Author: Alex Doenau

Are you familiar with Jane Austen? She's a promising young female writer with a strong following, perhaps best known for her seminal work Bridget Jones's Diary.

Turns out that she's taking the idea of olde timey romance and turning it on its head! Her first gambit is the zeitgeist shattering book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which effortlessly shoehorns a zombie infestation and battle into a perfectly serviceable story about a group of women who must be married off at all costs to rich landowners in order to save their silly mother's face. It must be successful, because I've seen at least three women reading it in public.

That's what they're all over these days: Edward Cullen and Mister Darcy. The latter, of course, is a master in the art of zombie killing and all around uptight jerkface with a heart of gold. So popular was this young upstart Austen's genre bending that she managed to claw her way to number three on the New York Times' best seller list before they realised that, as a woman, she didn't have the agency to warrant such a spot.[1]

Austen has decided to follow her surprise success with the release of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which will apparently be about two recently impoverished sisters who seek love and heartbreak … and something else that I think the title hints at but I've yet to get an actual idea of. Austen is moving up in the world, though: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is an infinitely catchier title that doesn't even rely on the crutch of memes as a cynical grab for readers.

…

Okay, I just considered Jane Austen as an actual meme hound, even … gasp! … a channer, and my brain exploded. I was surprised to see so many copies of Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in real life. In my estimation it's the sort of book that you hear tell of online and then never again. Serious, unironic reading of a romantic classic spliced with zombie combat. I was surprised when I found out that this book is more than just a cash-in, because further reviews have revealed "(w)hat begins as a gimmick ends with renewed appreciation of the indomitable appeal of Austen's language, characters, and situations…”[2]

It's a relief, really. I've got nothing against messing about in the public domain: my mother and I enjoy a good bonnet drama, and this year the ABC televised Lost in Austen, a BBC miniseries about a woman who accidentally trades places with Elizabeth Bennet, "ruins” the story of Pride and Prejudice as it was supposed to happen, and falls in love with Mister Darcy herself after they both over what an arrogant prig he is.

It's a knee jerk reaction to automatically think that zombies are a bad idea in this day and age, but one can't really blame me. All of the cool things – pirates, monkeys, zombies, vampires, and ninja … have been spoiled by an internet hungry for something that I'm not entirely sure of. That this seems to be done with a sort of love and respect warms the cockles of my heart, and other such disposition changing cliché.

I didn't have that instant reaction to Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. It may be that I'm getting less uptight in my old age, or it may be the fact that the open and gleeful stupidity of the title caught me entirely off guard. I'm not an Austen fanatic; in fact, I've never read one of her books, but I'm now comfortable in the knowledge that she's in safe hands. Sometimes the appearance of stupidity can mask a deep and abiding love, and  one that the world is just a tiny bit better for.

[2]Donna Bowman, AV Club, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, April 15 2009

The news of Futurama's return to television was a good thing, yes? If something worthless like Family Guy can claw its way back to prime time, surely a more deserving property like Futurama could be given another chance to shine?

The revival has hit a rather sour development with the release of a casting call sheet. When I saw the news on io9 I was prepared to discount it. Delving deeper and seeing that call sheet, however, is pretty damning. I'm expecting this to explode all over certain quadrants of the internet, and for good reason: Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Phil LaMarr and Maurice LaMarche are the crew of Planet Express and the people of the universe at large. They are an inextricable part of the show.

This is not like Daniel Craig succeeding Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. This is like someone killing one of your loved ones and replacing them with an android: it looks exactly like your dear old Grandmama, but it lacks her distinct personality and sounds ever so slightly off; an impersonator; an insult to the memory of someone important to you. Did no one at Fox see Changeling?

I don't see how Fox thinks they can get away with this. Part of the reason Futurama is coming back, perhaps even the entire reason, is that it has a following; people like Futurama. It has a strong and storied cast that endeared itself to audiences over 72 episodes and four movies (that I did not see) and it was genuinely funny a lot of the time.*
People who like Futurama like the cast, and anyone else is nothing more than a pale imitation. I understand replacing a voice actor for reasons of necessity:

• Death (see: legacy characters like Mickey Mouse);
• Retirement (see: Christine Cavanaugh);
• They turn out to be a serial killer who has used their position to abduct fans at conventions and then murder them.

I can't see a legitimate reason for replacing an entire, more than amply talented, ensemble (not to mention Tress MacNeille and Lauren Tom!).

"Money” is not a legitimate reason, because I can imagine that people – myself included … would not be keen to watch a Futurama that has been senselessly neutered, and therefore a large amount of the anticipated revenue stream will have died.

What is the point of watching a science fiction cartoon composed of strangers whom no one would bother ever allowing into their hearts? This is a question I ax in all sincerity: I mean, seriously, what the hell? This is arse-backwards creative philosophy. Who cares if these actors don't write or animate the material? They are still their characters, and their job is more than simply standing in front of a microphone and speaking their lines. If your cartoon is good, then your actors are going to care about the characters they represent and that care is going to translate itself to the finished product.

The call sheet is particularly insulting:

"Descriptions of these established characters follow, along with links to clips of previous episodes for reference.”

(Emphasis mine)

Who established these characters? The fact that they're providing clips of previous episodes for reference confirms that they're not seeking a new direction: they're searching for cut-price impersonators. It's my impression that voice actors have a certain professional pride: who could honestly trample over the work of people who are plainly still capable of performing the work they've become known for?

Entirely apart from not understanding the situation, understanding why people get emotionally attached to a property, it seems that Fox don't even understand that some people have sensitive ears and will not simply deafly accept a change.

People obsess over voice actors; they follow their work across the years. I do it in both cartoons and anime, as another one of my hobbies: when I saw a trailer for Secret of Monkey Island featuring LeChuck's first mate, I said aloud "Hey, it's Rob Paulsen!”- and it frustrates me to no end that I can't find a cast list for the game to confirm my suspicions. This would not go unnoticed by weird hobbyists like me, and even less fanatic types would be bound to notice a replacement of the entire cast of a cartoon with a large following.

It's particularly amazing that this would happen on a Matt Groening property. Does no one recall the multiple times that they have attempted to kill cast members of The Simpsons? Even The Simpsons remembered it, in largely unremarkable episode Homer to the Max:

Homer: Networks like animation ’cause they don’t have to pay the actors squat!

Ned:    Plus, they can replace them, and no one can tell the diddly-ifference!

They then summarily jerked around Maggie Roswell, who ended up paying for the privilege of appearing on the show (her pay cheque wouldn't cover the cost of travel to recording). Marcia Mitzman-Gaven, her replacement, was probably a good voice actress in her own right, but as Maude Flanders and Helen Lovejoy she plainly sucked. They got around this problem by largely shutting Helen up and killing Maude in Alone Again, Natura-Diddly. Roswell is back now, but Maude is still dead.

Since then there has been a variety of industrial actions and talk of strikes, but the voice actors have continued to win out. I've heard The Simpsons is improving again (I haven't particularly cared to find out), but for the longest time there the established cast was all it had going for it.
Futurama is plainly not the juggernaut that The Simpsons has proven to be, but there are clear ethical, professional and fanbase considerations that apply. I'd like to think that the Futurama fan base is strong enough to convince Fox that this is an awful decision and they'd better turn this ship around instead of charting unexplored and counter-productive territory.

*This is entirely not the time to confess that a while back I went through a listing of all of the episodes and only really appreciated about half of them, the third and fourth seasons largely, but not wholly, falling flat for me.

Inglourious Basterds, entirely apart from having a title that's painful to type, entirely separate from the not-entirely-favourable reception it had at Cannes, is Quentin Tarantino's latest movie.

I'm too young to really remember him being cinema's enfant terrible, and I recall being sent upstairs by my aunt while she and my brother watched Reservoir Dogs … unfortunately, the TV was at the bottom of the stairs so I could hear every damn word she was protecting me from … but I know his work, if not overly well.

I realise that it's becoming a sort of recurring motif for me, labelling things as "not movies” … but Tarantino doesn't so much make "not movies” as he does "genre movies” … films in bold and italics. They're more movie than movie.

Tarantino is in the business of making replicants, is what I'm saying.

I saw this trailer for it at Bruno, and immediately afterwards my occasional comrade said "that looks shit”. But it doesn't to my eyes. It looks somewhat splendid, and I say that as someone who thought that Death Proof was self-indulgent clap trap only partly redeemed by a great ending. As Tony said to Dittman, "it's Tarantino, man!”

There don't seem to have been a lot of World War II movies out of America lately, particularly not ones that have dealt with Nazi fighting adventures.  Spike Lee had his, which never saw release here and, in the interest of academic honesty, I can't be bothered looking up the name of it. The other was Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, which dared to answer the question "how do you make an assassination plot against Hitler boring?”

Inglourious Basterds, on the other hand, is unambiguous: it's about the olden days when people were allowed to kill Nazis on film and do so in elaborate and bloody ways. What's so bad about that? It looks fun, and it looks like once again Tarantino has indulged his love for film. Some may say that Kill Bill Volume 2 was better than the first, but what I most remember about it was that the credits doubled as the credits for Volume 1, and reminded me of how much fun I had the day I saw it.

Inglourious Basterds features everything that anyone could ever ask of this type of movie: Brad Pitt shooting Nazis, and at least a little bit of participation from Samuel L. Jackson. What could possibly go wrong? This is me setting up a hubristic goal: I am going to see Inglourious Basterds and I am going to enjoy it. 2009 has been so disappointing and underwhelming so far that it has to deliver.

It should also be noted that the trailer I've posted above is slightly different to the one I saw, but largely the same, and totally different to the most widely available trailer which makes the movie look boring as all get out. I know that some … my father, for one -  think that one shouldn't treat Nazi Germany as a simple matter of gung ho guns, render it a "boy's own” adventure, but I think that, as long as we don't try to deny it, it's right to try to get as much out of the experience as we can. By rendering Hitler ridiculous … and there's no one better at that than Mel Brooks … we disrespect not the memories of those who died in the war, but those of Hitler himself.

Please don't disappoint me again, Mister Tarantino: I know you have the power, through this movie, to save my American summer.

The Harry Potter movie franchise is an odd duck: it's not so much about movies as it is about the intellectual property. You expect a certain degree of something, and you generally receive it. After Christopher Columbus's twee bogs of the first two, the films have improved in most every way, although of course they've never been an adequate substitute for the books, instead being a series of realisations of key scenes. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is no different, although my choice to view it in a cinema full of teenaged girls was.

This is a bad idea and I would not recommend it to anyone unless, of course, they find themselves somehow knee deep in fandom and anything approaching romance makes them titter. The movie itself is okay, though!

For the moment, imagine there’s a picture of Megan Fox’s boobs here.

Oh, there they are. Very good.

There is practically no purpose served by writing about Revenge of the Fallen, because it’s already been said. The bombast has been brought, and it has been good, from Roger Ebert’s “horrible experience of unbearable length” to the Awl’s "fall[ing] into a city sized Cuisinart” and io9’s argument of the film’s merit as a breakthrough piece of avant-garde movie making. I have a certain barometer in my office, a man of diplomatically different tastes to my own. Even he was unhappy with the film, thinking that Michael Bay should maybe have dialed it back a bit so that he could have an idea of what was happening. That said, he liked the twins, so we're all doomed despite the little beams of hope that penetrate the dense canopy of hopelessness that is the modern cinema.

I have since learned to stop asking people what they thought of it because so many responses I have received have been depressing in their likeness: how “awesome” is a word that could ever be applied to this visual and narrative mess is entirely beyond my ken. One of my best friends informed me in a text that it was good, "not as good as [the] first but that often happens”. You can never really know a person …

The fact of the matter is that Revenge of the Fallen is so bad that after a time I started feeling nostalgic for the first movie, which is odd considering that I’ve spent the last two years bitching about it on street corners to whomever will grant me an audience. I don’t know if there’s such a strain as “Super Stockholm Syndrome”, whereby your present captor is so bad that you find yourself longing for the tender embrace of your last, but I think I got myself a case of that.

This movie gets so exponentially worse as it progresses that you long for the minutes when it was absolute shite rather than whatever expletive it evolves into. Sam’s mother ended up becoming a highlight of the movie, and she was really just crude and shrill up to that point. I’ll probably go to my grave not knowing what the point of the French interlude was, or why the audience hung on every word that Sam's idiot parents spew forth from their gormless gullets.

I got the impression after a while that Megan Fox was the only person on the film actually trying, and her performance actually endeared me to an actress whom I traditionally see as an inexplicable holy grail for heterosexual men. When she started bouncing away from explosions in slow motion, I laughed legitimately for the first time. She brings a sort of warmth to the role of Mikaela (Mikaela … Bay?) that is lacking in the remainder of the movie, no matter how many times we see Shia LaBoeuf shed tears for his precious robot chums.

This was truly a schadenfreude experience for me, seeing it with a friend who thought that the first film was a masterpiece, without exaggeration. He ended up comparing Revenge of the Fallen to the Matrix sequels. My friend Tony declared that Dragonball Evolution was a better film, and we came out of that in a waking dream that we only shook an hour and a half later. I’ve also heard unfavourable comparisons to Speed Racer, which isn't fair at all. Speed Racer tested credulity, challenging me to acknowledge and accept and at least try to understand its existence. Eventually I came to terms with it as something that should not exist but was awesome purely because it was able to gain a foothold in our dimension. I understand why Revenge of the Fallen was made, and it depresses the Hell out of me.

There's probably some rider in my contract that says I have to go into more detail about the movie itself. You may have detected that I don't really give a damn about this execrable excursion into the cinematic form, so it goes without saying that there will be spoilers.

The craynarbians drank freely of their caffeel, spliced with slipsharp oil, for Circle's sake …

I'm not normally much of a one to read fantasy or science fiction, with my toes only dipping as deep as Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett … special men, and special exceptions. It's not a failing of the genre so much as it's a failing of the self: I find so much of the material I've tried so dry that I haven't been able to immerse myself much further than a few pages. Combine that with the authors' tendencies to prolificacy, which makes it dang near impossible to find a place to start, and then in sequence, and it's something that I generally stay clear of.

Let's ignore entirely SF and fantasy writers' other tendency, after their works get a bit long in the tooth: that of transforming their series into a collection of rape, incest and paedophilic fantasies … which is a wild generalisation, but common enough to note … and let me focus on something good.

The other week, browsing in my favourite "surprise” bookstore (there's no point going there for anything specific, it's a pot luck affair), I saw Stephen Hunt's The Kingdom Beyond The Waves on the shelves. Intrigued by its cover, featuring a steampunk u-boat trailing an ancient diving suit, I meditated on the book and its promise of an archaeology professor seeking the lost civilisation of "Camlantis”. I didn't buy it immediately, but rather came back a few days later and purchased it after the allure of a Victorian submarine could no longer be resisted.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves turned out to be well worth it, but I had some initial misgivings. It soon became clear to me that this was not the first book that Hunt had written in this world. It turned out later that it's a case of world and history sharing, rather than character sharing, but this still poses a problem because if you're unprepared you can drown in terms for races and places and drinks that you've never heard of. Hunt is a good enough writer that soon enough you'll realise that there are apparently a race of four armed crab people operating alongside humanity and … more importantly … "steammen” who subscribe to a voodoo like religion.

Once I'd figured all of this out, the book became one giant ball of "yes” for me. Hunt hits so many of my buttons that it's almost as if he cut into my head and realised so much of the stuff I've always wanted and then overlaid it with things I never knew I was even allowed to want. Look at it like this: it's kind of like Indiana Jones in a fantasy setting with crabs and robots. Mix this in with a traditional Atlantis/Laputa quest, add disgraced royalty reduced to swashbuckling beneath the sea and then season with an eccentric man of high standing who has a thousand false faces and one "true” one, and you have a great book. There are eventually three plot threads running at a time, and every time I reached a new one I'd be cursing because I wanted to know what was going to happen next in the last one. It's a particularly vicious cycle, and one that can only be solved by continuing to read.

What does fantasy have to offer us? Lost technology is one of the greatest lynchpins: people operating machinery and other devices that they simply do not have the wherewithal to produce in their own context: relics of ages long gone. Hunt offers that here with the oil powered car of "Diesela-Khan”, not to mention the pure excellence that abides in the steammen and their feral siltempter enemies.

You also have people who "aren't what they seem to be” and who, under Hunt's tutelage, manage to be both exciting and surprising despite their obvious mystery: early in the book a blind man with awesome power manifests his awesome powers. Soon thereafter a blind man with uncanny sonar ability joins the u-boat's crew. Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps not!

I should also mention that not only are we treated to steam powered robots, but steam powered robots who have made mortal enemies of thunder lizards. Yes, dinosaurs versus robots. I realise I sound like I'm being flippant here but all of this material works very well together and achieves precisely what it should do: it captured my imagination in a way that forced me to run to the final destination and find out precisely what was going on.

Hunt takes many old ideas, blends them together and creates something that is at once both compelling and familiar. I think that the reason a lot of people stick with genre writing of any sort is because they're given something that is reassuring but hopefully also invigorating, something that reminds them why they follow whatever it is they follow in the first place (for crime, for instance see Ian Rankin's Rebus books). Even now, reading through Terry Pratchett's books again, I'm frequently floored by paragraphs of insight or turns of phrase that resonate deep in my core, and have for the twelve years that I've been reading his work.
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is the second of what presently stands at three books. I've only just barely touched on what makes the book so good, but I think it's clear that I wholeheartedly recommend it.

While Dragon Ball Evolution left me without words, Fast & Furious left me wondering if I should even bother with words. For a big movie allegedly about fast cars and explosions, the whole exercise is surprisingly boring: tedious plotting and cashing in on nostalgia for a movie that I never saw are the key ingredients. To stretch an analogy, it’s like making a cake out of Vin Diesel.

Yeah. You wouldn’t want to eat it, would you?