I have a lot of movies to write about this week; most of them are bad, and then there’s one that surprised me – mostly with nudity, but also with not being terrible! (I am not a fan of surprise nudity, but I am always up for something being less terrible than feared.)
But for now, a writing update:
1. In a hilariously busy month for audio fiction, my SF story “Advection,”, published last year in Clarkesworld, is now a podcast at Escape Pod!
(Unrelated, but sort of related: I really have to get my mp3 player working again, but my iPod is now a five-year-old hostage of a new iTunes system that neither it nor its owner can understand. Meanwhile, a thousand songs have plaintive exclamation points next to them because I can’t play them without authorization. /Preliminary geezer)
2. Bewere the Night, Ekaterina Sedia’s new anthology of shapeshifty stories, is now available for pre-order! It includes my story “She Drives the Men to Crimes of Passion!”, featuring were-shenanigans in 1930s Hollywood.
Tomorrow (here’s hoping), another truly terrible star in the cinema firmament.
As we lead in to Thanksgiving, I can think of nothing I am more thankful for this week than having seen Catwoman twice. (This could not be less true.) I hasten to add that both times were by chance, for free, but I still feel as though I have to talk about it, because YIKES.
No matter how bad you think Catwoman is, you probably have not seen it. “Man, that movie looks really awful,” you probably said when you saw the trailer. “I know better than to see that thing,” you probably said. “That is the worst movie of all time,” you might have said.
Good instinct.
Instinct? GET IT?
The thing is, there are plenty of awful movies that are gleefully, delightfully awful. They are made for five dollars. They are full of cheesy dialogue that lends itself well to drinking games. They are, hypothetically, soap-opera adaptations of Catherine Cookson novels about headstrong ladies who take their siblings to live in caves (“A cave? Really?”) and eventually marry their rapists. These movies are all wonderful.
Then there are the movies that just smack of focus groups and self-sabotage and someone’s cousin owning this totally rad CGI company. Those movies are grindingly awful, mostly because they’re so empty. Legion was one of those: a plodding, pompous wad of cinema. I have actually recommended that people watch Jonah Hex, which was awful, but repeatedly cracked me up; I would never suggest that anyone watch Legion, for any reason. If you are on a desert island and Legion is the only movie available in the island-proof DVD player, use the reflective surface of the DVD to angle sunlight onto some dry grass and start a fire; do not use it for any other purpose. I am serious.*
Legion is still better than Catwoman. Here are ten reasons why Catwoman might possibly be the worst movie ever made.
1. I have another story podcast this month! “Bread and Circuses,” a Tresaultiverse short story that appeared a few weeks back in this month’s issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, is now available in downloadable audio form!
(As opposed to “embedded-MIDI form,” which is nobody’s friend. Unless you like MIDIs, in which case, go to town! With headphones on. Think of your neighbors.)
Last weekend, the amazing Ellen agreed to take some author photos of me!
…In front of THE BEST MURAL OF ALL TIME.
Basically, this is a mural of awesome people who have been drinking gin (steadily) since 1895, AND LOVING IT. And I love them for it. (Except that jerk in the white breeches trying to hand an enormous flower to the gin bottle; for whatever reason I really hate him. I found this out only after I was looking at proofs, though, or I would have stood right in front of him in every shot, that jerk.)
I was very nervous about getting any kind of official photo taken, because I suspected I was not particularly comfortable in front of a camera. (Spoiler alert: this is an understatement.) I brought my friend J. with me, because I knew she’d yell at me about any weird faces when Ellen might err on the side of politeness.
As it turns out, I am so spectacularly uncomfortable in front of a camera that Ellen abandoned quite a bit of politeness by the end of the process. I mean, it’s not like I was holding out hope for a career in the expressive arts, but when someone says, “Smile!”, surely that is something my face knows how to do, right?
Nope. There was a lot of, “Okay, smile…wait, what are you doing?” (I had no idea.) “Could you look slightly less like you’re about to kill me?” (I could not.) And finally, “Could you just…?”, which was my cue to somehow move my body and face into something resembling a human. (I did my best.)
Also, turns out that my Transition lenses are super effective, even in the shade on an overcast day. Surprise! This meant taking off my glasses for several shots so I did not look like a Deal With It meme. Taking off my glasses did not help, since I don’t even know how to hold my eyes open when I can’t focus on anything. (This is not the first time I have encountered this! My junior-year high school portrait was taken without glasses at my parents’ request; in it, I am so blankly wide-eyed that I look as though I am preparing to burn down the school to declare my love for David Cassidy, whose haircut I had stolen. That was a banner year.)
J. likened the whole affair to this:
…She is not wrong. (She actually had to use, “Like a person!” TWICE.)
However, Ellen is such a good photographer that somehow I actually got some of my favorite pictures of me ever out of this shoot, so whatever Ellen did, it totally worked! Now I get to stand in front of that amazing mural, FOREVER.
Bonus: now that I have an official picture, I don’t have to put that high school yearbook photo on my book cover! I think everyone wins.
ETA: Ellen pointed out I hadn’t actually included any pictures! Well done, me.
All right; the trailer for Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood is out, and we need to talk.
(If you were extremely concerned about being spoiled for a Red Riding Hood retelling by a trailer full of people staring at each other as indie rock plays frantically in the background, consider this your spoiler alert.)
Here is a thing about movie trailers: I love them. They are an art form unto themselves and are one of the best things to come out of movie culture. Their evolution is fascinating, their construction is the work of evil geniuses, they often have the best moments of the movie in them, they occasionally ascend to greatness, and I am happy to watch them all day long.
Here is another thing about movie trailers: they are sometimes a pack of lies.
This is not anyone’s fault! This is a natural consequence of boiling down 100 minutes of film into a minute and a half; it is probably going to end up being a lot of lying by omission, is all. (Exceptions include: Michael Bay movies, anything with Katherine Heigl, anything from Meet the [Vague Family Connection], and Baby Geniuses. You can tell everything you need to know about those movies in a minute and a half…if you need that much time.)
So, the makers of trailers have a few choices as to how they tell the most compelling lies possible. Many of them decide to go with plot, thus saving everyone the ten dollars they might have spent to find out how Wicker Park is going to go. (Hint: exactly how you thought Wicker Park was going to go.) Many of them emphasize the movie’s three good lines, or the most expensive explosion, or use Brian Tyler’s Children of Dune music in the background like we’re not going to know who they’re using. (Well, we’re nerds, and we do.)
And many of them, especially spec movies, especially of stories whose plots we know, go for full-on imagery porn, trying to convince people who claim they hate fantasy movies (even though they saw Avatar six times and own every comic book movie made in the last ten years) to spend ten bucks, because sure, it’s Little Red Riding Hood by way of all that second-unit landscape footage you didn’t use in Twilight, but during all the sexing-parts you get to see Amanda Seyfried’s whole leg, almost! MEN, WE BEG YOU TO COME SEE THIS MOVIE.
Well, we will see how that marketing strategy pays off, but for now, let me assure the makers of Red Riding Hood that I will be there. I, in fact, would not miss this. I mean, look at it!
P.S. Before I even begin: yes, The Company of Wolves exists, and it is categorically better than this movie. We’re all on the same page there. Let’s not even worry about it for the rest of this post. There’s plenty of time to hash that one out later. For now, we have a minute and a half of longing glances that need to be made fun of!
First of all, let’s not pretend I’m too cool for school about any of this. Am I a sucker for Red Riding Hood? You are damn right I am – even if, in many retellings, she lacks the good sense God gave a waffle. Am I a sucker for any vaguely fairy-tale movie? You are talking to someone who watched SyFy’s Beauty and the Beast retelling on purpose. Am I a sucker for casts that include Gary Oldman, Julie Christie, and Billy Burke? Please, why are we even asking these questions.
On the other hand, as much as I am into the image of a character in the dark woods in a red cloak (boy, am I EVER), if she is walking up Carhadras in a red cloak that’s fifty feet long, and it’s not a dream sequence, I am going to want some answers, you know? (I am already in line for the answers about why Gary Oldman raids Dumbledore’s closet for his wolf-hunter garb, and have been for a looong time.)
Not that the trailer signals an unmitigated disaster. In and of itself, the trailer is perfectly workmanlike and hints at a movie that might also not be an unmitigated disaster. You know the general tone, you get a vague sense of some plot elements, etc. However, it weirded me out, and on the second viewing I realized why.
I think the most bizarre thing about this trailer is how much it looks like a skillful fan trailer, and much of that is not even how heavily it draws on the aesthetics she used in Twilight (and it does, but we’ll get to that), but because it draws so heavily from other recent fantasy films (the aforementioned LOTR, Sleepy Hollow, even – perhaps ill-advisedly – The Brothers Grimm) that I bet an enterprising fan could actually cobble together a reasonable facsimile of this trailer; if we include The Company of Wolves, which seems almost unfair, I bet we could get something in the uncanny valley!
Okay, now the Twilight part. There’s just no denying; not only did she draw on the same style of cinematography, she used a horny-and-scrappy vs. broody-and-elite love triangle in the center of the plot, and I suspect as more of the movie becomes revealed the similarities will grow in number. (Billy Burke, we need to talk.) But you know what? At the end of the day, no matter how bad the movie is – and I expect it to be pretty bad – I have absolutely zero problem with her pulling from her work on the Twilight franchise.
Was Twilight a good movie? You know it wasn’t. Did it have a 70-million-dollar opening weekend and on to gross what accountants estimate is 100 kajillion dollars? It sure did. Do men directors get away with making the same movie over and over? Absolutely. Are you going to blame Catherine Hardwicke for grabbing some light filters and returning to the hormone-addled pool that gave her the biggest opening weekend ever for a woman director? ‘Cause I’m not gonna.
Anyway, all this to say: this thing looks shitmazing, and I will be the very first person in line, hoping that this movie is unexpectedly great, but suspecting the reverse. (And being fine with that; who are we kidding?)
(Favorite moment of this whole trailer: Lukas Haas creeping around behind the door, getting a contractually-obligated stare in at whatever, and peacing out. HE IS TAKING HIS GOLD-LEAF WOLF DOOR AND GOING HOME.)
