Gaiman stuff

Here's a link to Neil Gaiman's profile on IMDB.

And here's a preview for the movie Stardust.

He has a pretty cool website.

And there's a website, of course, for the Stardust movie.

Neil Gaiman?

I'm sometimes annoyed by a phenomenon that is becoming more frequent as I age - the experience of being blindsided by an important author or director. This happened to me recently with Neil Gaiman. As I have come more and more to admit to myself that I want to be a science fiction writer, and as I have made my peace with my future as a genre writer, I have explored the existing practitioners to a greater degree. And I have found several authors who publish extensively but who write total crap. I couldn't handle Terry Pratchett - far too priggish and self-important. I don't think a writer should be in the business of obfuscation, and I feel like Pratchett wants to confuse more than he wants to explain and entertain. And, in my humble opinion, he's just not a good writer. (After writing this, I think I might give him another chance, and pick up a different book and try him out. After all, I'm sure he's contributed something.)

Neil Gaiman was a complete unknown (to me) when I found an interesting book with his name on it at a bookstore a few weeks ago. American Gods had an interesting cover, and an interesting title, and I pulled it off the shelf and skimmed the first few pages trying to get a feel for it. It seemed like a meaty, character-driven book about a mythical American landscape, peopled with supernatural "gods" - hence the title. A cool idea for a novel, and one that hit close to home for me. The main character was a little overly heroic (tall and manly - residues of wish fulfillment), but I plowed through the book in less than a week, despite the workload I was simultaneously shouldering. It was a great book. The characters - these washed-up divinities - were fascinating. Gaiman managed to tie together some arcane American geography with arcane mythial figures from all over the world. I had no prior knowledge of many of the gods he refers to, but I was impressed enough not to question his research.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit, and it wasn't obsessed with itself the way that a lot of books can be. It was a good story, and I liked that the plot and characters didn't need beautiful language to stand up on their own. I don't really recall being impressed with Gaiman's prose style, but I pushed hard to read and finish this book - that means a lot more than sitting and contemplating beautiful lines. Nabokov wrote some of the most beautiful lines of prose I've ever seen, and I never came close to gobbling up his books like I gobbled this one.

To return to the initial point about being blindsided: after I picked up and began reading this book by Gaiman, I started seeing him everywhere. I noticed his movie, Stardust, based on his book. I noticed that he had a hand in the recent film adaptation of Beowulf. And I noticed that he had a few young-adult books - a genre that I am also interested in for professional reasons - and, according to IMDB, one of those is about to be released as a movie as well. So this guy gets around. He also has a new book out, that I've seen and haven't read yet.

Unfortunately, he's not quite popular enough for me to bring his books out in public and let myself be seen reading them. There's the unfortunate possibility of mispronouncing his name - Gay-Man - that I wouldn't want to open myself up to if I were to be confronted with a boorish lout intent on mocking us bookish types.

What I'm working on

I have a lot of story ideas, but things continue to stall. I'm working right now on a short piece of fiction. I think I need to develop some habits of finishing my fiction before I fizzle and get too old to be good. I mean, too old to have a writing "career" and not an avocation or hobby. I don't want to be the guy who writes one novel in his lifetime and dies. That would suck - because I know that I'm going to be able to churn out ten. Or I hope that I can do that. It doesn't seem like the past is any promise of productivity on that front, though.

Oh well.

7 Minutes of X-Men

Here's a link to the final X-Men movie. I hate to dislike this, because I like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. They are both great actors - I just wish that the movie didn't fall apart in the end.

This chunk of film highlights some of the potential of the material. In better hands - or in the hands of a better editor - it could have become something much more than it was. Too many irreconcileable elements. If it were a student's paper in front of me, I would tell them that the scope is too great - that merely refocusing on a handful of characters instead of a universe of characters would resolve so much, and make the movie so much greater. The second movie had its problems, but the focus on Wolverine made the plot much more unified and sensible.

Links to Serenity

Here's a link to the Serenity trailer.

Returning to Film?

Thank you for the comments. I'm shocked and a little humbled to have an audience.

I've moved away from Chabon a bit lately, and I've been wading through some sci fi films. This includes movies that most would consider rather "low-brow," like The Fantastic Four or the X-Men trilogy. All of these were mostly a waste of time. I find myself intrigued by the social implications of the mutant in the midst of mainstream culture, and that was probably the best part about the X-Men movies. But the flashy finale of the three was really empty for me. Jean Grey's massive power seems to come out of nowhere, and becomes an important part of the plot without really being used or explored. I probably would have spent another half hour just on her, roaming the country destroying things. She trashes the whole island in the end, and murders dozens of people, but it seems like she's too easy to kill. If she's really that powerful, why isn't she important until the third movie?

Perhaps that's what annoyed me about X-Men - the final movie concocts this whole Jean Grey thing and suddenly makes her the engine of the plot. They invent a classification system that might have been implied before, but is suddenly overt and important. Magneto knows that he's a Class 4, and he knows that Jean is a Class 5, and he knew that all along, and showed no interest in her powers in either of the previous two movies?

Several movies that I saw were surprising, though. I finally sat down and watched War of the Worlds. I was surprised at how unusual it seemed to me that Tom Cruise was shown as a bad father in the beginning of the movie, with some violent tendencies. I liked that part - it was unexpected, and it added an edge to the movie that helped make it more interesting. The ending of the movie was horrible, though. Other than the struggle to escape the tripod using the grenades, there was no epic battle between the humans and the aliens. It was a victory because of our diseases? Say what you want about Independence Day, but at least it had that element of battle and victory.

I also watched the movie Serenity. It might be easy to dismiss this one as another butt-kicking-chick movie (like The Fifth Element, Aeon Flux, Elektra, Catwoman, Tomb Raider, Dark Angel and Alias on TV, Terminator 2, Sarah Connor files now on TV, and so on), and the fact that Joss Whedon is also the Buffy the Vampire Slayer guy adds some credence to this theory. (Perhaps I could lump some Chinese martial arts movies in here, like House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but that seems unfair and might make a nice follow-up post.) Heck, even Heroes has a killer cheerleader. But this movie is not just about a killer teenage girl. It also wants to be about a government that hides from its mistakes, and tries to control people and information.

Film genres?

It's interesting to think about what film genres I really enjoy the most. I'm starting to enjoy Westerns. I'd have to say that my usual pick would be either Sci-Fi or Film Noir. I suppose that historical stuff has to factor into something.