Asking the Wrong Questions

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. 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...

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.

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.