Seeing Through Things

So I went and saw the 3D re-release of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast earlier this week. Mostly it was for the nostalgic novelty of it; the film was the first one I had ever seen at a theatre, at age 5 (I was told that I was initially too terrified to go in the big, dark room full of loud noises at first), and it would be amusing to see the film again, twenty years on. I didn’t expect the experience to be much different from when I watched the film ad-nausem during my childhood (I think I was 12 the last time I saw it), but a few new things emerged from this new viewing.

To begin with, the movie is a bit more insubstantial than I remembered it. It’s a simpler story than I remembered it being when I was a kid, maybe because children can’t tell the difference between a simple story and a complex one as easily as adults can, but it was still a revelation I didn’t see coming. I’m not sure why I suddenly noticed this; maybe it’s because the pacing felt more brisk now than it did then (or maybe it’s because, since I can practically recite the film line for line, my brain kept jumping ahead). Movies have been getting longer than they were twenty years ago, and they feel the need to have more complicated plots. Take, for instance, a more contemporary Disney film, Tangled.

They still have a long way to go.

Sure, it was a Dreamworks film in denial, but the plot had meat. If you’re not familiar with it, this witch named Lady Gothel kidnaps Rapunzel there because her long hair has the power of eternal youth. She keeps Rapunzel in her big tower and has convinced her that she’s her mother and that she’s kept in the tower so that bad people don’t exploit her magic hair, but she’s curious about this event that occurs every year on her birthday where somewhere off in the distance, thousands of flying lanterns are released into the sky. Lady Gothel probably could have easily taken care of this by telling Rapunzel that she was born on a different day, and those lanterns are for an unrelated event, but whatever.

The story mostly concerns her escaping from her tower and going off into the world and seeing it’s not as bad and dangerous as her “mother” claimed. The movie’s a lot more fun if you think that Rapunzel has deep behavioural problems; she’s lived in a tower for her whole life and passes the time by singing, dancing, and painting. She’s so incredibly naïve, she doesn’t even wear shoes at any point in the movie. She reacts to almost every problem she faces in the world by singing at it.

Good thing they happened to stumble upon a tavern where everyone has the same musical psychosis.

Anyway, after they have a few adventures and Rapunzel gets to go to the lantern ceremony, Lady Gothel catches her and puts her back in the tower, not unreasonably assuming that she’s too much of a flake to see much of a problem with this. This leads, though to my favourite scene in the whole movie. Possible spoilers ahead:

Rapunzel had encoded a repeating symbol from latent memories in her paintings, and when she sees them, she has a sudden flashback about her real parents, which is so startling it literally knocks her over. She does not react to this sudden epiphany by singing about it, as one might expect, but by confronting this insane kidnapper who’s been pretending to be her mother, in a case of reverse Stockholm syndrome:

Though to be perfectly frank, "Did I mumble?" is not the best badass one-liner they could have come up with.

This made her emerge to me quite suddenly as a character, to show that kind of spontaneous courage that didn’t feel so much like it came out of nowhere, but that it was held down, and finally had a way to burst out, even to Rapunzel’s own shock.

Though it was dramatic and startling, it was also quite overt. Beauty and the Beast, and probably most animated films at that time, didn’t have quite such explosive moments, which is probably why the movie felt more insubstantial by comparison. The story and characterization was much more basic, more whimsical; Belle accepts the whole “enchanted castle” thing pretty quickly, between having girl talk with her wardrobe, and smiling and waving her arms during the “Be Our Guest” number. It must be the way fairy tale characters work; they must not take their fanciful situation too seriously, or else their walk in life is going to be a lot harder. Or maybe it’s a French thing.

Not to say Beauty and the Beast is a lesser film because of this; far from it. This kind of plot pacing and characterization make the film more timeless, it was more about the emotion between the characters than just hurling them on a bunch of adventures, and it easily makes for a stronger story. This is something that Disney really should relearn in a big hurry (they’ve had a problem with quickly dated films before; remember 1988′s Oliver & Company?)

In fact, another new thing I saw in the film upon this new viewing, something that I hadn’t noticed when seeing it repeatedly during my childhood, gave me a similar epiphany that Rapunzel had. It was a small detail with the Beast’s character design that really jumped out at me when I saw it again:

This detail may be hard to notice at first, especially because the entire point of his character is that he’s initially terrifying and intimidating, and people want to flee from him. It also may be hard to keep in mind, since we in the audience know already, that the characters in the movie have no reason to assume that the Beast was ever human before; they come across him in the forest, didn’t know anything about him, and it’s just natural to assume he was always like this.

Belle assumes this too, until she sees something:

This shredded portrait in the forbidden west wing is unrecognizable, except for the eyes. Belle looks closely at them, and they plant a curious idea in her mind… one that’s interrupted by the Beast storming in and driving her out into the woods, where this happens:

You may notice a difference between these two creatures. They’re both animalistic in appearance, but the one on the left attacked Belle out of opportunity; she was helpless in the woods, and probably delicious. The “animal” on the right came to her rescue, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. But how could you tell that just by looking at this still frame?

This is right around the point of the movie where Belle and the Beast start to come around about each other, and start to forge their relationship. Belle might not have entertained the idea at first, but she’s seen something in the Beast that suggests there’s more to him than what’s initially obvious.

“The eyes are the windows to the soul” is not something I was familiar with as a kid, but now that I’m older and wiser, it’s a sudden, vital detail about the Beast’s character that really helps show what he’s about. Belle recognized the eyes from the portraits as the Beast’s eyes, which suggested to her that he may not have always been a monster. Even with the enchantress’ punishment, her transformation wasn’t total: the Beast’s soul was spared.

Even at the end when he turns back, Belle has a hard time accepting it; she loved the Beast, who’s this weird guy that’s suddenly standing in his place? But she sees its him when she sees those same blue eyes; the same ones he had as a selfish prince, as a loathsome monster, and now as a noble prince. One must wonder, if the movie didn’t work out and she didn’t fall in love with him (and he didn’t get stabbed to death), would the Beast’s eyes have turned yellow or red or some other more animalistic colour, to see he was beyond help?

These are the things I see in movies and stories these days now, I guess. I’m better at reading between the lines and seeing what can’t be seen in a movie. This may be why I enjoy them more than one might expect, and also why there’s certain movies that I just can’t see the value in. I don’t care a whole lot for pointless “explosion” movies like, say, Transformers or 2012, something that many of my friends find strange, possibly even snobby. But I don’t look at a movie, I look through it, and I can see there’s nothing but a lot of hot air behind that Los Angeles-sized inferno.

How dare I be so snobbish?

Maybe that’s why Beauty and the Beast and other older films in Disney’s library have worked better than the animated films being made nowadays. An animated movie used to be for “all ages” because they were made with stories that kids could relate to, but there were little touches just past the screen that an adult, or even a pretty bright kid, could spot and get a sense of emotional fulfillment out of. Roger Ebert theorizes that these kind of family movies are enjoyable for older audiences because they can appreciate the technical and creative skill that went into it, that if a film is robust enough, everyone can enjoy it.

These days, in an animated film environment plagued by Dreamworks, they’re making movies “for kids and adults”. That doesn’t sound much different; but here’s how they do that: they make a movie with a premise that a child would probably be entertained by (like, say, a panda that wants to learn kung fu) and then throw stuff in it that would appeal to the adults (like, say, getting Jack Black to voice the panda). This isn’t stuff that appeals to everyone simultaneously; it’s just they put things in the movie that would sail over the kid’s heads, and meanwhile, the adults are left with a childish movie where Jack Black occasionally warns us to “feel the thunder.” They could make a movie with themes, characters and concepts that appeal to everyone at once (and they did, with How to Train Your Dragon), but it’s a lot easier to just write a kid’s film and hide adult stuff in it. They’re both insulting the intelligence of children, and leaving us with an innocuous kid’s film that occasionally references something we’d rather be watching.

Though I find it hard to believe that they expected anyone at all to find this entertaining.

The annoying thing about it is that Disney, and similar studios, rarely decide to change their tactics for critical acclaim and a more permanent place in film history; they change their tactics when they start losing money. The Disney Renaissance of the ’90s rose from a persistently unsuccessful run in the ’70s and ’80s, and when it was on the slip again in the early ’00s, they tried again, and it worked okay at first, but instead of being ambitious, they just decided to copy Dreamworks and Pixar. Imagine that; copying a company that split off because one of your old executives was so butthurt, and another company that you own, but constantly outclasses you. And unfortunately, this seems to be working out for them (probably because now the company is headed by a Pixar exec).

But I have an optimistic feeling that Disney needs time to adjust to the market before they can really re-emerge, to get people excited about the name again, and then really bring the house down. It looks like they’re still in that transitionary phase, between a CG movie about a video game character in 2012, and Frozen, another kick at the Tangled can in 2013 (and its title will probably elicit giggles about that old urban legend about Walt Disney’s frozen body). King of the Elves remains an unknown at the moment (along with a Mickey Mouse feature,) but if any film would be able to rise to traditional 2D glory, it would be that one.

Concept art for King of the Elves



I hope they’re back in prominence soon, though. I like being able to see a movie all the way through to its back wall, and its a lot easier to see through ink and paint than through glossy computer code.

Also, another neat thing about Beauty and the Beast after this revisiting; Tony Jay (the voice of Judge Claude Frollo) was in the movie for two scenes, as an owner of an insane asylum. I completely forgot he was in it, so that was a nice surprise.

The Death of Irony

“Being ironic” is something a lot of people aspire to nowadays, especially if they have a vested interest in popculture. These days, popular culture is a brightly coloured wasteland. You’ve got your Lady Gagas and Justin Biebers, people and things risen to irrational fame because of how “cute” they are, or because their scope of experience is so narrow, they think they’re innovative and shocking. This is nothing new in the past century, and people that feel they know better have reacted in various ways. Some bohemian, like the Beat poets of the ’50s, some idealistically, like the hippies of the 60s, some aggressively, like the punk scene of the 70s.

Going into the 80s and 90s, though, it felt like we were beginning to lose our energy for rebelling against this sort of thing. Every attempt to defy the vapid norm lost its energy along with its practitioners, when they aged, and the world they tried to revolt against hadn’t been much affected.

In that spirit, we started to become more subversive. The grunge mentality was on the rise, a fashion and lifestyle that celebrated indifference. Just as hair-ruffling, with less work. This soon wasn’t enough, and the hipster mentality followed, which was like the grunge look with one more turn of the screw. Sarcasm and irony replaced the activism and aggression of past counterculture movements; people wearing Care Bears shirts because men that age shouldn’t wear that sort of shirt, deeply analyzing any music or media you come across when people of the mainstream are quite happy to consume anything poured in the trough for them, and a general distrust and distance from too many obsessions, unless it was one that one would think would raise an eyebrow or two to indulge in them.

Be us not proud.

And now, with the advent of the internet and instant communication, this subversive movement may have picked up too much steam. Newer adapters don’t get very invested in why they dress and act the way they do, just be sure to do something. The internet has also given the irony-lover a new playground, Livejournal for those that don’t exert much personal courage, 4chan for those that exert too much.

The face of modern counterculture, disappointingly.

Irony is at the forefront of this latest development of the countercultural attitude. Deliberately hoary, annoying, or meaningless things are sarcastically beatified to lead along those not in on the prank. The renewed success of Rick Astley, Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, the multimillion dollar funny cat pictures empire, never mind why you like it. It’s absurd and trite, let’s celebrate it to repeatedly call attention to it.

The most important part of this attitude, though, is that you never quite let the other party in on the joke. They think your disparate opinions of something are sincere and legitimate, and they will yell themselves hoarse to make you see reason. But who needs reason? “Reason” is a single, obvious perspective. People may seem “reasonable” to tell Rebecca Black to get an eating disorder, but your playing the video at every opportunity (until it was taken down, of course) and enjoying its terribleness, you have much more than “reason”.

I’m concerned, though, that as this mindset becomes more and more subtle and hidden, it will turn back around on itself. The feigned, ironic enjoyment of something will become so massively meticulous, even we will fall for it, and the ironic enjoyment will morph into genuine enjoyment, not incongruous enjoyment. We will convince our detractors, so completely and convincingly, that even we aren’t in on the joke. It hadn’t happened for a while, as there was always a smug grin behind every repeated meme and irrational remark, but now I think we’re there.

What, exactly, happened? This:

You stand in the presence of your betters.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. This is it. This is something that, before it came out, no one would bat an eye at. It would occur, be briefly ridiculed, and brushed aside. My Little Pony has existed for years as an icon of the must puerile features of the 1980s, and was a common source of ridicule towards that era, along with similarly girly, dated cartoons like Rainbow Brite and Jem and the Holograms. It was already Old Meme by the time this happened.

But this was different. The show’s creative director, one Lauren Faust, was aware of the daunting task in front of her. Of it, she said:

“When I took the job, I braced myself for criticism, expecting many people – without even watching the show – to instantly label it girly, stupid, cheap, for babies or an evil corporate commercial. I encourage skeptics like this to watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with an open mind. If I’m doing my job right, I think you’ll be surprised.”

This wasn’t going to be the 80s show, dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint. All involved insisted it was something new. This was an upstart of a reboot being foisted on the world, and the usual sarcastic enthusiasm wouldn’t cut muster. The internet would need to indulge themselves in it. Soak in it. Let it sink into their every pore. This was too good an opportunity to pass up: a 22-minute toy commercial from the 80s, intended for today’s youth? Already the skepticism was trickling in, and it would be business as usual to flummox these naysayers.

But this would take a hell of an effort to slip past them. We had to become entirely enamoured with this thing. We had to obsess with it. We had to express our enthusiasm for this show in everything we did, because it was already causing mass confusion on the 4chan boards. The endless image macros and inside jokes were already starting to pile up, and a fan community was quickly formed. The fans were called “Bronies”, and they were all-inclusive (“Welcome to the Herd”) and yet strangely defensive in their all-inclusiveness (“I’m gonna love and tolerate the shit out of you.”)

The ensuing pony mania was quite a ruckus. Fan pages for it sprang up all over, Bronies spread out far and wide into other forums and sites, and in the midst of all this, something was drowned out. Their fervour for this cartoon was so immense, so thorough, that they eventually forgot it was all a big put-on.

Not a shred of self-consciousness.

Not to pooh-pooh the idea that this show entertains a lot of people, of course, and it has its fans that enjoy it sincerely as authentically enjoyable, independent of its oft-maligned origins. This was conceived by one of the creative forces behind The Powerpuff Girls (another “girl” show that shrewdly targeted a different demographic, albeit more crudely) and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. Hell, I’ve designed my own Pony character and written some Pony fanfiction, but this was mostly out of a morbid curiosity of the show and its fevered fanbase, and an interest in subverting them in my own way.

One of the reasons I write fanfiction is to take something minor and simplistic and attempt to inject some complexity and difficulty into it, to challenge myself and the other fans of it. I’ve also been thinking of writing some scripts for the show and trying out for a position in the studio that animates it, Studio B Productions, because, hey, it’s a popular show. They’ll probably need a lot of animators for it.

But let’s step back, away from the shock value of telling people you adore My Little Pony and say that Rarity is your favourite (though mine is Fluttershy, if you’re curious), and look at the show itself. A lot of Bronies will tell you it’s the most magnificent cartoon to come out in years, but speaking from the standpoint of a professional animator, I can point out a few things.

It’s compositionally uncreative, since scenes often consist of a static shot of a character on the left talking to a character on the right (or over the shoulder, for extra-dramatic moments). The animation is overly bouncy, a hallmark of low-budget Flash animation (along with repeated background characters). The show has its occasional terrific action scene, especially in “Sonic Rainboom”, and I’m impressed with the flexibility of their character builds, but this is hardly Warner Bros-level animation, or even Hanna-Barbera. The episodes are also often erratically paced.

For instance, in the episode “A Dog and Pony Show”, a fan favourite, all that happens in the first act is Rarity and Spike digging for jewels. The second act consists of Rarity being captured by giant, greedy dogs that want the jewels, and the third act consists of them just letting her go because she whined too much. Fans of the show will say Rarity’s whining was a brilliant and unique escape tactic, when really, it’s been a staple of cartoons for years.

Again, no disrespect to the show, I can appreciate what a monumental creative effort it is to make characters as ostensibly silly as magic, multicoloured Ponies be occasionally funny, often entertaining, and definitely fun, but it’s not something to get uptight about when someone calls it “just another kid’s show”; it’s at this point you’ve officially given up being ironic. Bronies will react defensively when you call My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a “fad”. It’s inconceivable to them that this thing that’s suddenly become of great interest to them could ever, and I mean ever, grow tiresome. Never mind that the very definition of a fad is “any form of behavior that develops among a large population and is collectively followed with enthusiasm for some period, generally as a result of the behavior’s being perceived as novel in some way.”  I mean, sure, My Little Pony is a form of behaviour that developed among a large population and is being collectively followed with enthusiasm, generally as a result of it being perceived as novel, but this is different! It’s not like every other thing that became popular through the internet, which is infamous for its stunted attention span, this is ironclad! It might linger as a curiosity, like Rick Astley and LOLcats have, to be sure, but I don’t think this has the energy or clout to become the new zeitgeist of children’s TV.

But this isn’t a rant about My Little Pony and how I don’t “get it”, it’s simply a description of the moment when irony lost its meaning. It used to be something powerful. When making people angry wasn’t effective anymore, we instead made them confused and irritable, playing them like a fiddle rather than just goading a reaction from them. It was a tool we used when we didn’t want to fit into the typical way of things, but we’ve lost, well… the irony of irony. It’s become such an automatic, knee-jerk reaction, we’ve forgotten why we do it, and even that we’re being ironic at all. This is why I try to rebel against these sort of things in my own way: I’m mired in irony, and when it’s the norm, it’s counter-irony that still means something.

Dragons, America, and Remembering That I Have a Blog

Well, this is a strange place for me to wander into all of a sudden. It’s poorly lit and there’s a lot of dust floating around, but the air is cool, and their are comfy chairs to sit in. More dust is kicked up as I plop myself down into one of the big, puffy leather easy chairs, and I find myself looking idly around. I haven’t been here in ages, but it seems… curiously familiar.

As my eyes adjust, and I start to see more familiar sights, then I remember. It hits me like a lightning bolt, and I stand up suddenly, and thrust open the curtains. This is my webspace! My author’s blog! I had forgotten how valuable it was supposed to be to me, but wandering here again after so much has happened, it all comes back in a rush.

Much has changed, and yet it doesn’t seem like much. The animation boom I was expecting is more of a crackle, and for now I’m working at Best Buy to make ends meet. Whiz-Bang Fantastic, my 2007 Nanowrimo debut, is all finished edited and I’m looking in earnest for an agent, I’ve got a story possibly up for publication if I can just pull it together. Much of what has been happening has been behind the scenes, but at least I’ve been allowed room to do these things.

Most prominent to me, though, is my February Idea.

This is the idea for my next Nanowrimo book, in the coming November. It always comes in February, spontaneously. It could be a totally new idea, it could be an unexpected reaction to a phrase someone has said to me, or it could be a half-developed idea that didn’t take form until February rolled around. All I know is, it came to me as a totally new idea, and it’s what I’m going to write in November. It’s probably no coincidence that February and November are nine months apart: the idea forms between now and then, and then I have a one-month labour. But enough tortured metaphors for now.

The one time I didn’t write my February Idea was for Nanowrimo 2009, when I decided to work on a concept I’ve had since 2006. I barely got to the halfway point before I was hopelessly stuck, and the month just ended. I know now to not ignore the February Idea.

An unlikely source of inspiration.

Anyway, this idea came to me initially after having read a certain book, Robert Asprin’s “Dragons Wild“, which I started reading just after a successful Nanowrimo 2010. Not getting into too much detail, it was a book about a dragon, in human form, who has no major obstacles, had everything work out too conveniently for him, and every chapter started with how bloody grand the French Quarter of New Orleans was. I only read it all because there was a sneaky contract killer out to get the main character, and I wanted to see how he would pull off the deed. Even that was a disappointment when the protagonist just beats him up and he leaves, saying that he “lost fair and square”.

I don’t think I’ll read the other two books in this series.

 

This despite their increasingly badass covers.

This book annoyed me so much with its squandered premise that I immediately had an idea of how I would do it. The main character is also a dragon in human form, and like him, he doesn’t know it at first, until a catastrophe strikes. He wakes up with his house inexplicably on fire, and managed to escape with barely a singe. His girlfriend, however, who he had a fight with earlier that night, was not so lucky.

His home insurance pays out, and rather than rebuild, he decides he needs to be as far away from his old life as possible, so he spends the money on a 1969 Plymouth Road Runner to drive from the east to the west coast of America.

Majestic, is it not?

I wanted the sort of car that would have a presence on a highway, like a dreadnought sailing a long, black river. Something distinctly American, able to burn out somebody at the lights, and not something as obvious as a Pontiac GTO or a Chevy Camaro. So he goes across America, encountering several strangers on the way, including himself. This character has yet to be named, but I’ve determined he’s a musician, and he plays a bar or two on his journey.

The title of this story so far is “Manifest Dragon”, sort of a play on “manifest destiny”. I initially thought that Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” was something it bore similarity to: it’s about a soft-spoken but strong man who is a part of something he can’t quite grasp, and travels the length and breadth of America as he discovers many strange people and places that contribute to his, if not understanding, at least his faith. This didn’t sit that well with me, though; there’s already an “American Gods” out there, and what’s a dragon compared to a god?

Facing this dilemma, other names began to come to mind about what ought to be done. Names like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Guthrie, Wolfe, Thompson and Kesey. Beat and hippie writers. Cynics, skeptics, postmodernists, romantics, hedonists. People who pried open the American dream, the nature of man, and the rotten heart of the world to see what was inside.

He saw inside the mouth of madness and pulled out one of its teeth.

Granted, I’m probably not twisted or gifted enough to go full-on Beat, but it seems like it would be great to attempt: a Beat fantasy. All the ingredients are there: an epic American journey, a man pushed beyond conventional emotion, and a whole carnival of weirdness between him and what he thinks is a destination. I just need to figure out a way to make the style seem like its more interested in the ideas and the boldness the Beat and related movements edified, and not just come off as nostalgic, especially with its fantasy trappings.

I need to brush up on my 50s-70s countercultural American lit a bit more, to figure out what to do. My February Idea is entering the second trimester, and proper nutrition is important for… wait, again with the tortured metaphors? Ah well, I’m back at my blog after a long stretch of not having anything to say, I can be a little bit giddy.

The Scott Pilgrim Bubble Has Burst

Well, after all the video game tie-ins, TV spots, and hoopla surrounding Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, what finally happened? It’s opened to glowing reviews, and subsequently tanked at the box office. It opened at #5, raking in $11 million or so. It dropped to #10 the next week, bringing in $5 million.

I can say that I’m relatively surprised. I thought, given what a bang-up critical reception it’s gotten for its unapologetic visual style and reference-laden humour (though they disliked the plot and Michael Cera, much as I expected) and how feverishly advertised it’s been, it would have at least opened in #2 or #3. Instead, The Expendables opens at #1, which suggests that moviegoers really wanted to go see geriatric action stars fantasize that its the ’80s again. I was enthusiastic about the idea when I first heard about it, but I can safely say my interest dwindled as its release date neared.

Normally this wouldn’t bother me, especially of a movie I had a fairly lukewarm opinion of, but the film has cost around $90 million to make. Those big “PWOMP!”s that appeared whenever someone punched someone else didn’t come cheap. Similarly budgeted movies, like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Straw-erm, Airbender, get to make THEIR budgets back, but not this? Most summer movies are an affront to the filmgoing public, and when a sincere effort like Scott Pilgrim comes around and is soundly ignored, that leaves us with just one question:

What in the hell happened? It probably ties in with why I dreaded this film’s release from its inception. It looked as though no expense was spared for this movie, and ultimately, it was a movie about a kid from Toronto trying to keep his girlfriend by throwing himself into video-game land. This is a plot that works better in a bright orange comic book you spot on the shelf and take home to read, it doesn’t communicate itself quite as effectively on a bright red poster as you walk into the movies. It’s not that you can’t make movies about this kind of thing, but there’s certain indelible facts about how movies work that the premise has to adapt to. Comic books are a forgiving medium, like it is with most books, in that we can grasp much of what it’s about while we hold it in our hands, flip through it, read the back, etc.

With a movie, we only have reviews, which probably wouldn’t have helped because Scott Pilgrim’s core audience would have gone to see it anyway, and we have the marketing campaign. Most of the trailers and TV spots for the film have had the same breakneck pace and loud visual style that the film supposedly has (I didn’t see it, so I’m going on what everyone else says about it), but it can’t communicate the premise effectively. As you no-doubt know, most comic book-to-film adaptations, their marketing practically writes itself. Put Spider-Man on a poster, and not much has to be said. Many comic books, even lesser-known ones like Watchmen, have really iconic designs, and really simple premises that, inWatchmen‘s case, unfold into complex, engaging plots. No one ever said that something that starts simple has to stay simple.

Scott Pilgrim’s premise is “This ordinary Toronto kid doesn’t have any superpowers, but he’s going to beat up seven people to win the woman he loves, and there will be loads of video game references.” You can’t write that all on a poster, and instead we get this red poster with Scott going “BYOWWWW!” on his Rickenbacker, and a tagline “An Epic of Epic Epicness”. What’s that supposed to mean? Maybe most average filmgoers find the overuse of the terms “Epic” and “Awesome” as tedious as I do; it’s like this generation’s “Tubular” and “Radical”.

The 1980s Michael Cera playing the 1980s Scott Pilgrim.

Some things are lost in the transition to film, as well, and their omissions can be obvious. One of the things most appealing about Scott Pilgrim as a comic was its bombastic art style, where the characters were simply drawn with bold, dark lines, simple shapes, and bright, expressive faces with huge eyes and mouths. You portray these characters as people in a costume designer’s idea of hip indie fashion, you’re going to lose something. This might have worked well as an animated film, but (pardon me while I wipe away a tear,) who wants to pay for an animated film these days?

Did they really have to rub it in by making a poster like this, then pointing out it was "live action"?

Points could also be said about the comic’s light humour being dumbed down and so forth, but the fact is that no one’s really going to be made aware of that by the poster. All they can see is they’re not sure what to make of this movie, and who can blame them?

Other people have suggested their own theories about Scott Pilgrim‘s earnings. One person thinks this movie was made for an incredibly specific audience, and one that was apparently far smaller than Universal Pictures thought. Word to the wise, Hollywood: not every comic book buff is the Wachowshi Brothers. This article posits a few reasons: it’s difficult to figure out what it is (“Is it a comedy or action? Is Scott a hero, or a geek?”), it’s just another comic book movie during a fad that’s brought us Jonah Hex and Wanted, Michael Cera is in it, to the rather odd reason that, since it’s being released on the tail-end of a recession, a movie about a 23-year old slacker who plays in a band and doesn’t really have a job isn’t something people want to see. That one’s a particular head-scrather; I’m a 23-year-old Canadian slacker, and I don’t resent him and want to avoid his movie. I would have found it identifiable if he wasn’t collecting 1UPs and punching people so hard in the face that it makes the camera shake.

For contrast, let’s examine another movie based on a niche-appeal comic book, April’s Kick-Ass. It managed to create a bright and vivid visual style with costumes and lighting, rather than the Robert Rodriguez-style digital effects Edgar Wright stuffed Scott Pilgrim with. As a result, it was a third of Scott‘s budget (and I’m sure a healthy chunk of it went to Red Mist’s tricked-out Mustang). Also, I went to go see it. I didn’t particularly want to, but I saw the hero on the cover, in his weird green superhero suit, and I had to see how the movie was going to explain itself. I’m sure a lot of people thought the same thing.

I didn’t really like what I saw. The premise that quickly developed I guess sounded noble enough: “You don’t need superpowers to do good.” Though the actual premise that occurred was “You can be a costumed crime fighter if you have a healthy disregard for your own safety.” Kick-Ass’s experiment quickly goes south until he’s saved by Hit-Girl, an incredibly violent child who says “cunt”, plays with butterfly knives, and wantonly stabs people. There’s also Nicholas Cage doing an Adam West-style Batman impression. Nicholas Cage was the Michael Cera of this picture, and though this character ends up getting burned to death, I didn’t get much pleasure out of it.

Unlike this. This was glorious.

Besides its main plot, a lot of the extraneous parts of the film rubbed me the wrong way. One of the early scenes shows the main character masturbating, I guess to show the simplicity of his life. I did not need to see this. Later, the main villain shoots an innocent kid dressed as Kick-Ass in the head. This wasn’t funny.

I didn’t like what I saw that much, but the point is that I SAW IT. A lot of analysts thinkKick-Ass was a box-office disappointment, but at least it made money. Matthew Vaughn, the same guy that directed Stardust (a movie that, weirdly, was better than the book), made a bombastic and colourful film on a fraction of its budget because of practical effects, and it was somehow self-financed by Vaughn.

Edgar Wright, being the unapologetic British kook behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, brought his unique brand of crazy to Scott Pilgrim to create… well, a bombastic and colourful film with bizarre colour correction and computer effects that made a weak story and a weak cast seem interesting. It can’t float a weak premise, though, and this might be a lesson thatScott Pilgrim has taught everybody: premise is EVERYTHING.

Quite a few people, after seeing this balls-to-the-walls experiment collapse, think this is bad news for the status of filmmaking. I’m optimistic, though, because other original films have done remarkably this year. Avatar and Inception are two fantastically ambitious and original (well… in that they’re not a sequel) films from ambitious and original filmmakers that have made a killing at the box office. With Michael Bay successfully repressed for at least another season, and M. Night Shyamalan left as a standing joke, the filmgoing public want challenging, original stories. Hopefully this will give smaller, more unknown films a chance, but if Scott Pilgrim seems to suggest otherwise, I remind you that a “small” film doesn’t have a $90 million budget.

This film is destined for cult status. It was such an ambitious, foolhardy project, that critics just melted at the sight of it. It’s a film that may join the ranks of V for Vendetta and The Crow as a film that just didn’t quite fit in the theatres, but fits in the hearts of movie and comic fans. Scott Pilgrim itself, even when it had just started, already had cult status, in that it was a little Canadian comic book that wanted to flout convention and just have a lot of fun, and in a rare and somewhat odd display, a mainstream film director wanted in on the party. Hopefully that won’t change, and filmmakers will want to make film because they look fun to do, they just won’t assume the movie’s going to haul in Dark Knight-like numbers. Make sure the premise can hold up your ambition.

As for me, now that I’m not being bombarded with so much hype about this flick, I might actually pop in and see it, so that I can just see the movie and not make the hundreds and hundreds of people and things telling me that I should see it happy.

Oh, and my friend and I played the Scott Pilgrim game on PS3. It’s alright, but it controls a little sloppy.

The Commercialization of Scott Pilgrim, and Other Problems at Hand

I bet you're excited, Mr. Pilgrim

I first found out about Scott Pilgrim around 2005 or so, around the time Scott Pilgrim Vol. 2 was all set to come out. There was a story about it in The Coast, essentially my local version of the Village Voice, because Scott Pilgrim was connected to my home province of Nova Scotia in some way: Bryan Lee O’Malley, the author, is from London, Ontario, but had drawn the first couple of volumes of his series in Mount Uniacke, a small town in Nova Scotia (Buck 65 is also from there, if anyone cares.)

In the first two volumes, I was immediately drawn to it. Scott was a wonderfully identifiable character, basically like any 23-year-old Canadian slacker trying to make his way. He meets an extraordinary girl named Ramona Flowers, awkwardly but charmingly goes steady her, and then he finds himself thrust into an unexpected video game quest to defeat her seven evil end bosse-erm, evil ex-boyfriends.

The first three volumes were great. The setting was realistic and believable, and the way it integrated so many video game in-jokes, like Scott’s rival band with music-based superpowers Crash ‘n the Boys, people exploding into a couple of bucks in spare change and such, and all the crazy action scenes, felt like they weren’t really part of Scott’s universe. They were presented in a tongue-in-cheek way, and many of the characters reacted to it like they weren’t sure what the hell was going on, but that it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. I liked how Scott is completely mystified by the 1-UP he gets in Volume 3.

It was populated with so many likable side characters, as well, making Toronto seem more like Toronto than some video game iteration of it, even with the in-jokes and bombastic violence. There was Stephen Stills, the lead of Scott’s band, the type of guy whom everyone says his names in hushed tones. There’s Hollie, the sassy lady who works at No Account Video, and seems like a female Quentin Tarantino. Even some of the ex-boyfriends, like Todd Ingram, the superpowered vegan, have a kind of goofy charm to them. It was a delight following these people around. They felt like comic book people, not comic book characters, if you follow me.

So when Volume 4 came out, I couldn’t wait for the library to stock it, so I rushed right out to Strange Adventures to get it. It sat on myself for a month or so, since it came out in the middle of my first NaNoWriMo, and I couldn’t spare time for it. Finally, around December, I read it.

I read the first five pages, rendered in splashy colour and with a parody of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 logo bearing the title, and I began to worry.

I kept going a bit into the first chapter, where Scott walks in on Knives Chau, Scott’s own beguiled ex, making out with a girl.

I set the book down immediately. One of my favourite series has become “quirky”. I couldn’t believe it; maybe I was just tired after having won NaNoWriMo, and I had just gone a little mad. I picked it up again the following summer, reading a bit into the first chapter. No, it was still “quirky”. I haven’t touched it since.

Around the time this came out, they announced the Scott Pilgrim movie, starring Michael Cera. Michael Cera, the 21st-century epitome of comedy blandness. The kid that was funny as George Michael Bluth, and kind of just stuck with it. The guy that thinks wearing a headband or having long hair is the same as having a different personality.

Give him a half-grown mustache, that will make him seem like a "bad boy" for Youth in Revolt.

Though Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame, were involved, I already wasn’t looking forward to this film. Wright and Pegg’s involvement isn’t as optimistic a sign as it looks: I think they do better with British humour, and besides, Simon Pegg didn’t automatically make Run Fatboy Run funny.

Then they showed the first picture of the cast. My heart sank.

Who are these wide-eyed bad-dyed douchebags?

Then the first trailer came out, where some guy throws Scott into the top of a tower, action words appear in the air when anyone does a slow-motion punch, and some guy prattles on about a cleaning lady joke. The movie’s visual style looks like Robert Rodriguez threw up his Skittles. The joke with the 1-UP is shown, except Scott just grabs the 1-UP like he expected it. Knives Chau, who in the comics was a vindictive, spiteful stalker and was actually cool, is now just annoying and whiny, and also kinda stupid. The ocean floor opened up and my heart sank further.

Accompanying this monumental release is a video game on the PlayStation Network, that combines many of my favourite things: beat-em-up action, Ubisoft Montreal, 4-player co-op, and Paul Robertson, creator of still one of the most awesome things in the world, Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006:

The man is a mad genius when it comes to pixelated graphics, massive video game explosions, twisted enemy designs, and insane violence. The Scott Pilgrim game is probably the closest mankind will ever get to PBCBSF’06 being a real game, which is sad to think about.

I confess that the video game is the most appealing thing I’m seeing out of this circus. There could still be problems, though, and it’s the same problems that Scott Pilgrim suffers from. Paul Robertson, like Bryan Lee O’Malley, was cool because he came out of nowhere, and surprised us all. His works weren’t products, they were creations, and damn incredible ones at that. Now that it’s being extensively marketed, all of it might be tied down to each other. P. Robertson might be able to stay on this side of edgy (Australian animators are good at that), but it sounds like O’Malley wants a ticket on the Hollywood train:

Those changes included a move to Los Angeles, where O’Malley says he’s bought a house and is writing a screenplay.

“I’m a big sellout,” he jokes, adding that he’s exploring many options while enjoying life in Tinseltown.

It’s a far cry from where O’Malley was just a few years ago. After leaving in Toronto in 2005, he says he and his wife moved to Mount Uniacke, N.S., where they bought “the cheapest house in the world.” In 2007, they moved to North Carolina where his wife is from. Heading to L.A. seemed like the next logical step in his burgeoning career.

-“Scott Pilgrim” author eyes ‘media empire’,

Metro News, July 19 2010

I suppose I can’t blame his enthusiasm, or even that he wanted to stop “slumming it” in my neck of the woods (hell, I certainly do); most Toronto boys pretty much go native when they go to the States. But there’s some things he seems aware of: he points out in the article that Cera has been “typecast” lately, but also that “this is completely different for him, I think.” Really, because from what I saw, it was George Michael wearing t-shirts with cool logos on them, occasionally punching a guy in slow motion.

I don’t even want to know what happened to Vol. 5 and 6 of Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 5 which has a foil-printed cover, and Vol. 6, the “epic conclusion that draws everything together.” All this hoopla over it leads me to ask: if Ramona had seven evil ex-boyfriends, and Scott breaks up with her, will he become an evil ex-boyfriend later? Or are they just going to date for years and get married? Unless one of those things happens in Vol. 6, I don’t think this is all that “concluded”.

Even disregarding the commercial aspects of this, the movie in and of itself still has a problem. Since it’s just one movie, and the comic book series is six volumes (and 5 and 6 were written “with the movie in mind”). Another movie that had to deal with this was M. Night Shyamalan’s latest cinematic blight, The Last Airbender. It stuffed the entirety of one season of the TV show into just a smidge over two hours, which resulted in disastrous pacing, a cast with no personality, and a plot that felt like it was checking boxes off a list. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a smidge UNDER two hours, and though it doesn’t have as much to cram in, it’s still something I’m weary of, especially since the movie insists on distracting itself with special effects and crummy visual gags.

One movie that I’m persistently reminded of during all this is 2008′s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Michael Cera was actually kind of likable and funny in it, and it has genuinely funny writing. Besides that, though, see if the plot follows a similar vein: Nick breaks up with a girl named Tris, and he has a hard time accepting it. He has a chance encounter with another girl, Norah, and they hit it off. Tris, in response, goes through a comical downward spiral. Much of the plot consists of the characters traversing various locations in New York City, and it eventually ends with the two leads finding each other, and they share romance. The plot basically reads like Scott Pilgrim, with no evil ex-boyfriends plot, and a couple of story elements tweaked (Tris breaks up with Nick and can’t accept it, rather than Scott breaking up with Knives and can’t accept it, it’s New York instead of New York: Canadian Version, etc). Nick and Norah feels more like the Scott Pilgrim movie, with its down-to-earth story about young romance, and its emphasis on music. Even its goofier moments embody what I like about Scott Pilgrim, which Scott Pilgrim seems lacking in.

What’s strange is that this series has drawn Hollywood’s attention after only one volume. A lot of great comics and stories are out there, but what is it that catches the eye of American movie executives after only one volume? One might say chance, but I think there’s something about the sort of media that grabs Hollywood by the nuts this quickly, though I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s that it makes such a sensation, despite it not really having come from anywhere. Maybe it’s that kind of “pizzazz” that attracts them, that they know would probably have instant appeal and adaptability. But that’s just a guess.

With all this in mind, thoughts of this work being the next new thing, reaping fame, fortune, and cultural acclaim at the slight expense of stripping it of everything that made it appealing to begin with, and Bryan Lee O’Malley going along with this march, how do I cope? I read some Bryan Lee O’Malley, of course:

This is Lost at Sea, one of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s earlier works. It’s an honest and vulnerable story that can be challenging, comforting, and even difficult at times, so it probably won’t be made into a movie or a beat-em-up game. It’s about a girl named Raleigh, who thinks she has no soul because her mother sold it to a cat. She deals with this fairly well, along with the other difficulties in her life: her best friend had moved away, her parents had divorced, her boyfriend is simply a face on the Internet. She goes back to Vancouver with three people from her high school that she barely knows, partly out of necessity, but maybe for a more complex reason.

The art style is simple and understated, it reminds me of an adolescent and less cartoonish Calvin and Hobbes. It has humour as well, but it’s a subtle sort of humour, more designed to put a little grin on your face than make you burst out laughing. Raleigh seems like sort of a wet rag at first, even kind of a bitch, but we find out that she is deeply introspective, rapt in her own confused thoughts. These three strangers help her work out her problems, and though it seems like none of them are solved, and even the characters don’t know what’s been accomplished, it feels like a much greater thing has happened from their efforts.

It doesn’t have loud fight scenes, it doesn’t have popcultural references, its inking isn’t bold and in-your-face, its characters make more non-sequitars and complaints than wisecracks, whole pages go by where nothing really happens, and it’s one of my favourite books. I named one of the girl characters in one of my novels Raleigh after the book’s main character; she came to mean a lot to me, soulless or not. I’ve read the book so much, the binding is starting to fall apart; I hope I can get another copy soon. If you go out and see the Scott Pilgrim movie, pick this up on your way home from it. If enough people buy it, maybe it will catch Hollywood’s eye, and they’ll find themselves stymied by a work like this. What a wonderful thing that would be to imagine.

Script Frenzy, Responsibilities, and Not Enough Time

It’s just over a week into Script Frenzy, an April event that challenges people to write a 100-page script in 30 days. I’ve attempted to get involved when I had a pretty irresistible idea for a story.

The working title is “Take a Deep Breath”. It’s about a frustrated playwright who, after visiting a Mediterranean country people have inexplicably never heard of, has come across an interesting substance. It’s a very unusual thing: it changes colour each time you look at it, it seems to be gathered from the air in this country, but what it does is the most incredible thing about it. When taken in some way, it clears up your head and fills it with amazing ideas. This stuff is, literally, powdered inspiration! It’s the actual force that can make people think up incredible things, focused into a powder that a person can put in his mouth.

The playwright brings home as big a sack of it as he can, and within weeks writes a brilliant new play, sells it to a theatre, and is put on as director. Things quickly go south, though, when the only country it comes from is racked by disaster, and the man that sold it to him has come to visit, and blackmail him into giving him the credit for the play. The powder itself isn’t making it any easier for him, either. The playwright’s not overdosing on it, getting addicted to it or having any ill side effects, but he’s noticed the actual stuff seems to have a weird sense of malice. It likes to run out when he thinks he needs it, and when he wants to get rid of it, it won’t let him, no matter what he tries!

We can all relate to that, can’t we?

I’m very compelled with this story, but after I had started working on it, I was rapidly finding out that it’s not a good idea to dedicate much time to it. My book still has to be edited and sent off to agents, there’s dozens of other books and short stories that I need to finish or edit, and I still need to find a job and get my new college application together. With all these responsibilities staring me down, it’s hard to rationalize working on a writing event that won’t pay off in the foreseeable future. It might not be a problem if I stay on schedule and only have to write four pages a day, but I’ve been swamped the last few days, and now need to write ten or more to catch back up.

This creates a dilemma for me. I know I have responsibilities to keep, but are they as overbearing as this, or can I afford to slot in a fun little month-long diversion? We’ll have to see. Right now, I’ve got ten pages to go for today!

Finally Among the Sane Again

Well after having started this blog last October and failing spectacularly at NaNoWriMo 2009, I was pretty much pitching a no-hitter for 2009 writing. I won Script Frenzy by the skin of my teeth (even though I didn’t like the result), but lost JulNoWriMo, lost 3-Day Novel Contest (and paid $50 for the privilege), and lost NaNoWriMo. I was feeling a bit spun out.

Fortunately, the wild careening out of control has resolved itself, and I’ve really only brushed the front fender against a tree, so I’m back on track. My first big writing project of the year is an extensive edit of a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo back in 2007. I want to show it to some publishers and agents, but after looking it over, I found out that it’s awfully fat, and I need to take the red pen to it. Words lost so far: about 3000, and I’m not even halfway done.

It’s taking a hell of a long time, though. Everywhere I look, there’s some extraneous sentence or clunky use of conjunctions that needs deleting or revising, and all the while, I’m thinking about ways that the story could be added to or subtracted from. It’s a fairly exhausting process, but I need to do it quickly; I don’t want to waste too much time on it when there’s so much else to do.

With the new year starting, animation studios all over the city and country are looking for people, and I’m pretty sick of unemployment, and even more, unemployment in my chosen field (well… second chosen). Much of my time is going to be invested into making new material for my demo reel, if I can remember how to use Maya and Flash effectively enough that I’m using them to make things rather than just wrestling with its interface, but I don’t want to lose too much other time to my writerly pursuits. Once WBF is edited, I want to move on quickly to writing another novel that’s been stewing in my brain ever since 2004, and it’s really itching to get out. I’ll have to work on that, too, on top of everything else.

Busy, busy, busy!

Welcome to the Blog

Hello, world! Welcome to my blog, “A Man of Letters”, a place for me to collect all my scattered thoughts and activities and hopefully arrange them into something that might resemble interesting reading. Many of my ideas and goings-on will be presented here, and if you enjoy reading about them, great. If you’d like to offer your own insights on it, even better. Well, that’s the intro, let’s give this a shot!