George RR Martin, Game of Thrones, and Hollywood Sword-and-Sandalism

I've met George RR Martin. I like him, he's a nice guy. This is saying something in a set of genres - science fiction and fantasy -  that seem to attract assholes. Sometimes interacting with SF&F authors is a long wade into a deep cesspool full of adolescent behavior, alcoholism, preening, and rampant egotism. I've been called names and mocked by Harlan Ellison. I was spit on by a drunken Jerry Pournelle. I've been reviled by an apparently endless line of writers. So Martin stands out as a legitimate nice guy.

Personal aside: detective, mystery, and hardboiled writers have treated me like a prince. One of them, James Lee Burke, became one of my mentors in college. Even guys who write about hardcore gangsters doing the most despicable things have answered my letters with great kindness.

It pains me to say this. I mean, it really does. I can't stand anything George RR Martin writes. I wish I admired his writing, a nice guy deserves that. But I can't. I don't like his books. It isn't for lack of trying. I've read several of his SF novels. I forced myself through two of the Song of Fire and Ice novels, Storm of Swords and the next one, forgot its title. Hated them all. Most of the time, in order not to harm the gentleman - nice guys deserve to be treated nicely - I evade or dissemble when asked my opinion about "the Game of Thrones books." But now that the series has become a full-fledged cultural thing, I no long have to remain silent. The guy's sold over 24 million copies, he's set for the rest of his life. So with a light heart, knowing I won't be doing a nice guy any damage, I can shout at you, DON'T READ THESE BOOKS, THEY'RE TERRIBLE!

Read Fritz Leiber instead. He pursues the same themes of reality-in-fantasy, human cruelty, tragedy, and non-sensational magic as Martin does. His Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories are a complete joy to read. I'd also recommend Lin Carter, Robert E Howard, C. L. Moore, Karl Edward Wagner, and a bunch of other dead people from whom Martin has borrowed his themes and tone.

However...this essay ain't about my affection for George RR Martin despite my dislike of his work. It's about the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, the television series based on his series.

It was a very good episode, mostly because of the trial sequence at the end.  Peter Dinklage is the actor behind the portray of Tyrion Lannister. Dinklage is a freaking genius, an actor with more talent than any five other actors you could name. He managed to unleash the rage that character has been carrying around in his heart since birth. Wow.

The rest of the episode was up to par if not to the epic standards of the trial scene...with one very notable exception: the fight sequence in which Theon Greyjoy's sister tries to free him. The punk-torturer shows up essentially naked, armed only with an axe, and charges straight at a heavily armored Ironborn, who also has a shield and an axe. I summarize this for easy comprehension: NAKED GUY charges STRAIGHT AT an ARMORED soldier holding a SHIELD. The naked punk-torturer wins?  This is the worst sort of Hollywood Sword-and-Sandal heroic bullshit, this in a series supposedly claiming to be more "realistic," more "faithful to the true nature of the Middle Ages." LIKE FUCK.

We're to believe that a heavily armored man carrying a large shield, armed with either a sword or fighting axe, is to be overcome by a naked guy armed only with an axe running straight at him?  Maybe it could happen, if there were another thousand naked Celts right beside him. But there aren't. Everyone else is armored up. One cut from the naked guy's opponent, one deep cut, the naked guy's gonna bleed out. At the minimum, the naked guy will lose an ear, a nose, fingers, be crippled by a blow to the leg...you get the idea. It would take him time to overcome the shielded, armored soldier, time he doesn't have given that one cut coming at him. This is shit out of a kung fu movie, not one of the good ones, either, one with everyone flying around on wires. It's Hollywood Magical Armor, which looks like real armor, like a real helmet, like a real shield, but offers zero protection even from glancing blows. Armor as a fashion statement? This completely dilutes the great scene about armor and combat between Arya Stark and the Hound in the previous episode. It undermines a major plot element right there. Naked guy charging into a shield wall held by heavily armored soldiers? Who knew PCP existed in Westeros!

What's really going on, gotta fill up that fucking plot point. Never mind that one change in the scene would have made sense of everything. We've seen that the punk-torturer likes to kill helpless people. He isn't into putting himself at the least risk. We've fucking seen this in previous episodes!  So why isn't naked-torturer-guy AT THE BACK of his crowd of minions?

Goofy Hollywood shit strikes again, even undermining the drama and epic talent on display elsewhere in the series. This is why I both love and loathe the TV series. In one thirty minute stretch of the same episode, it can be both epically good and epically bad.  If I can see the bad parts coming, I walk away from the TV, do dishes, fold socks, something meaningless for five or ten minutes. It's back to being epic by then.

It's the way things are with fantasy and science fiction in film and on television. It's why we can't have nice things. Hollywood must have its way, even if it fucks everything up.
R. P. Bird: Professional writer since 1989. Author of the IN THE REALM OF THE GODS series and the SUZIE crime novels. Crazy, but highly reliable. Can fix about anything.

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http://www.amazon.com/Contravallation-Realm-Gods-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00IHRXCQM
http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Realm-Gods-Book-One-ebook/dp/B00GC0X6AS
http://www.amazon.com/Essa-In-Realm-Gods-novel-ebook/dp/B00CHAPSKS

The good, the bad, and a quotation

Plato supposedly said: "Good people don't need the law to act responsibly. Bad people will always find a way around the law." I saw it on a random graphic just today. The internet wouldn't lie to me, would it?

I don't remember this quotation from when I was reading Plato in college, perhaps it's right, perhaps it's a confabulation. Don't know. Please bear with me while I check wikiquotes...

The quotation itself is really from Ammon Hennacy, a Christian anarchist. Here is the original version: "Oh judge! Your damn laws! The good people don't need them, and the bad people don't obey them."
[source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ammon_Hennacy]

Plato did write something vaguely like this, but its meaning is completely different: "Laws are made to instruct the good, and in the hope that there may be no need of them; also to control the bad, whose hardness of heart will not be hindered from crime."
[source: Laws, Book IX. Do a search in Google Books with the quotation as the search phrase to confirm this. I'd also like to mention the Talk page for Plato at wikiquote.]

I disagree with Hennacy. There are a minority of truly good and truly bad people in the world. What he says about those extremes is true. But for those of us who are a mixture of good and bad, the vast majority of humanity, we need the law, we need instruction in good moral behavior by our parents, by our schools, and by our culture. We need to condition our minds so that we are not merely accidentally good. These observations come not from contemplating the good, but contemplating the bad. My conclusion from studying the Holocaust and the rescuers who opposed it: you can teach ethics, you can live your ethics...but this takes work, more work than most people are willing to put into it - which explains why the Nazis found so many willing hands for murder...and why the rescuers were so few.




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R. P. Bird: Professional writer since 1989. Author of the IN THE REALM OF THE GODS series and the SUZIE crime novels. Crazy, but highly reliable. Can fix about anything.

Links:
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://twitter.com/rpbirdwriter
http://rpbird.blogspot.com/
http://amazon.com/author/rpbird
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rpbird
http://www.amazon.com/Contravallation-Realm-Gods-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00IHRXCQM
http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Realm-Gods-Book-One-ebook/dp/B00GC0X6AS
http://www.amazon.com/Essa-In-Realm-Gods-novel-ebook/dp/B00CHAPSKS

Had to change hosting services today. I went with Arvixe for the next few months. It was my own fault for being so rushed, I didn't notice the going-out-of-business notice in my alternate email box. Not like I'm Amazon, I missed a few junk emails and one or two visitors. At least it was sorted out before I begin my big push on the novels.

Arvixe uses cPanel, which I'm very familiar with. Boom, it's done.



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R. P. Bird: Professional writer since 1989. Author of the IN THE REALM OF THE GODS series and the SUZIE crime novels. Crazy, but highly reliable. Can fix about anything.

Links:
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://twitter.com/rpbirdwriter
http://rpbird.blogspot.com/
http://amazon.com/author/rpbird
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rpbird
http://www.amazon.com/Contravallation-Realm-Gods-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00IHRXCQM
http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Realm-Gods-Book-One-ebook/dp/B00GC0X6AS
http://www.amazon.com/Essa-In-Realm-Gods-novel-ebook/dp/B00CHAPSKS

Another one of those WTF moments

In regards to self-advertisement, at least I'm not dressed up in a monster suit while trying to get you to buy my books. I had no idea such a thing as monster porn existed until Twitter inflicted a picture of a guy in a monster suit...do I have to describe it? I should sue Twitter for the permanent damage this has done to my respect for the internet. Monster porn? Are you kidding me? I guess it really is a real thing. Who knew? Who wanted to know?


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R. P. Bird: Professional writer since 1989. Author of the IN THE REALM OF THE GODS series and the SUZIE crime novels. Crazy, but highly reliable. Can fix about anything.

Links:
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://twitter.com/rpbirdwriter
http://rpbird.blogspot.com/
http://amazon.com/author/rpbird
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rpbird
http://www.amazon.com/Contravallation-Realm-Gods-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00IHRXCQM
http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Realm-Gods-Book-One-ebook/dp/B00GC0X6AS
http://www.amazon.com/Essa-In-Realm-Gods-novel-ebook/dp/B00CHAPSKS
 

Elysium Sinks

Elysium irritates me to no end. I saw it a week ago on cable TV. Neill Blomkamp was the writer and director, famed for his nuanced District 9. Elysium is an utter mess of a movie. For one, it cost 110 million dollars to make and yet none of that money is on the screen. Lincoln cost less to make, around $45 MILLION LESS. What the fuck?

Nothing makes sense to me. The protagonist has to have a chip implanted in his brain to hack data in another guy's brain chip, yet the data was put into the victim's brain chip by a computer...and another computer, a freaking palmtop, is used to get it out and transfer it into the protagonist's brain. Here's an idea, just keep the data in the palmtop!

But that would spoil the plot gimmicks later in the film.  This movie is all-plot-gimmicks-all-the-time. It has just enough action in it to earn its money back. Elysium would be a huge hit if it cost, say, ONLY $60 million, but as it is, it barely broke even.

Much of the future environment the movie is set in fails, as if a Lexus passes Lincoln's carriage or Union soldiers armed with AKs. An orbital ring habitat full of rich folks completely defenseless except for one guy on the ground with some RPGs. They'd have orbital defense platforms around that thing like jewels around an heiress's neck. An exosuit that is completely useless, worse than that, the protagonist has to wear it because the brain chip somehow depends on the suit...except the brain chip isn't necessary in the first place.

The soul of a good movie was in there, buried under lazy writing and plot devices so flimsy they can't hold water. What will the fate of humanity be under the 1%? We know from Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the wealth of the 1% will only become more dominant, more concentrated as the decades pass, to the point of complete tyranny at some point in the future. What will that future look like? That's the real question Blomkamp started with, but he failed to answer it. We can only assume two things, either his talent wasn't up to the job, or he was lazy. The question doesn't go away, how ruined will the lives of our descendants be?  The answer is the movie I wanted to see.


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R. P. Bird: Professional writer since 1989. Author of the IN THE REALM OF THE GODS series and the SUZIE crime novels. Crazy, but highly reliable. Can fix about anything.

Links:
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://twitter.com/rpbirdwriter
http://rpbird.blogspot.com/
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rpbird
http://www.amazon.com/R-P-Bird/e/B00EDSESDK
http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Realm-Gods-Book-One-ebook/dp/B00GC0X6AS
http://www.amazon.com/Contravallation-Realm-Gods-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00IHRXCQM
http://www.amazon.com/Essa-In-Realm-Gods-novel-ebook/dp/B00CHAPSKS

The Superman Loop

Man of Steel is showing this morning on HBO. I've explained before about getting free satellite TV and the basic premium channels - along with free internet - at my apartment complex. Despite the pretty pictures and the tiny riffs on the old story of Superman's origins...it's still the same fucking story.

It hasn't been "reimagined," it has no changes from the dull repetitive death march that started in the 1930s, it is the SAME FUCKING STORY.

The real story inside the SAME FUCKING STORY TOLD EVERY FUCKING YEAR SINCE THE 1930s is the profound cowardice of DC Comics and the movie industry. Has not one of these outright cowards ever heard of "in media res"?

Start in the middle of things, never start at the beginning. Make him an epic hero. Has not one of the dummies involved since the beginning ever thought of that? We know how Superman came to be. Every person on the planet knows how it starts. Has not one person anywhere in DC or in the movie industry read Homer...or Gilgamesh...or Tolkien..or played Skyrim...or Knights of the Old Republic? Do they not think at all?

Start in the middle, then fill in the blanks on how we got here through conversation and remembrance. Start, say, with humanity trying to kill Superman, slowly reveal just why we want him dead, and then show Superman realize his sins and redeem himself through self-sacrifice. You want a first class example of how to handle Superman, read The Dark Knight Returns. Yes, I know, it's a graphic novel about Batman, but Superman plays a big role in the story, especially the last chapters. 

Say you want a reboot. How about a real reboot? Superman was never a child. In fact, not only is he not human, he isn't even a biological entity. Superman's race didn't die, because Superman has no race. He was created as the protector of an advanced race that did die off, despite his best efforts to prevent it. He has wandered the galaxy for five million years searching for a mission.

He finds it in humanity, in our broadcasts. He follows the radio waves home, sees us near the brink of World War III in the 1950s...he stops it...and we hate him for it.

But he doesn't care. He has a new mission, to protect and preserve humanity, to lead us to enlightenment.

Now that might be fun. Of course it isn't really Superman, it has elements of Buddhism's bodhisattva concept, the ideas behind the Singularity, and freaky mecha from Japanese manga and anime, but at least it is DIFFERENT. At least it would not be a display of cowardice on my TV screen.

On a personal level, this is one of the reasons why I gave up script writing. Nothing cool ever comes from Hollywood now. You want cool, read a book, play a video game, listen to music, watch TV. Movies, they're done.




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R. P. Bird: Professional writer since 1989. Author of the IN THE REALM OF THE GODS series and the SUZIE crime novels. Crazy, but highly reliable. Can fix about anything.

Links:
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://twitter.com/rpbirdwriter
http://www.amazon.com/R-P-Bird/e/B00EDSESDK
http://www.amazon.com/Contravallation-Realm-Gods-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00IHRXCQM
http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Realm-Gods-Book-One-ebook/dp/B00GC0X6AS
http://www.amazon.com/Essa-In-Realm-Gods-novel-ebook/dp/B00CHAPSKS

Having missed Brothers Grimm the first time...

...I finally saw it this morning on cable TV. I say "cable TV," but I don't mean "cable TV." The apartment complex has free internet and free Direct TV - satellite TV. We get the basic "premium channels": HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime. One of them had Brothers Grimm on this morning. It is largely the creation of Terry Gilliam of Python fame...and it's a fucked up mess.

It is essentially three stories put into a blender: a dark horror/thriller about two brothers trying to save a village from an undead queen, a period comedy about a roving band of con men, and a period drama about a German village's resistance to French rule during the Napoleonic era. It's a comedy...it's a drama...it's an action movie...it's a horror movie.  Yeah...that's not a promising start.

I can barely discern Gilliam's probable intent. He wanted to explore rationality in confrontation with the inexplicable. The brothers Grimm and the French start at the same place, the rejection of myth and superstition. First the brothers are forced to accept the reality of the inexplicable, then the more recalcitrant French commander is forced to acknowledge its existence...but that doesn't happen. The first part happens, but Gilliam, being an American turned Brit, engages in frankly hateful stereotypes about the French and the Enlightenment. He then eliminates the French general in an action sequence, when instead, he should have transformed him into an ally of the Grimms. I personally despise him for his anti-French stereotypes. Maybe in becoming a Brit, Gilliam, like many immigrants, has become more stereotypically British than the British. Not making excuses for the man, it's repugnant. This is especially true because Gilliam is supposedly far left in his thinking. Is he so out of touch that he has not noticed the core values of the Enlightenment under attack both in Britain and America? For the last fifteen years at least, since the 1990s, right-wing Christians and others have bombarded our culture with what can only be called medieval lunacy. Vast numbers of satanist child molesters that don't really exist, or natural disasters caused by an angry god, or ordinary astronomical events seen as portents of dire events.

Anyway, back to the movie. It's a disaster. The movie hops from one story to another until everything is thrown into chaos. Who the fuck cares how it ends?

So, how to fix it. It's simple. Instead of making the French general into a tyrannical stereotype, you make him into a follower of the Enlightenment, hard from the long years on campaign, first in the Revolutionary armies, then under Napoleon. He has no torture chamber. He threatens the brothers Grimm with prison, not death.

Both the Grimms and the general come at the horror of the undead queen from the same place, a firm belief in rationality. But rationalists, as the Grimms reveal and as the general states when he becomes their ally, accept reality, no matter how weird reality might be. They use their rationality to defeat the undead queen through the classic tools of rationality: gather evidence, derive conclusions based on their evidence, and act on their conclusions.

All of this in an action/horror movie, with little sprinkles of humor at the beginning and at the end. The humor slowly fades away to reveal the horror they are to confront, only returning at the end.

In other words, pick one story and tell it. Here's a shock, Gilliam could have told this same story without the French general or the Italian gunsel. He only needed the brothers Grimm to get his story told.

Simplification sometimes means cutting out extraneous characters and plot lines. Sometimes it means adding characters and plots. I know, confusing. Start with the central characters. Let them tell the story to you. Simple. This was the story of the brothers Grimm...and only the brothers Grimm.

I ought to note that the real brothers Grimm were dedicated academics and folklorists, very respectable, talented scholars. They managed to preserve a great deal of the myth and folklore of the Middle Ages. We should honor them for that.




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R. P. Bird: Professional writer since 1989. Author of the IN THE REALM OF THE GODS series and the SUZIE crime novels. Crazy, but highly reliable. Can fix about anything.

Links:
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://twitter.com/rpbirdwriter
http://www.amazon.com/R-P-Bird/e/B00EDSESDK
http://www.amazon.com/Contravallation-Realm-Gods-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00IHRXCQM
http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Realm-Gods-Book-One-ebook/dp/B00GC0X6AS
http://www.amazon.com/Essa-In-Realm-Gods-novel-ebook/dp/B00CHAPSKS