There are some good performances from the cast, and the actual ideas could make for a compelling story about the post-origin problems of being Iron Man, if only the resolutions for all then didn’t end up being different versions of Deus Ex Machina. And the metaphors are perfectly timed: after falling for a few seconds near the beginning of the movie, Iron Man doesn’t actually show up for the first half hour, and when the fireworks finally do come they’re mostly medium sized.

(non specific spoilers follow)

The biggest structural problem is that at key points the story gets hijacked by the need to set up a series of films set in a cinematic Marvel universe. It forces the plot to deconstruct itself in incredibly unhelpful ways, such Nick Fury showing up to rewire the plot and hand out cures to the film’s conflicts. He leaves behind a secret agent character who is supposed to babysit Tony Stark, fails at that job, and then leaves the movie entirely only to arrive in an after-credit sequence that is supposed to set-up the upcoming Thor film—except it doesn’t even mention that movie by name. Even the comics have the good sense to tell the audience when a crossover story is actually crossing over.

The second major story problem is that none of the characters seems genuinely motivated, and the stakes aren’t really ever that high. Tony’s life is sort-of in danger for a while, but that’s mostly resolved in a throwaway moment mentioned above. Then the move becomes about Stark’s daddy issues, all of which get resolved before you’ve fully figured out what they’re about. There’s also a rivalry with another arms manufacturer, but he’s played mostly for laughs. Lastly there’s there is Mickey Rourke as the film’s main villain, who never really rises to more than a cartoon threat. By the anemic explosions and rooftop banter at the end of the movie it seems like everyone mostly decided to show up and have a little fun, without ever actually making something truly entertaining.

Even narrative-free blockbusters like Twilight and Transformers get that you need to hit some high points in order to make the popcorn-munchers happy.  Iron Man seems content to coast at a steady pace, pushed by the energy of the first film, and pulled forward by the excitement of the upcoming Marvel movies. Too bad it didn’t end up being more.

That’s why I was shocked to realize that I was about to close the cover on The City & The City 70 pages in.

First off, it’s China Miéville. Not only have I enjoyed almost everything he’s ever written, I’ve gotten used to the fact that it often takes a while for his books to get going. It’s been a few years since I’ve read The Iron Council, but as I remember it, there was a good long boring bit before the mutant hell-train showed up, and everything got great.

And that’s exactly where I almost put the book down. You get some tantalizing glimpses of the (ultimately amazing) central conceit of the book early on, but it isn’t until around page 80 that you really start to “get” what’s happening, and realize that it’s something truly awesome.

I get why he does it. There’s an impact to subjecting the reader to a street level view of this strange world before lifting the veil. But it’s also as frustrating as hell, especially since the main character is a bit of the “by the numbers” guy. He’s cookie-cutter noir hero who spends the first chunk of the book looking forward to getting off the case.

But once the blinders are off, things get real good real fast. The plot remains is a fairly straight ahead political pot-boiler, with an ending that (at least in my case) became pretty apparent fairly early on, but the setting is so interesting that you want to keep reading about it just to get your questions answered. And the book does manage to answer most of them. I always find it comforting as a reader to be in the hands of someone who can stay a step ahead of me.

There’s no doubt that Miéville is a master world builder. His stories about New Crozubon quickly grew from describing a city, to encompassing a world. His prose often sings, or at the very worst at least hums along nicely, even if the characters come off as a little cookie cutter compared to some of the nuance he’s shown in the past.

But The City & The City is literally an urban fantasy in the way that most book that call themselves that aren’t. It’s a book about a city, and the consensual self-deception that is part of the cost of living in any metropolis. It’s also the story of a place that could only really exist between the pages of a book.

It’s well worth reading. Just make sure you promise yourself you’ll get to page 80 first.

Initially the show was shot on a sound stage, with the cast on a set, and a few mildly entertaining “host segments” thrown in along the way. While it worked fairly well, and had some quality laugh-out-loud moments, it never really seemed to rise to the heights of MST3K, or even Rifftrax.

After a long period of no new content, they have shifted to releasing DVDs of their live performances, with their latest—a late seventies sci-fi reject called The Alien Factor—probably the most disappointing outing yet. If your live audience isn’t laughing along with you, it’s probably worth tuning things up before you put it up for sale.

But it’s often in failure where the problems become clear, and in the end it seems that Cinematic Titanic has simply sunk under the weight of having five clever people on-stage simultaneously. For the most part it seems like everyone is content to simply read their jokes at the right moment, and laugh a little when someone screws up, or manages a good bit of improvisation. Like an eighties super-group, it feels as if there may be too much individual brilliance to allow for real synergy, beyond a few solos that remind everyone just how well they can play their instruments when they put their mind to it.

In the early videos, the cast had supposedly been hired to participate in a top-secret research experiment (another take on the “Monitor their minds” wrapper from MST3K). Stripped of that minimal meta-context, the focus is entirely on making jokes about movies. And while most of the comments are funny (if sometimes a little too focused on obscure references to the seventies) what truly sucks the life out of the whole affair is that there’s never any of the banter and goofy running gags between the characters that I think is integral to the success of a great riff.

It’s the personal barbs, and back and forth that makes it feel like you’re hanging out with friends instead of being trapped in some kind of abstract comedic symposium on the structure of bad film The idea that the cast has desires and a point of view not only invites you in, but keeps you hanging on when the jokes start feeling a bit dry or forced, or the movie itself is dull beyond comprehension. Like all good entertainment media, it’s the narrative that saves the day.

It doesn’t help that the cast (with the notable exception of Trace Beaulieu and J. Elvis Weinstein) seems to be less enthusiastic than they were two years ago, and without their passion, it’s hard for me to have any.

I’ll keep my eye on Cinematic Titanic, if only because I’m such a huge fan of the obvious vision and talent of everyone involved, but I’m not sure how much enthusiasm I have left for the actual product.

Once again these reviews manage to do an excellent job of deconstructing the film while being entertaining in their own right.

(Some NSFW language)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Travelling the same paths of the broken near-future as Bruce Sterling, The Windup Girl drops the reader into a struggling, but surviving Thailand as it might be 100 years from now (more or less). It’s a future where the world has been ravaged by out of control genetic technology and environmental collapse, and the few effective structures that have been put in place to protect humanity are as vulnerable to greed and stupidity as they are to the constantly mutating diseases.

The prose itself is great. Bacigalupi sure can write, and his descriptions are as vivid, hot, and lush as the tropical landscapes that the describes. And although events are a bit slow to get started, his characters are similarly interesting with quirks and motivations that make them sympathetic, even while they are doing terrible things to everyone around them.

The story is a mish-mash of political maneuvering, corporate greed, basic survival, and revenge. This definitely isn’t a novel masquerading as a movie treatment. It’s a real literary narrative with an inter-connected web of humanity that find themselves forced into unlikely places and uneasy alliances by events that are out of their control, even if they were responsible for starting them in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this book for a number of major awards.

But let’s give credit where credit is due: The story is, for the most part, motivated by character, even if that happens in much the same way that a freight train is “motivated” by a massive diesel engine capable of dragging tons of freight up a steep incline. And like this tortured metaphor, Avatar is not only impossible to stop once it gets going, but is also clearly heading towards a single destination that has to be clearly laid out beforehand.

But what struck me more than anything is how Avatar crafts something unique out of the new tools of visual storytelling. Cameron seems to understand that the main danger of using such massive amounts of computer-generated imagery is that it can interfere with our fundamental need to form an emotional relationship with the characters on-screen. It’s clear that  he spent a great deal of time giving his digital characters the ability to emote with enough human subtlety that we can’t help but find ourselves intrigued by them. These may not be humans, but they are, for a few instants at least, the first screen creatures that seem to truly engage our emotions at the most fundamental level. Gollum was a good effort, but he was a monster. He could evoke pity, but he was an animal. He wasn’t a creature that we could engage in with respect.

And that’s why having the Avatars be remotely driven creatures is such an excellent metaphor. These creatures look like the humans that control them, and they have human emotions, although they’re not quite like us. On another level they are also obviously motion-captured from human performances, giving us permission to believe in the gorgeous cartoon panorama that is the alien world of Pandora. And finally they are a metaphor for the audience, as we are dumped into this virtual world that constantly assaults our senses with strangeness and beauty.

The last film that tried to create this realized other-world was King Kong. But by putting that cross-species love story into the horrible and hostile world of Skull Island it ended up wearing its spectacle on its sleeve, and made it difficult to connect with.

As I discussed in my piece on the Spectacular Shift, CGI imagery has a tendency to push us out of our normal method of perceiving narrative media, and slip the audiences into a state where they are open to purely visual stimulation. Although the story is getting a lot of grief for being too simplistic, Cameron’s greatest achievement in Avatar is how he determinedly, and effectively, swims against that tide for most of the movie. His goal is to keep us emotionally grounded even as our senses want to make us float away. It’s a shame that in the third act he seems to give up on this effort entirely, and spends the last hour of the film pummeling us with over-the-top imagery until we are nothing more than an over-stimulated bundle of rods and cones with an alarmingly full bladder. But if we are going to move beyond the idea of a big budget computer-generated move as nothing more than a loosely plotted series of explosions and pretty effects, it seems that Avatar may be showing us the way.

His latest (and greatest) review is an extended takedown of The Phantom Menace. His style is definitely black humor with jokes about murdering his wife, and some serial killer stuff in there, but the criticism is spot on, with a solid understanding of how leaning on character creates a solid cinematic experience.

It’s good stuff, well presented, and I hope he makes more.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Update: Turns out I had posted links to his Star Trek: Nemesis review earlier this year.

He talks oddly, he very cynical, and sometimes crass, but he has great timing, and he knows Treck lore pretty damn well, backing it up his critiques with plenty of snippets from every Star Trek series.

He also has a pretty good understanding of story, and there’s great breakdown of what makes a good actions sequence (and why) in part 3.

They take a bit to get into, but if you get his vibe (including some dark humor about knocking off his wife) they pay off in very amusing and surprising ways.

Here’s his review of Nemesis:

Part I

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZjkHUrEuHc

Part II

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoWfTq8dYos

Part III

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DT7sSp-3_I

Part IV

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi5mj6-CUiY

Book Review: The Blade Itself (The First Law: Book One) by Joe Abercrombie

Fantasy has changed a lot in the last few years. Led by authors such as Bakker and Erickson, it often tends to be very dark, focusing on the squalor and terror of living in a medieval world where those in power use the limited and dangerous forces of magic to further oppress the poor wretches who live under their heel. And, oh yes, the vast majority female characters are either a)whores, b)slaves, or c)sexually-monstrous, power-crazed harpies who, most often, are fighting to help their inbred children gain or hold onto power.

Abercrombie’s book touches on these new tropes, but he manages to rise above them by being deeply character driven, and showing a patience in storytelling that will draw you in, and surprise you, if not at every turn, at least at the important ones. There are heroes in this book, but everyone is flawed, and by the end of this first volume you’ll only be beginning to unravel which of them are overcoming their baser instincts to become the hero they never imagined they could be, and which are about to fall into the pit of their own lust for power and control.

I particular really like Abercrombie’s take on the Barbarian character. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Abercrombie gives him a deep emotional life that allows you to get into his head. In fact it takes a while to realize that he is the barbarian. So when the inevitable clash with society comes, it’s easy to root for the unwashed stranger against his more “civilized” opponents.

This book isn’t life changing. Calling it a “compelling page turner” would be a fair description. But if you’re open to a well-written fantasy romp with deep and solid characterization, you should definitely give Abercrombies books a try.

Part of the problem is that the slapstick dumb-show used for the story elements only really works well if you’re already deeply familiar with what’s being parodied. That worked out great for Star Wars, and it was fine for Indiana Jones, but it doesn’t really make much sense in Batman. It’s a fun way to satirize the familiar villains (Riddler, Joker, etc.), but there’s no well known story there, so we get a lot of physical comedy, but none of the ironic, assumption-shattering meta-humor that made the earlier games seem so cheeky and fun when they were razzing Darth Vader, or mocking the Cantina scene. Instead it comes off feeling oddly similar to the old Batman TV show from the sixties. The characters are mostly defined by their strong visual traits and not much else, and their function tries to follow their form. Except, in this case, the form seems to have been defined to serve the gameplay and it weakens the story.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Both Batman and Robin are given a number of alternative “suits” that can be activated when they’re found inside a level. They’re sold as giving the player amazing new abilities, but the powers they confer are incredibly specific, and rather than opening up the player’s experience of the world they seem to limit it. Robin, for example, can get a magnetic outfit that allows him to walk on metal surfaces. But the places it actually lets him explore are clearly marked, and few and far between. So you end up in this goofy outfit, waiting for the next obvious place to use it.  It doesn’t make sense in terms of the source material, and it doesn’t feel all that fun after the first few times you do it.

Ultimately the core dynamic in the Lego world is collection, and there are plenty of things to try and grab, with money being the most important. The way you get stuff is busting up objects in the world so you can gather up all the juicy Lego coins that spring out. In order to do this effectively, you move through the world like a lawnmower, cutting down everything you can, until the environment has been cleared of anything destructible. Breaking things also reveals lego pieces that you can use to build new object. Unfortunately they’re pretty random. Breaking apart a bank vault door allows you to build a giant laser wielding robot, for example. This worked great in Star Wars, where you were creating cool stuff from the movies, but here it just seems kind of abstract and forced.

One of the most frustrating parts of the game is that there a lot of the objects that only become accessible once you’ve unlocked more of the content. You can see all this cool stuff hanging around the level, but you don’t have the ability in the game to actually get them, because the things you’d need to reach them are locked away until after you’ve finished a level in the story mode. This makes it available for “open play”. And in that mode you to access any of the suits and characters you’ve unlocked at any time.  So the first time through in the Story Mode you end up feeling like a sightseer, passing by collectible objects that can’t be collected, and machines that can’t be used. Or at least it seems that way… There’s often no way to tell if something is a mandatory now puzzle or an optional later puzzle. And it’s entirely possible to replay a level and still not have unlocked what you need to collect the bonus content. It just doesn’t have the elegance of something like Metroid, where the frustration of the unreachable is always a tease that the world will become more open as you power up.

You could argue that this dynamic makes the whole game a meta-puzzle; get the characters you need to go back and get the stuff to get more characters and abilities to get more stuff that you need. That’s a good idea, but it really doesn’t work so well in this case. There’s an initial rush, but after a while it seems like everything is constantly being kept just out of your reach. It ends up being a negative feedback loop, so at this point I have oodles of money, but nothing to spend it on because I haven’t unlocked enough stuff to go into the levels and find the stuff that will unlock the stuff that I’m allowed to spend my money on. So now, instead of being focused on the moment to moment gameplay, I’m constantly having my lack of resources rubbed in my face as I trudge through that limited story mode.

Having said all that, this isn’t a bad game. It’s polished, rich, and smart. It’s also got a great “fun for kids of all ages” feel that we don’t get enough of these days. For the most part it is also easy to play, with the only punishment for failure being the loss of a little cash.

Still, Lego Batman feels a bit like the end of an era for the Lego line. Traveller’s Tales have managed to create a number of great titles, hitting a high water mark with the Original Trilogy version of Lego Star Wars. But like any successful series, it’s possible to become so focused on improving and innovating in the fundamentals that you fail to occasionally add in the kind of wild innovation that made your original products so great.