Or, if you’re me, any day!

Up at Fantasy Magazine this week, I posted Ten Cheesetastic Fantasy Flicks for Summer. For once, there’s no competition for which one is best, because they’re all the best!

Except maybe Xanadu is the best.

(Look at those hostage eyes. Yipes.)

The thing is, some of the movies on that list are cheesy but legitimately good. The Mummy, for example, is pretty unapologetic summer-blockbuster pulp, but I’ve seen it quite a few times and it always holds up, because Pulpy and Bad are not synonymous, even though a lot of things that aim for Pulpy end up at Bad. (That’s another essay. I’m just noting it here.) Lost Boys is awesome, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is amazing. I’ll even make a case for Earth Girls are Easy being a pretty solid flick! (Somewhere, Joseph Campbell is cringing.)

But there are some movies (…XANADU) that defy explanation.

I mean, you CAN explain it. You can say Xanadu is about Kira, one of the Muses who routinely get sent to inspire various artists to great heights, and her job is to inspire an album-repo artist to quit his job and open a Xanadu-themed rollerskate nightclub with Gene Kelly.

But look at that sentence. Nothing in it makes any sense! The whole movie is like this.

Explaining it more doesn’t help. Kira and Sonny (Malone, his name is Sonny Malone, people tell you that constantly in this movie) accidentally fall in love, which the guy is supposed to do because stalking people gets the creative impulse going, but she’s not supposed to because her dad Zeus will get mad at her (literally, her dad is Zeus and he scolds her through a reverb pedal), so their love is Forbidden, just like her love with Gene Kelly was Forbidden back in the ’40s when she came down to inspire Gene Kelly to…do something artistically amazing that will make him rich and famous. (It doesn’t seem to have panned out. No one mentions it. Maybe it’s awkward.)

How will Sonny ever find the heart to take Gene Kelly away from his beach rock and make Gene Kelly shop for suits in a store filled with dancers and find the strength to keep the club going when all he can think about is that girl he keeps seeing who never, ever takes her rollerskates off, except during the animated love sequence, in which she turns into a bird with legwarmers?

(I’ve seen this movie like, six times. It never gets any less confusing.)

It was hard to choose a representative clip. The scene where the sisters wake up from the mural they’re painted on (really happens) is pretty good. It gives the right tone for the film, both because the song makes you want to slap your ears off, and because it looks like the people actually in the scene were just as confused as anyone else, and the choreography was called out in a series of impromptu orders. (“Look at your hands! You have some hands! Have more hands! HAVE MORE HANDS.”)

But I think this clip has to win.

Notes: this clip has been severely chopped, so you are missing out on the Gene Kelly-led rollerskating step routine and the part where Kira and her sisters sing this in half a dozen different styles, including Country Western, in which Michael Beck (SWAN, WHY) has to shake his shoulders like he’s trying to wrench an arm out of the socket so he can be excused to the medic and just keep running and never look back.

Also, many of those sisters aren’t the same sisters from the beginning of the movie. I’m just saying, that’s the kind of show you’re in for.

An awesome one.

Okay, I have not even begun to settle back in from Launchpad, where I spent a week learning about space with some unspeakably awesome people, but I have a lot of updates and not enough time to write thoughtful intros for them (or for anything, ever). So, we’ll do this list-style and then I promise to bore you sometime later this week with the awesome details about making s’mores with people using only starlight for heat and marshmallows we harvested ourselves.

(This did not happen. Wyoming has no marshmallow trees, as they only thrive in the Pacific Northwest.)

1. First, fiction news! My short story “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” is up at Lightspeed Magazine!

2. I saw Inception opening weekend. I had to wait until I was in New York to do it – I dropped my suitcase at my apartment and went straight from there to the theatre – but I saw it. I will be writing more (a lot more) about this movie later, but for now, my SPOILERY review is up at Tor.com. SPOILERS. It says so in the cut-tag, but I’m direct-linking, so SPOILERS. SO MANY SPOILERS. THE TITANIC SINKS. DARTH IS LUKE’S DAD. SO MANY SPOILERS.

3. Launchpad was great. I wrote up an intro post here, with some handy links, and followed it up with Four Fun Things About the Universe, for values of “fun” that include the knowledge that if you get close to a black hole you’ll be torn to shreds by gravity. Whee!

Tomorrow I should be caught up and ready to blog again. I hope. (I might just go home and sleep 12 hours. It’s reverse altitude sickness!)

Okay. This is the big Eclipse post.

Ten Things About Eclipse has covered the bases.

Yesterday, my piece about The Decline and Fall of the Twilight Empire went up at Tor.com. There, I discussed the fact that as the fandom grows, the quality of actual filmmaking seems to sink like a stone.

(I will be honest, though, looking at my notes for New Moon, I’m not sure if endless music-video tracking shots are any worse than establishing shots with voiceover that then cut to a different location/scene entirely. Still, Eclipse had more to work with and did less with it, so it’s probably still the worst movie of the three. I’ll have to think about this.)

But first, as always, there was The Line.

The line for Eclipse was, in many ways, the smoothest this operation has been run.

Theatres are now aware of what can happen if you keep the long lines bunched up together for hours (STAMPEDE), and this was one of the multiplexes big enough to have it showing on at least seven screens, so they did what any smart theatre would do: they lined up everyone outside by theatre, three deep across the sidewalk, and wound around a city block by 9:30pm, when we did a fly-by and immediately ran away.

The good news is, unlike the first year I went there and it was the fucking Mines of Moria, there were actual plans in place. As soon as the final showing of that theatre’s normal movie was over, they let that theatre in. It was a foolproof plan to minimize crowds, normalize lines at concessions, and make this a smooth operation.

Then they turned off the air conditioning. Let me tell you, when they turn off the air conditioning in a two-story movie theatre full of pining women, it is not pretty.

Also not pretty: the Team Edward/Team Jacob fighting, which reached a fever pitch in our theatre, and proved that keeping everyone penned together outside would probably have led to a battle royale. (Have you ever seen the poster for The Warriors? It was like that.)

Apparently the thing to do this year was to wear an Eclipse Burger King crown with the image of your favorite dude on the front. I counted at least fifty in our theatre alone.

(Bella was also on the crown; no one ever, ever had her in front.)

Two girls had a fight just outside the bathrooms, with one pointing accusingly at the other’s crown: “Of COURSE Edward is the best for her! How can you be Team Jacob? I THOUGHT YOU WERE MY FRIEND.”

Teenagers: holy crap.

At one point on the way inside, two girls had a Team Edward/Jacob sing-off to “The Boy is Mine,” pointing to their crowns. They seemed to be friends, so it wasn’t particularly invested, and they sort of wandered past the theatre employee, who looked after them for a second, sighed, and said, “Just…what the shit.”

I still think the line winner was the girl in a Cullen crest shirt, looking very displeased with her friends: “I was here early IRONICALLY.”

These kids speak for all of us.

And then it was time for the movie. Oh, was it ever.
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And the Eclipse postmortem begins! First up: Ten Things You Should Know About Eclipse, at Fantasy Magazine. This information might just save your life. (Or, two hours. Whichever.)

4. Howard Shore did the music.
You’ll know because whenever Bella and Edward make out, it sounds like every pervert in the Shire is creeping up on them.

His hand looks like a questing, half-hidden octopus, doesn’t it? (Go ahead, unsee it. I dare you.)

I have an article forthcoming at Tor.com about the franchise in general and the trend in cinematic quality (hint: yeeeeesh), and last up will be the line report and blow-by-blow, because seriously, you guys? YIKES.

Last night, while reviewing what I’ve been working on in handy graphic form (which I will be doing again, because it’s fun and prevents me from actually working), Inception was the last square.

Up at Tor.com today, I talk about what we know about Inception, and what Inception means.

Hint: it means that smart sci-fi movies are thin on the ground these days, and a movie pitched as cerebral sci-fi is an event in and of itself. (Seriously, the only thing emphasized in the trailer is dreams/ideas/the mind, and also how all these people look really great in nice clothes.) This strategy wouldn’t have worked on a movie like, say, Moon, which was one of last year’s thinkiest sci-fi movies, but too indie for its own good somehow, and it ended up coming out in about eight theatres and disappearing off the face of the earth, except for one DVD copy that I put in a time capsule to save for later.

Obviously there’s no worries about that here, because Nolan made Batman cool again, which means he can basically do what he wants, forever. However, I am really hoping that this movie does not happen to suck. A lot of movies by good directors happen to suck, but when Channing Tatum gets tapped for the lead in a dimensional-sci-fi-action-romance that got suddenly greenlit because it’s vaguely like Avatar, I bet a lot of good scripts are floating around that could really benefit from some box-office proof that smart sells.

I’m just saying, in a world where Ridley Scott is remaking his own Alien franchise, Spider-Man is getting a reboot THREE YEARS after the last one came out, and Avatar can win Golden Globes*, we could really use a win, here.

NO PRESSURE, INCEPTION.

* To be fair, many undeserving people have won Golden Globes.