The Cabin in the Woods

If you've been following this blog for any amount of time you've probably noticed that I don't have much use for spoiler warnings, or for the primacy that spoilers have gained in the discourse about popular culture.  The conversations I want to have, the ones that seem interesting and worth having, are precisely the ones that don't allow for the self-censorship of spoiler mania, and the truth is that I don't believe that a truly worthwhile work is one that can be "spoiled" simply by knowing what happens next.  So when I say that Drew Goddard's horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods (written by Goddard and Joss Whedon), is the sort of film that rewards unspoiled viewing, that probably seems entirely different to viewers who know its secrets, and that may, in fact, only be worth watching if you're ignorant of its central twist, I'm not being entirely complimentary.  Cabin is a funny, clever, well-made film, extremely effective in its scary scenes and an enjoyable viewing experience all around, but it is also rather hollow.  That's a direct result of binding the film's affect so inextricably with its central twist--a choice that is disappointing not only because of what it makes of the film, but because it leaves unexplored all of that twist's more intriguing implications.

Before I get any further I should probably acknowledge that my use of the word "twist" here is somewhat questionable.  Inasmuch as The Cabin in the Woods has a twist, it is not only announced in the film's trailers, but in its opening minutes.  Before we're even introduced to our cabal of doomed young people as they blithely prepare for their fateful trip to the titular cabin--bubbly pre-med student Jules (Anna Hutchinson), her earnest boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemsworth), her best friend Dana (Kristen Connolly), Curt's friend Holden (Jesse Williams), who has been invited as a fix-up for Dana, and pothead clown Marty (Fran Kranz)--we meet the people who are planning their cliché-ridden doom, Hadley (Bradley Whitford), Sitterson (Richard Jenkins), and Lin (Amy Acker), who from a hi-tech underground facility are monitoring every centimeter of the cabin and its grounds, the better to usher the campers to their deaths.  Even the purpose of that carefully orchestrated massacre has already been made clear in the film's opening credits, which depict scenes of human sacrifice.  Ten minutes into the film's run, then, the only question that remains--the one whose answer I am calling the film's twist--is really more of a missing puzzle piece: who are these kids being sacrificed to, and why?  Nevertheless, once you know the answer to that question, The Cabin in the Woods becomes a completely different story, and to watch the film knowing that it is that story would, I think, be a supremely unsatisfying experience, because just where you'd expect that story to start is where The Cabin in the Woods chooses to stop.

The film instead puts its eggs in the metafiction basket, revealing that the tropes of American horror films (and of those from other countries, as sites in places like Sweden, Japan, or Spain, where other scenarios are being run, are mentioned) are integral components of the sacrifice ritual.  These tropes are painstakingly recreated by the behind the scenes crew, who tamper not only with the campers' circumstances but with their body chemistry.  Jules has been designated the scenario's bimbo, so Lin has introduced a substance that impairs cognitive function into the dye with which she's recently colored her hair blonde.  Like most of Cabin in the Wood's jokes, however, the film hammers this one in--"dumb blonde, huh?" Hadley says admiringly.  Other jokes, such as Marty's genre-savviness and the frustrations it causes Hadley and Sitterson, or a scene in which Mordecai, the creepy hillbilly who menaces the campers on their way to the cabin, calls the control room to deliver overheated, foreboding oratory only to complain because he's been placed on speakerphone, are initially quite funny but go on for too long, while others take forever to build up--throughout the film the bunker crew refer to Dana as The Virgin even though we know she's had an affair with one of her professors--only to deliver a faint payoff--"We work with what we're given" is Sigourney Weaver's senior director's response to Dana's wordless query at her designation.  In the aggregate, The Cabin in the Woods is a funny film, but its individual jokes are strained, trying too hard to make up for the absence of truly excellent wit.  Though a few come close (the speakerphone scene is my favorite) there isn't a single gag that truly lingers and elicits laughter on the way out of the movie theater.

Even more frustrating is the way the film points out the shallowness of horror tropes, but refuses to replace them with anything deeper.  The five campers have been designated with roles that both correspond to character types found in horror films and are, in the film's universe, components of the ritual.  The more we see of the kids, however, the less those roles seem to suit them.  Dana and Jules have been dubbed, respectively, the Virgin and the Whore, but so far as we can tell both girls are sexually active and neither is very promiscuous--they could just as easily have been given each other's parts.  By the same token, Curt is the Athlete and Holden is the Scholar, even though Curt, as well as being an athelete, is a sociology major on a full academic scholarship, and Holden, as well as being a scholar, is the new star of the football team.  This, however, is as far as the film's characterization goes--it establishes that its characters are not the reductive stereotypes to which they've been assigned, but it tells us nothing about who they are, and doesn't even attempt to make actual people out of them.  It even seems pleased to make use of those stereotypes when they suit its purposes--Marty fits his role, the Fool, to a T, both in the sense that he is a buffoon and in the sense that he sees more than the others, noticing the joints and seams in the scenario and finding his way backstage.

"She's got so much heart," Hadley says of Dana as he watches her struggle for her life against the monsters he's unleashed on her, explaining why, despite the jaded cynicism he's evinced towards his awful job since the beginning of the film, he finds himself rooting for her.  This, however, feels like the film telling us how we should feel rather than an accurate description of Dana, who though suitably appealing does little to set herself apart from the million Final Girls who have come before her.  Inasmuch as she has heart, it's because her role--her role in The Cabin in the Woods, that is, not the scenario-within-the-film--requires her to.  The film may very well be commenting on this fact--Hadley's moment of sentiment is interrupted and replaced by his typical cynicism when his colleagues arrive with alcohol to celebrate the sacrifice's success--but that still leaves us with a protagonist who can't manage to escape or transcend her type despite being in a story that is all about pointing out that that type exists.

The problem, I think, is that Dana shouldn't be the protagonist, and The Cabin in the Woods comes close to reaching this conclusion itself before shaking it off and settling into a story that, for all its quirks, runs along very familiar grooves.  In the first half of the film, we can't help but root for the campers and feel anger towards the bunker crew.  Knowing that someone within the story--someone not monstrous but ordinary and familiar--is orchestrating the kids' gruesome deaths gives those deaths an extra, fresh layer of horror that cuts through the hoariness of the story, and makes the backstage characters' jadedness, and even glee, at their actions seem terribly cruel.  Around the time that Dana and Marty find their way into the bunker, however, we get our missing puzzle piece and learn the reason that they and their friends are being sacrificed.  Which turns out to be the reason for every human sacrifice--to appease the gods and prevent the end of the world.  All over the world facilities like the one we've been watching have been reenacting rituals from their cultures, trying to stave off the Old Ones' awakening, but this year all but the American scenario have failed--the fate of the world depends on Marty and Dana dying (actually just Marty, since as the Virgin Dana may survive so long as she suffers).

Since we're constantly ahead of the campers in our understanding of their story--first knowing that they are in a horror story scenario, then realizing the reason for that scenario before they do--it's hard not to feel unreasonably angry at Marty and Dana's determination to survive, and at the things they do to achieve that end.  When Dana releases all of the nightmare creatures stored in the bunker (a component of the ritual is that each group of campers chooses, through its actions, which monster will hunt them, and there is a wide selection to choose from) and sics them on the staff, the result is one of the film's most bloody, and weirdly exhilarating, sequences, as wave after wave of increasingly bizarre monsters are unleashed to deal imaginative deaths to office workers, maintenance personnel, and HR bigwigs.  But knowing what we do, it's also an almost villainous act--Dana's actions not only lead to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of unnecessary deaths, they also hasten the end of the world.

There is, yet again, a sense that The Cabin in the Woods is aware of this, and that if only the film had leaned a little bit further into this reading the result might have a much more interesting story.  After all, it's almost possible to read the film as Hadley, Sitterson, and Lin's story, a horror narrative of a different but no less compelling type.  The speakerphone scene is played for laughs, but Mordecai's dire warnings of looming disaster are aimed as much at his colleagues as they are at the campers, and they go unheeded.  The backstage plot could have been a horror story about hubris, about the arrogance of people whose power over the circumstances of other people's lives has blinded them to their own vulnerability and lack of control.  In broad strokes, this is what happens, but the final act of the film is too brisk, too preoccupied with inventive slaughter, and still too invested in Dana and Marty as protagonists while relegating Hadley, Sitterson, and Lin to comic relief (and then canon fodder) to work as their story.  Though interesting hints are raised that something more is going on behind the scenes--several near-misses before the true disaster are blamed on orders from upstairs, and someone appears to be sabotaging at least the American scenario and possibly the others as well--and though a few lines towards the end of the film, and Marty and Dana's uncaring nihilism when the purpose of the sacrifice required of them finally sinks in, suggest a theme of inter-generational strife, neither of these ideas are developed.  If The Cabin in the Woods is intended as a story in which the scenario operators are the protagonists and Marty and Dana are the villains, it is a rather shapeless one.  And more's the pity, as far as I'm concerned.

There is, quite obviously, a very large component here of blaming The Cabin in the Woods for not being the film I wanted it to be.  Goddard and Whedon set out to make a metafictional horror comedy that comments on the genre's tropes by employing them, and in this they succeeded.  (It should also be said that I might have been more appreciative of this success as its own accomplishment if I were a bigger fan of horror films.)  Much as I try to stop myself from chiding them for being short on ambition, though, I can't help but dwell on how much potential lay in their premise--a secret organization dedicated to defending the earth from ancient, evil gods with a menagerie of magical nightmare creatures at their disposal, who lure a bunch of kids to a secluded location to become part of their sacrifice ritual only for the kids to turn the tables, and the aforementioned menagerie of monsters, on them.  Once you know The Cabin in the Woods's twist it's impossible not to think of the film like this, and to have used this rich vein of story for little more than a metafictional gag seems like a criminal waste.  I wanted more time in the facility, more interactions between the campers and the bunker crew, more information about the organization running this show, more questioning of Marty and Dana's choices.  (Of course, maybe I'm only saying this because "underground facility that is also a wacky, surreal workplace and has become overrun by horrors while a menacing female voice booms on the PA" puts me in mind of Portal, which does a better job of blending humor and menace than The Cabin in the Woods and even feels like a more compelling story.)  The Cabin in the Woods is a funny, clever film, but it isn't nearly funny enough, or nearly clever enough, to make up for the loss of that story.

Homeowner

In case you were wondering what the recent dearth of posts was down to.  Of course, now that mere trivialities such as ownership and mortgages have been dealt with, it's time to scale the peaks of renovating, decorating, moving...

The Hunger Games

To get the boring stuff out of the way first: The Huger Games is a good movie.  Tense, fast-paced, and riveting, its nearly two and a half hour running time passes effortlessly and with a white-knuckle intensity that leaves one feeling almost breathless when the credits roll.  Jennifer Lawrence is excellent as Katniss Everdeen, the girl forced to compete for her life in a gladiatorial contest with twenty three other children, including one who is in love with her, crafting a character who is both heroic and overwhelmed, savvy and naive.  The film's world, a future America called Panem in which a hedonistic, wealthy capitol lords over the dirt poor districts that produce its food, goods, and energy, is a perfect blend of the familiar, the futuristic, and the backwards--Katniss's home, district 12, looks and feels in many ways like a Depression-era mining town, but with enough touches or modernity to make it believable as a backwater of a futuristic empire, and the capitol is opulent in ways that are both enticing and strange.  A strong cast, with standout performances from Woody Harrelson as Katniss's alcoholic mentor Haymitch and Elizabeth Banks as the vapid but strangely affectionate capitol representative Effie, help to bring that world to life.  It is, in short, an excellent evening's entertainment.

Now to the more interesting discussion: I watched The Hunger Games with my brother, who hasn't read Suzanne Collins's book, and where I found the film excellent he was sorely disappointed.  Katniss had it too easy, he complained, the plot never forcing her to compromise herself in order to survive, and never asking her to kill anyone who hasn't been heavily signposted as evil (and even then, quite rarely).  This is, of course, exactly the complaint I made after reading the book, and the film indeed does nothing to address it.  On the contrary, it plays up the bloodlust of "Career" tribute Cato (Alexander Ludwig), who has been training for the games since childhood and volunteered for them rather than being chosen in a lottery like the other contestants, and the sweet innocence of district 11 tribute Rue (Amandla Stenberg), whom Katniss adopts as a surrogate for the beloved younger sister whose place she took in the games, and whose death justifies Katniss's first kill.  The sequence in which Katniss first bonds with Rue, then avenges and mourns her death, which concludes with her laying out Rue's body and strewing it with flowers, is one of the weakest in the film, because so blatantly--and insultingly--manipulative.  (Also, the fact that both Rue and her fellow district 11 tribute, who later saves Katniss's life in Rue's honor and is then killed by Cato, are black while Katniss is white adds an extra layer of discomfort to this subplot.)

Having read the book, however, and having learned to expect a certain slavish fidelity whenever Hollywood tries to leverage a popular book's fanbase into a new blockbuster film series, I went into The Hunger Games expecting it to repeat the book's manipulations.  Which left me more able to appreciate the ways in which the film does deviate from the book, and address--if incompletely--some of its problems.  First and foremost, the film is forced to lose Katniss's first person narrative, which some fans might view as an impediment but is, to my mind, all to the good.  First person narratives are fashionable in YA right now (I've even heard some YA authors complain that they've had trouble selling books in the third person), but in a novel as rooted in complex, painful history as The Hunger Games, the narrator is often drowned out by the infodumps they are required to deliver.  The film lets Katniss breathe, moving through her world as someone who already knows it while people around her--mainly the games' administrators and commentators--explain its rules to the audience.  An even bigger problem with Katniss's voice is that Collins presents her as a blunt, uncomplicated person who is uncomfortable with her own emotions and has trouble understanding others', then uses her as our viewpoint on a world whose inhabitants are a great deal more subtle and sophisticated.  Another author could have shown us things through Katniss's eyes that Katniss misses or misconstrues, but Collins doesn't seem to have been up to the task.  Instead, she endows Katniss with a selective knowingness that seems to have more to do with the demands of the plot than with the character's organic growth.  Katniss is oblivious one moment, and psychologically astute the next, with no discernible reason for her shifts between the two states.

By stepping out of Katniss's limited perspective, and even depicting scenes in which she is not present, the film is able to preserve Katnis's naiveté while showing us the more complex world that she is only beginning to discover.  Even better, it allows her to grow and learn from her experiences in the capitol.  When Katniss is first selected for the games, she is combative and headstrong, because those are the skills that have served her well as her family's breadwinner.  Both Haymitch and her stylist Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) explain to her that winning the games is less a matter of martial skill and more of being able to win over an audience, and over the course of the film we see Katniss slowly learn, and then master, that skill.  She goes from hanging back from the crowd when she and fellow district 12 tribute Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) arrive in the capitol, to gingerly courting the audience by showing off her dress and talking about her sister in a pre-game interview, to gamely parroting the party line in a post-game interview, playing the role of star-crossed lover, through which she and Peeta were able to win the game jointly, to the hilt.

Another advantage that stepping away from Katniss's point of view confers on the film is that it forces the filmmakers to play up the book's most interesting aspect, its take on the games as reality TV taken to its illogical conclusion.  So much of the details of the film's plot are explained to us through the interviews and commentary that are being broadcast across Panem that we become viewers of the Hunger Games, which, through those scenes of commentary, emerge less as Katniss and Peeta's traumatic, life-changing experience and more as a longstanding sporting tradition, in which the current batch of tributes are but the latest participants.  References to previous games and victories, and comparisons of the events in the current games with those of previous years, not only have the effect of making the film's world seem more real and more layered, but reinforce the sense that the games are entertainment, and that the high stakes that the characters feel are nothing but an evening's amusement to those watching them.

It is perhaps for this reason that the one place in which moving away from Katniss's point of view hobbles the film is the love story between her and Peeta.  In the book, Katniss is thrown not only by her own confused feelings but by the fact that her life depends on being able to successfully perform infatuation, but the film doesn't bring across the complexity of her feelings.  Her romance with Peeta in the games arena feels rushed and unconvincing, and though this is at least in part a problem with the transition from page to screen--Peeta is probably the most shortchanged of the film's major characters--given the importance of performance, and especially the performance of romance, to the story, this failing can't help but reflect on The Hunger Games as a whole.  It's possible that the film intends for us to conclude that Katniss and Peeta's romance is purely a play for the audience's sympathy, though this is to simplify the book's version of the relationship quite considerably.  What I think, however, is that the film actually expects us to think the opposite, and take the romance as wholly genuine.  And therein lies the problem, as a story that emphasizes the falseness of everything that Katniss does and says expects us to accpet unquestioningly that this one behavior is genuine.

This, even more than the manipulative way in which it guides Katniss through the games without compromising her, is the core problem of The Hunger Games, book and film--and both are rooted in the same unwillingness on Collins's part to take real risks with her characters or her story.  The film presents us with a scenario whose artificiality it trumpets at every turn, and then expects us to selectively accept parts of that scenario as genuine.  Nor is this expectation of selective credulity limited to the love story between Katniss and Peeta.  In the film, as in the book, Katniss is the heavy favorite to win the games, both among the people who know her and the ones she meets in the capitol.  In the book, this feels like the natural conclusion to be drawn given Katniss's courage and skills (and, of course, the fact that she is the protagonist), but what the film emphasizes is that, as far as the characters in the story are concerned, the reason that Katniss is tipped to win is the fact that she's captured the public imagination--by volunteering to take her sister's place she's put herself at the center of a heroic narrative, and the people watching at home want that narrative to end satisfyingly.  One of the most interesting deviations the film makes from the book is Cato's final scene.  Where in the book he's triumphant all the way to the moment that Katniss vanquishes him, in the film he's despairing.  "I'm already dead," he says.  "I didn't realize it at first but now I do."  It's a puzzling line--Cato is close to winning to game--until one reads it as Cato's realization that, like so many reality contestants before him, he's been cast as the story's villain, someone the audience enjoys but doesn't want to see win.  And if Cato's villainy is, at least in part, a story imposed upon him, what does that say about Katniss's heroism?

It's a question that the film doesn't seem interested in addressing.  Much like her romance with Peeta, Katniss's heroism is something it expects us to accept as genuine, even though both are more complicated.  What's missing here, I think--what could have defused the sense that The Hunger Games is trying to have its cake and eat it too, to decry the violence and artificiality of the games, but also to revel in them as a meaningful contest of skill and courage--was some sense of the games' audience.  Not the people who manage the games, nor the ones, like Katniss's friends and family, who have a direct stake in them, but the ones who consume them as entertainment, for whom the story of Peeta and Katniss's doomed love and triumph against the odds is the best show on TV.  The equivalent, in the other words, of the bored security guards following the story in The Truman Show.  The bread and circuses reference in Panem's name almost requires that such people exist, but we never see them.  Instead, the people of the districts watch the games in solemn silence (giving way to riots in district 11 after Rue's death) while in the capitol they are a cause for celebration, which among other things feels unrealistically stark--surely there would be people in the capitol who recognize the games' barbarism, and people in the districts who enjoy rooting for their favorites and against the districts they dislike.  To show us such an audience would have been to make it clear that the games are a show, and that their artificiality infects everything that occurs in and around them--Peeta and Katniss's love story, and Katniss's heroism, included.  But this, I think, would have been a great deal more cynical than the film is willing to be, and the fans are willing to tolerate.

In the end, though it addresses many of my problems with the book, and though it is such a massively entertaining film, The Hunger Games can't--or possibly won't--escape the hollowness at the center of its original.  As Hollywood's looting of geek culture becomes ever more frenzied, I find myself repeatedly falling into the trap of thinking that a new take on an interesting but flawed work might chip away at those flaws and bring to the surface what was interesting and worthwhile.  What I keep bumping up against is the fact that in the new world of book-to-film adaptations, the ones looking to court a preexisting audience that numbers in the millions, fidelity to the source material is, for better and worse, the highest virtue.  The Hunger Games could, and should, have been a meaty, thought-provoking film, but only by stepping away from its source.  By remaining faithful to the book, the film is merely a very good piece of entertainment.  That's by no means a small accomplishment, but it's hard to watch the film, enjoyable as it is, without lamenting what might have been.

Hugo

Like, I suspect, a lot of people of my generation, my first introduction to George Méliès's 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon came from the Smashing Pumpkins' 1996 music video "Tonight, Tonight."  At the time, I had no idea who Méliès was or even that the video was an homage--it was simply a gorgeous, halucinatory short film set to beautiful music.  It was another homage to A Trip to the Moon that introduced me to Méliès's name and his importance in the history of filmmaking--the final episode of the 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, titled "Le Voyage dans la Lune," cuts between the preparations for the final Apollo mission and an interview with one of Méliès's assistants (played by producer Tom Hanks), who describes the film's production.  Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated, rapturously received film Hugo (based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick) also has Méliès and A Trip to the Moon at its heart, but its approach to both filmmaker and film draws a line between Hugo's intended, juvenile audience and people like myself.  When Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphan living in the maintenance spaces of the Gare Montparnasse in 1930s Paris, tells his newfound friend Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) about a film his father had seen as a young man, in which a rocketship takes off from Earth and hits the man in the moon in the eye, people like myself, who have seen "Tonight, Tonight" and From the Earth to the Moon, or simply know the smallest bit about the history of cinema, will recognize the film he's talking about immediately.  Children watching the movie, however, will probably be as much in the dark as Hugo and Isabelle, and eager to learn more.

Children's books have been a hot commodity for more than a decade, ever since a certain young wizard made it OK for adults to enjoy them, and children's films were quick to follow suit in courting both the juvenile and adult audiences.  The books and films that have gained massive popularity and large adult audiences tend to be fantastic adventures whose protagonists are either destined to greatness or have greatness thrust upon them.  What's been lost in the shuffle is the fact that there is an entirely different genre of writing and filmmaking for children, whose conventions adults are likely to find less congenial.  These books tend to be episodic, made up of linked stories that young readers can more easily process (or have read to them).  Their emphasis tends to be on mundane problems related to family, friends, or school, with fantastic or adventurous elements--if they exist at all--serving mainly to highlight and help resolve these issues.  The protagonist isn't a child of destiny, but merely the person that the story is happening to.  There is often an educational component to the story--a piece of history, or science, or art, that the protagonist learns about, and thus teaches to the reader.  The fate of the world is rarely at stake, but the characters' emotional well-being is.

I haven't read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but judging by Hugo I get the impression that it is this latter type of book.  For all the film's pomp and visual flair--its loving caress of every nook and cranny of the Gare Montparnasse (actually the Gare du Nord, filling in), its fascination with the enormous, endlessly churning gearwork of the station clocks that Hugo maintains, and of course, its impressive, and impressively subtle, use of 3D--the story it tells is very low key.  While struggling to avoid being spotted by the law and sent to an orphanage, Hugo is also trying to work through his grief over his father's death by fixing an automaton that they had been working on together.  He meets Isabelle, and her guardian Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), and together the two children discover the wonder and history of cinema, and learn that Papa Georges is Georges Méliès (and also the automaton's creator), now broken down and bitter over the collapse of his career and the loss of all his films.  They decide to assuage his grief by showing him that his films are still remembered and loved, and do--which also leads to Hugo finding a home with Isabelle and Papa Georges.  The end.

It's interesting to see a big-budget Hollywood children's movie that tells so small a story, and there is, at first, something refreshing about Hugo's avoidance of the conventions of such films.  It's initially quite wrongfooting, for example, that Hugo is so reserved about his history and the reasons that he is living in a train station and obsessing about an automaton, even in situations where to speak up would spare him significant misery.  We're used to children's films front-loading their protagonist's backstory, the better to get the actual plot rolling.  In Hugo, however, Hugo's reticence tells us something about him--that he is in too much pain to talk about it blithely, and that he has learned a healthy distrust of adults--prioritizing character development over plot.  The problem, and the reason that the film ultimately leaves me so unimpressed, is that this is not the only story that Hugo is telling, and that its other stories are nowhere near as small or as intimate as this one.  Whether he's keeping faith with Selznick's novel, or bowing to Hollywood's current idea of what a children's film should be like, or simply making the film he wanted to make, Scorsese combines this low-key character drama about a child coming to terms with the loss of his father with an adventure, complete with elaborate, visually inventive chase sequences, about two plucky children investigating a mystery and outwitting cruel adults, and a potted history of the early years of cinema and the career of Georges Méliès.  The result is tonally incoherent, the three strands constantly getting in each other's way.  The film is so busy serving up the set pieces of Hugo and Isabelle's adventure (including one in which Hugo dangles from the minute arm of the station clock), that it has no time to develop Hugo or his emotional journey in any but the baldest, most unsubtle of terms.  The adventure, however, is in its turn undercut both by Hugo and Isabelle's understated reactions and lack of urgency, and by the film's frequent pauses to deliver short lectures about the history of its medium.  From one scene to another, Hugo seems to have no idea what kind of story it's trying to tell.

Nowhere is this more apparent, or more troubling, than in the film's treatment of adults who behave viciously towards Hugo and other orphans.  Even positive characters such as Papa Georges, and ones that the film flags as redeemable such as Sacha Baron Cohen's station inspector, demonstrate an utter lack of sympathy towards hungry, friendless, homeless children like Hugo.  (If the film were more strongly rooted in its historical setting--if instead of concentrating on recreating the 1930s through visuals, fashion, and design, it took even a few scenes to establish the period's mores and attitudes--this behavior might be explainable, but Hugo feels too much like a modern child--albeit an unusually self-possesed and capable one--for the historical explanation to hold much water.)  A children's adventure needs villains, and those villains are usually adults who are cartoonishly evil, so it doesn't strain either our suspension of disbelief or our sense of moral outrage when they behave horribly to children.  Hugo, however, in its character drama plot strand, tries to show us these characters as real, rounded people, and yet it never calls them to account for their cruelty, because that cruelty belongs to another strand--the station inspector's pursuit of Hugo is part of the adventure story, while Papa Georges belongs to the strand about the history of cinema. 

In that strand, Hugo's suffering is downplayed in a way that feels entirely incongruous with the rest of the film.  When he and Isabelle try to confront Papa Georges about his history as a filmmaker, they are forestalled by his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory).  She refuses to tell them Papa Georges's story because, she says, Hugo is too young to know such sadness.  Mama Jeanne may not know that the child she's speaking to has lost both parents, been snatched from his happy, comfortable life by an apathetic, drunken guardian who put him to work from morning until night and then abandoned him, and is currently living without any adult supervision, scrounging for food, and trying desperately to keep out of an orphanage that nearly every character in the film describes as a hell on earth, but Hugo does, and so do we.  And yet neither the character nor the film challenge her assumption that Papa Georges's pain, and his need for healing, are greater, and more important, than Hugo's, which ultimately makes both Georges and Jeanne seem monstrously self-absorbed.  At the end of the film, Hugo shows Papa Georges that his films haven't been forgotten, and returns to him the automaton.  For this, Papa Georges tells the station inspector, "this boy belongs to me."  The implication being that Hugo has earned his new family, and his escape from the orphanage, by being of use to Papa Georges.  Meanwhile, other, less useful orphans--such as the weeping boy that the station inspector packs off to the orphanage with nary a moment's hesitation--don't deserve such good fortune.

I think the reason that Hugo ends up delivering such a vile message is that ultimately, both Scorsese and the film are much more interested in George Méliès and the history of cinema than they are in their title character.  By the film's final third, it's pretty clear that the heart of the story is not in Hugo's adventures but in the lectures about early cinema that he and Isabelle receive, some of which are both well-done and informative.  When the children read that audiences watching Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, one of the very first moving pictures, were so thrown by the new technology that they reacted in horror, fearing that the train would hit them, they (and we) can't help but chuckle.  But Scorsese draws our attention to the universality of that reaction in a scene in which Isabelle, who has gone to the movies with Hugo for the very first time, gasps with fear as the character on screen dangles from a great height, and of course through the new medium of 3D in which the film is presented, with which he creates his own illusion of an oncoming train when he has Hugo dream about a derailment (I had my own private demonstration of the way that new filmmaking technologies can cut through the audience's jadedness and familiarity when the woman sitting next to me during Hugo kept laughing with delight at the 3D objects coming at her from the screen).  At the same time, these infodumps, freed from the constraints of story, are belabored--the story about the audience fearing the filmed train is repeated twice, and so are many of the important details of Méliès's career--and, to someone who knows a little about the subject, nowhere near as detailed as they'd need to be to make up for that flaw.  It's hard not to conclude that we would have had a better and more informative time simply watching a biography of Georges Méliès.

Which brings me back to my observation that Hugo works very differently for younger viewers who don't know the history that it is relating than it does for older ones who do.  I don't mean to suggest that adults or film buffs can't enjoy Hugo, because that is quite clearly not the case--I've heard effusive reactions to the film from many adults, including film critics who most likely know a lot more about Méliès than I do.  But I have to wonder how many of those positive reactions are rooted in the sheer joy of seeing Méliès and early cinema on screen, packaged for a whole new generation of viewers with healthy dollop of cinephilia, and whether that joy isn't being allowed to obscure the fact that Scorsese does nothing new with these elements, simply presents them on screen for the audience's edification.  Visually, Hugo is a heady feast, but its visual elements give the impression of Scorsese checking items off a list titled Stuff Steampunk Fans Like: brass!  Cogs!  Gears!  Steam!  Late 19th century glass-and-steel architecture!  Windup toys!  Automata!  And, of course, A Trip to the Moon.  Taken together, they have the effect of making the film's visuals seem calculated and leaden.  The only one who escapes this effect is Méliès--his drawings and films are consistently the most engaging visual elements of the film, but like much else about Hugo's handling of Méliès, they are presented as is, and without comment.  It hardly seems fair to credit Scorsese for their affect.  (The sole exception, a scene in which Méliès's drawings fly around a room, becoming animated as they pass before the camera, is one of the film's highlights, but also an indictment of every scene that doesn't follow suit.)

"Tonight, Tonight" and "Le Voyage dans la Lune" are great introductions to Méliès and A Trip to the Moon, but part of what makes them great is that they take Méliès's ideas and images and make them their own.  "Tonight, Tonight" replicates the film's imagery but changes its plot considerably, not least by adding a pair of lovers as protagonists who echo the song's themes.  "Le Voyage dans la Lune" draws a parallel between Méliès's vision, and his visionary grasp of the potential of the brand new medium he was working in, with the dream of an actual trip to the moon, and the work that went into making that dream a reality.  It is simply mind-boggling that given more than two hours to work with, a budget of $170M, and the most innovative, cutting edge technology, a filmmaker as talented and versatile as Martin Scorsese couldn't--or wouldn't--do the same.  It's hard not to imagine--especially in light of the brief scene in which the film visits Méliès's workshop during his heyday--what a wonderful film Hugo could have been if Scorsese had tried to bring Méliès's artwork to life, in high-def and three dimensions, but what we get instead is plodding and unoriginal.  Hugo will no doubt introduce a new generation of viewers to Georges Méliès and A Trip to the Moon, and this is obviously a good thing.  Those of us who were already familiar with them, however, might do well to stick with the original.

The 2012 Hugo Awards: My Draft Hugo Ballot

I'm not sure that I've mentioned it here before, but I'm a member of Chicon 7, the 2012 Worldcon that will be held at the end of August in Chicago.  It's a bit up in the air yet whether I'll actually be able to attend, but for the time being I'm a member, which gives me nominating rights for the Hugo awards.  The deadline for submitting nominations is fast approaching--March 11th--and I'm afraid my progress through the ranks of prospective nominees has been poor.  If in previous years I made a point of reading through the year's entire output of short fiction magazines, online and off, and sought out books that might be likely nominees, this year I just haven't had the time.  In the short fiction categories, I've settled for relying on others to thin the herd--the Locus Recommended Reading List (as previously mentioned, Liz has a post linking to those stories on the list that are available online), Rachel Swirsky's recommendation posts (short stories, novelettes, novellas), recommendations from friends, and my own trawling through the archives of online magazines like Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Subterranean Magazine, and Apex Magazine.  I'm still hoping to get some reading--especially of novels--done before the deadline, but here's what I've got so far.  If you've got comments, or recommendations, I'd love to hear them.

Best Novel:

I've only got one surefire nominee this year--Kameron Hurley's God's War.  I'm also considering nominating Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti (already a Nebula nominee), a novel that I found flawed on a first reading (see my review at Strange Horizons), but whose strengths have lingered more strongly in my memory since then.  If it weren't so obviously a shoe-in for a nomination even without my help, I'd consider nominating China Miéville's Embassytown, but unlike Mechanique my ambivalence about that novel hasn't faded enough for me to give it my vote.

Other novels that I'm hoping to read before the nomination deadline: Osama by Lavie Tidhar, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, By Light Alone by Adam Roberts.  Other potential nominees that I'd like to read, but probably won't get to, include Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, and The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers.

Best Novella:

I've neglected this category until now, mainly because I can't shake the feeling that the field for works of this length has narrowed so much in recent years that the category is starting to lose its value.  Online magazines don't tend to print novella-length works, and print magazines have been cutting down on them.  Most novellas these days are published as standalone volumes, which creates a fragmented readership whose nominations reflect--even more than in other categories--a preference for certain authors rather than a comprehensive view of the field.  This year, there are several novellas that have been garnering a lot of attention--"Silently and Very Fast" by Catherynne M. Valente, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson, and "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (PDF) by Ken Liu (all three of which are Nebula nominees).  I plan to read them all, but with such a narrow consensus it's hard not to feel that the decision has already been made for me.

Best Novelette:

• "Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com) - A man who can see the future meets a woman who sees all possible futures.  They begin to date, as they've both foreseen, even though they both know that the  relationship is doomed to failure after six months and three days.  The characters' respective powers naturally raise the question of free will vs. predestination, which Anders does some interesting things with, but she also draws on the their powers to create a believable, and believably dysfunctional, romantic relationship whose unravelling is ultimately deeply painful.


• "The House of Aunts" by Zen Cho (GigaNotoSaurus) - It's hard to suppress a groan at Cho's premise--a teenage vampire romance.  But the vampire is not a vampire but a Malaysian monster, and the setting of a Malaysian village changes many, though not all, of the conventions of the teenage characters' lives.  More importantly, however, the central relationship between the protagonist, Ah Lee, and her aunts, is wonderfully drawn--the aunts are, at points, loving, overbearing, uncomprehending, fierce, and gentle, and Ah Lee's interactions with them turn from infuriating to hilarious to touching on a dime.  Add to that a romance that is neither cloying nor too dominant in the story, and you've got a definite winner.  Cho is a new writer, and one to watch--as well as nominating this novelette I plan to nominate her for the Campbell award.


• "The Vicar of Mars" by Gwyneth Jones (Eclipse Four) - The consensus seems to have settled on Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" as the standout story from Eclipse Four, but though I liked that story, I was more engaged by Jones's, which is darkly amusing and creepy.  It's a rather perfect distillation-cum-deconstruction of the classic 19th century ghost story, transplanted to Mars and starring an alien, atheist priest.  Though it's set in Jones's Aleutian universe, the story stands quite well on its own, and has stayed with me in the months since I read it.

Other stories that I'm considering nominating are Genevieve Valentine's "The Nearest Thing," a well-done variant on the very familiar story of the inventor who falls in love with an artificial being, and K.J. Parker's "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong."  I'm particularly uncertain about the latter, which on the one hand is one of the most engaging, perfectly formed stories I've read this year, and on the other hand is a fairly straightforward retelling of Amadeus with almost no fantastical component, and a final twist that makes Amadeus's already troubling message even more so.  I almost find myself wishing that it will be nominated so that I'll have the excuse to discuss it at greater length, but I'm not sure I'm willing to give it my vote.

Best Short Story:

In this category, there's only one story that I'm absolutely certain is going to be on my ballot, Catherynne M. Valente's "The Bread We Eat in Dreams," from Apex Magazine, about a demon who settles near an early American settlement.  It's a very funny story which seems more interested in the settlement's growing pains--particularly the squabbles between Puritans and Catholics--than in the demon, but it brings her in at opportune moments to stir the pot and take the town in a fantastic direction.

Other stories that I'm considering nominating include: "Pack" by Robert Reed (Clarkesworld), a weird story that I nevertheless found strangely compelling; "The Last Sophia" by C.S.E. Cooney (Strange Horizons), a story about a girl forced to carry the children of fairies with an interesting and refreshingly cynical narrative voice; "Her Husband's Hands" by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed), an affecting story about about a returning veteran and his wife that I found somewhat manipulative; "Shipbirth" by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's, February 2011), an expansion of her Aztec alternate history into space; and "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld), a story that anthropomorphizes the two species in its title in a way that allows them to play out campaigns of competing political theories in the space of a single season.

Best Related Work:

No idea what to nominate here.  It feels a bit inappropriate to nominate the Science Fiction Encyclopedia since a) I'm a contributor, and b) it's still in beta, but I might still do so.

Best Graphic Work:

Not only do I have no idea what to nominate here, I'm not very interested in the category.  Avram Grumer has an interesting list of potential nominees over at Making Light, however.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

• Melancholia, dir. Lars von Trier
• Source Code, dir. Duncan Jones
• X-Men: First Class, dir. Matthew Vaughn

I'm really of two minds about this ballot.  I'm certain that I want to nominate Melancholia, but am doubtful about the other two, both of which are interesting, enjoyable, but flawed films.  And why, for example, am I nominating X-Men, but not Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an equally interesting, equally flawed summer SF film?  The answer--that X-Men has better characters while Apes shortchanges anyone who is not an ape--doesn't entirely satisfy me.  And while I can justify leaving Another Earth off the list on the grounds that Melancholia does many of the same things, and does them better, I'm not sure about Attack the Block, a film that I found more interesting for its concept than its execution.  Full of unexplored ideas and underdeveloped characters, Attack the Block feels like a film whose script was several drafts short of being ready, but can I justify not nominating it while giving a vote to a less thought-provoking, and perhaps equally wobbly, film like Source Code?  I'll have to think some more about this category.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

• Community, "Remedial Chaos Theory" - There's a sense in which nominating this episode feels like a way of sneaking in a beloved, geek-friendly, but nevertheless entirely non-genre show under Hugo's radar, sort of like the knots that some fans are tying themselves in trying to justify a nomination for Sherlock.  But "Remedial Chaos Theory," in which the same story plays out in seven different ways according to the result of a die toss, is an episode that casts Community's prevailing concern with its core group and their relationship in genre terms, showing how each member contributes to the group, and how their absence changes it and creates different outcomes to the same situation.


• Being Human (UK), "The Longest Day" - The strongest episode in the show's generally strong third season, this episode sees Herrick, the first season's vampire antagonist, returning to plague the main characters as a seemingly helpless amnesiac, sparking a bitter, complicated dispute about the rights and wrongs of this situation that touches on the show's core issues and shows off the characters' strengths and weaknesses.  Given the somewhat disappointing turns that the show has been taking in its fourth season, this is probably the best that Being Human is ever going to be.


• Misfits, Season three, episode two - There are problems with this episode, mainly a cheerful willingness to retcon a lot of character development from the show's previous two seasons in order to make its plot work, and a tendency, when discussing the realities of the female experience, to go to the rape well too often.  But despite these issues, the episode, in which superpowered youthful offender Curtis explores the implications of his ability to turn into a woman, is one of the most deft, respectful, interesting explorations of gender identity and sexuality I've ever seen, parlaying the show's infamous crudeness into a refreshing frankness about sex and bodily functions.  It's a shame that the rest of the season drops this storyline and its implications for Curtis, but the episode itself is nevertheless laudable.

I'm not quite sure what else to nominate in this category--and given that the Hugo administrators might as well go ahead that engrave Neil Gaiman's name on the trophy right now I'm not feeling terribly motivated to keep looking.  2011 saw some mediocre-to-bad genre TV (Fringe, Falling Skies, Torchwood: Miracle Day) that I don't feel like nominating in general, and some decent-to-good shows (Game of Thrones, Caprica) that didn't feature any standout episodes.  Perhaps the rumors about the death of the TV episode are not premature after all.

I don't have much to write about the other categories, most of which--except for the Campbell, which I feel too woefully under-read to nominate in this year, except for the previously mentioned Zen Cho--I don't care much about anyway.  I'll probably post a more coherent, finalized version of my ballot closer to the nomination deadline.  Until then, your comments are welcome.

Recent Movie Roundup 16

The films of 2011 are coming in hard and fast this February, a deluge before the pre-spring effects films of 2012 show up.  There are still a few of last year's films yet to come, but here are my thoughts on the most recent batch.

1. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) - I gulped down Lionel Shriver's bestselling novel a few years ago, but for all that I couldn't put the book down, I also couldn't get around my core difficulty with it--that a story purporting to discuss the difficulties of motherhood and the way that women feel pressured into it oversimplified itself by deciding that the title character was born evil.  Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Shriver's novel addresses and defuses this difficulty by leaning into it, suggesting at almost every turn that Kevin, who just before his sixteenth birthday shot half a dozen students at his school, and his mother Eva (a magnificent Tilda Swinton), who narrates the novel and is the film's main character, are inhuman and perhaps even demonic. By stepping away from Eva's point of view, so dominant in the book, Ramsay let's us see that Eva is not only as bad at being a mother as Kevin was at being a human being, but that they have more in common with one another than they do with anyone around them.
   
   The film returns again and again to images of damnation.  The opening scene introduces us to Eva as part of a writhing mass of bodies slathered in thick red tomato paste (establishing the film's slightly overdone fascination with the color red, which also appears in jam, paint, and of course blood).  In a later scene, set after the shooting has occurred, Eva drives home on Halloween and flinches repeatedly as her headlights illuminate children in monstrous costumes, creating the sense of that she is surrounded by ghouls.  But these images are also complicated--Eva is in ecstasy, not agony, at the tomato festival, and the costumed children are entirely innocuous while Eva's own normal-seeming child was the true monster.  Most importantly, the film's most stifling sense of damnation is actually to be found in those scenes that establish Eva's comfortable, middle class life before Kevin destroys it--a life that Eva only tolerates because of her love for her painfully conventional husband Franklin (John C. Reilly, who on paper is an obvious choice for this role but somehow doesn't work here, perhaps because it's hard to imagine him and Swinton as a couple, and the film doesn't work hard enough to establish their relationship), and that Kevin reviles.  Ramsay's adaptation thus shows us Eva and Kevin as, simultaneously, devils whose presence poisons their quiet suburban community, and lost souls wandering through a hell of their own making.
   
   The film is impressionistic, cutting sharply between past and present, hazy recollection and cold fact.  Even more interesting is Ramsay's choice to cut away from the most dramatic and gruesome moments of the story, chiefly the murders at the school, alluding to them only obliquely, or concentrating on their lead-up and aftermath without showing the event itself.  Both of these choices may mean that people who have not read the book will find themselves a bit lost (though as someone who did read the book I thought the film's main weakness as an adaptation was that losing the structure of Eva's letters to Franklin had the effect of defanging the story's final twist), but they, and Swinton's performance as someone who is both pitiable and offputting, help to create a troubling and deeply affecting movie.


2. Margin Call (2011) - I went into this film expecting a fictionalized take on the early hours of the financial crisis, and nominally that is what Margin Call delivers.  But the film takes it as a given that anyone watching it understands at least the basics of how the crisis came about, and the characters--analysts, traders, and executives at a brokerage house who realize what's coming just before the bubble pops--refer to the technical details in only the most oblique, generalized ways.  The film's emphasis is instead on the characters' emotional reactions to the catastrophe that they are about to experience--and in many ways, cause--which seems like a reasonable choice until one realizes just how narrow a gamut these reactions run.  Margin Call shows us its characters acting shocked at the realization that the party is over, shifting blame and trying to justify their failures, feeling sorry for themselves for the soft, cushioned fall (complete with gold parachute) they're about to experience, and justifying the choice to dump the firm's toxic assets on an unsuspecting Street before the crash happens.  Often these beats are well done, and the cast--anchored by Kevin Spacey as a grizzled veteran who struggles, and ultimately triumphs, over his conscience, Paul Bettany as his nihilistic underling, and Zachary Quinto as the analyst who first realizes what's coming--delivers some great moments, for example a late scene in which Spacey essentially bribes a room full of junior traders into wrecking their credibility and careers by knowingly selling a worthless product in order to save a company that plans to fire them all by the end of the day.  But ultimately there's just not enough material here to support a two hour film, and the film ends up repeating itself, delivering slight variations on the same scene again and again.  Even worse are the moments in which the film reaches for cheap sentimentality--when the characters lament the more productive, more constructive lives they might have led had they not gone into the business of making money, or when it borrows significance from history by having the characters muse ominously about the coming disaster and the people who are about to be destroyed by it.  There are moments of genuine sharpness in the film--right before they begin their fire sale, Quinto's character asks Spacey if he's spoken to his son.  Later we find out that the son is a trader for a rival firm who is badly burned by his father's actions.  But too often Margin Call chooses to hammer in its points, and seems to do so less because of their significance than because it ultimately doesn't have enough to say to fill its running time.


3. The Artist (2011) - Every year there's at least one film that starts out as a plucky underdog buoyed by accolades on the festival circuit, parlays them into name recognition, and rides a wave of momentum all the way to the major league movie awards.  And every year around this time those of us who don't go to film festivals finally get to see that film and, almost invariably, leave the movie theater scratching our heads, wondering why such a slight, inoffensive work is gaining such enthusiastic acclaim.  This year that film is The Artist, currently a shoe-in for the best picture Oscar.  It's not that The Artist is bad.  It's a very sweet, very enjoyable, if slightly overlong movie, and its handling of its central gimmick, the fact that it is a black and white, silent movie, is skillful and intelligent.  Writer-director Michel Hazanavicius effortlessly eases a modern audience into the conventions of silent cinema in an early scene in which matinee idol George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, perfectly channeling the smarmy charm of silent film icons like Rudolph Valentino or Douglas Fairbanks) waits nervously for the audience's reaction to his latest picture.  The credits roll but the soundtrack doesn't change from its background music, which we assume means a deafening silence from the audience. Then George smiles in relief and the camera shows us the audience clapping enthusiastically, driving home the point that in this movie we can only rely on our eyes.  For the rest of the film Hazanavicius and his actors remain true to the conventions of silent film--the exaggerated gestures, the operatic emotions, and of course the title cards--without veering too far into over the top clowning and mugging.  (It is, however, amusing to note that as much as Hazanavicius expects to go along with these outdated conventions, he does not expect us to tolerate a fixed camera.  The film features plenty of tracking and crane shots, which would not have been possible in the 1920s.)
   
   After about half an hour of this, however, the novelty of The Artist's gimmick wears off.  What's left is a cross between Singin' in the Rain and A Star is Born, in which the advent of talkies kills George's career just as his love interest Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, who as the saying goes does everything Dujardin does, backwards and in heels, and pretty much walks away with the movie) becomes a star.  But The Artist has little to add to these classics, and its version of their story is curiously eager to indulge George's self-absorption.  He spends the film either basking in his own wonderfulness or, once his career tanks, wallowing in self-pity, while Peppy is made to feel guilty both for her success and for her efforts to help George--which, we are told, wound his pride.  One senses that Hazanavicius wants us to view the end of the silent film era as a tragedy on a scale that justifies George's depression and his unwillingness to either accept the end of his career or adapt to new standards, but The Artist, for all its technical accomplishments, doesn't do enough to sell this argument.  On the contrary, its most effective scenes are the ones that utilize modern sound techniques--a nightmare in which everything around George makes noise but he still can't talk, or the movie's final scene--and drive home just how much this technology has contributed to our enjoyment of cinema.


4. Take Shelter (2011) - I thought this film would be a companion piece to Melancholia, but instead it feels like a counterpoint.  Melancholia establishes, almost from its outset, that it can be read as either a genre work or an allegory, and draws its strength from the way those two readings clash against each other.  Take Shelter keeps its genre closet to its chest, and most of the tension of the film is drawn from our uncertainty about which reading protocol to apply to it.  Curtis (Michael Shannon) and Sam (Jessica Chastain) are a working class couple with a young daughter whose life seems charmed--Curtis has a steady job, they have a nice house and take yearly vacations at the beach, but most of all they love and cherish one another.  Then Curtis starts having terrible nightmares about a storm that will destroy his home, turn his friends and neighbors against him, and endanger his family.  Even as considers the possibility of mental illness, Curtis is so overcome by these visions (which soon start creeping into his waking life) that he begins building a storm shelter in his back yard, and soon becomes obsessed with it, alienating and terrifying Sam and their daughter.
   
   It's pretty easy to read Take Shelter as an allegory.  The film places a huge emphasis on Curtis's role as a provider, and in its early, happy segments, his good life is largely defined by being financially secure--Curtis and Sam are up to date on their loan payments, and the insurance that has just kicked in from his job will pay for their daughter's cochlear implant.  Curtis's visions of calamity are also strongly shadowed by a more mundane, and more present, financial calamity that he courts by building the storm shelter--he takes out a risky loan to pay for the shelter, and when he loses his job because of it the money for the surgery is lost.  Especially in this present moment, it's tempting to take the film as a depiction of the state of the American working class, poised on a knife's edge and ready to plunge into poverty at the slightest setback--to which Curtis's anxieties seem like a reasonable reaction.  Though there is some truth to this reading, it also feels a little glib, and doesn't quite account for the film's Donnie Darko-ish sense of portent.  We're left, therefore, with a sense of unease as Take Shelter proceeds towards its conclusion, not knowing what to root for.  If Curtis us merely delusional then the film might come off as mocking a character who despite his obsessive behavior is deeply sympathetic, but to reveal that he was right would be an equal mockery of the ultimately blameless (and entirely reasonable) people around him.  Take Shelter's final fifteen minutes, and its solution to this dilemma, reveal the film as neither a genre work nor a psychological drama, but a love story.  In all his visions Curtis faces calamities without Sam (in one of them she even attacks him), and in his waking life he conceals from her, for as long as he can, both his dreams and his reactions to them.  This is due partly to machismo, partly to a fear that Sam will leave him, but mainly because there is a lesson that Curtis needs to learn.  The film's final minutes reveal that both his and Sam's greatest asset is their devotion to one another--even, and especially, when they don't trust each other's judgment.  It is that devotion, Take Shelter concludes, that will allow them to endure any calamity they encounter.


5. Another Earth (2011) - 2011 seems to have been the year of the genre-tinged psychological drama in which troubled characters look up at the sky and see a slowly-approaching menace, but perhaps because of the way it incorporates the fantastic into its world, Another Earth is the only one of these films to have been generally discussed as a science fiction film.  Unlike Melancholia, there's no incongruence here between the fantastic and mimetic aspects of the film--the appearance of a second Earth, seemingly populated with our doubles, in the solar system is handled in a low-key but largely realistic fashion and folded into the film's story.  And unlike Take Shelter, the film doesn't leave space for a symbolic or allegorical reading that would defuse the strangeness of its central concept.  Earth 2 symbolizes many things to the film's characters, most importantly a chance for heroine Rhoda (a magnificent Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the script) to escape her feelings of guilt and shame over a car accident that left a woman and child dead, but the film makes clear that this is a meaning Rhoda and others are imposing on what is actually a perfectly real, perfectly ordinary--but for the circumstances of its appearance--planet.
   
   There's no way around reading Another Earth as a science fiction film, which is actually a bit of a shame, because the film is weakest when viewed through a genre lens.  The filmmakers don't seem very interested in developing their premise in SFnal directions, touching only lightly on the social and scientific implications of Earth 2, and it's only at the very end of the film that the presence of this fantastic element in their lives opens doors that a naturalistic story couldn't.  The film works a lot better, though, if you take it as a drama with just a sprinkling of science fiction.  Before the accident derailed her life, Rhoda was an aspiring scientist, and Marling ably conveys, with a minimum of dialogue, Rhoda's unquenchable scientific curiosity, as well as her belief that she no longer deserves to pursue an interest that gave her so much joy, creating an unusual and compelling character.  The relationship she strikes up with John (William Mapother), the man whose family she killed, is more than a little by the numbers, but well drawn despite this, and just as the film seems to paint itself into a corner frequented by so many other indie films about grief and misery, the fantastic element of Earth 2 offers the characters, and the film, another out.  Of the three films to play with the intersection of genre and realism in 2011, Another Earth is probably the least successful, but it is nevertheless worth watching for Rhoda, and for Marling's performance.


6. Haywire (2011) - In my corner of the internet this film has been touted mainly as an action film that not only has a solo female lead, but whose lead is played by an actress who looks like she might be able to throw a punch, and actually knows how to do so.  Which is all true, but what the emphasis on heroine Mallory Kane, a private security contractor who is framed and sets out to find out who is responsible and why, and her portrayer, MMA fighter Gina Carano, obscures is that Haywire is also a Steven Soderbergh film, and that his pedigree guarantees certain things.  So, like most of Soderbergh's films, Haywire is low-key and a little light on plot, quite deliberately averse to the melodramatic tropes of its genre, stylish, and a little bit empty.  The film is essentially a series of set pieces, in each of which Mallory squares off against a male antagonist who either wants to kill her or bed her, but will usually plump for the former just to be safe.  These are all well done, but they peak relatively early in a sequence in which Mallory is matched against Michael Fassbender, playing a British intelligence agent named Paul.  It's clear that Paul is relying on his own considerable charms, and on the fact that she's been dragooned into playing the slightly unfamiliar role of high-society eye candy, to destabilize Mallory, which is in fact what happens.  But it soon becomes equally clear that Paul has underestimated Mallory's resilience and adaptability.  Her momentary discomfort, however, gives the character a hint of humanity that she lacks in the rest of the film, in which her competence starts shading into detachment.  By the end of the film, it's not even entirely clear why Mallory is working so hard to find all the men who framed her--she doesn't really seem that angry at them.  This isn't the first time that Soderbergh has jettisoned the emotional component of his film in order to stress style, but he usually compensates for this with a more substantial, wittier story than Haywire delivers.  It's nice to see a character like Mallory Kane on screen, but here's hoping that next time she gets a story that's worthy of her.

Review: Chronicle

My review of the found footage superhero film Chronicle appears today at Strange Horizons.  I was initially dubious about mashing together two such tired concepts, but despite some weaknesses on the character front Chronicle revitalizes a subgenre I'd long since thought had lost its sense of immediacy.  Definitely worth a look.

This is Getting to Be a Tradition

The 2011 Locus poll is open, and for the fourth year running Locus is giving non-subscribers half a vote for every subscriber vote (actually it's for the fifth year running, but in 2008 the change was made retroactively, after the votes had been received and tallied).  I wrote about this at greater length in 2010 and 2011, so I'll just be brief this year: I don't plan to vote for an award whose organizers think I'm only worth half a vote, and if you're not a Locus subscriber, I don't think you should vote in the poll either.

I should also say that I've been considering purchasing a Locus subscription for my Kindle, but that much like last year, the fact that this miserable voting system hasn't yet been rolled back leaves me utterly disinclined to give Locus my money.

In happier, but still Locus-related news, Liz has a great list of links to the stories on the Locus recommended reading list that are available online.

Rewarding News

The nominees for this year's BSFA awards have been announced, and I'm very pleased to report that my review of Arslan by M.J. Engh has been nominated for best non-fiction.  I'd like to take this chance to thank the BSFA and the award's administrators, as well as everyone who nominated my review, and to congratulate the other nominees.

I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should.  As proud as I am of my Arslan review, and as gratified as I've been by the positive response that it has engendered, I can't hold it up against the entire third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, or the SF Mistressworks project, or the other, more "conventional" nominees such as the blog Pornokitsch, the catalogue for the British Library's much-lauded Out of This World exhibition, or the essay collection The Unsilent Library.  The BSFA's nonfiction award casts a wide net and has a history of producing rather esoteric shortlists.  Which makes it a lot of fun and thus a good award to be nominated for, and that's more than enough for me.  I look forward to learning, when the award is handed out, which of the fantastic and deserving works with which my review has the honor of being nominated gets to take the award home.

The Big Guns: Thoughts on Sherlock's Second Season

Two seasons into its run, I'm having trouble deciding whether Sherlock is a brilliant show or a terrible one.  The episodes themselves seem to alternate between the two extremes, with little in the way of middle ground--devastatingly clever updates on Sherlock Holmes tropes alongside plots so full of holes that they barely hold together, gags that make you gasp with laughter alongside lines so leaden and overwrought that you hardly know where to look, characters you fall in love with in a single scene alongside one-dimensional harpies.  My reaction to these episodes is similarly bi-polar--sometimes the credits roll on what seems like a perfect story, but thirty seconds later the whole thing has collapsed into a pile of contradictions, implausibilities, and contrivances; other times, you switch off an execrable story and the only thing that sticks in your mind is that one hilarious scene.  When writing about Sherlock, I invariably find myself making laundry lists of its faults, then concluding that I really like it.  If I weren't so frustrated, I'd be very impressed.

Sherlock's second season is very much of a piece with its first, which is--predictably--both a very good and very bad thing.  The things that worked in the first season--Martin Freeman, Benedict Cumberbatch, the relationship between Sherlock and John, the witty overlaying of Holmesian tropes and stories over the 21st century--are still very much in evidence (though somewhat muted in that last case).  Equally, the flaws that marred the show and held it back from greatness--its messy plots, the unwieldiness of the 90-minute format, the horrible writing for female characters--are back in force (though again, there has been some marked--if, ultimately, insufficient--progress on that last front).  The one key differences is in the stories that Sherlock has chosen to tell in its second outing.  Though the first season appropriated many of Holmes and Watson's most famous attributes, only a few of Conan Doyle's original stories made it onto the show, and those that did were fairly obscure ones and only faintly referenced--a brief nod to A Study in Scarlet in "A Study in Pink"; "The Bruce Partington Plans" as a subplot of "The Great Game."  In its second season, Sherlock has broken out the big guns--the two most famous one-off characters in the Holmes canon, Irene Adler and James Moriarty, what is arguably the best-known Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the most iconic incident in Holmes's career, his confrontation with Moriarty and seeming death alongside him.

It will probably come as no surprise if I say that the results of bringing these stories into the Sherlock universe are mixed, but what's interesting about the ways in which the second season is terrible is that they give the impression that Sherlock is eager for the cachet of its source material, but doesn't entirely trust it.  "A Scandal in Belgravia" starts out like gangbusters, cleverly updating the story of a shady woman with damning information about a powerful man who may be more than Holmes can handle.  The episode's first half, which is very nearly a play-by-play of "A Scandal in Bohemia," is Sherlock at its best--tense, funny, fast-paced, and peopled with indelible characters.  When that story runs out, however, Sherlock appends to it a complication in which Irene Adler's actions go from naughty-yet-understandable to villainous and potentially disastrous, and "Belgravia" devolves into a muddled mess.  The sharp, quick-moving plot turns episodic, and the story seems to take forever to come to its close--not least because it has so many false bottoms.  (This structural complaint does not address the equally valid, and equally damaging, problem of "Belgravia"'s handling of Irene herself, about which so much virtual ink has been spilled that I could hardly contribute anything to the discussion, certainly not in the face of Steven Moffat's own rather revealing response to the accusation that "Belgravia," and Sherlock in general, are sexist.)

"The Hounds of Baskerville," meanwhile, carries over little from the original novel but its basic premise--the legend of the Hound and the young heir who fears that he is its next target--a few character names, and the theme of pitting Holmes's rationalism against the other characters' superstitions.  The story itself is scooped out and replaced with what initially seems like a clever inversion--few people are credulous enough to believe in spectral hounds anymore, but many would be willing to at least consider that the secret weapons lab next door is unleashing its test subjects on the local population--but whose execution is sloppy, rooted in the stupidity of its players (a top secret military facility allows its highest-ranking officers to choose a password as weak as "Maggie"), their inexplicable willingness to accommodate Sherlock (Mycroft just gives Sherlock the credentials he needs to enter Baskerville for the second time), and plain coincidences (John happens to wander into a room where the crazy-making gas is leaking), and whose resolution offers a "rational" explanation to the legend of the Hound that is in fact significantly less plausible than the original, supernatural one.

I don't mean to suggest that Sherlock's problem is that it deviates from its source material, but I do think that the ways in which "Belgravia" and "Baskerville" deviate from their sources are telling, and shed a light on the show's actual problems.  "A Scandal in Bohemia" is an interesting story not simply because Holmes is beaten, and not even because the person who beats him is a woman, but because Irene Adler is so thoroughly uninterested in Holmes.  She's in the middle of her own story that is far greater than him, and he is but one of the impediments on her path to a happy, private life with the man she loves.  What's more important, however, is that by the end of the story Holmes recognizes this, and realizes that his client is the villain in Irene's story and that he, Holmes, is on the wrong side.  Irene beats him less because she's smarter than he is--does anyone doubt that he could have tracked her down after she gave him the slip?--than because he's realized that letting her go is the right thing to do.  It's a story that shines a light not only on Holmes's appreciation for intellect, but on his fundamental decency, and is thus completely unsuited to Sherlock, which has chosen to recast Holmes as an amoral sociopath.  Sherlock is far from the first Holmes adaptation to have reworked Irene Adler into a villain, Holmes's requited love interest, and Moriarty's ally (Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes movie did all three just a few years ago), but its emphasis on Sherlock's need to be the smartest guy in the room--in the pursuit of which, not justice or the greater good, he humiliates Irene and leaves her to a gruesome fate--makes him seem a great deal crueler and less heroic than I think the episode intends him to be, even taking into account the "happy" ending in which he saves Irene's life.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, meanwhile (which I feel I ought to say is my very favorite Holmes story, and whose mangling at Sherlock's hands I am finding it hard to get over), does two things that Sherlock could never have countenanced.  First, it sidelines Holmes for most of the story, sending Watson to gather evidence and meet the various players while Holmes observes from afar, only appearing to solve the mystery in the novel's final chapters.  Second, despite its Gothic premise, the novel is in many ways a cozy mystery, driven by the tightly-woven, longstanding relationships between individuals and families in a small village, into which both Watson and Sir Henry Baskerville blunder.  The plot is driven and eventually resolved by those relationships--by Miss Stapleton's confused feelings towards Sir Henry, or Mrs. Barrymore's devotion to her criminal brother.  Sherlock is too invested in its title character and his antics to spend the bulk of a story away from him (a fact that "The Hounds of Baskerville" amusingly comments on when it has Sherlock pretend that he is about to send John to investigate on his own, then dismiss the idea as lunacy) or root that story in the emotional lives of one-off characters.  I'm not enamored of the choice to make Sherlock both a sociopath and the emotional center of the show, but having made those choices, it was surely incumbent on Sherlock's writers to choose stories that would complement them.  Neither "A Scandal in Bohemia" nor The Hound of the Baskervilles do, and it's hard not to conclude that they were chosen solely for their name recognition, with very little regard for whether they suited Sherlock's vision of itself and the kind of stories it was trying to tell.

Happily, "The Reichenbach Fall" does a better job of marrying Holmes to Sherlock.  It helps that hardly anyone remembers what precedes the ending of "The Final Problem."  The salient points about that story are that Holmes is determined to stop Moriarty, that he sends Watson away to keep him safe, and that he realizes that the only way to kill Moriarty is to lay down--or at least pretend to lay down--his own life.  All of which is perfectly congruent with the way that Sherlock has built up both Sherlock and Moriarty.  The episode itself, though by no means perfect, is probably my favorite since "A Study in Pink."  True, the plot relies, like too many Sherlock stories, on coincidences and stupidity--Sherlock entertains, if even for a second, the possibility that a few bytes might comprise a computer program sophisticated enough to break into any computer in the world; the police are said to be stumped by Moriarty's break-ins but apparently never bothered to consider the possibility that he had help on the inside; Mycroft happily chats about his brother with an arch-criminal who has made his animosity towards Sherlock abundantly clear; no one ever explains how the kidnapped children were made to fear Sherlock--but these are in the way of go-homers, the kind of plot holes that only make themselves felt after the credits roll.  And the story works, credibly suggesting a threat that could easily get under Sherlock's skin, and tying that threat to a series of well-crafted challenges that only lead him closer to his doom.  "Reichenbach" is a sort of cross between "A Study in Pink" (it restores John, at least partially, as our point of view character, bookends the beginning of his relationship with Sherlock, and echoes the question of how a person can be forced to kill themselves) and "The Great Game" (which like it features Sherlock jumping through Moriarty's hoops on the path to his own destruction), and though it doesn't deliver the sort of highs that these (or "A Scandal in Belgravia") do, neither does it plumb their depths.  The pacing, which is Sherlock's most consistent bugbear--most of its episodes lose steam around the one hour mark--is kept at a steady clip that obscures all but the most egregious plot holes without shortchanging the characters and their interactions, and the plot handles its high stakes in a way that is plausible and that doesn't veer into melodrama until very near the end.

Something else that "Reichenbach" does, however, is to drive home just how thoroughly Sherlock is committed to its vision of Holmes as the Doctor.  That Moffat's Doctor and Moffat and Gatiss's Holmes shared a lot of their DNA was obvious already in "A Study in Pink," and in the intervening two seasons Sherlock has taken a very similar approach to its storytelling and character work as Doctor Who, emphasizing its central character, a superexcited blur of furious, and extremely funny, intelligence over his more recognizably human companions, and using moments of cleverness to distract from an incoherent overarching plot.  The two series's most recent seasons even wrapped up in largely the same way, with the main character, who has for a while been aware that he is marching towards his death, faking that death in part in order to get away from the attention that put him in danger in the first place.

Which raises an interesting question: given that I find Who basically unwatchable at this point, why am I still--and despite all the flaws that I've noted in this review, and which have aggravated me over the course of this season--won over by Sherlock?  Why, in other words, am I still debating whether Sherlock is brilliant or terrible rather than coming down, as I have in Who's case, on the latter side?  Like Who, there's almost always something worth watching for in Sherlock--a particularly funny scene, an especially clever bit of plotting, and of course the two leads--and it could simply be that after a mere six episodes, Sherlock's novelty hasn't worn off yet.  But the real reason, I think, that I'm still invested in Sherlock, and that "The Reichenbach Fall" works for me as a whole while "A Scandal in Belgravia" and "The Hounds of Baskerville" do so only intermittently, is Martin Freeman.  Freeman is Sherlock's secret weapon--so secret that it sometimes seems that even the show's writers have forgotten about him.  With hardly enough screen time or material to work with, he not only constructs a complex character--tough and vulnerable, bumbling and terrifyingly competent, fussy and adventurous, exasperated with Sherlock and deeply devoted to him--but gives the show something that Who lacks, a beating, human heart.

Season two, and especially "The Reichenbach Fall," make much of Sherlock's moments of emotion.  These, however, often seem either calculated and cheap--as if, having built up the character's inhumanity to such great heights, even the most basic emotions, such as anger at a thug who beat up Mrs. Hudson or shame at having humiliated Molly, count as major development--or overwrought--not to bring this back to Doctor Who, but the final confrontation with Moriarty has more than a whiff of David Tennant and John Simm chewing the scenery at the end of Who's third season.  It's John's emotions, which are on a more human scale--modulated by his awareness of society's conventions, and rarely operatic--that give Sherlock real resonance, especially when he's stripped raw, as he is at the end of "The Reichenbach Fall."

What season two, with its emphasis on the big guns of the Holmes canon, has brought into focus is that what's wrong with Sherlock is, well, Sherlock.  Not the character, who is great, nor Cumberbatch, whose showier role makes him easy to dismiss but who handles what is actually a tough job with aplomb, switching easily between funny Sherlock, amazing Sherlock, and terrifying Sherlock and making great meals of all of them.  No, the problem is the show's infatuation with Sherlock, and its willingness to set all considerations of plot and character aside in order to let him do his thing.  That infatuation is the reason that "A Scandal in Bohemia" and The Hound of the Baskervilles are neutered in their Sherlock versions--because this is not the show whose main character can realize that he is a minor character in someone else's story, or step back to let John drive a story.  The problem, however, runs deeper than simply a bad choice of source material, as "The Reichenbach Fall" demonstrates.  Sherlock only comes together when it's told from John's point of view, when his normal, ordinary perspective is allowed to mediate Sherlock's extraordinary one.  But the show is too in love with Sherlock to ever let that happen.

I think I'd be alright with Sherlock if it were simply a show that sometimes seems brilliant and at other times is just terrible.  But it's getting harder and harder to watch the show veer between those two extremes knowing that it has the potential to be consistently great, and absolutely no willingness to fulfill it.  That knowledge makes watching Sherlock one of the most nail-bitingly frustrating experiences I've known--it's probably a good thing that its seasons are only three episodes long or I'd go nuts.  But hey, if nothing else, whether brilliant or terrible, at least it's never boring.

2011, A Year in Reading: Best and Worst Books of the Year

I read 59 books in 2011, a bit of a drop from previous years which is mainly due to Strange Horizons and the SF Encyclopedia taking up a lot of my time, but also, as I mentioned yesterday, because commuting by car rather than pubic transport has cut into my reading time.  Probably the most interesting thing about this year's reading is that for the first time since I've been keeping track, I've read more books by women than men.  This is mainly due to my Women Writing SF project from early in the year (though a reread of the entire Harry Potter series in August, inspired by the release of the last movie, also helped).  If you look at the gender breakdown of best and worst books, there's a clear indication that I should strive to maintain, and even increase, this preference for women writers.

All told, 2011 was a good reading year but not a remarkable one.  I read many books I enjoyed, if few that I loved unreservedly, and not many that I hated.  Most of all, I didn't read nearly as many books as I wanted, and going into 2012 there are at least a dozen books that I'd like to be my next read, and that I would have loved to have gotten to this year.  Which is not a bad place to be in, I suppose.  Without Further ado, then, the best books of the year, in alphabetical order of their authors' names:

• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
  
  Once again, NYRB Classics delivers the year's hands-down winner.  Bengtsson's invented Viking saga, which follows the adventures of the sardonic, cheerfully bloody-minded Red Orm as he is kidnapped into slavery, becomes a royal bodyguard in Muslim Spain, escapes and makes his fortune pirating, and returns to his home to become a great chieftain, is an effortlessly fun adventure story, full of wonderful characters--including some memorable and prominent female characters such as Orm's mother and love interest.  Bengtsson tells his story with enough of a straight face that it comes across like a Tolkien-esque recreation that chucks overboard the tools of modernist fiction in favor of plotty, adventurous fun, but he also has a sense of humor about his subject, and doesn't mind poking fun at either his characters or the conventions of their story.  A thought-provoking discussion of religious conflict in the story's era, with pagans, Christians, Muslims and Jews vying, at certain points, for supremacy, and at others, for survival under an inhospitable regime, and constantly making the case for their own way of life, gives the story some heft, but even this is leavened by Bengtsson's sense of humor and Red Orm's practical approach to all matters, the spiritual included.  When I started The Long Ships, I worried that I would find nothing human enough in it to grab onto and interest me, but by the time I turned the last page I was heartbroken at the thought that I could spend no more time following the adventures of its wonderful characters.


• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  
  At the very other end of the genre scale, Egan's literary novel par excellence is a reminder of why I continue to read literary fiction and of the pleasures that can be found in it.  A Visit From the Goon Squad is quintessentially literary--plotless and focusing on character and affect--but it uses its leaps back and forth through the lives of large cast of loosely connected characters, taking the old and dissipated back to their innocent youth, the young and hopeful forward to disappointed middle age, to land a hell of a punch.  Slowly and almost obliquely, Egan drives home that point that time and its ravages spare no one, and the characters she subjects to those ravages are so human and so relatable that by the time her scheme becomes apparent the novel is nothing short of heartbreaking.  The segment set in the future works less well than the ones in the present and past, but it serves as a reminder that time doesn't stop for those of us who are still young--like it or not, the goon squad is waiting for us as well, and just around the corner.


• Gullstruck Island (The Lost Conspiracy in the US) by Frances Hardinge (review)
  
  I read a lot of YA in 2011, and enjoyed most of it, but Hardinge's novel puts the rest of her field--and a lot of novels for adults--to shame.  Most YA reaches for a sense of familiarity, through the characters' worldview and reactions, if not through its setting and premise.  Hardinge not only reaches for foreignness, but makes it the crux of her story.  The titular setting, a tropical island, has a rich history of colonization and cultural mingling that is a pleasure to discover, and the plot revolves around cultural differences and misunderstandings.  The heroine, Hathin, is as much a product of her culture as everyone else in the novel, which makes her slightly foreign to us, and her decisions sometimes a little hard to understand.  Over the course of the novel she struggles, first for survival, then for revenge, and finally for the future of Gullstruck itself, but the real struggle, for her and for the rest of the cast, is to find a balance between respecting tradition and being bound by it, and between holding on to one's own culture and trampling the culture of others.  It's a weighty subject, but Hardinge handles it as lightly as she does the novel's twisty plot, which sees Hathin escaping the massacre of her village and trekking across Gullstruck while other point of view characters slowly grasp the danger facing everyone on the island, and which makes Gullstruck Island an utterly engrossing read.

Honorable Mentions:

• God's War by Kameron Hurley - The setting grabbed me more than the plot or characters, but it is original and clever enough to make this novel a highlight of the year.


• Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness (review) - A fittingly dramatic conclusion to the excellent Chaos Walking trilogy, though it sadly fumbles the theme of gender introduced in the first volume.


• Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine (review) - Like God's War, more impressive for its setting than its plot or characters, but also a novel that does interesting things with the clichés of steampunk and its circus setting.


• The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman (review) - Not as impressive as Goodman's masterpiece Intuition, but the novel's depiction of the late years of the dot com boom has stayed with me, and resonated through much of my SF reading in the last few months--pretty impressive for an Austen-tinged romance about cookbooks.

A special, collective honorable mention goes to the Women Writing SF reading project and the authors whose science fiction I discovered through it for the first time: Joanna Russ, Gwyneth Jones (strictly speaking, a 2010 author), Mary Gentle, and even M.J. Engh, whose Arslan remains one of the most frustrating and challenging books I read this year.  I'm planning a second project, probably a little later in 2012, and hopefully its results will be as engrossing and illuminating.

And, since you can't have the good without the bad, the worst books of the year:

• The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
  
  I had planned to write a long post about Orringer's well-received debut novel and why it put me off so completely, but time and the complexity of the task put that project off long past the point where I could do it justice without rereading the book.  Still, I can't let 2011 come to a close without saying something about this book, which encapsulate, to me, the corner that Holocaust fiction has turned in recent years, from fiction aimed at illustrating the horror of the Holocaust to fiction that uses the Holocaust as a backdrop to an adventure, or a coming of age story, or, in Orringer's case, a romance.  Orringer has the excuse of basing her story, in which Hungarian architecture student Andras falls in love with an older woman, Klara, during his studies in Paris, and brings her back to Hungary just as the war kicks into gear, trapping them both in a Nazi-friendly country, on the lives of her grandparents, but whether out of love and family loyalty, or simple tone-deafness, she has cast those lives into the mold of an insipid romance.  Not only are Andras and Klara inhumanly perfect, never selfish or angry or craven or forced to do anything unsavory to survive, but Orringer so valorizes and prioritizes their love story that the awfulness of the Holocaust becomes the fact that it might tear these lovers apart.  One of the most horrifying crimes of the twentieth century is thus reduced to a romance trope, the obstacle that must be placed in the lovers' path so that their inevitable happy ending feels earned, while the deaths of other characters feel like dramatic necessities, heightening tension or sweeping a now-pointless character off the board, not the crushing blows they must have been in real life.  It's pretty obvious that Orringer thinks that she's honored her grandparents and acknowledged the horror of what they and their families experienced, but what she's created is so glib and so devoid of any real horror that I found it nothing short of disgusting.


• The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
  
  As I've already written, Rachman's implausibly well-reviewed debut feels like the antithesis of Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad.  Like that novel it moves back and forth through time and through the lives of reporters, administrators, and hangers-on at a Rome-based international paper, leading up to the paper's collapse along with the rest of its industry in the early twenty-first century.  But Rachman, instead of creating human and believable characters, trades in stereotypes and in crude, too-obvious jokes, reaching for dramatic irony--a character who has romanticized their free-thinking best friend discovers that he is now conservative and small-minded, a woman strikes up a romance with an employee she's just had fired only for their connection to turn out to be a cruel prank--but landing, again and again, on clomping, leaden, unfunny endings that only stress how unlikable and unsympathetic everyone in the novel is.  Rachman not only completely fails to sell the grandeur of print journalism and its vanished era or greatness, but by the time he reaches the end of his story, his elegiac tone feels so incongruous with the unpleasant, cliché-ridden stories he's been telling that one wants nothing more than to drive a final stake through the medium's corpse.


• Reamde by Neal Stephenson (review)
  
  Strictly speaking, Reamde isn't entirely a bad novel.  The early chapters have some typically Stephenson-ian excursus on the relationship between MMORPGs and economics, and the middle chapters are essentially one long action scene spread out over several days and locations, but nevertheless quite exciting.  But the novel is too long, and by its end both the neat inventiveness of its beginning and the cool action of its middle have faded away, several hundred pages before the story actually shuffles to its close.  Still, what's bad about Reamde is less the novel itself and more the way that its failures as a piece of fiction lay bare Stephenson's limited, self-satisfied, ethnocentric worldview, which in turn spurred a, perhaps long overdue, reevaluation of his past fiction, which suffers from the same flaws.  Reamde is on this list, then, because it may very well have put me off Stephenson for good.

Dishonorable mentions:

• Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber - What I had hoped would be a cool mystery starring a female scientist turned out to be a weepy romance with a self-absorbed protagonist and a nonsensical plot.


• Snuff by Terry Pratchett (review) - Poorly written and harping too hard on themes already worn into the ground, this latest Discworld volume turns Sam Vimes into someone who is more concerned with his own image as a class warrior than with actually being a class warrior, and treats slavery with an infuriating glibness.

That's it for 2011, then.  Have a nice (and safe) New Year's Eve tonight, and happy reading in 2012.