The Dotted Logline

I’m not a fan of Anne Rice. I read Interview With A Vampire back in high school, and it wasn’t really my thing. Still, despite the fact she has become the scion of far too many goth/vamp wannabe kids, I’ve never had a real problem with her or her work.

I did however check out her controversial post on Amazon.com. A number of reviewers had really slammed her latest book, Blood Canticle, the final volume in The Vampire Chronicles. Her husband died during the writing of the novel so it’s understandable that the writing was not up to par with her previous work. However, rather than explaining the situation calmly or even writing a rational defense of the choices she made, she blasted back with an angry post that resulted in even MORE negative reviews, this time about her attitude more than her writing.

Most of these posts, including Rice’s, have now been removed from Amazon, but having had the chance to read her post, I have to say she didn’t do herself any favors. It wasn’t even the dangerously overflowing ego that upset a lot of other people: comments that she was above having an editor “butcher” her work and that the negative reviews were “slander”. It was the fact that her very long post was done as one huge block of text with no paragraph breaks, tons of missing punctuation, and erratic structure that jumped back and forth between subjects with absolutely no sort of organization. Not only did it invalidate her claim she doesn’t need an editor, it just helped fuel the belief that a lot of people seem to have that you don’t have put any effort into expressing yourself clearly online, because it’s “just” online. Because if a famous writer does it, it must be right.

The premiere issue of Graphic Novel Review, a new online journal for casual graphic novel readers, has launched. It is edited by my friend and fellow Emersonion Alexander Danner. I also contributed a review-in-brief (my first paid publication), but it is one of the less interesting things to read. Be sure to check it out!

I just watched Thirteen Going On Thirty and while I’m not a fan of the “throw innocent people into totally alien situations that they don’t know how to deal with so we can laugh as they fumble around and make fools of themselves” genre, I think Jennifer Garner pulled off the part quite nicely. I always like actors better when they look like they really had fun with a role.

The one bit that really jumped out at me was the big magazine party sequence, which was a crashing bore until Jenna (Jennifer Garner) got the DJ to play Thriller, started doing the grooving zombie dance (which she remembered clearly because she’d been doing it in 1987 the day before), and slowly had a large crowd join her who all also remembered the dance and could do it in a beautiful unified group.

I have an irrational love of spontaneous large dance numbers that pop up for no clear reason in non-musical movies. I haven’t seen many (in fact, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the prom in She’s All That), but if I have my way, I’ll work one into one of my own scripts someday. Seeing Song and dance pop up like that in “real world” settings (as opposed to musicals) gives us all hope that maybe one day, it could happen to us. Without a zoot suit demon and people spontaneously combusting, of course.

While reading the latest issue of a certain popular comic book, I realized that one of the things that make mainstream superhero comics so fun is how often you find yourself saying “Hey! I thought he/she was dead!” This used to be fairly common in anime as well, but in some of the more recent series I’ve seen, the current trend seems to be “Let’s kill off beloved characters completely out of the blue and not bringing them back except in the angst-filled memories of other characters that will drive them to suicidal behavior.” And that isn’t nearly as much fun. True, killing off characters unexpectedly creates buckets of tension, but it is of the one-note variety. Bringing people back from the dead, literally or figuratively, instigates all sorts of interesting chaos.

I recently rewatched one of the first sci-fi films I ever saw, Logan’s Run. I was glad to see that it still stood up as a pretty decent film. The visual effects (which won an Oscar the year before Star Wars) are laughable, especially the blatant miniature sets and the bizarre pyrotechnics. There are plenty of acid-trip visuals and gratuitous sex/nudity scenes that scream 1970’s. The worst thing in the film is probably Box, who looks like the result of a breeding accident between a vacuum cleaner and a disco ball.

But the dystopian future story still holds up. The concept a society devoted to pleasure is a logical progression from today’s world. Michael York (Logan 5) feels a bit too theatrical in some scenes, but his emotion when he receives his assignment from the computer is still chilling today. Peter Ustinov steals the movie as the half-senile T.S. Elliot-quoting Old Man, but my favorite performance is Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan’s friend and fellow Sandman. Jordan plays the extreme emotional arch quite well despite limited screen time.

I really need to track down and read the novel that inspired the movie, as it is quite a bit different. The Bryan Singer film project which may or may not happen now is/was supposed to be much closer to the source material than the original film was, so it will be interesting to see the story he will be/would have been working with.

In a semi-interesting related note, I had the opportunity to meet Michael York when he visited University of Miami when I was an undergrad. At the time, he was best known by college-age students for his role in the Austin Powers movies, but when I got a second to speak with him, I told him I remembered him from Logan’s Run, which I had seen as a kid. He didn’t seem exceptionally thrilled by that, but he was still very cordial.

I moved back home a few days ago, and while going through a number of items I had on order that had piled up, I ended up reading Mystique Volume 1 and watching Feat of Clay parts I and II from BtAS in the same day. Though I wouldn’t consider either to be literary masterpieces, they did delve into the psychology of appearance and identity in interesting ways.

While superheroes often deal with concept of identity, they are themes that are easily found in mainstream lit: dual identities, one’s place in society, etc. But shapeshifting pushes the concept of identity beyond the realm of the familiar. If you can be anyone or anything, why do you choose to be who or what you are? And if you can be anyone, is there really a definitive you?

Issues like this are what I love about speculative fiction. There are only so many ways of looking at normal human issues. Sometimes, to really learn something new about yourself, you need to look at outside of their expected limits of human experience.