Freckles & Doubt

Now I'm wishing I hadn't used the e e cummings quote for yesterday's subject line, because I should have used it for today's. Because, what the hell is going on with Skyfall? I finished watching it last night, having been distracted the night before at the point where the train comes through the ceiling by the sudden arrival of herne_kzn, and it left me with a rather scattered set of impressions mostly along the lines of "WTF??" ( WTFs elucidated under the cut on account of spoilerage. )

I can't say I hated this film; it was an entertaining few hours, and Daniel Craig is always watchable (although he also always reminds me of my dad, which is simply weird). But it's not a good sign, when I found myself doing a lot of this analysis and deconstruction while I was actually watching. Action movies should blow you away sufficiently that their flaws only occur to you once you've emerged, quivering and energised, from the showdown. Not so much.

I fear it's official: I am Peter Jackson's bitch. He has me right where he wants me. It needs only the swelling strains of that Shire soundtrack, and I'm all misty-eyed and lump-in-throat and ready, once more, to be charmed. Which I was. I had very mixed expectations of The Hobbit, and it's a deeply flawed film, but I loved it nonetheless - why, yes, children, you can revisit Middle Earth, and it's just as beguiling as it was the first time round. I am down with this. I participate shamelessly in this shameless manipulation. It's fine by me.

Mostly, though, I left thinking, slightly weak-kneed, wow but this is going to be spectacular when all six films are done - a seamless, integrated storytelling artefact which even without extended versions will fling at us something over sixteen hours of loving, sprawling, coherent and unified vision. Unexpected Journey is so tightly woven into the LotR trilogy, it's basically meaningless considered separately. This is not a film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit, this is a structuring of a prequel to The Lord of the Rings around the backbone of Bilbo's story, but essentially and intrinsically fleshed out with history, backstory, foregrounding of minor story elements, wholesale ripping off of appendices, logical extrapolation of action for people from LotR, and other acts of gratuitous fannishness. This is a geek's film, built for the joyous recognition of those of us who have altogether too minute a knowledge of Middle-Earth.

This rather elevated project does some very specific things to the feel of the film. It's not about the children's book. It doesn't, other than in some slightly jarring moments, even try for the tone of the children's book: it's in a weird way rather more true to Tolkien's overall epic, rather dark-edged, elegiac Middle-Earth world-building than the children's book ever was. The violence and battle which are glossed with a certain childish innocence in the novel are here given the almost-full LotR grim and grit, and the broader implications of history and event which the book refuses to contemplate are damned well contemplated. If the result is a wee bit schizophrenic, I think that's inevitable, because the book is as well.

Above all, I am completely fascinated with what they've done with Thorin Oakenshield, who becomes the epic warrior hero counterpoint to Bilbo's little guy. Film-Thorin is a brooding, tormented, gothy figure with a Tragic!Backstory well upfront, prone to dramatic, solitary posing against interesting backdrops, à la Draco in Half-Blood Prince. He is an extremely compelling figure, and also ridiculously hot. Ridiculously. The sheer toe-wriggling appreciation of my own viewing experience (brooding intense men buttons firmly hit!) is backed up by a frothing online fandom frenzy approaching Legolas levels. (Fili and Kili are also incidentally firmly in the "wouldn't throw them out of bed for gratuitous bass-line part singing" camp). Most interestingly, I don't see this version of Thorin as in any way a betrayal of the book version. Book-Thorin always was fascinatingly flawed, a complex mix of heroism and dignity and focused intent and a chip on his shoulder the size of the Lonely Mountain which makes his avarice and defensiveness all too likely. Film-Thorin is something of a redemption of the Comic Dwarf elements of Gimli: no-one would dare to think of tossing Thorin Oakenshield, and I'm very happy the film picked up on the book's insistence on his dignity. He embodies "Tolkien Dwarf" both conceptually and physically in a way which at least partially compensates for the broad comedy of some of his brethren, for which, bitch or no, I will not really be forgiving Jackson any time soon.

While I loved the film, it was not an unmixed viewing experience: I don't think it's up there with the LotR movies in terms of absolute quality. It's a sprawling, self-indulgent piece, and some of its attempts to negotiate the clashes between childlike and epic elements are not wildly successful. While I'm still on a bit of a fangirly high, I'm also exceeding even Two Towers levels of slightly enraged incomprehension at some of the adaptation choices that were made. Therefore, a Swings and Roundabouts comparison seems called for. ( I shall also cut it in case anyone doesn't want to be spoiled for adaptation choices, although if you're spoiled for the novel as a whole I am shocked and horrified. )

All things considered, I am immeasurably relieved. The response to the film has been so mixed, I was rather afraid that Jackson-bloat would have crushed the life out of the world I love. But it hasn't. It's still Middle-Earth, and the visit is still magical. The kind of carping I'm doing is very much that of a fan, levied at the work of a fellow fan with whom I'm comfortable enough to wrangle affectionately when our visions differ. Thank the cosmic wossnames.

Also, hot dwarves. I'm just saying.

It was a slightly madly busy weekend, which I'm only getting around to describing now because I've been spaced and elsewhere all week. Possibly because of actual alien abductions. There certainly seem to be moments when I look up and great tracts of hours at a time have passed without me noticing or actually doing anything in them other than desultorily reading fanfic. (Hilarious fact of the day: the Hawkeye/Coulson slash ship is known as "Bowtie". Hee.)

At any rate, we Salty Crackered on Friday, with mixed results. Then on Saturday we did another installment of the Great Me/Jo LARP-writing pact, which is causing that Wild West LARP to actually be written at a rate currently not one microsecond faster than two hours per week, but that's just under two hours a week more than it's been doing for about the last decade, so score.

Then on Saturday night we movie clubbed. Movie club was Jo's choice, and we watched Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs Evil, which is a strangely inevitable pairing requiring much bolstering of my nerves with booze and a monkey pillow behind which to cower fetchingly because I really don't do gore. Really. And there was a lot of gore. A lot. (Collapses on fainting couch in girly fashion at the mere horrible memory of all the sprays of blood). Cabin in the Woods is, of course, Joss Whedon (fangirlfangirlfangirl*) doing his usual genre-savvy, hyper-aware, meta sort of stuff, with enough panache and general out-thereness that I spent the first half hour of the movie going "WTF is he doing?" in tones of fascinated dread. It's a brilliant (if bloody) script and has a bloody brilliant cast, I'm really enjoying Chris Hemsworth's slightly tongue-in-cheek jock thing, and Fran Kranz is a weird and lateral acting deity all on his own.

And the film, apart from being self-conscious pervy genre-fondling of the most extreme type (and therefore making me very, very happy) is also a beautifully dark and incisive exposition of the night's theme, which was, of course, The True Nature Of Evil. (Jo thinks it was about Horror Cabins In Woods Revisited Ironically, but she's wrong, or at very least less right. If these films do anything, it's to insist that evil isn't what you think it is and, in particular, it may actually be what you're doing when you think you're fighting evil, something the American Republican party would do well to consider. And horror has, after all, absolutely the best box of tropes about confronting evil.) Whedon's take on this is intelligent and pointed enough that it made the efforts along similar (and more slapstick) lines of Tucker and Dale look like the semi-comic hackery I darkly suspect they actually were, Alan Tudyk and some reasonably funny lines notwithstanding. Possibly I am prejudiced against it because of the gratuitous stereotypes. And the woodchipper. Aargh. Woodchipper.

In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that the night's theme was The True Nature Of Evil As Explicated By Oblivious Teens In Gory Horror Cabins In Woods, Revisited Ironically By Joss Whedon And/Or Alumni. But it's a bit of a mouthful.

Sunday morning I did tea in Kirstenbosch with my sister and Da Niece, who just turned seven, good grief, and scored thereby Ursula Vernon art and various subversive works of kiddielit including Dragonbreath, just because. Then Sunday afternoon/evening we trotted out to Fish Hoek for a braai with rumint in his ceremonial biennial visit to these shores, and it was lovely to catch up. But I am dead this week. Dead. I am not designed by nature to be a happy socialiser in any sort of extended format. And there's book club tonight. Oh, lord. *girds loins*. I love book club and its lovely ladies, but my socio-metre needle is quivering on "full".

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* obligatory

There’s a post from Joss on Whedonesque where he refers to his latest, box-office-record-breaking movie variously as “The Scavengers”, “The Availers”, “The Ravagers”, “The Lavenders” and “The Avoiders”. I could wax lyrical on the way in which every single tongue-in-cheek substitution is perfectly accurate for a particular facet of the movie (my slashy-subtextual defense of “The Lavenders” is a particularly fine piece of justificatory acababble), but mostly I’m just happy at the way in which Joss’s characteristic self-deprecation also perfectly encapsulates the mood of the film. The Avengers managed to construct itself as that chimeric and mythical entity which is at once a big-budget summer-tentpole blockbuster, with all its attendant boom and glitz, and a character-driven movie with an actual plot. It has heart and swash and its slightly angsty superhero tongue firmly in its cheek at crucial junctures, and consequently works as only something by Joss can work when it’s working well.

You may be noticing a slight subtextual hint that I enjoyed this movie. I loved this movie. I mean, I’m the world’s easiest sell on superheroes, you flap a cape at me and my inner “Whee!” takes over, but I also love the archetypes enough that, while bouncing happily in my seat, I am also supercritical about how they’re depicted. Joss, of course, gets it. While not quite descending to the levels of grit and angst promulgated by Nolan’s Batman, Avengers is simultaneously an ensemble film, a comic book movie, and one about real, live individuals. It partially rides, of course, on the success of its predecessors - both Thor and Captain America were amiable, character-driven pieces, and Iron Man was rather more than that - but its strength is in its ability to synthesise those individual backstories, simultaneously recognising the angsts and drives of the individuals while subjugating them to the needs of the group. And I am, as always, absolutely about the superhero ensemble. Joss himself acknowledges that the common trait of all these superheroes is their isolation, to a greater or lesser extent, into a world of their own - super-wealthy playboy, man out of time, alien god, assassin, sniper, Jekyll-and-Hyde entity afraid to be among people. In spite of that, he pulls them together into a whole that is coherent, functional and, by the end of it, even joyous, without ever losing sight of individual motivations and abilities, or stretching our credulity too far. (Inserts such as revelations of Nick Fury's manipulation of them contribute materially to this). It's quite an achievement.

The action in this film is pretty much non-stop, so it's interesting to look back on it and realise quite how character-driven it is. There's a particular skill with which the wildly varying power levels of the different superheroes have been integrated and balanced: Black Widow's martial arts training isn't even faintly in the same class as the powers of a Hulk or a god, but the script manages to assert her value nonetheless. (It's a particularly lovely bit of footwork which affirms the part-superhero, part-normal powers of Captain America, who resolutely remains my favourite character in the ensemble). Primarily, though, the explosions and what have you never feel gratuitous; they feel consequential, integrated, and in addition, they're also fun. This is absolutely not Batman. There are moments which epitomise the sense of superheroes as the sheer pleasure of agency, Hulk bounding around the show slapping aliens out of the sky in a sort of joyous abandon, or Iron Man "bringing the party to you". I also love the film's sense of play with the geeky stereotypes which speak both to comic book fans and to Joss's own following - one of my favourite moments in the film is Coulson geeking out over Captain America and wittering on about the pristine set of trading cards he wants signed. (Also, slashy subtext ftw).

No rhapsody about this film would be complete without noting that Joss seems to have pulled off the impossible, particularly, with the Hulk: the Avengers Hulk restores my faith both in the myth and in superhero film-making as a whole. It's possibly a bit odd to talk about the Hulk being humanised, but that's precisely what happens - certainly in the special effects, which neatly avoid Plastic!Hulk and integrate Hulk and Bruce Banner essentially and credibly via the motion capture, but above all in Mark Ruffalo, and in the script. Actor and writing work perfectly together to create not only a credible, world-weary man who retains something resembling a sense of humour about his situation, but also a rather endearing monster who stands not just for unrestrained violence, but for an unrestrained, childlike joy. If Hulk embodies a lack of sophistication, a stripping down to essentials, then the film demonstrates, vitally, that this does not only apply to the "smash" aspect of the character. Hulk is an important component in the film's address to a swashbuckling essence of superheroes: not the angst and conflict, but the simple coolness of magical, unlikely power. Hulk vs Loki is one of the great vignettes of the contemporary superhero story, both an assertion of evil's inevitable destruction within the superhero paradigm, and an amused and knowing nod to stereotype, comic-book power, and the villain's rueful subjugation to narrative expectation.

There was a terrible fear in watching this film, that a geek icon like Joss wouldn't have been able to pull it off. His experiences with Fox (hiss, spit) demonstrate all too clearly the extent to which a confident creative integrity is subject to the whims and warps of marketing. Marvel has generally a much more sane and coherent approach to their mythos films, but the fact remains, if Joss couldn't make something of this movie, it would have suggested, inescapably, that the giant blockbuster superhero ensemble simply couldn't be done. Thank the cosmic wossnames that it can, and the Marvel write-in campaign to put Joss behind the sequel starts here. I'm in.

Movie club! By age-old (i.e. approximately year-long) tradition this entails two movies linked by a theme. I've owned and been wanting to watch the original Godzilla for a while, but kept on coming up blank on something to pair it with. (Re-make? Aargh. Other daikaijū films? eek! Cloverfield would have been ideal, but everyone else had seen it. I wanted Akira for a "Destroy Tokyo!" theme, but Stv had seen it already.) Finally, as despair set in, I remembered that I also had a copy of Rango which I hadn't got around to watching. Perfect! the theme: LIZARDS!

And, of course, conceptual whiplash of the more neck-bracey variety. Godzilla is a black-and-white Japanese monster film hailing from 1954; Rango just won the Best Animated Film Oscar. And I don't think a chameleon is technically a lizard, anyway¹. However! they were both thoroughly enjoyable for very different reasons, and mature reflection suggests that the common theme could have been Fire And Water, or The Corruption Of Water, or even Water And Control.



The 2010 Hugo ballot contained a novella by James Morrow called "Shambling Towards Hiroshima", which featured Hollywood history, rubber monster suits and plots against the Japanese, and if I loved the story at the time (which I did), I love it even more having actually seen the film. Godzilla is one of those wonderful cinematic archives which makes you realise from moment to moment exactly how far film-making has come in half a century, at the same time as it ineradically demonstrates the power and precision with which the older tropes, conventions and special effects draw you into the film. (And how frequently black-and-white frames are starkly poetic). It was slow, clunky, alienating as much in terms of Japanese body language as the different pacing and storytelling, but it's a thoroughly worthwhile watch if only because it's one of the few examples I've met of unabashed allegory that isn't actually annoying. You have to realise quite how terrifying atomic bombs and their implications actually are when they're enacted on three levels simultaneously, two of them metaphorical. Also, it's enormously refreshing to watch scientists being respected and instantly credited instead of being silenced in the name of politics. And the special effects are surprisingly effective. The slow, inexorable, stumbling advance of the monster is somehow more terrifying than anything fast-moving, and Tokyo burns.

I could babble enthusiastically about Rango's extended pastiche of Westerns which is also a devoted love-letter, its pitch-perfect musical score (the music is genius), its brilliant voice cast, its frequently extremely beautiful visuals, its rapid-fire humour and continual film reference (the recreation of bits of the X-wing assault on the Death Star is extremely happy-making), its plethora of beautifully eccentric desert-creature characters, its ecological message, and the extent to which its animators were clearly having a blast. But I don't need to. I can sum up the film, and the indecent amount of pleasure it gave me, in two words. Mariachi owls. The chorus and commentary of the mariachi owl group caused me to lie on the sofa and giggle hysterically until jo&stv became quite concerned. No, really. Mariachi owls. Go and see it. Also, it's incredibly self-concious about narrative construction. Basically I was doomed.

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¹ Edited to add: no, wait, Wikipedia says they totally are lizards. And have "parrot-like zygodactylous feet", which is a curiously wonderful phrase. I love chameleon feet. Like little alien paws.

So. Jane Eyre. This is actually a favourite novel of mine; partially for its lovely Gothic elements and atmosphere; partially because of the amazing feminist analyses which enrich my readings of it (Gilbert & Gubar and madwomen in attics); and partially because of Jane herself, who I find both interesting and appealing. She's an amazingly self-contained spirit, Jane - someone who has risen through really quite awful circumstances of deprivation and mental assault, to become nonetheless a decided entity in her own right, a person with intelligence and will and opinions which are all the more powerful for being hidden by her generally self-effacing reserve. I love watching her vivid mental life spark out of that reserve. She's a fascinating icon for female suppression, and I like her for some of the same reasons I have a soft spot for Austen's Fanny Price.

I have to say, I never quite attained the requisite literary crush on Rochester - he seems to me to be an odd, abrupt, rather narcissistic individual whose conversational roughness and cruelty always prevent me from trusting him enough to like him. He's tormented, sure, but it never quite excuses his behaviour. (I like him a lot better if I imagine him played by a mid-career Alan Rickman; it gives him a complexity the book never quite manages).

I have been driven into a Jane Eyre kick by the lovely treatment of the novel in one of Sarah Rees Brennan's wildly amusing Gothic Tuesdays. ("THE PLOT: Suddenly, typhus!" Hee.) This has caused me to do the following:

1. Repeatedly forget to bring my copy of Jane Eyre back from campus so I can re-read it.
   
2. Order, acquire and re-read Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting, since my copy seems to have fallen to earth, I know not where. (If you're the one who borrowed it, consider it yours).
   
3. Order, acquire and read Sharon Shinn's Jenna Starborn.
   
4. Order, acquire and watch the recent film version of Jane Eyre featuring Mia Wasikovska and Michael Fassbender.

Lucky readers, you get a three-part review, whether you like it or not!

In loving Nine Coaches Waiting, I am utterly unrepentant. Mary Stewart romances are still a comfort read (far more so, in fact, than her Arthurian series). Nine Coaches is one of my favourites of hers, a loose Jane Eyre mirror featuring a French/English governess sent to a chateau in France (written late 50s, probably set contemporaneously) where she finds Lies And Shenanigans Afoot, possibly perpetrated by devilishly handsome Frenchmen. It's fascinating as a Jane Eyre response because it deals neatly with the problem of what Sarah RB calls "Edward 'Crazypants' Rochester" - i.e. he's both hero and villain, attractive and alienating, desirable and bloody dangerous - by splitting him into a father-son team who embody the two halves separately. This works beautifully. I spent most of my teens with a passionate crush on Raoul, possibly secondary only to my passionate crush on the chateau. But the novel also plays very nicely with the class issues in Bronte's novel, and the dangerous appeal of attraction in the middle of lies and cover-ups. It substitutes the standard Mary Steward thriller-tension for some of the Gothic moments, but still nods affectionately at the Gothic. It works.

Jenna Starborn is a far more up-front and faithful adaptation of the novel, but set in a far-future, multi-planetary setting where class divisions are those of citizenship and wealth rather than birth (although the characterising of the Jenna as a clone is a fascinating choice in terms of how it externalises difference and alienation). Lowly governess becomes lowly but essential technician; mad wives setting fire to houses become assaults on the containment and life support systems on a low-atmosphere planet. The "madness" of the hidden wife is beautifully translated, and I decline to spoiler it here, because it was effective in its unexpected revelation. However, the novel doesn't quite work, in part because its adaptation is too faithful: the constraints and strata of nineteenth-century British life are too wholesalely flung into the future, and there isn't much to account for why such retrograde social structures should be re-created. It also, given the update of the Jane-figure into a (technically) more enlightened era, spotlights the really gaping absences at the heart of the Jane/Rochester relationship, and the comparative lack of explanation for why Jane should fall for the ridiculous man when he's such a surly and uncommunicative bastard. I mean, please.

I watched the Jane Eyre movie last night. It's absorbing; slow, but beautifully made, and casting Mia Wasikowska as Jane was genius - she portrays that essential self-containment beautifully, playing right into my sense of Jane as all surface primness, all hidden fire. Fassbender also manages to make something almost human and understandable out of Edward Crazypants Rochester. The film is interesting, though, because it strips out a lot of the better-known Gothic moments to focus, instead, on relationship and feeling. Very little screaming from the attics, in fact. No Edward Crazypants Rochester in drag, therefore no gypsy figure. Absolute lack of the torn-wedding-veil moment, which I've always adored for its incredibly complex symbolism. You see the mad wife precisely once. Instead, the film gives you minute after drawn-out minute of beautiful landscapes, Jane trudging through them, rain, storm, high-angle shots of fields and downs and forests and fog and cliffs by the sea. It's landscape porn, which tries, I think, to use the landscape and environment as emotional indicators, but ultimately fails. The film feels as though it's been gutted, the heart stripped out of it; what makes Bronte's novel powerful is the way in which Gothic symbol and motif externalise and explore feeling and implication, and in a lot of ways substitute for character development. Rochester's pain and corruption aren't in what he says or does, they're in the figure of the mad wife, who also embodies the threat to Jane's integrity and safety, both mental and physical. You marginalise the mad wife and it really all stops hanging together. Which is sad, because the film is beautiful, and the actors are both beautiful and accomplished. (Total waste of Judi Dench, though.)

Thus endeth your dose of pseudo-lit-crit for the week. I must go and feed the cats, and water the garden, and possess my soul in patience until the second and third seasons of Veronica Mars hove to on the horizon. Twitch.

Much as I enjoy noodling around on the piano reproducing pop tunes as my wayward fancy takes me, it's all too often that I encounter Actual Pianists who rub my nose inescapably in the fact that it would be extreme hubris to even think of myself as a two-bit hack. This is another Youtube discovery not entirely unrelated to yesterday's Piano Guys. Apart from being a rather fun piano piece all on its lonesome, as a distillation of a full orchestra it's quite something. (It's also reminding me of quite how much of the Skyrim music is ripped off from this, or from LotR). His Harry Potter version is also lovely, but I rather like the ending on this one.



It's also obscurely comforting to discover that the guy's a professional who does this sort of score-creation for Yamaha. I'm able to vaguely think "ah, corporate shill" and go my merry way with the inferiority complex marginally mitigated.

Apropos of nothing at all, a random concatenation of ideas has just reminded me of last night's Salty Cracker (La Boheme in Sea Point, lovely food) at which the usual wayward puppy conversation suddenly reminded me of a dream I had the other night. I dreamed I seduced C.S. Lewis at a garden party, more or less directly as a result of feeling horribly embarrassed. I'd just spent twenty minutes declaiming to this amiable bespectacled gent about fantasy novels, finishing up with a condescending supposition that he'd probably never heard of C.S. Lewis's Ransom trilogy, but they're very interesting books despite their overly heavy Christian bit, at which point I suddenly realised I was talking to the author himself. (I plead in mitigation that he's been dead for a while, I wasn't to know). Shamed and irritated, I seduced him, presumably as a form of distraction (or possibly a subversive attack on the overly heavy Christian bit). Memo to self: do not recount this one to therapist, I'm not entirely sure I want to know what it means.

Words cannot express how grateful I am that it's Friday. My exhaustion levels form an interestingly steeply-pitched graph that starts at "manageable" on Monday and then wantonly climbs to the weekend.

One of the minor irritations of the Slight Medical Contretemps which afflicted me in the middle of this year, was its timing. It stuck me in hospital, and immobile/recovering, slap bang over the period when a bunch of movies I would have liked to see were on circuit. In horrible defiance of my ongoing superhero fetish, I thus missed X-Men First Class and Green Lantern, as well as PotC 4, although I'm not too distraught over the last one - Johnny Depp notwithstanding, the films have progressively lost the plot as they staggered onwards into greater and more unrestrained excess. Nonetheless, giant blockbuster special-effects extravaganza superhero films need to be seen on the big screen, all the better to Pow! Blam! Zap!

At any rate, we're watching X-Men FC and PotC 4 for movie club on Sunday, the theme being "Popcorn movies we missed on circuit", and proud of it. Green Lantern arrived in the same batch of videos, and I watched it the other night. I can't say I expected much, the reviews have been terrible, but in the event it was both a bad film, and more interesting than I'd thought it would be.



I Am Not A Comic Book Geek, insofar as I've actually read very few of them, and my collection is a small and random sampling heavily weighted towards Sandman¹ and things which have recently been made into movies (mostly because the folkloric adaptation of mythology across media fascinates me unduly). However, any genuine comics geek is fully entitled to righteously look down their nose at me. I've never read any Green Lantern comics (although my unhealthy relationship with Loot suggests that that will change shortly). I didn't know much about it, other than random sideswipes in geeky blog comments, and a half-arsed sense that "the ring allows you to create anything green, but yellow is DOOM!" is not a well-thought-out superpower.

One movie and a spot of random research later, and it's a fascinating mythology. Its genesis is, I think, identical in sensibility to that of the classic old space operas of E. 'Doc' Smith, whose Skylark and Lensman novels presuppose the same inter-species troop of good ol' American clean-cut lads kicking righteous butt across the universe in the name of Mom and apple pie. The whole thing has a sort of goofy naiveté which verges on the endearingly gormless, and for which I have a low, reprehensible fondness. (I love the Lensman books, if only for their galloping excess. By the end of it they're chucking galaxies and universes at each other). The other influence I can't help detecting is that of animated cartoons: the endless morphability of the ring's creations, and in fact the weird alien races which make up the Corps, are really the opposite of realistic, tending to invoke the no-limits fantasy of an animated space-opera universe rather than anything real.

The film caused me, alas, quite unseemly levels of toe-curling fangirly glee, but that's a personal weakness: while it appeals equally to my mutant organs of space-opera and superhero enjoyment, it's not a good movie. It struggles with precisely the elements of unreality I describe above, and I've spent odd moments of the last few days wondering how on earth they actually could have dealt with the Green Lantern story in any way which would infuse it with even a little bit of grit. It's a fairly tall order, trying to use this mythology to appeal to the sensibilities of an audience conditioned to Dark Knights and the strange element of naturalism achieved by RDJ even in shiny powered armour. I don't think it's impossible, the mythology has some interesting things to say about heroism and power, but they really needed to be a lot more thoughtful about it.

The film, I think, hamstrung itself on two levels: in its special effects, and in its lead actor. The green in this movie is very green. Sunday morning cartoon green. Practically glowing. The suit looks plastic, the aliens look cartoon, the landscapes on Oa appear to originate in an animated special. The green ring creations are apparently radioactive, and horribly prone to slapstick. The script is serviceable, if uninspired, and certainly not good enough to infuse the mythology's over-the-top elements with any degree of conviction. Likewise, Ryan Reynolds is an extremely likeable lead, but in fact his fit with the material is almost too good: you could probably equally accuse him of a sort of goofy naiveté which verges on the endearingly gormless, which means he doesn't quite manage to ground the story in anything particularly real. He tries, but ... nope.

I had fun watching this film, but I'm slightly ashamed of the fact. It also occurs to me that at least part of the enjoyment I am apparently able to gain from bad genre movies and TV is the result of my academic inclinations towards contexualisation, analysis, deconstruction. To be an academic and a fan is to exist surprisingly comfortably in a state of dual personality, both enjoyably invested and equally enjoyably distanced. It means that even a bad and facile movie is layered and textured in surprising ways. It works for me.

¹ If only because I possess four Absolute Sandman tomes, any one of which must weigh rather more than Hobbit.

The Avengers trailer has been tabbed in my browser for about four days, which means it auto-plays every time I boot up and load the browser, forcing me to watch it yet again. Oh, fiddlesticks. Oh, darn. All those lovely men being superheroic and flip with authentic Joss Whedon dialogue. Daily. Oh, woe is me. Of course, a superhero movie doesn't have to be particularly intelligent or actually good in any way to make me ridiculously happy (viz. the Fantastic Four Secret Shame), but I'm really looking forward to this one. Apart from Scarlett, who's just a pain.

So, update on the Great French Bank Account Fiasco! I attribute solely to this recent experience my sudden need to re-read Going Postal, which I did yesterday, possibly in morbid fascination with successful cons. Last week's unsuccessful attempt to illegally boost EUR4150 from my account has been superceded by this week's perfectly successful removal of EUR4150 from my account. (This bastard is nothing if not consistent). The bank are being very sweet about it and managed, after much scurrying, to reverse it yesterday, but apparently the thrice-accursed spawn of financial evil (the thief, not the bank. The bank are lovely) actually sent them a hard copy transfer request with all the correct banking details and (drumroll!) my correct signature. This is, to say the least, disturbing. We seem to have ruled out Eric the Hedge-Trimmer, the nice policeman assures me that said Eric has been righteously incarcerated for the last two weeks, so unless he's part of a Ring, it's probably not him.

What it is, is someone who has laid hands on enough of my private documentation to include both a bank statement and a signature, a conundrum which my immersion in Ngaio Marsh and her ilk is responding to by causing a little-used detective gene to come to attention. The availability of my signature is not surprising, I must sign several thousand pieces of paper every year in pursuit of my legitimate admin activities, but its coincidence with the bank statement is considerably curiouser. The bank statement must have come from my study, or from the postal service before it came anywhere near me - I don't carry those around. (I still think it's mostly likely that someone nicked it from the postbox outside our gate). The signature could have come out of something in our recycling, I suppose. Both together could have been accumulated by a half-hour spent sitting outside our house sifting the recycling in conjunction with rifling the postbox, but it would have been rather obvious. Both could also have been lifted off my desk, but I don't really see how. (Apart from anything else, the giant pile in my inbox is giant, and frequently weighed down by the Hobbit). I am gently revolving a third theory, that both were the result of someone digging around on the hard drive of my old computer, the one which was stolen a couple of years ago. But I really don't think the French bank details were ever on there; hell, they're not on the current one, which means it's not even that my nice new wireless wossname has allowed someone to hack me. In the immortal words of Detritus, it a mystery.

The whole thing is causing me (in addition to the moments of incandescent rage, because how bloody dare he) to become horribly paranoid, and to spread that paranoia around a lot. Anything that goes into recycling, for example, is going to be shredded into teeny tiny bits. All correspondence at all about anything whatsoever is going to go to the box number, not the postbox. I've put another padlock on the postbox, in a futile stable-door-horse-bolted sort of gesture, but I don't trust it. I shall discuss with the nice bank people the possibility of simply shifting the whole bang shoot to another bank account, although that's going to be a royal pain in the butt. But I ask you, nice witterers: do you know where your bank account details go? what bits of paper are innocently being recycled? Can you say you are safe? she says in the thrilling tones of a bad drama trailer or an insurance sales pitch. It happened to me! it could happen to you!

And while we're at it, are you making sure you exercise your feet on long plane journeys, too? My mother didn't raise me to be a cautionary tale, but if it's a gig that ends up being any use to anyone else, I'll take it.

Or, Three Things Make A Post.

1. It has occurred to me that the condition for Dragon Age's easy health regeneration is simply that you have to kill all your enemies. I'm wondering if this has real-world application. Right now, for easy health regeneration I'd be willing to become a ninja assassin. If I had the energy for rappelling down buildings, which I don't. Sigh.
   
   
2. I am completely enamoured of the new Firefox tab grouping system. Suddenly my Giant Tab List Of Doom looks all neat and structured and minimalist, and I can hide the shame of the near-infinite list of computer game quest walkthroughs, while still being able to consult them at a click.
   
   
3. I trundled off, dazed but determined, and saw Captain America yesterday. The default state of this year's superhero movie seems to be Cute And Fluffy, and Captain America falls very much into the Thor category - bland, inoffensive story featuring slightly bland, inoffensive superhero. The default state of this year's male superhero seems to be in some sense antiheroic: they always have to be decontextualised figures, fish out of water trying desperately to make sense of an overwhelming alien environment. Thor on Earth. Steve Rogers on a propaganda stage or in the future. Hal Jordan out in the galaxy. They no longer celebrate effortless agency, it has to be hard-won. Since the default state of this year's Extemporanea Brain is towards the cute and fluffy, I rather enjoyed the movie (particularly the 40s period feel, and wossname, Chris Evans does a good job of a sort of geeky good-ol'-boy innocence, and the nifty shield uses are unexpectedly beguiling), but I mourn the iron-clad physical and/or moral certainty of Superman or Batman.
   
   Also, the default state of this year's bad guys seems to be shiny Nazi jackboots. What's with that?

Now I have to go and unwrap the Hobbit from the new kelim (well, old kelim, new to me, courtesy of friendly_shrink) in my study, a frenzied desire to disembowl which he has apparently conceived the instant I put it down. Dear little kitties.