Two Links

  1. Further to my last: Niall Harrison reviews Night Shade Books's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2, and coincidentally ponders the fluid definition of fantasy as expressed by that anthology's editor, Jonathan Strahan.

  2. Further to my comments on Iron Man being, fundamentally, just another dumb superhero film: The Kids Aren't All Right by Christine Everhart, a phony Vanity Fair profile of Tony Stark which imagines events in his life and on the global arena in the year following the end of the film.  I suspect that this story is going to be to fanfic what the Supernatural fanvid "Women's Work" was to that form last year: a work that appeals even to those not generally interested in fan art, and which mercilessly skewers the unthinking and simplistic assumptions at the heart of the original work.  If any superhero film ever came close to dissecting its character and premise as finely as this piece does, I might not dismiss them as easily as I do.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
As I said before in other places, I just can't get all the positive buzz surrounding "Iron Man". Yes, the film has 3 or 4 action scenes that are done very well. But the attempt at doing a serious drama around them is a complete disaster. Leaving aside the predictable plot-turns, and the endless march of cliches that shape both characters and dialogue, the screenwriters just have no clue about developing the protagonist's personality throughout the film in an interesting way ("Children of the Man", written by the same guys, also suffered a similar problem). We're 30 minutes into the film, and the hero turned from one kind of person to a completely different kind of person. End of the story - yet the film goes on for another 100 minutes. Plain boring.
July 11, 2008 3:02 PM
Vir said…
I just read "The Kids Aren't All Right"and it was a great read! I was wondering, how did you happen to come by it? the main site itself seems to be under construction... i went through the root directory and found some other interesting fanfic-ish articles, including one on Farscape!
muchos gracias for the linkage.
July 15, 2008 9:04 AM

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