Asking the Wrong Questions

For about a year now I've been toying with the notion of a blog post about the show Chuck and the way it treats its female characters and viewers.  I kept putting it off because I could never quite convince myself that Chuck --whose title character, a nerd with a dead-end job, somehow ends up with a CIA supercomputer in his head and is recruited to fight bad guys--is worth my, or your, mental energy.  Chuck is a silly show, but not in a good way--not in the deliberate, meticulously crafted way of shows like Pushing Daisies or The Middleman , which commit wholeheartedly to their silliness and create an alternate world in which it is the norm, nor in the breezy way of frothy confections like Leverage or Castle , which skate by on charm and sharp plotting[1].  Chuck is silly because so little about it actually makes any sense--not its premise, which relies on a definition of spying that out-Bonds Bond for unreality but continually denies its own campness, insisting that...

The zombie craze has been burning steadily for the better part of a decade, and for the most part I've let it pass me by.  I enjoy them in small doses--the occasional Resident Evil film, Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains," John Langan's short story "How the Day Runs Down" --but I'm not committed to the notion, as fandom in general often seems to be, that zombies make everything better and are inherently fun and interesting.  I seem to have reached a point in my reading life where killing off all but a minuscule portion of humanity in order to give one's heroes a planet-sized playground to run around in seems not only callous but unimaginative (in much the same way the new Star Trek writers opting to suck an entire planet and most of its inhabitants into a black hole in order to give one of their characters angst was quite literally overkill), and as a joke zombies strike me as a one-note gag (see, for example, the general consensus on Pride ...

I don't know why there's been such a tizzy about the messages that the Twilight films pass along to their young, female viewers.  Or rather, I understand the tizzy; I just don't know why the people at the center of it are treating Twilight as if it's in any way anomalous instead of a mere intensification of an industry-wide process.  At the same time that more and more energy and talent are being poured into romantic comedies for and about men (which seem to invariably treat women as killjoy moms whose job it is to force the man-child lead to grow up), the ones Hollywood produces for women just keep getting more toxic.  In the last year alone, we had films whose messages can best be summed up as 'women!  Isn't it hilarious how they desperately want a man and yet no one will ever love them!,' 'if only you file away every last bit of your personality, wants and desires, you too can land an obnoxious misogynist!,' and 'a WOMAN?  Proposing to a ...

As with Star Trek , the conversation about Avatar is loud but not particularly broad. It seems to center around the divide between those who like the film unreservedly and those (like myself) who appreciate its visuals but roll their eyes at its script and underlying message (and, on the one site where I've followed such a discussion, devolved so quickly into the former accusing the latter of cynicism and snobbery that I'm not sure it's an avenue of conversation worth pursuing).  These, however, are some of the more interesting comments I've seen on the film, which try to extend the conversation beyond this debate. More on the film's racism: Scott Eric Kaufman considers the film's presentation of humans and Na'vi, and concludes that its message is a variant on the "black quarterback problem": This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines ...

As if my lack of enthusiasm for even the year's best books weren't bad enough, 2009 was also a year in which, unlike 2008 , I was very much not stumped for choice when the time came to choose the year's worst reads.  Looking at this list, which contains two Hugo nominees and one of the most talked-about genre books of the fall, it's hard not to draw conclusions about at least some of the reasons for my reading malaise.  A lot of my reading this year was motivated by a desire to keep with the conversation and with SF fandom in general, and that has turned out to be a mistake.  I need to listen to my instincts.  The ability to trash the Hugo nominees from an informed position is surely not worth the heartache of such a lackluster year's reading. As usual, these books are presented in ascending order of their stinkiness. Saturn's Children by Charles Stross ( review ) This was one of the three books I read in preparation for my review of the Hugo-nominated n...

A lot of bloggers and reviewers have been posting their decade's best lists, but I'm sticking with the end of year format.  On the whole, I've found most of the best of decade lists I've seen rather samey.  Past a certain resolution, one loses sight of the interesting, idiosyncratic choices that make best-of lists so much fun.  Besides, after blogging for nearly half the decade (a scary thought, that) I hope it doesn't need a best-of post to make it clear that I consider books like Air and Atonement , Cloud Atlas and Perdido Street Station to be among the best I read in the aughts.  More importantly, I think that to linger on these fantastic books would only cast a harsher light on 2009's reading.  I read 60 books in 2009, a slight drop from last year (mainly because the last few weeks have been swallowed up by a major work project, which unfortunately will continue monopolizing my time in the first quarter of 2010) which doesn't quite convey just how muc...

Even more than 2008 , 2009's short story reading was dominated by genre fiction (aided and abetted by the Torque Control short story club ) and by reading specifically directed at finding worthy Hugo nominees for the 2009 and 2010 awards, which is to say recent stories.  I read only one non-genre collection this year, Jumpha Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth , and though it was an excellent read and is highly recommended, no single story from it lingers strongly enough in my mind to make it onto this year's best short fiction list, which is thus populated exclusively by recent genre stories.  I'm deeply fond of all of the stories on this list--I have nominated or plan to nominate all of them for the Hugo--but I feel the absence of mainstream and older fiction, or for that matter of reading fiction just for the pleasure of it and not in order to meet a deadline and do my duty by the Hugo award.  I plan to remedy that oversight in 2010 (once, that is, the Hugo deadline passes-...

Let's get this out of the way: Avatar is a beautiful movie.  Stunningly, even shockingly beautiful, and not in the inert, static way of Watchmen or the more recent work of Tim Burton, which emphasize the creation of detailed, meticulously crafted tableaux.  Avatar is beautiful in a cinematic way.  The individual details of its locales are lovely, but it's the movement--walking, running, swimming, flying--within those locales that takes one's breath away.  And breathtaking as its beauty is, Avatar isn't eye-popping.  The film encourages you to forget that you're watching computer generated characters in a computer generated environment, and its use of 3D technology is subtle and thought-out.  Avatar is the third 3D film I've seen this year, and if Up treated the technology as an afterthought and barely made use of it, and Coraline went out of its way to poke the audience in the eye (and made me very queasy in the process) with Avatar James Cameron ha...

After four seasons, it's easy to become blasé about the magnitude of Dexter 's accomplishment.  In a television landscape in which so many shows flare brightly and briefly and then go to pot, and others are cut off in their prime, and others still are content to wallow in carefully maintained mediocrity, Dexter is that rare artifact--a series that has maintained, with some peaks and troughs, a high and highly satisfying level of quality for four years.  It's not a perfect show by any means.  It relies too heavily on clomping, obvious dialogue and an times insultingly over-explanatory voiceover; its pacing is often off, with seasons dragging in their middles and racing towards their endings; it tends to shunt off interesting minor characters into uninteresting, dead-end plotlines.  The fourth season, just now concluded, suffers from all these flaws as well as other, more serious ones, which we'll discuss below.  But it also displays the show's strengths--a rolli...