloopers and outtakes shows that the movie wasn’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, and for the most part the humor works, though there are some odd bits like a skateboard chase scene involving a priest (that I would suspect could be mapped onto the similar scenes in Back to the Future). Yes, a medieval skateboard chase. The priest lands on a little wagon and the sides fall off, turning it into a skateboard. This has very little to do with the overall plot, but it sets the tone.

The casting is mostly better than the usual fantasy cheese movie, in that most of the actors are moderately (even well) known and most of them are quite good. We have James Purefoy and Piper Perabo as the leads, with people like Simon Callow and Joan Plowright in small roles, Val Kilmer in an uncredited cameo, and Michael Clarke Duncan and Patrick Swayze in supporting roles.

Swayze is by far the weakest link and the biggest “why?” in the movie. Not that he’s bad if you take his performance out of context. He does a good job portraying his character and seems to be having a lot of fun. The problem is that the movie is set in medieval England, and Swayze sounds like he’s from Texas. I’m sure it would have been even worse if he’d attempted an English accent, but this is worse than Kevin Costner’s attempt at Robin Hood. True, the people in this time period (and more on that later) would have been speaking either Norman French or Old English and we have to assume that everyone is being translated into modern English, but it would help if everyone who’s from the same place sounds like they’re at least from the same continent. (Duncan and Kilmer also use American accents, but they’re not supposed to be English, so it’s not so grating.) Piper Perabo is American (and also a Texan), but she does a decent English accent (at least, to my American ears).

As for the time period, I’m not sure what was going on with that. George is returning from the Crusades (in an opening that’s basically a copy of Prince of Thieves), which would put this after the Norman Conquest, but we’re dealing with a King Edgar, who’s not on the list of Norman kings, and who has his court in the north of England, where the main threat is from the Picts, which would put this during the Saxon era and before the Saxon kingdoms consolidated — long before the Crusades. This is supposedly England in our world, but at times they treat it like secondary world fantasy. The costumes are generic medieval-ish. Some of the men’s costumes are pretty good, aside from the poor kid who goes through the movie with a bath mat tied around his shoulder. The princess wears a dress that’s obviously polyester stretch velvet. She looks like she’s wearing a princess costume from Spirit Halloween.

But George is a wonderful character, going through all this stuff when he really just wants a quiet life, and Purefoy manages to find a nice balance in making him world-weary without being a downer. The duke the princess is supposed to marry keeps trying to make him jealous about marrying the princess, and George doesn’t care. He just wants his land. He and the princess have good chemistry. She’s very much the modern “spunky princess,” but I think it works here. As long as the film focuses on George, the princess, the royal advisor, and the kid who’s helping them, the film is a lot of fun. There are some excellent fight scenes that are quite inventive, especially one where there are multiple factions and shifting allegiances, with people going from fighting each other to fighting the common enemy and then back to fighting each other. In these parts, Patrick Swayze is even good, probably because he’s not talking.

This is very much a turn-off-your-brain popcorn flick, but it can be fun if you’re looking for a fantasy film you haven’t seen dozens of times (why are there so few good fantasy films?). It’s better than some of the cheaply made movies on the free streaming services and the lead characters are pretty likable. It has a nice ending that leaves you with a smile.

It turned out not to really fit my fantasy road trip pattern because the road trip is a very small part of the movie. It’s the good part, which may be why that was all I remembered of it. It is kind of a fantasy rom-com, though the hero and heroine don’t meet until about halfway through the movie.

movies, TV

Bi-Starial

Earlier in the year, the New York Times crossword puzzle had a clue that was “the better of two science fiction franchises,” and it worked whether you answered Star Wars or Star Trek (there were two possible answers for the crossing words). I actually had to waver between them and ended up doing the thing where you put both letters in the square, showing it could be either. I’ve never really understood the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars thing because I’m very much on team Why Not Both. I guess you could say I’m bi-starial. I have a long history with both franchises and my obsession has swayed back and forth, depending on what’s more prominent in my life at any given time.

My mom says she used to nurse me as an infant while watching the original run of the original Star Trek (yes, I’m old), so I guess you could say I’ve been a fan since birth. I have vague memories of seeing episodes as a child, and I watched the animated series. But then I saw the original Star Wars when I was nine and became utterly obsessed with that for about six years.

The Star Wars obsession faded somewhat after Return of the Jedi, I think in part because the story seemed to be over and there was no more speculation about what would happen next to keep me occupied. Also, none of my friends seemed to be into it (I later found there were a lot more closet geeks in my hometown than I realized, but we were all keeping quiet about it and it took us thirty years to find each other), which gave me nothing to keep the obsession going. But then one of the local TV stations started showing Star Trek reruns every afternoon, right around the time we got home from school (my parents worked at the school, so we all commuted together), so it became a family routine to get home from school and watch Star Trek. We’d gone to see the movies, and I knew enough about it to know who the characters were, but I hadn’t really watched the series in any depth, and when I did, that obsession hit. I found some of the novels at the used bookstore and finally appreciated the stories in the movies.

The Star Trek obsession was reinforced when I got to college and the gang on my dorm floor gathered every afternoon to watch before trooping down to the cafeteria for dinner. I was the journalism major surrounded mostly by engineering and computer science majors, so Star Trek was one of the things I could talk to them about and sound reasonably intelligent. The Next Generation came on while I was in college, and we also gathered to watch that, usually after dinner on Saturday nights. I got really into that show and even bought the novels as they came out. We did watch the Star Wars trilogy on our movie nights every so often, so the Star Wars thing was still lurking. It just wasn’t top of mind during those years.

There was a slight resurgence in the Star Wars interest after I graduated from college when the original Timothy Zahn novels came out, actually continuing the story, but I didn’t much like most of the Expanded Universe books that came afterward. Then Deep Space Nine came on, and I was back to Star Trek obsession. I started watching both Voyager and Enterprise, but I didn’t finish those series (I did come back to watch the Voyager finale, though). The Star Wars Special Editions came out during this phase, and I did go see those with friends from work, but The Phantom Menace didn’t revive the Star Wars obsession too much. It was Attack of the Clones that did that, and that came after Deep Space Nine ended, so there was no Star Trek at the time. This was the first new Star Wars movie to come out when I was in a place in my life when I could see it as often as I wanted to, and I actually wanted to, so one of my friends and I went to see it three times that summer. Revenge of the Sith is oddly paired with Enchanted, Inc. in my mind, since they came out at around the same time. Revenge of the Sith came out the week before Enchanted, Inc., and then I saw it a second time the day I had my author photo taken (I saw the movie in the same dress that I’m wearing in that photo).

There was then a dry spell in between, when there wasn’t any new Star Wars or Star Trek. I mostly drifted to Doctor Who during that time. The Clone Wars animated series was on, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I picked up on Rebels about halfway through its run. Then the Star Wars firehose opened and we started getting tons of new Star Wars stuff with all the new movies, and then the various TV series. I’m back to being that nine-year-old kid who’s utterly obsessed, but there’s a lot more material to immerse myself in. I don’t have to just reread the novelization of one movie while listening to the soundtrack in order to get my fix.

At the same time, though, they’ve also started giving us a lot of new Star Trek. I didn’t have Paramount+ so I hadn’t seen much of it. I saw part of the first episode of Discovery when they showed it on CBS during the pandemic, but that station wasn’t coming in well for me and I gave up after getting mostly glitches. The one I got into was Strange New Worlds, when they had the first season on Prime Video as one of their “free this month” previews.

That series follows the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike (the one in the wheelchair-like device in the episode that was repurposed from the unaired original pilot), with a very young Spock and Uhura. A young Kirk shows up from time to time. I feel like this series captures the vibe of the original series, but in an updated way. They even manage to get the aesthetic so that it feels like it could be from the same era, but somehow without it looking too dated (the way they manage to get Andor to look like the original Star Wars without it screaming that it’s from the 70s). My brother gave me Paramount+ at Christmas, so I’ve been able to catch up on watching the rest of that series.

I’ve also picked up on Lower Decks, an animated Star Trek series that’s both a good Trek show and a spoof of Star Trek. It follows the ensigns who don’t work on the bridge, who do the grunt work, on a ship that isn’t the flagship of the fleet. They’re on the “second contact” ship, the one that comes in to handle the paperwork after a ship like the Enterprise has made first contact. It’s set after The Next Generation (Riker is captain of his own ship, finally). The show pokes gentle fun at all the Trek tropes by showing them from the point of view of the crewmembers who are just trying to do their jobs. For added fun, there was an episode of Strange New Worlds that had the characters from this animated series be transported back in time to the Enterprise and converted to live action (using the same actors who voice the roles). The episodes for this series are only a half-hour long, so this is what I watch when I don’t have time for anything longer.

I started watching Picard with my brother at Thanksgiving, but I haven’t had a chance to finish it. I also want to revisit the original series, since I know I missed a lot of connections and references on Strange New Worlds.

I feel like we’re in a golden age of Stuff Starting With “Star.” I could watch nothing but Star Wars and Star Trek and fill all my entertainment hours. With there being so much of both, I’m kind of teetering between the Wars and Trek obsessions. I may be leaning closer to the Wars, just because I think I’m more emotionally engaged with that universe and it’s essentially fantasy in a science fiction setting, which is more my jam, but I don’t feel like it has to be a competition. It’s more like “Yay, lots of fun stuff!”

movies

Re-Frozen

My second weekend movie was Frozen II, which I was revisiting after rewatching the first one. I realized why it feels more like a fantasy movie to me than a Disney princess movie: It’s basically a Norwegian fantasy film. Not that I have a large sample size, but it’s a lot like the ones I’ve seen. Part of it is the scenery and costumes and the use of Norwegian folklore elements. The stone giants look a lot like the mountain trolls in the Norwegian movies (the ones we see when they play “Hall of the Mountain King” on the soundtrack). Plus, the movies all seem to have the ordinary guy who ends up on an adventure with a spunky princess. All it’s missing are the Denmark vs. Norway jokes.

Structurally, they do something interesting, with a kind of protagonist hand-off. Elsa gets to be the protagonist in this one. She gets the “I Want” song with “Into the Unknown,” and then has the story goal of setting things right with the elemental spirits. But late in the movie, she essentially passes the baton to her sister to do the final push, so we’re back to Anna having to do the hard part to set things right, but then Elsa gets to step in for the very final thing to save the day.

I think one reason this one feels more like a fantasy movie than a Disney princess movie is the way the romance is handled. Kristoff’s proposal plans are part of the story, but the story isn’t really a romance. The first one fit my romantic journey structure, but this one doesn’t, and Anna and Kristoff are separated for much of the movie. The story is mostly about the journeys Elsa and Anna are on.

The autumn setting may be one reason I like the sequel better than the original, but I also get emotional at the part where Anna essentially loses all hope but makes herself keep going and “do the next right thing.” Plus, Kristoff gets a song (It was insane in the first one to cast Jonathan Groff and have him just sing a couple of lines, most of them in a funny reindeer voice). On the whole, though, I think the music is a bit weaker in the sequel. The songs are okay in context, but there’s nothing that really stands alone. The only musical bit I remember is the line “into the unknooooown.”

I don’t know what I’m going to watch this weekend. I’m not sure what I’m in the mood for. I’ll need to relax after a busy day of packing.

I found out this morning that I’m moving in a week and a half (yikes!), so posting will be somewhat on hiatus for a week or so. I’d been thinking about moving, but then it all fell together really fast when I found and got an apartment, and now the movers are available earlier than I expected. I’m going to be frantically sorting and packing, and then I’ll be in transit, and I don’t know how long it will be until I get in the new place and have Internet access again.