Sometimes movie trailers try to be too cute. That is to say, they hide the entire story from the viewer, or try to create mystery where there is none.
And sometimes movie trailers tell you exactly what the movie is about. Sometimes, the trailer says “you’re going to watch a 100-minute live-action episode of Family Guy, and you’re going to laugh your ass off doing it.”
Ted is one of those movies.
Some months ago, I spoke rather eloquently* on Geist and Spectyr, the first two Books of the Order by Philippa Ballantine. One of the things I praised was Ballantine’s ability to give the reader just enough information without making a fantasy novel into a doorstop.
Her latest tale, Hunter and Fox — the first of the Shifted World series — is similar in nature, in that a huge world is revealed in small chunks without turning the novel into a gigantic tome. Clocking in at 280 pages (according to my e-reader), it’s definitely not an intimidating read.
But I can’t say I put the book down feeling really satisfied, either.
Last Sunday, I took advantage of the fact that it was Father’s Day and (in the words of my daughter) “you should do whatever you want” to play about seven hours of Civilization V. I got the game a few weeks ago in one of those software bundles* never having played Civilization in any form. In fact, all I knew about it was that Brentalfloss made a song about it which includes these catchy lyrics:
So keep playing Civilization, take good care of your little nation
Start a war with ancient Egyptians, spread your equally valid religion
Win with science, culture, or napalm
Watch out, Gandhi might drop the A-bomb
This isn’t actually an article about Civ V, by the way. It’s an article about how some writers (like me) get obsessed with a thing to the exclusion of what we should be doing.
Perhaps you can relate.
Imagine that, a year or so ago, you saw a trailer for a film in which humanity discovered another planet Earth growing slowly closer. Humanity made contact with Earth Two, as they called it, and realized that each and every person on the planet could have a duplicate up there.
Then there’s some cuts of a young blond woman, a car accident, a relationship, and the chance for Our Heroine to win a trip to Earth Two. She seems all introspective; a Coldplay-like song runs in the background; the trailer ends.
Watch it yourself, if you like.
The problem, though, is that the movie I saw wasn’t quite the movie I was advertised.
This review contains minor spoilers for “Railsea”, but does not spoil the ending.
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The review you’re reading now will be the third review I’ve written of a China Mieville novel. I’ve read all his books except for King Rat & Looking for Jake. Most of them have similar themes & tropes — the love of home, phantasmagoric settings & creatures, some form of transportation that’s central to the story, & an ending that leaves you wondering why you read the book if you’re going to be left empty when you’re done.
Note that I said empty. Not unsatisfied.
Well, Railsea broke the trend on at least one of them: I wasn’t empty at the end. But otherwise, we’re looking at pretty standard Mieville here.
The following article contains spoilers for the Angel episode “Smile Time”, and is fair game for spoilers of any episodes preceding it, as well as the entire run of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer.
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When Joss Whedon and the Buffy team announced that they’d be doing a musical episode, people were skeptical. I mean, how can you make a musical about slaying vampires?
Oh we of little faith. “Once More, With Feeling” was one of the best hours of television made in the last quarter-century*.
As I began watching Angel a few months ago, I heard rumblings that there was an episode centered around puppets sometime in the fifth season. I finally got there and my tweet**, no lie, was: Oh crap… it’s the puppet episode. Now, I knew there were some big story pieces coming up — the arrival of Illyria, the coming apocalypse, and the series finale, just to name a few of the things to be crammed into the next eight episodes. I’ve just been waiting to get to that part. The one I watched prior to this was a World War II-era submarine story where Angel and Spike are caught on a captured U-boat, and it… wasn’t that great. So I didn’t have high hopes for “Smile Time”.
Should’ve learned my lesson from OMWF: trust in Whedon and his team, and he will never lead you astray.
This book contains spoilers for all films and television shows Joss Whedon has written, and therefore the review shall consider such material fair game. Reader discretion is advised.
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It doesn’t take an astute student of my Twitter feed or my blog to know that I’ve been on one hell of a Joss Whedon kick over the course of the past year. From full viewings of Buffy and Angel to my opinions on Cabin in the Woods (excellent) and The Avengers (waiting for the DVD), you must know by now that I’m a fan of the man’s work.
So when Amazon’s algorithm suggested I purchase PopMatters’s Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion, I figured it would be something I’d enjoy.
Perhaps I should’ve thought a little more about the purchase first.
For the past few months, I’ve been doing a re-watch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I missed a lot of episodes (maybe 40 percent) while it was in first-run, and I’ve never seen it in syndication, so I figured… why not? It’s on Netflix; might as well make good use of my $7.99 monthly fee.
Last night, I watched “Our Man Bashir”, and I was reminded just how flimsy the “malfunctioning transporter/holodeck” plot can be.
For years now, we have done our best here at Escape Pod to bring you audio renditions of the Hugo-nominated short stories. Our original reason was to allow the Worldcon voters to have access to all the nominated stories, as some stories wouldn’t be easy to find (eg, it was in the January issue of a magazine you don’t read…). But now, Worldcon is putting out the Hugo pack for its members to receive the stories in ebook form.
Even though the voters now have the stories emailed to them, we still embrace the tradition of dedicating May to the best stories voted on by fandom. So get ready for Hugo month!
Note- even though we have dedicated ourselves to SF-only stories since branching off Pseudopod and Podcastle, we will run non-SF stories during the Hugo month, if they are nominated. (And this year we have three!)
Also, this year we had a new thing happen- An Escape Pod reprint AND a Podcastle reprint were nominated! We are so thrilled to have already offered these stories, but to remind you, and keep all the Hugo posts together, we will be bringing you Podcastle’s recording of “The Paper Menagerie,” and rerunning “Movement” as a mid-week special.
The nominees and the schedule:
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld April 2011) – Running 5/3/12
“The Homecoming” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s April/May 2011) – Running 5/10/12
“Movement” by Nancy Fulda (Asimov’s March 2011) – Running 5/14/12
“The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction March/April 2011) – Running 5/17/12
The very funny “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue” by John Scalzi (Tor.com) will not be appearing on Escape Pod, but you can (and should) read it in its entirety at Tor.com. And here’s a taste:
Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal.
Read more at Tor.com.
This year’s stories are pretty amazing, (two of them may drive you to tears- long time EP fans will easily guess one of the culprits) and it will be tough voting. But we hope you enjoy Hugo month as much as we enjoy bringing it to you.
You can also get ALL of our Hugo-nominated stories on one feed! Subscribe here!
The following review contains spoilers for the first three Highlander films and the television series.
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What do you do after your 1986 movie achieves cult status? Well, if you’re lucky, you get to make a sequel. When that sequel bombs, you get to make another sequel. If the third film bombs, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to get your intellectual property turned into a TV series that gets passable ratings and hangs around for six years — long enough to justify a fourth film in the series.
In other words… someone made Highlander: Endgame, the fourth movie in the series. And I watched it. More than once.
Although set in 2002*, four years after the end of Highlander: The Series, the film actually begins in 1992, when Connor MacLeod arrives at his New York shop/apartment just in time to see it blown up, taking the life of Rachel Ellenstein, the young girl he adopted during (I believe) World War II. Devastated that he’s lost everyone he loves, Connor joins up with the Watchers, a group dedicated to chronicling the lives of the immortals, and agrees to go into the Sanctuary. There, the Watchers keep several immortals out of The Game (the worldwide headhunting competition with a nebulous “prize” to go to the last survivor) so that no one can be the last.
Now, in 2002, Duncan MacLeod (Connor’s cousin and friend) is still secluded, meditating, trying to find himself after (in the series) killing his protege Richie and getting the It’s a Wonderful Life treatment from Roger Daltrey**. He has a prophetic dream and visits his friend Methos, the oldest Immortal on the planet, before heading to New York to see if he can figure out what happened to Connor ten years ago. Way to wait around, my friend.
Meanwhile, the villain of the piece, Jacob Kell, goes to the Sanctuary and kills all the immortals there with the exception of Connor — I’m still not sure how he escaped, or who let him free. Kell is powerful and ruthless, and he hates Connor for killing his mentor, while Connor hates him for killing his mother. Kell and his guys go to New York and face off against Duncan, but the only death is from Kell, who kills one of his henchmen. Shortly after, Duncan is sent to the Sanctuary, only to be rescued by Methos and his (Duncan’s) Watcher, Joe Dawson. They explain that Kell has killed 661 Immortals, more than Duncan and Connor combined.
Eventually it’s revealed that Connor is still alive. We see several adventures of Connor and Duncan in the past, including when Connor taught Duncan the “unbeatable move” — one would think he’d have used that at some point in the last three films. But anyway. Things come to a head between the MacLeods and Kell, and as we know, there can be only one.
In addition to a spectacularly-ancient-looking Christopher Lambert as the supposedly-immortal Connor MacLeod, Shelia Gish and Beatie Edney reprise their roles (however brief) as Rachel and Heather (the latter being Connor’s first wife, from the 1500s). However, top billing goes to Adrian Paul, star of the Highlander television series, now sporting short hair. Paul is as good in the film as he is in the series — a sort of cardboard boy-scout good-guy character with very little darkness in him despite everything he’s done. Kell is portrayed by Bruce Payne (great name there) and unlike the villains of the previous two films he’s not a cutout. He actually has a good reason for hating Connor. He’s also kind of nuts.
There’s quite a supporting cast in this film, which is topped by Lisa Barbuscia, a model and musician. She plays Kate, who, in the 1700s, was Duncan’s wife. However, she was also a pre-Immortal. Now, in 2000, she is fashion designer Faith and she is wicked pissed at Duncan for making her Immortal and depriving her of children. Good motivation. Donnie Yen is the most honorable of Kell’s henchmen, Jin Ke. Peter Wingfield and Jim Byrnes reprise their roles from the series as Methos and Joe Dawson, and there’s a special appearance by Adam Copeland, better known as the WWE’s “Edge”. Interestingly, “Edge” got a “special guest star” mention in the credits, because as we all know that sort of thing will bring in all the wrestling fans.
For what it’s worth, he didn’t suck in his brief role, although one wonders why a Canadian-speaking rogue was hanging out in Kildare, Ireland.
Oh, and one other weird piece of casting — June Watson, who played Connor’s mother, looked an awful lot like Stanley Tucci’s weird cohost in The Hunger Games. It was distracting.
If you take Highlander: Endgame as a straightforward action film and don’t care about the plot, I think you’ll be satisfied. Unlike Lambert, Paul is actually capable of moving in the way martial artists have to (he’s a dancer), and he also spent six years doing martial arts and swordplay on the TV show. Plus, Donnie Yen choreographed the martial arts for the film. The fights in this movie are faster and crisper, and the cinematography is better; in this alone the film is elevated above the previous three. However, Connor still gets his moment as awesome swordsman dude by teaching Duncan the unblockable attack I mentioned earlier. Now, I’m not a swordsman by any stretch of the imagination, but I can think of at least three ways to get out of the move, not the least of which is to duck, you idiots!
But I digress.
One thing I did like about the fighting was the contrast between Connor’s and Duncan’s styles — Connor, while a good swordsman, is definitely a dirtier fighter; Duncan prefers to keep it clean. We do get the fight between the two of them that people have been waiting for since the pilot of the TV show, though.
The writing was about as good as an episode of the television show — Connor got the good quips; Duncan didn’t. Duncan never really struck me as a quippy kind of guy anyway. In what was supposed to make the viewer go “ah-ha-HA, indeed!”, Kell had 661 kills at the start of the film. Which meant he almost had 666. Given that he was trained as a seminarian, it’s supposed to be ironic. But it wasn’t.
Because this was a Highlander movie, we had to have at least one sex scene with nudity. This time, it was awarded to Paul and Barbuscia. I’m not quite sure of Faith’s motivation to sleep with him after she lays into him with a wicked tongue-lashing***.
Set design and music were again about average, although I really got tired of the Scotland Enya-style music — it always makes me think of this song from the Toys soundtrack. The original ending had a really bad composite shot of one of the heroes standing at a grave before walking off into what was supposed to be the moors of Scotland, and I wasn’t thrilled to be leaving the movie with that shot — which is why I’m glad there was a director’s cut released with a slightly better ending.
Highlander: Endgame was in development hell for a while, and it shows. It went through several cuts and rewrites, leading to a subpar finished product in pretty much everything except the fight scenes that featured Duncan, and the conclusion of the Connor/Duncan battle. Christopher Lambert was getting too old for the role, and anyway he’d passed the torch in the TV series. This was not a good movie, and if you’re not a Highlander fan, you probably won’t like it. Even if you are, make sure you see the director’s cut so you can get the better ending and a few more scenes that make the plot work better.
I remember being pretty disappointed in the movie when I finally saw it (on DVD). It felt more like a two-parter from the series, and really, that’s what it should have been. It completely ignores the second and third films**** in favor of the TV show’s mythos — which is good, but not if you’ve never seen the show. It’s written without explanation of the Watchers or how Joe and Methos are Duncan’s friends, and there’s no time in the film to give anyone a really decent character arc except Kate/Faith. At least we could all take heart that this would be the last of the…
Oh, wait? It… it wasn’t?
Looks like it’s time to dig up my digital copy of Highlander: The Source, then.
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Note to Parents: As with the other Highlander films, this movie contains violence (including decapitations), nudity, adult language, and adult situations. At least in this one the sex scenes actually flow with what little plot there is, whereas in the last one it was just indulgence on the part of the director and star. I think this could be handled by most older teens, as long as they don’t get all tittery***** about nude women on film. Of course, you should use your own best judgment when it comes to your children.
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* The first present-day scene in the film actually happens “ten years ago”. If Connor and Duncan last saw each other in the pilot of the series, which was 1992, then the earliest the film could possibly occur was 2002. Since the technology was pretty much present-day for the film’s release, I’m saying it’s in 2002. You can dispute me if you like.
** It actually makes sense on the show. Don’t try to figure it out right now.
*** No pun intended. This was the 00s; heroes in film didn’t regularly engage in oral sex at the time. That didn’t come — oh, shut up — until a few years later.
**** With the exception of some good bits from Sean Connery, everyone should ignore the second film.
***** See what I did there?