Saw these clips on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, a blog with approximately … oh, I don’t know … 500 quintillion times as many readers as this one, so apologies if you’ve seen them before. Feel free to move along, if so. If not, spare a moment to enjoy these little summaries of the joy of travel (especially the first one, which is just kind of lovely, if you ask me).
Without wanting to sound too ungrateful or smug, I was lucky enough to kind of overdose on travel – especially the kind to rather unusual and far-flung places – by the time the 21st century got underway. These days I’m a rather sedentary sort, deeply attached to my home comforts, with distinctly unitchy feet. But watching those films gave me a little tingle in both soles and soul, and I remembered, for a moment or two at least, just how awesome it is to journey out into the wider world …
I have no inclination whatsoever to do this myself, but I feel a certain envy for those who do. Do they feel as free – free of gravity, free of fear, free of doubt – as they appear? Amazing, and rather beautiful.
So, here comes one of the oldest stalwarts of fantasy literature, roaring in from the horizon for another crack at the big screen.
Now, call me a grump (it has been known), but I think this is a pretty bad trailer. Not because of its impact on my desire to see the film – it looks like DVD fodder for me, but I thought that before the trailer ever saw the light of day – but because of the way it’s put together. The thing looks, to my aged eye, like it was cut and pasted by a toddler with attention deficit disorder. In the main, it’s a succession of bogglingly brief images of people shouting, fighting and bonking, intercut with horses and writhing cgi tentacles; some of the action is so brief, particularly in the second minute or so, it hardly has the time to register on the retina, let alone the brain, before it’s snatched away. The only extended (using the term loosely) scene is of some witch summoning up sandy ghost things to fight our hero, and it doesn’t look too bad, but the rest of the trailer’s a pretty formless stew.
It all screams ‘brainless spectacle with no interest in narrative or character, made for those of limited attention span’, which may or may not be an accurate representation of the movie. As it happens, I quite like a bit of brainless spectacle with no interest in narrative or character now and again, and my attention span is certainly not what it once was, but if you’re going to go that route, you still ought to have some spectacle coherent and spectacular enough to last more than a fraction of a second in the trailer, surely? If you’re going to rely on the wow factor to compensate for the absence of substantial content – which is a fair enough approach to trailers – at least give the images enough breathing space to elicit a wow. As it is, all this elicits in me is ‘oh, look what’s that … wait, it’s gone, what’s this now … no, gone, we’re back to those tentacle-things again … oh, no, it’s the beast with two backs … damn, I’m starting to get a headache …’ Maybe I’m just getting old.
Which may also be the reason for my increasing dissatisfaction with the technological sheen of movies these days. CGI and 3D just don’t really do it for me. Especially 3D, which I increasingly think is the curse of 21st century movies (true, I’ve only seen a couple of movies in 3D in the last few years, and neither of them was Avatar, but I stand by my only lightly informed opinion).
My anti-CGI inclination is a bit more surprising to me. As I said, I like spectacle, and I certainly like the way the advances in special effects have freed up cinema to do sf and fantasy on a grand scale, but there remains – with a few honourable exceptions – a weightless, inconsequential quality to even quite sophisticated CGI that somehow distances me from the images on the screen. For all the technologists’ talents, they still can’t quite replicate the texture and presence of reality inside their magic boxes, and I find myself noticing it more and more. There have been a few rare occasions in the cinema when I’ve totally, 100% forgotten that I’m looking at wholly digitally-created images – now and again with Gollum in LotR, for example – but generally, even when the CGI is done quite brilliantly, there’s always some tiny, near-dormant niggling part of my brain that is distantly aware that what I’m seeing isn’t real, and that can sometimes be just enough to dilute the immersive effect of the movie.
All this technological genius applied to films has produced a medium that looks, to my jaundiced eye, more than a little decadent. Awash with money and capabilities that have induced a kind of wanton frenzy, admitting of no restraint, that creates weightless, rather debased, wonders on a gargantuan scale.
Enough moaning, though. It’s more pleasing to reflect on the source material for all this: Howard’s original Conan stories. I re-read a few of them not so long ago, in the decidedly not weightless, very much real, collected edition that’s one of my favourite book-as-objects I possess.
I’m by no means an uncritical fan of this stuff. Some of the stories feel a little over-extended, their length not quite justified by the content, and some of the racial and sexual assumptions don’t exactly jibe with modern sensibilities. But still, I find a good deal to enjoy. There’s an energy and conviction to the stories that’s very engaging, and on the whole they’ve aged remarkably well, considering how the world and the genre have changed since they were written. I suspect the discerning fan of fantasy might well find their time better spent going back to source and reading or re-reading Howard’s original tales rather than sitting in a dark cinema being beaten over the head with 3D CGI. But that’s just me, grump that I am.
An interview with Neil Williamson, a Scottish writer of speculative fiction, who has a short story in contention for one of the annual British Science Fiction Association awards. I thought I’d pass it on for various reasons, including (a) there’s some discussion of the Scottish sf/fantasy scene, which is not a particular corner of the genre diaspora that gets talked about all that often (except in Scotland, I suppose), (b) the interviewer is Jeff Vandermeer, who is the sort of chap who’s well worth following around the internet, if you’re not already doing so, in a nice non-stalkery way, obviously, and (c) I get mentioned in the interview. Which is nice. But not important, of course.
First saw this on the indispensible SF Signal, by the way.
Thought I’d resurrect an old tradition around here – not that something that’s only happened once before, long ago, really qualifies as a tradition – and provide a randomish smorgasbord of odds and ends to mark the festive season. So, without further ado:
For Movie Fans (and Superhero Fans), the trailer for one of the latest in the apparently endless sequence of movies based on comic books. Thor, which I confidently predict will be the highest grossing superhero-fantasy-Norse mythology mash-up of 2011:
Considerably more promising than I thought it might be when I first heard it was in the pipeline, but I’m saying that from a position of low, low expectations. Vastly more promising, in my humble yet obviously expert opinion, than the other big budget superhero trailer doing the rounds at the moment: Green Lantern. Still, trailers are only trailers; who knows how the final products will measure up.
For Book Fans, and in a somewhat self-serving spirit entirely out of tune with the season, my author copies of the Subterranean Press Speculative Horizons anthology edited by Patrick St-Denis turned up the other day, and things of compact but considerable beauty they are too.
The limited edition signed copies are very pleasing, with a whole page of signatures bound into the book. Enough to make a chap giddy, to be keeping such august authorial company:
For Podcast Fans, I offer a couple of the more unusual items from the long list of stuff I’m subscribed to, in case there’s someone out there who shares my peculiar combination of interests.
The Norman Centuries. An excellent, straightforward narrative history of the Normans. For fans of medieval history, this is rich pickings. Most folk – round here anyway – know the Normans as the conquerors of England, but less generally known is their habit of conquering all sorts of other folks, wherever they went: the French, the Italians, the Byzantines, the Sicilian Muslims. Just about everyone they came across, really.
The Ink Panthers Show. Exactly the kind of thing, in many ways, podcasting was invented for. Two guys, with occasional semi-random guests, talk to each other about … well, about almost anything they feel like talking about, really. They’re both comics creators, so that comes up now and again, but a lot of it is just about what’s going on in their lives and families. I find them pretty personable, articulate and funny. Once – if – you get on their wavelength, it’s a pleasant listen. It’s mostly quite family-friendly, but sometimes strays into slightly more adult or non-PC areas, so consider yourself so advised.
For Fans of Ye Olde Classical Music … well, this (in case any overseas visitors don’t know, by the way, the chap introducing things is Matt Lucas, one of the current movers and shakers of British comedy):
You can only wonder what the neighbours thought …
And, come to think of it, I’m going to repost the musical clip from that long ago first iteration of the Christmas Miscellany, just because I still think, as I did then, that it’s one of the nicer sounds on the web and sounds to me suitably restful, reflective and contented for the holiday season. How’s that for keeping a tradition going?
And For Everyone Else: well, just my best wishes for the festive season, however you choose to spend it, or celebrate it, or ignore it. I’ll be back and blogging once the inevitable gluttony-induced lethargy and inertia wear off. Happy Christmas!
The Pink Tentacle blog, which I’ve mentioned before here, has become one of my favourite providers of internet-based ‘Huh-Would you look at that-How weirdly interesting’ moments. So today is Pink Tentacle Day in these parts.
It provides a reliable stream of interesting snippets in support of its mission to sample the unique charms of Japanese culture, particularly as it relates to technology, sf, fantasy and so on. Like lots of people, I’m fascinated by Japan despite never having been there: it’s got an intrinsic interest and appeal as a highly distinctive culture that had economic and historical foundations deep enough to armour it, at least somewhat, against the homogenising spread of US and Euro cultural hegemony over the last fifty years. The world needs diversity, and Japan definitely provides a bit of that.
I’m similarly fascinated, these days, by the rise of places like China and India, and – setting aside all the complicated economic, political and environmental issues that rise presents – the slow but steady spread of awareness of their culturally distinctive products and habits. It seems at least possible that twenty or thirty years from now these Asian giants will be setting the cultural agenda – particularly the pop culture and genre agenda – on a global scale to a far greater extent than they are now. They’re the future – not all of it, of course, but a big part of it.
What I’d really like is to find blogs that do for China and India what Pink Tentacle does so well for Japan, but I’ve not managed it so far. Until I do, a sampling of Pink Tentacle’s recent, typically varied, output:
The things anime and manga fans do to their cars. Apparently these eye-popping vehicles are called itasha, and personally I think a few of these rumbling around Edinburgh would be a great addition to the streetscape.
And finally, How To Drill a Hole in Someone’s Head, from a late 18th century Japanese medical treatise. The full array of historical medical illustrations is very definitely not for the squeamish (you have been warned).
Philip Palmer is on holiday. You may think that’s of no interest to you – and you’re probably right, though I’m sure we all hope he’s having a good time – but it does mean he’s put up an in absentia reposting of my contribution to the regular SFF Song of the Week feature on his blog. So if you didn’t catch it first time around, now’s your chance to discover what tops my personal ‘epic fantasy in the form of rock song’ charts.
Which reminded me of this other sff/music collision, which I found on some website or other recently (can’t remember where, sorry), and liked for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that it’s using possibly my single favourite song to have emerged from the 1990s Britpop frenzy:
In fact, let’s just have the proper version too, so that anyone unfortunate enough not to have heard it can do so:
Obviously, if you don’t like Britpop in general or Pulp in particular, or indeed that specific song, this post will have been a bit of a wash-out for you. Sorry about that (although I know it’s too late to apologise now, down here at the bottom).
Over at his Debatable Spaces blog the very nice sf author Philip Palmer has a weekly feature inviting fellow spec fic writers to showcase music with a science fictional or fantastical vibe. My turn this week, and you can see my choice here. You might want to browse around a bit while you’re there. Lots of diverse and interesting content on his blog.
There have been bubbles blown in the house recently. Watching them, I was struck by a child’s eye view (a perspective highly recommended for its ability to give the whole world a wash of wonder and fun): ‘Wow. Bubbles are cool.’ And for no other reason than that: bubbles!
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