The mainstream & comics again

Sure, so-called think pieces in newspapers are always easy targets but a new one in The Telegraph is particularly unthinking about an unimportant subject and weakly argued about an important one.  I was going to start with the second but since the first shows many of the problems then might as well go in order.

The headline and opener put forward the idea "Are superheroes the new gods?"  The headline even claims the writer "argues that comic books are the new Bible" though of course she does no such thing.  Even the god/religion idea has been kicking around for decades, explored both within the stories and by criticism.  In no sense is this an actual religion so the writer Anne Billson resorts to the argument that fans oppose changes to the "canon".  First thing to note is that comics fans rarely use the word "canon" instead predominantly saying "continuity" which is a different concept.  Though you could argue that it takes a canon (texts) to make up continuity (diegesis) that's not how comics fans approach this.  One good example that relates directly to Man of Steel is that he does something at the end that can be supported in one book that's considered a classic (in other words more or less canon) but is actually out of continuity.  The enormous arguments among fans about this isn't whether it's canonical or in continuity but whether it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the character and the purpose of the stories.  (I haven't seen the film but if the reports are accurate--and you've noticed I'm being vague about this--then fundamental misunderstanding seems correct.)

Billson then resorts to religious terms that don't in any way relate to the actuality.  Who is being "excommunicated" because of X-Men: The Last Stand and from what?  The debates about Spider-Man's webbing according to her are "theological" (based on what?) and The Mandarin's revision in the new Iron Man movie might be "heresy" (or it's just so radically different it share nothing but the name with the books).  I'd like to think this is tongue-in-cheek but the tone doesn't really support that and if she was then the transition to the next topic would be even more clumsy than it already is.

Then Billson gets to the important point and one that really should have been the headline - "the world of superhero movies is a boys' club."  Not exactly news or even very observant but unlike the religion claims this is something that needs to be addressed and changed.  At least she focuses on the movies and not the books which may be because she hasn't read the books (it's unclear but considering the lack of references probably not) or because while this is a major problem in the comics business it's nowhere near as bad.  And of course this is not specific to movies or comics since there have been numerous reports about the problem in journalism and literary writing (see for instance here or here or here).  It's just worse in the film business because the amount of money and inherent risk (plus let's be fair the lack of imagination) makes studios very resistant to change.  The solution isn't that somebody should decide the movies need more women characters but that the business needs more women executives, directors and writers (unfortunately in that order).  Who knows, maybe they will make the exact same decisions but that's at least a start.

Haul from the library sale

Today picked up:

Schoenbaum - William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life
Harington - Some Other Place, The Right Time
Brooks - The Times of Melville and Whitman
Eicher - Dixie Betrayed
Armstrong - A History of God
Adams - Brave New Worlds (dystopian anthology)
Moorcock - The Jewel in the Skull (Tor edition)
Thompson - Mystery & Lore of Monsters

There was also a nice copy of Pound's Cantos but when I flipped through somebody made a bunch of annotations along the lines of "loosely translated from Homer" so they weren't even useful.  I went back and forth anyway because it was only $2 but figured I was just getting it as a spare or potential gift so maybe somebody else would appreciate it.  There was also a thick history of WW1 naval war that I also nearly got.  Decided against it since that's probably the one period of naval history that I'm least interested in but more importantly it really was very thick so I was pretty sure I'd never read it.  And a Bill Malone-edited collection of country musician profiles that I really did intend to get except I didn't put it with my stack the first time through and completely forgot to go back.

Jack Reacher(s)

I don't usually post spoiler warnings but since this will be about a book whose primary purpose is plot twists and a similar movie then I thought this might be a nice touch.

Lee Child started the Jack Reacher series with his first novel, 1997's Killing Floor.  It's a reasonably effective crime thriller laced with the grotesque violence that so many writers feel is necessary to show how hardboiled they are.  The premise of Reacher as a former military cop who's now a drifter obviously draws from Westerns and solves a lot of problems in writing a series since there's no need to explain how he got anywhere, tie up any loose ends or even explain why he knows anything.

Killing Floor has Reacher in a small Georgia town chosen for an arbitrary reason but he soon gets involved in a murder investigation.  It has the usual small town scheming, hired thugs, local bad boys, surprise events and sexual encounters that are driven purely by genre needs.  As you might expect Reacher is something of a super-detective, always one step ahead of the cops and rarely wrong.  The most interesting part might be when he's in prison and I halfway expected (or at least hoped) him to be there for the entire novel.  He's of course not concerned about The Law but about Justice and in at least one situation basically murders a couple of men - they do turn about to be guys planning to kill him but when he did that he only had a suspicion nothing concrete.

The oddest thing about the book is some outrageous coincidences.  The biggest is that Reacher gets off at that particular town because it was the home to a blues musician that his brother told him about years ago.  And then the murder victim turns out to be Reacher's brother but he was in town for reasons completely unconnected to Reacher's.  That two brothers would be in the same small town at the same time unknown to each other and for completely different reasons (and then one is arrested for the murder of the other) is so outlandish that Child even has Reacher muse on it before deciding that life is full of coincidences.  True but art shouldn't be unless there's a particular point (or it's a structuring principle as with Lost).  In this case it's clear that first-time novelist Child created a situation that he couldn't (or didn't want to spend the time) resolve.  It's this inexperience that's also why the novel has so little flavor.  It's set in rural Georgia but could just as well have been anywhere in the country.  There's not much in the way of anything unique to that region and sure Child is British but if he didn't want to do the research then he could have just made it up.  On the other hand that's what he apparently did with a description of the Atlanta airport that's completely wrong.

The film Jack Reacher (Christopher McQuarrie 2012) is based on a later novel in the series and is in most ways more effective though it too ends with implausible plot devices.  (It's not well served by a trailer that makes this look like more of an ubermensch action film.)  Tom Cruise was a good choice to play Reacher since as an actor he's mostly a blank and Reacher borders on the anonymous.  Rosamund Pike, though, seems to have not been told she's in a genre film since at times she's performing as if for something altogether more naturalist.  The film is taut and if not really unpredictable then at least twisty enough.  The dialogue is definitely sharper than usual and at least some of Reacher's investigation follows a logical path (though he still is rarely wrong).

It's main flaw is some of the plotting and motivation which apparently come from the novel (which I haven't read).  At one point Reacher tracks down somebody because she said "THE auto parts store" instead of "AN auto parts store" so he has the lawyer take him to the city's THE store.  This is ridiculously slender to be charitable - actually it's basically impossible and was papering over a plot point.  (I call the place where I work THE store even though it's not remotely THE store for my city.)

But when we get to the reason why all of this is happening everything becomes more and more outlandish.  Apparently a criminal-backed real estate company pressures people to sell for cheap, develops property then sells at a profit.  The pressure seems to consist of assorted nefarious activity and in this case they orchestrated a mass murder to hide a single murder. Sure we wouldn't have this story if they had done otherwise but when any kind of garden-variety killing would have worked it's hard not to tug at that thread.  I'm sure the filmmakers realize this since they zip through this part very quickly.  They also zip over why a civilian would come help Reacher in what is also clearly illegal.  (I also always wonder how lunatic criminal "masterminds" who kill their underlings ever manage to get more - though in this case the "mastermind" is so lethargic that I half expected another reveal towards the end of somebody else behind the whole affair.)

One more about screenwriting

My last two posts were about Django Unchained and the state of screenwriting so perhaps it's inevitable that I'd get to the fact that Django won the Oscar for best original screenplay.  And the year before that Midnight in Paris.  Both seem somewhat odd choices.  Nobody expects the Academy to actually choose the best anything but Django is unusually disorganized and quite unfocused while Midnight is basically a bland Twilight Zone reject.

But those are judgments of taste, at least to some degree, and clearly many people would disagree.  Moving to more factual ground it's worth noting that both films very deliberately remove politics from their historical subjects.  Midnight is set in Paris during a time of great artistic creativity but there are no French characters in it except for a brief Cocteau cameo.  All of that activity becomes a mere backdrop to the Americans.  The war becomes just a bit for Hemingway.  And the surrealists are portrayed as mere clowns with not the slightest mention of their constant political activities ranging from Communist provocations to (verbally) attacking priests in the streets.  Django portrays slavery as just the whims of sadists or lazy landowners and not a long-lived and vast institution that had governmental, religious and social support.

But really what's most interesting about these writing Oscars is that while they're for writing a screenplay voters apparently don't have to read the screenplay to vote.  I checked the rules and didn't find any mention or other restrictions (though it's possible there's something not in the rules on the website).  Django for instance was filmed from a larger screenplay and was adjusted during filming and editing.  According to many reports at least one fairly large sub-plot was eliminated while others were reduced, expanded or had emphasis changed.  None of this is particularly unusual though there does appear to have been a bit more for Django.  Another Year was nominated in 2010 and Happy-Go-Lucky in 2008 but Leigh's films often use much improvisation.  Several Pixar films had writing nominations but Pixar's famous highly collaborative filmmaking method almost can't be described as writing, certainly not in the traditional sense of a first script that's then produced.

The point is how can the finished film be used to judge a screenplay when at least in this case you only have a rough sense of what the screenplay was like?  Sure Academy members are film professionals and would have a much better idea of the screenplay from the finished product than, say, me.  But in cases where there are extensive changes, improvisation and what have you it's just impossible to know.  (It's doesn't help that the Academy is invitation-only with no public membership list - the Oscars are proof that they've never had any idea about genuine film art but even on a more trivial level we just don't really know who's voting.)  I don't know anything about the production of Midnight in Paris but from what I've heard about Allen's previous work it was probably a tight shoot that followed the script closely.  But the point is that I don't know - maybe Allen did have all the French life in it but took that out during filming and editing.  Maybe the lead character was a woman in the script (which at least might have removed the whiff of misogyny that the film has).

I also noticed that the adapted screenplay category has a few odd choices.  Toy Story 3 goes into "adapted" just because it uses characters from previous films.  It's not really adapted in any meaningful sense.   Similarly the fantastic In the Loop is tagged adapted because one character comes from a TV show (and though some of the actors do they're playing different characters in the movie).

Screenwriting

Drop by a bookstore and you can find numerous books about screenwriting, far more books you might think than there are active screenwriters.  And maybe that’s ok – one reason books exist is to let us immerse in activities we would never actually do or perhaps dabble with doing or maybe actually can’t do.

So then why do so many colleges offer classes in screenwriting?  The best that one of these students can hope for is that they might be able someday to write a commercial or instructional video for an employer.  In fact even then they would be better off learning as they go like most screenwriters have done.  Whether this makes screenwriting classes the equivalent of the mythical basketweaving classes is hard to call – you might argue that students learn discipline and control of language – but that’s not a comparison that could be easily dismissed.

The even bigger picture is that despite all this instruction and support there can only be a very few people who would claim that Hollywood writing is in any conceivable fashion being well-done.  We all realize that screenwriting is far worse than it was even thirty years ago, across the board no matter whether you’re considering structure, dialogue, concision or pacing.  And I’m including TV as “Hollywood” because even if you consider The Sopranos, Deadwood, Lost or even The Walking Dead, True Blood or The Wire as somehow superior to other TV they are all severely damaged by the demands of a medium that requires padding, extension and subplots.  (The Brits, at least here, do this better.)

But it was actually three films and a specific item that started me wondering about this.  Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, The Green Hornet and Conan the Barbarian all have a prologue and in each case the prologue is utterly unnecessary.  The material is what once upon a time would have be considered backstory and brought up in the main story as needed.  Now we’re treated to plodding displays of every single motive and character beat.  The idea of backstory still exists apparently but now is something to fill out running times or to eliminate any confusion or ambiguity.

Admittedly these three films are all quite bad but as far as screenwriting goes they aren’t Hollywood anomalies.  Enormous hits like Avatar or Iron Man are if anything worse.  Even acclaimed films such as recent Oscar nominees Moneyball, Inception, Midnight in Paris, Argo and (seriously?) Avatar don’t show much to contradict this, though admittedly even if most Oscar nominees typically aren’t particularly good films they also typically aren’t especially bad ones either.

This all comes back not necessarily to screenwriting classes and books but to the idea inherent in them that screenwriting is basically learning certain structures and techniques.  I’ve read the Robert McKee book and that perhaps sums it up.  McKee’s book either displays the obvious or jumps into the silly but basically it’s an extended attempt to turn learning exercises into master technique, or even dogma.  However useful the idea of three-act structure might be on a theoretical level it does have a purpose in guiding somebody learning to write.  It’s not necessary to learn that way and in fact that may not be best way to do it but it does have a function.

What’s happening though is that this is turning into the way all screenplays are being conceived and structured.  That’s why we’re seeing prologues and exposition and character moments and movies that are far too long.  There’s just too much clutter.  This is unavoidable for TV shows because they have to run for certain amounts of time and use a certain number of actors (at least American TV).  Not to mention that networks can’t leave well  enough alone and insist on continuing shows past their sell-by dates.

And there’s too much effort on making the three-act story fit three acts.  It’s increasingly rare to see in media res used though many films could benefit from it.  One of my all-time favorite TV episodes is from Firefly that opens with the captain alone on the ship, so wounded that he’s barely able to crawl and the ship counting down to self-destruction.  How many films would open like that?  (Actually one of the deleted scenes for The Avengers was a Maria Hill debriefing that would have made most of the film a flashback.  It was wisely removed not just for the flashback issue but because the tone was off.)  What made the Firefly episode more memorable, if a bit showy, is that along with the story of the captain’s struggle against the clock it had flashbacks to show how he and the crew got to that point and then a second set of flashbacks relating how the crew came to be on the ship together.

You could argue that the sorry state of screenwriting is really due to those perennial bad guys The Money Men.  They’re the ones insisting that stories be completely clear, that there be no gaps or ambiguities, that characters be likable and reasonable (or if they’re antagonists then mean and reasonable), that every little thing be explained and filled in.  So writers are just giving the studios what they want which is what the studios think the public wants (or at least tests well).

Which perhaps answers my initial question.  There are books and classes about screenwriting because that’s how the assembly line keeps running.  And I’m hardly the first person to point out that it’s the glamour of movies that brings people to that business against their better judgement so if they see a way to create a ticket to that ride then what could be better?  Even if they really know it’s never going to happen they can still convince themselves that hey just maybe it could if only I had the time, connections, ideas, luck, right software.  Because after all writing a screenplay is just like making a sausage….

Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino 2012)

In an odd way Django Unchained reminds me of Cars.  That film was Pixar’s first failure and, consequently or causally, looked like a Pixar imitation while Django Unchained is Tarantino’s first complete failure and looks much like a Tarantino imitation.  Except that few imitators would have let their film stretch so far that a good hour or so should have been removed.

Consider the opening where Dr. Schultz inexplicably arrives from the exact opposite direction of the slave train so how did he know about the sale of a particular slave?  Or why he rides with Django all the way to the next town before either of them discuss what he wants?  Yes, this is nitpicking - both points could easily be explained and don’t much matter anyway.  But why set up a plot based on tracking down three brothers only to resolve it immediately, apparently at the first plantation the duo visits?  Only to then bring out the longer plot point of Django searching for his wife?  What’s the purpose of the entire winter sequence?  I suspect it was just a way to pay tribute to The Great Silence but supposed that it could be considered Django’s training.  It’s not at all clear if there’s any good reason to delay Django’s search through the winter.

The film basically meanders along, oddly slack and with little of the brisk dialogue that Tarantino favors.  Apparently the point is to show Django’s growth from his start with a (re)birth, to where he is taught to dress and read, sits down for a bedtime story then learns from the doctor until at last he’s a murdering, bombing, wife-saving Man.  The whole thing is so simplistic and even cartoonish (one sequence could have come from Blazing Saddles) that the film has nothing to say about slavery (which Tarantino perhaps learned about from viewing Goodbye Uncle Tom) or race or anything really.  Maybe it wasn’t meant to say anything but it’s not even entertaining except for bits here and there so that doesn’t leave us much of anywhere.

I’m still not sure whether Tarantino meant for us to notice, if in fact he noticed himself, the ethical problem of Dr. Schultz.  As a bounty hunter who can bring in a bounty dead or alive he chooses dead, something he explains in such a deadpan tone that it sounds more psychopathic than reasonable.  More to the point is this means that the legal system, if not justice in the broader sense, is being bypassed - there can never be a trial.  The suspect is prejudicially determined guilty.  Considering the vague descriptions and lack of photographs there’s certainly a good chance for misidentification, though admittedly this point starts to wander away from the film.  DU isn’t about the mechanics of bounty hunting though the blatant disregard of ethics is certainly to the point.

As an aside, this is a movie version of bounty hunting.  Such hunters weren’t officially part of the law enforcement system until well after the Civil War and most of them during the period in the film tracked slaves and deserters primarily.  And they only got half the bounty if the suspect was dead.  All this seems to have varied widely but it does point to some historical uncertainties in DU.  At the very start we’re told that the film is set in 1858 “two years before the Civil War” which of course is wrong.  I tried to see if Tarantino explained this but all I found were some people claiming that this is him deliberately adding historical inconsistencies though I didn’t really understand to what purpose.  In Walker Alex Cox added blatant anachronisms with the purpose of drawing a continuity between 19th and 20th century meddling in Central America.  That film wasn’t entirely successful in such a purpose (and of course ignored that Walker’s expeditions had no government backing unlike most of what the US did the following century) and Django Unchained has no similar point to make.  Besides being off about the start of the war by a single year looks far more like a plain old mistake rather than some deliberate effect.  I also noticed that instead of Brunhilde (or variant spellings) the character’s name is spelled Broomhilda just like the comic strip.

It’s nice to see Franco Nero, the original Django, in a cameo though it would have been even better to have also included Tomas Milian who had the lead in the demented Django Kill...If You Live Shoot (whether or not he’s actually called Django in that film).  The geek part of me thinks it would have been cool to have peppered the entire film with actors who played Django in the many films using that name, though most were simple retitles for the English-language market.

German Book 3

J.W. Thomas (ed) - German Verse from the 12th to the 20th Century in English Translation (1963)

Well, this is very annoying.  I wrote the review for this and apparently at some point deleted it without posting.  I don't feel like rewriting it (and in any case have returned the book to the library) so a few points:

*  The translations are all by the editor J.W. Thomas and though he doesn't explicitly say so he appears to be trying to duplicate the original meter and rhyme scheme in English.  This starts out well (perhaps the song-like nature of the medieval verses are more musical than poetic?) but increasingly seems to hobble the translations.

*  As far as I can tell from comparing to other anthologies this is a fairly standard representation of poets.  There are a few that don't appear in others (such as the Penguin anthology) but I have no idea if those are idiosyncratic choices or just the second-tier writers that will always change with the person making the selection.

*  The modern pieces are missing such big names as Brecht and Benn.  There's no indication whether this is due to copyright, whether Thomas feels they're not important or if they're after some unstated cut-off date.

*  There are some glosses as headers to the poems that mostly are unneeded.  The bios for each poet are useful as far as they go but Thomas is determined to link most poems to the actual life.  A strong and not uncommon impulse but does it really matter whether a particular work was intended for the woman who would become the poet's wife?  Thomas' introductions to each era are broad and simplistic.