This Review Is the Scene of the Crime: Inception

This Review Is the Scene of the Crime: Inception

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inception-city-posterInception (2010)
Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger.

You expected a review of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, didn’t you? I respect Dukas and Goethe too much for that. As apparently does the rest of the nation, since over the weekend the film made roughly the amount of change found in the lint catcher of the dryer.

Inception right now is the movie conversation. No matter what else occurs in cinema during 2010 (Tron Legacy! So hyped for that), this will known as the year of Inception. Even if We Make Contact. Inception is guaranteed to become a speculative-fiction classic that will sit on the same shelf with Metropolis, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, The Terminator, The Matrix, et al.

What? Did you think I was going to go against the grain of critical and viewer opinion that has almost cased and mounted Inception in the Hall of Fame?

I’m not. I can’t. The movie deserves every accolade it has received. I don’t even think there can possibly be a fan-backlash against it like there was with Avatar. Inception is as good as you’ve heard it is, and for many of you, it might even be far better.

But don’t walk into the theater with expectations, or even that much knowledge about it. Writer-director Christopher Nolan remained closed-mouth about the film in the build toward its premiere, which was the perfect approach. Inception isn’t exactly a “twist” movie (Bruce Willis was dead all along!), but it is a film of the constant escalation of surprise. Its story continues to plunge deeper and deeper, turning more complex with each passing scene, where the stories of most movie strip away complications as they head toward their finales. It’s a reversal that recalls Nolan’s second movie, the breakthrough Memento, but Inception is much more intricate in design. Hell, it makes Memento seem linear! Therefore, even though Inception can’t be spoiled with a single sentence the way you might spoil The Crying Game, it’s still best if you know as few details about the plot as possible or any of the specific scenes before you go in.

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A Review of The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

A Review of The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

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hero-and-the-crownThe Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
Ace Books (240 pages, $6.99, 1987)

Almost two decades before The Hero and the Crown begins, we are told, a witch seduced the king of Damar.

She married him, bore a child, and then died of disappointment when the child turned out to be a girl, unlikely to take the throne and fulfill her ambitions. Or, at least, that’s the version of the story that everyone knows.

The protagonist of the story is that daughter, a young woman named Aerin. I have to admit to some positive prejudice here: the maladjusted princess is a favorite archetype of mine, and Aerin fits it perfectly. Awkward, prickly, shy, taller than all the other women around her, an outsider in her own family and to her own court — it’s even mentioned that her embroidery is lousy, which has gotten to be a little bit of a cliché.

But she’s also determined, kind, brave, and — interestingly — thinks very scientifically for a quasi-medieval person, so even if you don’t like princesses with problems, I believe she’s a relatable hero.

Shortly after the story begins, we get an extended flashback explaining how she came to her current place in life. At fifteen, Aerin hadn’t yet manifested the magical gifts that mark Damarian royalty. To prove to her cousin Galanna that she truly had royal blood, she ate some leaves from a plant that was supposed to be deadly poison to all those outside the royal family — and nearly killed herself.

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Exploring Fantasy in Metal, Part II: Six Albums In the Dark of Night

Exploring Fantasy in Metal, Part II: Six Albums In the Dark of Night

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metal-dragonflameOnce upon a time, on a dark winter’s night, a black-clad adventurer came to my apartment to tutor me in the ways of Heavy Metal. Such Metal, that is, as pertained to my favorite genre ever, Fantasy. The long and fraught road leading to this nocturnal excursion can be found here, if you care for a saga’s beginnings.

So there we were. We sat on the floor of my bedroom. I was nervous and babbling; he was amused and patient. Before us like a Tarot spread: six CDs, each with songs or themes based in the fantastical or epic.

The night was long, but not infinite. Neither were my powers of concentration, my will, or my bladder.

In order to preserve my sanity, I asked Metal Master Sam to choose one or two songs from each of the six albums that best typified the whole. I felt a little guilty making him do all the work, but we had to focus.

Focus we did. We listened to two songs on every album but The Odyssey. We only listened to Track 8, “The Odyssey” on “The Odyssey,” because it was perforce very long. One cannot, after all, embark on only part of an Odyssey. It’s unseemly. More on that later.

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Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

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marvel-supers-4John O’Neill’s editorial in Black Gate 14 touched on gaming, on wargaming and role-playing, and on the way these things shaped the way friends interact. It hit home for me, because I recognised in my life much the same sort of phenomenon John described in his own.

I didn’t play Nova, the game he and many of his friends played as a sort of long-form creative wargaming campaign. I did play, and in one case referee, long-running role-playing campaigns that gave everybody who took part a special vocabulary, a shared set of touchstones and references that (I think) acquired a particular power from being our own: our own stories, independent from the culture at large, shaped by us and our choices.

I was about seventeen when I met a group of role-playing gamers who’d created their own world for the Marvel Super-Heroes role-playing system. I think the game had been going on for something like eight years at the point I met them, and it’s still going today. (Jeff Grubb has a thoughtful reminiscence on the secret origins of MSH here.)

The world, as such, was not and is not stable; it has been re-invented several times over, as campaigns and storylines begin and end (and, this being a super-hero game, occasionally lead to a reboot of the timeline in the course of play), sometimes incorporating actual comic-book characters and sometimes not, but always using many of the same heroes and villains created by our group of gamers.

The characters were, are, the essence of the game; not their histories, but their concepts, and if you played in that world you could add something to it that would become a part of the ongoing tale.

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Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

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echo-small-image

So Echo Bazaar, the free browser game set in the Fallen London, “a mile underground and a boat ride from Hell,” is a fantastic diversion. (I’ve mentioned it before.)

One of the things I love about it is that, despite its pseudohistorical goth neo-Victorian/steampunk setting (it’s like what might happen if steampunks discovered black), it’s not all that hateful about sex.

Which is a fine line with historical or pseudohistorical fantasy, right? You don’t want to be intolerably oppressive with your historical attitudes, and you don’t want to be irritatingly anachronistic by jamming in progressiveness where it doesn’t go.

And with history, at least you can rely on being accurate: with fantasy there’s a whole nother element where you have to be plausible, which basically means subscribing to historical fanon. There were black people living in Victorian London, but if what you know about it comes from seeing fifteen different versions of A Christmas Carol, you’ll probably think that the Repentant Forger is an example of unrealistic political correctness.

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Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

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theharm3TTA Press, publishers of Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave magazines as well as a few books, has launched a (potential) new line of exclusive novellas, beginning with Gary McMahon’s The Harm:

We hope that this will be the first of many TTA Press novellas, stories that you’d expect to see in Black Static and Interzone but are just too long for the magazines. They will be of varying lengths, and many we expect will be much longer than The Harm, but each one will be priced the same, just £5. In time, we hope to offer subscriptions to these novellas and offer significant savings.

The Harm is aimed at the Black Static audience, i.e., horror.  The story depicts the not unpredictable intertwined fates of three now grown up victims of particularly gruesome (though the adjective may be a redundancy) child molestation, as well as that of a sister of one of the casualties.  

The title intends to convey not just the horror of physical and sexual abuse of children (and, actually, the narrative is not, thankfully, directly concerned with detailing this) but the harm to all those who survive.

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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Eleven – “The Knocking on the Door”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Eleven – “The Knocking on the Door”

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fu_manchu_image“The Knocking on the Door” was the tenth and final installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu.

By the time it was published in The Story-Teller in July 1913, it had already appeared a few weeks earlier in book form as Chapters 27-30 of Rohmer’s first novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for its subsequent U. S. publication).

“The Knocking on the Door” starts off with Dr. Petrie and Nayland Smith grieving the terrible loss of Inspector Weymouth.

There is little comfort in Weymouth dying a hero, despite his having taken Dr. Fu-Manchu with him to a watery grave.

The Inspector was denied his dignity during his supreme act of self-sacrifice, for he died a victim of Dr. Fu-Manchu’s madness-inducing bacilli.

In his anguish, Nayland Smith gives vent to one of his most hateful pronouncements, “Pray God the river has that yellow Satan….I would sacrifice a year of my life to see his rat’s body on the end of a grapping iron!”

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Climbing Aboard the Dragon: 10 Tips to Better Productivity

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: 10 Tips to Better Productivity

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“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
— Joseph Heller

Previously in this series about writing, we’ve talked about ways to get story ideas as well as different approaches you can take to writing your story, novel, comic script, screenplay, or other related screed, tome, or pamphlet.

Pen image by Michael ConnorsBut what about the single most important aspect of the writing process? Yes, I’m talking about butt-in-chair time. How do you get yourself into a good schedule and motivated to write?

Very good question.

My answer? Below I’ve listed my top-ten list of tricks and techniques I’ve used that help me get more productive (and less annoyed with myself for not having gotten and writing done):

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Goth Chick News: Vampires and Cat-Vomiting Noises

Goth Chick News: Vampires and Cat-Vomiting Noises

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let-the-right-oneIn the name of journalistic integrity, with stomach fortified by a hearty breakfast, I took myself to a Sunday morning matinee of Eclipse. I mean in all good faith I couldn’t hack on something I hadn’t seen.

But now thankfully, I can.

The theater was empty sans me and some guys sitting a couple of rows behind. In the minutes leading up to the start of the film, I overheard their conversation which helped explain why four, twenty-something men were about to sit through the third installment of the Twilight saga.

Apparently they were there solve the mystery of their girlfriends’ collective mania which had, until now, completely eluded them.

And from what I understand, they pretty much agreed they all hated Robert Pattinson just on principal.

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WINDWALKER: A Fantasy Masterpiece

WINDWALKER: A Fantasy Masterpiece

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windwalker“He conquered love and death…
now he walks the winds of eternity.”

Some movies have the power to sweep you away into a fantastic world and take you on an adventure that you will never forget. These films are legends in and of themselves, enduring visions that you want to revisit again and again. They are pure magic.

When I was about 11 years old (circa 1980), I entered a small-town theatre in Kentucky and discovered a film that transported me through space and time into the lives of a Cheyenne family struggling to survive in a savage world of stunning beauty.

The film was Kieth Merrill’s WINDWALKER. It starred Trevor Howard, James Remar, and Nick Ramus. Recently I obtained a copy of this masterful film on DVD. Once again I took a journey into the primal world of two centuries ago, and once again I was mesmerized, moved, and thrilled by its powerful story, vivid characters, and sheer cinematic beauty. WINDWALKER is a film of quiet genius that never truly earned the praise it deserved, and if you’ve never seen it, you have a rare pleasure awaiting you.

The film hit theatres the same year as George Lucas’ THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, one year before Steven Spielberg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and two years before John Milius’ CONAN THE BARBARIAN. It came at the tail-end of 1970s cinema, one of the most creative and vital periods of American filmmaking. Three years earlier, STAR WARS had changed the Hollywood landscape by breaking all the records for box office success and setting a premium on pure movie bombast and the blockbuster “formula.” Perhaps that’s why a more subtly magnificent fantasy like WINDWALKER soared gracefully under the radar. In the 30 years since its release, the movie’s masterpiece status has been largely recognized by experts and critics.

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