Kick Ass

Saw "Kick Ass" on Friday night. I haven't been this disappointed by a movie I expected to be good since "Jurassic Park." The film is getting 75% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, which actually matches, roughly, how much of the movie I liked. But I think the 25% I disliked just did this movie in for me.

I'm going to put the blame for this disappointment squarely on my shoulders as I made the mistake of reading the source material a few weeks prior to the film's opening weekend. The source material, the first 8 issues of a comic series written by the current hotshit comic-book writer Mark Millar and penciled by John Romita Jr., is fantastic. It amped up my expectations for the film pretty high because it was already a pretty great screenplay and expertly "shot". The comic is exactly what the film's marketers said the movie would be: violent as hell, laugh out-loud hilarious and original. Well, as it turns out, the film's marketers were overstating their case a bit. "Kick Ass", directed by Matthew Vaughn and co-written by the comic's originator, Millar, is violent and there are some funny moments, but in the end this movie doesn't have the courage of its convictions.

"Kick Ass" follows teenager Dave Lizewski, a normal dorky kid who, like a lot of folks, defines himself by which movies, TV shows and comics he likes. And he, like his other dorky friends, is enduring the savage Darwinian landscape that is his high-crime outer-borough New York high-school. After the last in a series of routine muggings, Lizewski decides to answer the question he puts to his friends one day at their local hang-out -- "Why hasn't anyone tried to be a superhero?" -- by becoming one himself. His first run-in with criminals ends disastrously, but gives him powers of a sort -- the inability to feel pain, a skull outfitted with metal plates, and bones reinforced with steel rods. When a beating he gives a group of thugs (only slightly less vicious than the one he takes) is captured on a cell phone video and posted to YouTube, he becomes an overnight sensation -- kind of a hybrid of Tay Zonday and Capt. Sully: Kick-Ass is both absurd and heroic. But Kick-Ass's exploits also capture the attention of some seriously bad guys, who find ways to make his life hell, and trust me, it gets hellish.

"Kick Ass," the way Mark Millar orginally conceived the idea in the comic, is all about the idea of matching up the fantasy of superheroing against the reality of modern life. To do this, he mashes-up the Spider-Man and Batman mythologies and creates Kick-Ass. Kick-Ass is like Spider-Man because Lizewski is a teenage dork like Peter Parker, and Kick-Ass is like Batman because Lizewski is fighting crime armed with nothing more than his fists and non-lethal gadgetry.

In the comic, Millar has Lizewski beaten to a pulp and nearly killed in his very first crime-fighting attempt. The only way Lizewski has success in his later crime-stopping forays (and it is minimal) is because of the medical Weapon-X-ization he undergoes. In the end, Lizewski finds out that once the surface glamor of celebrity wears off, crime-fighting is a grisly, soul-killing, nightmarish enterprise, and not at all what the comics suggest it is. The comics are what they've always been: fantasy. Lizewski doesn't even get the girl (is, in fact, publicly humiliated by his version of MJ). Crime-fighting, in a word, sucks.

The makers of the film, however, only half-bought into the premise. The celebrity of being a superhero must be cool, but the reality of being a super-hero is ... also really cool? To me, that's a different story than the one that got me enthused, and not a very interesting one.

I won't exhaustively list the ways the comic improves on the movie (I'm already being annoyingly geeky as it is), but I think, overall, the things Vaughn and the writers excised from the comic all had the effect of cutting the heart out of what made the comic so refreshing. From the way they altered the relationship between Lizewski and his dream girl Katie, to the way they changed Big Daddy's back story (played by Nicholas Cage, making some interesting choices, as usual), the decisions seem to have been made with a mind to make "Kick Ass" a more standard superhero movie, to its detriment.

But then again, I'm not sure I can really fault the filmmakers for this impulse. "Watchmen," the last superhero-deconstructionist film released, was made with an overarching reverence for the source comic (with one glaring squidly exception), and its failure made all future comic-book adaptations vulnerable to being second-guessed by thoughtless studio execs for perpetuity. As soon as the 2nd weekend grosses for "Watchmen" came in, the fate of movies like "Kick Ass" was sealed. The almost-was-ness of "Kick Ass" was that earlier failure's first casualty.

A few other notes.

Aaron Johnson, who played Kick-Ass/ Dave Lizewski, was perfectly cast in this and does a great job. Conversely, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, (better known as McLovin') seemed miscast, and was never really believable as the son of a mafia don. His reading of the last line of the film was actually cringe-worthy.

The CG was, at times, very bad. One character who was set on fire looked as if he'd actually just conjured a ghost-fire in a seance. The moment this movie lost me completely can be described in one word, a piece of equipment I won't write here as it's a spoiler. But you'll know what I mean when you see it. And besides what the appearance of that bit of equipment told me about where the movie had decided to go thematically, it was also just badly done from an FX standpoint.

Given everything I've blabbed about above, the idea that I liked 75% of this movie doesn't seem to ring true, but I really was into this movie for a good while. Honest. I'm not even against alterations from quality source material for the good of a film, but when the scene between Kick-Ass and Katie Deauxma in her bedroom did a 180 from the comic and became, in essence, a dream sequence (I really thought the next cut would be to Dave in his own room, waking from a dream), the movie lost me and we never got together again. There was no reason to make that change other than fiscal reasons, and those rarely inform good creative decisions. (And given the sub-20 million box office in its opening weekend, maybe the studio guys should have let Vaughn and Millar hew closer to the original story which was, as I said before, camera ready from the get-go.)

Also: Why no "tunk" joke?! That would have frickin' killed!

Anyway, wish it had been a better film. Maybe I'm being too hard on it - it did a lot of stuff right. Maybe I just need to lay off the source material for film adaptations until after I see a movie. Or maybe I need to see fewer movies with a sister who says things in the middle of a movie like "It kinda got boring, didn't it?". I don't know.

(Just kiddin' S, you're great.)

Amazing Time Lapse of Milky Way

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

Unilluminating Inanities Facts

After an unusually long period of effectiveness the Google/Blogger spam-filters stopped working some months ago. Or maybe the spammers finally figured out whatever trick Google had employed to keep them at bay. Whatever the case, I've been getting a lot of junk spam comments on a lot of my old blog posts of late, but none more than this one, my "Men Who Stare at Goats" review post. Right now it's got 83 comments, all of which appear to be in Japanese. Most have a helpful link to some Japanese adult sites. The spammers are also enjoying commenting on my Asheville post. 23 so far on that one.

Thought I'd share.

Winter is Coming

HBO has officially picked up George RR Martin's "Game of Thrones" for a full 10-episode season.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Winter is, indeed, coming.

HBO has greenlighted highly anticipated fantasy series "Game of Thrones."

The premium network has picked up the project for a first season debut next spring (below is the first released photo from the series). Nine episodes plus the pilot have been ordered. Production will begin in Belfast this June.

From the moment the project was first announced in development, the series based on the George R.R. Martin novels has generated enormous, perhaps unprecedented, online interest for a series at such an early stage.

The sprawling tale set in the mythical land of Westeros tells the story of the noble Stark family who become caught up in high court intrigue when patriarch Eddard (played by Sean Bean) becomes the king's new right-hand man. The four-and-counting books in the series would each be used as one season of the series.

Unlike many fantasy novels, the "Thrones" series largely avoids relying on magical elements and instead goes for brutal realism -- think "Sopranos" with swords. Martin, a former TV writer ("Beauty and the Beast"), writes each chapter as a cliffhanger, which should lend itself well to series translation. David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the series creators.

That image above is the first one released to the public. Bad things have clearly happened there in the snow. Sadly, more bad things will happen soon.

The first episode will air next Spring, which is damn far away, but plenty of time for me to save my pennies and sign up for some pay cable for 10 weeks. I'm telling you folks, if this series is half as good as the first book in this series, people are going to go nuts for this. Can't wait.

In fact, do yourself a favor: click it.

New Car!

The wife and I bought an '07 Prius from a CarMax on Saturday.

We'd been circling and circling the new Honda Insight, test driving it a couple times at different dealerships, but at the end of the day, we just didn't want to eat the depreciation costs that come with a new car. But we weren't exactly thrilling to the idea of a used car. Obvious financial benefits to going used, sure, but not as fun as being the very first owner of a car. So if we did go used, it'd have to be something that would keep us away from the wallet-rapists that dwell in auto-repair garages nationwide for a very long time. The memories of what was done to us to keep the Crown Vic running the last couple years are still fresh in our minds. So with the loan approval set to expire soon, the wife did a little looking on-line and found some newish Priuses with low mileage at a CarMax across town. We went, test drove, and said yes to becoming a two-car household again. Yay!

[And yes, it is a Toyota but no, it is not under recall. Yet. We're not really worried about the acceleration problem: folks who've run the numbers say Toyota drivers have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than experiencing uncontrolled acceleration. Of course it was my good buddy Akio Toyoda who told me that, but he's always been so open and candid with me and really everyone since I've known him, I feel like I can trust it.]

Some fun facts about the new car:
1.) When I drove out to my folks' house to show them the car, we drove 62 miles. Our average mpg on the way over: 57 mpg. A little more than a gallon. Of course the Prius gets amazing mileage when you're essentially coasting downhill, and since my folks appear to be much closer to sea level than I am, I basically just steered over there. It usually averages in the high 40s. So much better than the 15 mpg I got with the Crown Vic.

2.) To put the Prius in park, you press the 'park' button. Those thousands of minutes wasted and untold millions of calories expended to shove a metal stick jutting out of the steering column from one groove to another is now, finally, a thing of the past.

3.) And just when you thought I couldn't get lazier, to turn this thing on and off? Another button. Push-button start folks. Prius understands me. Prius gets how much I hate putting a key in the ignition and turning it.

4.) Reverse camera. When I back up, I see what the back of my car sees. No more backing up over bikes, cats, and toddlers. Also next time I go to the drive-in, I can back up to the screen, put it in reverse, and watch the magic of movies unfold on my dash display! Nevermind the bright white reverse lights or the unceasing beep beep sounds my car will make.

Now these features are by no means new to the automotive world, but they are quite new to me, so I feel like I've stepped into the future of cars. And the gas mileage! Who knew I hated to buy gas this much? But I do. And who needs smug liberal bumper stickers when you drive a Prius? Smug liberal is basically implied. But then again, cost-conscious conservatives also love them some fuel economy. People of all political stripes can get into this thing. Anyway, we're both enjoying the new car.

Also, total digression:


Everytime I go the NYTimes website, in the lower right-hand corner I see this photo and it's really messing with me. Thought I'd share with the group.

The Internet Age's Airbrush Virtuosos Bring You a Megan Fox Time-Lapse

This is pretty amazing. Starting with a blank PhotoShop canvas, this guy, Nico DiMatttia, re-creates a very nearly photo-realistic still of Megan Fox from one of the Transformers movies. It's a time-lapse of the process and it lasts 5 minutes.

One thing I've learned from artists like this is that when you get to a certain level of mastery, skilled artists, especially those who work in paint (real and virtual), are not horrified or discouraged when the image they're creating looks like hell in the early stages. Whenever I work in color and I get my image into the looks-like-hell stage, I'm never really able to bring it out of it. I just need to practice like this guy! Anyway, worth a look (or let it load and just watch the last little bits to see how he finishes it off.)

One question to consider: did Nico choose Megan Fox as his subject for the 7-8 hours it took him to do this because he's a savvy artist and knew Megan would get his YouTube more total views, or did he choose her because he's kind of a cheeseball and the absolute best thing he could think of to spend 7-8 hours drawing in excruciating detail on PhotoShop was Megan Fox? I don't know. We report. You decide.

"Shutter Island" and "A Gate at the Stairs"

I saw "Shutter Island" on Friday.

Sorry. I've told you too much already.







Anyway! I also finished a novel by Lorrie Moore called "A Gate at the Stairs." I don't know much about Ms. Moore beyond what the NY Times Book Review has told me, which is that she's an amazing writer and her last book was published more than ten years ago and ever since critics and literary types have been wringing their hands and drooling over the prospect of the next Lorrie Moore book. So in 2009, "The Gate at the Stairs" appeared and, based on the critical response, it exceeded already high expectations. So I had to pick it up.

The day after I started this book I was having a MSN chat with the owner and operator of the Hinesy.com blog and told him I was reading this book. I gave a brief (and fairly lame) description of the premise -- "A college girl takes a babysitting job" -- and he came back with some quotes from the book (taken from the internet I assume) which, admittedly, made it sound like a pretty bad book. It was pretty funny. But, despite it's young adult genre premise, "Gate" is actually a brilliant, complex and adult novel. And the writing itself, Hinesy's choice quotes aside, is actually one of the best things about it. Warm, legitimately funny, and really really smart.

The plot, roughly, concerns a college freshman in Wisconsin named Tassie. Looking for a job to keep her finances afloat while "studying" (her class-load amounts to a damning comment on the state of higher education -- in addition to wine-tasting and an intro to sufism, there's a class on war movie scores), she takes a job with a restaurant-owner/chef named Sarah Brink who doesn't have children, but is in the final stages of adopting a child. Sure enough, Sarah adopts a mixed-race toddler girl and Tassie comes on as a full-time nanny.

Assuredly bad and tragic things happen, but one of the things I liked best about the book, the thing I'll probably remember most clearly happens late in the novel, when Sarah Brink tells Tassie a story about her past. In as straight-forward a book as this, where there's no grand historical setting to rely on for mood or atmospherics, and there are no otherworldly entities to contend with when the action slows down, Moore's creation of suspense building up to the telling of this story is masterful. And she does it by putting everything into creating real characters who you come to care about and she does it all without the reader feeling the strain of her effort. As much as I'd like to lay out the secret Brink shares with Tassie, (it is devastating and beautifully told), I won't, but I will say it was nice to set the book aside afterward, get some fresh air, and reassure myself that what she'd described hadn't actually happened.

I also liked Moore's quietly scathing depiction of the adoption industry, showing that in many instances it's simply a form of legalized child-buying. After years and years of seeing adoption held up as the regret-free option for women who find themselves pregnant, it was interesting to have an adoption presented that was as emotionally damaging to the mother as the anti-choice people say abortions always are. That is not to say Moore paints the adoption process as inherently traumatic or bad, but I think she takes pains to show it as it is: an imperfect system that often seems to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

Anyway, I'm on a good-book roll with this and "2666" just before it.

Here's the one I'm into now:


It's hardcore fantasy. Not normally what I'd pick up on my own without some strong word of mouth, but the New Yorker told me that it's one of the best fantasy books written so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm 50 pages into this one, and I'm not sure my good book readin' roll's going to continue. Time will tell and I'll let you know.

2666

I finished reading "2666" this morning. The wife went to the Capitol Building this morning to lobby on behalf of Planned Parenthood and because we are a one-car household now (we sold the Crown Victoria a couple of weeks ago) and she had to be in downtown Atlanta early, I got dropped off at Panera at 7AM this morning. Two solid hours of reading time. So I lasered in, strapped on some headphones, pressed play on my "Prestige" soundtrack playlist and got to scraping paper with corneas.

"2666" is the last novel written by a man named Roberto Bolano. When he finished it, he was not well-known in the English-speaking world, but after he died and his translations started percolating through the literary world, his fame grew and he's now considered one of the best writers of the last 50 years. If I feel a vague sadness Bolano's not alive to enjoy this justly earned attention or, more selfishly, to talk more about this and his other books, then I can't imagine what his loss must be like for the critics and fellow artists who recognize without question how important Bolano is. Reading "2666" gives one the sense that a writer of Dosteovsky's stature managed to come in and go out of this world without anyone being the wiser. At least that is the sense I have less than 24 hours out after finishing it.

I don't know what I want to say about it. Much of the action is set in a Mexican border town called Santa Theresa, a stand-in for La Cuidad de Juarez, one of the most dangerous places on earth. Juarez is primarily dangerous because of the warring drug cartels. The murder rate in the city is unimaginably high. But the sense of menace in Bolano's Juarez stand-in, Santa Theresa, is of a completely different nature, and the dread he infuses his fictional city with makes it unlike anything I've encountered in my limited reading. He makes it a legitimately scary place. Maybe to some small degree the Venice of McEwan's "In the Company of Strangers" is comparable, but that book is small and its effects limited, an hors d'œuvre to "2666"'s 9-course meal.

Much of that menace comes from what's going on in Santa Theresa. Women are being murdered. More than a hundred at least and all by the same killer or killers. In one of the five books that comprise the novel, the murders are the focus. So much so that they almost become... not a character but a fixture -- a certainty of that world so woven into the background that the constancy of the killings becomes almost darkly soothing, and when the murders temporarily stop the reader is unsettled. Each crime scene is explicated with the cold finality of police reports. The sadistic, savage brutality done to their bodies before and after the women expired is listed with that cruel phrasing common to documents of that kind. And because Bolano details the crime scene of every single murder so exhaustively -- and I didn't count but there must have been a hundred -- you can almost feel the threat of violence, particularly violence against women, hanging in the air. And if your faith in the goodness of man feels significantly degraded after finishing this book, I think Bolano's intention's been achieved. But you don't begrudge him because he's done it so masterfully. And also because you can't argue the point.

I just wrote yesterday that I was getting myself into trouble by writing long entries, thinking they all have to be long, and make some kind of point, and here I go writing and writing and eating up all of this evening time, and so far none of it's coming to anything, but I need to see if I can say a little of what I want to say about this book.

The first of the five books is about a group of literary scholars who've all become expert in the critical studies of one author: a reclusive German named Benno von Archimboldi. The second book follows a journalist in Santa Theresa who's covering a boxing match in the city, the third a professor n the city who meets with the scholars (maybe switch the last two), the fourth the murders, and the fifth is a short biography of the author Archimboldi, the writer the four scholars never locate though they search their whole lives.

There are moments during the fourth book (or "Parts" as they're called) where the thought crosses the mind that the author almost no one's seen might be the one killing these women. This idle wondering loses some of its potency as the numbers of dead women increase and then increase some more and we come to see that no one man, particularly a tall old white man who speaks only German, could do all of this killing in Mexico and not be caught after the second body's discovered. But as the fifth part unwinds, the biography of Archimboldi, the thought sneaks back in at certain points before drifting out of feasibility again, and then he shocks you by producing a legitimate connection between the old German writer and the killings in Santa Theresa and you realize that he's pulled it all off somehow. It's been a highwire act for hundreds of pages and he's made it work without our even realizing.

But really the whole book is like this. He's got this thing going where he gets the reader established into narrative patterns -- whether its the murders or the patterns of behavior the literary scholars fall into -- and the patterns lull the reader into a kind of boredom that's not really boredom. And with the reader safely lulled, Bolano's able to subtly suggest and hint at things that may or may not be relevant to the plot so that some of the same absent, purposeless thought patterns that characterize our way of thinking in everyday life are almost forcibly replicated by Bolano and confined inside the world of the story. So that while reading the reader is thinking in the same way about the events of the story as one of the characters in the novel might be. (Or maybe this is just something all great literature does or can do. Not sure.) This lulling also allows the author to drop allusions and clues to events detailed more fully later in the novel so subtly that as the reader presses forward, the story resonates without it being fully clear why it's resonating. It's almost as though Bolano is throughout this novel implanting a feeling of deja vu designed to blossom with visceral force 200 pages later.

There's more to write but I've gone on and on as it is. A fascinating, brilliant book and one I think will get better with time and re-reading.

Back from the Dead and, Apropo of Nothing, eBook Pricing!

I had a whole post going about what's been going on for most of the month of January (and the last week of December), but then I started to take too long to make some obscure point and that one's just not getting published.

So the long absence has been down to a few things. Primarily some surgeries in the family, one planned and one not so much. Everyone's fine now, but as neither went off cleanly, it was harrowing for a few weeks there.

I've also attempted to revive some good habits, and start some new ones. Writing regularly being the former, and regular physical activity the latter. Mixed results for both, but the time required for both eats into blog time.

So as I don't like this thing to be a red frog, I've decided I should blog more often, but I've also decided that I shouldn't have to think each post, or even every third post has to be well-written or thought out or even very interesting to put up on here. (I can hear some of you asking how that's different in any way than what's come before and, man, that stings.) If 'good enough' is the new 'great', 'not that good' is the new 'good enough'. Right?

Anyway, onto the aforementioned 'not that good'.

So for Christmas my mom got one of the new e-book readers. The Sony Reader. It's pretty good. She had Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs" loaded up on there, which helps, and reading through the first pages of that went fine. The device is intuitive and simple. The surface technology, the way the user interfaces with the machine, doesn't appear to have changed that much since they first came out but I think it has wider-ranging capabilities now than it used to. The sorts of files it can display for example. But it's lighter than a heavy book and, like my mom said, it's easier to find a comfortable position to read in when all you have to worry about is this little screen. So definite advantages.

Leaving aside for a moment whether these things will kill paper-based books, or even whether it's okay if they do, what about the price per ebook? The consumer-friendly price that Amazon set back when they introduced the Kindle was $9.99 for most new bestsellers, much less for classics (which are often free).

That appears to be changing. From the NYTimes:

"In the battle over the pricing of electronic books, publishers appear to have won the first round. The price of many new releases and best sellers is about to go up, to as much as $14.99 from $9.99."

Is a digital file of, say, Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" really worth $14.99? That price is essentially just $10 bucks off the price of an actual, holdable, lendable, throwable hardcover, and usually that discount comes out to a bit less when you consider how deeply some chain bookstores discount the stuff that really sells. To anyone reading who's got an e-reader, is the $14.99 per e-book a show-stopper or is it still fairly reasonable? Does anyone think this could be a feint, a trial balloon from the publisher and e-tailers to see how far buyers will go to load up their e-readers?

So how's the 'not that good' posting strategy going so far?

Cat v Dog, Winner: Dog. Cat and Robot v Dog? Winner: Cat and Robot.

This is NOT a cat video blog. It is mostly a dead blog, but it is most assuredly NOT a cat video blog.

But here is a great cat video.

Wherein This Blogger Meets Stephen King

To get a blue wristband, the wristband that guarantees your book gets signed, we had to send two emails at midnight on November 5th. Before the wife and I slept, she drafted two emails on two different Blackberries from two different email accounts. The alarm was set for 11:58 PM. Two minutes later, she pressed the 'Send' button on both, and we both went back to sleep. The next day we got confirmation: on Friday the 13th, we would see Stephen King. And he would sign our books.

The day arrives. I leave work an hour early and drive south to the Barnes & Noble in Buckhead.

The bookstore's in a strip mall, and when I get there the line has already wound its way from the double doors of the Barnes & Noble to the grocery store next door. I go inside, buy my copy of "Under the Dome", Mr. King's latest work, give my name to the man at the table, receive my blue wristband, and get in line outside. I don't have to wait but a couple minutes before the line moves inside.

We wait. The wife and I talk. Seven o'clock, the scheduled start for the signing comes and goes. I feel anxious. I still don't know what to say, if anything. How many hundreds of tall 32-year old dorks have gushed to King at book signings? Should I say something painfully earnest and instantly regretted, like "You're the reason I became a writer"? I wince at the thought. Why should he get the blame for that? I'm still considering when a cheer goes up in the children's section. The author has arrived. An excited murmur runs up the line; people who were sitting, now stand. The show is getting on the road.

The line is long but moves quickly, leading us through the sections of the bookstore few visit: True Crime, Sports, Car Maintenence. And with every bookshelf we pass, we see more of the set-up they've created for the author. A three-sided black curtain has been set at the top of a short set of stairs, with a big wooden table and padded chair placed inside the enclosure for the author working the pen. And then, as I make the turn around the Occult shelf, I see the man himself.

Gray and thin and bent over the book he's signing, Stephen King and I are officially in the same space. For the past 20+ years, I've watched him age and change with each new author photo, but here I am, seeing him with my own eyes. It is a strange experience. Seeing him there, the long face, the hair that will not thin or recede, the omnipresent eyeglasses, I feel I already know him, the way I'd feel if I saw someone I went to school with, and as I think this I am struck once again by the fundamental bizarreness of fame, the way it creates the illusion of a meaningful two-way relationship where no relationship exists at all. As evidence of this oddness: much of this post.

We get close. Getty Images is there to take some photos. Below is King posing with his novel (the 3rd longest of his career) for the Getty photographer. A short time after, I see him raise his arms to chest height and rotate his torso first right and then left in a stretch, settling in, limbering up.

The handlers of this event, some Barnes and Noble folks and some folks undoubtedly hired by the publisher, are the event's greasemen: they keep stuff moving. Requests for photos are knocked down pitilessly. Loquacious signees are subtly edged from the stage. This is a signing, they say with their stern faces and all-business body language, not a chance for you freaks to commune with your personal hero. Which is fine. We are, in this case, beggars, and thus cannot be choosers. King rarely does tours anymore, and never visits the Deep South, so we're all glad to take whatever's given.

We are next. I hand mine and my wife's books to the man in the suit and glasses and tell him, "This is my wife's book, and this is mine. He can sign both and she'll take a picture?" The man in the suit and glasses frowns and shakes his head. I can't quite hear what he says, but he's clearly not thrilled with my brazen and outrageous plan. All I know is I'm getting a picture of this, whether it stresses this guy out or not. The man in suit and glasses hands my books to the woman designated to open books and slide them over to King to be signed, but there's a fan still standing at the table, saying something to King or just watching him sign her books, I don't know, and then he's signing Peggy's book and the fan is still there.

The fan moves away finally and I step to the table. Stephen King is now signing my book.

Shit, say something, I think. He's almost done! I can't let this chance go by without saying a single thing, I'll be kicking myself for years. Literally kicking myself. I'll swing into black depressions whenever my mind chances upon the memory. He's done signing.

"So what should I read next?" I ask. "You got me into 'Edgar Sawtelle' and 'The Ruins', both of which were great, so what should I get into next?"

King closes my book, slides it over to the person designated to hand signed books to their owners, and sits back in his chair. "Ah," he says, mulling. King reads a lot, 80 books a year on average, many of them review copies of books yet to be published, sent to him by editors looking to get a blurb, so I imagine him trying to think of a book out now. He can't think of one. Instead, he says, "There's a book coming out next summer called 'The Bastard', by--" the author's name I didn't quite make out, but it sounded a bit like James Crowley, whose novel "Little,Big" I just finished and frickin loved.

"All right," I say. "I'll read that! Thanks!" He nods, puts pen to paper to sign the next book, I take the signed novels from the nice lady and head back down the stairs.

I've been to lots of book signings but this was the first and likely the only signing where I got to meet someone who's had a real appreciable influence on me. Meeting the writers of Sesame Street or Fred Rodgers himself (RIP) might be the few equivalents. I loved his books as a kid, and though my feelings about his work now are a bit more reserved than they once were, he's one of the few writers who made the transition with me from adolescence into adulthood. He's still good and worth reading and, I think for some books, re-reading. And more than just making scaring people with writing seem like the best possible job on earth to a kid who liked books and movies more than he liked being a kid in middle-school, his books helped shape my worldview. Anyone familiar with King books, or even the film adaptations of his books, knows that certain themes pop up again and again in his stories and, reading him as a kid, I soaked it all up without question: the military is untrustworthy, religious zealots are evil but wrap themselves up in 'good', life can end suddenly and violently and unfairly, etc. I still believe those things, so meeting the guy who had a hand in putting those ideas in my head so many years ago was a big deal for me. I'm glad he was a nice guy, didn't blow me off, and that he appears to be, more or less, exactly as he seems in his conversational notes to his readers and in his columns in Entertainment Weekly: friendly, human, engaged and serious about what he does, and always ready to recommend a book.

Mini-Review of "Men Who Stare at Goats", "Kick-Ass" Trailer's Up, New Blog to Check Out

Three things, and three things real quick.

1.) "The Men Who Stare at Goats". Checked this out on Sunday night after an exhausting leaf blowing/raking session that afternoon. Not terribly impressed. I knew right off the bat it wasn't going to be as good as it appeared in the first trailer I saw for it (before the studio decided to start up with the ridiculous "No Goats, no Glory" ad campaign) because Ewan McGregor's voice-over is the first thing I heard. His voice-over comes on a lot, and Ewan struggling to keep an "American" accent consistent for an hour and a half is distracting and usually, not necessary to the film. The film starts strongly, but by the end, just runs out of juice. Also, I experienced one of the most temporally disorienting moments I've had coming out of a movie. I swore the movie had been at least 2 hours and some odd number of minutes, but a quick look at the clock on the drive home and I realized it had only been an hour and a half long. Ninety-four minutes to be exact, and I'm sure that's counting the credits. I'm going to chalk that up to the episodic and wandering quality of the movie. It felt like a literal adaptation of a good magazine piece. It just didn't work. I think I'd also put some of the blame on the director. According to Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke, Grant Heslov is one of Clooney's producing buddies. Producers shouldn't direct. When they do, you get this movie or one like the execrable "American Sweethearts."

2.) Kick-Ass trailer. This went up yesterday. Check it out here. Less good than I'd hoped, but I'm thinking I'll like the full trailer more. The comic (and what I'm hearing is the film is a pretty close adaptation of the comic) is real and dark and original. This teaser trailer only touches on some of the originality of Mark Millar's idea, but not much at all on the real or the dark. My guess is they'll show more of the arc of the film, including why this comic was so harrowing and a bit controversial.

3.) Finally, everybody needs to check out friend o' the blog Nathan Hines' new blog, located at hinesy.com. Nathan, as some of you may know, is an aspiring writer and business mogul who lives in Taiwan with his wife and two daughters. So, in addition to giving you the occasional taste of life in Taiwan (like the photo of a dude carrying his Schnauzer in a baby sling), he writes candidly about some of the conflicts one has to deal with when pursuing personal career goals while also being responsible to one's family. It's well-written and a good read, and worth checking in on.

Okay, and that's it.

A Brief Dispatch from the World of Fantasy Literature

George R.R. Martin, arguably the best fantasy writer working today, has written four books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, the first of which, "A Game of Thrones", is already a classic of the genre. The thing that makes these books different from other similarly oriented fantasy novels, is that backroom politics and palace intrigue are the novels' focus. In the story, motivated players from all over the kingdom conspire and scheme, backstab allies and create unlikely alliances ("some friends become enemies, some enemies become friends") all to better their odds of toppling the current king and taking the throne for themselves. The good guys are complex but unapologetically good, and the bad guys are so goddamn evil you gnash your teeth when they appear in the story and you cheer when they get the sword in the ribs, or whatever death Martin's cooked up for them. Yeah, it's that kind of book. Which is not to say it's broad or simply written. The plotting Martin does here is as elaborate as you'll find anywhere, but he carries it off and doesn't make you see the difficulty in what he's done. This becomes less true as the books go on, but the first is a classic for a reason. And the end of the book, well -- it's memorable. I strongly recommend the book.

So, now that the glorious light that was the "Lord of the Rings" movies has begun to dim in the minds of geeks everywhere, and the next Guillermo Del Toro-directed Tolkein adaptations are still a couple years away, what fantasy awesomeness will arise to fill the gap?

Enter HBO's "Game of Thrones", filming in Ireland right now (very close to where DGG's "Your Highness" is filming, incidentally.) HBO's putting a lot of cash into the pilot, and word is they're likely to pick it up for a full first season. David Benioff is co-running the show, which is encouraging -- I liked the "25th Hour" and apparently his latest novel, "City of Thieves" was reviewed very favorably, so I think the likelihood of a faithful, well-adapted show is pretty good.

But the casting is where they've already gone so clearly right. The Daily Beast published an article about the growing geek interest in the project, and thrfeed.com put together an excellent page with all the characters accompanied by the photos of the actors portraying them. They nailed pretty much everyone. Sean Bean will play the patriarch, Eddard Stark, the reluctant noble from the northlands who's asked to travel to the capital city and serve as the king's consigliere. And then there's Peter Dinklage, who's been given the role of the crafty dwarf, Tyrion, the best character in the series. It's a pretty exciting cast and I can't wait for this to air.

Martin's been toiling away on the fifth book but, sadly, there's no light at the end of that tunnel -- he's been working on it for quite a long time, and now he's on-set in Ireland watching the filming, which probably means he's not working too hard on finishing the monstrosity he's created. I can hardly blame him. I'd rather watch great actors re-create scenes from my book than write new scenes too. Writing's hard.

Anyway, thought I'd give the uninitiated a glimpse of what geeks are going to be most excited about next.

The Comic Book Artist's Process

So many stories to tell, so little time. Especially for the graphic novelist.

Comic book writer and artist Doug TenNapel is the focus of a short video about his process of making comics. In it he talks a bit about how the time allotted to us -- provided we're lucky enough to live all 75 years of the average US citizen's life span -- is far too short to make all the art we aspire to make, whether it's comics, movies, music, books or what have you. Which feels especially true to a serial procrastinator like myself. To speed himself up so he can put more of what's in his head on paper, he's made some adjustments, like inking 4 pages everyday, which is a hell of a lot, even for fast inkers. This does exact a toll on the quality of the inks, I would say, but he gets more done. He does also say he's more interested in telling a story than in making the image perfect, which results in a few examples of hurried-looking brushwork, at least in his 2005 Image comic, "Tommysaurus Rex", but certainly many more pages are done well than not.

There's also some interesting tidbits on brushwork, types of ink, and a few time lapses of TenNapel inking panels. I found it all pretty interesting.

"Avatar" Trailer Hits

The new full "Avatar" trailer is up. I'm both more heartened by the fuller glimpse and a bit more disappointed. I'm heartened because I can see now that Cameron hasn't gone off the deep end and made "The Phantom Menace." The conventions of the sub-genre Cameron's staked out appear to have been followed closely, which should keep him out of abysmal failure territory. Which is also why I'm more disappointed than I was after just seeing the teaser. Not to be the cynic who's always looking for which movie the new movie most rips off, but, based on on this trailer, "Avatar" seems like a sci-fi remake of "Dances With Wolves."

The two movies aren't just similar because they both tell the story of a guy who sees how the natives he's supposed to fear/hate are not scary/evil, finds their simple way of life superior to his own and decides to protect it, it's similar because it appears to grab a lot more from Costner's movie than just the throughline. The loss or near-loss of a leg in service to the US Military (John Dunbar nearly loses his, but gets to keep his because of his heroic/suicidal diversion ride run - the paraplegic hero of this movie will have the use of his legs returned to him once he's proven himself in battle), the immersion into their primitive culture, the slow disillusionment with his own side, the fraught love story with the native girl, so on and so forth. That's a fine story, and Jim Cameron sure could have picked some worse plots to try out. But we've all seen it. "Dances" was kind of hokey in its way, but also really well done. So what about "Avatar" is going to improve on the original story? Cameron wrote it, so we know it's not going to be the snappy dialogue. The 3-D? The CG and motion-capture? Does anyone get excited about non-Pixar CG anymore?

Only the full movie will tell the tale. I hope Cameron makes me a believer.

The End of Disaster Movies or "California's going down!"

Sometimes a movie can single-handedly kill an entire sub-genre. It can tackle it and subvert the conventions so slyly that the genre either has to change significantly or die. Or, in an attempt to make the "be-all-end-all" of a given sub-genre, a film can destroy that sub-genre.

Some comic geeks used to wonder if 'Watchmen' might be one of the former, rendering all future superhero movies obsolete or irrelevant. That didn't happen, but with "Scream" and the slasher movie sub-genre, it did. Because that film held up so many slasher-movie conventions as objects of mockery, there now exists a clear line demarcating all slasher movies that came before "Scream", and all of those after. A horror fan coming out of that film was justified in asking how anyone would make a slasher movie after 'Scream'. (Hollywood muddled through and out of this creative morass, the so-called "torture-porn" sub-genre became dominant).

All of that was the very long way around to say I think Roland Emmerich's "2012" will be the end of disaster movies for a long time, if not ever. And not because it's so subversive or because Emmerich clearly has so brilliantly wrung all the emotion there is to be wrung from disaster movies, but because he's obviously filmed, unintentionally, a parody of the disaster movie. Watch this 5-minute clip and tell me I'm wrong. Pure silliness.

All of that said, I'll be seeing this. If the disaster movie's going down, I'll be in the front row. I'm going to miss you man.

YouTube Compilation!

Sorry I've been more than slack updating this thing. In what I hope to be the start of a fresh spate of new blog entries, here is a compilation of YouTube awesomeness over the years. It's damn fun to watch. So enjoy.

Josh Olson Will Not Read Your Screenplay

Josh Olson, who adapted "A History of Violence" for the movies, got burned in one of those "Will you read my screenplay?" interactions that seem to happen a lot in Los Angeles. Mr. Olson has written a response to all other would-be Josh Olson-approachers, entitled, "No, I Will Not Read Your Fucking Screenplay." I like well-written and angry screeds, so if you like those too, go ahead and give a click and a read. I don't agree with everything he says in here, a lot of it's pretty darn harsh, but from the sound of it, he was asked for honesty, he was honest, and how he's the bad guy and he's rightfully pissed about it.

But here's the main paragraph for the time-challenged, where Olson describes how some non-writers, particularly film-industry aspirants, view writers and writing:

"Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter."

And then this nugget:

"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)"

(Italics mine.)

A 4-Minute Time Lapse Movie That Will Keep You Unproductive for At Least Another 4 Minutes

Saw this over on Andrew Sullivan's blog and he's right, it's hypnotic. The music, not so much. But it's fascinating to take in that trip in such a short amount of time.

It's amazing to think that a journey that was once a 50-50 life or death gamble that took month after arduous month (I know this because I used to play 'Oregon Trail'), can now be a.) done in a few days of driving (or 31 hours if you're nasty), or b.) depicted in its entirety in a 4-minute Web movie.

Lewis and Clarke's expedition ended 203 years ago. If they were able to see this video, they would obviously have ten varieties of puppies and then kill themselves as fast as their fingers could pull the triggers on their musket-guns. Two-hundred years in the future, which facet of our descendants' accepted workaday world would most deliciously blow their ancestors primitive early 21st century minds?

2009 Decatur Book Festival

The wife and I went to the 2009 Decatur Book Festival on Saturday (for my entry about the 2006 Decatur Book Festival, click here). The Great Recession is making pretty much everything a little bit less good, and Georgia's biggest annual Book Festival did not escape the economic carnage unscathed. More on that later.

Though the Decatur Book Festival is a big event, with talks and panels and hours upon hours of emerging writers reading their work, for me the Festival consists of 3 things:

1.) The Antiquarian Book Fair.
2.) The tents.
3.) The big names.

1.) The Antiquarian Book Fair section of the festival, held each year in one of the ballrooms at the Holiday Inn in downtown Decatur, is a collection of booksellers from around the southeast who deal in rare books, some of which are signed by the authors of said rare books. There were fewer participants this year than in years past, which meant fewer booksellers selling rare, first edition novels (which is my thing). Worse than the decrease in the variety of books was the increase in their price. On a lot of 1st editions, prices had jumped 25% or more over last year for no apparent reason. There may be some complicated supply and demand forces at work here, but since the only thing I'm worse at than blogging is economics, I'll leave that for others to ponder. But the practical result of these unreasonable mark-ups was that I left the Holiday Inn empty-handed.

2.) The tents, which are open to anyone who can lay out the cash for the space, are the heart of the Festival. Which probably means the Book Festival needs triple-bypass surgery. The self-published cranks who populate the majority of these tents are pretty good at putting me in a bad mood, so we didn't spend much time there. McSweeney's, whose tent was a bright spot in the tent-sea last year with stacks and stacks of colorful and creatively-produced books for sale, had a tent again this year, though with many fewer books for sale, none of which tempted me to give Dave Eggers any cash. (The book I bought from them last year, "Arkansas", is still sitting on my shelf, unread. Soon!)

3.) There were a couple big name authors at the Festival this year, Charlaine Harris, author of the "True Blood" mystery series, being arguably the biggest (she was on-loan from DragonCon). But for me, there was only one writer visiting the Festival this year: Lee Child, creator of Jack Reacher. (He's the one in the photo who doesn't look like he's trying to creep his way into a photograph being taken of someone else.)

For a brief refresher on Reacher, click here for an old Inanities post.

In person, Child (his real name is Jim Grant) is tallish and looks in person exactly how he looks in photographs. His event was held in a church, so we all sat on cushioned pews while he spoke about how thrillers were the first genre, the best genre, and literary writers and readers shouldn't disrespect it. His talk was entertaining and low-key. He gave the impression of being not terribly overexercised about the difficulties of writing, and of viewing the process of writing a novel as being as much a commercial endeavor as a creative one. There are writers out there one suspects of being crassly market-minded, but would never cop to it in public, so it's vaguely unpleasant to hear this outlook admitted to so blithely. Guys like Clive Cussler and James Patterson, thriller writers who wrote very popular novels early in their careers, view their own books now as so much product. They subscribe to this view so completely that they're quite open about the inclusion of their name on a book's cover being more of a stamp of approval than a proclamation of authorship. Child has never done this, but gauging by his talk this weekend, it's conceivable he might one day decide to take this route. I went into the event thinking thrillers had, perhaps, been unjustly singled out as lesser than so-called "literary" books, but left thinking the thriller genre's bad reputation is likely deserved.

Outside, under the signing tent as he autographed my three Reacher books, I thanked him for writing about tall people. He laughed and said, "Yes, we're a much maligned minority. Not able to find clothes that fit, always having to bend down to look in mirrors." Seemed like a nice guy. And while some writers (often the "literary" ones) have stipulations at signing events that they will only sign multiple books if the new hardcover book is included among them (Ford), or will only sign one book and it has to be the new book (John Irving), Child told the crowd that he would sign everyone's books until there were no more books to sign.

All in all, not a bad year for the Decatur Book Festival. I hope the 2010 Decatur Book Festival occurs under far better economic circumstances.