A Plague Tale: Innocence – In Review
It is the year 1348 and Amicia, a fifteen-year-old girl of the noble de Rune line, wants to be a brave knight. Hugo, her five-year-old brother, has always been ill, and it is that illness that has quarantined him and her mother since he was born. The setting is based historically, within France during the Hundred Years war. That war seems so distant in Amicia’s idyllic home, but then nobody expects an Inquisition (not Spanish, this time). There’s only just enough time, with her parents dead and her home burning behind her, for Amicia to find Hugo and run for it.
At its heart A Plague Tale: Innocence is a stealth game, an escort quest across the countryside and the ruined towns of a war torn France. It borrows elements from history, such as the Hundred Years War. There’s a plague that’s littering the towns with dead, an infection spread by rats, but at best this setting is just historically inspired. The rats, unlike the fleas upon the rats that spread the black plague, literally burst forth from the Earth like a miniature volcano, consuming the flesh of anyone who steps into the darkness, stripping them down to the bone. Also, there’s magic in the form of supernatural elements sleeping within the blood that, much like the phases for which the power awakens, also emerges from the subplot to take the main stage in a tremendous battle involving ratnados.
Until then, and after then, the game does manage to keep the scale of the conflict narrow, focused on Amicia and Hugo, and the travelers they meet along the way. It manages this part by keeping you focused on the smaller scale, where every corner could present itself with some manner of immediate danger. It also manages this because of the pace of the game. While Amicia can take care of herself well enough, she’s not a fighter. She doesn’t have a sword or armor; she only has a slingshot and a collection of rocks to fend off enemies.
She also has a crafting system, in which she can use alchemy to construct various types of rocks using the assortment of collectables found throughout. She can make rocks that start fires, rocks that put out fires, rocks that douse steel helmets in acid, rocks that lure rats, and more. This means a lot of time is spent searching environments and crafting in order to maintain an arsenal, ready for whatever comes next.
Stealth can often feel like a series of small puzzles, where you are less trying to sneak through an area, and more trying to solve to figure out what is the expected path forward. Distractions can be used to move enemies out of the way. Hugo can make his way through smaller openings, and eventually fellow travelers show up with their own abilities. The use of alchemy also becomes an addition to the stealth puzzle, especially as the rats become more prevalent. In the game the rats hate light, love darkness. Navigating areas filled with rats means understanding where light sources are and how to maneuver sources of light. Sometimes that means something as simple as picking up a torch, sometimes that might also mean setting the blade of a windmill on fire and following the light as it passes.
There is combat in this game. Aside from slinging stones Amicia can dodge, and there are situations where she will be expected to fight, to protect herself and to protect Hugo. While the combat technically works, its here that the game showcases its limitations. Enemy movement can be incredibly erratic, and even with the ability to lock on sometimes shots can miss simply because of changes in elevation. One of the most frustrating sequences of the game had enemies coming in on a straight line, but because they were running down the stairs and back up the stairs it became very difficult to acquire and maintain a lock on.
It’s for the best that combat is only a small part of a game that does an excellent job keeping itself focused on developing a satisfying stealth experience, spiced up with the use of alchemy and the environment as a means of both sneaking past enemies and dealing with them. The supernatural elements sometimes try to steal the show, and the combat can feel awkward when you’re forced to do it, but the combination of stealth and story creates a compelling trip with the kind of protagonists you don’t usually see in this kind of game.
The Matrix Resurrections – In Review
A long time ago, back in the day when The Matrix trilogy was still fresh, I recommended an album to a coworker of mine. I don’t always recommend music, but it’s not because I have good taste. It’s because I don’t listen to much. This particular recommendation was the album Scientist Rids The World Of The Evil Curse Of The Vampires, by The Scientist. I discovered them as I discovered most new music I listened to at the time: via the soundtrack of a video game.
I didn’t bother telling my coworker what genre the album was. If you had to guess what kind of group they are based on the musician and album names, what would you guess? Did you guess reggae? My coworker didn’t, and it clashed with his expectations so hard that he immediately turned it off.
The Matrix Resurrections plays a similar game of expectations, because if you’re expecting a Matrix 4, you came to the wrong place. Instead, in its place, is a deconstructive meta commentary of what The Matrix is, of modern cash grab sequels and franchises, while also being a discussion about the relationship between the creator and their creation. The new story is a reflection of the old while also a criticism of the audience that had been clamoring solely for more of The Matrix, an audience that has generally not been favorable to its sequels.
It’s that meta commentary that makes this film unique among modern sequels and franchises. This last decade has brought about sequels to various dormant storylines including new Star Wars movies, new Jurassic Park movies, and they often fall into the trap of trying to get you to like the new thing by reminding you of the old thing. Star Wars: The Force Awakens borrows so much from its predecessors that it practically becomes a retelling of Star Wars: A New Hope, at least beat for beat.
Resurrections doesn’t want to be that sequel and makes the point to tell you that in story. Without going into spoiler territory, there are a lot of aspects of the original movies that are looked on from an outsiders perspective within the story, a Matrix inside a Matrix, so to speak. Characters comment about what they think the Matrix means to them, all while the creator of the Matrix is forced to listen to their theories and comments.
All of this happens while technical terms that weren’t even terms within the films are used as plot points. Bullet time, the name for the camera technique used to capture the slow motion in the original trilogy, is now a force to be used and commented on within the story. Clips from the trilogy are spliced into Resurrection, clips are prominently displayed within scenes, characters act out previous parts, camera work and stunt work go through the same motions.
But unlike the Star Wars and Jurassic Park sequels, these callbacks aren’t mean to just be nods toward the originals. There’s a part in the trailer of Resurrections that showcases this best. There’s a shot of Neo, having just delivered a few punches, where he stops in front of the camera to say, “I still know kung fu.” On paper, in the trailer, this looks like the kind of thing you see in a lot of action movies: the close-up of the action hero saying the catch-phrase, the call back to the memorable line from the previous film. In the actual movie the line is thrown out there in the middle of an escalation of music and is lost within its chaos. The close-up and catchphrase are the expected moment that’s purposefully ruined within the film that loves to subvert expectations.
And while the movie doesn’t necessarily treat its callbacks with the same rose-tinted glasses as the Star Wars sequels or the Jurassic Park sequels, it does mean that a lot of Resurrections feels derivative of itself. It’s a new movie that doesn’t feel new, as characters go through a lot of the same motions as they did in original trilogy. It’s a risk to make a big budget film only to spend most of the time dissecting its predecessors, but the lack of new material and the focus on the old make it seem like a movie that was born without the same ambition as the original.
Past the meta commentary there’s not much of a story. Characters don’t really have much motivation to their actions. In the middle of the movie a character from the original trilogy returns to shout at Neo and crew while they fight, and then that character leaves, doing nothing and contributing nothing to the plot. Because so few characters seem to want anything, there doesn’t seem to be much at stake in the story.
It doesn’t help that the action, something that has defined the trilogy, is almost entirely bad. There are multiple fight scenes where groups of people start throwing punches in a crowd, and whatever choreography that was rehearsed is lost in the shuffle. There are multiple slow motion shots of people falling off of ledges. Bullet time is less an impressive display of choreography and technical wizardry, and more a conversation piece.
I should admit that, when it comes to The Matrix, I’m one of those people who really loved the original film and disliked the sequels. I would even go so far as to say that the first Matrix is a perfect movie. I’ll just focus on one aspect of the first movie for the purposes of this review: the fight scenes. In the first film noo fight exists without character significance. When Neo fights Morpheus, its meaningful because no one was expecting Neo to even land a punch. When Morpheus fights Agent Smith, its meaningful because we know what he said about agents, and yet we still seem him fight, and lose. There are deeper philosophical ideas in the story, and there’s also meaningful character growth shown through action.
In the Matrix Reloaded, when Neo fights the agents in the beginning, it doesn’t matter, because he’s the one. When he fights all of the Agent Smiths it doesn’t matter, because he’s the one. When he fights the ghosts, it doesn’t matter, because he’s the one. Character growth isn’t important to the fight scenes anymore, as long as it looks cool. And Resurrections doesn’t even try for that.
Back in my college days, I took a workshop class on creative writing. I had written a short story that, to the best of my recollection, had something to do with Where’s Waldo. The people in the class didn’t like it, and I agree that it was bad. The problem they had was that the story began with deeper characterization, and then halfway through the characters weren’t important, it was the message of the story that was important. The wants and motivations of the characters stopped mattering and they became little more than mouthpieces for the concept and message.
That’s the problem I have with The Matrix Resurrections: it doesn’t seem to care about the characters and plots that had been built up over the course of the trilogy, and would rather utilize its characters as mouthpieces for the message.
Resolutions For a New Year – 2022
There’s an episode of the Simpsons which explores the past of the character Ned Flanders. It’s revealed that Ned was actually a problem child, something his hippie parents weren’t able to solve. They take little Ned to a Doctor to get some help, and freely admit, “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” They know the problem they want to solve, but they’ve done nothing to solve it.
New Year’s resolutions can be a lot like it. There’s generally have a problem that wants to be solved but lacking the process to solve it. It’s a promise that requires effort to back them up. It would be incredibly dishonest of me to claim that every New Years resolution I made was followed up on by actual effort, and not immediately forgotten within the first week of the year.
Also, there’s the entire idea that you can just resolve to change your life any day of the year, but that’s not important right now. What is important is my own resolutions for a new year, and my idea is going to be based on a specific set of rules. They all will build a foundation toward one goal, they will all be concrete, achievable goals, and they will all depend on myself.
The goal: become a professional writer.
Concrete and achievable means that there are metrics that can be measured.
There are plenty of things I might want that may not be accessible due to availability. For instance, I would love to write for a video game company, but I don’t want to make that a resolution because getting hired would be dependent on job availability as well as other people to do the hiring.
Ground rules established, here are the resolutions:
1. Write more
Generally, my goal is to be more productive with my writing. I’ve started writing a blog post every Sunday, and I would like to be able to produce a new short story every two months. I also have a novel I had started writing for NaNoWriMo, and would like to continue writing it. I think writing a full novel, or at least 50,000 words of it, in one month is still beyond what I can do (even without working a full-time job), but given a year? I think there’s a chance.
2. Submit short stories for publication
I need to put more energy into publication, and not just of the novel I had finished but also of short stories. This means going through content I haven’t necessarily published on my own blog, or creating new content for specific markets. It would be nice for me to be able to say my interest in writing has at least gotten me some compensation, but it would also look nice on future query letters.
3. Submit my novel for publication
Speaking of the novel I finished, it has a want for publication. Or at least I have a want for its publication. Based on my research (Twitter posts from agents) I get the impression that two things are happening: a lot of people are on break for the holidays, and they’ll be back soon. If I really want to be productive I’ll polish up my query letter in the meantime and get ready to send it out when the chance is made available.
4. Read more
I also need to read more. Part of this is because I think to be a good writer you need to read, and the last book I read was The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, back in late July. Or it might have been End of Watch by Stephen King, in August. Either way, I haven’t read anything for four months.
Now I just need to make time to accomplish these resolutions. There’s this block of time where I’m very unproductive. It’s usually from between 10PM to 7AM where I’m not even conscious. I’m sure I can just cut some of that out and suffer absolutely zero repercussions.
Resolutions – A Short Story – Fiction
Resolutions
By Nicholas Vracar
Claire had said she was going to the party. She had said so on Facebook, so it was too late to back out now. If she stayed at home she’d feel guilty for not going. It had been a while since she had gone out, spent time with anyone in person. She grabbed her coat, slipped on her gloves and stepped out into the cold December night.
She had layers upon layers, but even past the tank top, sweater, hoodie, and coat, it was still cold, the kind of cold that felt like it was icing up her eyes for daring to keep them open. Her car struggled to a start, but it did start. If it didn’t that would’ve been an excellent excuse. She shifted gears and sped off down the road, and slowly but surely hot air filled the inside of her car.
Harry and Dana’s house was in the suburbs, a two-story home that stood out from the rest due to all of the cars parked in the driveway and along the street outside.
Claire pulled over alongside the road a pair of houses down. There was a closer empty spot, but it probably wasn’t a good idea to finish off the year attempting to parallel park. She shut off the engine and stepped back out into the cold.
She tucked her hands into her armpits and rushed across the sidewalk. There was a sound in the distance of indiscernible eighties synth that grew louder as she approached the front door. She rang the doorbell, and stepped back, and waited, the cold icing up her eyes.
Dana opened up the door with one hand, a colorful drink in a martini glass in the other. She cried out, “Claire! Get in, it’s cold!”
Claire smiled, her cheekbones stiff. She stepped inside.
Dana closed the door. “You can put your coat in there, and your shoes there.”
“Okay.” She added her shoes to the collection and shoved her coat into the closet.
Claire walked into the living room and said hello to Harry and Mark. Harry was alright, Mark was drunk. She said hello to Ben, sitting at the end of a couch slowly sipping a beer. Three children ran by as she stepped into the kitchen.
She said hello to Andrew and waved to Quincy. Tina said hello and Stella reached in for a hug. Stella offered to mix one of the colorful martinis in the kitchen. She had been taking bartending classes on Sunday nights.
Stella said, “I don’t have all the ingredients I’d like to choose from here, but you work with what you’ve got.”
“It looks neat.”
“And tastes like a gummi bear.”
“I can deal with that.” Stella handed the glass over and Claire took a sip. It did not taste like a gummi bear.
Stella said, “How is it?”
Claire coughed, “A bit strong.”
“Word of warning, if William offers you a shot of Malort, do not drink it.”
“It’s stronger?”
“It’s disgusting.”
She nodded and said, “Thanks for the warning.”
Claire carried her colorful blend of alcohol out onto the patio, in the limited safety of the patio heater. She said hi to Beverly and Jane. Paul was leaning against a rail looking out into the dark of night, vaping. He was talking to someone she never met. She stood beside him and waited while Paul talked about how the Bears were really going to have a good season this year.
She stepped back inside. There were more people in the living room now, sitting around the television. The TV was muted, and over unseen speakers she could hear Bon Jovi singing about when to live. In the corner of the TV screen a timer counted down to the end of the year.
In the basement a small group of people stood around a bar talking about sports. William offered a shot of Malort, Claire turned it down. Thomas, Petra, Linda, and Edgar were playing beer pong in a corner, and in the back Shrek 2 was playing on a widescreen television. She found a comfortable chair and sat down. She sipped at her colorful drink until there was nothing left but psychedelic residue.
Claire looked for a spot to set her glass down but found nothing. There was a distant table, past the beer pong, already covered with discarded glasses and empty cans of beer. She held her empty glass in her hand, balancing it against her knee.
The game of beer pong ended and then started again, ended and started again. Huey Lewis sang about love, and Rick Astley sang about the things he would never do. She liked the song, unironically. She could just get up and dance. She had danced to the song before, in her room, when no one was looking.
She could try her hand at beer pong. She probably wouldn’t be good, but the people playing didn’t seem to be good either. She wondered how many carpet fibers ended up in the beer from all the missed shots. She could get up and she could play, and after a few drinks maybe that wouldn’t matter so much.
Linda said, “Hey, uh, Claire, want to play?”
Claire looked from the beer pong table to Linda. “No thanks.”
She left the basement. The living room was crowded now. There was an empty spot between the couch and the recliner. She squeezed her way around the coffee table to the vacancy.
Rick Astley had been cut off and the volume on the television had been turned up to compensate. On the TV there was a man in a red tuxedo and a woman in a short silver dress standing in front of a small crowd of people gathered in a decorated hall, talking about New Year’s resolutions they would definitely follow up on. No one seemed to be watching what was on.
She felt tense, in the arch of her foot pressed against the floor, in her knee, in the wrist of the hand that held the empty glass. The TV seemed louder than it needed to be and it still wasn’t audible over the people in the living room, and all she could hear were fragments, fragments of conversations, fractured words and sentences without context that blurred between each other creating an indiscernible mix of phrases, and she had no idea when it became so warm, only it wasn’t just warm it was heat, just a wave of heat that she could barely breathe in.
It was empty on the patio, just her and the portable heater. Even with the heat on she could feel the cold, out there, lingering, hoping for a way in. She leaned against the deck railing and looked out into the night sky, at the stars above. Outside it was mostly quiet. The insulation from the house couldn’t keep all of the noise in, but out here it didn’t feel so encompassing.
She didn’t have to be there to watch the ball drop, the countdown end, the declaration that an old set of numbers had ended and a new set of numbers would begin. The new year would arrive right on time, right on schedule, without worrying about whether or not she was there to witness its social introduction. The world would keep on spinning, the stars in the sky blinking in and out, regardless of her own awareness.
The patio door slid open and some of that noise spilled out for just a moment before it was shut again. Dana walked over and stood beside the patio railing. She said, “Want me to get Stella to make you another one of those?”
Claire looked at her empty glass. “I have to drive home.”
Dana nodded and pulled out a bottle of water from a nearby cooler. “That’s fair. Maybe some water instead?”
“Yeah, okay.” She took the water and set the empty glass down on the patio table.
“I’ve been trying to drink more water myself. Less soda, less beer. That’s my New Year resolution, you know, to take care of myself. My body is my temple and all that.”
Claire pointed at the can of beer Dana was holding in her hand. “What about that?”
“What about it?”
“Less soda, less beer?”
“Well, that’s for next year. It’s still this year, and I haven’t resolved to do anything this year.”
“Isn’t it going to be next year in like a minute?”
Dana leaned back and chugged the beer down. She tossed the empty can onto the patio table and it rolled off of the side. She pulled out her phone and tapped the screen. “And with a minute to spare. Come on, let’s go inside and welcome the new year.”
The crowd had moved to fill in even the empty spaces between the recliner and the couch in the living room. Claire found an empty spot in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, and pressed herself against the doorframe until she could see the television.
The people in the room shouted, “TEN!”
The new year was so close.
“NINE!”
Claire tried to remember what it was they said about New Year resolutions.
“EIGHT!”
She could do whatever she wanted, make them whatever she wanted them to be.
“SEVEN!”
She could become whatever she wanted to become.
“SIX!”
The old year and its insecurities were a thing of the past.
“FIVE!”
The new year offered with it hope.
“FOUR!”
Or at least the possibility of hope.
“THREE!”
She wondered what kind of person she wanted to become.
“TWO!”
She knew she wasn’t that kind of person, not yet.
“ONE!”
But she could be.
“HAPPY NEW YEAR!”
The resounding shouts lasted for a minute, and then the TV was turned down and the music was turned back up. This time it was a song about two lonely people meeting on a midnight train. Claire wandered, from the living room into the kitchen, down into the basement.
On the television downstairs the DVD menu for Shrek 2 was playing. Quincy, Harry, and Dana were standing over by the bar. Dana held a water bottle in one hand and the cap in the other. Claire stood alongside them and listened for a while, until they all dispersed, one after another.
She walked back upstairs and found the recliner was empty. She sat down and looked for a spot to set her bottle of water, but the coffee table was out of reach. She leaned back and watched the silent television. The music and the conversations grew louder, and louder, and she could feel her muscles tense. She took a deep breath and tried to relax.
The End
Don’t Look Up – In Review
The film Don’t Look Up makes for a satire of political and social apathy that had the potential of greatness. There are moments that happen in the film that are really interesting, there are moments that are extremely on point and there are some great ideas there, but as a whole the movie is as distracted and over embellishing as the characters in power. It goes on for too long before the end credits start to roll, and then it keeps on going, making the movie’s message muddied by the excess that surrounds it.
The premise of the movie is that a comet has been spotted in the infinite vastness of space, and using math two astronomers are able to confirm that the comet is on a trajectory to Earth. Unlike the people of Deep Impact, who had a year of time to prepare, Earth only has just over six months before a world ending comet crashes down in the ocean. For this movie, and Deep Impact, the comet is only half the story. For Deep Impact, the other half of the story is how people can maintain their humanity even against the hopelessness of death.
For Don’t Look Up the other half is the movie Idiocracy, represented by a public whose attention span enables pop stars to stand out in the media over an actual international crisis. It’s here that the movie has a lot of interesting ideas, such as the idea that bad news doesn’t have to be sugar-coated. Everything doesn’t have to be pleasant all the time, especially if that unpleasant business needs to be discussed. At the same time, though, would John Oliver still get as many views if he didn’t pair his presentations with comedy? Come for the jokes, stay for the realization that there are big problems in the world, and nobody’s doing anything about it. In a sense Don’t Look Up is doing a similar thing to John Oliver: come for the fantastic story of imminent destruction that also comes with a side order of social responsibility for those in power.
While watching the movie my first thought was that it was about climate change, and that thought was there because I know Leonardo DiCaprio is all about climate change awareness. Looking back I realize that it could really be about any subject that needs to be disproven time and time again. For some reason there are still people out there who believe the Earth is flat. That the moon landing was faked. That there is such a thing as an alpha wolf, that a person only uses 10% of their brain. It’s hard for humanity to advance if we’re forced to disprove falsities that have already been disproven again and again.
As for what keeps the movie from really being great, well, the first problem I noticed is how strangely disjointed and distracted its editing is. On one hand there seems to be a deliberate choice behind this. In an early scene there is a part where DiCaprio’s trying to explain what’s going on, but he’s very nervous, struggling to get through his explanation. The camera cuts to him, to the other characters, to random things in the room. Because the camera isn’t focused, it presents the idea that the people listening to him aren’t focused on him. The issue I had with this is that it made the movie has this kind of disjointed editing throughout, making it feel disjointed over purposefully stressful. It makes me feel like they were trying to stylistically convey something that DiCaprio was already doing without the aid of an unfocused camera operator.
As the movie goes on it dives off the rails, dipping into unnecessary excess that doesn’t really add on to the central message of the film, nor does it develop the main characters or conflict any further. The ending suffers the most from the film’s excess, choosing not to just stop with the main characters, the emotional heart of the film, but to instead keep going past that, emphasizing the movie’s more ridiculous tendances over its message of social responsibility.
The thing that stood out to me the most, though, is just how powerless we are as individuals. Looking out into the stars, I am just a single man standing on a rock being flung through the void of space. If a comet would decide to crash my party, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. There’s nothing most people can do to stop it. There’s only the hope that those that have the power to protect Earth’s population from global catastrophe also have all of our needs at heart. That’s what I think the central message of the movie is, the hope that those that can will, and the fear that those that can won’t.
Squid Game – In Review
Squid Game is a remarkable show. It’s a story that mixes violence with children’s games and a death count higher than most Rambo films, while still having a lot of tension as likable characters are pitted against each other to the death. I would argue, though, it’s not about predicting who will live and who will not, but witnessing the lengths the characters go and the personal attachments they sacrifice in order to not just survive, but win.
In short, the show is about four hundred fifty six people, down on their luck, with little more to their name than the debt on their backs. They’re given a choice: play a game, and win some money. If you break the rules, if you lose at the game? You die.
What’s especially interesting about the show is just how equally tense and predictable it can be. In the beginning the games focus on individual ability, but there’s a point in the story where people get sorted into teams. One team has all of the main characters on it. The other team has nobody you’ve ever looked at before. Who will survive?
Spoiler: the main characters.
In the early games characters were not playing against each other, but against the clock, or against a skill threshold. If they lived or died depended on their own skill and their own luck. This team game changes the dynamic because now a group of them has to work together to succeed, and success means that they will have worked directly to kill every member of the other team. It raises the tension for what the games expect from the participants, but what’s also important is that their success isn’t easy. It maintains the illusion of danger by having these characters brush up against death, leaving you to wonder how they will succeed more than if.
While Battle Royale was an inspiration for the show, I feel that the setup for Squid Game is something I find to be more effective than Battle Royale. It’s been a while, but if I remember correctly Battle Royale is about overpopulation, looking at an eventual problem and creating a horrible solution. Squid Game deals with more immediate existing financial problems, such as a character whose mother is dying, but cannot afford the health care. That’s what I think the key ingredient is that separates things like Battle Royale and The Most Dangerous Game from Squid Game, because Squid Game creates a system in which its players are given the illusion of choice and fairness, despite all of the power held outside of them putting them through games that are designed to thin out the herd.
The Most Dangerous Game, and stories like that, feel representations of idealistic capitalism. The setup for these stories usually has someone plucked from their life and then hunted for sport by a group of people. It’s up to this individual, who starts with nothing, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and defeat the hunters that hunt them. It’s the ideal representation of capitalism in that an individual can start with nothing and make something of themselves despite the odds, in a system that allows for creative endeavors to succeed.
Squid Game is the opposite of that, the representation of capitalism at its worst. People are researched and chosen based on their lack of futures, their suffering exploiting for the sake of the competition. The games are presented as if everyone has an equal chance to succeed, but as the games continue it becomes very apparent that the only outcome is that the games are rigged against the players.
I’ve seen a few people try to analyze the movie for its political messages, including an analysis I don’t agree with because it ignores parts of the show in order to support itself. The message that I like to take from the show is presented in one particular scene. There are two people looking out a window at a man freezing in the cold. Someone will help the man, and that man will live, or no one will help the man, and that man will die. Both of the people have the ability to help them, but they don’t. It’s the kind of question that sounds like it belongs on a Voight-Kampff test, an empathy check that, in that moment, neither of them pass.
To quote the song Mass Destruction by Faithless: “Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.”
Losing at NaNoWriMo
This past month has been the first in years that I’ve attempted National Novel Writing Month. Write 50,000 words in 30 days! I didn’t expect to succeed, and I did not succeed. I have never succeeded in writing so many words in so little time, so the prospect of accomplishing this was considered a slim chance at best, self-fulfilling prophecy at worst. That said, I did write something.
That was my ultimate goal, really. To walk away with some amount of words that I did not have on the page before. I wouldn’t have a novel, but maybe I’d have the start of a novel. I asked for little and I gave less, but that’s okay. Something’s far better than nothing, and I learned a few things. I had an outline written beforehand, a story already plotted out, but I ran into problems in regard to perspective, transitions, descriptions, voice, dialogue, all of which I might not have discovered if I didn’t try writing the thing.
I’ve been listening to back episodes of the podcast Writing Excuses (I’ve got what, fourteen seasons of catching up to do?), and one of the things that they had discussed was the idea of what a writer would do if they’re hesitant on working on their “great” idea. In short, their recommendation was to write it. It doesn’t matter how great an idea might seem in your head, having to write it is a different beast entirely.
For instance, imagine if you were going to write a novelization of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a thing that you could do as all of his work is public domain. First, think about the things you wouldn’t have to worry about. You wouldn’t have to worry about writing a plot or dialogue, coming up with names, developing themes. That said, you would have a lot to fill in. Hamlet leaves out description and specificity in favor of short general stage direction. In order to fill the gaps in between the dialogue you will have to make decisions.
Do you write the exposition in iambic pentameter? Do you try to mimic the language Shakespeare used, focusing on the style of the time? Do you write descriptions and narration in a modern voice, but leave the original dialogue as is, creating this odd juxtaposition of eras? Whatever you plan might sound good, but it’s not until you get words on a page will you actually be able to see it and get a feel for how well it worked.
I recently finished writing a novel this Summer, and one of the most difficult parts of writing it was just moving my characters from point A to point B. Do I follow them all the way, or do I cut somewhere in between and just skip ahead? If I skip ahead, that means I have to set up the new location, which could cause problems to the momentum of the story. If I follow, that means I have to fill in the space with something meaningful, which is very tricky to do when you know the exciting part is at the destination.
There are countless problems that can occur when trying to write any kind of story, but you simply won’t know they’re there until you actually try to write it. So I may have lost the NaNoWriMo, but I did win the nothing else, because I haven’t written any more of the story this month, and clearly need to figure out where in my schedule I can carve out time for writing because if I don’t nothing will get done.
No Time To Die – In Review
Sean Connery was a sometimes serious, sometimes playful James Bond. George Lazenby was a sometimes serious, sometimes playful James Bond that also did winter sports. Roger Moore was playful. Timothy Dalton was upset. Pierce Brosnan was the most British. And then there’s Daniel Craig, that last in a long line of 007s, now freshly retired from the gig.
With Casino Royale there seemed to be an intent to rebuild the franchise from the ground up, starting with a more realistic world, and a more grounded hero, which is not too much of surprise considering how poorly received Die Another Day was. A grounded a gritty spy thriller where all the stakes are on a poker game featuring a villain that bleeds from his eye is very different from an invisible car escaping a satellite based laser through an ice mansion.
James Bond films generally haven’t had the most continuity. Sometimes the new story picks up right where the last one left off, sometimes it doesn’t. The end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me said James Bond would return in For Your Eyes Only, but it was actually Moonraker that came next. The point is, Bond films have generally been like Law and Order episodes. There’s no law saying you have to watch them in order. Daniel Craig’s series has, for the most part, followed that similar idea. Quantum of Solace immediately followed Casino Royale, but Skyfall and SPECTRE didn’t.
No Time To Die is an ambitious Bond film that tries to do a lot of things, and the first is that it tries to tie up and resolve the disparate plot lines and character stories that had been built up since Casino Royale (except for Quantum of Solace, which has largely been abandoned). This is part of the reason for why No Time To Die is a long film. Aside from the plot that its trying to tell, along with the Bond’s own personal story, there are a plethora of characters who come and go, all getting their own sendoff from the series in one way or another.
The problem that this highlights is just how disconnected the films have been. Because every film, except for Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, hasn’t been connected to each other, this means that there a plots that were never intended to be stitched together, and story threads that I simply forgot over the past fifteen years. For the most part the result of this is photographs of the dead, but the one missing link that No Time To Die forgets to remind anyone of is who the love interest’s father was, because I completely forgot. To be fair, the movie franchise also forgets that he was set up as a member of Quantum first, before the writers stopped caring about Quantum.
Watching the movie feels like watching two separate shorter movies that have been stitched together. The first half deals with trust. Time has passed since the last Bond film and he’s retired, but retirement in a spy movie is about as effective as martini umbrella in a rainstorm, and it’s not long before he gets called into the mix. There’s been a bit of an incident and a high profile target is on the run and both the CIA and MI6 want to take him in, and nobody’s talking to each other. This half of the film has a much stronger spy versus spy dynamic which is generally missing from most Bond films.
The second half of the movie feels like more of a throwback to classic Bond films. While the villain of the show appears in the first half, it’s only as brief parts and dialogue heard in the background. At this point the spy versus spy dynamic disappears and it turns into a classic Bond film with a villain that feels very reminiscent of Dr. No.
No Time To Die is an ambitious film that tries to do a lot of things. It wants to be a good send off to Daniel Craig, it wants to be a spy thriller, it wants to be classic Bond, it wants Bond to be a serious character who deals with serious character development, it wants Bond to pour drinks with strange women in the middle of firefights, and somewhere beneath the stunts and the action and the plot it wants to have a story about the things you do for the people you love.
Reminiscence – In Review
Reminiscence, a film written and directed by Lisa Joy of Westworld fame, has some good ideas in it. At its core it’s a noir detective story that’s twisted by the concept of memory set in a world ravaged by war and water, and there are excellent performances all around. It’s an interesting story weighed down by a combination of melodramatic and heavy-handed narration.
The story takes place in a future where global warming proceeded on course and the oceans rose up, flooding the coast. The setting makes for interesting visuals, while also setting up a class based society for Nick, the protagonist of the story, to interact with. The rich live on dry land, the poor make do in communities that reside in old buildings, accessible only by boat. Nick is a former soldier who operates a business that sells nostalgia; he sells your nostalgia to you, to be more specific. Hop into a machine of his and you get to live out your favorite memories again, and in a world that doesn’t have much a future there’s money in selling the past.
The machine that he uses presents the first oddity in the film. A person would lay unconscious in a vat, with Nick guiding them into a state of sleep hypnosis, while their memories appear as a hologram-esque visual, displayed in a one to one ratio on a stage set near the machine. These memories are depicted not from the perspective of the person remembering them, but rather as an out of body experience, generally with a single static camera image of themselves.
For instance, the first character that saddles up into the machine remembers a moment in which he was playing catch with his dog. The memory that is displayed shows him standing in a field, and every so often his dog comes into and out of view. The movie provides a small explanation of why memories are seen as out of body experiences, rather than through the eyes of the person experiencing the memory, but it still makes for an interesting choice.
It is a purposeful choice, because there are both plot reasons, and visual reasons, that the memories are not just viewed by themselves but also projected for the operators of the machine to view as well, privacy be damned. Though, I suppose the people in this story don’t mind having their memories viewed by strangers, and saved on backup disks.
There is a scene where someone is in the machine living out a memory. In their memory they were having a conversation with someone and left the room, but from that out of body camera it could be seen that the person they were talking to stole something. If their memories were being visualized through their eyes they would not have seen it, but if they didn’t see it then how would this out of body camera be able to remember things that they didn’t experience?
Let’s say, though, for the sake of argument, that we’re just going to accept the science because, at the end of the day, it’s a movie. The entire idea of re-experiencing memories itself is science fiction, so let’s just accept that a person’s memories can be translated to a viewpoint that exists outside their body and depicts actions that they did not observe.
The next major hurdle is the narration. Hugh Jackman is constantly narrating. He narrates to explain what the culture of society is like, he narrates to explain the technology, he narrates his motivations, he narrates other people’s motivations. Blade Runner did an interesting thing, in that it cut out its narration from the theatrical release, a choice that does make certain scenes feel longer and slower, because there used to be narration there, filling the gap.
With Reminiscence, however, a lot of that narration devolves to Nick constantly asking, “What happened to her?”, or “Where did she go?”, or “I had to find her.” The more he talked, the more I wished that this movie borrowed a line from the Blade Runner Director’s Cut, that being just throw out all of that excess narration. It’s exhausting and drowns the movie in melodrama.
Not that the dialogue helps. There’s a part of the movie where Nick tells someone that they’re his only friend, and my gut reaction to that was that they’re his only friend because the movie didn’t have time to introduce other characters. There are only a small number of characters, but because of the pace of the film very few get any development. Considering that the movie’s plot is centered around a machine that shows a person’s memory, a lot of plot points are told, some of which just occur and develop in the background, with the faintest degree of provocation.
I think that Remiscence could have been a better movie then it was. If it axed the narration, if it trusted its visuals to tell a story, instead of having its characters explain what the visuals mean thematically, it could have been a really good movie. Instead, it’s a good attempt.
Finders Keepers by Stephen King – In Review
Stephen King’s novel Finders Keepers, sequel to Mr. Mercedes, begins with a literal bang. In the dead of night a reclusive author’s home is invaded by three robbers. Two are in it for the money, but it’s the third that pulls the trigger, killing the old man. It’s a thrilling start to a book that doesn’t really have any intent on doing anything quickly. This is a story that moves at such a glacial pace that the returning main characters of Mr. Mercedes don’t even show up until a third of the book is done.
Until then it feels like reading two separate character studies stacked on top of each other. I wouldn’t necessarily call this bad, as much as it removes the immediacy of the plot. Because so much time and attention are given to what these characters lives were like before they intersected, it takes a long time before the plot becomes immediate and thrilling again.
Reading the book reminds me of the 2000 film Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas. In that movie he plays an author who’s attempting to write his second novel. One of his student’s reads his first draft (or a chunk of it) and says that it’s good, but it feels like he’s not making any decisions. There are a lot of character details in the novel, but does he really need to include their dental records?
The first third of Finders Keepers is spent following the backstory of two characters: a thief that stole the money, and a boy that found the money. The backstory for the boy makes sense, it lays the foundation for his own motives and why he ends up over his head. The backstory for the thief does not. Do we really need to know that his mother was a famous writer who wrote a single book, and nothing else? Do we need to follow the entire stretch of time in between him hiding his stolen stash and him emerging from prison to claim it?
Whether we really need to see every detail or not, it is true that the stories themselves are interesting, even if they get in the way of pacing. And I would never argue that Stephen King doesn’t make decisions, I would argue that at least for Finders Keepers the momentum of the story takes a long time to build up. Part of this is because of the exhaustive character development in its first third, but also because the second third exists to set up the conflict. Once it finally gets to the point in which all of the characters start actually colliding with each other it does become a thrilling novel, but it takes a long and winding road to get there.
Greetings and salutations, folks 