Archive for January, 2010
The beautiful painting above is by Vermeer; and it could only be by Vermeer. Even if you didn't recognise the actual painting, there's no other artist who paints domestic scenes with such care and lyrical attention to detail. Of course I'm no expert. If I were an expert I might think that this
is by Vermeer.
In fact, it's a fake painted by Hans Van Meegeren, one of the great forgers of all time, who was an inspiration for me when I wrote my radio thriller The Art of Deception. It's an incompetent and annoying piece, which doesn't look a bit like Vermeer; but that doesn't mean Van Meegeren was an idiot. Quite the opposite; his early Vermeer forgeries were very skilful, and looked pretty close to the real thing. But 'experts' dismissed them as forgeries. And so cunningly he invented a whole new style of paintings which he called early Vermeer; and his forgeries were the only surviving examples of this style.
It worked! Van Meegeren made a fortune, and he even sold a fake Vermeer to Goering.
But nothing can beat the real thing:
The Procuress
Girl with a Pearl Earring
I was in Brighton on Tuesday night to give a talk on writing for television, organised by the splendid media training group Lighthouse (I've run a number of courses for Lighthouse on creating TV drama series, which have been, to be honest, so enjoyable it almost hurts.)
My fellow guest was BBC script editor Esther Springer, who has worked on many many TV shows, including Survivors and Born and Bred, and knows more about telly than anyone I know. Esther told it as it is, and we had a lively session and a great discussion. It was a full house - about 70 people there - which shows what a passion for TV writing there is out in yon world.
Later in the week I had a meeting with ace producer Archie Tait, and we began cooking up some schemes. I also had a coffee with old friend, Dan McRae, who now has an important role in the British film industry (as head of development for a major distributor) but is as genial and entertaining as he's ever been.
Nicole Peeler's SFF Song of the Week - Sea Lion Woman by Feist - appeared on this site got a fabulous response, and I'm still getting great feedback for Al Reynolds' choice, Wings by the Fall. (Oh, and one of my screenwriting students at the London Film School loved Experiment IV, Tony Ballantyne's choice.)
I wrote a blog for Orbit - it's still there! - and a Movie Zone blog for this site about the classic SF movie THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. And I read Paul Cornell's wonderful CAPTAIN BRITAIN anthology of comics (he doesn't like the term graphic novel), featuring a Muslim superheroine. This tale blends magic and action in a truly wonderful way, and is gorgeously illustrated by Leonard Kirk.
I'm close to the end of epic space opera The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfield. I'm at that stage of not wanting it to end; but also wanted, desparately, to know The Twist. (Do NOT write in and tell me.)
My own epic space opera Hell Ship is proceeding apace, but I'm encountering a major problem: I have too many aliens! And all of them have different versions of phyics, and different terms for such things as hyperspace, teleportation and quantum physics. Damn, maybe they should all speak English.
Robert Jackson Bennett and I have been exchanging emails recently; and indeed, we may write up our thoughts in a blog. Robert's the author of the acclaimed Mr. Shivers, and he's a very smart and witty guy.
And I may - for now - be close to the FINAL DRAFT of my Welsh film Inferno. Fingers crossed.
I love movies, and I wish I'd seen them all. Or rather, all the good ones.
In pursuit of this ambition, I've been catching up on some classic movies, some of which I've seen before many times, some of which are new to me.
Today's blog is about the daddy of all SF films, the Robert Wise version of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951).
Stephen King writes about this in his wonderful book DANSE MACABRE. He compares it with the later movie EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS, an all action and terrifying tale of aliens invading Earth. Like much movie SF, he argued, EVTFS is really a horror movie; THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL by contrast, 'is one of a select handful - the real science fiction movies.' It's not, in other words, a futuristic version of a tale about the boogeyman. It's not like ALIEN, with its vagina dentata alien conjuring up primal fears that we didn't know we had. It's not about The Fear of Strangers, or of Otherness. It's a cool, careful, masterly dissection of what shits humans are, and how and why aliens are right to fear us.
This makes TDTEST sound rather cool and academic; but in fact, it's an amazingly taut film. I was delighted, in fact, to find that - despite a small special effects budget, and the incredibly over-precise diction of all the characters, that it's not a dated or 'old-fashioned' kind of classic SF movie that is better left dust-covered in the archives. Admittedly, the space suit worn by Klaatu the alien looks as if it was retained by some skinflint in order to be re-used by Cybermen in the sandpit in the early Dr Who eps. And the interior of the ship is sadly inadequate compared to the Tardis. But this film is, I discover, a masterpiece of suspense.
The plot, briefly, and without I hope too many spoilers: An alien spaceship lands on Earth
and a humaniform alien called Klaatu (Michael Rennie) emerges, accompanied by a huge robot, Gort. Klaatu comes in peace, but is treated with hostility by the authorities. And his attempt to summon a meeting of the leaders of the world is snubbed. So he escapes and - after befriending a young boy and her mother - explains to a kindly Professor with hair issues that the Earth is in deadly peril.
That's all I can say - if you haven't already, see the film! - but the genius of this movie is how much is achieved by the simple act of Defining the Peril. We know the Earth will be in dire danger unless certain things occur; and knowing that is enough. It's the opposite of 2012, where we have to SEE houses fall down, cars fall into the sea, planes fall from the sky, people dying horribly, in such graphic detail that it becomes, pretty quickly, a bit ordinary. (What! Only a hundred people just died! - what a yawn!)
Here the jeopardy is defined; the clock is set ticking; and it's terrifying. I was literally on the edge of my seat in the climactic sequence. Okay, the robot is not that scary - it has zappy eyes like Cyclops, but that's all it does - but we know what it might do. And because its potential power is so awesome, its very presence terrifies.
All this artfulness is of course - at one crude level - a result of budgetary constraints. Even in 1951 audiences liked action, not chat; spectacle, not thoughtful speculation. But with limited resources, director Robert Wise and writer Edmund H. North (working from a story by Harry Bates) dug deep into their bag of storytelling tricks and made us fear a man who does nothing malicous, at all, in the course of the entire film. But though he's courteous, and pleasant, Klaatu is an utterly cold and decisive character. If he has to kill, he will kill, and he will kill vast numbers of those who deserve to die.
Gulp.
For Klaatu is a rational being; and his rationality is the source of his scariness. You can't reason with him; because he's right. And you can't defy him; because, as the setpiece sequence of the movie proves, his power, casually executed, utterly dwarfs that of the humble Earthlings.
The music is another key element of this movie. Composer Bernard Herrman - who also wrote the scores for many of Hitchcock's great suspense thrillers including PSYCHO, as well as providing the music for THE TWLIGHT ZONE and some of the 1960s LOST IN SPACE - creates a chilling, haunting soundscape of singing voices and jagged orchestral crescendos. It's a style that's often imitated, but I have to say I don't think I've ever seen/heard a movie with such a brilliantly tense score. The opening sequence, when the spaceship lands and the tanks take their position, is utterly nervejangling, like having someone run a cold knife blade down your spine to test how thick the skin is.
At other times, the film IS dated. There's a lot of talky stuff, the girl (played by Patricia Neal) is very much the typical 'pretty, good Mom' character you always see in 50s movies. The army briefing scenes have a static, expository quality. And, even in 1951, what Mom would let a total stranger wander off with her kid...?
But for much of the time, Wise and North show remarkable adroitness in the way in which they use newscasters and telephone operators and soldiers in jeeps to convey a rich, busy universe of action, without spending too much money.
I saw this movie on a lovely collector's edition DVD which I bought last year at Eastercon, in that wonderful little stall on the far right. As always, I bought a bunch of old movies thinking, 'I must watch these some day.' Fortunately, that day, for this movie, was yesterday.
Did you know? (I know you did):
The band Klaatu, named after the alien in this movie, wrote the song 'Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft'.
The 2008 remake (a stinker, allegedly) stars Keanu Reeves, who actually IS an alien!
Here's a truly fabulous song choice from urban fantasy author Nicole Peeler, whose debut novel Tempest Rising is a witty and sensual thriller about a selkie in New England. Nicole is a Professor in her spare time (!), but wears her learning lightly. I love selkies, and have spent a lot of time in Scotland where they mostly live. And I always thought that selkies would kick the asses of vampires and werewolves; and so it proves.
Nicole Peeler writes:
Hello! Nicole Peeler, here. For those (ten) of you who know me, you know that I write for Orbit books, much like Philip. Only I write the dreaded . . . urban fantasy! Now, I am well aware that there is an element of more hard core sci-fi/fantasy readers who think urban fantasy consists of a bunch of women dressed like leather daddies running around with swords, alternately decapitating monsters and bonking vampires.
And, admittedly, this description is often accurate.
That said, I write a slightly different kind of urban fantasy. I write UF that’s based on my love of mythology, and one of my all-time favorite myths is that of the selkie. The very first time I read a selkie myth--I think I was twelve--I was transfixed. And not only with the beautiful selkie maiden, but especially with the idea of the half human children she inevitably leaves behind after finding her seal skin and returning to the sea.
Ultimately, these selkie legends are very much ones of victimization. The selkie maid is victimized when her skin is stolen; the human husband is victimized when his wife leaves him (and sometimes, if rarely, he doesn’t understand why because he never understood the import of the skin he’d found); and the children are victimized by losing their mother.
Which leads me to Feist, and her song, “Sea Lion Woman.” In many ways, this song is the delicious, grrrrl power, feminist answer to the selkie myth. For unlike her selkie cousin, the seal woman, Feist’s “Sea Lion Woman” is anything but a victim. Just drinking a cup of tea, she makes a rooster crow!
And you know what else they call a rooster. . .
I imagine Feist’s sea lion woman as the Black Widow version of my beloved selkie myth. The seal woman takes off her skin, and some man comes and steals it. The sea lion woman, however, takes off her skin, dons some pretty dresses and she does the calling, hoping the men who answer know what to do. And the ones who don’t? They get a knife in the back.
Those sea lion women are fierce, yo.
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
Sea lion woman
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
Dressed in red
Smile at the man
When you wake up in his bed
Sea lion woman
Dressed in black
Wink at the man
Then stab him in his back
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
Dressed in white
Marry the man
And you'll spend a long sweet life
Sea lion woman
Dressed in green
Silver lining and golden seams
Sea lion woman
Dressed in blue
Call on the man
And hope he knows what he can do
Sea lion...
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
Dressed in the blue
Call on the man
And hope he knows what he can do
Sea lion woman
Dressed in red
Smile at the man
When you wake up in his bed
Sea lion woman....
My latest Orbit blog is here.
Alastair Reynold's choice for SFF Song of the Week is here.
Last week's blogjay was Tony Ballantyne, who choose this.
And this whole feature started with a song I often listen to while running on the treadmill at the gym, and dreaming of space.
I grew up in a Welsh town near the sea, a town built on sand dunes. As kids we used to play cowboys and Indians among the dunes.
So this image really spooks me out; it's sand dunes on Mars:
Image courtesy of NASA
This week, just to annoy that puritancial Calvinist Archie Tait, here's some gratuitous nudity.
Grand Odalisque by Ingres
Note: An odalisque is a female slave in a harem - a popular subject with many male painters throughout the centuries. (Harumph!)
Nude Study of Hector by Jacques Louis David
This blog believes that we are now - all of us - engaged in a vast global battle between good and evil. Polly Toynbee explains why.
The highlight of my week came by email...a scary, eerie, and extremely funny cover design for my next novel Version 43, which comes out in the autumn. Designer Lauren Panepinto has brilliantly echoed the design of Red Claw, with its scuffed corners and pulp feel; and she's also added some flamboyantly original touches.
Thanks Lauren!
I've been writing and researching Hell Ship this week. The research mainly involves reading about the ancient civilisations of Earth - the Egyptians, the Sumerians (pronounced Shoo-merians, I have now discovered), the Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mayans, to name but a few.
The story of the Mayans is a sobering one - they were a thriving civilisation until about 950AD, when the civilisation collapsed. There was no invasion, no plague, no asteroid landing in the jungle; the entire culture just fell to pieces, because of overpopulation, greed, and possibly war. It's not a unique story; prehistory is littered with accounts of civilisations that imploded under the weight of their own contradictions.
Maybe ours will be next?
That happy thought leads me into some reflections on the global economic crisis and bankers' bonuses...it's a subject that fascinates me and appals me, and I keep thinking, 'Someone should write something about that!'
Then it occurred to me this morning (as I woke up at 3am, regretting that last glass of rich red wine) that maybe that someone should be me. You see, I'm currently pitching for a 3-part radio drama series about politics and war which is being looked at favourably (it doesn't mean I'll get the gig! But it looks promising.) And I think I can see a way to make Part 3 of the drama an account of the banking crisis, in vivid and terrifyingly dramatic form.
This gives me another big subject to think about and research, to add to my already large pile of big subjects: there's ancient civilisation and parallel universes (for Hell Ship); art, architecture and forgery (for my commissioned radio drama The Art of Deception), and now global politics and finance, for this new radio pitch.
Hmm. That means I'm pretty much researching life, the universe and everything; should be fun!
A good portion of this week was devoted to a rewrite/polish of my Welsh film noir Inferno. I've nursed this project over several years. I endured the departure of my brilliant producer and executive producer (we didn't fall out - far from it! - but they left to pursue highly paid and prestigious jobs elsewhere.) I created my own company, as a way of accessing finance to get the film made. And now, after more than six months working with a director of incomparable cleverness and flair (that''s you Marc!) damn it all, there may be a chance of getting it made this year.
Or not - film is a fickle business. But I've never felt so optimistic about getting the film produced, and out there in the cinemas. So - we'll see. Watch this space!
I'm currently reading a splendid Scott Westerfield SF epic - he's SUCH a smart writer. And I'm close to the end of CAPTAIN BRITAIN, the comic anthology/graphic novel by Paul Cornell, who also writes Dr Who, and who I met last year at Eastercon. A lovely man; and his Captain Britain is an absolute delight.
Speaking of Eastercon; I've signed up to do several panels at the next one, Odyssey at Heathrow, and I may also be doing some book signings. Hope to see some of you there.
Oh and I've written a short review of the great SF movie Delicatessan (it is SF, honest!) for Cinema Futura, which I'm about to email. It's a gorgeous, funny, utterly unexpected film, rich in visual beauty.
The other highlight of the week - apart from the Version 43 cover - was Alastair Reynolds' choice of SFF Song of the Week - the eerie, haunting, brilliant Wings by the Fall. If you haven't listened to it yet, scroll down and find it, or go across the Categories bar and click of SFF SONG OF THE WEEK, and you'll find it there.
Adrian Reynolds sent me this fabulous link about life in the depths of the sea....
Here's the latest guest blog in our Movie Zone feature...from the talented and irrepressible screenwriter and blogger Adrian Reynolds. Adrian's thoughts on life and movies and other stuff can be found on his beautifully named youdothatvoodoo blogsite.
Take it away Adrian:
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DOES WHATEVER A FRANCHISE CAN: SAM RAIMI'S SPIDER-MAN by Adrian Reynolds
Timely Comics, established in the 1940s, produced titles about crime, romance, monsters, and cowboys as well as superheroes, whose role was to take on the Nazis in wartime pulps. It was under the guidance of Stan Lee two decades later that the publisher -- by now known as Marvel -- created a new generation of winning superhero titles: Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man. They were a clear departure from DC's heroes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, who were archetypes seemingly divorced from regular human experience. By contrast, the characters Stan Lee concocted in collaboration with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were easy for their teenage readers to identify with. The Hulk was effectively a teenage boy struggling to control a body undergoing transformation. The Fantastic Four were a family as dysfunctional as your own. And as for Spider-Man...
Spider-Man artwork by Steve Ditko
Peter Parker is a high school kid consumed by unspoken love for Mary Jane Watson, a science nerd living with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Then he is bitten by a radioactive spider and rather than acquire leukaemia gains arachnid powers for himself, gifted with impossible acrobatic skills, heightened strength, able to scale vertical walls and sense danger. Adding to that nifty repertoire, Peter's invention of webfluid allows him to zip round the city suspended from ropes of web. But...he still can't talk to Mary Jane, and adding superheroics to his repertoire just means he has less time for college work, and that his life gets more complicated.
OK, the characterisation might be as two dimensional as the pages Spider-Man's stories appeared on, but that's one more dimension than DC's leading icon, Superman, had back then.
All of this, more or less, is present in Sam Raimi's trio of Spider-Man films. The first presents the story of Peter's transition from human to superior human to superhero. The distinction is important: he gains his powers first, but it's following the death of Uncle Ben that he becomes a superhero, whose values inform his actions. The bit about Ben telling Peter that "with great power comes great responsibility" is frequently quoted, but just as important is what Ben says before that: "these are the years a man changes into the man he's going to become the rest of his life -- just be careful who you change into."
Those two quotes anchor the trilogy, with every aspect of Peter Parker's progress relating to those themes of maturity and honour. The films chronicle a teenager growing into young adulthood, dealing with the responsibilities of work and the complexities of being a family member, and the distinction between the dream of love and its day to day reality. Which serious business is thankfully leavened by a healthy dose of wisecracking, acrobatics, and fights with grotesque supervillains. Phew.
Something that distinguishes Peter Parker from the likes of Batman is that he has read superhero comics. When Peter gets his powers, he tries out catchphrases such as 'Shazam' and others associated with classic comics heroes in the hope that it will reactivate his webbing -- produced organically from his body in the films...adding to the squicky adolescence of this singular hero, Peter oozes sticky fluids -- which takes a while to get under control.
Reading comics is one thing, emulating their protagonists is quite another. Bringing together superheroics with teenage tribulations was a stroke of genius on Stan Lee's part. Buzzing on his new powers, and realising he can use them to win money to buy a car to impress Mary Jane, Peter takes part in a wrestling tournament -- and wins. His jubilation is short-lived: the fight organiser weasels his way out of giving Peter the full prize money, and the consequences of that form a straight line to the murder of Uncle Ben.
So, Spider-Man is haunted by his past actions, giving him the requisite dose of angst that adolescents thrive on. And at the same time, he -- literally -- masks that guilt and adopts a joke-a-minute persona with the bad guys he takes on, seen to its fullest effect in the second film, when Peter is relishing his powers. That mix of jauntiness and emo despair will be familiar to anyone who has been a teenager, or has one in their house.
Any hero is defined by the calibre of their villain, and Spider-Man has a rogues gallery of bad guys on his tail. In the first film it's Norman Osborn, a zillionaire scientist entrepreneur whose son Harry goes to high school with Peter. Norman sees Peter's intellect as outranking his son's, and the two get on fine initially. But in designing a weapons system for the military, Norman Osborn is driven mad and becomes the Green Goblin, who after being thwarted by Spider-Man appoints himself as Peter's nemesis.
As a rationale it works well enough, but there's another motivation underlying the Green Goblin: merchandising. Conveniently, Green Goblin's armoured outfit looks just like a kids' toy, complete with accessories. Ideal for rolling out as actual toys to children worldwide, accompanying Happy Meals, essential in a franchise like Spider-Man. Ho hum.
Green Goblin gets killed in the first film, and Harry takes on his father's mental mantle in the third, sworn to take down Spidey, who he mistakenly believes murdered him. That kind of continuity is exactly what superhero comics are made of, somehow straddling soap opera and Greek drama at the same time. Which is good: it gives the films a feeling of connectedness, and there are all kinds of easter eggs dotted in the trilogy for readers of the comics.
One of the biggest assets of the trilogy is its lead actor, Tobey Maguire.
It's an inspired piece of casting: Tobey is credibly nerdish as Peter Parker, and has a physicality that suits Spider-Man, very much in line with the way that Steve Ditko drew him -- he's got a wiry build, not a muscle man's.
Maguire convinces as a harried young man trying to do the best he can, with a touch of puppy dog in his genetic make-up, quizzical at the curve balls life throws him. And if he doesn't always perform to his best as Spider-Man, that's because in a lot of the longshots when he's swooping through the city you're actually looking at a digital simulation that sometimes has a rubbery feel. Other actors also turn in strong performances. Kirsten Dunst is delectable as Mary Jane, and has her own character arc across the trilogy, experiencing the ups and downs of the acting profession, falling for Spidey and discovering that he and Peter are one and the same. She has such a transparently good heart that it's credible when, under her watchful eye, a bank employee puts back cash that bursts out everywhere during a robbery. Of the supporting characters, the best is newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, brilliantly brought to life by actor 
J.K. Simmons, a foghorn-voiced penny-chiselling petty tyrant who hires Peter Parker to take photos of Spider-Man, only to use them in a campaign against Parker's alter ego. Which is typical of Peter's luck, and gives rise to some great scenes in the offices of the Daily Bugle. The third film sees a rival compete with Peter to bring images of Spidey to Jonah's attention -- Eddie Brock, whose emnity towards Parker has tragic consequences.
The relationship between Peter and Mary Jane is at the heart of the films. That and the bond between Peter and Aunt May provides an emotional core to the story that grounds it in recognisable human feelings, important when there'd otherwise be a danger of getting lost in larger than life action. One of the keynotes is a special moment between Spidey, hanging upside down, and Mary Jane, who pulls up the bottom half of his mask to give the hero an iconic kiss.
Comparing that kiss to one from her beau in the second film proves to Mary Jane that she really isn't committed to the relationship -- but she doesn't get to kiss Peter and discover the whizzbang she feels when they lock lips as that's when the bad guy turns up, a perennial problem of dating superheroes. And the kiss is a touchstone once again when Spidey demonstrates the same move with a rival in front of a crowd celebrating what he's done for New York -- the city might be impressed, all Mary Jane sees is Peter cheapening 'their' kiss. Impressive, on director Sam Raimi's part, that something so apparently simple can be called back through the trilogy to demonstrate different facets of Peter and Mary Jane's romance over time.
Raimi is an interesting director, who started out with the horror classic Evil Dead, but is also a pal of the Coen Brothers, co-writing their The Hudsucker Proxy and being a sounding board for them as they are for him. He's more steeped in pop culture than the Coens, with a love for comics and tv and genre films that clearly comes out in his own work: the first Evil Dead film (which Joel Coen worked on) was very much a cheap horror, its sequel had comic elements to give it broader appeal, and he's followed that pattern since: shocks leavened by humour, as seen to good effect in Drag Me To Hell. Maybe it's Raimi's relish for pulp fiction that makes him so adept at handling villains. None are better than the second film's bad guy, Doctor Octopus, played magnificently by Alfred Molina. He starts out as anything but plain old Otto Octavius, a scientist dedicated to harnessing fusion technology to create cheap power for the world. But as soon as he declares that he holds "the power of the sun in the palm of my hand" you know that hubris is going to bite him on the ass. And it does. An experiment -- funded by Norman Osborn's son, and Peter's friend, Harry -- goes wrong. Result: the four robotic limbs that Otto uses for his experiments are fused to him, and lose the ability to be overridden by his conscious mind. The snakish extensions are an amazing creation, and bring out a darker side of Otto, fuelled by the death of his wife in the experiment that went wrong. He's a tragic figure, and one who with Spider's guidance comes to redeem himself when it counts, humanity winning out over baser instincts, saying with dignity "I will not die a monster" as he seeks to right what he has done.
The third film is perhaps weakened by having three villains. Sandman is a stunning creation, run of the mill baddie Flint Marko escaping from the cops and leaping into a pile of sand that's being used for an experiment (those scientists insist on messing with forces they can't comprehend). He gets zapped, and becomes a creature of sand, the effects for this transformation first class, and used to convey pathos as well. Less successful is the alien symbiote that turns Spider-Man's costume black and boosts his powers, before moving onto another host in the form of photographer rival Eddie Brock. 
When the symbiote is with Spidey it's a brilliant opportunity to showcase more of Tobey Maguire's range, as a darkly seductive side to Peter comes to the surface, seen to fantastic effect in a scene set in a jazz bar where Mary Jane is singing. Peter saunters in, accompanies her on piano ('does whatever a spider can' evidently includes keyboard wizardry), and launches into a dance routine in which he humiliates Mary Jane by flirting with a love rival in front of her. The cad. But when Eddie Brock bonds with the symbiote, it's not so interesting.
Except, that is, for the matter of his defeat. The crittur turns out to be vulnerable to certain sound frequencies, which Spider-Man discovers by accident when he wallops the Brock symbiote with a hollow metal pole. Realising it's effective, Spidey gets a bunch of similar poles and puts Eddie within a circle of them -- the first time to my knowledge that an enemy has been defeated by tuned percussion since my uncle Len played the Mike Oldfield album Tubular Bells to drown out the carol singers at his door.
The final villain of the trio is Green Goblin. Kind of. Norman Osborn died in the first film, and son Harry replaces him in the third. But only after he has amnesia and forgets that he hates Peter, reigniting their former friendship for a while. It's a cute device, and of course it doesn't last -- Harry realises what the score is, and sets out to avenge his dad...or is that extend the franchise given the merchandising undertones of all this? In the end, Harry has a change of heart and pairs up with Spidey to take on Sandman and the symbiote-boosted Eddie Brock. If it all seems rather fraught and melodramatic, it works because these costumed weirdos stay true to their characters. Harry Osborn reverts to being Peter's good pal. Otto Octavius reasserts control over his serpentine limbs and dies a hero. Sandman is forgiven by Peter for his involvement in Ben's death and gets to live on, free to love the daughter he misses so much. It's only the symbiote that dies, and good riddance: it's icky. Besides, its function is to bring out the worst in people.
The Spider-Man trilogy is a fine addition to the superhero movie canon, one of its more honorable entries given the amount of garbage out there (I'm looking at you Catwoman, you Daredevil, and -- sad to say -- Fantastic Four, whose comics can be fine stuff). It's a kinetic funfair ride with Spidey swooping between buildings, having cool fights in alleys, and on and in subway trains zooming through the metropolis, zinging out one-liners as he does. What could be more fun? Add an ongoing romance with a great looking girlfriend that takes us from teenage crush to real relationship with credible problems, and you've got a series that suits both genders, and every age. Perfect family viewing, and worth going back to for some of the subtleties Raimi and his writers bring to the films that give the films a lingering fizz you might not be expecting.
Copyright Adrian Reynolds, January 2010
THE MOVIES:
Spider-Man (2002): Screenplay by David Koepp. Directed by Sam Raimi.
Spider-Man 2 (2004): Screen story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar & Michael Chabon, screenplay by Alvin Sergeant.
Spider-Man 3 (2007): Screenplay & screen story by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi; screenplay by Alvin Sergeant. Directed by Sam Raimi.
Here's this week's song choice from Alastair Reynolds. Alastair - author of Revelation Space, Chasm City, House of Suns and many more wonderful books - is, in the view of many of us, pretty much the definitive modern science fiction writer, brimming with ideas and also with humanity. He's also Welsh. ('ray!)
Alastair's SFF Song of the Week is Wings by the Fall, a tale of time travel and time paradoxes.
Alastair Reynolds writes:
I've loved The Fall for about twenty years. I don't think there's any one particular period of their music that I like more than another but "Wings" is undoubtedly one of my all-time favorites. It's from the early Brix era, when the group's music was starting to becone slightly more poppy, or as poppy as it's ever going to get given Smith's unique vocal approach, the relentlessly lo-fi production and the ever present emphasis on repetition. "Wings" pretty much encapsulates everything that's great about the group, though. It's got a fantastically catchy riff, mind-bending sci-fi time-travel lyrics, and as always there's some great dead-pan humour. "I paid them off with stuffing from my wings", indeed. And the video is superb.
Day by day.
The moon gains on me.
Day by day.
The moon gains on me.
Purchased pair of flabby wings.
I took to doing some hovering.
Here is a list of incorrect things.
Hovered mid-air outside a study.
An academic needed his chin,
Sent in the dust of some cheap magazines.
His academic rust, could not burn them up.
Recruited some gremlins.
To get me clear of the airline routes.
I paid them off with stuffing from my wings.
They had some fun with those cheapo airline snobs.
The stuffing loss made me hit a timelock.
I ended up in the eighteen sixties.
I’ve been there for one hundred and twenty five years.
A small alteration of the past. can turn time into space.
Ended up under ardwick bridge.
With some veterans from the u.s. civil war.
They were under irish patronage.
We shot dead a stupid sergeant,
But I got hit in the crossfire.
The lucky hit made me hit a time lock.
But, when I got back.
The place I made the purchase, no longer exists
I’d erased it under the bridge.
Day by day.
The moon came towards me
By such things.
The moon came towards me.
So now I sleep in ditches.
And hide away from nosey kids.
The wings rot and feather under me.
The wings rot and curl right under me.
A small alteration of the past.
Can turn time into space.
Small touches can alter more than a mere decade.
I've finally seen Avatar, and it's as amazing and spectacular as everyone says. The 3D experience is exhilarating, the plot is tight and smart, and the concept is brilliant. It's one thing to write a story from an alien's point of view; but Cameron has gone one step further, by allowing a human being to become an alien. (I know that also happens in District 9 - but in Avatar you really start to see and feel the world from this new, extraordinary perspective.)
I do have a couple of gripes about the movie though. And I accept that my criticisms probably say more about me than they do about James Cameron.
But really, who would actually want to live on that ghastly planet full of simpering size zero models? They're all so skinny! Where are the tubby aliens!
I also have a problem with the sheer unremitting niceness of the aliens. Admittedly, Neytiri the cute alien love interest, does get to snarl and be cross from time to time, and those indeed are her sexiest scenes. But the deal is: humans, especially American soldier humans, and American mean-minded bureaucrat humans, are a Bad Thing (except for our small team of liberal-leaning American nice guys, including one Hispanic woman.) And the aliens, by contrast, are a Good Thing. For they are 'primitive', at one with nature, in touch with their feelings, and receptive to the gaia of the planet in the way that rich materialistic Westerners (like me and, quite possibly, you) simply aren't.
Well okay, it's a movie, and that's the story, and I'm not going to knock it. But there's something about this vision of the sacred primitive that has always got my goat. Because in reality, lots of ancient and primitive cultures have been violent and warmongering. Some civilisations, like the Maya, died out because of greed and war. The Incas and the Aztecs were also brutal violent cultures; and their Spanish invaders were no better, morally speaking, but also not that much worse.
And that's humans for you. We are a violent, predatory, competitive species, and there's never been a time in history or pre-history when that hasn't been the case. And no wonder: we are products of an evolutionary system that privileges survival over all else. Nature is red and tooth and claw - damn, I wish I'd said that! - and the only way to stay alive is to kill better, flee better, or hide better than all the rival species.
If primates had remained in the trees, and jackals had become sentient - would the world really be a better place? Would capitalism be more humane and fair, if snarling hyenas in suits ran the banks and the financial institutions? Would the streets be safer if wolves were in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme? Or wouldn't they just - being wolvish by nature - steal and kill and mug unsuspecting elderly wolves?
Lions are the kings of the jungle; but they are lazy, arrogant and savage beasts. Would sentient lions do a better job of this planet? Or wouldn't they just sleep for eighteen hours a day then nuke all the other lions for two or three hours before going to bed again?
Evolution is a cruel schoolteacher; and for that reason, my guess it that most aliens we encounter - all of whom will have been subject to evolutionary forces - will be just as violent and selfish and brutal as we, as a species, are.
Of course I like to believe that humanity is capable of better things. Humans can be wise, poetic, liberal, gracious, and kind. (I'm not saying I am any of those things though.) But generally, I would say - looking around a post-Iraq War world, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, at a time when greedy bankers who almost destroyed our financial system are being rewarded by massive bonuses and new highly paid jobs - I'd say we are a species that has a long way to go before we can call ourselves a civilisation.
In Avatar, the balance of nature is vividly dramatised as a bond between all living things. In evolution, I would more cynically argue, the balance of nature is that if there are too many herbivores, the predators will catch them more easily and then there will be fewer live herbivores. And if the predators get too skilful, they'll kill too many prey; and then they'll die of starvation.
Evolution is a battlefield littered with corpses; it's really NOT that nice.
That doesn't mean I'm defending the humans in Avatar. Nor am I denying the beauty of Nature, and the extraordinariness of the way so many diverse creatures sustain life in a complex web of inter-relationships. But 'one-ness' with Nature only gets you so far; it takes hard work, and moral courage, to pursue and enact the ideals of justice, peace, cooperation, democracy and fairness.
So we, as a species, have a long way to go; but I'm betting that most other species in the universe will have the same problems, and the same flaws, as we do. For that reason, I'd prefer a less rose-tinted view of alien life. Let them have flaws; let them make mistakes. Let them be the slaves of their own evolution - whether they are predators, prey, parasites, or symbiotes.
And let's also hope that they, and we, learn to work together and with others, to build a culture that isn't based around the desperate desire to thwart and humiliate others, in order to be 'top dog'.
The funniest thing I read this week was John Crace's parody of The Road, written from the point of view of an actual parent.
Screenwriter and blogger Danny Stack alerted me to this fascinating piece about screenplay credits in Hollywood, involving the movies Up in the Air, Nine and Avatar. In a separate dispute, James Cameron has been accused of plagiarising the story of Avatar.
This week SFF Song of the Week featured Tony Ballantyne as our blogjay...Tony seems to be the honest person I know who's loving the snow. Those who know Tony and his blog will be aware he has a delightful passion for Folk Music, even when it's unfashionable. Tony's a wonderfully inventive writer, who loves accordians and robots in equal measure.
I read this delightful short story about storytelling by Brazilian author Fabio Fernandes.
And I've been looking at the Analytics for this site, and am delighted to find that one of the most-read blogs is a piece I wrote yoinks ago about my radio drama Breaking Point. I would argue this is a good reason for the BBC to repeat it. Now! Come on guys, get on with it.
Meanwhile, my latest Orbit blog - about why it was a great year for historical fiction - is still up there on their website and also lurking here.
Here's one from my archive of images that haunt me....
After last week's blogfest on this site - featuring Tony Ballantyne, Kate Bush, Archie Tait and, er me - here's another full schedule for the Spaces that are Debatable:
SUNDAY: Paintings of the Week. Singalonga-art.
MONDAY: Astronomy Photo of the Week & Reblog
TUESDAY: My own weird take on Avatar - If Jackals Ruled the World
WEDNESDAY: Alastair Reynolds hits the decks with his choice of SFF Song of the Week.
THURSDAY: Movie Zone: a guest blog about the Spider-Man trilogy by Adrian Reynolds (no relation to Wednesday's guy)
FRIDAY: The Week Reviewed
SATURDAY: No idea what's happening on Saturday. Could be something, could be nothing - let's see!
ALSO, today on Radio 3 at 8pm then all week long in iPlayer is my adaptation of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North.
This week, just for fun, here are two great paintings that have inspired two great songs.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda by Leonardo da Vinci
Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh
On Sunday 17th January (which is tomorrow, if you're reading this today) at 8pm, Radio 3 are repeating my adaptation of Tayeb Salih's marvellous novel Season of Migration to the North.
It's Pick of the Day in the Guardian Guide, which writes:
Season of Migration to the North is an adaptation of Tayeb Salih's lauded story of a man's return to his home in Sudan after seven years of studying in Europe. Suleyman reflects poetically on the comfort he feels on returning to the village of his birth, which is shaken when a dangerous stranger arrives in the town. Philip Palmer's dramatisation captures the sense of menace that hangs over the apparent unchanging safety of a Nile village.
If you miss it, then you can catch it on BBC iPlayer for 7 days after broadcast.
I killed a lot of people this week. Millions of them, in fact.
Well, strictly speaking they weren't 'people', just sentient aliens, but I killed 'em. Horribly and stone dead. Such is my life as a science fiction writer...
This was the week when I didn't go to see The Road. I was intending to; it's science fiction, it's had stunningly good reviews, and I was all set to go and give it a try. But to be honest it sounds a bit grim; so instead, naughtily, being a shallow kind of a cove, I went to see Daybreakers instead - a vampire movie with a twist (humans are the endangered species!) which is flawed and silly but, hell, it's great fun.
I also saw Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, which is a treat. After seeing the trailers, I pompously thought it was wrong to vulgarise Sherlock Holmes by making him a martial arts expert ass-kicker; but to be honest, after seeing the movie, I decided all that was cool. After all, you can't make a modern blockbuster without some kick-ass action - not if you want an actual audience. But for the most part, this movie is true to the Holmes tradition of brilliant deduction and emotional turmoil. And Jude Law as Watson is pretty faithful to Conan Doyle's original creation - not a duffer, but a competent soldier and loyal ally.
I finished Alan Moore's magnificent graphic novel From Hell; then read Warren Ellis's astonishing Transmetropolitan. I've got a guest blog in the Book Zone slot coming up on Ellis and his work - from screenwriter and comic book reviewer Stuart Angell McGregor - so watch this space.
And this is the week that Debatable Spaces grew up. We had Tony Ballantyne's SFF Song of the Week (the wonderful Experiment IV by Kate Bush). We had Archie Tait's marvellous and scholarly blog on SF movies. There was the Painting of the Week slot on Sunday; Astronomy Photo of the Week on Monday (okay, okay, I forgot to post it, so I sneakily put it up on Tuesday and backdated it Monday - ha! Bet no one noticed.) And also on Monday was the Reblog section where I mention stuff that's been on this site and elsewhere and still lives in archive cyberspace.
This has been a fabulous week for me in terms of not going out much but still having lots of friends - I've been exchanging emails with Al Reynolds, Lilith Saintcrow, Nikki Peeler (all of whom are blogjayying in the SFF Song of the Week slot.) And I've also been in touch with movie and TV pals like Greg Dinner, Britt Harrison, Margaret Glover and Johnny Furse, who've all popped in to visit Debatable Spaces and have a little wander around.
The next stage is to get a USB cable that connects my computer with my brain, and sit in a vat of baked beans. Then I will be truly post-human!
Oh, I also did a blog on the Orbit site, which is still there. That was fun...