Archive for movies

movies, TV

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.

movies, TV, Books, writing

Shipper Bait

Happy Valentine’s Day! I should probably talk about something romantic, but I’ve come to realize that both as a reader/audience member and as a writer, I’m more of a shipper than a romantic.

For those who aren’t up on Internet talk, “shipper” is short for “relationshipper.” As far as I can tell, the term originated in the X-Files Usenet newsgroup back in the mid-90s. If you wanted Mulder and Scully to get together, you were a relationshipper, or shipper. (The other faction was the No-Romos, who wanted them to stay friends and partners but not get involved romantically.) From there, the term spread. “Shipping” is wanting two characters to get together, looking for evidence that they might be developing feelings, imagining how they might get together and what it would look like if they did, sometimes even writing fan fiction about the characters being romantically involved. If you say you ship a couple, you want them to be romantically involved.

While some shippers really do want to see the couple get together, the real fun is in looking at the subtext and trying to figure out where things might be going. I think this is why I prefer to get my love stories in genres other than romance (and now romantasy). I have the most fun trying to read between the lines and figure out what the characters feel based on their actions. Romance novels are a lot more up front about the attraction. Even if the characters are denying it, you know where it’s going and it’s still pretty obvious. I think a lot of the “Moonlighting Curse” is due to this. Once the couple is together, you know where things stand and there’s no more room for imagination. (Though there were other things going on with Moonlighting, so it wasn’t just them getting together that killed the show.) This also makes it a lot harder to do in a book than in movies/TV. When you can get inside the characters’ heads, there’s little guessing, unless they’re utterly oblivious.

As an example, I’ve always said, not entirely jokingly, that Aliens is one of my favorite romantic movies. It’s fun to analyze the way Ripley and Hicks interact and see the way he looks at her and figure that they were falling for each other, and later they’d get together (the third movie Does Not Exist, so there). I was vindicated in this when I heard Michael Biehn say on a convention panel that he played the whole movie as though Hicks had a huge crush on Ripley.

I like to say that I write shipper bait instead of romance because the romantic relationships in my books tend to be fairly subtle and leave the impression of there being a lot more romance than there is because there’s so much material for the reader’s imagination. I’ve even had a book that didn’t have a kiss in it rejected by a fantasy publisher with the recommendation to send it to a romance publisher because it was too much of a romance.

I’ve been trying to think of my favorite fictional romances, or at least some that I think were handled well. I’ve got more from movies and TV than from books. Connie Willis probably does my favorite book romances, though she writes science fiction. Ned and Verity’s relationship in To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite lovely and has a swoonworthy conclusion. There’s also something pretty epic in the Blackout/All Clear duology that involves time travel and an outcome worth cheering out loud for. Lately, she’s been writing all-out science fiction romcoms, and they have just the right mix of romance and action. You want the couple to get together, but it’s not super obvious where things are going.

I think Jim and Pam’s relationship on The Office worked pretty well (aside from some iffy stuff in the final season). It helped there that the mockumentary format meant that we only saw what the camera crews were there to see, so even when they started dating it wasn’t entirely obvious what their status was and there was still room to guess and imagine.

Possibly my favorite TV romance was Nathan and Audrey on Haven, which had all kinds of supernatural stuff going on, plus one of my favorite paranormal tropes, the “in another life” thing in which the same people keep running into each other in different timelines, sometimes not knowing each other, but always falling in love when they meet.

Shipping isn’t limited to couples that actually do end up getting together or who are on that trajectory. I’ve even seen people ship characters from different fictional universes. It’s really common to ship non-canon relationships, sort of an amusing what if. My personal favorite there is that I figure things would have gone very differently for the galaxy if Obi Wan had ever turned to Padme and belted, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.” Seriously, an Obi Wan who looked like Ewan McGregor was right there, and she went for the whiny kid? I’ve seen some unhinged fan theories that this is what happened (well, maybe without him acting out Moulin Rouge), and Obi Wan was Luke and Leia’s real father. Anakin does get really jealous of Obi Wan having anything to do with her toward the end.

Somewhat closer to possibility is Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One. That lost opportunity is even sadder after the Andor series, which makes it look even more like she’s just the person he always needed, and they found each other just a bit too late. There are some pretty loaded looks they exchange. In my mental happy place, the Enterprise flies by and beams them out right before things go boom.

There’s a lot more room for romance in fantasy now that romantasy is the hot thing in the market, but I’m not sure I write enough outright romance for that. My shipper bait is too much for fantasy but not enough for romantasy.

fantasy, movies

Fantasy vs. History

Last summer, I ran across a video about how the aesthetic of “medieval” fantasy is actually more early modern, from the 1600s up through the Victorian era (with pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic revival). The usual adventurer outfit with the high, cuffed boots and long coat is mid 1600s, as is the typical Renaissance festival wench outfit. The fantasy tavern is a 1600s-1700s coaching inn, etc. I posted about it then. Ever since then I’ve been looking at fantasy movies in a different way, and I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the video made it sound. The medieval fantasy movies I’ve been watching lately are pretty medieval. I’m no expert. I’ve just done some research on the topic and I read a lot of expert commentaries about historical things in movies, but I have a general sense for what fits into each period.

The Princess Bride is mostly pretty true to a medieval period, with some exceptions. Westley does have a bit of Leading Character Costume Syndrome, in which the main character wears less historic, more “normal”-looking clothes. He’s a bit closer to 1700s, with the slimmer breeches and loose shirt. He’s just missing the long waistcoat and frock coat. Inigo is similar, though he has the waistcoat but is missing the coat. Vizzini’s outfit is kind of Renaissance, as are some of Buttercup’s princess dresses, and Buttercup’s red dress is hard to place (per Frock Flicks, it’s a decent 15th century dress). Otherwise, the look is actually pretty medieval for most of the characters and the settlement outside the castle. There’s even an open hearth in the castle’s hall, and the female extras have their hair covered and are wearing wimples.

Ladyhawke also has some Leading Character Costume Syndrome, with Navarre and Isabeau wearing more fantasy-type clothes rather than anything true to any period (her dress at the end looks rather 1980s), but everything else in that movie is at least aiming at medieval rather than early modern (though they’re apparently not accurately medieval).

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is pure fantasy. I can’t identify any particular period they’re trying to hit. There are bits and pieces of things thrown into a blender. And that’s okay. This is a fantasy world, so they may as well make up their own thing. The costumes for The Huntsman: Winter’s War are also more fantasy than historical, but the dwarf women do seem to be in the Renaissance festival type outfits, so 1600s. The rest are a lot of leather “adventurer” looks that don’t belong to any particular period. I think the original thesis of that video that started this line of thought was more about people thinking they were doing medieval but missing it by several hundred years.

The Lord of the Rings movies do something interesting, with each culture being from a different time period. The hobbits are pretty much 1700s with the style of clothing. They’ve got the long waistcoats and frock coats. They also have cast-iron stoves and fireplaces. Then we get to the elves, which are basically pre-Raphaelite meets Gothic Revival, so they’re medieval through the lens of the Victorians. Then we get to Rohan, which is essentially Land Vikings. Their clothes and general style are a mix of Viking and various eras of medieval, except for the pants the men wear (men’s pants in fantasy movies are almost never anything close to period, since they aren’t wearing hose, they don’t do the short balloon-type pants of the late 1500s-early 1600s or the big, baggy pants of the 1600s, and they don’t have the tight front/saggy butts of the 1700s-early 1800s. Men’s pants throughout history are pretty weird to modern eyes. I’ll admit that even in my mental costuming for my books, I go with more modern pants because it’s my fantasy world and they can look the way I want them to). We get the open hearth in the hall, too.

I guess that makes the elves most advanced, since they’re Victorian (cosplaying as medieval), and then the hobbits are more advanced than the men if the hobbits have iron stoves and the men still have open hearths.

I’m sure for film, one reason you get period attire rather than going pure fantasy is that they may rent costumes for the background characters instead of making up their own thing. I didn’t pay too much attention to what the people in crowd scenes were wearing in Honor Among Thieves to see if they were likely in rented costumes and, if so, if they were from a particular period. But I would guess that some of the costumes for The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke were rented or possibly from the BBC costume stores. It would be cheaper to rent a lot of costumes designed for costume dramas for the extras than to design fantasy costumes, and that’s going to give you something reasonably authentic for a period. The main actors get costumes made for them, so they’re more likely to go “fantasy” rather than being period, for various reasons, including the actors wanting to have a certain image. A macho movie star may refuse to wear hose or those balloon shorts with hose. Female movie stars are likely to want to either look sexy (and thus flowing hair rather than pinned up under a cap or veil) or be a Strong Female Character in leather pants, regardless of historical accuracy.

fantasy, movies

Cursed Romance

Last weekend I got around to the previous weekend’s planned movie viewing, with some fantasy from the 1980s.

First up, I tried watching The Dark Crystal but didn’t make it very far into it because it hit some serious uncanny valley stuff for me with the hero, who at times was very puppet-like but then was a bit too human for comfort. I also couldn’t follow all the story that was infodumped by a narrator at the beginning. So I gave up and ended up watching the US figure skating national competition.

Then on Saturday night, it was Ladyhawke. I have really mixed feelings about that movie. On the one hand, I love it, but on the other, it’s pretty seriously flawed.

In case you’re not up on 80s fantasy, this is the story about a young thief (a rather miscast Matthew Broderick, who half the time sounds like he’s doing Ferris Bueller—before he was Ferris Bueller—and half the time sounds like he’s trying to do a fantasy European-ish accent), who escapes from an evil bishop’s prison, then is rescued from recapture by a mysterious knight (Rutger Hauer) who wants his help getting back into the bishop’s citadel so he can kill the bishop. It turns out that the bishop used dark magic to curse the knight and his love (Michelle Pfeiffer) so that the knight is human by day and the woman a hawk, then the knight is a wolf by night while the woman is human. They’re always together, but also always apart. Then the priest who unintentionally betrayed them finds a way to break the curse, but the knight can’t bring himself to trust him. Can the young thief scheme to help his friends?

The main flaw is the score, which doesn’t fit at all. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put an electronic disco-style score on a fantasy movie needs counseling. There are moments in the movie that have a lovely traditional soundtrack, and they really work well. There’s a part when the hawk is flying over the water and the music is gorgeous, perfect for the scene. Then there’s another moment when the lady is next to the wolf when the transition happens, and for a split second they can almost see each other. It starts with the disco score, but then the synth pulls out and it becomes more traditional movie music, which works so much better. You can hear the orchestral line that should be there in the disco stuff, so it’s like we’re getting the disco remix of the real score. It’s mostly in the action scenes (and sometimes goes off into wacky cartoon-style music for a chase scene that should be tense), and it throws me right out of the movie every time.

Another issue is the fact that the difference between day and night is extremely important to the plot, but it’s hard to tell the difference because it looks like they did “day for night” filming using blue filters to make it look like night, but half the time the woman is human, it practically looks like broad daylight. They’ve gone overboard in making things dark these days, so you can’t see what’s going on, but there has to be a middle ground, where you can see what’s happening but you can also tell that it’s night.

As much as they like remaking things these days, I wouldn’t mind a remake of this one. The story is quite good, but this isn’t such a perfect movie that it would be blasphemy to make a new version (like, say, The Princess Bride). I was pondering what would need to be changed other than the score and the night filming, and maybe some of the casting (Matthew Broderick was the big name in the cast at the time, but he’s also kind of a weak link because he’s just a bit too extra. Even when I was a teenager seeing this before Ferris Bueller existed, he made me cringe). Not that this cast is bad, but the accent inconsistency is weird. The main characters speak with (mostly, in Broderick’s case) American accents, including Rutger Hauer, who only occasionally has a slight inflection that suggests this isn’t his native language. Everyone else with a speaking role (which isn’t a lot—they must have been careful to keep the speaking parts to a minimum) has a British accent. But they’re all from the same place. I like that they didn’t try to show the transition between animal and human forms with any kind of special effects. They just used editing and framing the shots, and I wouldn’t want them to try to morph using CGI now.

I think if I were given the assignment to update it, I’d make the thief a girl and create an unrequited love triangle, not for the romance, but for the moral dilemma. If it’s a girl who gets rescued by a handsome knight, she might develop a crush on him before she learns that the hawk that travels with him is the woman he loves. Then when they learn there’s a way to break the curse and the knight rejects it, wanting to go through with his plan to kill the bishop (which will result in the curse being permanent), the thief would have to decide whether to do what the knight wants, thus making him happy and essentially getting him for herself, or to go behind his back to help break the curse and thus make him angry if it fails and lose all hope of being with him if it succeeds.

Then I started trying to think of a way to file the serial numbers off it and write that story. I could make the way to break the curse better and more of a dilemma (in the movie, breaking the curse involves being in the same place as they’d be to kill the bishop, so I don’t see why they didn’t try for the breaking, then have killing the bishop as plan B or a follow-up. I’d make it a true either/or where having both would be impossible). The trick is coming up with a “always together, forever apart” curse that’s not obviously a ripoff of Ladyhawke.

I’m actually writing a similar triangle now, with a woman traveling with a man who’s on a mission to save a different woman, and as she falls for him, she’s torn between helping him save the woman he loves and holding back to maybe win him for herself, but she never meets the other woman and he’s never been involved with that woman. It’s been a crush from afar on his part and he’s hoping this heroism will help him win her. It’s not like Ladyhawke, where the thief becomes friends with both and passes messages between them and they were in an established relationship before they were cursed to keep them apart. Mine is a bit more like Stardust but with the woman he’s trying to win actually being in danger. He’s not just doing this to win her.

The trick with the more Ladyhawke situation would be resolving the triangle. If the thief is the viewpoint character, then we’d be pulling for her to win the knight. It would be disappointing to go through the whole thing with her sacrificing her own happiness for the man she loves, only to be left aside as he goes back to his love, but he looks like a jerk if he ditches the woman he was cursed for because of a girl he just met. The whole idea of Ladyhawke is that these were people and animals who mated for life but were kept apart, so they were doomed to be alone. You’d have to make the thief realize it was just a crush and she wants them to be together. Maybe she finds a more suitable love interest along the way.

Actually, if they could digitally make night more night-like and replace the score, they wouldn’t have to remake Ladyhawke. I think it would hold up pretty well with different music. Other than that, it doesn’t scream “80s!” too badly. They did a decent job of making it a fantasy world that didn’t look obviously made in the 80s.

With the end of January approaching, I’m trying to decide what my next movie theme should be. I’m not really in the mood for rom-coms or romances for Valentine’s Day. I’ve been thinking of doing a big Star Wars rewatch to build up to Andor season 2, which would include rewatching Clone Wars and Rebels, so I’d need to start with the prequel movies, then it might take a month or two to get through all the animated stuff that comes in between. Or I could extend fantasy month. I haven’t seen the extended editions of the Hobbit movies, but those are already so bloated. Are they like the LOTR extended editions, where the extra stuff is all the character development that makes things make more sense, or is it just more swarms of orcs?

fantasy, movies

Barbarian Fantasy

I ended up changing my weekend movie-watching plans. I didn’t get around to a movie on Friday night because I spent the day out and about instead of working (taking advantage of a nice day before the next deep freeze hit) so I had to catch up on work in the evening. Then on Saturday I’d noticed while looking up 80s fantasy movies that Conan the Barbarian was leaving Peacock soon, so I watched that.

I could have sworn I’d seen it. It was the kind of thing they showed during movie nights in the dorm big-screen TV lounge or that my group of friends watched either in the study lounge on our floor or in someone’s room. I can quote lines from it. And yet it was utterly unfamiliar. I didn’t recognize most of the characters, had no idea what would happen, didn’t know the plot. Usually if I saw something once decades ago, it starts to come back to me when I watch it again. This was all new to me.

And I liked it more than I expected to. I haven’t generally been a big fan of the barbarian-style sword and sorcery fantasy, and I thought this would basically be big-budget Fantasy Cheese. But it was at least a bit deeper than that, with stronger characters and a more coherent plot. It was surprisingly enlightened, given the era in which it was made. Yeah, there were a lot of topless women, but the woman who got dialogue was a strong character without fitting the Strong Female Character trope (they didn’t just put a sword in a woman’s hand and declare that this made her strong, and she wasn’t Rambo in drag). The romantic relationship is relatively non-toxic, based on mutual respect and trust. The cast is rather diverse, especially for that era. Aside from a few special effects and the ages of the cast members (or the fact that they’re alive, RIP James Earl Jones), this could have been a movie made today, and you can’t say that for a lot of 80s fantasy movies.

I think it helped that they were very restrained in the dialogue and let the action tell the story. I didn’t do a count of lines, but it seemed like James Earl Jones’s character had the most lines, even with much less screen time, and that was a good decision because he managed to make lines that probably were pretty corny on paper sound like Shakespeare. He elevated the material to the point of transcending it, and he was utterly mesmerizing. It made me wish I’d had the chance to see him do Shakespeare. He was menacing enough here that I managed to forget the warm smile and infectious giggle he had in person (he was the guest speaker at the opening of a new library where I used to live).

One thing that was familiar to me was the soundtrack. A friend gave me a copy of the soundtrack on cassette, and even though I’d never seen the movie, I loved the music, and it became my background music for reading fantasy books throughout my teens. As a result, I had very different mental images associated with that music. I haven’t listened to it in ages (I’m not sure I even still have that tape), but I listened to it so often that as soon as I heard the music again, it all came back to me, and it was a little disconcerting hearing it in context with the movie while also getting flashbacks of mental images from things like the first couple of Shannara books or the Katherine Kurtz Deryni series. The CD doesn’t seem to be available anymore, but you can get a digital version, so I may have to do that and burn a CD because it does make good reading music and would probably make good writing music.

I don’t think the movie is going to go into my regular rotation. I enjoyed watching it, but I also had nightmares about beheadings afterward. It’s definitely not a repeat watch comfort movie. There’s no part of that world I would want to live in, so it’s not a place to revisit, and I don’t particularly want to hang out with those characters. That’s generally why I like rewatching movies.

On an entirely unrelated note (aside from the thing about places you’d want to live and people you want to hang out with), the first two Rydding Village books are now available on audio. Here’s the first one.

movies, fantasy

A Golden Age of Fantasy?

In January, my movie-watching (and often my reading) theme tends to be epic fantasy. I think it’s because cold nights are perfect for burrowing under a blanket and immersing myself in some other world. It gets dark early, so I have time to start a really long movie after sunset and finish it before bedtime. Plus, it seems that a lot of epic fantasy movies have at least one sequence involving snow, so it seems seasonal.

I did a Lord of the Rings rewatch a couple of weekends ago, this time the extended editions, which I hadn’t seen before. It was hard for me to tell which material was new because I have mental images from the books, and I’ve seen clips of extended edition scenes. There’s a YouTube series I’ve been watching in which someone compares the books to the movies, chapter by chapter, to show what was changed in the translation between book and movie, and he uses the extended edition versions of the movies, so I’d seen a lot of those scenes up to the point where he is in the series. It seems like the extra stuff is mostly character moments that weren’t critical to the plot but which flesh out some of the character arcs. We do get the trudging through snow sequence in the first movie. If only I’d known that would be my life a couple of days later!

Last weekend, I rewatched The Huntsman: Winter’s War, mostly because of the winter imagery. I thought Snow White and The Huntsman was a total mess, but this prequel/sequel that plays with the Snow Queen fairy tale is actually a decent fantasy movie. Then I rewatched Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which is rapidly becoming a Happy Place movie for me. Everyone in this movie knows exactly what movie they’re in, and they managed to walk that fine line between spoofing the genre and taking it seriously. This is a rare movie that’s a brilliant and hilarious spoof of a genre while still being a good representative of that genre. And we get some trudging through snow.

I think this weekend is going to be about the 1980s fantasy. I discovered that Ladyhawke is available through the library Hoopla service, and I haven’t seen that one in ages. And then there’s The Dark Crystal, which I never managed to see.

In scrolling around, looking for good fantasy movies to watch, I’ve come to the conclusion that the 80s were kind of a golden era of fantasy movies. Some of them look cheesy now because special effects have come a long way since then, but a lot of the classic fantasy films came out in that era, and most of them were at least somewhat original, not based on an existing popular franchise. There weren’t even a lot of sequels. Conan the Barbarian had a sequel, and it looks like there were sequels to The Neverending Story, but were they direct to video? I don’t remember hearing about them, and they were in the 90s. Willow had a sequel TV series, but that came decades later.

Off the top of my head and in no particular order, the 80s gave us:
Excalibur, Dragonslayer, Clash of the Titans, The Dark Crystal, Legend, Labyrinth, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Kull the Conquerer, The Beastmaster, The Neverending Story, Ladyhawke, The Princess Bride, and Willow.

Fantasy seems to have tapered off in the 90s. There was yet another King Arthur retelling, and there was Dragonheart, and some of the Robin Hood movies in that decade had fantasy elements. Otherwise, I think most of the movies that might have counted as fantasy in the 90s were animated (mostly Disney, but some from other studios).

The early 2000s brought us The Lord of the Rings, but not much else other than the Narnia movies. We were in the age of the franchise. We did get Stardust then. That was also the era of the Harry Potter films, but those were more contemporary fantasy than epic fantasy, as they took place in our world.

In the 2010s we got the Hobbit trilogy. There were a few fairytale movies that seemed to be aimed at the Twilight audience, like Red Riding Hood and Snow White and the Huntsman (and then its sequel that veered away from that vibe). And that was when we started getting all the live-action Disney remakes of their fantasy animated movies. But this was when they started doing more fantasy for TV with Game of Thrones. In a sense, that’s better for the epic stuff based on long series of long books, since you can’t tell the whole story of those sagas in even a trilogy of movies. Ten episodes of a TV series can do a better job of telling the story of a long novel than even a three-hour movie can.

But all this means that I have a hard time finding good fantasy movies to watch when I go into epic fantasy mode. There are a lot of “fantasy cheese” movies with much lower budgets, but they vary widely in quality. I’d love to have more stuff with the production values of the Lord of the Rings movies. I’d have thought that success would have triggered a trend, but it just gave us the Narnia movies and the Hobbit movies. I’m trying to decide if I want to bother with the extended editions of the Hobbit films. The regular versions were so bloated already, but if the extra stuff is the character moments and all the Bilbo stuff, it might be worth it (by the last movie, Bilbo was barely in the movies that were supposedly about him).

I also wouldn’t mind original fantasy that isn’t based on a series of books or an existing franchise, but I guess these movies are expensive to make, so they don’t want to risk it on an unknown quantity without a built-in fan base. I’m glad they didn’t have that attitude in the 80s, or we wouldn’t have had something like Ladyhawke.