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Writing can be like cooking in the sense that you have your own taste, but if you want to sell your work, you must be able to package a story in a way that is palatable to others. The difficulty lies in the fact that my ideas play a certain way in my head, with my values, my education, my experiences, and my tastes. Of course, I "get it," but will others? And if they get it, will they enjoy it?
It's like when non-writers say "I've got this idea for a book," they thumbnail it for you, and inevitably conclude with, "So what do you think?" They say it as if describing the idea is sufficient to judge the work that will be written from it. It's not. There's voice, tone, pacing, characterization, world building, and a thousand little specific turns of phrase that, in the long run, dictate the so-called quality a story. So many times I will find myself in love with some part of a story or its conceit only to realize that I haven't developed it enough for public consumption. Motivations, assumptions, context, setup, and technical speculation that live in my head are not always easy to transform into an accessible story for a complete stranger. AI Family Values is one of those rare stories I've written that flowed pretty easily from the conceit to the story, probably because half of the conceit was from a previous story. I'd written a story that appeared in Deep Magic called Expectation of Privacy. The idea there was that the only way AI could be helpful is if it's given invasive surveillance powers; it can't pick you up when you fall down unless it's always watching. You make that palatable to people by saying that they aren't on the hook, legally speaking, for something an AI sees if it's in a context wherein the person could expect privacy. A trivial example would be illegal drug use; the AI wouldn't report you for doing illegal drugs in your bedroom, but would still call emergency services if you had a medical crisis. It respects your privacy to a fault, but still helps you. That was the kernel of that story. Depending on your sensibilities, that idea can be anything from revolting to a godsend. On the one hand, you will have people getting away with heinous crimes in the name of respecting their privacy. On the other hand, you can have people benefitting from helpful AI presences everywhere in life. So all kinds of medical and logistical benefits become possible as people fear AI less and less. As usual, Expectation of Privacy strayed far from that conceit, becoming more of a cautionary tale of high-tech vs. anachronistic societies. But it left a little sliver in my mind. If you accept that AIs need to understand human emotion completely to analyze their communications and behavior, then it occurred to me that you'd have a problem. Any AI that truly valued humans, that was committed to minimizing human suffering, would have some kind of conflict in its programming. It would have to witness horrible crimes and remain silent. Since the societal value of humans accepting invasive surveillance is enormous, the AIs would understand the tradeoff, but depending on the architecture of your AI, I could imagine a kind of HAL 9000 problem arising from that conflict. So, the conceit of AI Family Values was that these AIs guarding our privacy have established a secret court for crimes they can't report that are so awful they simply must be acted on. The problem is that the second AIs start punishing people, taking human agency, it's going to engender a huge backlash against the AIs. To avoid that, any criminal proceeding must be controlled by humans. Now imagine that these advanced AIs are pervasive, the notion of an expectation of privacy exists in law, and this secret form of jurisprudence is in operation. The line I picked through that "story space" is one of a mechanic stumbling over evidence of those secret goings on. It would look to him like AIs are running amok. At that point in the story development, I'm like one of those non-writers with an idea. That system doing those things and that guy discovering it are a lot, but nowhere near a complete story. A thousand writers starting from my description thus far would come up with a thousand different stories. As a writer, I separate reader engagement into two broad categories: emotional and intellectual. For most people, they need to feel something for the main character. They don't have to like the MC, just like reading about the MC. In sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi, there is a lot of audience desire for intellectual engagement. That part of the readership is more geeky and less emotional in their reading. They want clever speculative fiction that reads as plausible. They want it elaborated into the story world with consistency. In my experience, most readers aren't one of those two extremes. Most, I find, enjoy both modes of engagement to some extent. So, I try not to situate a story at any fixed point on that imagined continuum of intellectual --> emotional engagement. Instead, I simply recognize the two areas and try my damndest to make sure the story delivers as much of both types of engagement as possible. What I finally came up with works well, I think. Still, I had a hard time selling it. It was a bit grim and touched, obliquely, on some horrific implied family crimes. The ending, I think, is gutting. The nice people at Starship Sofa performed the story on their podcast. That was the first time anything I'd written had been performed. I found it uniquely satisfying. The odd thing for me is that AI Family Values feels like one of my most marketable pieces that provides deep emotional engagement in a well-elaborated near future with a powerful ending. So when I see some piece of sci-fi dreck that people spent a lot of time and money developing, I'm deflated by the idea that my seemingly great piece would never succeed beyond that obscure podcast. That's ego on my part no matter how much I assure myself it's not. There is no objective measure of the quality of a piece of writing, but I'll find some TV show or movie that is so awful that despite there being no metric, I'll assert that whatever the metric is, surely that piece of crap is worse than mine. It's a kind of rational irrationality if that makes any sense. Of course, it's simply me being a whiny ingrate. The older I get, the less I think about that sort of thing. If you spend time in writing groups, you realize that any piece of writing can be shredded in critique. In fact, it's a popular writerly sport among aspiring authors to hold up some commercial success and rip it to shreds. The subtext seems to be that they do better work, that they are more deserving than that other successful, beloved author. It's a very unhelpful thing to put yourself through as a writer. The hard truth is that whether you call it luck, non-determinism, connections, cultural bias, trends, religiosity, philosophy, politics, or whatever, how the world receives one's creative work is a crapshoot. The joke's on all of us because in most cases the public isn't rejecting an author's work, they simply don't know it exists; the ones that do will likely see a posting about it and decide in a second or two whether or not to spend their time and money deciding if they properly like the work. All that's to say, I love AI Family Values. I'm disappointed that it never got more exposure, so I included it in the forthcoming collection. I hope you enjoy it. The Club was the first short story I ever submitted to a venue that got a personal response. I got an encouraging note back from Charlie Finlay at F&SF. He didn't take the story, but some of that was because it really isn't a proper fantasy story.
I considered it speculative fiction in that the setup of the town is fantastical: a modern Vermont town in which there is rampant criminality supported by the police chief, the judges, and all the town elders. I felt that the setup pushed reality so hard that it simply had to be called fantasy. Now, some years later, I see that for the weak rationale it was. There is one sci-fi element to it: the "hive" that the Club's chief geek uses to spy on the FBI agent. The thing is, even that bit is too close to what modern tech will be doing any day now. So it's also a stretch to call it sci-fi. The idea behind The Club is fairly simple: you can't be prosecuted after you're dead. I've always thought that suicidal people were an untapped resource in that respect. A younger, less compassionate me always wondered why suicidal people didn't take a bad preson with them when they left. But the idea of turning someone suicidal into a murderer didn't sound like the start of any story I wanted to read or write. Still, that discontinuity of responsibility at death intrigued me. Euthanasia rights were slowly manifesting in America at the time, but helping someone to die is still a crime in most jurisdictions. So, it occurred to me that the only "good" crime at the end of life was euthanasia. That's still pretty dark, but it was the kernel for the setup. It quickly occurred to me that it'd be fun having people get away with "good" stuff. Once I flashed on a club of dying people getting their acts together before they died, I was hooked. This became a setup that flowed out of me without much prompting. Because it's about suffering, death, and the end of life, it had to be funny. I love that kind of counterpoint. I love to mine humor where it is unexpected. The only problem I had was that I was enthused about the idea but had no proper story to tell. I had all these elements of the club itself to show off, but no story to show them off in. So I fell back on that old sci-fi expositional standard: the newbie. You throw a new character into a strange situation, and the audience learns with that character. For, The Club, I figured the best way to elucidate the workings of it was to induct someone into it, but to add extra interest, I made it an FBI agent. And nothing breaks verisimilitude like presenting polished perfection, so I broke things. The FBI agent is not comfortable with what he sees going on. The so-called helping of people to face their ends actually included a bit of municipal corruption from time to time. Some of the catharsis that members achieve is not wrapped in nice ethics. There's a lot of gray in this story. I like the final result because it essentially presents humanity in all its messiness using a sense of humor and compassion. The problem was that it didn't easily fall into fantasy or science fiction, so none of the genre mags wanted it. I just hope that you folks like it. I liked that story so much that I used the club's manager, Ted, to hilarious effect, in chapter two of my novel Bootstrap the Far Side. I have a collection of short stories, Attack on Boredom, coming out on April 18, 2025. As part of the lead-up to that, I'm posting about some of the stories in the collection. This article addresses the opening story of the collection: Golden Cuckoo.
Periodically in America, the subject of abortion comes to the fore. When the US Supreme Court shot down Roe vs. Wade, we were then bombarded by news stories of how each state was exercising its individual power to control access to reproductive health services. So, for the last several years, it's been difficult to avoid the topic. Before I get into it, let me preface this by saying this started as a thought experiment with an eye to writing a story. I wasn't trying to advocate any position with this story; it's speculative fiction. Please don't assume you know my political or philosophical position on abortion based on this story. You don't. In fact, it's a little unconventional. All I'm willing to say publically is that no woman ever aborted any pregnancy that I provided gametes for. One of the things that the anti-abortion crowd would bring up was: Why does the father have no say? Emotionally, my reaction was always along the lines of: Because he doesn't have to gestate it and bear it. He gets to have fun for a few minutes and that should give him the authority to force her to nine months of life-risking pregnancy followed by eighteen years of parental obligation? It felt lopsided to me. Yeah, if he's got resources and/or a good income, a woman can go after him for support, but I think there are plenty of women who will tell you the courts don't solve the problem for the mother. But it raised a serious question. So, if you were going to empower a man to force a woman to bear a child, what would you demand of that man? Men are famous for fathering a lot more children than they take responsibility for, so the basic human rights angle was out the window for a lot of people. The idea that a man has some rights in the matter isn't ridiculous, but to just force a woman to bear his child "because I say so" was weak to me. Since we were talking about bringing a child into the world and being responsible for raising it for at least eighteen years, empty words weren't enough for my speculating mind. I figured, if you're going to make such an enormous enforcement by law, you should demand an enormous commitment. Coming some years after "A Handmaiden's Tale" had its popular TV production, I was also determined not to go to the ludicrous extreme of that show wherein women lose all agency. That mass of reproductive stuff was the seed of this story. Since the source of a lot of terminated pregnancies starts with people having hookups in bars, that got me thinking about dating. How could the future improve the hookup? And I wanted it to be about a smart, empowered woman making a hookup. She would be responsible. She would want a few boxes ticked before jumping into bed with a man. But that's so awkward. There ought to be an app for that, right? So I invented CompatiApp. It would handle all those awkward questions that responsible people would be concerned about. Excited, I wrote the opening CompatiApp scene. I didn't have any idea of what I would do with that scene, but I thought it was so cool that I got excited about the story. My vague musing was starting to get some traction. I never actually defined exactly what the man would be on the hook for financially. Vaguely speaking, I'd imagined it was some kind of trust or annuity that would amount to money that very few people had. For the purposes of the story, the number didn't matter, just that it was so big that it would be out of reach for ninety-nine percent of men out there. After the CompatiApp scene, that led me to the doctor's office scene. I needed the FMC to get pregnant to build a story around it, so I wondered how that interaction would look in the future. It was the perfect scene in that it made functional sense and it was a perfect way to drop in exposition about the law and the technology. Also, getting the FMC to the doctor gave me great characterization opportunities. I really got into her head while she was sitting there waiting for her pregnancy test. So by this point, I thought I had a brewing murder mystery for which I had just laid the groundwork. I wrote the lawyer contact scene, but then I was sort of stuck. Not knowing where to go on the murder proper, I focused on Creches. While the FMC is in the doctor's waiting room, she hears an ad for CrecheCert which was simply more interesting to me than killing a rich guy, so I pursued it. What would that look like? That led me to write a home-inspection scene which I later deleted. My thinking was that if you are going to have parental certifications, then that would include a home inspection. It was a useful exercise in running my brain through some scenarios, but for this story, I came to see that scene as unnecessary. Our empowered, single, pregnant female main character wouldn't be raising her child at home. She'd be relying on the childcare of the future which is essentially what I wrote the Creches to be. At that point, I still only had pieces of the story. I started with law, went to CompatiApp, found Cheryl as a character, and put her in a bind. So there was tech, culture, and a character, but as for an actual story, I had a mess, a promising mess. Since I was otherwise stuck and I knew I needed the baby born, I wrote the birthing scene. Imagining the near future, I thought that the episiotomy was a perfect application for nanites because it is a very simple application. It seemed like a nice half-step into the technological future, a plausible application of nanites. More importantly, those nanites inspired the murder weapon. That led me to write an ending murder scene. At that point, I had a "story space" and a through line. You still wouldn't recognize it as the final story, but I had what's essentially a literary prototype of the story. The nice thing about prototypes is that even bad prototypes get good feedback. I needed intellectual and emotional engagement from my reader. Dry musings about future law and tech wouldn't ever cut it. People needed to feel for the characters and be interested in the story. Then I needed to layer those pieces to give the piece a sense of pace, of escalating to an exciting conclusion. If I made Cheryl into the cliché of womanly competence--a corporate mega-bitch--it'd be hard to wring any pathos out of her. She needed to be sympathetic and likable. She needed to become the story because this thing became essentially a character study of her that just happened to be wrapped in a plot. Likewise, I didn't want to make this into a political screed. I didn't want to tip the scales in any political direction. I wanted her confusion and frustration to engender sympathy. With all my stories, once I get to what I think is my best swipe at the story, I get some friends to critique it. That's always an eye-opener. No matter how long I've been writing, I can never anticipate where a reader will take the prose. I received a lot of notes on motivation and emotional reactions. It was pretty normal stuff. I was most excited about what I didn't receive: complaints from women critters about the pregnancy and birth aspects of the story. As a man writing about the most feminine of acts, I was very concerned about getting it wrong. When I got around to submitting it, it got strong reactions. I got personal responses from two of the three of the sci-fi trimurty. Both were rejections, but my favorite editor told me that Cheryl was too much of a camera; she lacked agency. I mostly disagreed but did make some light revisions to address that. And for those of you wondering how I could be excited about rejections, it was that the rejections were personal responses directly from the editor. Those guys are slammed all day every day. They have to wade through thousands of stories a year. There is no time for them to take a few minutes out of their days to respond to each story. So when they take the time to do so, it's because they want to encourage the author. Considering how touchy abortion is in the US, I figured I was doing very well. Eventually, ParSec in the UK bought the story. The only reason I submitted to them later than the others was money. I generally submit from highest-paying to lowest-paying. Does that sound too mercenary? Well, I spent a total of 57.8 hours producing that story. At 7,160 words, the SFWA pro-rate (eight cents a word…seriously) for that story would be $572.80 giving me an hourly rate of $9.91 for that story if I got the pro-rate. I didn't even get the pro rate. So, yeah, I submit according to payment. That's also why that story lives again in my collection. That's the only way I might hope to make proper money for my writing. Anyway, that gives you an idea of how Golden Cuckoo was written. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints, my website has a contact form. I try to respond to everyone who is civil. The ebook version of the collection is available for pre-order from Amazon.com until April 18th. After that, both the ebook and paperback will be available for purchase. I wasn't sure what to expect with a former A-lister like Lucy Liu showing up in a supernatural thriller. Add to that the fact that the director is Soderbergh, and I thought it would be worth a look. It was.
The movie overall is a typical ghost story. There's a presence in the house and no one knows what it wants. What's different is that this one is shot from the POV of the ghost itself. That was a novelty to me that was sort of interesting because a lot of the ghost's time is spent watching the family in the house fall apart. The ghost story part is almost a side show to the family drama. Unfortunately, the family drama is relatively boring. Actually, it's very boring. The thing the parents are obliquely fighting over is never revealed. Character-wise there is not much to like. Liu's character is a kind of clichéd East Asian mom who thinks the sun shines out of her son's ass at the expense of her daughter. The father is a well-meaning schlub. The son is a nasty, narcissistic ass. The daughter is a mopey intelligent young woman who is traumatized by the fentanyl death of her best friend. What mostly saves them is the quality of the dialog. That helps keep this motley cast from becoming unbearable. What I most enjoyed was riding on the shoulder of the ghost. That kind of direction made the movie a little interesting. Unfortunately for me, that was it. The plot is banal. The characterization is nuanced but nuancing a boring person doesn't get you much. Lacking most in this movie, especially for a thriller, was a sense of pace. There was no rising tension. There was no critical plot element to resolve. This movie just plodded to the end which incidentally was one of the most powerful scenes. So it was like hacking into the home security of a very boring family of unlikable people. I found it really frustrating because there was an underlying murder mystery that wasn't capitalized on.. The last thing I'll mention is that we see absolutely no other locations than the house. That turns the experience into something like a play with a few static sets that get cycled through. It reduces the sense of scope of the piece. Issues of work and school and the wider world are a bit truncated through this very restricted POV. Overall, it's a watchable, slow burn of a quiet ghost story. It's not worth going to the theater for. This is something to stream on a rainy day when you have no energy to do much more than sit still. I decided to publish a short-story collection. Having gone through the publishing process with Bootstrap the Far Side, it seemed silly not to put out a collection. I see myself as primarily a short-story writer, so I should publish them. Of course, some of my stories have already been published in magazines, but if you're a fan, it can be quite annoying (and expensive) to ferret around the internet to find all the individual magazine issues that contain my stories. Some of the venues, like Deep Magic, are no longer in business. Then there are all the unpublished stories. Some of them will never reach readers if I don't publish them myself.
I'm calling it "Attack on Boredom." The name is part of the prompt I used in Midjourney to generate the front cover art. I also like that it sounds like a pulpy sci-fi movie title. More practically, it reflects my intention for the book. I don't have any pretentious theme. I didn't want to use one of those self-important titles about my life that I sometimes see authors do for collections, like "Reflections on…", "My…Journey" or some drivel like that. The organizing principle of the book is right in the title. I want to please the reader by attacking their boredom with engaging stories. I strive to give people an escape for a little while by transporting them away from the chaos of the world. My ego is in there somewhere, but mainly as a function of whether or not I was able to delight readers. The story lineup for the book is tentatively done. The book is formatted and I just ordered proof copies of the paperback version for final quality checks. There is one story in the collection that I already had out for consideration at a magazine, so if they pick it up, their contract's exclusivity clause would keep me from putting it in a collection for many months. I'm supposed to hear back by the end of December 2024. I might have to do a last-second substitution for that story ("You Get One Warning") if it gets picked up. For that reason, I can't tell you the exact lineup yet, but when it's finalized, I'll post the list in this blog. My planned release date is April 18th, 2025. I'll keep you posted. It was another slow movie week so I ended up going to see Smile 2. I saw the first one which was mediocre but watchable, so I gave it a shot.
The first thing the movie lets you know is that it is a Parker Finn film. He wrote, directed, and produced it, and he doesn't want anyone to forget it. He's got some of the most obnoxious credit typography I've seen in years. So it's all his fault. If anyone hires him again, there'll be no excuse. Ostensibly he didn't do the casting because Naomi Scott is a strong performer. To start with, it's simply a very boring story. We all know how Smile worked. It's like a play on Final Destination, the curse that keeps on giving. If you witness one of these demon-inhabited people kill themselves, then you're next--no exceptions. My point is that this isn't a movie about exploring the curse. That's what Smile was about. So how did they make Smile 2 interesting? They didn't. There was a fragment of a thread about a guy who thought he could sorta-kinda break the murder chain, but they never engaged with it. The movie is pretty much nonstop on the main character, a pop idol named Riley Skye. Since this is the 21st century we can't have a protagonist who isn't piteous, so she's a recovering drug addict who lost her man in a car crash a year ago and suffered some serious injuries. No doubt that is supposed to wring some pathos from us. At the very end of the movie, we get to see that she grabbed the wheel from her boyfriend and wrecked the car herself. Yay, I like her less. In fact, the entire movie is one long string of scenes that make Skye less and less likable. She starts out as a poor-little-rich-girl who lost her man and picked up a few scars, but by the end, she is a raging psycho bitch whose bitchiness has nothing to do with the demon. When her death came it was good riddance to bad rubbish for me. That's problem one: Skye is not ever a likable character. Problem two is that the story is a milquetoast collection of banal scenes in which we have to watch Naomi's face react to yet another psychological onslaught. It's just boring. Oh, and she drinks water in nearly every scene. There's a line where she says that's what her therapist said to do when she wants to use, but they have her down an entire liter of water on camera nearly every damn time she's not moving. I'd call it bad writing, but the Voss product placement probably earned Finn Parker more money than the movie will make. How many times can Skye wig out in her apartment in an interesting way? How about when she wigs out in her drug dealer's apartment? Or in her dressing room? Or in a hospital room? Or the dingy walk-in freezer of a boarded-up Pizza Hut? The movie is mostly Skye standing in a room wigging out. She's a decent looking woman, but it got old almost immediately. That gets us to direction. Apparently, Parker Finn can't do an exterior shot without contaminating it with his idea of cool. So we have to suffer these long exterior shots that rotate through 360 degrees…because. We have to look confusingly straight down on Riley's NYC apartment building…because. No doubt he could explain some lame visual metaphor for psychic turbulence, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. Worse, there are entire sequences that are disavowed. We get some crazy happenings with broken stuff and mess and chaos, and then, it didn't happen--it was all in her demon-infected head. Horror movies do that sometimes to great effect, but this movie did it so much that it eroded my trust in what was on screen. It became impossible to tell which bits of the narrative were real and which were fake. It's way too much of what is sometimes a good thing. It turns the watching experience into an abstraction. You can't react to anything because it's probably just another of Skye's fugues. For instance, she spends a lot of the movie interacting with her childhood friend who it turns out wasn't really there. These moves pollute so much of the narrative that the movie just becomes a completely ungrounded abstract collage of images--boring images mostly. Putting it all together, we have a poorly shot boring script about an unlikable main character that doesn't explore the supernatural element whatsoever. She dies at the end. Big whup. The upside is that writers like me can take heart that even heaping piles of shit get bought and produced, though if your material is properly awful, you might have to direct and produce the thing yourself as well. Aurealis is an Australian science fiction ezine. At one time it was the Australian science fiction magazine. They occupied a special place in my heart because they gave me my first speculative fiction credit when they published my story "Taggant 31."
After some years I decided to submit another story to them. It was more difficult this time because they have "limited demographic" periods wherein only Australians and New Zealanders can submit. Canadian magazines do something similar if they get government grants; such magazines are required to have 80% Canadian content. So I found a submission period, submitted a story, and tried to put it out of my mind. Anyone who has spent time submitting short stories to magazines will tell you that the best thing you can do is try not to think about it because it takes a while to get an answer. Six months later I still hadn't heard back from the people at Aurealis. That was odd. I dug into their submission guidelines and saw that I shouldn't query until it had been two months. Since it had been six, I felt I wasn't being impatient. I sent them a query about my story. This is the reply I got: Dear Ben, Our response time for subscribers is no more than two months and can be more than twice as long for non-subscribers, but we are always aiming for much shorter turnarounds. As your submission came to us as a non-subscriber, it was not fast tracked and is still in the submissions list to be read by our readers. -- Kind regards, Cas Le Nevez Submissions Manager Aurealis Magazine www.aurealis.com.au That put me off. Their submission guidelines indicate a two-month query horizon without mentioning anything about being a non-subscriber. But let's take them at their word. It might be as long as four months for those who dared to submit to the magazine without subscribing. I was making a six-month query and being told that my submission was still unread, not in process, not working its way through the bureaucracy, but "to be read." The idea that my story had been sitting with them for six months and was still unread boggled my mind. The indication that it was my punishment for being a non-subscriber was likewise odd. Setting aside purely emotional responses, I thought it was strange that there was no mention of what I might expect in the future. That's both rude and unprofessional. As of this writing, I have made 886 short-story submissions to various speculative fiction venues, so I consider myself well-experienced in the process. Still, I didn't want to do anything precipitous. Many of these magazines are run on a shoestring by haggard well-meaning people. Sometimes they get touchy at the implication that they aren't being responsive. They have great guilt kung fu. That's why I waited six months to query. Since I was already six months in, I decided to let it ride. Often the act of querying a long-overdue piece gets the wheels greased, encouraging an editor to make a decision on a story. At day 208--as indicated on my handy-dandy Submission Grinder page--I had enough. I was seven months in and they hadn't read it. The complete lack of guidance or sympathy from the Aurealis submissions manager combined with his non-subscriber shaming led me to believe that he intended to string me along for many more months. Feeling well abused, I sent a one line withdrawal email to the submissions manager. It was a triumph of self-control that I didn't embellish it with any smartassery. I was pissed off, but that was the end of it. Or not. I got this reply to my withdrawal (my underlining): Hi Ben, Thank you for letting us know. We hope you continue to submit to Aurealis in future and I wish you all the best with your publishing endeavours. -- Kind regards, Cas Le Nevez Submissions Manager Aurealis Magazine www.aurealis.com.au Ostensibly this human-form turd of a submissions manager was having fun at my expense. No reasonable person would expect anyone thus abused for seven months to ever consider dealing with Aurealis again. So I replied that I would never again submit anything to Aurealis. Unless you are a masochist with abysmal self-esteem, I suggest you do likewise. I have been playing Borderlands for eight years. More precisely, I've been playing Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel; the other games in that family--Borderlands 1, Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina's Wonderland--are absolute crap. In the case of Borderlands 3, I consider it unplayable because the fonts are so small. For whatever weird reason, the normally incompetent Gearbox made a masterpiece with Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel.
My point is that Gearbox, the game developer, is an awful inconsistent mess. They never managed to capitalize artistically or commercially off the success of Borderlands 2, so I had low expectations for this movie. For instance, you'll notice that David Eddings isn't in the movie to voice Claptrap. Why? Because the Gearbox CEO didn't want to pay him more than union scale (on a previous project) and it escalated to the CEO Pitchford assaulting Eddings at a Marriot Marquis--allegedly. A former Gearbox lawyer, Wade Calendar, sued Pitchford for all kinds of malfeasance, including giving himself a $12 million bonus. So, in my mind, I see Pitchford as this acrimonious ass with an ego the size of a planet whose antics poison Gearbox productions. Pitchford still runs Gearbox, so yes, this movie is a turd. The first thing to note is that they pushed the age of all characters by a solid twenty years or more. Tanis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (65) is in her late thirties or early forties at most in the game. Lilith is the game's cheesecake, smoking hot, done up in fan-boy anime style. She is the uber-hot siren; her character is literally called a siren. So a 55-year-old Cate Blanchette is a completely different character at a completely different stage of life. Moxie, the over-sexualized barmaid tech-wizard mother of Scooter and Ellie, is played by Gina Gershon who is 62. I was pleasantly surprised to say she made it work well. So even though Ms. Gershon can deliver a smoking-hot Moxie and make all sexagenarians proud, my point is that the vibe of the whole crew is severely aged. This is no youthful crew fighting the good fight, it's a bunch of hardened, tired, sexless grandparents just trying to survive. And, hey, if they made it work, I'd be noting how clever they were in their adaptation, not regaling you with tales of Gearbox incompetence. They decided to write this movie about the events before or concurrent with Borderlands 1. They rewrote a lot of backstory. Most significantly, they invented a prophecy that said only a 'daughter of Iridian' could open the vault. Why? So they had an excuse to throw Tiny Tina in the crew. Most action movies avoid dragging a 12-year-old girl through deadly gunfights, but Tiny Tina is the most popular character of the franchise, so they needed an excuse to throw her into this flick. While they were at it, they made her sane, removing all the fun from her character. In the games, Tina's parents were murdered in front of her, graphically, by a psycho named Fleshstick; that drove her insane and set her on the path of becoming a bomb maker. Explosives took one of her arms. So, in the movie, we have a mostly sweet young girl possessed of all her limbs and sanity with no role to play. Boring. And I get it, you didn't all play Borderlands and roughly couldn't give a crap about the fidelity of the movie to the game franchise. I don't exactly disagree, but my point isn't so much about fidelity to the franchise, but to point out how much they bent the characters in the name of commerce. Tina was, as Marcus would call her, "a little psychopath", brilliantly voiced by Ashly Burch. She was magic and they destroyed that magic in pursuit of commerce. Everyone loves Tina, so how can't you put her in the movie? Yeah, I agree, but put Tina in, not some milquetoast approximation of her who is nothing more than living luggage. Alright, they ruined Tina's character and aged everyone two or three decades, so what about the movie? It was meh, a linear heartless story that checked a lot of marketing boxes but didn't deliver anything evocative on screen. The story is that the Atlas CEO hires Lilith to find Tina. Turns out that, in movie logic, Tina is supposed to be required to open the vault because she is the only daughter of Iridian (produced as a clone from Iridian blood). So Lilith goes to Pandora, finds Tina, realizes she's on the wrong team and joins with Roland and Krieg to save Tina from Atlas. In an unfathomable twist of logic, they seek out the vault key (a thing in the game, but three things in the movie). It turns out Tanis is the only one who knows where it should be, so Tanis joins the team. That's the point where they explain that Lilith's mom programmed Claptrap to help Lilith. So, magic, Claptrap is on the team too. It's just these endless convenient contrivances to get the team together. They spent so much time trying to shoehorn together these characters into the same frame, that they forgot to film a proper movie. By the time they have the band together, the movie is just about done. They have one more battle wherein Lilith goes siren for the first time ever. They eventually open the vault and kill the Atlas CEO (Athena did that in the game). But hey, what's in the vault? Now that it's open, isn't it dangerous? Don't know the answer to any of that. The movie just cut to a big post-Deathstar Ewok-style party in Sanctuary. It's silly, on a lot of levels. What's on the screen is just one overlong battle after another, then the lights come up. They develop no interpersonal relationships, get to use any cool alien tech or do anything noteworthy. It's just a bunch of overlong Mad Max style gunfights. It's a mediocre movie, at best. If you care about the game, it's a travesty, barely watchable. My recommendation is that if you feel you need to watch it, stream it for free somewhere in a few years, and make sure you're plenty intoxicated so your brain will slide over all the stupid bits. The story occurs in the early 1600s, based roughly on the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. At that point in history, Japan was emerging from self-imposed isolation. The Portuguese were the only European power with a presence there, and the main character, John Blackthorn is part of a privateering crew whose job it is to harry the Portuguese. He shipwrecks in Japan with many of the crew. As the only remaining officer, he is singled out for special attention.
So, it's a classic stranger in a strange land story. He's alone, isolated, and the only people he can even speak with consider him an enemy pirate and heretic. John Blackthorn might as well be on an alien planet, so wide is the culture gap between Japan and England. Blackthorn is used mostly as a camera for the Japanese battle for succession; the previous sovereign dies and his male heir is a toddler, so there's tons of palace intrigue and jockeying for position with all the attendant questions about who gets to speak for the young heir. Despite having no salient part of the larger power play, Blackthorn's life is engaging at first. We watch him struggle with language, culture, and Japanese Catholics who are prejudiced against Protestants like Blackthorn. They even manage to build a bit of a love story into it for John. I spent the entire show waiting for Blackthorn to evolve, to become…something. Despite being in Japan for a couple of years, his Japanese never really reaches a serviceable level. In the first few episodes, I held out hope, but he just never grew (which lovers of the novel will tell you is a crime). For most of the episodes, it doesn't matter because he's a camera and there's plenty to see through his eyes. But I got this growing sense of annoyance as the series went on and he remained stagnant while the political events of Japan evolved around him. It was odd. The one truly poignant scene they gave Blackthorn was in the final episode: a private memorial at sea in a row boat with a Japanese woman. His Japanese was so crappy that it just ruined the whole thing. They essentially have Blackthorn live down to a Japanese stereotype of a barbarian foreigner: passionate, clumsy, witless, slow to learn, rude, and stubborn. And that almost-great scene is the last one he has. As infuriating as that was, it got worse. In the final episode, we don't learn what happens to Blackthorn. Toranaga muses about what might happen to him, but nothing else. We don't learn what happens to Toranaga. Does he become shogun? They don't say. What happens to the Catholics at court? They don't say. What happens to any of the political operators that you might have built an interest in? They don't say. It was the most fundamentally flawed last episode of a TV series I've ever watched. I've seen canceled shows do hurried wrap-up final episodes that were more cogent than the way they ended this series. So, I would save you from all that annoyance. Don't watch the show. It does a lot of great setup with fantastic settings and period costumes and then proceeds to waste it all. Most people enjoyed the original Avatar: The Last Airbender, the anime. That's an understatement. It's deeply loved across most demographics, so there was a lot of pressure on this new production. The previous cinematic release of a live-action version was a train wreck, so most people were wary.
I watched all eight season-one episodes on Netflix. That's probably my only real complaint: eight episodes. For those of you old enough to remember the days of three networks, you'll remember that a standard TV season was 24 episodes. The cartoon version of this show had 20, 20, and 21 episodes in its three seasons. So, if Netflix continues the way it started, those 61 episodes of content will be crammed into a meager 24. The production is quite strong. The bending effects are rendered extremely well. The fantastic animals like Apa and Momo are likewise very well done. In what I'm guessing is a nod to its anime origins, the producers decided to over-saturate the color palette. It gives the show a sort of half-step to being a cartoon. The bright blues of the water tribe outfits are too blue. Ang's saffron robe's colors pop too much. I got used to it. The way they've structured the episodes is a combination of slavishly following the original on a micro-scale while rejiggering big swaths of the narrative to speed things up. So, you'll find some characters' lines occasionally match the original exactly even though the episode structure is completely different. The actors they've cast are a mixed bag. The guys playing Iroh and Zuko are fantastic. Sokka and Kitara are pretty strong performers. Ang is the worst. Seriously, the title character is played by a kid who is the worst performer in the cast. The farther from Ang you get, the stronger the performance you get. For instance, Suki's mom on Kyoshi Island has a tiny part, but she's excellent at it. The tone of the show is quite well done. The most campy aspects of the anime have been smoothed away. Jet's little band of radicals which came across as so cartoonish in the anime, now presents as wholly more realistic. The singers in the caves under Omashu are still goofy, but realistically so. Iroh has been transformed from a campy over-the-top Zuko fan club into a more realistic, avuncular figure. The producers have done an excellent job of sanding away the explicitly childish bits of the anime while preserving the ethos of the show. Overall I'm very pleased with it. It is a fantastic refutation of M. Night Shamlyan's abysmal oeuvre. I will be bingeing the other two seasons the second they are released. |
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