Asking the Wrong Questions

When I watched the Nickolodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender a few years ago, it was, despite the recommendations of a few rabid fans whose blogs I follow, with no small amount of doubt and trepidation.  When I finished the series, having become a rabid fan myself, and tried to pass on that rabid fannishness to some friends, it occurred to me what a tough sell Avatar is.  If you're not a fan of animated (and specifically anime or anime-style) shows, or of children's TV, the series could very easily have flown under your radar (in fact it's likely that the title will cause associations with either James Cameron's unrelated movie , or M. Night Shyamalan's by all accounts dreadful live action film adaptation of the show's first season).  It certainly doesn't help that the series take a while to get up to speed, and that its first ten episodes are broad and very consciously child-oriented--I wouldn't blame someone from my corner of fandom who ...

There are a lot of things I like about online fandom, but one of its traits that gives me pause is the speed with which it forms an overwhelming, inescapable consensus about certain pop culture artifacts.  Not to keep beating a much-too-lively horse, but this strikes me as a much bigger problem than the dreaded spoiler.  It's one thing to know what's going to happen in a movie, but quite another to know how you're expected to react to those events--to know that The Avengers has been judged the greatest thing since sliced bread, or that Prometheus , Ridley Scott's prequel-but-not-really-but-actually-yes to Alien , is generally reviled.  Which is not to say that I disagree with the fannish consensus about Prometheus , which is indeed a terrible, terrible film.  But I am a bit troubled by the fact that when I settled into my seat at the movie theater on Saturday, a mere week after Prometheus 's release and without having gone to great lengths to take the temperature o...

My review of Mary Gentle's The Black Opera appears today in Strange Horizons .  I've liked pretty much everything else I've read by Gentle, particularly 1610: A Sundial in a Grave , which The Black Opera resembles in several ways, so it was a particular disappointment to discover that her latest effort is a baggy, unconvincing exercise.  Better luck next time.

A bit surprised that this hasn't had more play: in an interview with Empire last week, Neil Marshall--who directed the penultimate episode of the second season of Game of Thrones , "Blackwater"--has this to say on the subject of the show's use of nudity: The weirdest part was when you have one of the exec producers leaning over your shoulder, going, "You can go full frontal, you know. This is television, you can do whatever you want! And do it! I urge you to do it!" So I was like, "Okay, well, you're the boss." This particular exec took me to one side and said, "Look, I represent the pervert side of the audience, okay? Everybody else is the serious drama side. I represent the perv side of the audience, and I'm saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene." So you go ahead and do it. (The original quote is in a podcast.  Here are two text reports, both of which seem quite cheerful about HBO courting the pervert demograp...

By a lot of conventional yardsticks, the second season of Game of Thrones is less successful than its first.  It lacks the commanding, gravitational figure of Ned Stark at its center, and the strong throughline of his investigation into the death of his predecessor as Hand of the King and the maiming of his son.  It's a more diffuse narrative, flitting between an ever-increasing number of locations and characters, and not properly a story at all.  Most of the season is spent laying the groundwork for a single battle in a war in which no side has a particularly strong claim on the audience's sympathies, and that battle turns out to be not only far from decisive, but perhaps not even very important in the grand scheme of things.  And yet it can't be denied that the second season of Game of Thrones is better and more engaging than the first, that over the course of its ten episodes the pull of its narrative, of the various clans warring for control of Westeros and the...

Setting up my new apartment is a lengthy process, involving many cycles of shopping, positioning, evaluating, and making lists of what's still missing.  But possibly the most important part--the one without which I couldn't have felt properly moved in--was moving and arranging the books. The first part took a while to accomplish, spread out over two weeks and several stages, and mostly taking advantage of my brother's limited free time and strong back.  Slowly, The piles of books started accumulating in my new place. I spent most of yesterday sorting, forming teetering, alphabetized piles. With more than 30 Discworld books, the letter P is the big winner of this construction project, though M (Miéville, Mitchel, McEwan, McDonald, Morgan), and C (Crowley, Chabon, Angela Carter) weren't far behind.  I, O, and U had only one representative each ( The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Morality Play by Barry Unswor...

It seems strange to think that only a few months ago, Smash was being touted as the show that would save network television .  As you'll know even if you haven't been following the show, simply from the tenor of the conversation surrounding it, this has turned out to be most emphatically not the case, but if Smash couldn't be excellent, engaging, fun TV, it has at least proved to be the next best thing--a series whose creators' arrogant certainty that they are crafting a masterpiece is matched only by their inability to grasp just how far the finished product falls from perfection.  Smash doesn't quite reach Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip levels of hubris, but it comes close enough to make one wonder whether that quality is a particular pitfall of the "let's put on a show" genre. Smash , whose first season came to a close last week, follows the early stages of the production, from inception to previews, of Bombshell, a new Broadway musical about t...

My review of The Avengers appears today at Strange Horizons .  Short version: I enjoyed the film, but not nearly as much as so many other have done, and certainly not to a degree that makes its phenomenal box office success understandable to me.  As impressive as it is in its ability to tie together characters and plot points from five previous movies, I can't help but think that The Avengers also lays out very clearly why the Marvel movie franchise is fundamentally flawed.

Earlier this spring, HBO cancelled Luck , a show set in and around a struggling Southern California horse-racing track from Deadwood creator David Milch, then several weeks into the filming of its second season, following the death of one the horses used on set.  Two other horses had already died during the filming of Luck 's first season, and in the face of intense criticism following those deaths the production promised to tighten its safety protocols.  When these proved ineffective, HBO and Luck 's producers jointly came to the decision to pull the plug.  I never fell in love with Luck , which outside of its tense, riveting horse racing sequences always seemed a little too benign for its subject matter, but I did enjoy the first season and was looking forward to the second.  Nevertheless, the news of the show's cancellation came as a relief to me.  I was deeply troubled when I learned about the first two horse deaths on Luck 's set, and the third one le...

As I recently mentioned , one of the effects of scrambling for homeownership has been that I've had very little headspace for anything else.  It's not just writing that has fallen by the wayside but also reading, and often these days I find myself more contented with some cheesy TV at the end of the day than a good book.  Hopefully that will change in the coming weeks, and I'll soon have more substantial things to write about my reading, but here are the few books that I have managed to read this year. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer - Whenever I chance upon a discussion of Heyer's Regency romances, the impression that forms is of Jane Austen methadone.  This isn't entirely an alluring description--it conjures images of an author who replicates the frothy surface of Austen's novels without dipping into the acid that lies just beneath it.  In my first foray into Heyer's writing late last year, with Cotillion , that is indeed what I found, but Cotillion ...