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fantasy, movies

The Huntsman Rides Again

I did check The Huntsman: Winter’s War out of the library, and I was surprised to find that it was much, much better than the first movie. It’s still high-budget Fantasy Cheese, but it was much better structured than the first movie.

As an aside, I figure I should define “Fantasy Cheese.” The quick and easy definition is “the sort of thing the Sci Fi Channel used to show on Saturday nights,” but then I had to think further to figure out what that meant. I think for me it boils down to underdeveloped fantasy that’s mostly a string of tropes. So, generic quasi-medieval European world with no development beyond that of what the society is like, the standard character and plot points without much to make them unique. In books, I’ve heard this referred to as “extruded fantasy product.” It was the sort of thing that got published a lot in the 70s and early 80s when people wanted more stuff like The Lord of the Rings, and so we got works that were essentially based on LOTR without any further development. I think it can be fun for movies since a lot of the nuance and development never makes it to the screen anyway, and there’s something satisfying about a favorite trope done well. A lot of these movies are low-budget, so there’s a bit of a camp factor to them. They’re kind of cheesy and predictable. These are fantasy movies not to be taken too seriously but that can be fun to watch.

But back to The Huntsman. The main thing for me was that the heroes had actual goals, both on the story level and the personal level. We knew what they wanted and why, and those things had emotional resonance. There was interpersonal conflict with emotional stakes. And the heroes got to be proactive rather than just reactive.

The way I define “proactive” is that the heroes are trying to do something other than just escape from or counter the villain. If all they do is respond to what the villain is doing, that’s reactive. If they have their own plan that they’d be carrying out regardless of what the villain is doing, that’s proactive. They’ll still have to deal with and react to the villain, but the villain is getting in the way of them doing something. In the first movie, Snow White was purely reactive up until the end. She was just trying to get away from the queen, so if the queen stopped chasing her, there would be no story. You have a proactive story if the heroes would still be doing something if the villain left them alone.

This movie is both a prequel and a sequel. There’s an extended prologue (maybe about 20-30 minutes of the movie) that gives some of the backstory of the queen from the first movie and her sister and how the sister becomes the Snow Queen (that’s the fairy tale this movie focuses on). Then it gets into the backstory of the Huntsman from the first movie and how he and his future wife were taken by the Snow Queen and trained to be part of her army of warriors, then goes on to show what happened to his wife and how he got to where he was in the first movie. And then it skips ahead to after the first movie, when the magic mirror has gone missing and Snow White’s husband asks for the Huntsman’s help to find it and get it to a safe place where the Snow Queen won’t be able to get to it. So he sets out on a quest, running into someone from his past along the way, and he learns that things in his past weren’t what they seemed.

There’s some humor and some decent action sequences that had an emotional core, so I didn’t zone out during them. Emily Blunt makes a wonderful villain, with a kind of fragile vulnerability beneath her icy exterior. I found myself actually caring what happened.

This one actually might work best if you don’t try to connect it to the first film because there are some continuity gaps, and this movie makes some of the pivotal stuff in the first movie an even bigger “huh?” There’s a bit of a Once Upon a Time (the TV series) thing, with the Huntsman from the Snow White story turning out to also be one of the kids from the Snow Queen story, and the Snow Queen and the Evil Queen from Snow White are sisters (in that series, it seemed like all the fairy tale characters were either related to each other or were mashups, with the same person playing key roles in multiple fairy tales).

In general, this is a good popcorn fantasy film with some good performances, gorgeous costumes, and a decent story. I don’t know that I’d buy the DVD unless I find it on the bargain shelf at the used bookstore, but it’s a fun watch. I think it’s currently available to watch with ads on Freevee (what used to be IMDB-TV).

movies

The Dreaded Triangle

I’ve been analyzing what was wrong with the movie Snow White and the Huntsman, since I’ve lost a lot of sleep mulling it over and figuring out how to fix a bad story is a good creative exercise. Previously, I dealt with the major issues, which are mostly about how the writers forgot to actually create characters for the protagonists. We never really knew what they wanted in life or what they aimed to accomplish in the story. And that made for a mess when it came to the weirdly halfhearted romantic triangle in the movie.

Generally, a love triangle represents a choice the person at the center of the triangle has to make. There are two major approaches. In one version, one guy is good and the other is bad, but it’s hard to tell which is which, often because the bad one hides behind a fair face, charm, and other things we associate with goodness, and the good one may not have the superficial qualities we associate with goodness. One famous example of this is Pride and Prejudice, and it’s also common in Gothic romances. Figuring out which one is good and which is bad is a test for the heroine, and she has to learn whatever cosmic lesson the story is teaching her to be able to make that choice, such as getting over her prejudice or learning discernment.

In the other kind of triangle, both suitors are good, but they represent different paths the heroine could take, and one of those paths might be better for her. Choosing a guy means choosing the direction of her future and the kind of life she’s going to have. A famous example of this one would be The Philadelphia Story, in which Katharine Hepburn’s character faces the enviable dilemma of choosing between characters played by Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. They’re both good guys who care about her. Jimmy Stewart’s character sees her as a goddess and puts her on a pedestal, while Cary Grant’s character sees her as a flawed human being and loves her anyway. She realizes that’s what she needs, that she’ll never grow if she’s being admired as a goddess. She needs to get knocked down off the pedestal and challenged.

I’m honestly not sure which of these the writers of Snow White and the Huntsman were trying to take. There are going to be spoilers here because this is where they deviated a lot from the fairy tale, so if you haven’t seen it, want to, and want to be surprised, come back after you’ve seen it.

In one corner of the triangle, we have William, the duke’s son, Snow White’s childhood best friend. He’s sort of in the role of Prince Charming from the fairy tale. He had to be literally carried away to keep him from trying to get back to the castle to save her when the evil queen took over when they were children and he’s been actively fighting against the queen ever since then. He’s taking a great risk by infiltrating the enemy to try to help her. In the other corner, we have the Huntsman, a drunk who’s still hung up on his dead wife, who was working for the queen to try to catch Snow White until he learned the queen lied to him and who only agreed to help Snow White after that because he was promised a reward. He abandons her at one point and only comes back when he realizes the people he ditched her with are under attack.

I don’t think either guy is bad. Both help her, neither betrays her, and they end up being able to work together well. There’s no jealous sparring between the guys and neither one turns out to be a louse. It may be that they represent two different paths. William wants to place Snow White on her rightful throne, so he represents the path of royalty. I’m not sure what the Huntsman is supposed to represent. This is where the characters having no real goals becomes a problem. We don’t know what the Huntsman wants out of life (other than his wife back), so we don’t know what Snow’s life with him would be like, and we don’t know what Snow really wants, so we don’t know if she’s opposed to William’s goal or torn about duty vs. freedom, or anything like that. As queen, she can’t really be with someone like the Huntsman, so being with him would probably mean going away to someplace safe where the evil queen can’t reach her and giving up on being royalty. But it’s hard to see that as a positive outcome, especially since she sees the harm the queen is doing to the people of Snow White’s kingdom. She’s selfish and irresponsible if she chooses that path. So then we’re down to a Roman Holiday thing, but with a triangle twist, where she might want to choose that guy but out of duty she can’t choose the path he represents, so she’s making a sacrifice to choose duty and give up love. That seems to be what they’re aiming for, since it’s the Huntsman who saves her from the curse of the poisoned apple with a kiss (after William’s tearful kiss after she collapses from the poison does nothing), and then the scene of her coronation in which the Huntsman is lurking near the back is somewhat reminiscent of the ending of Roman Holiday, in which the reporter shows up at the princess’s public appearance, back in their royalty and commoner roles but with a sly acknowledgment to each other of what has passed between them.

Except, they don’t really bother to develop that in any way. We haven’t seen any kind of development of their relationship or any struggle between desire and duty. The plot more or less follows the fantasy road trip outline I came up with last year — there’s the bargain they strike that leads to them traveling together. There’s bickering (though it’s sort of half-hearted, almost like they’re just ticking it off a list and then they forget about it after a scene). They come under attack and barely escape. Then there’s a “whew, we made it” scene after they run into the dwarfs in which there’s dancing. Except she’s not dancing with him. She’s goofing around and dancing with one of the dwarfs. This should have been where the Huntsman cut in and ended up dancing with her, with them having a big moment of sexual tension or awareness of each other. It’s in the next scene when the childhood friend finds them and helps them fend off the rest of the search party, so that would have fit perfectly — just as she’s had a moment with the Huntsman, William shows up and she’s reunited with her old friend. Cue Huntsman looking lonely and Snow White feeling torn. Except it doesn’t happen that way. The Huntsman is amused by watching her dance, but shows no sign that he wants to be the one dancing with her. He doesn’t seem to be all that interested in her other than as someone to be kind of in awe of and even encourages William to tell her how he feels about her after William talks to the Huntsman about how he’s always felt about Snow. The Queen uses Snow’s relationship with William to trick her into taking the poison apple, and Snow seems pretty keen on him then.

But then after the poison apple, the Huntsman makes a big, heartfelt speech to what he thinks is Snow White’s dead body, laid out in state, talking about things between them that they never really showed. We didn’t see the things he describes in his speech before the kiss, and then there’s the fact that just a few days earlier, he was so hung up on his dead wife that he was willing to take the job to bring Snow White to the queen because he thought the queen could bring his wife back to life. Instead of it being a pivotal emotional moment the whole movie was building toward, it was a big “huh?”

I think him showing up at the coronation and the ambiguity they left it with, with no definite relationship with either guy, was meant to set up the sequel, but they removed Snow White from the sequel, which is just about the Huntsman, and apparently the sequel reveals that she married William, which makes what happened in this movie even more baffling. I’m curious enough to see what happens in the sequel, even though apparently it’s worse than the first one, that I’ve checked the DVD out of the library for weekend viewing. It has Emily Blunt in it, so it can’t be all bad. She’s always fun to watch. I’ll be making popcorn and settling in Saturday night. There may even be alcohol.

movies

Why Didn’t it Work?

Last weekend, I was still in the mood for fantasy but not quite up for starting an entire fantasy saga, and as I noticed the previous weekend, there are precious few standalone fantasy films. So, I ended up watching Snow White and the Huntsman, which is new to Prime. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before. I remember the wisecrack I made at the time about how they got all those noted British actors to play the dwarfs by finding the pub where the renowned theater actors hang out, drugging them, loading them into a van, and driving them to the set, where they woke up already made up as dwarfs. But, oddly, there was only one scene in the whole movie that seemed at all familiar to me, and my memories of scenes I thought I remembered turned out to be inaccurate. As I recall, I watched it on HBO when I was sick, so it’s possible I was dozing off and on and didn’t see much of the movie. This viewing felt like I was seeing it for the first time.

And it’s not a great movie. It’s basically Fantasy Cheese with a bigger budget. They had good special effects, a mostly top-notch cast, and enough money to hire enough extras for crowd scenes (though a lot of them might have been computer generated). But the script may have been worse than most of the Fantasy Cheese movies. I had to fight to stay awake and wasn’t at all engaged, which may be why I didn’t remember much from the first time I watched it. I actually lost sleep that night from lying awake and trying to figure out why it didn’t work. It was an interesting exercise in story craft, so I thought I’d share my analysis. I’m going to try to keep it vague enough to not be spoilery, especially where this version deviates from the basic fairy tale this is loosely based on, but if you haven’t seen it and think you might want to, I suggest watching it before you read this.

I think the main problem for me was that I didn’t find the protagonists very engaging. I didn’t care enough about them to get emotionally involved in the story, which meant it was mostly spectacle and I mentally checked out. The villain was reasonably well-developed. We learn early in the movie what she wants out of life — what might be called her character goal or desire — and why. Then there’s the time when things change and she comes up with her story goal, the specific thing she needs to accomplish in order to set things right. We also get a pretty good sense of what her underlying drive is. These are the core things you need for a character who’s going to be driving the action, so they got that much right. Unfortunately, she mostly drops out of the movie around the time her story goal is established. She does a few pivotal things late in the movie, but for most of the middle of the film, she just stands around looking menacing and occasionally yelling at people.

The protagonists don’t get that much development. Snow White is just a void. We get a little bit about her as a kid in the prologue, but as an adult, we know nothing about her. She wants to escape the queen and we understand why, but she doesn’t really have any hints of goals or motivations beyond that until almost the end of the movie. They keep telling us how special and inspiring she is and how she’s some kind of chosen one the people will rally around and finally defeat the evil queen, but we don’t really see her do anything inspiring. Mostly, she just stands open-mouthed and with her chest heaving while various people and creatures stare in awe at her because she’s just that special. All the people around her want to restore her to her rightful throne, but we never learn how she feels about that until almost the end of the movie, and we don’t know if this is a difficult decision for her. Is it something she wants all along? Does she change her mind? Is she doing it because she really wants it or out of duty? I think the character development in the script stopped at “played by that chick from Twilight, so all the teen girls will love her.” I understand that Kristen Stewart got a lot of hate for this role, and she’s not good. She just has that one facial expression with her mouth hanging open and almost no inflection to her speech, but the script gives her absolutely nothing to work with. She’d have had to create a character from scratch and write an entire script for what’s going on inside the character to have had anything to play. She has very little dialogue and almost no action other than running away from people chasing her.

The Huntsman isn’t any better. He gets a sad backstory about having lost his wife, but we don’t know what he wants. He initially works for the queen to track down Snow White because she promises she can use her magic to bring his wife back, but he later agrees to help Snow White because she promises him a big reward if he can get her to the duke who’s still holding out against the queen. He doesn’t really have a story goal and we don’t know if he has a character goal. The character development went no further than “played by Thor, so maybe people will remember that and apply it to this character.”

Because the title protagonists don’t have a goal beyond surviving, they’re in reactive mode. They don’t do much other than react to what the queen and her minions do. They get chased around a lot, but there’s no narrative drive for them. The turning points come about because of things the queen does or things they stumble across rather than because of choices they make. I think that’s what makes me lose interest.

There is one good guy they actually did some development on, the duke’s son, Snow White’s childhood friend. When we see him as an adult, he’s fighting a guerrilla insurrection against the queen (character goal!), and then when he learns that Snow White is still alive after all those years as the queen’s prisoner, he sets out to find and help her so he can restore her to her rightful place on the throne (story goal!). And he’s proactive about it — he has a plan. He joins the queen’s hunting party that’s looking for Snow White so he can protect her before they get to her (and he can hamper them a bit). The scene in which he shoots his way onto the hunting party in a very Robin Hood way was the one scene I recalled from the first time I saw the movie. A movie about this guy infiltrating the hunting party as a way to find Snow White while also trying to sabotage them so they don’t find her might have been a lot more interesting than what we got.

And, oddly, this guy was apparently the “Mr. Wrong” in a weirdly undeveloped romantic triangle, but that’s a pretty complicated topic I’ll save for the next post.

That means we have no narrative drive from the protagonists whose names are in the title, and no real emotional or relationship development between them, while the one they give narrative drive and emotional development to is peripheral. And that’s why I couldn’t make myself stay engaged with the movie. The lesson learned here is that your protagonists need to be trying to get or achieve something, and we need to have a sense of what relationship they have to each other. Those are the things that keep an audience engaged in a story.

Another problem related to the lack of narrative drive is the role of what seem to be coincidences in furthering the plot. There’s something later that hints that maybe it wasn’t just coincidence, but it’s never made explicit what’s going on, and while I don’t have to be spoon-fed, I do like to have my guesses verified, and I’d like to know if the characters have made the connections and figured things out. Snow White is able to escape from the tower where the queen has kept her imprisoned for about ten years because some friendly birds get her attention and get her to notice a big nail sticking out of the rock wall near her window. She’s able to pull the nail out, and it comes in handy when a moment later the queen’s brother comes to get her to bring her to the queen. She’s able to fight him and lock him in her cell so she can run. Then when she’s made it out of the castle, she happens to find a horse waiting for her on the beach. Since we later see that fairies were riding those birds, I think we’re meant to assume that the fairies set up her escape, including having the horse waiting for her. But they never make it clear, so it just seems like everything lined up conveniently.

I think if I were going to do a rewrite to fix it, I’d start by doing more to establish Snow White. She’s been kept a prisoner for about a decade, but we don’t know what she’s been doing all that time or how it’s affected her. She’s going to be doing a lot of physical stuff in the rest of the movie, so I think I’d set it up by showing her regular daily routine, with her walking and running laps around her cell, doing some shadow fencing, and maybe some other physical training stuff to show that she’s preparing to escape. Maybe she’s already got the nail and has been waiting for the chance to use it, but they slide things through a slot in the door instead of opening it. Or the friendly birds, her only companions in her imprisonment, have been spying on the queen, hear what her plans for Snow are, and bring her the nail. I’m still not sure what a nail was doing sticking out of the wall of a stone tower and why she hadn’t noticed it before. Finally, she gets her chance to use the nail when the queen’s brother comes to get her. The friendly birds lead her to the horse, so it’s more obvious that this has been set up.

Then we need to know where she stands on what she wants to do next. It’s treated as a big turning point when she wakes up from the apple curse and announces that she knows how to defeat the queen and she’s going to lead the army into battle, but up to that point, she hasn’t really had a position. It might be somewhat understandable if she feared that the queen was too powerful for her to defeat and she was too traumatized by her long imprisonment to face the queen again, so all she wanted was to get to a place of safety and hide, but that wouldn’t really be a heroine you’d root for, especially after she’s seen what the queen is doing to her people. During her initial escape, the people in the nearest village made no move to help her and even cleared a path for the queen’s men to come after her, so Snow White may have taken that to mean she didn’t have support among the people and no one would rally behind her, but everyone else she encountered after that was in awe of her, which kind of kills the “she didn’t think anyone would fight for her” theory. Maybe take a middle ground in which she thinks there’s some magical McGuffin she needs to defeat the queen, not realizing until later that the reason the queen needs her is also the reason she alone can defeat the queen. At any rate, we need to know what she wants to do, whether it’s just survive, fight back, or buy time. We’d also need a bit more evidence of how inspiring she is and why. Snow White is known for her kindness, so use that here. Let her help some of the magical creatures she encounters along the way and have that pay off. There’s a scene in which she keeps the Huntsman from killing a troll and the troll seems in awe of her, so why isn’t the troll fighting in her army against the queen later?

Likewise, we need to see something of what’s going on with the Huntsman. What does he think about Snow White? Does he want to defeat the queen and restore Snow to her rightful throne? Does he just want to get away somewhere the queen won’t find him? Is he in love with Snow but worried that a guy like him doesn’t stand a chance with a princess? We don’t know (and I’ll deal with this more when talking about the love triangle). The guy who doesn’t want to get involved and is just in it for the reward — until he has a change of heart at the end and joins in the big battle — is a cliche at this point, so maybe he realizes from the start that now that he’s betrayed the queen he doesn’t stand a chance of having a life unless she’s defeated, so he’s all for that plan for selfish reasons, until he later comes to be a true believer.

These are all minor tweaks that wouldn’t require any additional budget and that could easily have come in the time they had available by shaving some of the slow spots, but I think would have made the movie more engaging.

Next up, I deal with the issue of romantic triangles and how this movie does it wrong.

fantasy, movies

Where’s the Fantasy?

Since I’ve been watching the Rings of Power series, I was in the mood for a fantasy movie last weekend, and I didn’t have time to watch any of the Lord of the Rings or Hobbit films since most of those run about three hours. I found a fantasy film on Amazon called Dawn of the Dragonslayer that worked pretty well and was less than two hours.

I’d put this in a similar category to the kind of fantasy movie they used to show on Saturday nights on the Sci Fi Channel (back when it was the Sci Fi Channel instead of SyFy) that I called Fantasy Cheese, only it was much better executed. It was filmed on location in Ireland and they had a good director of photography, so it looked utterly gorgeous, and there was a good score to go with all the lovely imagery. They had an actual castle to use as a location, so the setting looked real. The acting was mostly strong (it seems to have been a cast of mostly Irish actors who do a lot of theater work). The script was so-so. It may just be that I’ve spent too much time studying story structure, so it’s hard to surprise me, but I felt like it was very by-the-numbers and a bit too predictable. On the other hand, it was the kind of predictable that’s satisfying — a key factor in good Fantasy Cheese. You know what’s going to happen, but it’s what you want to happen.

The story was about a farmboy whose father was killed by a dragon. It was his father’s wish that he leave the farm and go to be a bondsman to a nobleman who owed the father something, with a sealed message the farmboy was to bring the nobleman. The idea is that the nobleman will train the farmboy to be a knight, and he’ll be able to move up in the world. Except the nobleman is down on his luck and out of favor with the king, so although the sealed message definitely gets a reaction, he only takes on the farmboy as a farmhand, not to train him to be a knight. But the nobleman has a beautiful, scholarly daughter (of course), and she has a rare book on how a knight should be trained and an even rarer book on how to be a paladin who can battle dragons and survive, so she trains him in secret — when comes in handy when the dragon returns.

The low budget mostly showed in the lack of cast and in the bad special effects, and I think those things affected the story. It’s a really small cast, and there are no extras, which made it feel like a really empty world. The farmboy walks across the land from his farm to the nobleman’s castle without encountering a single person that we see until he reaches the castle, and there are several other long journeys (some requiring camping overnight en route) in which the characters never see another person or even a sign of civilization, and this is not a plot point. We never learn that the dragon has wiped out most of the people, or anything like that. Aside from a few farmhands, there are no servants at the castle. Maybe that’s because the lord is down on his luck, but a wealthy elderly noblewoman who’s a relative comes to visit, and she has no servants with her, not even a lady’s maid. A wealthy and powerful young nobleman with eyes for the daughter comes to visit, and he doesn’t have any servants with him. I guess since there are no people, they were able to safely travel without guards. I think the script could have used this to add a bit of worldbuilding, but since the lack of people wasn’t acknowledged, it just made the world feel empty and artificial.

And the CGI dragon itself wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t integrated well into the “real” footage, so it looked like one of those bad Photoshop jobs where they just stick something into a picture and it’s obviously pasted in. That didn’t bother me quite as much as the heroine having Jennifer Anniston hair with face-framing layers and a heavy-handed modern makeup job. If you’d told me there was a deleted scene saying she was a time traveler who’d fallen through a portal from 2010, I’d have believed it.

But aside from those quibbles, it was an entertaining and lovely to look at fantasy movie with a running time of under two hours, which is rare.

Really, fantasy movies seem to be oddly rare now. The 80s were a heyday of fantasy films, with things like Dragonslayer, Ladyhawke, Legend, Labarynth, The Princess Bride, and Willow, along with more sword-and-sorcery type stuff like the Conan movies, Krull, and The Beastmaster. And while some of them were based on books, there were several that were original stories.

But in spite of the success of the Lord of the Rings movies, Hollywood didn’t seem to capitalize on it with more fantasy stuff. There were the Hobbit films, which were the same universe and filmmaker, and the Narnia movies, but otherwise I can’t think of many fantasy films other than a few of the fairytale-based movies and the Disney live-action remakes. They seem to have headed for TV instead, with A Game of Thrones and the spinoff, Wheel of Time, and Rings of Power. There are a few other things that kind of fall into the fantasy category, like the Pirates movies and some of the Marvel movies, but there’s not a lot of what I call “traditional” fantasy, with a quasi-medieval setting, castles, wizards, etc. And all the more recent fantasy I can think of is based on books or some other pre-existing property. Not that I have any problem with turning fantasy books into movies or TV series, but it does make you wonder where the original stories are. Are studios so risk-averse that they only fund things based on something that’s already got a fanbase, or are writers not coming up with their own fantasy stories? I scrolled through the entire fantasy category on Amazon last night, and there’s very little of what I would consider “fantasy.” Most of it is more horror or science fiction.

I need more horses, castles, knights, wizards, dragons, etc.

That filmmaker who did Dawn of the Dragonslayer (who also did another good Fantasy Cheese film I watched last year, The Crown and the Dragon, which I think is set in the same universe as this film) should maybe try writing a script that actually uses the practical limitations she’s dealing with and that doesn’t require a dragon. Write about a witch or wizard in a lonely place, doing magic that requires minor CGI to show, and no CGI creatures, and let the director of photography have fun with the scenery.

movies, TV

A Golden Age

I’ve been thinking lately about what my 11-year-old self would think about the times I’m living in now. That was the age when I fell full-on into geekiness and there wasn’t enough of the geeky stuff I wanted to satisfy me.

I’d been obsessed with Star Wars since I first saw it when I was 9, and in the fall of my sixth-grade year we were still a year away from The Empire Strikes Back (I was living on a military base overseas, so we wouldn’t get it until November of the following year after it was released in May in the US). Around that time, I discovered fantasy as a genre. I’d read books with magic and had even read The Hobbit, but that fall I found the Chronicles of Narnia, the Lloyd Alexander Prydain books, and The Lord of the Rings. I’m not sure which of them I found first, but I do know I read them all during that fall (though I stretched out the Narnia books and didn’t finish reading the series for the first time until early the following year).

The problem at that time was that there wasn’t enough of these things. There was one Star Wars movie, and there was no home video, so the only way to see it over and over again was to go to the movie theater, if it was playing anywhere. Which it wasn’t, especially not on military bases in Germany. There wasn’t a lot of related media. There were mostly just iterations of the original movie — the novelization, the comic book version, the audio drama version, the “storybook” version that had photos from the movie to illustrate the novelization. The way I “saw” the movie repeatedly was to read the novelization while listening to the soundtrack album. The only new stuff that wasn’t just the same story as the movie was one non-canon sequel novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which originally was meant to be the sequel if the movie did well enough for a sequel, but then when it was a smash that got scrapped and Lucas planned a whole saga with a bigger mythology. I guess the Han Solo books came out around that time, but I didn’t find them until about a year later. And there was the infamous Holiday Special, which was terrible but which we were excited for because it was something new in the Star Wars universe.

For Lord of the Rings, an animated version of the first half of the saga came out around that time (I’m not sure when it was actually released, but it came to one of the base theaters nearby that fall, right around the time I read the books). I was so excited about that, then was rather disappointed. And even if I’d loved it, there was no home video, so no way to watch it if it wasn’t at the theater.

It would have blown my mind then to imagine there being eleven Star Wars movies, plus multiple TV series. And it’s all streaming, so you can watch it whenever you want to. You could watch Star Wars content every waking hour for weeks before repeating anything. I was watching Andor last week and it struck me that I was watching a Star Wars TV show, and there would be a new episode a week later. In the days when it was three years between Star Wars movies, that would have been an unimaginable luxury.

And then on Friday night, I watched the latest episode of Rings of Power, which also amazed 11-year-old me. Not only do we have full movies of the whole Lord of the Rings saga, but now there’s a TV series with new stuff in that world, so we get to visit that world again without knowing exactly what will happen because we’ve read the books repeatedly.

I’m really enjoying both of these series, and not just because it’s so exciting to have new content in worlds I love. I think I’d enjoy them even if I hadn’t already been a fan. Andor is actually pretty peripheral to the main Star Wars story, though without that character and his actions, the events of the first movie wouldn’t have happened. But in a way, that’s what I like about it. It fleshes out that universe and shows why the Empire was terrible (beyond just the “willing to blow up whole planets to make a point” thing) while telling a new story I haven’t seen or read before. And Rings of Power is just gorgeous. It’s an immersive wallow in that world, getting to see different aspects of it than were in the main saga.

Twice a week right now, I get to indulge my inner 11-year-old and live out some of the biggest dreams I imagined when I was that age. And if I want to watch something related to these universes between episodes, there’s plenty to choose from.

movies

Fortunate Fools

A few weekends ago, I rewatched the Bill and Ted films. I have the first one on DVD, after seeing it multiple times in the theater. I saw it during the initial release, and then it played at the dollar theater across the street from my university campus, so my friends and I went multiple times. I saw the second one when it came out, but I don’t know if I’d seen it all the way through since then. There were parts I remembered clearly, but I didn’t remember the big picture story. I got the DVD of the third one when it came out. I noticed that they were all on Amazon Prime, so since I could see the second one, I decided it was time for a rewatch. (Warning: there are two versions of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey on Amazon, and the one that comes up first in recommendations is a rent/buy, but it’s also in Prime Video if you scroll further.)

Something that struck me upon this viewing is that the first two movies, in particular, are a modern telling of a “fortunate fool” story. This is a fairy tale archetype in which a good-hearted simpleton manages to bumble through life unaware of threats against him and always manages to come out ahead. He may stumble into trouble because he’s a bit of an idiot, but he also gets out of trouble easily due to a combination of good luck and good karma. He collects friends and allies easily and shows kindness. He’s the kind of guy who’ll see a hungry person and give him his own food, and then later realize that he’s hungry and has no food. But he wins in the long run, usually getting the princess.

Which is basically Bill and Ted. They stumble their way through history, collecting their historical figures and managing to win them over. They seldom lose their good natures and don’t really hold a lot of malice, even when people wrong them. They benefit from a lot of good luck and good timing, getting out of trouble in the nick of time. And they end up with princesses.

I have to wonder how intentional this was. Were the writers conscious of this trope and deliberately using it, or did they maybe absorb it subconsciously from fairy tales? I know that the Bill and Ted characters started as a bit the writers did as stand-up comedy and they wrapped a plot around these characters, but I don’t know if there was more to it than just these airhead guys.

Oddly enough, the description of this trope at TV Tropes fits Bill and Ted perfectly, but they aren’t mentioned among the examples.

The third film goes in a different direction. It’s more about dealing with destiny and facing mortality in the Bill and Ted side of the plot. The daughters are doing the running around in time part of the story, but the daughters are geniuses, with extensive in-depth knowledge of music theory and an ability to have conversations about quantum physics.

I love these movies so much (I need to get a DVD copy of the second film). They’re very much happy place viewing, and they never fail to make me grin. There’s something infectious about their zest for life and tight friendship. It’s even more fun when you know that the two actors became friends while filming and are still close all these years later.

movies

Disappointing Dresses

Last weekend, I watched the 1965 TV version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella. I remember watching it on TV as a very small child when they used to air it every year (I wasn’t born when it was first on, but I believe it was an annual TV tradition for a while after that). Watching this made me think about how often the revelation of the magical dress that totally transforms the heroine ends up being disappointing.

The dresses in most versions of Cinderella are actually pretty blah. They’re pretty, but not really anything that you’d think only a fairy godmother could conjure up or that would make her stand out from the crowd. The one in the Disney animated version is kind of dull. I think the dress she and the mice make that the stepsisters destroy is far prettier and more interesting. I remember as a child being disappointed with what she wears to the ball. The one in the TV version I just watched is pretty plain. It’s prettier than the things everyone else is wearing, but it’s nothing special. The dress in the more recent stage adaptation of the TV musical is mostly interesting because they pull off the transformation live on stage, but that means the dress itself isn’t that spectacular, since it has to fit inside the peasant dress to unfold as she spins around. It’s a neat bit of special effects, but it’s not a magical gown. About the only Cinderella dress that really lives up to the hype is the one in the live-action Disney film, where they used layers of tulle and LED lights to make the dress truly look magical, so that it changes color subtly as she moves and it looks lit from within.

It’s not just the magical dresses that can be a letdown. The same thing happens in non-magical stories. Ever since I was a child, I’ve hated the ballgown in My Fair Lady. It was like a 1960s evening dress suddenly appeared, and the hair also doesn’t really work for me. I like the dress from the Broadway version a lot better. It’s more apt for the period than the movie gown is.

And I can rant for hours about Pretty in Pink. She cut up a really cute dress to make a new creation for the prom, and everyone acts stunned when they see her, but the dress she made looks like something the mother of the groom would wear to an afternoon wedding.

In some cases, I’m sure my reaction is about perspective. The My Fair Lady movie dress probably was stunning to someone from the era when the movie was first made, since it was what was in style at the time. Now it just looks dated while not really fitting the time of the movie. Then again, I was a teen in the 80s, and I still think the Pretty in Pink dress is horrid. It was ugly then and now. I think showing up in the actual vintage dress would have been a bigger statement.

Now I’m trying to think of any dramatic transformations on film that really live up to the hype, aside from the live-action Cinderella. Is there a dress that’s supposedly knocking everyone’s socks off that really does knock your socks off? The nice thing about writing books is that I have an unlimited wardrobe budget for my characters, and everyone gets to imagine their idea of a fabulous dress, so no one’s disappointed.

movies

Fiction Becomes Real

I guess I’ve been on a “fiction becomes reality” kick lately, because after watching The Boyfriend School a couple of weeks ago, last weekend’s movies were The Lost City and Galaxy Quest, which also fall into that trope.

The Lost City is a spoof of the Romancing the Stone sort of film, in which a novelist gets dragged into the kind of adventure she writes about. In this case, an eccentric billionaire kidnaps a reclusive novelist because her latest book made him think she knew how to find a treasure he’s seeking, and her himbo cover model decides to stage a rescue mission that doesn’t quite go as planned.

This movie is an absolute hoot. I did have to turn off the part of my brain that knows anything about publishing because they seem to have written it as though it was movies but then changed it to books (a book tour doesn’t really work like a Hollywood press junket) and they don’t seem to understand that if you have a long series about the same hero, they’re probably not romance novels. But I laughed out loud so often during this movie. It somehow manages to be a spoof of the genre and an excellent example of it. It stands on its own as a romantic adventure movie while also sending up the tropes of that kind of movie. Everyone involved seems to be in on the joke, having fun and not taking themselves too seriously, sometimes mocking their own images. We’ve got Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter’s all grown up!) gleefully chewing the scenery as the villain, Channing Tatum playing the himbo with surprising depths while still leaning in to his character’s foibles, Brad Pitt having tons of fun mocking his own image, and Sandra Bullock pulling off an older, wiser version of the “spunky kid” type she played earlier in her career. Meanwhile, all the supporting characters are given something that fleshes them out and makes them memorable.

It’s on Amazon Prime, and I don’t know how long it will stay (movies seem to rotate in and out more rapidly lately). I may have to watch it again while it’s there. If you liked Romancing the Stone, check this one out.

I saw Galaxy Quest at the theater when it came out, but I don’t think I’ve seen it since then. There were parts that I remembered but a lot that I didn’t, and there were a lot of people I didn’t realize were in the movie. They’re known now, but that was an early (or first) role. That movie, about the cast of a Star Trek-like series that gets recruited for a mission by aliens who saw their show and thought it was real, is an excellent example of setups and payoffs. Every character gets established with a “thing” early in the movie that establishes their arc, and they all pay off at some point in the movie, which makes it all quite satisfying. One that works particularly well is Alan Rickman’s character ranting about hating his character’s tagline, and then he delivers it with utter sincerity later in the movie in a scene that’s quite emotional.

I’ve been a Star Trek fan most of my life (apparently, my mom watched part of the original run while feeding me when I was an infant), so it’s fun catching the way this movie lovingly sends up so many of the Trek tropes. It’s aged surprisingly well.

Mashing up all these things I’ve watched lately now kind of makes me want to write the story of the reclusive fantasy author who gets taken through a portal to a magical world, where they think she can coach them in defeating the Dark Lord and recruiting a team of heroes, since it looks to them like she’s an expert, thanks to her books that they think are histories. Or something like that. I’m trying to decide if her genre savvy would turn out to help or if it would turn out that nothing works the way it does in fiction. We could throw in a recent divorce and make it Under the Tuscan Sun meets Galaxy Quest, but in Narnia.

movies, Books

New Perspectives on an Old Favorite

I recently revisited an old favorite book and finally saw the movie based on it, and it’s been an interesting experience that’s going to be difficult to talk about without spoilers, so I’m going to do this post in layers.

The book The Boyfriend School by Sarah Bird feels like it was written just for me because it parallels my life in a lot of ways (in fact, the inscription in the autographed copy I have mentions the parallel lives, since it turns out I have a lot in common with the author, including having the same editor for a while, which is how I got the autographed book and why she knew about the parallel lives). It takes place in Austin in the 80s, which is when I lived in Austin while I was in college. During one summer, I stayed in Austin to work at a small newspaper, and the heroine works for a small newspaper. She lives in the neighborhood I lived on the edge of for that summer, so I walked around a lot of the places mentioned in the book. When the heroine goes to the library or post office, it’s the library and post office I went to. And during the course of the book, the heroine goes to a romance writers’ conference and starts writing a category romance novel. It was after I lived in Austin, but I’ve been to a lot of romance writers’ conferences and used to write category romance novels.

I was thinking about this book recently because it takes place during a bad heat wave, and we’ve been having a bad heat wave this summer, so I was planning to reread it. And then I saw that the movie based on it was on Amazon Prime. I’d started to watch it when it was on TV years ago but noped out at the beginning when I saw that it was set in Charleston, S.C., not Austin. Since the Austin setting was a big reason I loved the book, that turned me off of the movie. But I thought I’d give it a try again. It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it may have to win some kind of award for being the worst adaptation of a book in which the screenplay was written by the author of the original novel. I’m sure a lot of the changes were dictated by Hollywood—like they probably got some filming incentives to shoot where they did, which meant the location change. Other changes were required by the change in medium. You couldn’t film the book as it’s written because of the structure. While the movie is your basic false identity rom-com, the book is actually more about the contrast between real-life love and romantic fantasy.

But the changes mean that you can’t really talk about the movie without spoiling the book because the movie flips the perspective and centers on the book’s big twist.

So, first the book. I’ve referred to it as “proto chick-lit” because it was published in the late 80s, long before Bridget Jones came along, but it has a lot of the same elements — it’s got the first-person narrator heroine who’s a bit of a mess and trying to navigate her life, friendships, career, and relationships, and not necessarily doing a great job at any of them. There’s a romantic plot, but the focus is on her personal growth and figuring things out.

The story’s about a photographer for a small newspaper who gets assigned to cover a romance writers’ conference, where she goes in with some preconceived notions but gets taken under the wings of a couple of pro writers, who teach her a thing or two and encourage her to try writing her own book. She insists that real women wouldn’t actually be interested in romance heroes. Women don’t want dark, dangerous men. They want nice guys. But then she recoils at a setup with the nerdy brother of one of the writers, and just as she’s struggling to write the romantic parts of her romance novel, she meets a mysterious biker she can’t resist, so she may have to eat her words.

I don’t know how much my fondness for this book comes from the parallel lives thing, since I’ve never gone for the dangerous rogue type. Then again, I also would have rejected the nerdy guy (those scenes made me cringe because just about every guy I’ve been set up with has been a lot like that, personality-wise). What I’d prefer is somewhere in the middle. So, I don’t really relate to that part of the plot. I guess I just enjoy reliving the summer I spent in Austin and the time when I was first getting into serious writing and going to conferences.

The book is now available as a pretty inexpensive e-book and it’s on Kindle Unlimited, so if it sounds interesting, check it out. The rest of this post will address the movie, which means it will have spoilers for the book.

So, the movie …

They changed the setting and the heroine’s name. She’s a writer, not a photographer, and they skip the part where she’s trying to write a romance novel. She just interviews the writer. But the focus of the movie is more on the guy. Here’s where the book spoilers start.

The movie is about a guy who falls hard for the woman his romance writer sister sets him up with, but when she rejects him, his sister sets out to turn him into a romance hero the woman won’t be able to resist, in spite of her protestations about real women not being interested in men like the heroes in romance novels.

That’s the twist in the book, that the mysterious biker is the nerdy guy. The biker doesn’t show up until more than halfway through the book, and we don’t find out who he is until near the end. It really does feel like a twist. I remember being surprised the first time I read it. I was pretty sure she was being set up, but I didn’t guess that it was the same guy rather than something like an actor hired to prove a point. But I can see how you couldn’t pull that off in a movie. In the book, it’s all from the heroine’s perspective, then she finds out who the guy is and he gives her his journals to explain himself, so then there’s a section where we see what’s been happening from his perspective. You couldn’t do that in a movie.

And I don’t think you’d be able to make his identity be a surprise in a movie. In the book, you can believe it because of how it’s set up. The guy has just finished cancer treatment, so his hair hasn’t come back yet, he’s been on steroids, so his face is still puffy, and his body is still skinny. There’s a three-month gap, during which time his hair grows back, his face goes back to normal, he starts exercising and builds muscles, and he gets colored contact lenses. But in the movie, as good of a makeup job as they do on him, he’s still recognizably Steve Guttenberg at the beginning, so you know who he is when he shows up as a stud. I think it might actually work in real life that you wouldn’t recognize someone you’d barely met if you ran into him again after he went through a lot of changes, but it won’t work with a known actor. Maybe with an unknown and no opening credits it might have worked, but trying to hide that twist would be hard in a movie. In real life, you encounter a lot of random people who aren’t necessarily connected, but when you’re watching a movie, you know that everyone you see is probably important, so you look at them differently.

Focusing on the guy’s story means the movie loses a lot of the things I love about the book, but I noticed in some of the Amazon reviews of the book that there are people who like the movie more because they like the straightforward rom-com. They don’t like that the heroine is such a mess or that the ending is a bit ambiguous. I still think the movie should have been better than it was, and there were things from the book that could still have made it to the screen. The casting, aside from the heroine (who’s too pretty for the way the book character was described), is pretty good. It’s on Amazon Prime, and it’s short, so if you want an 80s rom-com that’s a bit different, check it out.

And now I’m going to spoil the book even more.

There’s something that’s always bugged me about the book and the way it works out that I finally have the right vocabulary for: It basically reinforces the “nice guy” myth, the whole “women don’t really like nice guys, they just go for jerks who treat them badly” thing that you tend to hear from the incel crowd. That’s something guys who proclaim themselves as “nice” like to say, and I’ve found that the self-proclaimed “nice” guys are seldom as nice as they think they are. A lot of the time, they don’t actually make a move on the woman and then act like they’ve been rejected for being nice when she doesn’t go for them. Or the niceness is purely transactional, so he’s supposed to be rewarded for being nice and he pouts if he isn’t. Or he has his own definition of “nice” which is on his terms, not what she wants. Or he seems to think that just being “nice” should be enough, without him working on anything else.

For the most part, the guy in this book isn’t entirely like that — up until the end. She understandably feels betrayed by his deception, even after she reads his journal. She’s understanding about the cancer thing, and he doesn’t start out planning the deception. That was something his sister came up with, and he only panicked when this woman met him, so he went with it rather than admitting who he was. What she can’t get over is the fact that the role he was playing in the deception was created based on what she was writing in her book, which his sister was critiquing for her. It was designed purely to fulfill her fantasies. And yet he’s the one acting hurt because she fell for this character when she wouldn’t give him the time of day. I keep wanting the heroine to point out to him that he was just in love with an imaginary person. His journal talks about falling in love with her at first sight, but the person he thinks he’s in love with has nothing to do with who she really is. The real woman is basically an avatar for his fantasy woman. At least when she fell for a fictional guy, it was a deliberate deception designed to fool her. He made up a fantasy woman on his own, without her doing anything to encourage it. It seems pretty clear from the contrast between what we saw from her side of the story and the way he sees her in his journal, but no one in the book ever addresses it, and it’s not even mentioned in the reading group guide in the back of one of the copies I have, aside from a question about whether you believe in love at first sight the way he does.

Not to mention, the guy is stalking her the whole time. He follows her home from work and drives by her house all the time. He even looks in the windows sometimes. He’s supposed to be a nice guy who couldn’t get any attention until he changed, but he’s rather creepy. He claims to be following her because he’s worried about her coming home from work in a shady part of town late at night, but if she doesn’t know he’s there and never asked for this help, him following her like that isn’t cool.

I may be a bit overly sensitive about this because I’ve found that the “nice guys” tend to do that avatar thing, where they act like they’re really into me, but it becomes clear that the person they like has very little to do with me. I’m like the actress who plays the character they’re in love with. For me to buy the possibility of a happy ending, I’d need for this to be addressed. The ending of the book is ambiguous, so I guess in my head they’ll have this conversation before anything else happens. It’s always left me with an unsettled feeling, but in recent years the “nice guy” has been discussed a lot on the Internet, which has made me realize what unsettled me so much. I still like the book, but now I know why it bothers me. I don’t know if you could publish this book or make this movie today. Would we see it differently?

writing, movies

Much Ado About Tropes

A couple of weeks ago, I rewatched the Kenneth Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing. That’s my favorite adaptation of that play. Branagh does a lovely job of making it so real and vital, and the cast manages to make the Shakespearean language sound perfectly natural. It takes maybe one scene to tune your ear, and then you just get caught up in the story and forget that it’s Shakespeare. Emma Thompson is particularly good, able to spit out all those zingers while still showing humanity and vulnerability.

I realized while watching that this play contains one of my least-favorite romantic comedy tropes and one of my favorites.

The least favorite is the old “see something involving the other member of the couple out of context, leap to the worst possible conclusion, flounce on the relationship without even discussing it with the other person, then realize they’re wrong, but then everything’s okay and the other person doesn’t seem to have a problem with the fact that someone who supposedly loved them was willing to jump to the worst possible conclusion about them.”

You’d think this would have died out long ago, since it’s more than 400 years old for Shakespeare, and it comes from an even older work that Shakespeare based his play on, but it’s still a staple of rom-coms and Hallmark movies. Shakespeare actually does a somewhat better job with this trope than many of the modern stories do. It’s a deliberate set-up, for one thing, intended to give Claudio the wrong impression. He’s brought to a particular place just in time to see something being staged for his benefit, with Hero’s name being said, and what he sees is unambiguous. Someone he highly respects sees the same thing and comes to the same conclusion. It’s not like the “dark moment” in the Hallmark movies when the heroine sees the hero hugging another woman and decides to flounce back to the city and let the ornament factory close because she thinks he’s involved with another woman.

Then once Claudio learns the truth and realizes he wronged Hero, he does penance even though he’s not the one truly at fault. And in their society, even though she’s been proven blameless, her reputation might have remained damaged if the one who accused her hadn’t taken her back, so of course she’s glad he still wants her. I don’t cut the modern characters as much slack. If she assumed he was cheating on her and didn’t even discuss it with him, then after she realizes that was his sister he was hugging and she goes back to him, I don’t get why he would be so willing to take her back. Why would he want to be with someone who’s that irrationally jealous and who thinks the worst of him?

I have seen one movie in which the woman visited the man’s workplace and saw a wedding photo of him, assumed he was married and she was the “other woman,” so she refused to speak to him again, and after she learned that he was a widower she apologized, but he wasn’t ready to take her back. It took some big gestures on her part, a lot of apologies, and some strings being pulled by his friends for them to move past it and get back together. That worked a bit better, but I’m ready for that misunderstanding trope to be given a rest or at least a twist. Maybe have that happen at the beginning of the story, and that’s why the character is single and maybe a bit bitter when the story’s real love interest comes along. They wouldn’t take back the person who dumped them in a fit of misplaced jealousy, or else they’re the one who screwed up. There could even be a second-chance thing, where this is backstory, and they meet again after this happened.

But the play also contains one of my favorite tropes, which is the people who act like they dislike each other to cover for the fact that they do like each other but are too afraid to let on, for fear that the other one actually does dislike them and would use the knowledge of their feelings as a weapon against them. Benedick and Beatrice bicker and shoot zingers at each other, but they’re ridiculously easy to trick into confessing their feelings. The moment each of them “overhears” (thanks to a scheme by their friends) that the other likes them, they’re delighted and go all-in. There is one speech by Beatrice early in the play that suggests they have a past. It hints that maybe they had a relationship before that ended badly. In the “Shakespeare Uncovered” episode on this play, actors who’ve played these roles said they read it as them having had a romance that went wrong, and both of them see themselves as the wounded party, so they’ve been bickering, but they never got over each other. They’re just both too proud and too wounded to lower the barriers and let their feelings show. It takes other people intervening to make them feel safe to express their feelings.

This isn’t really an “enemies to lovers” thing because they’re basically on the same side. They just pretend not to get along. It’s sort of a second-chance thing. Whatever it is, it can be a lot of fun if it’s done very well, with good dialogue and sizzling subtext. But I suspect it would be very tricky to pull off in a novel that allows you to get inside the characters’ head. It works in the play/movie because they can have fun with the subtext (especially with actors on the level of Branagh and Thompson). It would lose something if you got into their heads and knew how they really felt. I’ve been trying to think of how to make it work in a novel. I’m not sure it could work in third-person narration, where you get to eavesdrop on their thoughts. It might work in first-person narration, with the narrator not being privy to the other character’s thoughts and editing her own thoughts so that she’s not telling the whole story or being entirely honest either with herself or the reader. Or it could be told from some other character’s perspective, say, if the couple were members of a team and the viewpoint character is someone else on the team being amused by how dense those two can be. That was kind of what happened in the Harry Potter books with the relationship between Ron and Hermione, which was seen entirely from Harry’s perspective, except he wasn’t even amused by them. He was as dense about what was going on as they were, and the reader had to figure out what was going on from the subtext and realize that although they bickered a lot, their feelings regarding each other were quite strong.

Now, of course, I’m trying to figure out if I could make the mistaken assumption story work in a way that I like, and I’m mentally scanning my story ideas to see if there’s a place for a “Beatrice and Benedick” relationship. Because I need more story ideas. (Not! I don’t have time to write all the ideas I currently have.)