Day in the Life of an Idiot

 I'm here in a Starbucks in Chicago, waiting for the SFWA Nebula Conference to wake up, so I thought I'd finally write down a few thoughts about Captain America: Civil War.  

Generally, I liked it.  There are a few things I think I can say about the movie 'above the cut.' as it were. Without spoiling, I want to talk about one of the fundamental differences between the movie and the comic book arc.  In the comic book, like the movie, there is an event that triggers a public outcry about the unchecked destruction that superheroes cause when they come blundering into situations, do their best, but sometimes civilian lives are lost.  In the comic book arc, the difference is that the destruction is caused, quite accidentally, by random "new" superheroes.  That's to say, "powered" people who have no affiliation with a superhero group like the X-Men or the Avengers.  As a result, part of what the public demands is a "superhero registration act" which not only requires any people with powers to offer themselves to the government, but ALSO requires long-standing superheroes to expose their secret identities as part of registration.

I think you can already see why, in the comic book version, someone from World War II might stop and say, "Uh... wait a minute... You gonna ask us all to wear stars next?"  (He had other really amazing observations which really resonated with everything that was happening during the time Civil War was written, which was during the Patriot Act, which DIRECTLY commented on things happening in the US.)

In the movie (and this isn't much of a spoiler, because, in many ways the movie is actually about Bucky's past), the accords only require the superheroes to subject themselves to oversight.  Now, the question is a lot more nebulous: who is in charge, what decisions do they get to make... ?  

But, what's missing in the movie is Captain America being far more articulate and CLEAR about why he, specifically, finds this situation squicky.  The thing that drove me absolutely buggy (later... because during the movie my only thoughts were: bam! crash! zap!) was that it was certainly all set up in the previous Captain America movies. All we would have needed is, during the scene where the gathered Avengers are looking over the accord (I do love that it's clear Captain America read EVERY PAGE) to have Cap say, "Guys, really? We're going to put our trust in a governing body... WHEN HYDRA WAS SECRETLY IN CONTROL OF S.H.I.E.L.D. FOR THE PAST FIFTY YEARS??"

MCU Captain America has a LEGIT reason not to want to sign something that gives away his decision making power to an organization he knows nothing about.

But, so. like, *I* thought of that, but it was _never_ said out loud by ANYONE in the movie.  

Which to me, made Captain America seem like a war-mongering vigilante.... which is... super not Captain America.

That's not to say there weren't things I loved. Again, no spoilers, but I thought Black Panther moved EXACTLY RIGHT.  I was having flashbacks to comic books I barely remember reading every time he did a jump or a four-point landing or a swipe with his vibranium claws.

Also, I loved Peter Parker/Spider-Man

Okay, a couple things I can't say without a spoiler block...
( Read more... )So, those of you who saw it, what are your thoughts?

For the month of February I'm going to have the weirdest schedule.  Mason has Inter-Session at his school.  Inter-session is Crossroad's answer to not having a traditional summer vacation.  Mason has three weeks off from school now, will again in May, and then have the month of August off.  There are school programs if people have work issues, but we've always found a lot of value in the whole idea of taking time off to do the nothing Shawn and I remember fondly doing a lot of in the three months of summer vacation.  Other Crossroad's families take vacations.  For instance one of Mason's good friends is flying to New Zealand right now.

As you know, I've started a new job. I didn't feel entirely comfortable telling my new employer that I'm planning on just blowing off work for an entire three weeks (though I will feel *just fine* about it come May, because then I will have worked there a lot longer.)  The point is, I've agreed to work a bunch of evening hours.  Tonight I'll be at Roseville from 5 to 9.  I'll be at Maplewood tomorrow night, and then back to Roseville Thursday night (which I belatedly remembered is supposed to be Wyrdsmiths.)

Working nights is weird.  I'm sure I'll have other observations about it, once I've done it a few weeks in a row, but I think I sort of kind of like it.  What I like about it right now is that I feel like I have the day off, even though I don't.  For instance, I have the whole day to get stuff done. I'm sure I'll be super productive and do ALL THE THINGS.


(Miss Ball's opinion about how well that'll probably work out.)

But today is the day that I usually meet with some member of my writers' group to parallel play.  In other words, we sit together and write.  It's kind of our answer to the solitary life of a writer.  And, it can be a lot of fun, because you have an audience who understands when you'd rather be playing Solitaire or can't remember a synonym or just want to read the cool line you just wrote that you're super-proud of.

In other news: last night, Shawn and I finally saw "Elysium."  That's the science-ficiton film with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster? The one where the rich people have moved off Earth to a kind of Niven-esque ring world/L-5 colony?  Yeah, that one.  The one that looks super gritty?  Yeah, it was grim.  About as grim as I expected it to be, but it totally pushed some of my class buttons (in a good way.)  I long ago confessed to naomikritzer that a science-fiction trope that ALWAYS works for me is "stop the line"/labor strike stories.  They'll show up as Very Special Episodes on shows like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek and every damn time (even though it's essentially the same story) I'll get little tears and my eyes and secretly think it was the BEST EVER.  "Elysium" isn't quite that story made large, but there're elements of that trope in the movie... particularly the end, which I won't spoil beyond that.

There was a surprise character moment for me in "Elysium."  There's a mercenary/thief/fence-type named Spider who is pretty loathsome when you first meet him, but it becomes clear throughout the course of the film that he's weirdly... altruistic and kind of has been all along if you think about it for a few minutes.  He was my FAVORITE character, honestly.

So thumbs up?  Maybe.  I wouldn't necessarily tell you to go out of your way to see "Elysium," but I wouldn't warn you off it either.  I ultimately enjoyed it.  But Shawn had to look away several times because it was so gritty-dark and the beginning is so unrelenting that she kept asking, "Should we turn it off? Is this just going to be AWFUL??"  I'm glad we stuck with it, but, see: I can't exactly recommend it without reservations.

We were able to watch a movie like that last night, though, because Mason was PASSED OUT.  He'd had a sleepover the night before (Sunday to Monday, because of Inter-Session) and I kind of intentionally ran the kids around on Sunday.  Mason's buddy is a bit of a couch potato otaku, which are in point of fact MY people, but Mason can get irritable and restless if he sits ALL DAY.  So we let them game well into Sunday night and then yesterday I got them involved building marble towers (those Rube-Goldberg-type things) and then took them sledding at the St. Paul Country Club's golf course hill.



So, yeah, there's a date stamp now.  That's not from my camera, but from the stupid Mac iPhoto.  (Man, I hate Macs. I don't know why people are such proponents.)  At any rate, they had a lot of fun, but the rest was that Mason crashed sometime before dinner and we couldn't even rouse him to eat.  So, he slept until this morning--a whopping 13 and a 1/2 hours!  I told him he's getting practice in for being a teenager!

First of all, I have to let people know that an anthology my short story "God Box" is going to appear in is doing one of those kick-starter things, so if you're inclined, please help them out at: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/king-david-the-spiders-from-mars-tales-of-biblical-terror. The anthology is a follow up to SHE NAILED A STAKE THROUGH HIS HEAD, which featured Biblical horror stories. This one will be called KING DAVID AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS. My story, alas, takes place on Ganymede, and while it doesn't feature any spiders, does retell the golden hemorrhoids story. Because golden hemorrhoids are horror.

In other news, I've been somewhat incommunicato because Mason returned from Indiana with a cough that was very reminiscent of Whooping Cough. So, we kept him out of school for the past few days until the test results from the clinic came back. I'm pleased to be able to say that they were negative. He's back at school today--although very, VERY bummed about it. I thought we might be out a while so I took him to the library yesterday and we had a little checking out "accident" of about twenty-one books. And, yes, he'll read most of them by the time they're due back--partly because at least five of those were Toriko manga, all of which he finished yesterday before bedtime.

Mason is not fond of school. It cuts into his reading time.

My only other "news" is that Shawn and I finally watched "Magic Mike," the stripper film. I should preface my review by saying, you know, I like pretty men. I like watching pretty men get semi-naked. Yeah, I'm a lesbian, but I can appreciate all the glistening rock-hard abs and whatnots. But OMG THIS FILM WAS BORING. Let me give you some sample dialogue: "So... um, like, hey." [long pause] "Hey."

I'm not making this up. It was as if the director decided to be "artsy" and go for hyper-realistic dialogue. That can be cool, but ONLY IF THE CHARACTERS AREN'T MORONS. Seriously, the two main characters Mike and Adam have mind-numbingly stupid conversations for hours. Most of which were made up of those kind of grasping, half-finished sentences that dripped into other thoughts without any context or preamble. Characters who were "fast talkers," ie anyone who completed a sentence in less than twelve hours, really stood out. Okay, that's an exaggeration, because it couldn't have possibly been actual _hours_, because the film is only a couple of hours long, but holy shit it felt like a glacial age was passing before these two dolts of supposedly sympathetic main characters said anything of substance. Oh, and I should say that substance usually was signaled by, "Shit. Fucking shit, man."

Yeah.

And the there was dancing.

The dancing was fine, honestly, as it picked up the pace of this film by lightspeed jumps, and Matthew McConaughy's charcter had potential. Actually, they all did, but the story was hampered by DULLNESS. The love interest spends half her time looking so depressed to be there that I finally decided she was a symbol of THE AUDIENCE.

Shawn kept saying to me, "Can we turn it off now?" I doggedly said, "No! It will get better! People said this had a story!"

People LIE.

First, I want to say: library day was a big success. I ended up reading the first three Manga volumes of Naruto. (I'm totally hooked!) Mason read the newest "janitor" book as well as one called JINX, which he'd had on hold. It was kind of cool to pick out books, check them out, read them while sitting there, and return them before we left for the day. We also had money on a Noodles & Co. gift card we got for Christmas, so we had a free lunch (and they say there's no such thing!)

In the middle of the day I got a text from my Marvel Movie buddy seanmmurphy. He's been wicked busy, so he finally had some time to go see Iron Man 3 and did I want to go? Of course I did!

A lot has been said about this movie. I read Charlie Jane Anders' review in io9 and so I was expecting big things. Entertainment Weekly also gave it a A-.

I... was less impressed. As I've said on Facebook, I was never a huge Iron Man reader back in the day, so my comic book canon fu is low when it comes to villans and story lines in the Iron Man title. ("The Wolverine" is going to be a tougher sell for me because Silver Samurai and the whole Japan storyline was a favorite of both Shawn and mine back in the day.) But what I'm saying is, my problems with Iron Man 3 had nothing to do with any kind of canon fail... at least not in a nit-picky kind of way. But it also meant that the SPECTACLE of the suits worked for me, but only so far...

I will say in what I hope is a spoiler-free way, that Marvel very carefully gives its heroes weaknesses that are critical to the character, and I felt, at the end, perhaps Tony Stark's was severely undercut.

I think my problem was very simply that Tony Stark never changes. A bunch of stuff happens to him in this movie that sort of parallel Thor's fall from grace, but, unlike with Thor, I never felt a real transformation from Tony. I never bought he was humbled by any of it, because he remained the quippy, surface guy he was in the very first Iron Man movie (well, more like who he is in the 2nd Iron Man and Avengers, because at least in the origin story he has to go from military industrial playboy wanker to superhero playboy wanker.)


But what about the panic attacks, you argue? My problem there was that, while they were a good character moment (and possibly the first on-screen version of superhero PTS) he got over them INCREDIBLY EASILY and, more importantly, they never happened to him during battle, when losing his nerve could have actually cost himself his life OR SOMEONE ELSE's. Thus, they were kind superflious to the plot... and honestly to his character development. He doesn't seem to learn anything having gone through them, about the perils of being a hero. Sure, he's worried about Pepper and throws away his electro-magnet heart, but I just don't buy it. He'll be back. He's Iron Man. He says so at the end, which, again undercuts any real tension and character development.

So, yeah, I felt Iron Man was sort of Iron Meh.

St. Patrick's Day Observed was for us, as it was for a lot of people I suspect, Saturday.

We took Mason to his usual swimming lessons in the morning -- alas he didn't pass to level 5, but, tbf, "stroke improvement," which is where he's at is very hard. This is also a Red Cross program so they don't just automatically pass anyone who shows up enough. There are serious standards.

Our big social event was the party at naomikritzer's house, where we were looking forward to ingesting the traditional corned beef and cabbage. We were not disappointed. I had a great time talking to pegkerr and her daughter and seeing haddayr and family again. The only lampshade/dim shablows moment was that I think I may have actually gotten a bit buzzed on the trifle (which is pretty sad. But, yes, I'm that much of a light weight.)

Mason kept us there quite late because he joined a game of "Clue." But I think good times were had by all.

Sunday was a complete pajama day, so I was an utter slug and did nothing useful. We tried to watch "Branded" last night--a science fiction film about advertising (in Russia.) It was... surreal. There was a burning of a red heifer and attack logo muppets. And those are the easily accessable parts. YEAH. If I were feeling more coherent I'd summarize the movie better and maybe even offer a review, but I'm not sure my brain is up to trying to explain the "space cow"/voiceover.

Unlike Shawn, I watched it through to the bitter end. I should have recorded the recap I gave her in the bathroom while she was brushing her teeth, but all you would have heard was a lot of 'what?' and 'are you serious?' and laughter.

Yeah, so it was called "Branded," and you could give it a miss, I think.

Today, I'm trying to work on Elite Forces, but I keep getting distracted by research into the Red Planet. Shawn found me a copy of THE CASE FOR MARS: THE PLAN TO SETTLE THE RED PLANET AND WHY WE MUST by Robert Zubrin, which I've started to read. I also listened to a couple of podcasts on Mars, and discovered a lovely site called "Universe Today", and their Guide to Space (not, alas, the Hitchhiker's Guide, but close enough.)

So total word count ON PAGE was pretty sad. I did a good amount of research, though.

Even though Shawn thought I was fairly crazy, I went out last night with some folks I only sort of know through the Internet and fandom to the midnight showing of "Thor." More than that, I paid over twice the usual price for movie tickets for the privilege.

But you know what? It was AWESOME.

I need to preface anything I have to say about the film by the fact that I'm NOT, nor have I ever been, a Thor fan. As I said before, I remember looking over my cousin Laun's shoulder at various Silver Age issues of Thor. I vaguely followed the Beta Ray Bill storyline of the early 80s. But Thor was never a title I sought out or bought for myself. Of course, I knew about him from his various interactions with the Avengers and other titles that I preferred.

Part of my inability to attach to Thor as a character is, in point of fact, the whole God thing. I was never a big fan of Superman because I like the heroes that bruise more easily. For me part of being heroic is the courage it takes to stand up to powers much stronger than you are. Thor is a freaking God. Hard to be stronger than that.

On top of that rather major character issue, I was also a snotty kid. I thought the title was full of people with strange names and hard to pronounce words, like, Mjöllnir. Plus, people talked weird (and in a weird font) on Asgard. They had very stylized costumes and Jack Kirby made everyone look square (literally) and kind of grumpy.



The writers of the movie deal with the God-issue very nicely, IMHO. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that, in the movie, Thor gets cast out of Asgard for being a self-centered git. Odin strips him of his powers and, he spends the rest of the film attempting to be worthy of Mjöllnir again. For me, that’s a classic Marvel conundrum. It’s like Spider-Man’s “with great power, comes great responsibility” only it’s more like, “heroes need humility as well as strength to be truly great.” Though, humility isn’t quite the right word in this situation. One of the things I love about what the writers explore in the Thor movie is the idea of what it means to be a hero. The turning point in the movie actually stirred me. I cared about Thor enough to care whether or not he came through the other side of his challenge.

That’s pretty miraculous, IMHO, since normally I could care less.

It helps, though, that the actor who plays Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is a complete hottie. (IMDB just informed me that he played Kirk’s dad in the Star Trek reboot. Cool!)

I also really ended up liking what they did with Loki, who, from my memories of the Thor comic books (which, granted is very sketchy), could very easily have been played as a larger-than-life EVIL villain. What they did in the movie, IMHO, was make him the hero of his own story in a way, frankly, that I found very sympathetic. Both Thor and Loki have serious daddy issues/needs to prove themselves MEN, but they manifest completely differently.



I went to the movie with David J. Schwartz (author of Superpowers) . He was saying that what they did with Loki in the movie is very different from Thor canon. This is one of the moments where not being a hardcore Thor fan probably helped me enjoy the movie more.

Also, my other companion did not like the look of Asgard, but, for me, it looked exactly like something Jack Kirby might have imagined. In fact, all the costuming on Asgard really felt Kirby-esque to me, which could either be a plus or a minus depending on how you feel about his particular style. Though (and I realize this is sort of blasphemy) I normally am not a huge Kirby fan, I thought it really worked in the film.



My last couple comments about the Thor movie is that it seemed clear to me that Kenneth Branaugh is a big, fat fan (very likely of Silver Age Thor). There were lots of “money shots” early and often, including spinning hammers and lightning strikes. I laughed out loud (and sometimes by myself) at a few of the fan insider jokes, including what it probably the best Stan Lee cameo of all the Marvel films.

The biggest flaw in the film was Natalie Porter, who played a revised version of Jane Foster. It was hard to imagine her as a love interest, especially since Darcy Lewis (played by Kat Dennings) is WAY cuter and funnier. I totally fell for her in the movie and could not understand what Thor saw in Jane.

Anyway, for me, it was one of the best Marvel films to-date. Right up there with Ironman (#1).