For a movie that doesn’t try to be anything more than solid, slightly pulpy fun, and that succeeds in the execution, there is a lot being said about Haywire. (Don’t all get surprised at once!)

That seems to be largely because its star is MMA all-star Gina Carano, who does her own stunts, and who is under the sort of scrutiny most male action stars never see. (Among some bizarre pearl-clutching about her fight scenes, her acting ability has been repeatedly questioned, which is strange, because I do not remember a lot of interviews asking Jean-Claude Van Damme how his workshops with Meryl Streep are going.)

We live in a world that makes it impossible to leave discourse at the door about this kind of thing, and means that the movie hits theatres under a lot of baggage it doesn’t deserve. But Haywire itself seems to be blithely unconcerned about it all. Instead, it focuses on turning in a slick action movie that can be boiled down to Vasquez: The Motion Picture, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.

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Hollywood’s Homecoming Dance was last night! I was pleased to see that my guess about the Stump Everybody theme is going strong, even though I spent a lot of my time with my hand propping up my dismayed face.

For the Golden Globes, many people decided to keep the baffle in the details, so mostly-lovely garments are supplanted by a single rogue element that was clearly designed to make my heart hurt.

And no one was immune from Baffle Fever. Not even Tilda Swinton. NOT EVEN TILDA.

I could not love 80% of this more – the shoulders, the sleeves, the tailoring, the silhouette of the skirt are all great. A case could even, maybe, be made for the color, though I would have liked to see it a greyer, less Easter Egg pale. But something about the skirt-matching sash disaster make her look like a mother of the bride from SyFy’s Children of Dune, and that is no place you want to be, Tilda. Trust me.

Other people’s attempts to baffle me with their outfits under the cut!
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I figured a good way to start the year is by nerding out all over the place, so this week I have a guest post up at the blog of astronomy-camp alum and Affair-to-Remember-lover Marjorie Liu!

Since I know she understands deep and abiding love for fictional people, I took the opportunity to list ten movie relationships that should have happened, for values of “list” that really mean “talk about how you banged their invisible dolls together with more determination than you addressed many real-life things like calculus.” (In fact, cutting down the list was so hard that technically I squeezed in eleven, because it’s really difficult to watch Wings of the Dove and NOT think a frank conversation could have set up the best triad in a hundred-mile radius.)

The list includes some couples that would have gotten together except they died (Alice and Uncas!), couples that would have gotten together except Austen couldn’t bring herself to pull a switcheroo at the two-thirds mark (Elinor and Brandon!), couples that would have gotten together if Picard had ever, ever learned how to talk to a woman for like two damn seconds of his life (PICARD, GET IT TOGETHER), and couples that were clearly together and just never got the screentime they should have, like these two:

(The couple that trades unauthorized ammo together stays together!)

For those who enjoy some free books alongside their couples not quite getting together and/or pop culture, I’m also giving away copies of Mechanique and Geek Wisdom. So if you’re so inclined, head on over and check it out!

I don’t tend to do big year-in-review posts, but this year I wanted to take a second.

Behind the scenes, there were ups and downs (family, day job, work-life balance, and the like), but I came out the other side of 2011 all right. I even managed to get out of the house enough to attend some lovely cons where I hung out with some lovely people, and there were no champagne fights or anything!

Writing-wise: I published my first novel, Mechanique! It is a great feeling to hold a novel you wrote in your hands, as it turns out! I had some positive reviews which pleased me greatly (positive reviews tend to do that), and have really enjoyed hearing from people (strangers!) with whom the book resonated. But really, most aspects of it were rewarding in some way, right down to the book launch party, for which some friends (and a family member I tricked!) worked their asses off for nothing more than free snacks.

I also got a nonfiction book under my belt this year! Geek Wisdom, in which my co-authors, Stephen Segal, and I gathered geeky quotes and set out to talk about how being a nerd was like a philosophy course, only with more dice and movies and computers and stuff, was a blast.

Short-fiction-wise, I had a dozen stories come out this year (of which I am perhaps particularly fond of “Demons, Your Body, and You,” “Semiramis,” “The Nearest Thing,” and “Study, for Solo Piano”), and some reprints, of which I am particularly glad for “And in Their Glad Rags” in Happily Ever After, and “Keep Calm and Carillon” in Creatures.

Movie-wise, I saw some really great movies this year and some extremely questionable ones. Drive and Shame might be two of my favorite movies that came out this year; the bad ones seem too numerous to mention and often too painful to recall. I must say that, especially in light of some of the completely shit movies I saw this year, Red Riding Hood seems to be on a lot of people’s Worst Movie Ever Made lists, which I find a little suspicious. Don’t get me wrong, it is definitely a bad movie. However, its biggest crime to many people seems to be that it’s directed by a woman who found commercial success with a blockbuster teen-girl movie that also had a love triangle, and is now condemned to be accused of repeating herself forever for things like having helicopter shots of landscape in two movies in a row, which, seriously. Without defending a movie that is for sure not a good movie, the vitriol and content of the criticism is still a bit eyebrow-raising, I think. (I mean, I saw Beastly this year. BEASTLY.)

Tonight ends a year that was often fun, sometimes tough, often interesting, and awash in coffee. I’m at home for the duration, and have spent the morning cleaning up so that I can spend the evening writing, and start the year as I mean to go on. (I’ll also be honoring my family’s oldest and most hilarious tradition, banging a pan on your doorstep at midnight to keep the devil out. Since I live in an apartment and am not a total jerk, I will be tapping a wooden spoon against a pan for about five seconds and hoping the devil is a pearl-clutching sort and that does the trick.)

Wishing you and yours a happy start to the New Year!

Ridley Scott puts out a Prometheus trailer that smacks a couple of generations of nerds right in the face by haunting the trailer for Alien.

Do I dig it? The throwback elements of it, I do. The lack of non-screaming face-time for Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron, not so much. (I’d go into the underpants shot, but that means talking about the scene in Alien that is 110% underpants, -15% alien vanquishing, and that would lead into more than anyone wants, so we’ll just pretend nothing’s up.) And someday I will have to write about my feelings for Ellen Ripley, but loving her with the intensity of a thousand suns doesn’t mean I can’t love any other awesome lady that wanders this doomed-ass landscape (Hey, Vasquez!), so I’ll keep an open mind there. (The cast in general looks pretty stellar – resume-wise, anyway. So far in the trailer it’s lots of jumping and some questionable hair color on Monsieur Fassbender.)

I admit, I had always figured that Ridley Scott was just being coy about this movie because he didn’t want to blow his remake mystique before he could sign the contract for Blade Runner 2: Runnerer. But now I’m wondering if he was being coy because nobody wants to answer the “But really, are aliens in it?” question until the last second. However, what’s here is still more than enough to interest me (and the bursts of high-pitched squealing are just aces), so this goes on the calendar, with some poor, gullible friend who will get her hand terror-clasped an embarrassing number of times.

Speaking of, I think it’s time for me to pull the courage together to see the first one again! (It takes a lot of courage. That movie is amazing, but I have a very low threshold for the Creeps, and that movie pushes it right to the limit. I really need to work on getting a scary-movie setup where you have a small TV and it’s very sunny and you’re surrounded by puppies the whole time.)