Asking the Wrong Questions

Between them, Niall Harrison , Adam Roberts , and, in the comments to my post about it (starting here ), Brian Francis Slattery, have talked me over to their reading of Inception --the film and the concept at its core--as a metaphor for storytelling and the artifice of filmmaking (which probably means that my original take on the film, as an SFnal story about learning the world, is, if not off-base, then probably no more productive than obsessing over whether Cobb is still dreaming in the last scene).  As I say to Brian, however, I think that as an analogy to storytelling, dreaming is a very poor fit.  Niall is right to point out that most of us don't dream as vividly and imaginatively as the more common filmic represenation of dreams--vividly colored surrealist landscapes--would have us believe.  My dreams, the ones I remember at least, usually feature familiar settings and actions (though I did once dream that I was investigating the murder of Kermit the frog--I'm stil...

Quoting from the most recent issue of Locus , Sean Wallace reports on the voting statistics of the Locus Awards (results here ), which, as we discussed a few months ago, have for the second year running persisted in their policy of counting non-subscriber votes as half of subscriber votes.  The language is muddled (and continues to spin the unequal vote-counting policy as a response to alleged "ballot-box stuffing" in 2008), but a quick calculation gives us the following results: Year Total Votes Subscriber Votes Nonsubscriber Votes % of Nonsubscriber Votes 2008 1012 385 726 62 72 2009 662 357 305 46 2010 680 306 374 55 The good news is that the overall number of votes has remained low, and that the significant drop in nonsubscriber votes between 2008 and 2009 has not been reversed.  The bad news is that there were more nonsubscriber votes in 2010 than 2009, and that their percentage is creeping back up to its 2008 levels (though this is also the result of the st...

Has there ever been a film as hotly anticipated, as burdened with expectations, as Christopher Nolan's Inception ?  It's certainly hard to think of one, nor to credit all the things that we thought, believed, or hoped that this film would accomplish.  It would rescue one of the dullest and most underperforming summer blockbuster seasons in recent memory.  It would combine the best qualities of all of last year's science fiction films--the stunning visuals of Avatar , the originality of District 9 , the enthusiastic fannishness of Star Trek , the detail-oriented fannishness of Watchmen , the attention to character of Moon --into a single perfect storm of SFnal moviemaking.  It would prove, once and for all, that a film that both demonstrated intelligence and demanded it from its viewers could triumph at the box office.  It would put an end to the plague of sequels and remakes that has blighted Hollywood's blockbuster production for the better part of a decade....

Looking over this list, I see that it creates a distinctly underwhelming impression of my recent reading--even the one book I really liked proved less impressive in hindsight.  That's not actually an accurate picture, because there's a whole pile of books that I'm planning to write about in the near future that I've been very pleased with.  But for the time being, here are some books I wasn't too crazy about. The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers - This is only the second Powers I've read, and the first, The Anubis Gates , was more than a decade ago and thus one of my earliest forays into non-Tolkienian fantasy.  That, and the fact that The Anubis Gates is a fantastic book with a twisty time travel plot that is a joy to unravel, created some high expectations from Powers, which I thought this novel, in which the Romantic poets turn out to be entangled in relationships that are one part abusive, one part addictive with vampires who fuel their creativity and ...

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to put into words just why I've found the most recent and just-concluded season of Doctor Who so underwhelming.  What's standing in my way is the fact that somewhere around the second season I lost the ability to think or write critically about the show.  Oh, I've produced the occasional piece , but what they've all had in common was an emphasis on a single character or plot arc that I could get a handle on, while the show as a whole seemed to elude my grasp.  From the moment it exploded onto our screens in 2005, New Who 's defining characteristic seemed to be its cheerful and relentless determination to ignore all the rules of good writing in favor of spectacle and, as Jackson Lake so accurately put it in "The Next Doctor," wonderful nonsense.  Russell T. Davies came out and said that he wasn't interested in coherent plots or nuanced characterization or subtle moments, that what he wanted was to eli...

Once upon a time, the summer months were a long, arid stretch bereft of new TV episodes, with only the occasional bit of counter-programming to break the monotony.  Then the whole concept of an October to May TV season proved unsuitable to the new, serialized paradigm, and cable channels discovered they could make a profit on a fraction of the networks' target ratings and could do even better if there was nothing else on, and before you knew it there wasn't one TV season but four, and no sooner does one batch of television series wrap up its season but another one starts up.  Which is distracting if, like me, you were planning to use the summer downtime to catch up on some older shows and maybe, you know, read.  Happily, hardly any of the pilots that have aired in the last six weeks have been any good, so my viewing schedule hasn't gotten much heavier (except, of course, for Futurama 's welcome return, though I have to say that the first two episodes were only nice, and...

After a promising start to the year, it's been a dispiriting spring and summer at the movie theaters, and there's not much coming up that I'm looking forward to (well, Inception , of course, and probably Scott Pilgrim too though I doubt it'll have an Israeli release), but here are some of the films I've watched recently. Julie & Julia (2009) - I can't be the only person who would have liked this film a lot better as a straight-up biopic of Julia Child starring Meryl Streep as Child and Stanley Tucci as her loving and supportive husband Paul.  The juxtaposition of Child's early career as a chef and cookbook author--her introduction to French cuisine when Paul, a diplomat, is assigned to the American embassy in Paris, her studies at a Parisian culinary institute, her meeting with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she would write Mastering the Art of French Cooking --with the ballooning success of Julie Powell's blog and her struggles ...

Of all the many pleasures that television offers me, the one itch it rarely scratches is eloquence.  I love a beautifully written piece of prose, but there's something so much more satisfying about beautiful speech.  We live in a society in which eloquence is a vanishing commodity, and public speech and conversation have become homogenized and diluted.  It's rare for any of us to have even a small fraction of our vocabulary at our immediate, unconsidered disposal, or for unrehearsed speech to have a cadence or poetry that reflect the speaker's personality and the full breadth of their intelligence.  This is, of course, because true eloquence is rare even when it's prized and nurtured, but that's exactly where the scripted media, which offer a marriage of the performance of spontaneity and pre-written and -edited words, should come in.  Alas, most television characters just talk the way most of us would if we didn't have to pause for thought or backtrack over our...