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MPoAF: Conan

May 6, 2011 in Clips, Movies, Moving Pictures on a Friday, Uncategorized by Brian | 3 comments

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.

A Christmas Miscellany

December 23, 2010 in Books, Clips, History, Movies, Music, Podcasts, Short Stories by Brian | No comments

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:

Available from the Subterranean Press website (where those nifty limited editions reside), or from the usual online venues, should anyone fancy a post-Xmas treat.

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!

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MPoaF: It’s Oscar Time

February 26, 2010 in Movies, Moving Pictures on a Friday by Brian | No comments

My humble contribution to the feeding frenzy of the entertainment-industrial complex that is the Oscars. If you want predictions for who’ll scoop the main prizes, you’ll have to look elsewhere. The words ‘Avatar’ and ‘Hurt Locker’ will not be appearing anywhere in this post. (Except just there, obviously). I’ve seen precisely one of the ten films up for Best Picture – pathetic, I know – so have nothing remotely sensible to say. Other than that the one I have seen – District 9 – is a good, unusual piece of sf, which it’s great to see on the list, and that it is obviously not going to win in a million years (and to be honest, much as I liked it … well, I liked it, quite a lot in fact, but I didn’t think it was an earth-shattering masterpiece or anything).

No, this is all about one category we can get some properly good moving images for: short animated film. Here are three of the nominees in full, for your perusal. I would have said ‘for your amusement‘, but the humour on display here is pretty dark stuff, so your mileage may vary.

First off (and winner of my personal Oscar, I think) some nicely grim fairy tale-telling:

And next some nifty French animation:

And finally more thoroughly macabre goings on (just a bit too macabre for me to find it terribly amusing, to be honest):

The other two nominees, by the way, are Logorama, which its creators seem to have removed from most of the video sites that let you embed stuff in blogs, so I got bored trying to find a version to include here, and A Matter of Loaf and Death, which is similarly not easy to get hold of the full version of – but it’s Wallace and Gromit, so you know more or less precisely what it’s like already.

MPoaF: Trailer Time

December 17, 2009 in Clips, Movies, Moving Pictures on a Friday by Brian | No comments

I have a confession to make. I don’t know if this disqualifies me from my membership of geekdom or something, but … The Dark Knight wasn’t my favourite superhero movie experience of 2008. Shocking, I know. Just shocking. I liked it well enough, and obviously thought bits of it (mostly Joker-related bits, I suppose) were brilliant. But I’m pretty sure I derived more simple enjoyment from … Iron Man. It was a straightforward, slick, pretty confection that didn’t really try to be anything more than what it was, and as far as I was concerned it succeeded pretty triumphantly. Which is not in any sense damning with faint praise: I seriously think it’s an impressively well put together package, with the directing, acting, scripting and effects all working in near-perfect harmony towards a clear and shared goal. Sure, it’s some way from being perfect, but I left the cinema wearing the dumb smile of the satiated seeker of eye candy.

Dark Knight, by contrast, was an altogether more complicated and ambitious beast. And perhaps because I’d fallen for the pre-release hype, it seemed to me to come up just short of the lofty targets it set for itself – aside, as I said, for some passages of seriously accomplished film-making. It’s clearly the more interesting film of the two, but it just didn’t deliver quite the entertainment kick to me that Iron Man did.

All of which is a convoluted (and believe me, I could go on and on, making it more and more convoluted, because I’ve thought about this particular compare and contrast exercise far more than is healthy) … anyway, all of this is a convoluted way of saying that of all the big budget, sfx-heavy films promising to grace our cinema screens in 2010, this is probably the one that tickles my fancy most of all:


It’s All About Me

September 25, 2009 in Interviews, Movies, Reviews, Short Stories by Brian | No comments

Further worrying evidence for the progressive contamination of the internet with me-related material.

First, I do the interview thang at Moon Drenched Fables.

Second, I do the fantasy casting for the movie-of-the-book thang at My Book the Movie. Not something I actually gave any thought to while writing the Godless World, but I think some of the casting possibilities I came up with are quite promising. And – I only realised after I’d finished – it’s shaping up to be an all-Brit cast, which either means I’m terribly parochial or that we’ve got all the best actors. I incline towards the latter possibility.

Third, someone else does the review thing for the small press anthology Rage of the Behemoth I’ve got a story in, over at The Cimmerian. A fitting home for a review, given the anthology’s focus on heroic fantasy of the sort Robert E Howard excelled at. Nice, too, that the book gets the thumbs up. I’ve been gradually working my way through my author’s copy, and can confirm there’s some fun stuff in there for fans of this kind of thing (i.e. warriors, monsters and mayhem). Copies still easily available for purchase in both the UK and the US.

Three Random Things I Noticed This Week

June 9, 2009 in Interviews, Movies, Translations by Brian | No comments

Sometimes it’s hard not to be a bit despondent about the way bookselling is going. Latest manifestation of the increasingly uphill slog bookstores are facing in the UK is that Borders UK seems to be heading for the exit. (Not the same company, incidentally, as Borders in the US, which is having it’s own possibly even more severe problems). I know this is just the market doing what it does, and I know online book sales, and the brutal discounting of best-sellers in supermarkets, and eventually – even in the laggardly UK – the rise of e-books all have their pluses for the consumer, but it still feels regrettable that it’s becoming so difficult for even those with some scale on their side to make money out of bricks and mortars bookstores. I can’t help but think that the domination of the mass bookselling market – online and offline – by so few players is not going to prove an unreservedly good thing (to put it mildly) for either readers or authors in the long run.

On a more cheery subject, one of the entirely unpredictable amusements the internet offers is provided by the mindless working away of the automatic translation gremlins. Latest manifestation I’ve noticed is a version of an sf signal mind meld I was involved in the other day, on the subject of gloominess in sf. It’s clearly been translated into French and then back into English again, with the results that I apparently said, amongst many other similarly weird things:

The unhurt put candid, in its chichi quieten, is a youngster of the 20th century

When writers are more interested in how lavish shades of bloodless they can reproof up with than in hellish and unblemished, you inevitably aim up with a more less rose-tinted phantom of charitable possibilities.

There seems to be some kind of poetic, profound wisdom hiding in there somewhere: much more poetic and profound than what I said in the original interview. Perhaps I should put all my answers through a couple of rounds of online translation before submitting them in future?

And finally, I was pleased to discover that one of my favourites amongst the innumerable cgi shorts that show up on the internet these days is moving towards expansion into a full movie. Here’s the original short, a fun slice of sf:

Four Items

May 11, 2009 in Facebook, Fall of Thanes, Interviews, Movies, Reviews, Signing by Brian | No comments

Item 1: First winner of the Facebook signed Fall of Thanes giveaway has been duly selected. One more chance to win – this coming Friday – so there’s still time to sign up as a fan and thereby get yourself entered in the prize draw.

Item 2: According to this review of Fall of Thanes, it appears I might have made someone cry. Good. I mean that in the nicest possible way, obviously.

Item 3: I did an interview at a slightly more unusual venue than my usual online habitat of sf/f book blogs: Grinding to Valhalla, which as far as I can tell is a sort of mass interview site for mmo bloggers/podcasters. As a result, there’s a little bit more in there about my gaming habits/history than is usually the case.

Item 4: And finally … well I’m not really sure what to say about this (found via CBR), other than that I am at once strangely fascinated and strangely repelled:

Please Don’t Do It, Hollywood plus Any Questions

February 4, 2009 in Movies, Writing by Brian | No comments

Call me a grumpy, glass-half-empty, misanthrope of a worrier, but I fear, in my bones, that the Hollywood machine is about to chew up one of my (and a great many other people’s) favourite ever sf books, Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

Little snippets of info about the planned film adaptation have been turning up here and there for quite a while, with the most recent batch – which plunged me into my current gloomy apprehension – showing up on the invaluable sf signal blog.

It’s not so much the naming of the potential director that alarms (I’ve never heard of him, my movie director geek fu being much shrivelled in recent years – although a quick check of the IMDb doesn’t suggest my ignorance is exactly appalling). It’s the distant sound of the butcher’s knives being unsheathed as another genre classic heads into the studio slaughterhouse. It’s The Dark is Rising all over again. (And we all know how that turned out, right?).

It would take, I suspect, a genius to cram Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion into a single movie without pounding into a homogenous pulp much of what is distinctive and accomplished about them as novels: the Canterbury Tales mosaic of overlapping stories that flesh out the world and the characters, the literary allusions, the wanton firework display of exotic ideas and images, the balancing of extreme violence with much more personal, somewhat philosophical and existential, struggles. Seems pretty probable that the worries expressed over at sf signal – that the Hollywood instinct will be to excise much of the subtlety and elegance to turn it into a more accessible, action-packed event movie – will prove accurate. And I love me some accessible, action-packed event movie fun, it’s just I don’t particularly want it marching under the Hyperion banner.

I guess it’s the nature of things, given the huge cost of getting this stuff to the screen, but it always makes me wonder why the movie moguls don’t just go for more of the (equally high-selling, surely) flash-bang-wallop type of books in the first place. You’d think the less reductive surgery required to turn the original text into a movie, the greater the chance of a positive outcome. That’s probably my hopeless naivety talking, though. It likes to make itself heard now again. Shameless, it is.

On any entirely different subject, I’m going to work up a couple of blog posts in the not too distant future talking about writing-, book- and getting published-related stuff, taking as a starting point some of the questions folks have asked me by e-mail, over on Facebook, or in person (poor misguided souls, asking questions of me, but there you are). So just in case anyone’s got any questions of that ilk, now’s your chance to send me an e-mail, or ask it in the comments to this post, or head on over to the Facebook discussion board and ask it there; I’ll add anything new into the pot and stir it around for a while. Like porridge.

Three Quick Things

September 11, 2008 in Interviews, Movies, Podcasts, TV by Brian | No comments

World’s briefest interview! In terms of the number of questions asked, at least; not in terms of my answer. While you’re at that site, check out the huge library of links to online reviews of fantasy novels in the sidebar. Very handy if you’re wondering what to buy next.

I’ve got to admit I’m not a big fan of Torchwood. Not even a small fan, really, though I kept watching the occasional episode in the vain hope of falling in love with it. But I quite like this idea: a special radio episode to mark the switching on of CERN’s now famous Large Hadron Collider. You can download the mp3 of it here, but only for the next five days or so. It’s not remotely enough to turn me into a fan, but it does make me wonder: might I actually have liked it more if Torchwood was a radio series instead of on TV? On this evidence, I think there are ways it benefits – or could benefit – from the different constraints and opportunities of the audio medium. And from having to comply with the requirements of a pre-watershed broadcast slot, for that matter.

And this is my idea of a top quality movie trailer: Quantum of Solace. I’m looking forward to this more than I’ve looked forward to a Bond movie in … well, ever. Although there were a few doubting voices when he was first cast, Daniel Craig now looks – to me, anyway – as though he was born to play the role. The tuxedo fits.

Geekgasm for Comic Readers (of a certain age)

July 18, 2008 in Comics, Movies by Brian | No comments

Found the Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator via Antick Musings.

EDIT to add: the youtube clip may get yanked at any time, I guess, so here’s a link to the official trailer, which unsurprisingly is vastly better quality and really rather pretty. (Still got slight reservations about how well this is going to work as a movie, though …)

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