On The Construction Of Artificial Families

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We’re re-watching Firefly these days with a friend of ours. Not quite through yet, but I can’t remain silent any longer:

Firefly is incredibly awesome!

Mhm…

While this is a perfectly adequate description of Firefly, I think I need to elaborate a bit.

My three favourite series of all time are Firefly, Babylon 5 and Rome. Star Trek and Futurama also feature somewhere in the list, albeit further down.

What makes Firefly stand out among all those excellent series are the characters. Mal and Inara. Zoe and Wash. Kaylee and Simon. River and Jayne and the Shepherd. And Serenity, for Firefly has managed what few shows centering around space travel have ever done: it has given the ship a personality. Whenever Serenity gets hurt I hurt with her. Neither the Enterprise (A-E), nor Galactica nor the Andromeda has ever done that for me (and with Andromeda they tried real hard to give the ship a personality, literally). I could go on for hours about how wonderful the ship-set is, how organic if feels. How much love must have gone into its design. But I shan’t, because, well, this post is about families, not set design.

The thing that made Buffy so great (and that made Dollhouse so awfully mediocre) is Joss Whedon’s talent for creating families. Artificial families. With very few exceptions the characters in Buffy aren’t actually related by blood. The same goes for Angel, although in this case the term “blood relation” takes on a whole new meaning, I guess. Still, they function as a family. I haven’t seen enough of Angel to make an educated statement in this matter, but at least in Buffy Xander, Willow, Gilles and our dear Buffy form a tight-knit group from the very beginning. Dollhouse doesn’t have that; the very format of the show doesn’t allow for strong ties between the characters, and thus the show fails.

Firefly is easily Whedon’s Magnum Opus. In thirteen episodes it manages what other shows don’t manage in as many seasons. (A lie, but it sounded good. The two really long shows that I can think of at the moment, The X-Files and ER, manage quite well on the subject of character relations. Back to the topic at hand.)

I want to adopt every single one of these characters. They are all lovely, and wonderful and, most of all, good. The goodness radiates from them like heat. Not only Kaylee,who has often been described as the heart and soul of the Serenity, all the others too.

There is one scene, in an early episode, I can’t come up with the name right now, in which Simon asks Mal why he didn’t hand him and River over to the Alliance. Mal’s answer is short and to the point, only twelve words all in all, but to me it embodies the spirit of the show:

You’re on my crew. Why are we still talking about this?

Two simple sentences, yet they manage to wrench my heart every time I hear them. Because for Mal that is really all there is to it. Simon and River are crew, they’re family, and that is all that matters. And this sentiment seems to fill the entire ship. Everyone, including Jayne (who could as a rule do with a little less greed and a little more brains), stands by it – come rain, come shine. They form a family that is stronger and closer than any ties ever formed by blood. Nine people, some of them so fundamentally different that one marvels how they can stand to be in the same room together, and yet each and every single one of them would rather die than forsake one of the others. Stealing and cheating seems to be okay though, just for the record.

It is a shame that Firefly had to end so soon. We are three episodes from the end at the moment and I dread and yearn in equal measures for every minute of it. I find some consolation, and it grieves me to say this but it is still true, that Joss Whedon frequently states that he wanted to go down a much darker road with Firefly. To make it edgy and base and bloody. And all in all I think it might be a mercy that Kaylee and Book and Inara didn’t have to go through that. And that we didn’t have to watch how Mal slowly turns on Jayne and Simon and Wash, one after the other.

Better to burn brightly and briefly than to go out in a slurred, ugly whimper, I think.

The Blade Itself

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Three days of being miserably sick – three books. The first of which was The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie.

The book follows three principal point of view characters, plus a slew of minor characters in the second half. Let’s get the important part out of the way first: None of them are likeable.

There’s Captain Jezal dan Luthar, an egocentric little prick whose only reason for falling in love seems to be that the lady in question is “damn fine looking” – it certainly isn’t her personality, take that from me. There’s Inquisitor Sand Glokta, a cripple who hates everybody and their mum and, judging by his name, seems to be the child of Portuguese and Dutch immigrants (kidding, but: the names in the book enraged me with their wanton inconsistency). And then there’s Logen Ninefingers, the only one of the sorry lot that seems to be even remotely likeable, although he is thick as a brick, which doesn’t go far towards endearing him to me.

Supporting characters include Ferro Maljin, an escaped slave woman whose only goal in life is killing and spitting in the face of every other living being on this planet, including her allies. Major Colleem West, who will trick you into thinking that he’s likeable until you find out that he is just as uncaring and egocentric as his buddy Jezal. And Dogman, who doesn’t seem to have a proper name and enjoys pissing himself…

In short, an endearing lot.

The book isn’t helped by being the first part of a trilogy, the part where everything gets rolling. It consists of long, detailed (I’m not using that as a compliment here) descriptions of how our characters become part of the team and what they have to endure to get to the eventual starting point of their mission. One very brief scene tells us a little bit about the larger picture, but since that scene is (no doubt deliberately) written as a conversation between two high mages that already know everything, it might as well be written in Swahili. The rest is mediocre jokes, unending fight scenes and a love story so horrible that you want to tear your eyes out.

Don’t. Read. Trust me.

Sick Again

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Acute hearing loss, at least that’s what all the online dictionaries spit out if I enter “Hörsturz“, not really sure if that’s even correct. Symptoms include a strange buzzing in my left ear, like listening to a very loud radio that hasn’t got proper reception, paired with all other sounds being dulled down, as if I’m hearing the world through a thick wad of cotton. Am getting injections to combat a possible infection and pills to lower my already low blood pressure even further.

But try as this new hurdle may: It may keep me from the cinema, but it won’t keep me from blogging.

I laugh at this puny sickness.

Ha ha ha.

(Sniff.)

A Book A Day Keeps The Doctor Away

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Well, sort of. My flu is gone and I managed to get a whole lot of books read while lying on the couch and getting pampered. I can think of worse ways to spend the time. Okay, I could have done without the blinding headaches, but apart from that…

Two of the books I read were Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, both by Tom Sharpe.

Like Wilt, by the same author, I had read both of them a while ago, back in the regrettable time when I still thought that reading translated books was a good idea.

So?

Yeah. Good. Both of them. Although reading the books back to back makes you realize that they have been written fourteen years apart. The author’s style has changed ever so slightly and a few things don’t quite fit. Nothing major, nothing that would ruin the books, but enough to notice. But don’t let that distract you from the fact that together these books represent 700 pages of the finest, wittiest writing to come out of Britain in a long time.

All in all, Tom Sharpe’s books are just outrageously hilarious. Exhumed sex dolls, exploding ostriches, penile injections, elephant guns, old ladies with rubber fetishes. If it’s lewd and strange, it’s in there. And that is a good thing. I have never, ever in my life read books that are more crazy, and I find that I like it.

So get yourself to a bookshop or internet retailer of your choice and buy some Tom Sharpe. You won’t regret it.

P.S.: And you gotta love the dedication:

For all those members of the South African Police Force whose lives are dedicated to the preservation of Western Civilization in Southern Africa

He’s already mad, at least let him keep his pants!

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So, on Friday we went to watch 2012. (Yes, I’m healthy enough to go to the cinema, so I must also be healthy enough to blog.)

To begin with: I like Roland Emmerich. Not because I see it as my patriotic duty or because he and me were, by some freak accident, born in the same country, but because I think he can be a damn fine director. Note that I say “can be”.

I loved Stargate and The Day After Tomorrow and 10.000 BC and I also have a soft spot for Eight Legged Freaks, which he only produced. But it appears that Roland Emmerich is a man at one with the universe, always intent on balancing things out, and so he gave us The Patriot and Independence Day and Godzilla. Balance. The good and the bad. The man would make one hell of a Buddhist.

Anyway. 2012:

The trailer was, to put it in one word: awesome. It had great music, it had pretty CGI, it had a giraffe. What more can you ask for?

A movie that is good. How about that?

Was 2012 a bad movie? Well… not quite. But it wasn’t good either. To come back to the topic of balance: apparently Roland Emmerich has given up on the idea of making good and bad movies in equal amounts and just thought “what the hell,  I’ll be more efficient if I just make a movie that has an homogeneous mix of good and bad scenes”.

Spiffing idea.

I won’t go into detail on the plot, since I don’t feel up to unravelling that particular gordian knot so soon after recovering from the flu, but let’s look at some specific character moments and motivations, just for kicks.

John Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, the man of a thousand coincidences. Not only does he either accidentally meet or already know all the major players of this movie (okay, so three of them are his wife and children), his character also constantly gets abused in most horrific ways by the scriptwriter (hey, wait, that’s Mr. Emmerich too.) To say once, and only once, that it would be a terrible coincidence for a little published writer like Jackson Curtis to make it on the ark ships and then for that guy to actually make it on the ark… well that is already pushing the powers of cliché to the breaking point, but Dr. Adrian Helmsley (played by Serenity-Evil-Übervillain Chiwetel Ejiofor) insists on repeating this line as if he had swallowed a broken record player.  Speaking of cliché…

Dr. Adrian Helmsley: Mr. Curtis, there is only one way to save us all. You have to go on a suicide death dive!

Jackson Curtis: Okay. Death is better than staying with my stupid ex-wife, who’s already smooching me although I let her current husband drop into an oversized gearbox five minutes ago.

Dr. Adrian Helmsley: Your sacrifice will be remembered. I have the president’s daughter with me here, because she’s black, like me, and she didn’t have any action scenes so far. She’ll do the remembering for me, because I can only remember one li… What would be the chances of Jackson Curtis, a little known author, ending up on…

President’s Daughter: Shut up. But I do think you’re kind of cute. Also you’re the only black guy in this flick that isn’t somebody’s dad.

Jackson Pollock Curtis: Hey… guys. I already said yes. Anyway… can I take my kid?

Adrian Healy Helmsley: Sure, of course you can…

Everyone (including the drowning Russian chick that the movie is going to forget about after this scene): What?!?

Jackson Samuel: Well, I thought suicide death dives were the perfect thing to build up a better dad-son-relationship kinda thing.

Everyone (including drowned and now zombified Russian chick): Oh, okay.

Michael Jackson and his son dive through endless tunnels.

(V.O. as they dive): Who was stupid enough anyway to build these arks in a way that you can only start up the engine if all the doors are closed?

Adrian Helmsley sneaks away with an embarrassed facial expression while everyone is trying to figure that one out.

Meanwhile under water on the death dive: Holding your air for so long seems impossible, especially since the movie insists on cutting back to the bridge of the ark for extended dialogue sequences, but they make it to the jammed hydraulics chamber. Bits of Gordon, the kid’s stepdad referenced earlier in this scene, are floating in the murky water.

Jackson Five: Gurgle blubber grargh. (Kid hold the flashlight so that I can see what I’m doing.)

Kid: Blubber, shlubber bubble gurgle. (Okay dad. Will do. Am I blue in the face?)

Jackson Curtis: Gurgle. (Yes.)

Kid:… (Has drowned.)

The ark slams into Mount Everest and everybody on board dies. Since the other two arks are full of multimillionaires, politicians, telephone sanitizers and hairdressers, mankind goes extinct.

Yes, anyway. That took a little longer than I thought it would. Back to the real movie.

I could point out other character and plot inconsistencies by the bucketload. Like the Russian chick that seems to be superglued to her boyfriend. At least he tries to ditch her twice in the movie and they always kind of end up together again, or at least in close physical proximity. Or the fact that the Italian prime minister chooses to stay behind with his people and face the coming apocalypse only armed with his faith in God. That’s Berlusconi for you, Roland Emmerich nailed him perfectly. Or… well, there is actually just one more character that I’d like to talk about.

Charlie Frost aka Woody-nobody-ever-gives-me-serious-parts-Harrelson. Now, here’s your classical mad conspiracy theorist. No one is ever going to do that part better than Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, but let’s give Mr. Harrelson points for trying. Nice touches all around. And they even resisted the lure of having a motorcycle-out-racing-the-pyroclastic-explosion-sequence (if you’ve seen the movie you’ll know what I mean).  But, and here’s the thing that really, majorly pissed me off:

They have a character like that, who’s clearly off his rocker, who’s kind of funny and tragic and also a little heroic. And they have to ruin his last scene, his death, by doing a f**king ass crack joke. Seriously. Words fail me. He’s already mad, at least let him keep his pants on when he kicks the bucket.

So *takes deep breath* enough ranting. 2012 is, despite all its flaws, a good movie.

Okay. A mediocre movie. It didn’t make me want to kill myself. Jonas agrees. For all its faults it somehow manages to be decent.

With another composer and a slightly better script it might even have been a good movie. The right ideas are all there. And it even manages to look good, except for everything surrounding the suicide death dive, which is out-of-proportion bad. Come to think of it… a new cut, eliminating that entire useless last minute complication, would probably already save the movie.

This one will never enter even the top 100 of my favourite movies, but it won’t make it into the worst 100 either. I don’t regret seeing it. At least I got a review out of it. And it has a giraffe in a spacesuit. Sweet.

Sick

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In case any of you have been missing my frequent and unbearably witty updates and are wondering as to the reason of my sudden and shocking silence: I’m sick.

Sick. Miserable. Feverish. And to boot my cellphone seems to be suffering from SAD. (Yes, there might be other, more reasonable explanations for its weird behaviour, but where would be the fun in that?)

Regular updates shall resume as soon as I have conquered the evil flu.

Wilt

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A while ago I finished reading Wilt by Tom Sharpe. (Yeah, this review has been in the pipeline for a while, and for no good reason at that. Grrrr.)

My first experiences with the writings of Mr. Sharpe lie about fifteen years in the past, give or take a few. Thus it is understandable that I wasn’t sure if I would like them nowadays. That I had read those books in German doesn’t make my memories of them more trustworthy.

But the memories kept resurfacing. Unfortunately I have read quite a few books in German before switching to English somewhen around my fifteenth birthday, and I am trying to get my hands on original-language versions of all the ones that I liked. I feel I owe it to the books; you wouldn’t believe what incompetent translators have done to some of them. Trust me, it’s not pretty. Anyway, back then I read Wilt as well as Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, and during another, recent attack of Sharpe nostalgia I ordered those books in English.

The other day month, at two in the morning and dead tired, I decided to read one of them. Since I couldn’t be bothered to figure out the reading order for the other two, I decided to start with Wilt. And I almost didn’t put the book down until I finished it.

At first I was a little disappointed. I had remembered the book to be more on the bellyache side of laugh out loud, and sadly this seemed not to be the case, but after sixty or seventy pages that quickly changed. The book takes a while to get going, but when it does, oh man is it funny. (Personally I wouldn’t mind some sort of distilled version of Wilt that only features the conversations between Wilt and Inspector Flint.)

Oh yes, and the scene where the blow-up doll is exhumed. Mustn’t forget that. A scene so epically funny that I dare say I have seldomly read three more entertaining consecutive pages in my life.

So. Wilt is good. And a lot more graphic than the German version. I wonder if the censor-fairy had her part in that. Maybe I just misremember things. (On the other hand, my parents did give me the book when I was fourteen or fifteen. Mhm…) I did wonder whether lesbian sex and rubber dolls might have been shocking in Britain in 1976, but have come to the conclusion that they probably weren’t. It was the 70s after all. And in any case, that’s not what this book is about. It is about a downtrodden community college teacher who finds the one thing in his life that he is certain about. That he drives the staff of the local police station potty in the process is only a pleasant side-effect of that.

There are more Wilt books out there and I think that that makes the world a brighter place somehow. Right now I have other stuff to read. Work stuff, research for my next novel, but after that I can’t wait to read more of Tom Sharpe’s delightful writing.