1. My story “Things to Know About Being Dead” will appear in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s anthology Teeth! If you follow the link to the full TOC, you’ll see I am in some seriously great company. I’m thrilled.

2. My short story “The Zeppelin Condocutors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” will be forthcoming in Lightspeed! And glancing at that list of names, this is also going to be a pretty exciting project when it launches this summer.

And with the fun stuff out of the way, I return to cleaning and bad-movie-watching. (This is not true; the bad movie stuff is just as fun.)

1. My story Light on the Water has been named a storySouth Notable story for 2009! That was a very pleasant surprise, and a great way to start the weekend.

2. Apparently I have decided that the way to go through the rest of the weekend is a complete Netflix tear. I have made a semi-cogent choice to ignore my pile of work to be done and instead buzz my way through as many movies as I possibly can in 48 hours. I left the house today, which was a tactical error, but I plan to make up for lost time tonight!

So far, in addition to movies I’m watching for work purposes, the winners this weekend have been “sweet spot” movies I first saw between the ages of, say, 10 and 13, which I remember just well enough to enjoy but have enough distance on to laugh my ass off about how bad they probably are. (Exception to this rule: Gleaming the Cube, which has vanished off the face of the earth, and which I am willing to bet is as awesome now as it was when I first saw it.)

P.S. I also saw Clash of the Titans. In unrelated news, some truly awful movies get made these days, don’t they?

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list; if I tried to make an exhaustive list of all the questionable relationships in fantasy movies, I’d be here twenty years from now. This is the Whitman’s sampler of uncomfortable dynamics, with one exception: The Sea Prince and the Fire Child. That movie is one of the best examples of weird relationships ever. It is just an endless cocktail party of interactions that are Not Quite Right.

This is one of those things, like The Red Shoes or The Linguini Incident, that I spent my childhood thinking no one else had ever seen. (To be fair, that might be because whenever I said, “Have you seen [movie]?” the other person would pull a face and say, “What? No.” in that tone you reserve for people who ask you if you’ve ever eaten a roach.)

If you’ve seen this movie, you know what I mean when I say that this movie messes with you. For those of you who are new to it, be prepared to make one or all of these faces:

Let’s do this thing.

First, a brief summary:

Long ago, Oceanus the Sea God and Hyperia the Fire Goddess lived together in a state of love (they were also brother and sister – hat tip to Greece!), but their shitty brother instigated a fight that made them hate each other forever, so they split up and now fire and water live apart like a couple of pissy six-year-olds in their magnificent respective kingdoms, one of which is like the Great Barrier Reef on acid, and one of which is like a Mucha painting gone berserk.

Many years later, Syrius the Sea Prince and Malta the Fire Child meet by accident and fall in luuurve, and he takes time off from his very close friendship with a six-year-old mer-unicorn to pursue her, and she ditches her good friend Piale to go make out with this dude she hardly knows who only wants to meet her at night, alone, in secluded areas. Sounds safe!

It’s exactly like Romeo and Juliet, if Romeo and Juliet had a turtle mentor named Aristurtle (not kidding) who tells them to hop on the huge dandelion seeds that will float up to some other planet where they can be together forever, except they miss the huge-dandelion-seed takeoff because they get busted by their parents, and then Syrius dies because the sun blinds him because it’s fire and whatever, and Malta, who has shed her pubescent form and now is a totally naked butterfly woman (oookay) picks him up and carries him into the sea where SHE’LL die, and then they’re both dead.

Sleep tight, kids!

This is one of those movies where I am sure there is a lot of appeal, and I just miss all of it. I mean, parts of it are lovely.

But what I mostly remember about this movie is that Malta cried ALL THE TIME. ALLTHETIME. When she saw Syrius, she cried. When she couldn’t see him, she cried. When her mom caught her out and put her on her own little throne-cloud in her throne room, she openly sobbed at a pitch only dogs could hear. Even when I first watched this movie as a very young kid, I remember really disliking all the crying. I mean, Beezle from Unico was a comparative bastion of fortitude, since there were at brief interludes where he was tear-free. No such luck here!

Note: I don’t think she ever cries for Piale, the best friend who gives up her life to try to cover Malta’s ass because the sacred flame went out when Malta broke curfew. Way to be the WORST FRIEND EVER, MALTA.

Basically, I disliked this movie intensely as a kid, and on a rewatching a few years ago, I may have disliked it even more. On the other hand, I also remember this being one of the first movies I ever saw where the heroes didn’t get what they were after. I think that is actually a very important lesson for kids to learn, so that is one small bonus for this movie, at least?

I don’t know; I think it’s perfectly possible for a movie to make an impression of quality on you even if you dislike it, and to dislike a perfectly good movie, and knowing that I have never been hugely into animation I think it’s unfair for me to judge some of its tropes, except that I would like to see a little less crying, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask. (Also, maybe slap some animated clothes on these kids so their pubescence during the solar eclipse could end with a nice halter dress or something instead of her sobbing naked in front of a crowd of 500 fire sprites and/or merpeople. That would be good.)

This one seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it movie: either you love it for being gentle and comforting, or you hate it for being predictable and treacly. I don’t have a dog in this fight whatsoever, mainly because this movie is so useful for Supporting Actor Bingo that I’m just pleased it got made because now I can get from Nina Foch to Miranda Richardson like THAT.

I will, however, put up a fight that Chocolat is a great food movie, because food plays such a main role that it’s hardly even a metaphor any more; without any of the conflict in which chocolate plays a part, you’d still have a perfectly good short film about a lady in a snappy cloak who comes to town and makes awesome goodies in a big gorgeous montage of mole sauce and hot chocolate and almond cake, and the village loves everything and parties forever, the end.

Plus, I’m just a sucker for a nice mise-en-scene every once in a while.

Johannes Vermeer, Juliette Binoche with Milk Pitcher, 1658

Just saying.

Welcome to Fair Food Fight Films, awesomely abbreviated FFFFilms, which sounds like you’re about to cuss if you say it out loud, so that’s not recommended unless you say all the words. It will cover food in movies, from those which are entirely about food (like Big Night) to those that simply use food in world-building (Chicken goooood).

For the initial offering, the clear front-runner was Babette’s Feast. It’s about food, it’s about food as metaphor, and more than anything, it’s about a village full of the most emotionally constipated, ungrateful folk you’ll ever find.

I mention this more over at Fair Food Fight, but it bugged me so much I’m laying it down here, too; there’s a huge “art doesn’t require gratitude” theme in this movie hammered home by poor Babette slaving away in the kitchen and never hearing word one about how delicious it was. I completely understand, cinematically, why it was there. But I was also raised that you thank the person who cooked the meal, even if you can’t bear the idea of gnawing the head off the guinea fowl up there and end up eating nothing but puff pastry and gravy with one eye closed. It’s just manners, metaphorically-saturated village people, damn!