Basically every Wes Anderson film is either “Yep, that sure was a Wes Anderson film!” or “yep – that sure was a Wes Anderson film” and this one happens to mostly merit the exclamation mark.

Prometheus (and yes this post will have at least a few spoilers) doesn’t really work.1

However, before we say anything about how it doesn’t really work, let us list off its good points. As an Alien prequel, it is serviceable. It is beautifully shot and composed – say what you will about Ridley Scott, but the man is one of the few truly ambitious sci-fi filmmakers still alive (when he chooses to make sci-fi, anyway) and he knows how to compose visuals that are memorable, striking and beautiful as needed. The ending is very fitting. There are several scenes that are admirably scary, creepy and thrilling all at once (the autosurgeon sequence leading among them). The cast is filled with actors I happen to quite like. Michael Fassbender’s portrayal of the android David is quite perfect, leaving just enough questions that it works as a whole. And Noomi Rapace fits quite well into Sigourney Weaver’s boots.2

But it still doesn’t really work. The plot is a jumble of mishmash ratatouille – it wants to be an Alien-style stalk and a bit of a conspiracy film all at once. It doesn’t introduce its various characters efficiently or well – there are characters who die at the very end of the film who get a reasonable amount of dialogue and I’m not sure what their names were. Compare this to Aliens, where every Colonial Marine gets at least one or two lines that distinguish themselves from the other Marines – even relative non-entities like Weirzbowski or Dietrich. Hell, Drake gets a fully recognizable character. He gets four lines.3 The ship in this movie has seventeen crew members, about half of which are morts who exist only to be killed off; it’s a waste of narrative space to even have them there.

And speaking of narrative, this movie bobs and weaves like a drunken sailor. At one point Idris Elba appears to be sacrificing two of his crewmen to the alien goo-menace – or was he? I’m still not sure, but I lean on the side of “not” because later on he starts talking about how it is vitally important not to let the alien ship go to Earth – and that’s the only reason because otherwise that initial scene plays out just like he is the villain of the movie. Michael Fassbender infects Logan Michael-Green’s character with the alien goo and it is never really explained why he does this. Like, I don’t even mean in a character way. I mean “it is never explained what his objective even was.” It certainly doesn’t make sense when you consider that David is ostensibly serving the wishes of Mr. Weyland, who supposedly just wants to meet the Prometheans so he can live forever. An entire subplot about Charlize Theron’s luxury escape pod exists only to set up the beacon that Newt’s family goes out to find in Aliens.

The one narrative leak that I don’t object to is that it is never explained why the Prometheans want to destroy Earth now. It’s not because that will be dealt with in the presumably-inevitable sequel-prequel4, but because they are fucking aliens and therefore it makes sense that they should have alien motives and wishes and desires, regardless of common DNA or whatever. That is fine. I don’t mind an unknowable menace; really, that falls right in line with the Aliens story philosophy. But the rest of the movie doesn’t support that to the extent that is needed. (It doesn’t help that we have to guess at David’s motivations at the same time as we are trying to guess at the Prometheans’ motivations.)

Basically: where the first two Alien films are tight, Prometheus is flabby. Where they are seamless, it is creaky. That does not mean Prometheus does not have its moments, and it’s heads above the usual summer dreck a studio puts out. But I can’t say that it is good, because it is not.

1. A lot of British people and critics who saw it early were saying exactly that. I was really hoping they would be wrong, or at least pointlessly snobby, as critics so often are. [↩]
2. Pre-boots. Whatever. [↩]
3. Don’t let anybody tell you James Cameron can’t write a good script just because all they remember is Titanic and Avatar. [↩]
4. “Seprequel?” [↩]

See, I have a problem with this:

The problem is that I know I’m going to be all “but wait, if the games don’t work when the bad guys aren’t there, do the bad guys ever get, like, time off? What if the game is on all the time?”

And I know the answer is “shut up,” and normally I shunt disbelief aside pretty easily. But this one seems to be niggling at me for some reason.

I’m not a movie guy.  I’m the guy who would watch Avengers at home, alone, on my 36″ TV if I didn’t have to wait four months to do it.  So I mostly only read movie reviews to see if some movie that actively annoys me is being panned.  Usually movies that annoy me are the ones that air too many obnoxious commercials, but in this case it’s Men in Black 3, which is a completely unecessary sequel to a completely unecessary sequel.

So I’m reading the MIB 3 review on Time.com and I come across this passage:

The average moviegoer is well educated in the particulars of time travel. Even if your high school curriculum didn’t include any H.G. Wells, thanks to Back to the Future, Terminator and dozens of other films, just about everyone knows how it works. Why don’t the fleet of screenwriters who cooked up this script? They have J wake up the morning after the bloodbath at the Chinese restaurant to a world already missing K. This makes no sense. Boris hasgone back in time, but given that he hasn’t found or killed young K yet, old K ought to be alive, well and doing that “sort of surly Elvis” thing he does in contemporary Manhattan. Instead he’s dead and gone, and at headquarters, only the boss and former paramour, O (Emma Thompson, 53 and playing 65 or so, every actress’s dream) even remembers old K.1

It says something about our society’s perception of time that the reviewer apparently thinks Back to the Future makes perfect sense and this plot does not.  Let’s be honest, most time travel stories are completely illogical poppcycock,2 but in general we do not care as long as we’re satisfied that the story follows certain rules we’ve come to expect, which I have given snazzy names because why the hell not:

1. Brown’s Law: A time traveler is capable of preventing events he has already witnessed, but it is extremely dangerous (in some nebulous, end-of-the-universe, don’t-cross-the-streams kind of way) and should be avoided.3
2. Connor’s Berth: The effects of a time traveler’s changes to the timestream are synchronized with the timeframe from which he departed.  That is, if I go back in time and a week after I arrive I prevent your conception, you have a week from my time of departure to send somebody to stop me before you cease to exist.
3. McFly’s Confidence: Time travelers are “immune” from the effects of changing history (even when the changes directly affect their own lives) and retain full knowledge of whatever nonexistent timelines they’ve witnessed.
4. Guinan’s Exception: “Stationary” observers are only “immune” to changes in history through extraordinary circumstances, like being a special kind of alien or standing next  to the Guardian of Forever.
5. Simpson’s Razor: The only changes a time traveler must concern himself with are the ones he can perceive; he needs only to make additional changes that restore history “close enough” to his personal satisfaction.
6. Beckett’s Mandate: The morality of altering the timeline is subjective and ultimately determined by the sympathies of the audience, represented within the story by the will of  “God, time, fate, or whatever.”4

So yes, the setup of Men In Black 3 apparently breaks several of these rules, but the rules are arbitrary to begin with–they have no logical basis and aren’t rigorously applied even in the stories that purportedly follow them.  As long as the good guy needs to fix time, the bad guys are trying to stop him, and the viewer isn’t completely lost, everything else is just gravy.  This is why so many Star Trek time travel episodes suck–not because they don’t play by the rules, but because the writers confuse themselves, give up, and end with an explosion that puts everything back to normal.5  In the end the only rule is to tell a good story, although I am dubious that the 10,000th variant of “Let’s go back in time to the late 1960s!” can do that.

1. If you’re wondering why I read Time’s movie reviews, it’s for the elitist attitude.  “Oh, your average mouth-breather at least saw an  Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but my school could afford actual books by H.G. Wells!” [↩]
2. The Bill & Ted duology being a notable exception that follows Novikov’s self-consistency principle. [↩]
3. Incidentally, Thunderbolts #174 recently broached the subject of what the danger actually is, which was quite satisfying. [↩]
4. You might say “But the audience wanted Sam to save his dad!” but we really didn’t because that would fundamentally alter Sam’s history, and thus Sam as a character.  Similarly, Sam can’t fix Al’s past until the series is over and we don’t need Al to be a lovable creep anymore. [↩]
5. Jim’s Law of Time Travel clearly states that if you think your time travel story is so confusing that you decide to have a character point out how confusing it is,  you probably  should not be writing a time travel story. [↩]

So I was watching The Avengers again over the weekend and during one of the fight sequences, there is of course a Wilhelm Scream. This was not something I failed to miss the first time I watched the movie. More precisely, when I watched The Avengers the first time through and the Wilhelm Scream happened, my reaction was “oh, Christ. The Wilhelm Scream.” And this is because the Wilhelm Scream now must be in every movie ever, because it’s stopped becoming an in-joke and started becoming a sign of nerd credibility. I mostly blame this Youtube video for that:

And now every action/blockbuster movie has to have a Wilhelm Scream in it somewhere. All of the Harry Potters had them, The Hunger Games had one, all of the Marvel flicks have one, I think The Expendables had about half a dozen, et cetera. But the problem is this: whenever I hear a Wilhelm Scream I am taken out of the movie experience. My suspense of disbelief ends and I am just a guy sitting in a movie theatre who realized he just heard the same damn scream for the umpteenth time, because I recognize it. Every time.

I hate that feeling of being reminded I’m watching a movie, and for the sake of a cheap in-joke at that. When I watch a movie, I want to be thrilled during the fight scenes and exciting bits where a Wilhelm Scream might conceivably be heard. I want to experience that “ooooch” feeling when somebody really gets it, and if that moment is punctuated with a Wilhelm Scream then I’m not going to get that feeling. Instead, I’m just going to be thinking “oh, a Wilhelm Scream. Huh.” I mean, it would be as if a character stopped acting and suddenly just turned to the camera holding a handful of bacon and said “look! Bacon!” Because people love bacon. You would want to smack them if they did that, right? I mean, I already want to smack every webcomic artist who uses “bacon” as a punchline, and I’m not even paying for the webcomic, whereas I am typically paying in some manner for the movie.

Seriously. Sound people in Hollywood. Go find some other scream noise. Don’t use the Wilhelm Scream for another ten years at least. We all need a break from it.

The first thought: It’s tricky. Obviously, Marvel has provided a blueprint on how to create a blockbuster film that acts both as a standalone film and as a sequel to numerous other standalone films featuring the origins of the cast of your current movie (so that you don’t have to spend the first ten hours of your two-hour movie just explaining who everyone is.) They’ve shown not just that it can be done, but that you can structure the contracts to retain (almost all of) your cast and have a strong studio involvement to keep things consistent from film to film while still attracting A-list directors with unique personal styles (like Branagh, Joe Johnston and Joss Whedon.) But Marvel had a big advantage that DC doesn’t: They hadn’t made a whole bunch of movies already before coming up with the idea.

DC, on the other hand, has a high-profile Batman trilogy that isn’t even wrapped up yet, one which establishes an internally consistent mythos for the character that doesn’t involve any other superheroes. It’d be difficult to imagine Nolan and Bale’s Batman standing on the same screen with Green Lantern and Superman, even if it seemed likely that Bale would return to the role (which it doesn’t.) They have a Superman franchise whose most recent movie has been more or less entirely disavowed by the studio despite positive reviews and box-office success. And they have a Green Lantern movie that woefully underperformed both financially and critically. The Superman reboot that could serve as the beginning of a hypothetical Justice League launch is coming this year, but it’s anyone’s guess whether Warner Brothers had gotten its act together sufficiently by the time Man of Steel went into production to be able to think of their comics properties in these terms. (I have insisted, and will continue to insist, that the reason Marvel’s films have done so well while DC’s have done so poorly is because Marvel is in a position to be able to dictate terms to the studio, while DC is ultimately just “the hired help” at Warner Brothers.)

So the first thought ultimately leads to the second: There’s gonna be a lot of rebooting going on. Two of your three core members (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman) need a new movie to establish themselves as part of the DC Movie Universe, and one of your second-tier members has a stinker that needs to be swept under the rug (a la Ang Lee’s Hulk.) How do you handle this?

You start by ignoring it. You’ve got an Aquaman movie, a Wonder Woman movie, a Green Arrow movie and a Flash movie to make. By the time you get through those four films, there’s a pretty good chance that you can go back and do a soft reboot of Green Lantern that isn’t so obviously an admission that the previous film tanked. Then, with five films under your belt, you can go in and do your Justice League film.

“Wait, what, five?” I hear you say? “What about Batman? What about Superman? What about the Martian Manhunter?” But honestly, I don’t think you need a movie to establish Batman and Superman before putting them in a JLA film. Batman and Superman are, at this point, such iconic characters with such iconic origins that babies practically come out of the womb knowing that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed and he was inspired by a bat to fight evil. The last thing we need, pardon my mild frustration, is yet another goddamn retelling of the origin of Batman and Superman. (You can see how excited I am for the Man of Steel movie, aren’t you?) Just mention them from time to time in the other films, establish that they exist, and then throw them in the final flick.

As to the Martian Manhunter, he’d be filling the Nick Fury role on the DC end. He’d appear in all of the different movies, talking to the different heroes about how he’s getting them together to face a larger threat, one that he knows about as a telepathic space alien. (Maybe even one that killed off the Martian race…) This would link the various heroes together, whet interest for later films, and give audiences time to get used to the Martian Manhunter, who is definitely something of a legacy from a very different age of science fiction and comics.

So who would the villain be? Actually, surprisingly enough, I’d pick Libra. Go back to his original roots, where he was a supervillain attempting to steal the powers of the entire Justice League, and give a tip of the hat to his recent role in ‘Final Crisis’ by a) having him do so in order to better prepare Earth for the coming of Darkseid, and b) having him recruit a passel of henchmen to help him out. Then, in the Justice League movie, you pull a big surprise at the end…in the third act, after he steals the powers of Superman and the Flash and Green Lantern and seems pretty much unstoppable, you find out that the Martian Manhunter’s been recruiting a lot more than just the heroes who have movies. The final battle would have cameos by dozens of superheroes, from Zatanna to Black Canary to the Elongated Man to Steel to everyone who you haven’t gotten the rights to, all dogpiling on Libra and his Secret Society. In the end, Libra overloads himself absorbing everyone’s powers and blows up (a la his original appearance…) but the greater threat is still out there.

But all that, of course, assumes that Warner Brothers is interested in replicating Marvel’s success, something which has never been particularly clear from their actions. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that the people who made ‘Batman and Robin’ are interested either in making money or in bringing joy to the lives of others.

Okay, so before the nerd hordes charge with their bat’leths held high (or Mjolnir replicas, or whatever), I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy watching The Avengers. Indeed, I came out of it feeling truly entertained1. On that score, let us be clear: The Avengers is quite successful. I would particularly mention that the final third of the movie, wherein the Avengers fight the baddies in New York City in a top-notch extended battle, is probably the best super-extended action sequence since the final third of Hard Boiled when Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung fight the army of gangsters in the hospital. There are plenty of amusing quips, as one would expect from a Joss Whedon movie (and one hopes this elevates Joss Whedon, finally, to the directorial A-list, because there are many people who are there who deserve it less, and that is even given all my issues with Whedon’s oeuvre), although only three of them really made me laugh out loud and two of those involved the Hulk. The performances are good, although there are levels of excellence – RDJ and Mark Ruffalo top the list, of course, but nobody is bad.2

But here’s the thing. When I came out of Captain America and Iron Man and even Thor, I came out and said to myself, “well, that was a great movie.” Because all of those were great movies.3 I did not say that after coming out of The Avengers, because, well, it’s not a great movie. It’s not even a really good one. It’s an okay movie. At this point someone usually says “but it’s a great thrill ride!” and… well, no. At the end you might think it’s a great thrill ride, but again – that’s after the superb third act. The first two thirds of the movie are not a great thrill ride – there are thrilling moments interspersed with a lot of waiting for the awesome moments. There is, let us be honest, barely a plot to this movie: it is a bunch of Awesome Character Moments (well, mostly) and big fights, but the Awesome Character Moments aren’t really earned like they are in the previous and better Marvel films because no character gets enough time to really build a coherent storyline, and some of the plot twists in this movie are really amazingly stupid.4 Also, the movie unfortunately points out multiple times how stupid it is for anybody in a superhero universe to use a bow and arrow, which is a shame because Jeremy Renner is great, but nobody put a gun to his head and said “hey, be Hawkeye.”

So it’s not a great film. It is about as good, though, as I think an Avengers movie can be in the modern era of film: it is entertaining, competent on most levels, and if you’ve seen all the other Marvel films you can appreciate it as Adventure of The Guys From Those Other Movies well enough, and I have and did. It could be so much worse than it is, and it’s not really “worse” in any way. It’s just not great, and it’s not because it’s a team movie because The Incredibles was a team movie and it was splendid – it’s because it’s product, and product has to hit the expected beats, and in a movie like The Avengers there’s so much less room to hit them well. Which it does, right down to the end-credits reveal of Guess Who to make the fanboys come in their pants.

1. Although I wish I had not spent the money to see it in 3D. The 3D is ass. See it in 2D, folks. [↩]
2. Although Samuel L. Jackson just phones in a paycheck Samuel L. Jackson performance, which is not terrible but let’s be honest, he’s basically the black Christopher Walken at this point. [↩]
3. Okay, Thor less so than the other two by a fair bit, but even so, Thor is at least a decent movie with some really great moments. [↩]
4. Loki’s mind-control can be beaten by punching them in the head, which is basically the shittiest mind-control ever. [↩]

Black Mage: Does Thomas Mulcair have a good shot of winning the next Canadian election? Is it a better/worse shot than any of the other NDP contenders?

I would say yes and I don’t know, respectively. I think Mulcair is perhaps better positioned to leech votes from the centre than any other of the NDP candidates were and he’ll protect the new Quebec base, but the fact that he is from Quebec will be at least a slight negative in the West because they get incredibly pissy about that. I think on balance he was the best choice, not because he of geography or politics, but because he’s a political gut-punch fighter, and that’s what going to be necessary until the next election. But the NDP bench was really deep this time around (due in large part to Jack Layton making sure that it would be), so Mulcair is just the best of a strong lot.

supergp: If you were going to write a big comic crossover event, what would your premise be?

Old DC: Probably something involving most of the major heroes being mind-controlled with Starro or whatever and a few stragglers left to save the day. Probably including Empress, Major Disaster, and Geist the Twilight Man as some of the rebel fringe. (Yes, I know both MD and Geist were supposedly killed in Infinite Crisis. My answer to that is simple: “nuh-uh.”)

New DC: Something that brings back the old DC.

Marvel: Victor Von Doom. Infinity Gauntlet. *drops mic*

JDR: Can you compare Canada to some country(ies) that aren’t the USA?

Well, we’re colder than Botswana, freer than Yemen, less blonde than Sweden, better at parking than Italy, have less Japanese people than Japan, have better McDonald’s than Australia, less jiggly at most times than Brazil, less shaky than Djibouti, less class-riddled than England, have more Tamils working as line cooks than Sri Lanka (seriously, in Toronto Tamils fill the same role that the various Central American immigrants do in American kitchens; one of my former roommates, a sous chef and thoroughly white dude, spoke decent Tamil), easier to pronounce than Kyrgyzstan, less desert-y than the Western Sahara, and our French bears only a slight resemblance to France’s French. How’s that?

Greg Morrow: What is the most important difference between the constitutional laws of Canada and the United States? Not the procedural stuff about how the legislature is constituted, but the substantive stuff about civil rights and limited government power.

Probably the existence of s.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the limitations clause. (Which, for the uninitiated, allows the government to pass laws which limit individual rights, so long as those laws are relatively specific and enumerated and that the limitation is justifiable in a free and democratic society.) It prevents a lot of “this absolute principle is clashing with that other absolute principle” confusion that arises whenever rights collide with other rights, which actually happens just about all the time. Of course, I know more than a few Constititional scholars who absolutely loathe the existence of s.1, so who knows.

Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?

It’s not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap.

You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, clearly having aged in real time from the end of the show, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn’t be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss.

And that’s when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn’t quite understand it, suddenly they’re working together to do something he can’t quite understand. The three of them are now leaping together, and every time she reminds him of what’s been happening so he doesn’t lose track. She’s working with slightly more advanced technology than Sam is, but even her advances aren’t enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she has enlisted Sam’s help. Two Leapers, working in tandem across multiple times, can pull it off. There’s no other way.

What has happened? Thanks to the interference of the second Leaper (who is much younger than Sam), Sam has traveled into her timeline. This leaper dies much, much later than Sam will – a century or more later – and this means she and Sam, together, can effect the events necessary for a future Leaper to leap backwards and give her the technology she so desperately needs to return Sam home. And so the present changes the future changes the past changes the present…

…because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.

(previously, slightly less previously)

supergp: What game would you use to introduce a young kid to boardgames, and at what age?

Start them early (and this isn’t just me espousing the hobby, incidentally – any childhood dev expert can tell you that the problem-solving and analytical skills kids can pick up by playing boardgames will go a long way in their lives). You can start playing boardgames with kids as early as two thanks to games like Go Away Monster! (among others). Animal Upon Animal is a dexterity game first and foremost but there’s strategy to be found there (enough that I have played it with adults and had fun, albeit using variant rules); Geistesblitz never, ever stops being fun either, whether you are four or sixty-four. As kids get older you can introduce them to slightly harder stuff: Liar’s Dice, Blockers! or Zooloretto or even Ticket To Ride. And then you can get them into the big-name stuff like Settlers or Carcassonne.

Evil Midnight Lurker: Have you ever killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good murder to do such a thing.

A2H: Will there ever be any more Who’s Who columns? And if not, would going over the Official Guide to the Marvel Universe be a possibility?

Yes to both. I was actually working on a fairly lengthy Who’s Who entry (one of the more think-piecey ones, although I do especially want to do another Crime Tailor segment at some point and have a couple of villains in mind for that) last week and didn’t have time to finish it for that Thursday. Maybe this Thursday if everything goes smoothly. Or not. It depends.

As for the OHOTMU, probably, yes. Rex the Wonder Dog’s awesomeness is not constrained to one universe.

Mitchell Hundred: Does Armond White actually believe all the crazy shit he writes, or is he just trying to garner publicity? I’m really not sure about this.

I think Armond White is a born contrarian, and contrarians are extremely skilled at making themselves believe that the contrary opinions they hold for the sake of being contrary are also correct. Seriously, if Armond White is trying to get publicity, there are much easier ways to do it than by arguing that latter-day Michael Bay films are unrecognized works of genius.

Nicodemus: If you were a flavor of soup, what flavor would it be?

Presumably “mangled flesh” flavour.

Jonathan: Do you have any opinions/insights into the current Alberta election? Does it even have any meaning to you as an Ontarian?

Yes. I said on MetaFilter a couple weeks ago that I thought Danielle Smith – not Wildrose, Smith – represented the future of Canadian small-c conservatism because she was what it needed to be to survive (or at least pretending to be so): fiscally radical-conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Youth polling in Canada – even in Alberta – makes it quite clear that social conservative positions are wildly unpopular with young voters and that is only trending downwards. Libertarian-conservatism is really the only way for conservatism to truly survive in Canada over the next fifty years, and Danielle Smith was trying to sell Wildrose as being that.

The problem, of course, is that Wildrose was actually chock-full of the usual old white Reform Party psychotics who have always been the backbone of Canada’s far right and once it became obvious that this was the case, the moderates and youth that might have considered voting Wildrose suddenly found they weren’t so interested in voting for Canada’s religious right and went for the Progressive Conservatives, who have moved to a decidely centrist position over the past few years. So generally, I’m quite happy with the results, as Alberta politics seem to have shifted from all-right-wing-all-the-time to a centrist/conservative fight, and that’s a leftward shift in the most conservative province in Canada.

KD: Nearly a year in, what are your thoughts on the DcNU?

I’m reading I, Vampire and that is pretty much it (and I don’t know how long I’ll hang on to reading it). The Nu52 basically killed DC for me – the emotional attachment that I always had to the DCU is still there, but it’s strictly to the old DCU and not this shitty new EXTREEEEEEME version. Really, most of the Nu52 comics are just appallingly bad, and the ones that aren’t are crossing over with the bad ones far too often. But at the end of the day, it’s not about quality but about the fact that my DC comics, the ones I grew up with, have been mostly discarded for something else. Even if they were good comics, I still wouldn’t want to read them, because without the emotional tie they lose all resonance for me. I mean, I’m not even reading Legion of Super-Heroes! This is the first time basically ever that I am not bothering to read Legion. It just feels weird for me to type that, but it’s true.

And look – DC has greatly increased their sales, so good for them, I suppose. But it’s not for me any more. I used to dream of writing for DC; I don’t any more, because it’s quite clear that even if I could get past their abominable treatment of creators (and I don’t think I could), it’s just not a place I’d want to work now.

As per yesterday:

Andrew Miller: What’s the best horror movie that most people haven’t heard of?

I’ll go with Demons 2, Dario Argento’s sequel to his somewhat more famous but less scary Demons. For those not in the know: the Demons films are essentially “fast zombie” films twenty years before fast zombie films became a thing – the titular demons attack and either kill their victims or turn them into more demons in a very zombie-like way, and the movies are gory and violent. The first one is okay, but the second one takes place entirely inside an apartment building where the demon attack begins when a girl watches a TV show with a demon in it and then the demon on the TV sees her and comes out of the TV – which is ridiculous, of course, but it sells the horror quite effectively and the movie as a whole is a pretty good take on the “locked in the building with zombies” genre. Except, as I said, twenty years before that was really a thing. The original Demons isn’t bad either, but I like the second one better.

What’s the best horror movie that has an undeservedly poor reputation?

Probably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Yes, the one with Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. I’m not going to say it’s good exactly, but it got pilloried for being total shit because it’s not like the earlier films in the series – this one is just sort of insane in a weirdly entertaining way and I think it deserves to be resurrected as a bold failure if nothing else.

Goattoucher: Why, God? WHYYYYY?!?

Bud Dry.

Darren K: Do you like travelling? Have you done much of it? Left the continent? Been to Winnipeg?

Yes, no, yes (Australia, Bolivia, and South Africa when I was little), and yes (it’s quite pretty along the river, but other than that – sorry, too small for me).

Bret: Pete Ross (The Superman supporting character): Why doesn’t he work?

Pete Ross doesn’t work because there is nothing special about him; he learns that Clark Kent is Superboy completely by accident and that is basically all there ever has been to the character, and it’s simply not enough because A) Lois either already knows or will eventually figure out that Clark is Superman, B) there’s a strong argument that Perry White and Jimmy Olsen know (or have at least guessed) and are just playing along because Clark is their friend and they’re covering his ass, as friends do, and C) Batman knows, and if you’re gonna write a Superman story, are you going to team him up with Batman or Pete Ross? The answer to that question is never going to be Pete Ross.

mason stormchild: Do you think reddit is basically becoming 4chan with a veneer of respectability?

“Becoming”?

Brendan: What do you think the best policy is for coming up with fantasy names/words without making them sound too silly?

Take a name from the culture you want the character to reflect/imitate (since nobody is really imaginative enough to truly come up with their own completely original culture, when you get down to it). Change 1-3 consonants depending on how many syllables the name has (if it’s two syllables or less, only one), keep the vowel sounds intact, and you’re done.

Kai: Marvel Studios, riding high on their successful series of movies all leading up to the Avengers (which is going to be a hit whether it’s actually awesome or manages to totally suck, let’s be honest here), is looking for their next big Marvel-verse thing and comes to your door with a dump truck full of cash and a request for you to take the helm of their newest project, a Doctor Strange movie. So how do you do it? Who do you cast? What’s your script breakdown look like? Bear in mind that you have to try and keep things roughly within the style and tone of the Marvel movies we’ve seen so far, but beyond that you can tackle it however you like.

Dr. Strange is, I think, one of the great unexploited origin stories in comics and a film version of it would be the wisest course for an initial Dr. Strange film: a bad (but not irredeemable) person becomes a good one when his quest to make himself whole becomes a quest of an entirely different sort. The overall tone would be more contemplative than your average Marvel film (although still with comic moments) and lean more in the direction of Guillermo del Toro visuals than Joss Whedon-style wit because you really have to sell the otherworldliness of Dr. Strange in order to make him stand out from the superheroic crowd, but you’d still have the vicious and awesome magical battle with Dormammu as your closing piece. I would probably borrow a few story elements from JMS’s Strange miniseries since it had some excellent ideas in it.

And: Benedict Cumberbatch as Strange, Daniel Dae-Kim as Wong, James Hong as the Ancient One, August Diehl (from The Counterfeiters) as Baron Mordo and Rosario Dawson as Clea.

First two acts are perfectly serviceable and okay meta-commentary on horror tropes that some will claim are more clever than they in fact are; third act is some of the most ambitious, exciting horror filmmaking in years, and since it’s the last bit, you’ll forget that the first two-thirds of it was only okay.

A couple weeks back Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a great piece about white actors Hollywood keeps trying to push despite their continuing failure to succeed. (For those who quibble about Sam Worthington’s inclusion: watch Man on a Ledge and then try to tell me differently.) These actors are not bad actors per se (although I would argue Jason O’Mara is pretty bad), but they are pointedly non-special-in-any-way actors who keep getting breaks until something happens for them. Alex O’Loughlin is a good example of this: he was boring in Moonlight and then he was boring in Three Rivers and now he is boring in Hawaii Five-O, but on that show he is surrounded by more entertaining actors and pretty scenery so it has become successful and now O’Loughlin is the Hollywood equivalent of a made guy. The point is that minority actors, by and large, do not get these same types of chances. Idris Elba in particular should be huge now. Morris Chestnut seemed tailor-made to be an action star – muscular, attractive, charismatic, – but it never happened and he got shunted into “urban” romcoms. And so forth.

Anyway, I mention all of this because I just saw the extended trailer for Step Up: Revolution. (Yes, I know some of you are going to just click over to Reddit instead of reading the rest of this post, but try to bear with me.)

Now, if you are not familiar with the Step Up films, there is a simple pattern to them: boy meets girl, they are both dancers, one or the other has a crew and for some reason that crew has to win a big dance battle which is awesome, Love Conquers All, happy ending. Now, the first Step Up starred Charming Potato but since Mr. Potato was not available to do Step Up 2 The Streets, as he was now rich and famous and too important for such things, instead the film transitioned to his character’s previously unmentioned little sister analogue and she took the role of The Girl in the second movie.

Since all of the Step Up films take place in the same universe where dance battles are bigger than UFC, the third film, Step Up 3D had to be connected to the second and this time around the primary transition character was Adam Sevani’s Moose. Now, Sevani is a pretty badass dancer, and in fact he gets a romance subplot, but instead of being the lead he is secondary to some blandly attractive model-esque dancers who aren’t bad or anything but certainly aren’t the sick dancers that the rest of the cast are – and really aren’t so amazing as actors that they merit any additional consideration on that front. But they’re definitely attractive and Sevani is, let us be honest, geek chic rather than traditional leading man.

However, Step Up 3D also introduced Stephen “Twitch” Boss to the cast, and Twitch, as any fan of So You Think You Can Dance knows, is charismatic, articulate, a decent actor, a ridiculously good dancer, has an existing fanbase, and most importantly for our considerations at this point is quite handsome:

And producers promised that Twitch would get a greatly expanded role in Step Up 4 (which later got renamed to Step Up Revolution as they jiggered the plot to tie it into Occupy Wall Street, sort of, if Occupy Wall Street danced in far more badass ways than they usually do), so a lot of people, myself included, naturally assumed that he would be the transition character into the fourth film. But instead of this happening, Twitch is still a supporting character and the leads are going to be a white girl and a not-terribly-dark Hispanic guy.

Granted, one can’t get too upset about Kathryn McCormick playing the lead white girl, because she is totally awesome in her own right, but why can’t she just romance Twitch instead? I mean, interracial relationships are common nowadays – particularly in the dance community. But this is one area where Hollywood continues to be weirdly reactionary.

Dammit, this hits me right in my sweet spot:

It’s become an overused and empty catchphrase with almost depressing speed; faced with sexist caricature after sexist caricature, feminist comics fans said that they wanted strong female characters as an alternative to women who serve no purpose other than to be the eye/arm-candy for male protagonists. And seemingly within days, every character was being described as a “strong female character”, from Ripley to Buffy to Catwoman to Lady Bullseye to X-23 to Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose. Because there are so many different kinds of strength and different ways to depict it, just about any character could be described as “strong” according to the writer’s personal lights, even while feminists continued to decry them as sexist caricatures. Which just led to a sort of hurt puzzlement among clueless male writers…after all, how could Lady Bullseye be considered “sexist”? She beats people up! Having read more than a few of these debates that always seem to trail off into anger on both sides, I thought I might present some of what I think are tangible, clearly-defined differences between actual strong female characters, and those just called “strong female characters”. Here are some of the characteristics of the “strong female”, as opposed to the actual strong female:

1) A “strong female character” is strictly limited in the scope of where she is allowed to be strong, usually to combat; she is strong, but she is not active. The best example I can think of for this particular trope is Cherry Darling, Robert Rodriguez’ supposedly strong character in ‘Planet Terror’. Certainly, she’s strong in one sense–she is able to kick lots of ass, mowing down dozens of zombies and Marines and zombified Marines in the film’s action climax. The ending of the film even shows her as the leader of the group of survivors. But when the film isn’t showing her shooting people and blowing people up and openly defying the laws of physics in various violent ways, it’s showing her…taking orders from El Wray, the male protagonist. He tells her to stop moping. He gives her both her wooden leg and her gun-leg. He practically drags her along through every scene of the movie. Even her final decision, to become the group’s charismatic leader and take them south to an easily defensible coastal region, comes from a scene where El Wray says, “Honey, time for you to become a charismatic leader by following my plan.” “Yessir.” She is never a decision maker, only an exceptional fighter. The two should not be conflated, and all too often are. (This is what John Scalzi referred to as “Spinny Killbot Syndrome”.)

2) A “strong female character” is strong in a way that does not threaten male gender roles. The implication that’s always given in these roles is that anytime women are anything other than helpless and simpering, they are automatically challenging sexist assertions and should be lauded for it. But the fact is, in practical terms, there is a strong societal belief that violence is perfectly acceptable for women under the right circumstances. Take Ripley, for instance. She is definitely seen as a feminist icon, and there’s certainly a lot of justification for that. But her most iconic scene is actually her least feminist; when she confronts the Queen Alien at the end of ‘Aliens’, it is with the intent of defending her surrogate daughter. It is automatically assumed, in fiction and in life, that a woman standing up for her family (her children, her husband) is going to use violence far more effectively and with less hesitation than a man would in the same situation, because her primal maternal instinct is aroused. The “Mama Grizzly” stereotype is every bit as sexist as the “Damsel in Distress”, even though one involves inflicting grievous bodily harm on people and the other involves helplessness in perilous situations. So are all the female characters who fight with determined efficiency while the battle is going on, only to faint when it ends because they’re so relieved, so are the femme fatales who vamp their way through combat. In ‘Aliens’, it’s Vasquez who is the truly challenging female character, determined to succeed better than men in their own field. (Unsurprisingly, people seem to prefer Ripley’s brand of “feminism”.)

3) A “strong female character” is either sexless or hypersexualized. The “virgin/whore” dichotomy is a classic complaint about the treatment of women in both fiction and life; female characters, it seems, are never to mention that they have body parts that produce orgasms or otherwise they’re supposed to be teases, sex kittens, vamps and sluts. Red Sonja is one example of the former; she’s a “strong female character” whose actual motto involves a vow of chastity to be enforced at swordpoint, while Catwoman gives us a view of the opposite extreme, a character who fights crime in a slinky catsuit and high heels. There’s very rarely a middle ground (and ironically, characters who inhabit it are all too frequently deemed “sexist”, because in the minds of many feminists, it’s better to fall on the “sexless” side of the divide than the “hypersexualized”. Slut shaming is all too common, even among people who know better. Of course, that isn’t to say that all sexual characters can be or should be defended by saying, “Oh, you’re just slut shaming!”. Sometimes hypersexualization is exactly what it appears to be, turning a female character into nothing more than an object of male lust. Are you listening, Scott Lobdell?)

4) A “strong female character” derives her strength from victimization. And speaking of Red Sonja, her origin story is par for the course for about two-thirds of female heroes…she was made helpless and victimized (“sexually” is often implied even if not outright stated), and she has made it her mission never to be helpless and victimized again. Lady Bullseye, Beatrix Kiddo…even X-23 has an element of pointless victimization grafted into her origin, as she apparently spent some time as a prostitute with an abusive pimp. When the female equivalent of Wolverine gets sexually abused, you know the trope is a little bit nuts. (By the way, it’s worth pointing out that the number of male heroes with the same element of victimization is exactly one: Batman. And he was a ten-year-old when it happened.)

And 5) a “strong female character” has an existence that revolves around the male protagonist. This is why I grew less and less enamored of River Song, even though I couldn’t articulate exactly why at the time. It’s because while she started as a mysterious archaeologist with a hidden past, she rapidly became “The Doctor’s assassin who became the Doctor’s lover who became the Doctor’s wife who became the Doctor’s murderer who became the Doctor’s Doctor’s Doctor’s…” While she’s active, competent in ways other than the merely physical, and has an active sex life but isn’t defined by it, she does come to be defined by her relationship to ther Doctor. Her story revolves around his, it does not cross it independently; this is all too common regarding “strong” women. (One of the biggest and most positive changes to Lois Lane was when she stopped trying to prove that Clark Kent was Superman so that she could marry him and started becoming an actual journalist.)

Now, appearing on this list does not immediately mean that a female character is sexist, or that their creators are sexist. Every character is on a journey that may involve them overcoming personal issues like those mentioned above (take River Tam, who moves from being passive to active over the course of a season of ‘Firefly’.) Some characters are meant to be flawed, but still admirable (River Song, for all that she has become obsessed with the Doctor, is nonetheless an active figure who refuses to blindly trust him or follow his orders.) If your character can check off a box on this list, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a huge mistake. (If they can check off all five, on the other hand…) But they are things worth discussing, and they are definitely things worth remembering when creating future female characters. Because an actual strong female character shouldn’t be that hard to create.