In memory: Irvin Kershner (1923-2010)

Let's hope that we never have to do this again: write obituaries for two of our heroes in one day. It's not something that we take excitement from doing, but it does allow us to reflect on the impact these people have made on our lives. By directing The Empire Strikes Back, and creating one of the best films in history, Irvin Kershner certainly made a noticeable impact.

There was something people saw in Star Wars when it was originally released. Maybe it was the characters, the science fiction/western element, or the familiar Arthurian cycle ever present that made it so easy to connect with this galaxy far, far away, but I think it was made very plain in Empire that it might have been a skillful combination of all three.

We start with the Battle of Hoth, then on to the introduction of the Jedi sage, Yoda, and the betrayal at Cloud City. What we don't see is this marvelous balance of action, character, and drama the likes of which we just don't see much anymore. It's all behind the scenes, keeping you in your seat, making the development oh so seamless that it stops being a movie at some point and becomes an experience. You feel a chill run across your skin when Luke learns the truth about his father, no matter how many times you've seen the movie, and an insane urge to watch Return of the Jedi when the credits begin to roll.

Mister Kershner may not have created Star Wars, but he came to own it, and in doing so created one of the most satisfying sequels since The Godfather: Part II. His eye for detail and his complete willingness to allow his actors to ad-lib (see Han's response to Leia's "I love you") helped made The Empire Strikes Back something more than just a sequel or just a space opera. He allowed us a window into another world.

And he didn't have to use 3D to do it.

Thank you, Mister Kershner, for making me believe.

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Buch here. I just wanted to add some thoughts and join in this one. Anthony and I have been 'Star Wars' fans for a long time, and I think one of the reasons that there is still such a thing as 'Star Wars fans' is The Empire Strikes Back.

It's the little details in that famous 'revelation' scene that make it so special - the tone of voice, the use and placing of the music, the build-up. It's the way the director got a great performance out of every actor, many of whom were dressed as robots. It's how my favourite character is a Jim Henson puppet with green skin and big ears, and how that character only seems silly, or anything less than magnificent, when you look at him out of context.

I honestly don't know much about Kershner's body of work as a filmmaker, but I really do love his most famous movie. It was a middle act more than a sequel, refusing to let the law of diminishing returns set in just yet - but more than that it was just a perfect adventure film. The amount of care and skill that went into it shines through in every scene - the movie has supreme confidence in itself and just carries you along with it for two hours, making Star Wars into a saga and a hobby, not just three 80's space movies.

So as a fan, I have to say I'm very sad about Irvin Kershner's death and I owe him thanks.


Here's a scene that maybe shows what I meant about Yoda.

In memory: Leslie Nielsen (1926-2010)

"Who are you, and how did you get in here?"

"I'm the locksmith. And... I'm a locksmith."

-

I remember when Peter Graves died, I thought, 'maybe I should do obituarites on the blog' and I thought of Leslie Nielsen, his co-star in one of the best comedy films ever made, 'Airplane!'
I remember suddenly being hit by the mortality of the cast of the movie I had grown up on and studied, and wondering how I'd ever do justice to an actor as funny as Nielsen in an online obit. Very sad memory today.

He was an actor who truly mastered deadpan delivery, like Buster Keaton but sterner and with a sexy voice. He made very fine straight heroes and villains in his other movies, for the record.

Here's one of his best moments.

****

Knight here. Don't mean to hijack Buch's post, but I just wanted to toss in a bit of my own grief.

My first "Nielsen Experience" was during a little movie called The Poseidon Adventure. If you've never seen it, the film has been hailed as one of the greatest disaster films of all time. It's about a cruise ship out in the Atlantic that is struck by a rogue wave and capsizes. Mister Nielsen played the captain of that cruise ship, in one of the most serious roles you'll ever see him play. His reactions completely sold me on the horror of that situation, which is why it's so funny that he would eventually become, to me, one of the greatest comedy actors ever filmed.

Airplane is a masterpiece, in no small part because of Nielsen's contribution to it. As Buch pointed out, his complete deadpan delivery is masterful. The bit where the stewardess asks him if he's a doctor and he responds with a serious "That's right" with a stethoscope in his ears...I still crack up at that.

And he never really lost that ability to make you laugh no matter what role he played, and he was doing what he did best all the way up to his death. His performances made me laugh like no others have, and his good humor made me a fan for life.

So, I just wanted to tell you, "Thank You, Mister Nielsen," we're all counting on you.

Mock Effect 2 is up and online...!

... and I am very impressed.

Regular readers of my blog entries will remember at the beginning of this year, me dilly-dallying about whether or not to write a spoof of Mass Effect 2, considering the bizarre and ego-boosting success of my parody of Mass Effect in 2007/8 - Mock Effect.
I spent ages going back and forth, trying to decide whether or not to do a sequel. I made a huge fuss about it and attracted a lot of attention to myself, which was secretly the whole point of the exercise.

But I was always quite sad that the concept and the characters of John and Jane Shepard died there, with my creativity.

OR DID THEY!

I really should have mentioned this ages ago. Fittingly, John and Jane have been ressurected by the beautiful Australian scientist/marine that is Clint Johnston.

Clint has been writing Mock Effect 2 for months now, and uploading each chapter as he goes. And honestly, it's very very good. If you enjoyed the first one - here is the improved sequel. It's teriffically funny, painstakingly well-observed, and very kindly brings back the Shepard twins exactly as I wrote them. It was a very nice moment when I first started reading this - seeing those characters still going and still just the same.

Because fanfiction.net doesn't allow script-format stories/parodies, Clint has been uploading at Bioware and the Mass Effect Fanfic Forums (the home of Mock Effect 1).

Here's an excerpt :D

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(The Turian in front of them holds up a finger, and the team waits impatiently as he takes out the last remaining mercenary. He then turns to them and dramatically removes his helmet, revealing GARRUS VAKARIAN)

JOHN: Oh shit. I’m out of here. Hey, guys, you can kill him now. We’re sorry!

JANE: Not so fast now. Maybe he’s not as boring as he used to be.

GARRUS: Guys, I’m right here. I can hear you. How come you aren’t dead?

JANE: We’re not… anymore… I think. I’ll explain it later.

JOHN: No thanks to you, Mr. I’ll-Shoot-My-Rescuers…

GARRUS: You were part of a heavily armed attack force that has spent the better part of the last few days trying to kill me. I was supposed to notice you were different? Thanks for shouting that out by the way, I got in a lot of shots at shocked mercs.

JANE: (dryly) No problem. No offense, but what the hell are you doing here? In Game 1 you at best a mediocre human shield, at worst, you were nearly killing hostages.

GARRUS: Don’t worry, I still do that, but I’ve picked up some new skills. I got tired of C-Sec and all it’s bureaucratic crap…

JOHN: Oh come on, not this again!

GARRUS: So I decided to come out here and lay waste to all the criminal lords in the area. Back at C-Sec, we never had decent sniper rifles.

JOHN: (suddenly paying attention) Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad. Shooting people interests me.

JANE: I don’t imagine that went over well.

GARRUS: Er… no. I’m throwing a major kink in their operations, not to mention the fragile local economy. But killing mercs is hard work. I’ve had to study up on gangland tactics. Would you believe that Eclipse uses cement shoes for disposing of undesirables? It’s all very impractical. Have you any idea how long cement takes to mold?

JANE: (mutters) Probably as long as it will take archaeologists to find our bodies. (aloud) How did you wind up with the name Archangel?

GARRUS: The locals gave it me for… for….(searching for a logical reason) all my good deeds.

(JANE raises an eyebrow)

GARRUS: (sigh) I don’t know. It just sounded badass. “The Punisher” was taken. I tried to call Wrex for some name ideas but he’s been very busy lately. Something about his new writing career.

MIRANDA: Well, if you three are finished with old home week over there, the robots climbing over the wall might need your attention.

JANE: Well it was polite of them to wait until we ran out of topics.

JOHN: Ooh, robots. Can I see?

(GARRUS hands him the Sniper Rifle. JOHN headshots a robot, exploding it in the middle of its compatriots. JANE, MIRANDA, and ZAEED join in, leaving nothing but spare parts lying around.)

GARRUS: I’m just going to take a nap on the couch over here. You guys keep up the good work. (Immediately falls asleep)

JOHN: Jackass. He thinks withstanding a siege for days on end gives him an excuse to nap?

JANE: Well… remember the Alamo! Let’s get ready to fight!

They're eating her! Then they're gonna eat me!

I used to work in a video-shop in Bolton, whose company also owned a very cheap movie studio, and so out catalogue was flooded with a crazy amount of terrible, super-low-budget horror films. So during that time I developed a hobby of watching awful, recent monster movies and laughing at them - and I got to see films like Ice Queen (they used a toy car on a model background in the establishing shots) Haunted Boat (which came out just after 'Ghost Ship' and featured a boat... that turned out not to be haunted at all) and of course - What Ever Happenned to Alice (which I still say is the 'worst movie I've ever seen').

Oh! And they also had one my absolute favourite films, the one that became a big running-joke for us employees - Trees 2: The Root of All Evil, which was about killer Christmas trees that over-run a hillside town. Trees 2 has the best damn ending-credits song I've ever heard in my life. If you ever see that movie in a shop - buy it, at any price.

But I've gotten away from my point here, which is Song of the Dead. I saw a second-hand copy of this at Blockbuster (who normally don't bother with this kind of film, except for The Asylum's boring efforts) with a box reading 'Day of the Zombie'.


It looks boring and generic - but what's that at the bottom of the box? 'The ultimate horror opera'? Yes! It's a zombie musical! And one so bad that the title had to be guiltily changed, just so that it would stand a chance of being sold! That seems pretty stupid to me - who would rather watch a nondescript zombie flick than THE ULTIMATE (or rather, first... I think) zombie musical?! Well, I love musicals, bad films and zombies so I grabbed it.

Here's the trailer - which actually gives a very fair and honest account of the movie's content.

And it was such a pleasure to see another one of these movies - that know they're bad and kind of mock themselves but also are really lovable for trying - and I have nothing better to do, so now I'm going to review it.

--

The movie is very, very low-budget, and very, very poorly-acted (by everyone except Steve Andsager, who is actually very funny). The singing is also truly awful, except by the guy you see at the beginning of the trailer there, but sadly he only appears twice.

The plot is deliberately very similar to George Romero's classic 'Night of the Living Dead' which these film-makers (like me) clearly adore. It begins with a man and a woman in graveyard, moves to a beseiged cabin in the middle of nowhere and ends on a pile of burning bodies. The Romero references are many, and usually painfully obvious.

Speaking of heavy-handedness, I think the biggest flaw here is the large amount of time and effort given over to political satire. Because of the zombie-musical concept, the movie tries to be lighthearted and throw jokes in there. Sometimes they're bad, sometimes they don't even make sense, sometimes they're actually good (the 'hobbies' song made me laugh out loud). But the zombies are referred to as 'zombie terrorists' and the chemical that caused the problem is the 'Jihad Ressurection Virus'.... yeah.
And we're not talking about a few throwaway lines here: this is the major theme of the plot. Believe me, after an hour or so it gets old. It's a nice enough idea to try to parody recent US foreign policy in your movie, make your heroes occasionally look like monsters, follow in Romero's satirical (but much much much subtler) footsteps... but this scriptwriter and this premise are just not capable of effectively satirising that. "We need to bomb any country that had anything to do with terrorism!" What, because your shack is beseiged by zombies...?

The songs themselves are actually catchy as hell! Unfortunately the singers are absolutely horrible, and the bland rock band who play them all are awfully samey. No big book numbers, sadly. All light rock.

It's a bad movie - there's no denying that. There is a tombstone at the beginning that looks like it's made of card and written in marker pen. One of the zombies is topless, and curiously she's always at the very front of the horde, next to the camera...

--

But at the same time this movie really is something special... or at the very least unique.

Every now and again the movie really impressed me with a subtle Romero reference (one character angrily calls another 'flyboy' under his breath) or a clever little spin on a zombie cliche (arms reaching through a wooden wall, waving slowly back and forth during a sad song).

And this is the thing, here. This is why I'd recommend seeing this film. Despite the fact that it's a kind-of-comedy musical, despite the huge limitations it faces, this film really tries hard to add a few things to the zombie lore.
There is a scene near the end when one of the characters who's been bitten gathers the others round him and starts to explain the zombies' motivation. Another character asks a rhetorical question, why do these reanimated corpses want to eat the flesh of the living? Why are they cannibals? And suddenly you think.... wait, that's actually a very good point! Why the hell do they? And the guy says this:

"By feeding on the living, the zombie's mind thinks that... it will live again! Their drive is to live: it's what they remember. But all they have is this unnatural state of death, mixed with awareness. Their minds tell them... that if they feed on the living, then they will live again, and the pain of being dead... will stop. / I can feel it inside me."

And that's a brilliant bit of writing, in this armchair reviewer's opinion. You have to watch two acts of cardboard tombstones to see it - but it's worth it.

Two stars out of five. But that's more than I'd give to most of the zombie films from the last ten years - including Romero's.

Book Review: Old Man's War by John Scalzi

I remember (in the before-time) when I read Ender's Game for the first time. It was everything I had wanted in a book, and it was what got me back into reading as a hobby. Ever since then, I've always recommended it to people. I've given it to my brother as a gift and to my English cohort, Mister Buch. These days, I almost feel bad that I did, not because the book is bad, 'cause it's not, but because Orson Scott Card is...well, I shouldn't say.

What I will say is that I no longer wish to support him or his views, which are so readily available to the world these days.

This was depressing to me, since science fiction is in flux these days. You can't walk down a proper sci-fi/fantasy aisle in a book store without finding:

1) A metric ton of fantasy novels.

2) An entire section dedicated to Star Wars.

3) A small selection dedicated to Robert Heinlein.

4) A slightly larger selection of books from the Honor Harrington series.

It's hard to find good science fiction these days. Really hard. If I wanted to read a modern fantasy book, how many authors are there lined up? Off the top of my head: Salvatore, Weis & Hickman, Rothfuss, Martin, Sanderson, Stover, Donaldson, Brooks, Butcher, Erikson, Weeks. If I do the same thing with science fiction authors I get...ah...Weber? Bear? Most sci-fi authors these days are writing for Star Wars. That's not a bad thing at all, but it sorta makes that aisle a little wanting.

It's a bit telling when I have to choose from a line-up of science fiction works from half a century ago. But I'm glad I don't have to anymore.

I didn't pick up Old Man's War on impulse, I did it out of spite. John Scalzi's name simply popped up everywhere. Amazon would always recommend his books, Borders would always have them sitting out on a table for me to notice, and Stover eventually did an interview on a blog called "Whatever." Whose blog is this, I wonder? Well, it looks like - dammit!

I won't even go into the whole Stargate Universe thing.

So, I bought Old Man's War to quiet the voices. I took it home, got ten pages into it and...well, yeah, I'm finished with it. I couldn't put it down. Just couldn't. Something was just shouting at me the entire way through: I had found my new sci-fi hero.

Hey, we made it to the actual review! Old Man's War is about a seventy-five-year old man named John Perry. He's recently lost his wife and can't quite see how he can get much more out of his life on Earth. So, he signs up to join the mysterious Colonial Defense Forces military on his birthday, not knowing exactly what he's signing up for. What he does know is that he's about to be declared legally dead, and will never be able to return to Earth for as long as he lives.

Tough break. Eventually, he finds himself traveling across the galaxy in a new, younger, battle-ready body to fight a war the likes of which humanity has never experienced. A war where you might be fighting one alien species one week, and a completely different species the next - and that's assuming you even know how to kill them, a possibility that is always up in the air.

John's real battle isn't about the war, really. He's lost his humanity in little ways, and has to discover what it is he's really fighting for. It's a battle worth experiencing.

Mister Scalzi knows how to write damn good sci-fi. He strikes a fine balance between story and science. You won't be reading this book for the brand of hard sci-fi that makes your head asplode; you'll be reading it for the characters first and foremost, then the story, then the science, then the hard science - in that order, and they're all worth following.

What I loved was the romantic view toward the unknowns of the universe. Scalzi can just dazzle you with bits that make you question the scale of the universe and the beauty that surrounds us in the unknown regions of the galaxy. It felt like Scalzi really got what Sagan was trying to say, and attempted to continue it in little ways.

There were only two things that I didn't like. One was the brevity, because it felt like Scalzi only had a certain amount of space to work with, and the ending feels a bit rushed on account of this (regardless of if it's true or not). The other thing was that, you know, I'm no scientist. I've dabbled in astrophysics, but that was a long time ago, and wherever that information is, it's not in my head. Obviously, there's some hard science in this book, and my gripe lies with the way it was presented.

In the real world, scientists can talk about certain concepts without having to explain them, right? Right. But the reader might not know what these scientists are talking about, so the author has to think of a plot device in order to justify these characters explaining the science willy nilly. Enter the dumb guy at the table, who just doesn't know what these scientists are talking about. There is a dumb guy around pretty much every time a science concept is brought up, which then prompts the scientists to lay it all out on the line. This got kind of annoying. Firstly, because it's a cheap plot device. Secondly, because I don't like identifying with the dumb guy!

But these gripes don't make much of a difference either way. This is a fantastic book and one of the best science fiction books I've read in a very, very long time. Authors just can't seem to figure out what the point of sci-fi is these days, but I think Scalzi is very much on the right track.

100 words - October 2010

Knightfall and I finished our first 'batches' of entries at 100Words.com!

It's been a really interesting writing game, which we were both playing along with a bunch of others from the Mass Effect Fanfic forums. I think writing alongside four friends makes it much more enjoyable! Espescially when it's something tricky and fun like this.

If you missed our earlier blog about it, it's a simple but surprisingly hard challenge. Once you sign-up you have to write a 100-word piece (any subject, any style, fiction or non-fiction) every day for a month. If you're too late writing, you're out. If it's not exactly 100, you're out.

So we had a lot of fun! Knight wrote a series of hilarious skits, impressive poems and little prose vignettes that were like something Joss Whedon took out of his new show because they were too good for it. I wrote... mainly about Frankenstein and superheroes.
Regardless, we both full enjoyed it! here's Knight's October batch, and here's mine.

And here are our final entries:

As he began to fall, the elf's life flashed before his eyes; and given the density of his lifespan, that flash seemed like a very long time.

He saw the Kastarn Spire as it glowed bright with energy just beyond the Nightwisp Hills. Then came the Breaking of the Clan, where he received his weapon and the one direction he would follow for three years.

He saw the Edge of the World.

The last thing he saw, before everything got crazy, was a single arrow flying across his periphery. The rope around his neck went taut - then severed.

------

Mister Laurie crept up the stairs, swaying from side to side, eating smarties. Up the spiral staircase of Castle Frankenstein. When he reached Peter's door he peered into the thin strip of black, widening it by half-inches and giggling. In his hand he clutched three Brandon Routh 'Superman Returns' action figures, painted green.

Peter is wearing his Ben 10 pyjamas. This does not make him any less of a genius.

Laurie creeeeeaaks open the door and steps through. The moonlight is weak but the atomic supermen glow in the dark.

'Mah-ster,' she whispers, 'the first batch is finished!'

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I've decided to have a stab at the November challenge too! that's 30 days instead of 31, so it should be easier. This might be the beginning of a beautiful hobby. Expect another post about it in a month ;)