I've ranted about this before, but the mainframe-as-antagonist (commanding an army of dumb terminal minions) was a well-worn meme sixty years ago when Captain Kirk was outwitting IBM System/360 lookalikes on a regular basis. It's so overdone by now you can't stick a fork in it. It's mush.

And yet Hollywood keeps serving it up. Because we keep chomping it down.

Conquering the galaxy since the 1950s.

Even the ending of Edge of Tomorrow (without a computer network in sight) is straight out of The Phantom Menace. And straight out of Oblivion, the previous Tom Cruise SF post-apocalyptic, blow-up-the-alien-mainframe actioner.

Making it an organic mainframe is a slight improvement but just as dumb. The whole "hive mind" thing needs to go too.

Speaking of organic mainframes, Star Wars fell back on the Evil Emperor trope, a linchpin apparently holding the whole universe together by his lonesome. How is never explained, but all the good guys have to do is knock out this one bad guy and peace and prosperity is restored to the galaxy.

Well, after they deal with the truly killer mainframe that is the Death Star. The whole Star Wars franchise ended up being about destroying Death Stars, each one a more ludicrous violation of the laws of physics than the last. Again, what long term problems this solves is never made clear.

Does the mail start arriving on time now? Does the tax code suddenly become more comprehensible? And what happens to the unemployment rate when all those Death Star jobs get instantaneously terminated? Imagine the size of the catering contract for just one of those behemoths.

Of course, destroying a single machine in a single place and winning the war everywhere makes for easy denouements. But if the Earth is ever attacked by malevolent aliens who know how to implement autonomous distributed network technology, we are so screwed.

That aside, though, what do the aliens hope to accomplish by attacking Earth? Or attacking any inhabited planet? (Besides giving the director an excuse to restage the Battle of Britain or the Invasion of Normandy.)

If they wanted to wipe out the humans along with the infrastructure—the whole objective of the Independence Day aliens—there'd be no need to get anywhere near the planet's surface, as Heinlein pointed out back in 1966 with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. An asteroid makes for a handy ICBM.

There are lots of big asteroids out there.

Another reason is, they want our water. But there is plenty water elsewhere, that is not at the bottom of a deep gravity well. Europa, for starters.

Then there's the "To Serve Man" plot device. But homo sapiens is a lousy food and energy source (The Matrix is dumber than dirt in this regard). That's why so few people get eaten by sharks (surprisingly few!).

Besides, a blown-up country is a huge resource sink. Hence the Marshall Plan. By 1950, SCAP was already regretting Article 9 in the 1947 Japanese Constitution (forbidding war) and was revving up Japanese industry to support the Korean War, which was just what the economy needed.

In The Phantom Menace, Lucas tosses the politics of trade into the picture, but without explaining what is being traded, why, or how. The result is a blur of handwaving when it comes to the story because there are no underlying rational reasons for anything that happens.

The economic model of the Star Wars universe makes no more sense than the socialist utopianism of Star Trek, which finally gave us the robber baron Ferengi to make things interesting.

Still, Lucas was onto something. The unequal treaties imposed on Japan and China by the U.S. and European powers in the mid-19th century led to the Boxer Rebellion in China and propelled Japan into a regional arms race in order to even the scales. Lots of dramatic conflict there.

The thing is, China and Japan had stuff the foreign powers wanted, stuff as trivial (to our modern eyes) as tea. But like spice in Dune, there were underlying economic causes behind the conflicts. And at the time, a bad trade deal was a better deal for both sides than smash and grab.

And so we're back to the Lebensraum ("living space") ideology promulgated by Germany in the 1930s. (The Nazi bad guy connection certainly doesn't hurt.) The Japanese equivalent was used to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria.

Both Germany and Japan were doing rather well at expanding their territories (employing their own "unequal treaty" tactics) before they started actually invading their neighbors, after which everything went downhill fast.

So we'll assume our invading aliens are smart enough not to turn the whole thing into a scorched-earth shooting war. The problem is how to make that interesting.

A good place to start is Ryomaden, which describes the opening of Japan in the mid-19th century, the shock to the system, the unequal treaties, the escalating civil strife, finally resolved by a quickly-concluded civil war that launched Japan on a burning quest to surpass the west.

If gunboat melodrama is what you want, (bad) diplomacy seems pretty good at supplying the necessary Sturm und Drang motivations. Kudos to Guardians of the Galaxy on this score.

The problem is the time frame required by real politics. Summing up two decades of geopolitics in two hours would be tough. I suppose it really is simpler to just have Tom Cruise blow up the mainframe.

Labels: computers, mainframe, movies, robots, science fiction, star wars, tech history, technology, thinking about writing

The eponymous character, originally named Lieutenant Mary Sue, was created by Paula Smith in her short 1973 parody of Star Trek fan fiction. Editing a Star Trek fanzine, Smith had noticed the predominance of stories that featured

the adventures of the youngest and smartest person ever to graduate from Star Fleet Academy and ever get a commission. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm wrestling, this character can be found burrowing her way into the good graces of Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, if not all three at once. She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.

The Mary Sue can be simply summed up as a character who is too good to be true, having acquired more skills and talents and positive personality traits than our most generous expectations suggest is realistically possible.

Put the Mary Sue shortcut down to the rush of wish fulfillment or to impatient writers who want to fast forward to the "interesting" scenes. Or who think they are giving the audience what it wants to see. You know, because practicing to get good at something is for chumps.

Meeting all these criteria, a recent Mary Sue par excellence is Rey in The Force Awakens.

Yoda himself can't keep Luke Skywalker from getting badly beaten by Darth Vader in the second movie. Forget about crossing swords with anybody in the first. But Rey is an expert the first time she touches a lightsaber. She's as good a pilot as Han Solo the first time she sits in the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon.

Now, Luke does have a Mary Sue moment at the end of A New Hope, when he pilots an X-wing starfighter to victory. No, logging a couple hundred hours in a Cessna 172 does not mean you can hop into an F-35 Lightning and out-fly the Top Guns who've been at it for years.

We give Luke a pass here thanks to the narrative trick of making the audience a participant in the trials, travails, and eventual triumphs of the protagonist. As the help wanted ads put it, having proved his mettle, we'll let the good guy skate by on "equivalent experience" in lieu of a resume.

The problem with Rey is that's she's perfect from the moment she appears on the screen. We never see her resume. We never see her burning the midnight oil. Making it all the more annoying, as I outlined in my review, is that it would not have been difficult to give her one.

The big irony of the Mary Sue and its Star Trek origins is that The Next Generation wrote one right into the cast. Pandering to the fan base, I suppose. But perhaps any trope worth being singled out and savagely critiqued is one that connects at a deep level with a significant portion of the audience.

In that light, it deserves a defense. And so now I rise not to bury Mary Sue but to praise her.

To be sure, I cannot bring myself to defend Wesley Crusher. He is exactly the kind of annoying Mary Sue that Paula Smith snarked about back in 1973. Any reasonable appeal to verisimilitude could not tolerate his presence on the bridge of the Enterprise.

But a Mary Sue story can be done right. Komichi Akebi in Akebi's Sailor Uniform is a more recent and perfectly adorable example. But Snow White with the Red Hair really sets the standard.


Based on the manga by Sorata Akizuki, the anime ran two cours (the manga is still being serialized). As befitting the title, the story takes place in a spick and span medieval Disneyland (the setting itself qualifies as a Mary Sue).

When we first meet her, Shirayuki (白雪), whose name translates as "Snow White," is a conscientious herbalist who owns a small pharmacy. That is, until the lecherous Prince Raj, entranced by her brilliant red hair, decides to make Shirayuki his mistress. And won't take no for an answer.

Figuring that caution is the better part of valor, Shirayuki's answer is to pack up and scamper across the border, where she promptly runs into Prince Zen of Clarines and his retainers. It's "like" at first sight.

No mooning around. No one gets serenaded beneath a window. Shirayuki and Zen are preternaturally practical and competent people. Shirayuki has principles and no hesitation in standing up for them. And one of those principles is to own only what she's earned.

Although ostensibly a "European" kingdom, Clarines appears to be run by a ranked bureaucracy of mandarins appointed through an imperial examination system. Determined to stay close to Zen but refusing any handouts, Shirayuki applies for a job as an assistant court herbalist. And passes the tests.

But, again, the backstory has established that she works hard and is good at it, and shows us (doesn't just tell us) that she is deserving of the position. Zen as well works for a living. Being a prince in Clarines comes with a portfolio. Besides going on inspection tours, he has to sit at a desk and push paper around.

These jobs not only make them more interesting but also generate compelling plot material.

(Seriously, what do Disney's Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty actually do? Well, Cinderella is good at housekeeping. What does Elsa do? Anna at least has the important job of keeping Elsa from going nuts and destroying the kingdom.)

There's no need to pretend Shirayuki and Zen aren't Mary Sues. They are too good to be true. Here we have a pair of protagonists who couldn't be any nicer without getting saccharin. Even Prince Raj can't resist becoming a better person when he's around them (a character arc that pays off well in the second cour).

Yet they both possess a depth of character that makes their stories compelling. Yes, nice people can be interesting and do interesting things. I would describe the resulting genre as a "cozy" romance, the equivalent of the "cozy" mystery.

Dispensed with are the angst, the sturm und drang, the love triangles, the miscommunication, all the melodramatic conventions of the genre. Another way of describing this romance sub-genre might be "You and me (and our friends) against the world."

In fact, the only real hint of romantic tension arises among their friends, principally Mitsuhide, Kiki, and Obi, who are Zen's retainers, though Zen assigns Obi to Shirayuki. Later in the series, Mitsuhide seems to have a thing for Kiki, and Obi definitely has unrequited affection for Shirayuki.

But being loyal to Zen and having earned his trust, Obi never does anything stupid or inappropriate. Aside from Mitsuhide getting goofy in one episode in which he goes looking for Shirayuki in the pharmacy and accidentally ingests an elixir, nobody embarrasses, betrays, or compromises anybody.

Even for the day or so that Mitsuhide is under the effect of the elixir, he acts like a stereotypical gallant knight and drives everybody batty. It's a clever way of stating what the show is not about.

In the second cour, more high adventure comes their way, what with pirates and outlaws and damsels in distress and long lost family members showing up in unexpected places. But Shirayuki keeps her head on her shoulders (literally and figuratively) and the relationship never falters. Neither does her career.

In the end, nobody rides off into the sunset. There are no impending nuptials. We don't need to be told that Shirayuki and Zen will live "happily ever after." They only need to live their lives as best they can. From what we have learned about them, that will suffice. Real life is tough enough already.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, crunchyroll, movie reviews, romance, star trek, star wars, streaming, thinking about writing

Star Wars isn't "science fiction." It's medieval fantasy with suits of armor made from extruded ballistic plastic (painted white to make them easier targets, I suppose). Light sabers instead of swords and lasers instead of longbows. (Except the laser bolts move slower than actual arrows.)


Not that there's anything wrong with that. Repurposing old genres makes the topsoil of popular entertainment all the richer. And like McDonald's french fries, when it comes to genre entertainment, the decent low-brow stuff beats the tony high-brow stuff nine times out of ten.

The first Star Wars movie (1977) defined this revised genre. With Irvin Kershner at the helm, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) extended it (it even included a dragon in a cave). Then things went downhill and never recovered. Not even after George Lucas bowed out and laughed all the way to the bank

Granted, at that stage there was no place to go but up. But so determined was Disney to rekindle some of that now "classic" fairy tale goodness (its specialty, after all), that they made the same movie all over again, only with better CGI and a worse script.

It'd be one thing if they'd made exactly the same move. But everybody was so familiar with the archetypes that they forgot to fill in the rest. In between each predictable turn of plot, there's supposed to be, you know, a story. And the accompanying material that fashions ongoing character development.

As a result, The Force Awakens ends up a compilation of deus ex machina moments, the characters and their reasons for being there springing into existence out of empty space like subatomic particles.

The original Star Wars has a few of these problems too, though they're not nearly as glaring. For example, Luke demonstrating the skills of an experienced ball turret gunner straight off the literal farm.

In fact, everybody in the Star Wars universe is surprisingly adept at both operating (and sabotaging) complex military hardware they've never seen before. Galaxies long ago and far away must have had the same high school curriculum as Girls und Panzer (in which armored combat is an extracurricular activity).

And the last act of Star Wars is plain silly, suggesting that a couple hundred hours flying VFR in a Piper Cub qualifies a pilot to jump into an F-22 and fly circles around an MIG-29. (See also: Independent Day, but at least the Randy Quaid and Bill Pullman characters had flown military jets before.)

Otherwise, Luke is realistically shown to be the novice that he is, whose best option in a tight situation (again, until the heroic last act) is to run away or hire some muscle. Even after extensive one-on-one training, he is incapable of besting Darth Vader with a light saber in The Empire Strikes Back.

By contrast, the time to learn any activity, any skill, any knowledge-dependent process in The Force Awakens—from "I've never seen this thing before" to "I can use it as well as a professional"—is about sixty seconds.

All the more exasperating is that most of these glaring plot holes could have been easily fixed.

1. Finn goes AWOL after ten minutes of doing whatever he was programmed/trained to do since forever.

Well, they certainly don't make stormtroopers like they used to. For such a key character, a bit more substance behind the decision would go a long way to informing us about his character and personality.

Easy fix: Make Finn part of Kylo Ren's detail. Finn is sick and tired of babysitting this whiny kid with anger management issues, has been nicked one too many times during his temper tantrums. Then witnessing Ren's depravity in person punches his ticket to get out of there before he ends up as cannon fodder.

This would also explain why a narcissistic sociopath like Ren would notice who Finn was in the first place, let alone bother to call him a "traitor." Because he knew Finn personally.

2. I read the manual and now I can fly a starship better than an experienced pilot.

"Howling Mad" Murdock on the A-Team could fly anything because he learned how to fly everything. But since the original Star Wars, "The Force" somehow became shorthand for "Hard work, study, and practice is for suckers."

Easy fix: Make Ridley a mechanic when we first meet her. She works for the pawnshop proprietor who owns the ticket on the Millennium Falcon. She's trying to fix it because Han disabled it before hawking it and it won't go FTL, making it worthless. In the meantime, Ridley uses it to cart junk around.

One day she spots Finn and BB-8 out in the desert and gives them a ride. When they get back, Han Solo and Chewbacca have shown up to claim their craft. In the middle of arguing about who owns what and who owes whom, the stormtroopers charge in and all hell breaks loose.

3. I didn't even read the manual but just holding a light saber means I can beat a guy with way more experience than me.

It's easy to establish that both Finn and Ridley can handle themselves in a fight. But that's not enough. Not after the first three Star Wars movies established the deadly difficulty of light saber fighting.

Easy fix: This was sorta hinted at, but it should be pointed out (by Finn, say) that, sans the Force, Ren can't fight his way out of a brown paper bag. Lazy jerk that he is, he never had to. But now he has to. The question is whether actually applying himself will make him a better man too. Ah, a character arc!

On the other hand, some things are not fixable.

The Death Star was a cool enough concept that, first time out, I could quell the eye rolling. But this predilection to "Do the exactly same thing only bigger" movie after movie is just inane.

And here I thought that Space 1999 boasted the stupidest SF premise of all time. Supposing that the Queen in Through the Looking-Glass really could believe six impossible things before breakfast, she couldn't believe this:

Moonbase Alpha is a scientific research colony and watchdog over silos of atomic waste from Earth stored on the Moon's far side. On September 13, 1999, magnetic energy builds to cause an explosive chain-reaction of the waste, blasting the Moon out of Earth orbit and off the plane of the ecliptic, out of the Solar System.

The first Death Star (so sad there's more than one) was the spherical version of the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek. And the Doomsday Machine was huge but not-unreasonable sized. But a whole freaking planet on the run? I'd need a space elevator for my suspension of disbelief to go that high.

Also, these super-advanced societies can travel faster than light but can't make a decent circuit breaker. Or make a non-combustible space ship. (Also see Independence Day, but I do give Independence Day credit for setting off a nuke inside the mothership, which would do pretty much as depicted.)

This single-point-of-failure problem extends to the Republic, which hasn't figured out distributed networking either. They need to take lessons from Monty Python on "Not Being Seen."

Speaking of Monty Python, watching Star Wars gets me into a "What have the Romans ever done for us?" frame of mind. The entire argument against the regime du jour is that they're mean. And not very bright, taking a sledgehammer approach (repeatedly) to solving small problems.

These are the kind of people who, lacking a flyswatter, grab a hammer. Now all the windows are broken and the walls are full of holes. With Disney committed to pumping out rebooted Star Wars sequels on a regular basis, turning every conflict into an galactic existential threat will get old fast.

It's already old.

Firefly employed a not-dissimilar premise—big bad bureaucracy against the little guy—with an important difference: our motley crew has a job to do, and overthrowing the Alliance tomorrow isn't anywhere near the top of the list.

Posit instead that the Empire or First Order or whatever rules with a heavy hand but is basically competent. The Republic doesn't want to (and can't) overthrow the whole shebang. It's the Republic of Texas: it'd rather not be part of Mexico anymore (it helped that Santa Anna was not a nice guy or a smart general).

Even if the center could not hold, the result would likely resemble the Warring States period in Japan, which is still producing great story material four centuries later.

The sovereign power wielded by the warlords during the era compares to that of the Italian city-states, with conflicts taking place mostly at the peripheries of their domains, leaving commerce and agriculture largely undisturbed. This, in turn, led to significant economic, cultural and technological growth.

But the lack of central control also produced a veritable queue of claimants to the throne, and great business opportunities for the pirates and mercenaries in (or out of) their employ. The kind of universe in which Han Solo and crew would feel right at home.

Related posts

Attack of the Clones
The Phantom Menace
McKee meets the "Menace"

Labels: history, japan, movie reviews, science, science fiction, star wars, technology

"Hard" science fiction—science fiction that attempts to adhere to actual science—is hard. When making up stuff, the closer to reality, the higher the demands of verisimilitude. Almost nothing in a space opera like Star Wars is even scientifically plausible. Nobody cares because we accept from the start that it's closer in genre to a Disney fairy tale.

Hollywood's been on a hard science fiction binge of late, to varying degrees of success. The physics in Interstellar is more wishful thinking than science. Gravity turns the laws of orbital mechanics upside down. But The Martian, which maroons Matt Damon on Mars, is basically Apollo 13 and Cast Away (minus most of the angst) set a few years in the future.

In The Martian, man fights nature largely within the limits of current technology and without any bad guys out to purposely harm him. Oh, for a few minutes, they try to make Jeff Daniels into a villain to gin up some conflict. But two scenes later he goes back to playing a perfectly plausible NASA administrator.

The simple yet daunting goal of Damon's Astronaut Mark Watney is to survive until a rescue mission can return to rescue him. The problem is that with current technology, getting from the Earth to Mars takes six months at best. So he's got a lot of problem solving to do. A major motion picture that is about nothing but problem solving is a breath of fresh air.

Granted, in the space of two hours, the screenplay is going to have to gloss over a few aspects of the real world to keep the story moving. This is big budget motion picture, not a NOVA documentary.

Like, I'm willing to give the radiation thing a pass, because no manned mission is going to Mars in the first place without solving that vexing problem. They don't solve it in the movie either, they simply ignore it, the same way they mostly ignore the .38 Gs of gravity on Mars.

And unlike Tom Hanks shedding a real fifty pounds for Cast Away, Matt Damon didn't starve himself for the role; a scene toward the end showing us his gaunt frame (face hidden) is almost certainly a body double. He's wearing a space suit most of the time anyway.

Tacking down the Pathfinder lander, plugging it in and powering it on (interplanetary cable standardization at last!) a quarter century after it landed is an eye-roller. Still, I could roll with it just because it's such a cute idea.

And I loved the bit about digging up the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) and using it as a plutonium-powered handwarmer (accompanied by Damon's wry "Don't try this at home!" narration).

No, what first suspended my suspension of disbelief was the implication (again, in order to create more obstacles to cleverly overcome) that the astronauts had only a single point of direct communication with Earth. In fact, the Mars landers use satellite uplinks to talk to the orbiters, which relay the signals to Earth ground stations.

Likewise, it is beyond belief that an ATV the size of a small truck would be limited to line-of-sight communication. All of the later Apollo missions left working equipment and experiments on the Moon. The vehicle and the habitat would be studded with transponders and satellite dishes humming along long after the humans left.

Equally improbable is that the inner hatch door of a habitat in a near-airless environment wouldn't be sealable and built into the superstructure. To quote NASA, the purpose of such a hatch is to "isolate the airlock from the crew cabin." I bet Astronaut Mark Watney sure wishes he had one of those. They were standard equipment on the Space Shuttle, after all.

The first failure of the NASA resupply rocket was awfully predicable (more conflict creation). While I did appreciate bringing in the Chinese (China should be part of the ISS), the movie ignores that Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency have comparable launch capabilities, not to mention ULA, Orbital ATK, and SpaceX.

Given the chance to save the day, Elon Musk would be all over this.

And yet I give it a solid A for effort. The Martian isn't one of those movies where the plot holes let all the air out of the suspense. It is a rousing Rubik's Cube of an adventure movie with a bunch of cheating aces tucked up its sleeve. Like the old Star Trek, it's often more interesting for its obvious flaws than for its dramatic successes.

Labels: movie reviews, science, science fiction, space, star wars, technology

Produced and narrated by Keanu Reeves, Side by Side nicely documents the recent history of digital cinema, how it supplanted traditional silver halide film almost overnight, and raised the hackles of the purists (to mostly no avail).


Reflecting trends on the still camera side, ARRI, Panavision, and Aaton no longer make film cameras. That film and camera production peaked only ten years ago illustrates the rapid adoption of digital since 2002, when George Lucas shot Star Wars: Episode II entirely on digital.

There's plenty--a glut--of used film equipment lying around. The more pressing question is how much longer Kodak can afford to keep making (and chemically processing) celluloid film.

Fujifilm quit the motion-picture film business in 2013. Kodak's film sales have fallen a staggering 96 percent since 2006. Like vinyl LPs, there will always been a niche market. Whether the economics of film can continue to justify blockbuster quantities is another question.

Right now, it seems that only guaranteed minimum orders from a handful of Hollywood heavy-hitters are keeping the Kodak film franchise alive.

Television's quick adoption of digital also contributed to the rapid decline of film. But we should also pause to thank the original 35mm prints of Star Trek and other TV "classics" for the brilliant, high-def versions available today.

Along with a brief history of the evolving digital film technologies, Keanu Reeves interviews directors and cinematographers with competing analog vs. digital loyalties. If nothing else, this documentary rekindled my admiration for George Lucas as a technological pioneer.

Digital projection is the last frontier. That frontier is closing fast. In its heyday, most of the motion picture film stock Kodak made was used for theater projection prints. That market sector has taken biggest hit as theaters switched to digital projection.

IMAX was a lone holdout for a while. The last 70mm IMAX theater in Los Angeles will have a 4K laser projection system by the end of 2015.

As with still film cameras, the question not "if" but "when." The most ardent film aficionado has to admit that the best film stock in the world is ultimately no better than the worn-out print running through the crappy projector with the dim bulb in the local mall theater.

And lastly, there is the unavoidable irony of watching a documentary about the motion picture business in which the "old timers" extol the aesthetic superiority of analog--using digital technology.

Labels: movie reviews, movies, star wars, technology, television

During one of those free preview weekends (Cinemax, I believe), I was watching Avatar (the most expensive anime film ever made) in short bursts (until my rolled eyes made it impossible to see), and came to three realizations:

• When it comes to sermons about noble savages and the white man's burden, Dances with Wolves gets it pretty much right.
• Though Avatar is more a remake of Independence Day and The Last Samurai.
• The intelligence with which fictional cinematic wars are waged cannot exceed that of the writer and director.

Costner especially gets the scale right. Dunbar doesn't rise to the top of a huge, established feudal order (nor one that unlike any other feudal order in history is mysteriously united in purpose). Dunbar's prior training is commensurate to the task. He doesn't magically acquire skills out of whole cloth.

Costner doesn't ignore history. In the long run, the U.S. Army would not be defeated. Not even close. They would return with overwhelming force and a really bad attitude.

In glaring contrast to Dances with Wolves, Edward Zwick's ahistorical The Last Samurai demonstrates how desperately dumb Hollywood can get in its search for exotic noble savages and angsty white Americans to heroically shoulder their burdens.


I go into greater depth here, but the Battle of the Southwest was fought against a nascent democracy to preserve the feudal privileges of an aristocratic order, and was led by a man who quit the government mostly because it didn't invade Korea fast enough (they got around to it a few decades later).

Not to mention that Americans never served as military advisers or arms suppliers to the Meiji government. If anybody, that honor goes to an adventurous and enterprising Scotsman, Thomas Blake Glover (a way more interesting person than any fictional character in any of these movies).

An American Civil War veteran, Captain L. L. Janes, was hired by the Meiji government, but to set up a school for "western learning" in Kumamoto.

So I suppose James Cameron came up with the ideal solution and invented his noble savages out of whole cloth, making sure the black hats were naught but black and the white hats were bluer than blue, and every conflict was absolutely unresolvable by any rational means.

But the real formula being shamelessly exploited here is the classic underdog story. Except that Rocky going up against Apollo Creed is one thing. Having the good guys win grossly mismatched military conflicts is quite another.

Read more »

Labels: deep thoughts, history, movie reviews, movies about japan, pop culture, social studies, star wars, ww2

The problem I have with LOTR is the same one I have with the Star Wars sequels, Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, even Narnia: I don't care about the bad guy. His goals and motives are incomprehensible, or he goes about achieving them in the dumbest way possible, or conversely, he's omnipotent—except when he isn't for purposes of plot.

Not caring about the bad guy, it's hard to care about the conflict challenging the good guys. What would Sauron do if he got the ring? Bad things! Um, what bad things? No idea, but it'd probably be more interesting than this movie!

The first Stars Wars is instructive in this regard. Darth Vader is a cog in a machine. His ostensible superiors disrespect him to his face. We get that he's defending a fading way of life in an efficiently managed Empire where the galactic trains all run on time. (It's not clear what the rebels bring to the table as a viable political platform.)

Then Lucas got all preachy and Manichean and perversely tried to "humanize" Vader, revealing that he had no idea what motivates anybody to do anything, except that we again see a disturbingly common pattern in all these movies: bad people are really ugly.


And incredibly dim and ineffective. Rowling (more ugly) has conveniently summed up everything she doesn't understand about villainy in her own arch-villain:

That which Voldemort does not value he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.

Voldemort was steeped in that culture. He couldn't not understand it. Nobody that clueless could gather around him the best and the brightest, and then almost pull off a successful coup d'état. The great villains of history have always had a finger planted firmly on the pulse of the popular will and the governing zeitgeist.

There's a basic confusion here about the means by which people rise to power, and the ways in which they exercise it once it has corrupted them absolutely.

If anything, Voldemort is a carbon copy of Joss Whedon's first Big Bad, the "Master" from season one of Buffy. Whedon's villains improved considerably after that, reaching the epitome of cool, calculating evil in the person of Sunnydale Mayor Richard Wilkins (Harry Groener).

And the coolest, most calculating thing about Mayor Wilkins? He got elected. Compared to him, Voldemort is a cardboard cutout.

Which is not to say there aren't good uses for cardboard villains. Where would James Bond be without them? But they have short half-lives. Take the (ugly) villains of Independence Day. They serve the purpose well for two hours. Any longer and their unfathomable stupidity would become intolerable.

Similarly, the one redeeming characteristic of "Evil Angel" was that he was a two-hundred proof nihilist. But two-hundred proof nihilism gets boring fast, which is what prompts Spike's famous monologue:

We like to talk big, vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." It's just tough guy talk. Strut round with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is I like this world. You've got dog racing. Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here.

Both Buffy and Angel eventually succumbed to too many Big Bads destroying the world too many times. Though to give credit where it's due, Whedon did come up with another real bad beauty, the law firm of Wolfram & Hart. Okay, "evil lawyer" is playing to stereotypes, but good art doesn't dispense with stereotypes; it fully fleshes them out.

Destroying the world is easy and dull. Corrupting it using the kind of enlightened people who contribute to PBS and wouldn't be caught dead (or living dead) at McDonald's or Walmart and earnestly believe they're doing the right thing for the greater good (and for your own good) is a much more rewarding challenge.

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Labels: deep thoughts, harry potter, magic, movies, pop culture, religion, star wars, television

Yes, it's back to the future again to beat up on poor George Lucas. Hence the dated references to Malcolm in the Middle (which, if you remember the show, I think hold up well). I really did write this before listening to the enlightened opinions of "Mike from Milwaukee, Wisconsin," so I guess demented minds think alike. But I haven't seen Revenge of the Sith and it's not in my Netflix queue.

One good thing I can now say about The Phantom Menace: it was crap, but it was endurable crap. Attack of the Clones is just crap. I asked myself over and over, scrunching down in my seat in empathic chagrin for those grossly overpaid SAG members: Have worse lines been uttered before in the history of talking pictures? I suppose so, but by actors being so handsomely rewarded to behave so pretentiously in the service of such bad directing while pretending otherwise? I doubt it.

In fact, Attack of the Clones pretty much settles the question of whether good acting can overcome a really bad script. It can't, not if everybody insists on keeping a straight face.

Unless, that is, if George Lucas is actually a Vogon, the speaking of whose words physically lobotomizes skilled thespians of talent and common sense. Had I not known that actors such as Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson had previously acquitted themselves is productions that didn't totally reek, I could have imagined that a bunch of George's drinking buddies showed up at the ranch one day to appear in one of them, you know, talking pictures, with the promise of cab fare and free beer in the offing.

Only Christopher Lee, the prince of B movies, manages not to embarrass himself. Maybe because he knows he's in a B movie and acts accordingly.

Granted, things do pick up once the shooting starts (after an initial chase sequence, you've got to wait a whole bloody hour), and the camera starts bouncing around so much you can't see anything and you realize you're not missing anything. The problem is, none of the action sequences make sense in the context of, you know, common sense. In the first chase scene we're dealing with a bunch of assassins who can't hit the broad side of a barn. And notice how our lady's Praetorian Guard goes galloping off after them, leaving their charge completely exposed.

Lucky for our dumb heros, the villains are even dumber. (And why don't the bad guys just shoot the good guys, for crying out loud? What is this, a James Bond flick?)

You quickly resign yourself to the dreadful realization that every strategic decision in the story will be executed with a complexity of thinking that wouldn't stump a seven year old. Proof: when Obi Wan needs to find the hidden planet, he asks a bunch of seven year olds. No kidding. So it's no surprise that World War III starts when the entire Jedi community takes stupid pills and decides to risk their collectives asses in order save their two brain-addled colleagues, one of whom, even if we didn't already know, we'd be better off without. (And, by the way, it's not Attack of the Clones; it's The Clones Come to the Rescue, Thank God!)

Okay, Natalie Portman does look quite fetching in a half torn off lycra body suit. Almost worth the mayhem. That doesn't explain Anakin Skywalker's behavior (played by Hayden Christensen, who left me puzzling whether he was a decent actor stuck with awful material, or whether he really is that big of a jerk in real life, which I don't think; is that praising with faint damns?). Well, it would explain it if he were fourteen. That's where things start getting creepy.

Bad art, even bad art that doesn't know how bad it is, is at best laughable, at worse (as in this case) painfully monotonous. What's creepy isn't what's on the screen but trying to imagine what's in George Lucas's mind. Not anything evil, but frighteningly juvenile. True love, according to Lucas, is the kind of thing normal women take out restraining orders against. Every scene featuring our two supposed lovebirds left me pondering in what possible alternate universe any romantic tension could be construed between them, that could actually lead to somebody getting pregnant.

Okay, let's posit that Anakin is one messed up kid with a mother complex, who thinks that the best way to win a girl's heart is by stalking her. What precisely does Padme (based on the previous installment, a dozen years his senior) see in him? And she declares her undying love in the last act on what possible evidence? There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hack romance writers who could strike more sparks from a sponge than this. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the very annoying and immature jerk with no social skills gets the babe. Is that what this is all about?

In the first Star Wars series, Han Solo gets the girl, not that whiny dweeb, Luke Skywalker (it runs in the family apparently). What, is Lucas regressing back to junior high school in his late middle age?

As usual, there was a good story in there, until George Lucas got the notion he was smart enough to write another installment of Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Nope, not by half. The story that would have worked would have required resetting the time line back at least five years and casting Justin Berfield (Reese from Malcolm in the Middle) as a young Anakin who's got A) "issues," and B) hormones, and C) a whole lot of barely-controlled power. And deals with A and B by bullying people and kicking butt (Justin Berfield masterfully accomplishes this without becoming totally unsympathetic or irredeemably). Obi Wan's job, then, is to sit on his head and keep him from ending up in a juvenile correctional institution.

We'll also posit that his mom is happily married, as is suggested at the end of Attack of the Clones (Lucas does way too much telling and no showing, like giving us any reason why Anakin is such a whiner), which would passably explain why Anakin hasn't given a damn about her for, like, ever. Better: Obi Wan has deliberately kept them apart (it's some monk/Jedi/cloistered life thing), more fuel for resentment. The movie begins with her being kidnapped. While Obi Wan is off looking for clones on invisible planets, Anakin and Padme run off to save her. Why? Because they're impulsive (and horny) teenagers (we're dumping the age differences in The Phantom Menace for the sake of continuity and believability).

And to drive the Freudian point home, Mom dies while Anakin is trying to rescue her, because of the way he went about it, and because teenagers are not smarter than adults simply because they think they are. Note: talk to Joss Whedon about how to write this type of sequence, how he takes a screwed up, teenage super hero, Faith, and turns her evil. And then redeems her.

But back to the real world. George Lucas needs to return to this galaxy and not so long ago, like the Renaissance, when wealthy patrons of the arts, themselves possessed of marginal talents, hired a Mozart or Da Vinci to bring their imaginations to life. Journeyman SF writers like Dave Wolverton have made a good living writing Star Wars novels. Mr. Lucas, hire one of them to write your next movie! (They owe you, big time.)

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Labels: annoying stuff, movie reviews, science fiction, star wars

Speaking of The Phantom Menace, I wrote this review way back in 1999 when it first came out (watching this movie in a theater is one of the reasons I don't fork out the big bucks to see movies in theaters anymore). Here it is in all its original contempt [with a few added parentheticals].

The theater I attended, a weekend showing at one in the afternoon, was packed. The only way a film can score blockbuster ticket sales is by repeat viewings. But why would anybody see this movie more than once? A movie so full of lousy directing and lousy scripting and lousy acting and unfulfilled promise that it left me depressed. Movies don't often leave me depressed. Maybe annoyed, but not depressed.

Let's start with the premise. What premise? How can you begin an entire series with a premise so murky you need five minutes of written exposition to not explain it? Come to think of it, I'd have a hard time explaining why anything in this movie happens the way it does. What's with Darth Maul, for example? Why does the character exist? What's the point of killing off Liam Neeson, other than because he wasn't scripted into the sequel? If they wanted to dispose of the Jedi Knights, why not just blow up the whole pompous bunch and their whole pompous council? Getting rid of that horrid excuse for bad acting and pretentious dialog (and those "highways in the sky" vistas that look like 50-year-old Popular Mechanics covers) would have improved things immeasurable.

My brother points out that the Jedi Knights would make better sense if, like the samurai, they were attached to particular lords or rulers [that is exactly the premise of My Otome Hime]. In medieval Japan, martial arts schools instructed samurai according to certain rules of combat and religious philosophy, and these schools competed with each other for students, prestige, and the good favor of the ruling elite. Lucas does credit Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress for inspiring the original Star Wars. If he got too big to steal good ideas, then he should go back to shamelessly copying them.

The insipid dialog is, frankly, far more bothersome than the mediocre acting. I guess there was no one on the set brave enough to say, as Harrison Ford reportedly did, "You can write this crap, George, but you can't make us say it." Camille Paglia is right on this point: contemporary movies makers don't know when to stop a scene--they just run on and on and on. The point of editing is to give the director and actors less time to embarrass themselves. In this movie, they're given all the time in the world.

And at the same time, let's get rid of most of the aliens, okay? Digital or not, they end up looking like so many Muppets after a while (repeat after me: Yoda, Fozzy Bear, Yoda, Fozzy Bear). I didn't find Jar Jar Binks as racist a character as described by some critics (he's too incomprehensible to pin on any racial group), but nevertheless utterly annoying. And that was after thirty seconds. After five minutes I'd prefer fingernails scraping on a blackboard. If you're looking for racist overtones, I'd pick the evil federation traders, who sound like extras from a Charlie Chan flick, and Anikin's slave master, who sounds (and acts, wings notwithstanding) like a Brooklyn Shylock direct from the Stereotypes Casting Agency.

Even more despicable is the sentimental gimmick that ruined Return of the Jedi and has been recycled here (along with a story climax that's been used in three out of four films--George, please, think of another way to end a movie!). That is, making war into comic relief. Now, I'm not against war and comedy rubbing shoulders. I'm fine with the "war is hell but a lot of fun to watch" genre. I'm fine with dark Black Adder-type Strangelovian satires. But trying to make war cute and cuddly is loathsome. Barely-armed aliens of any sort going up against tanks will get mowed down like so much cannon fodder [Avatar being the latest incarnation of this absurdly Luddite fairy tale]. There's nothing entertaining about this that I can see, no matter how cute the combatants are.

And why can't any of these futuristic societies design anything at least as effective as a cruise missile? [A Predator drone? How about a MIRVed JDAM?] C'mon, a force field that deflects exploding shells, but that you can just walk through? Armed droids that couldn't hit the broad side of a barn (from inside the barn) and break apart like fine china? In the future (that is, the "future" that is the original Star Wars), they chuck the droids and go back to using human soldiers in body armor. Well, no kidding.

Irksome political correctness: the queen, we are told, was "elected." An elected queen? What kind of an oxymoron is that? If they "elected" a guy, would he have to dress up in those goofy outfits? I liked the goofy outfits (shades of Shinto ceremonial garb), but they belonged on a hereditary monarch. And I liked Portman--she's the only thing that really shines in this movie (and her SR-71 spaceship is a real gem, I'll give them that). But as with Neeson she has nothing to act against or with. No internal conflict. Nothing to stir the soul. Not a single human relationship is created in this movie that is worth caring about.

The Phantom Menace proves the epigram, "It's the pictures that got small." For all the extravagant locations and special effects, it impresses only the left side of the brain. It's otherwise a small movie, it looks small, it feels small.

Star Wars, with its limited cast and limited sets, and as clunky as it is in parts, has a big heart and an expansive vision. Even on TV, its vistas appear broad and unending. Through the eyes of Luke Skywalker we see a frontier beckoning to "go west (or up), young man," while Han Solo bets you that the universe can be conquered with sheer verve and boldness, politics be damned. But the eyes in The Phantom Menace are jaded and dull. They don't see anything worth looking at, including, mostly, each other.

What surprised me the most was the movie's literary emptiness. Lucas cops out every step along the way. He's got Joseph Campbell on the brain, and seems to think that dropping in a mythic allusion here and there qualifies as "depth." There's no subtlety, no foreshadowing. I really expected the kid to do something that would in some way reveal a kind of inner corruption. A touch of darkness, a shadow on the soul. Something. Anything. But nada. Publicity posters tell us that Anikin turns into Darth Vader. Yoda tells us that the boy "troubles" him. We're all but told who the "Emperor" is, just in case we're too stupid to figure it out. The entire movie is Exhibit A when it comes to explaining what "Show, don't tell" means.

Now, I can conjure up reasons why, say, Darth Maul does what he does--pretty obvious reasons, I think--but that would require people knowing and doing things that are never shown or even hinted at. Still, there's reason to hope. We ex-Trekkies grew up kindling eternal hope. Hey, this episode reeks, maybe the next one won't. And even if the next one does, surely the one after won't. We keep on doubling down. So Lucas got Star Wars I right (yes, it's "I," no matter what numbering system he's come up with since), and it went downhill from there. But maybe after cranking out this stinker, he'll figure out what he really wants to do and things will improve with the sequels.

[They didn't.]

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Labels: movie reviews, science fiction, star wars

"Some guy named Mike from Milwaukee, Wisconsin" deconstructs The Phantom Menace in seven YouTube videos (produced by Red Letter Media). And when I say "deconstructed," I mean he takes it apart and reduces it to artistic rubble.

As my brother notes, the criticism is so relentless that adopting the brain-damaged persona of Larry Flynt-meets-sociopathic fanboy (imagine Anthony Perkins from Psycho teaching a course in film criticism) makes it easier to digest the punishment he dishes out.

Even more unexpected, the incongruous psycho-killer segments add up to a story in the story that pays off at the end (if you enjoy very black humor). And though the seven-part series is edited to suggest an amateurish effort, it is expertly produced and written.

Star Trek producer Damon Lindelof reportedly calls it "astounding film making." He's not being hyperbolic.

I think the narrator is Robert McKee in disguise. Okay, not seriously. But after describing the hero in the monomyth story structure, he then lists directors capable of telling stories without following it. He could just as well be reading straight from McKee's Story.

And when he attempts to psychoanalyze how Lucas consciously created something so awful, he qualifies his observations in ways that you wouldn't expect from a disgruntled fan. But in ways you would expect from an objective critic.

In any case, if you don't want to wade through McKee's Story, set aside seventy minutes (first send the children out of the room) and watch of all the main ideas systematically illustrated here instead.

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Labels: annoying stuff, criticism, movies, science fiction, star wars

Released in 1978 after being rushed through production in a mere six months, Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato followed on the heels of Space Battleship Yamato, which outperformed Star Wars at the box office. Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato doubled that.

With its cute robots, planet-killing "Death Star" antagonist, and "Battle of Britain" fighter scenes, it's clearly derivative of Star Wars. The ship's bridge as the principal set, the protagonist's Kirkian disregard for military protocols, and his propensity—on a ship with hundreds of crew—to rush off to confront his enemies personally are clear nods to Star Trek.

The overdressed, operatically overacting evil aliens with blue or green skin as their only non-human characteristics come straight out of 1950's B-serials.

The crudely-drawn animation is reminiscent of 1960s Saturday morning Johnny Quest cartoons (60,000 cells in a 150 minute movie averages out to 6 fps). However, even given such rough material to work with, the direction by Toshio Masuda and Leiji Matsumoto borders on the brilliant at times, creating visual perspectives cinematically ahead of their time.

About a bajillion people get killed in Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato, just as they do in Star Wars. Though without any blood and guts, Masuda and Matsumoto somehow manage to make the experience a lot more harrowing than in Star Wars.

Despite all the back-to-the-future echoes in the plot—fans of the original Star Trek series will recognize how the Yamato is turned into a big antimatter weapon, the "grand theft starship" business from Star Trek III (1984), and destroying a Death Star by flying inside it from Return of the Jedi (1983)—the Yamato itself is all Japanese and all Leiji Matsumoto.

Anachronistic space opera is Matsumoto's unique oeuvre, including pirate galleons in space (Captain Harlock), WWII battleships in space (Space Battleship Yamato), and steam engines in space (Galaxy Express 999). That last one is his most inspired and most inspiring. The 1979 film version is a remarkably exploration of moral philosophy through science fiction.

To be sure, despite its financial success, die-hard fans did not react well to practically the entire crew getting killed and the ship itself being destroyed. The events of Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato have since been relegated to an "alternate timeline," and the series—both television and theatrical releases—was resurrected anew.

However, I believe that Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato is actually the most true to its namesake and to the enormous weight of history that the story of the Yamato carries with her. Yamato is the ancient name of Japan, and the original battleship Yamato carried the Emperor's Imperial Seal prominently displayed on its bow.

Commissioned a week after Pearl Harbor, the Yamato and her sister ship Musashi were the biggest battleships ever built, and their eighteen-inch main guns the largest ever mounted on a ship. The Yamato's first deployment was as Admiral Yamamoto's flagship during the Battle of Midway, though it never directly engaged U.S. forces.

But as Eliot wrote, "In my beginning is my end." The Battle of Midway made the battleship an anachronism. The Yamato was too valuable a symbol to risk as a "tin can" destroyer and was too fuel-hungry to use in middling support tasks. Aside from occasional run-ins with U.S. submarines, the Yamato saw minimal combat duty until October 1944.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended its career. In one of the most remarkable naval engagements in history, the tiny "Taffy 3" escort group fought an entire task force led by the Yamato to a draw. The mighty Yamato proved no match for the puny but radar-directed five-inch guns of the U.S. destroyers and the antiquated Wildcat and Avenger fighters from the escort carriers.

The Yamato spent most of its last year docked at its home base in Kure on the Inland Sea. Finally, in the name of blustering patriotism and "morale," it was sent on a suicide mission—with only enough fuel for a one-way trip—to engage the U.S. Navy off the shores of Okinawa.

The Yamato was attacked by carrier-based torpedo and dive bombers as soon as it emerged into the East China Sea. It was sunk two hours later. Only a handful of sailors escaped when its ammunition magazines exploded. The ship sank with 2,498 hands on board, the largest loss of life attributed to a single ship in peacetime or war (the Titanic lost 1,517).

Otoko-tachi no Yamato ("Our Yamato") is the latest attempt (2005) to document the life and death of the Yamato with a gory, melodramatic, Ridley Scott-style Hollywood approach. Except that lots of stuff spectacularly blowing up can't mask the criminally stupid waste of men and material that marked the Yamato's final voyage.

At least the Light Brigade featured in Tennyson's famous poem overran the Russian positions they were aiming at, but were forced to retreat when the less suicidal Heavy Brigade didn't advance down the "Valley of Death" after them. Pickett's Charge briefly breached the Union line on Cemetery Ridge before being pushed back with crippling losses.

All the Yamato managed to do was temporarily distract U.S. fighters from their more important job of shooting down kamikaze. The Yamato got nowhere near Okinawa. It didn't accomplish a single military objective. Twenty-five hundred men died for absolutely nothing.

At its heart, I can't help but read the Space Battleship Yamato series as an attempt to vest meaning in that meaningless loss.

In nods to The Philadelphia Experiment and Raise the Titanic! a starship is constructed inside the wreck of the Yamato, and then raised from the bottom of the ocean to battle aliens out to destroy the Earth. Spinoffs also have the ship being purposely sunk to prevent top-secret technology from falling into enemy hands, which is then salvaged by later generations.

Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato then becomes a restaging of the battleship's final, tragic mission (April 6-7, 1945). With the captain dead at the helm and the first mate alone alive at the wheel, the ultimate sacrifice made this time around is truly noble. The Yamato dies for something, saving the Earth from destruction and saving the lives of billions.

Even so, the historical perspective makes it all the more painful to watch. The most appropriate treatment of the Yamato story is perhaps the "Crossing the River of Time" episode of Kamichu! (DVD 3 episode 9). Kamichu! is about a junior high school student living in a fishing village near Kure, who wakes up one morning to discover she's turned into a minor Shinto deity.

In "Crossing the River of Time," Yurie escorts the "soul" of the Yamato (Shinto theology stipulates that all things—animate and inanimate—have unique souls or gods) back to her home base in Kure. It is a moving story that recognizes the bravery of the men who served on the Yamato, and the magnitude of their loss, without rationalizing or wallowing in it.

Labels: anime reviews, history, japan, matsumoto, shinto, star trek, star wars, ww2