Books Lying Open
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
¤ DAW, The Best Fantasy of the last Thirty Years
¤ The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Parental mystery visits.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because repeatedly punching several inches from the face of a relative stranger is enough to tire out the trapezoids.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May the construction continue interminably.

s previously mentioned, my mom and stepdad are coming to visit us this weekend. We think. It's very unclear, since they were going to be up from San Diego, visiting some other friends during the week, and then were going to come up here over the weekend. The problem is that the last time I heard from mom, via email, was in late August, and she didn't mention visiting here then. We'd sort of fixed the date for the trip weeks before that, but there's never been any actual "We'll be there on X date at X time, and in fact I've not heard a word from mom for 10 days via email, and not on the phone in weeks. So as I said, they may show up tomorrow, or they might have cancelled the whole thing and still be in San Diego, and think that we know that, when we do not.  I've been meaning to call them for several days, but since they were (supposedly) not home, and since the only cell phone they own is janky and can only be used when it's actually plugged in, in the car, I seem to be using that as an excuse not to call. Plus I keep thinking they'll call here; after all, shouldn't they be checking to be sure we're home, we know they're coming, to tell us when they're going to arrive, etc?  It's all very confusing.

I did get one wish though; the weather finally cooled down a bit on Thursday, and is supposed to be cooler yet over the weekend. The forecast initially had it cooling on Wednesday, then they backed that up to Thursday, and now it's Friday, but hey, that's the beauty of a prediction. If you keep making it, eventually it'll come true.

On a side note, I hate the term "stepdad" in this situation. My parents divorced when I was 7, and my mom didn't remarry until I was in my 20s, so the usual image of the hated stepdad moving in and imposing his new rules on a child who hates him and wants his real dad back is inaccurate. Wildly inaccurate in this case, since I like Glenn a lot, and he entered my mom's life, and therefore my life, when I was already an adult and soon to be living out of the house (they dated for a few years while before marriage).

The problem is... what do I call him? As discussed, "stepdad" is almost a curse word in most usages, but if I call him "my mom's new husband" that sounds even worse, like I'm refusing to have anything to do with him and not admitting that he's in any way related to me.  Yet it's insufficient to say "my mom and a friend are coming to visit" since that doesn't explain the situation at all.  On the other extreme, if I just say "my parents" then it's equally inaccurate, but for other reasons, mainly he's not my biological father, and my biological father is also part of my life and visits here quite often. Speaking of the Mr. Bruce, he's not even that fond of me calling Glenn "stepdad," since the one time he heard me use it, he was a bit weirded out. Dad was like, "I'm not dead!"  It made Malaya and me laugh, at least.

Sadly, I lack a solution to this issue. I'm just spending 4 paragraphs to explain something that you probably didn't need explained in the first place.

Anyway, assuming mom and Glenn arrive sometime tomorrow, and stay overnight somewhere (we'd put them up here but they'd be sleeping on the living room floor in our small condo) in the area, we'll be spending some time with them over the weekend. We've got some stuff planned for Saturday and Sunday, and anyway, they're both like us; more into sitting around and talking than necessarily going out and doing stuff together.  Mom wants to see me and catch up on life and both the parents want to get to know Malaya better, and she likes both of them even though there's only been one short visit thus far. So it should be a pretty good weekend.  Assuming they show up tomorrow. Or at least call.

That visit (or not) issue aside, I posted a quick bit of deleted material from my ongoing fantasy novel in Wednesday's blog. It wasn't much, and it wasn't anything special, but it did generate a few reader comments. Here's Andrew, who makes a point I want to comment on.

He's got a point, and if I were leaving that in the story I would make changes much as he suggests. I have in other areas, but it's tricky. I want to convey the size and scale and time-flow of events, but I don't want to make it sound like a measuring contest.  So I try to be somewhat generic "a day and a night later" rather than "24 hours later" and I try to be more poetic in my language, "by the time she'd taken another ten strides" rather than something like "fifteen seconds later."

But at times I need to say just how far something is, like when characters are racing to get through a collapsing cave, or trying to climb a steep cliff, and then I often have to use an actual measurement, of some kind.  What kind to use is also an issue, since I'm writing fantasy and it's assumed they're not that technologically-advanced. Sci-Fi you can use parsecs and meters and liters and all that, and it's fine. But when I've seen modern fantasy try to use the metric system, it's always painfully jarring, in an anachronistic fashion. "The man was huge -- easily 190 centimeters tall!"  Just death.

The problem with other measurements is that you either invent something of your own, give it arbitrary lengths, and confuse readers through the entire book since you know they're not going to memorize your new system of weights and measures, or you use olde English measurements, since Tolkien inspired most of this nonsense, in one way or another. And that's okay, and "feet" and "inches" and "yards" seem more or less appropriate to fantasy... but what happens when your books are sold in other countries where they don't use those measurements? Or get translated into French, German, Spanish, etc, and the translators put in metric terms in their language?

I'm already trying to avoid anachronisms in my narrative voice, and even that's a pain at times. Since the story is pre-industrial, basically the whole "dark ages with magic" period that most fantasy is set in, I can't use analogies or descriptions I would in a modern day tale. Nothing can be described as moving "mechanically" or "robotically," nothing is "hard as steel" nothing has "plasticity" no one moves "like clockwork," and so on. I constantly catch myself trying to use the first simile that pops to mind, and having to reject it since it's got some modern derivation.

Another email, this one from Donnie.

I can't really get into Vena and Quinoss' relationship without it being spoilery, but once you read chapter two up to the point of the excerpt, you'll see that she has plenty of reasons to fear him letting her be buried in a cave in, or leaving her behind to die. At least she thinks she does, which is all that matters for the chapter excerpt, since it's from her POV. Quinoss ain't no Galdalf, and Vena ain't no ring bearer. Quinoss has a goal and a plan, he's not about to risk his life or die for any man or woman in the meantime, and right from the start Vena knows she's got very little to offer him, and needs him a lot more than he needs her.  In fact he doesn't seem to need her at all, and she occasionally wonders why he's keeping her around at all. You think there will be a reason eventually? And something good, not just the usual fantasy novel cop out that she's a child borne of prophecy or some bullshit like that? You'll have to wait and see, won't you...

As for the names, I'm pretty happy with Quinoss, despite the Quiznos subs association, though that may yet change. It's not his real name anyway, and that becomes a plot point in a very strange way in a much later chapter, but he might start going by a different alias later in the book, or I might just change it entirely from the start.

I am not happy with Vena's name, but I'm not worrying about it at this point since 1) "Vena" is quick and easy to type, and 2) once I settle upon something better, "find and replace" won't take long at all.

As for Donnie's suggestions, thanks, but there is no way "Amber" or "Misty" will be what I choose. I'm never good at picking names for characters, (You thought me calling them all by just their character class was an accident in the D2 holiday stories?) but I want something you don't hear people called today, that's not too long or weird or annoying, at least not for Vena. She's not going to have a handle like oh... Mellisandre, or Galadriel, or something classy and multisyllabic like that, since she's just a street thief, at least initially, and she's got enough character without me giving her a Princess' name just to have her play against type. 

This was the first (and so far only) M. Night Shyamalan movie I've seen, though I've heard about The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable forever, and how widely people are split on their opinion of his work. (I saw Signs on a DVD from the library in July, before the release of The Village, so the coverage of that movie didn't effect my viewing of Signs.) I knew, going in to Signs, that Shyamalan aspired to be this generation's Hitchcock, and that he was very good at setting a creepy mood and tone and creating great suspense from almost nothing. No one seems to deny his skill at directing; it's the plots and characters and stories he chooses to tell that people debate. I knew something about Signs, that it involved aliens and an ex-reverend losing his faith and then maybe regaining it.

So while I knew of and about Shyamalan's movies, I'd never actually seen any of them, and had generally heard that Signs was pretty good, at least during the set up. And I agree, it had a very effectively creepy set up, if you could buy into the relative absurdity of it all.  But when it came to the pay off, the grand finale, where the flashbacks were resolved and they came up out of the cellar and saw what was in their living room... I thought the movie fell apart completely and just became ridiculous. If I'd only seen the first 80% of this film, I probably would have given it a 7.5 or an 8 overall. But since I thought the ending was not just bad, but actively horrible, my score for it and for everything else came tumbling down.

I'm not going to compile one of my lists of nit picking details for this film, but if I did it would be very, very long. The following paragraphs contain spoilers, since the movie came out years ago and I figure you've all seen it or at least heard about it by now.

The whole "allergic to water" part was certainly the weakest and more ridiculous thing in the movie, but it wasn't like the aliens made any sense on any other level either. They can navigate the universe, find a planet with suitable life forms, to randomly-terrorize, etc. But then they've got to make crop circles to mark where they're supposed to land. They don't have a slightly more advanced location system than flattened corn stalks? And it wasn't as if it mattered where they landed anyway, they didn't have any more strategy than "land and terrorize and try not to get locked into pantries."

Moreover, they pick a planet covered in water, where it rains all the time and the air is largely composed of water vapor, and then go in to attack without any sort of protective gear or weaponry. Mel Gibson's farm had to be the only one in America that didn't have a few hunting rifles or shotguns lying around, and even without them a few boards with nails in them is more than enough to keep out the invading alien horde. They can build spacecraft but they don't know how to pick up a rock?  Or carry a chainsaw? And they're not smart enough to just grab people and carry them away, rather than trying to do their pointlessly-nefarious poison gas thing right in the living room?

It was like they were some sort of alien-zombies; scary, deadly in some ways but so stupid in others that it was just embarrassing. Imagine you and five friends are going to try and break into a house that's protected only by a few boards nailed over the windows. It's a farm house, so there are hoes and hammers and saws and all sorts of other heavy tools out in the shed, and anyway, you can leap up onto the roof and they didn't seal all the upper windows. How long are you going to spend clawing at boards you can't pull off bare-handed? How stupid do you have to be to not organize your friends to pick up a table and use it to bash the basement door down?  It was like Shyamalan wanted to make a monster movie, and tie it in with crop circles, but when he decided to make the monsters actual intelligent humanoid aliens he was too lazy to rewrite the plot events to make sense.  So they're basically just wandering idiots who look scary, but don't have enough intelligence to do anything productive.

As Ebert said, in his one-star review of The Village: 

I was never that involved, and while the first hour of Signs worked quite well for me, even though it felt a bit manipulative, "can we please just barely see one more creepy thing vanishing into the darkness of the cow rows," I was still more or less caught up in the suspense, and I was watching it at home. If I'd seen it in the theater without knowing anything about it, I think I would have really been into it, though the ending would still have seemed very, very stupid.

I also didn't like the connected "rediscovering his faith" subplot, since it felt very ham-handed. Mel's wife died in impossibly melodramatic fashion, and left him only her incomprehensible "swing away" dying message. So of course that's what saves the little kid in the end when Mel's able to tell his brother to "swing away" with the bat. I must admit that I've never beaten an alien to death while it was trying to poison my nephew, but do you really need a dying message from your brother's wife to tell you to grab a club and use it to whack a dangerous intruder?

We're also supposed to see the little girl's phase of not drinking water and leaving full cups all over the house as a blessing since it helped save them from the naked alien, and the little boy's asthma as a blessing since his lungs closed off and therefore he didn't breath any of the poison. (As if any quality poison gas wouldn't just absorb through the mucus membranes in your mouth and throat, even if you didn't swallow it.) I mean yeah, all the little clues throughout the movie end up tying together and making sense, but they make such a stupid-sense that it felt very manipulative to me. Like Shyamalan spent too much time writing cute little things into the script just because he thought he was so clever, rather than because they were needed and helped the plot work.

Overall, I admired the skill with which the movie was made and with which the suspense was built up, and the acting was fine, but the conclusion is ridiculous, and the more you think back over the film the less it holds together. Hence my low score for a movie that had a lot of good elements, especially over the first 75% of it.

Master and Commander, the Far Side of the World
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 8
Humor: 6
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6

I'm at a loss to explain why I didn't like this movie more. It's got a decent plot, good action, good acting through and through, it mixes in enough humor to keep things light, it's relatively fun, and though I've only seen it once (since we bought the DVD used from Hollywood Video during one of their 3/$25 sales) I can imagine watching it again and enjoying it.

My main objection? The star. After years of reading one drunken brawl story after another about Russell, I have trouble seeing him as a real actor. It's sort of like any Mel Gibson movie after the craziness of The Passion when we all found out what an out-there old-school pre-Vatican II Catholic he was: I'll never see him in a movie again without wondering when he'll be tortured, or start ranting about Jews, or work in his obligatory anti-gay character/remark.  Russell isn't that bad; I can still see him as an actor, sort of, but it's hard. And whenever he's in a scene with drinking, or fighting, it's all over; it might as well be a documentary at that point.

Other than Russell "Fightin' 'Round the World" Crowe, my only real objection was that they took too long to get to the conclusion, and that they spent too much time on the subplots. This is utterly hypocritical of me, since I regularly dislike movies that have no subplots, or feel rushed since there's nothing at all that's not put there purely to propel the plot along. And yet, while watching Master and Commander, I frequently wanted them to get on with it. Less grumbling about the captain's determination to fight a more powerful ship, less of the doctor whining about how he never gets enough time to catch animals on the Galapagos Islands, less of the wimpy underachieving midshipman before he finally kills himself, one or two fewer long dinner scenes with lots of officers roaring in laughter, etc. Any of those would have been fine, but to cram so many subplots into the same long movie bloated it and sapped the energy from the overall plot and story. By the time the enemy ship showed up again at the end, I hardly remembered what Russell's ship was there to do in the first place, or why we were supposed to care.

True, I always expected that it would show up again, and that we'd get some closure, but the movie seemed too content to just putter along and show the minutia of life on the ship. And while that would be great in a documentary, and I liked all of the subplots and information about that era, it took me out of the story and excitement of the plot.

This is a very subjective complaint and review, I admit, but what's a review for if not to communicate my opinion, about the film, no matter how unlikely?

I'll get through the remainder of my reviews backlog at some point, but no promises when. Fortunately, I haven't seen any films or read any books that I wanted to review, didn't get to, and had to add to this list, in weeks. So while it's not getting shorter very quickly, at least it's not going the other way.

So, coming semi-soon:

• Roger and Me
• The Professional
• La Femme Nikita
• The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett