Constantine: Set Aside The Fan Rage And Give It Another Try

IO9 is reporting that plans for a sequel to Constantine are still in the works. I have mixed feelings about this: I felt that they did well enough with the first movie that going for a sequel is just going to ruin it. I've always felt that Constantine is an underappreciated movie. I was a big fan of the original comic Hellblazer for many years (I still have the first 125-ish issues, which is as many as I was able to buy before the cover prices forced me to scale back my comics budget). To say I was leery of Constantine is to understate the matter greatly. Is Keanu Reeves an accurate representation of John Constantine? Well… not entirely. Alan Moore famously had Quadrophenia-era Sting in mind when he first sketched Constantine, and Keanu Reeves is no Quadrophenia-era Sting. But honestly, I thought he did pretty well. Given that the location was moved from England to Los Angeles, I felt that Keanu was probably one of the better casting choices they could have made. Let's just be grateful they didn't cast Keanu Reeves and keep the English setting, and make Keanu trot out his abysmally bad English accent. Keanu Reeves is pretty, but kind of skeevy, and that's just the right quality for John Constantine. The movie also drew on Deadpan Burnout Constantine, and Keanu did quite well at that. The less Keanu is asked to emote, the better he "works" in a role. Could other actors have done a better job? Certainly, and I nominate John Marsters for the job. But given what we had to work with, I thought Reeves pulled off the job well enough. Once you get past Keanu Reeves and Los Angeles, the move is absolutely perfect. Is anyone going to argue with Tilda Swinton's performance as the archangel Gabriel? No. Can anyone quibble over Peter Stormare's turn as Satan? Absolutely not. I feel like Chas got short shrift in the movie, but then again, doesn't he always? The best thing about Constantine is that it looks exactly like the comic book should have, but couldn't, given the restrictions of ink and cheap paper. The saturated colors, the dark shadows, the way that every shot is framed exactly like a comic book panel - the look and feel of the movie is deliciously perfect. I also appreciated many of the deft touches in the script. For example, the scene where Constantine traps a cockroach under a glass and blows cigarette smoke into it, which is drawn directly from one of the first issues of the comic. The scene where Keanu Reeves holds Rachel Wiesz under water, his expression as dispassionate as if he was washing dishes, while Wiesz's panic gradually rises, never fails to make me nauseous. And truthfully, I'm glad that in the movie, the cat didn't die. Constantine is a movie that rewards re-watching, if only because of the beautiful visuals. If you haven't seen it recently, or if you saw it when it was first released and were disappointed, I recommend that you set aside the fan rage and give it another try.

LOTR, Hobbit, Books and Films

After months of accusations and cross-accusations regarding The Hobbit movie, Peter Jackson and Inline finally agreed that Guillermo del Toro would direct, and the screenplay would be written by Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson. Jackson is the Executive Producer, and he and del Toro have just announced that there will be not one Hobbit film, but two. The Hobbit Part One will be released in December 2011, with The Hobbit part two following in December 2012. The two movies, according to del Toro and Jackson, will encompass not just the core plot of the novel, but the activities of the White Council and Gandalf's travels to Dol Guldur. You can read more about it here, but most of our questions—like who and what and where—are still unanswered. The official site, which mostly has lots and lots of speculation, is here.

But while we wait for the Hobbit film to be released on May 3 we will at least have The Hunt for Gollum. It's a 40 minute independent fan-driven film inspired by The Lord of the Rings. The Hunt for Gollum will be released on the Internet on May 3 2009, for free. The film, although made very much on a budget (less than 3000 pounds) nonetheless uses high production values, as you can see from the trailer below.

And if that's not enough Middle Earth goodness for you, the first legal professionally produced ebooks of The Hobbit and the entire LOTR trilogy, are now available for Amazon's Kindle and eReader Pro. Right now, the eReader versions are 50% off.

SETI Astronomer Gives A Thumbs-Down To Interstellar Travel

This week the New York Times is carrying an Op-Ed piece by Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI institute, about how we will never make it out of our own solar system. I find it greatly amusing that someone who works for SETI - possibly the single most heedlessly optimistic science program operating in the world today - is the one to throw down the wet blanket on dreams of interstellar travel. Shostak, the little buzzkill, points out the obvious: given the technology currently at hand, interstellar travel is simply not feasible. "[…] such sci-fi crafts would get embarrassingly bad mileage. The energy required to reach even the nearest stars in a decade or less with a very modest-size starship (say, the tonnage of the 17th-century Mayflower) equals the total energy consumed in the United States last year. At 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, that's a fuel bill of $5 trillion." Blah blah blah! YES OKAY, if you do the math, interstellar travel is not actually possible today, or in the near future. Although I find it interesting that Shostak does not do the math on ram scoop designs, since it's my understanding that these are the most plausible of the current space travel offerings. Instead, Shostak posits that the most likely way to journey to the stars is with very small robots, which send their signals back to Earth. (That sound you hear is me, giggling with delight that of course this is what a SETI guy would posit.) Our telepresence technology is robust and developing quickly, and micro-robots would be considerably easier to ship outside the solar system. Tiny robots are far easier to ship, requiring little in the way of atmosphere, fuel, or gravity - unlike human travelers. One interesting point about this argument which Shostak didn't address is that micro-robots would make for a far more egalitarian exploration of the universe. When we watch science fiction, we always imagine ourselves being there with the crew. The truth is that 99.999% of humanity is left behind on Earth, while the remaining .001% gets to travel into space. ("A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies" not withstanding.) Statistically, none of us would be the ones out there exploring the new frontier and pooping into bags. However, if micro-robots explored and reported back with a vast array of sensory data, all of us could see it at the same time. Only a tiny handful of people visit the Maldives every year, but we can all look at them with Google Earth. The second point that can be made from Shostak's argument (which is probably correct, sad as I am to say it) is that we will not be finding and inhabiting new planets any time soon. If we're lucky and very very smart, we'll get Mars into semi-habitable shape within the next 100 years. (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy spanned almost 200 years, from dusty red planet to watery oasis.) I think a lot of science fiction fans are secretly hoping that interstellar travel and colonization will be the end solution to all of our problems here on Earth. But, as Shostak points out, that's just not going to happen. (I wonder if the polar bears would like Europa?)

Five Ways To REALLY Reboot Star Trek

IO9 is carrying bits from an interview by Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller, on what he would like to do with Star Trek. I think a lot of us are hungry for a real Star Trek reboot, and not the time travel "everything's the same but the characters are younger" thing we're going to get this summer. Among other things, Fuller would want to give Star Trek a full-on Battlestar Galactica re-imagining, featuring Rosario Dawson as a lead character. (Thankfully, he's careful to specify that she wouldn't need to be a captain. Call me ageist, but I think 30 is a little young for a starship captain.) He then adds that "Angela Bassett as a captain would rock my boat." THIS. Although personally, I'd rather see CCH Pounder as a captain. Because she is SO AWESOME, that's why. Here are some other suggestions for a real Star Trek reboot: 1. The Prime Directive Scrap it. Let's face it, the Prime Directive is a namby-pamby weasel way for the writers to get out of having to take sides. Sure, we don't want starship fleets flying around the universe handing phasers to cavemen. (Although that might help settle the infamous argument.) But at worse, it allows Starfleet to stand back and let atrocities roll. Call me old fashioned, but I think the Allies were right to fight the Nazis. DS9 grappled with this issue in a sidelong way, but who could listen to accounts of the Bajoran genocide, torture, and internment camps without thinking, "Hey, shouldn't Starfleet have lent a hand?" 2. Aliens There should be more of them serving on Starfleet ships. There are about as many non-humans serving in Starfleet as there are non-whites. Both imbalances should be severely corrected. It was always interesting when a Starfleet ship docked at DS9, disgorging a crew of what looked, to the DS9 audience, like a whole lotta white humans. 3. Holodeck Just knock it off, already. A starship would never launch with a holodeck, in the same way that a Navy ship would never launch with a porn theater on board. It's just not going to happen. Holodecks are a ridiculous prop which only serves to foster lazy writers. 4. Pets We either need more of them, or fewer. Whenever Porthos made an appearance on Enterprise I always got distracted wondering, "Where does he poop?" This question either needs to be definitively answered (in which case there would be dogs EVERYWHERE on ship, and I love the idea of a ship-board dog park), or pets need to be banned. Maybe each ship could have a Ship's Cat on retainer. (I recommend naming it Frankenstein.) 5. Crime You simply can't put that many people together for that long, and not have crime. Everything from petty theft to murder. "The brig" occasionally comes up in conversation, but I'd like to see it used more, and to greater effect. I know we're expected to believe that Starfleet folks are the best of the best, and would never EVER do something bad or ill-conceived, but it's time to get real. How about you?

Nicola Griffith and David Gerrold Hit By Amazon Fail

By now I'm sure you've heard of Amazon Fail. If you were out doing things like having Easter dinner this weekend and happened to miss the internet, here's a quick recap: a bunch of GLBT books were removed from Amazon search results. Aside from assuring everyone that they are working to fix it, Amazon has declined to comment further. While this was most likely a boneheaded programming error, it certainly looks from the outside like a conspiracy to sweep GLBT authors and books with GLBT themes under the rug. I sincerely doubt that this is the case, but I can't fault anyone for taking the harsher view. At the very least, it's an appalling disaster, and one which has apparently been going on for several months before it rolled onto Twitter and into the global internet consciousness. Two books by openly gay science fiction authors have been caught up in Amazon Fail: David Gerrold's The Martian Child, and Nicola Griffith's Ammonite. Science fiction blog IO9 asked David Gerrold and Nicola Griffith for their reactions. David Gerrold seems miffed but slightly amused by the inconsistency. Nicola Griffith, on the other hand, is not at all amused. And who can blame her?
"Writing is my only source of income. No listing = no sales. Taken to its logical extreme, this policy could mean I starve-that I starve because I'm queer."
Amazon will presumably have this issue fixed shortly. In the mean time, I suggest that you show your support for Gerrold and Griffith by purchasing copies of their books... from anywhere but Amazon.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Gets A New Incarnation

Independent comic book publisher Boom! Studios has announced that they are releasing a new version of Philip K. Dick's classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This version promises to be considerably more faithful to the original than certain earlier adaptations. (Adaptations which I love, don't get me wrong, but Blade Runner* is probably more accurately described as "inspired by" rather than "adapted from.") According to science fiction news blog IO9, this new version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? will "mix comic art with the original text" and "will include the full text of Dick's 1968 novel [...] alongside brand new sequential illustrations for something more than just illustrated prose." I have to admit, I was a little puzzled by this description. It's not quite a comic book graphic novel, and not quite a book with lots of pretty pictures. The project is certainly ambitious - it will include all of the original text, and be released in 24 installments, one per month for the next two years. The first issue is set to be released in June. Philip K. Dick's literary legacy has proved to be a gold mine for adaptations in the past 20 years, but I wish the industry would stray a little further into Dick's catalog for material. * As much as I love Blade Runner, partly for nostalgic reasons, the Rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly is slowly edging up my personal list of favorite screen adaptations of Philip K Dick's works. And I don't think Minority Report gets the respect it really deserves.

Star Trek Babies - Why?

I've been thinking a lot about the trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie. (It's hard not to - it's plastered all over the few time slots and channels that I watch.) Mostly what I think is, "Why?" Allow me to summarize the trailer: "Hi, I'm James Kirk! KABOOOOOM!!! I'm Doctor McCoy! BLAM!!! I'm Mr. Spock! KAPOWIEEEE, ZOOM! [brief clip of sexy scene between Kirk and unknown female; we note again that Starfleet uniform includes boxer shorts] PEW PEW PEW!!!" The trailer is laughably transparent. This is Star Trek shown through the diffracting prism of big budget action movies like "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon." The trailer promises us that things will be blown up, and that our favorite characters will perform bizarre and unlikely stunts. Also, that Kirk will sex up some lady. Something that gets lost in the translation is that a low budget show is forced to rely primarily on characters and dialogue to carry the story. It may surprise a lot of people in Hollywood to learn that people like characters and dialogue. No one watches "House" for the cool special effects. People don't endlessly re-rent "Blackadder" for the awesome visuals. And if anyone remembers a special effect from the original Star Trek series, it's not in a good way. I'm not prepared to say that the new movie will cheapen our memories and experience of the original series. I refuse to pass judgment on a movie that I haven't seen yet. But I wonder if it will try very hard to do what the original series did best? Or will it just be characters with familiar names running through effects that were added in post-production?

Hugo Award Nominees Announced

The Hugo Awards committee has announced its nominees for 2009, and I have to agree with Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi: I pity the awards voters this year! The nominees for Best Novel are: * Anathem, by Neal Stephenson * The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman * Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow * Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross * Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi This is the first year I can remember when I've already read almost all of the nominated novels. (The only one I haven't read yet is Saturn's Children, although it's on my stack.) Yay, me! Some thoughts: Anathem This book is a huge literary accomplishment. I was amazed by its scope and reach, and floored by the way that Stephenson continues to tie all of his books together. After reading Anathem, it behooves the reader to go back and re-read both Cryptonomicon and System of the World (which I consider to be one massive novel, instead of three big novels, much less nine regular-sized novels). The way that Anathem reflects, refracts, and re-interprets the characters and events of his previous novels is nothing short of breath-taking. That being said, Anathem is very very dry, and very very long, and the opposite of "action-packed." If you were frustrated by the lengthy asides of Cryptonomicon, then Anathem is not the novel for you. It's at least 80 percent "asides," and 20 percent "actual things happening." The Graveyard Book I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, although his fiction for younger audiences has typically failed to move me. I enjoyed Coraline well enough, but only barely made it through The Wolves in The Walls without losing interest entirely. There's nothing wrong with them - they just weren't for me. I was therefore greatly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Graveyard Book. It sucked me right in, and I read the entire book in one slurp. I used to do that kind of thing all the time when I was young, but the realities of adult life prevent me from reading for more than an hour or two at a time. The Graveyard Book is not just a captivating story about a boy being raised by ghosts. It's about love, and loss, and growing up, and what it means to grow up, and why. Who could ask for more? Little Brother I didn't make it through Cory Doctorow's latest chunk of shrill sociological criticism disguised as a novel. I find his authorial quirks grating (Cory's never met an adverb he didn't like), and I find the resulting fiction to be indigestible. Blecch. Zoe's Tale This is a wonderful novel in all respects. Scalzi "Rosencrantz and Guildensterns" himself by returning to his novel The Last Colony and retelling the events from the perspective of Jane Sagan and John Perry's teenage daughter, Zoe. The result is a thousand times more wonderful than I (a Scalzi fan) would ever have imagined. Scalzi's previous novels have been set squarely in the center of "space opera," and I enjoyed them despite the fact that they classify as military fiction. The mere fact that he returned to one of them and suffused that world with a story about emotions and feeling and heart is award-winning, even aside from the writing itself. Which is great. All I can say to the voters is... yeah, good luck with that. Tough choices, all!

Happy Birthday, William Gibson!

On March 17th, 1948, William Gibson was born in South Carolina. Wired has an excellent overview of Gibson's life in their article here. Just the thought of William Gibson makes me feel both nostalgic and very old. How could something I once considered so cutting edge be so fusty? Kids these days, most of them have never even heard of Neuromancer, much less read it. And I no longer recommend it to them, because I'm sad to say, it has not aged well. Pictured with this article is my own tattered copy of Neuromancer, which I bought at the Chicago O'Hare airport in 1984 at the age of 12, when I was traveling back home from a visit to New York State. The visit had not gone well. I dove into the book on the airplane to escape from my life. What I found in Neuromancer blew my little twelve year old mind. When I finished it, I flipped back to the first page and started again. Unfortunately, as time passes, that experience is less and less likely to occur. In fact, I would almost say that in order for Neuromancer to have an impact, you would have had to read it when you were twelve years old, and it was 1984. Reagan was president, and the Cold War was full steam ahead, and you had just learned how to make an Apple ][ E draw a kitty face on the computer monitor by giving it the precise coordinates of the start and end point of each line. Neuromancer suffers the (perhaps enviable) fate of having been far too accurate. In a world suffused with text messaging and Facebook and mash-ups created with Google's open API and online banking as an everyday occurrence, Neuromancer seems downright quaint. The future has swallowed Neuromancer up, with hardly a burp. Gibson's later books were more thoughtful, more measured than the all out drag race of Neuromancer. Many people dislike them for this reason, but they are by every metric better books. It's not Gibson's fault that his subsequent books failed to set the world on fire. I recently had to stop reading Spook County because I realized that Gibson was revisiting the characters and events of Neuromancer, and dragging them into real life. What he had portrayed as edgy and sharp would be, in real life, bleak and sad. Everyone in Spook County is scrambling after crumbs, often ineffectively. Case isn't an antihero who sizzles with lust and a fierce desire to live. He's just a sad man with a drug habit wearing week old clothes. He's there not because he's the best, but because someone has to be there, and he will do as well as anyone else. Pawns aren't chosen because they are special; they are chosen because no one cares what happens to them. Spook Country is very real, and very pertinent, and very bleak, and I confess that I didn't have the guts to finish reading it. Welcome to the future, indeed.

Sci Fi Channel To Be Rebranded "SyFy Channel" - Not An April Fool's Joke

The Sci Fi Channel recently announced that it would rebrand itself as "The SyFy Channel." Although admittedly this has more to do with their inability to brand a common term like "sci fi," their meaningless re-shuffle has raised the hackles of geeks across the internet. (The American television-watching internet, that is.) Various marketing people have stepped up to proclaim that the rebranding will allow the channel to widen its audience. By not painting themselves into a corner, the network is now free to explore fantasy and the wider realm of speculative fiction. These are the statements which really stick in our collective craw. Some may remember a time when the Sci Fi Channel actually showed science fiction. In recent years it has devolved into the network that airs giant blocks of terrible monster films, sprinkled with bits of shows like ECW Wrestling, Ghost Hunters, and (notably) Battlestar Galactica. Last night's lineup is a perfect example of the channel's typical programming: Leprechaun movies 1 through 4, followed by two hours of professional wrestling. I like Ghost Hunters a lot, but it isn't science fiction, in any sense of the word. I like anime, but I can't be bothered to stay up until 11PM on Monday nights to start watching it. I absolutely love the new Dr. Who, but watching the episodes on the Sci Fi Channel is an exercise in frustration, as the channel constantly breaks into the middle of scenes to air large commercial blocks. Once Battlestar Galactica ends this Friday, what does the channel have left to offer to science fiction fans? I mean, science fiction fans who have already seen "Mansquito." Unfortunately, this rebranding is only the most public and self-aware manifestation of the Sci Fi Channel's race to the middle. In this, it follows in the footsteps of every other cable channel which started out as marketing to a niche audience, but eventually devolved into showing the same crap as everyone else. From the day when MTV showed its last music video, to the day when The Learning Channel became TLC and started airing shows about expectant mothers, we are all made to suffer for the greed of the network executives. Meanwhile, some of the most innovative science fiction is being developed on other networks. NBC's show "Kings" (which has some weird cross-promotion deal with the Sci Fi Network, such that ads for "Kings" are being shown there) is an ambitious stab at the alternate reality genre, following the trials of a young soldier in a contemporary America that never existed. The premiere airs this Sunday at 8PM, and I've made a note to watch it. Another show for which I'll use the word "promising" is "Boldly Going Nowhere," by the producers of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." The show's concept can be summed up as "Star Trek TNS Meets The Office." I approve of this concept. FOX recently picked up five episodes from the pilot, which will be filmed later this year.

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