Silent Hill: Revelation

This will come as no surprise since hey, it's a video game movie, but Silent Hill: Revelation is a bad movie. And it's not even gleefully bad like The Man With the Iron Fists. It's just really... plodding and inadequate and hey look I guess Sean Bean got a paycheck, good for him.

(Spoilers of course, but trust me, you don't care.)

The setting was nice, the monsters mostly well done (though a bit too obviously CGI for my taste, though the mannequin monster feeling up the boob of the newly made plastic lady was nicely creepy), and the musical score was excellent. The room scene with the nurse demons was nicely creepy, even if all of us were left wondering what made the two dumbest cultist foot soldiers ever decide that a room full of nurse demons was the place to go. But that's all I can really say that's positive, and that does not a decent movie make. The makeup on several of the characters, by the way, is utterly awful. And the story itself is completely incoherent, with all of the explanatory scenes a word salad of cultist terms that don't actually make sense even if you have played the games.

Really, the inexplicable scene with the nurse demons points to one of the movie's most major flaws. In these games, you do a lot of running into random places, herded by monsters, and you simply accept that sure I'm going to pick up the wax doll and the horseshoe so I can later make a handle for a trap door because that's how I get to the next area and I want to beat the game. (For the record, that is actually a thing you do in Silent Hill 2.) That doesn't work so well in a movie because you're not participating. Instead you're forced to just watch other people to nonsensical things and wonder just who the hell would even think that was a good idea.

Silent Hill: Revelation is actually an uncomfortable mix of Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Homecoming. It's got a lot of plot elements from SH3, but more of the monsters and setting are straight out of Homecoming, which makes it weird if you're a dedicated fan of the games. There was also a lot of twisting of the SH3 plot, combining elements that it really made no sense to combine, and then the wheels just really come off at the end when suddenly Heather and Alessa basically hug it out as their epic finally battle and Claudia is actually a boss monster called the Missionary.

Also, Victor is inexplicably Heather's teenaged love interest, and Kit Harrington can't figure out what the hell his accent is, which doesn't help matters.

There are a lot of things in this movie that left me wondering why these choices were made. Look, if you want to make Silent Hill 3 into a movie, it had a perfectly serviceable plot that could have worked, I think. If you want to make your own original movie set in Silent Hill because it's an interesting setting with a lot of potential stories, I think that would actually be amazing and way more interesting than just remaking a video game. But trying to combine the two by not quite telling the story of Silent Hill 3 is really not the way to go. It confuses the fans of the series (or out and out pisses them off) and just makes for a story that has no internal logic.

For example, Claudia. She was a scary character on her own. She didn't need to be transformed into the Missionary (one of the boss monsters). It's not a nod to the game that Silent Hill fans would really want, since Claudia was Claudia and the Missionary was the Missionary and they were both very frightening on their own; adding them together does not multiply the scares, trust me. It also means that Heather loses much of her badassery because instead of defeating Claudia and getting closure from that woman's manipulations, she goes on to not personally defeat the Missionary (more on this later).

To be honest, what I disliked most about the movie was what they did with Pyramid Head. I was right to be worried. Suddenly he's been transformed from Sir Not Appearing In This Game (though arguably the monster Valtiel in SH3 has similarities) to Heather's protector. No, really. He shows up twice to save her, once so he can chop off the arms of all the people in the asylum because they're trying to pull Heather's hair and scaring her, and once so he can fight the Missionary for her. The movie ends not with Heather being a badass and saving herself, but with what is basically a clash of the Titans where the audience is put in the strange position of cheering for Pyramid Head.

I'm guessing perhaps this has something to do with Pyramid Head's popularity with the fans, but turning him into something quasi-good is really not the way to reward that.

I will note that I found the ending of the movie the most entertaining part, by the way. After Heather and Victor (sigh) escape Silent Hill (Sean Bean inexplicably decides to stay behind, I guess he just wanted the hell out of this franchise) they get picked up by a trucker... named Travis. And then pass by a prison bus being escorted by the police in the opposite direction. So that was amusing.

If you're a fan of Silent Hill, don't waste your money seeing this in the theater. And if you're not a fan, really don't waste your money.

Not a generic get out the vote post

There's something that I've said for a long, long time. Pretty much since I made the discovery that you could argue with people on the internet: If you have to lie to win an argument, you know in your heart that you've already lost, and that you think victory is more important than having a moral compass.

This is not meant to be a compliment, by the way.

Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, not very long ago, I was a Republican. I voted for George W. Bush both times. And I'm only actually ashamed of the second time, when it became apparent just how much we'd all been lied to a matter of weeks after I cast that vote. 

So I don't think Republicans are, in general, evil. I don't think they're trying to destroy the country. I think a lot of them (the social conservatives) need to examine their own prejudices and mind their own goddamn business, but that's a matter for a different post.

I am, however, starting to have my doubts about the party as a whole. Because if you have to lie to win an argument...

Which could just as easily be: if you have to stop people from voting in order to win an election...¹

If you think that voting shouldn't be easy.

If you tout a voter ID law that makes it harder to vote because it'll deliver the state for your candidate.

If you "don't want everybody to vote." 

If you don't want to accommodate a "voter turn-out machine" because it's "urban - read African-American."

If you think the answer in democracy is less democracy for the people you disagree with instead of more for everyone. 

You have already lost. You have lost any claim to morality you ever had. And you have lost your right to say that you love democracy and wish to defend it. 

You have already lost something far more important than an election. You have lost your soul. 

Stop. Just. Stop.

1 - Large scale in-person voter fraud is a paranoid fantasy. Get the fuck over it and honestly examine who you are really trying to stop.

Okay seriously why do you people hate me. (YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME)

Less than 24 hours after setting out the challenge, the goal of $100 donated to the Red Cross has been reached! Wow, you guys must seriously hate me! (And by that, I mean the people who read my blog are AWESOME.)

Thus, you have bought my tasty, tasty suffering on Black Friday. I will liveblog that Ray Comfort DVD. I will liveblog the shit out of it.

But let's not stop there. The Red Cross needs us! And apparently, you need me to alternately froth and sob over my keyboard!

So I propose this - if you get up to $250 on the donations before November 19, I will throw in Metal Tornado the next week (So probably on November 30 or December 1), because I saw it was available on Netflix and it sure does look like a thing. If you get to $350, instead of Metal Tornado I'll liveblog Dreams From My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception, which is an anti-Obama birther wingnut DVD my parents have some how gotten hold of (don't ask) and almost guaranteed to make me burst a blood vessel in my eye.

I'll keep up the running money tally on the original post.

Sound good? Help out the victims of Sandy with the Red Cross! MAKE ME SUFFER!

Donate to the Red Cross, Make Rachael Liveblog Something Awful

I've already donated to the Red Cross to help out those who have been caught by Hurricane Sandy. I'd like you to donate as well. And I have a (dubious) reward for you if you do!

I've noticed my blog posts tend to get around 100 hits. I'm hoping that means at least 100 people actually read my little blog. So if you each gave $1 to the Red Cross, that'd make $100, right?

So here's my proposal. If my readers donate $100 in total to the Red Cross between now and November 19, I will liveblog something terrible. Right now, it's looking like it would be the random Ray Comfort DVD that got left on my friend's windshield when he was parked near a Planned Parenthood. Because I would rather hammer nails into my skull than subject myself to Ray Comfort + Anti-abortion bullshit, so it'll likely be hilarious.

Though I am, of course, open to suggestions. Please feel free to leave your thoughts on this topic in comments.

I'd like to operate this on the honor system. If you donate to the Red Cross because you both want me to suffer and want to help out the victims of Hurrican Sandy, leave a comment on this blog post, tweet at me, comment on facebook, plurk at me, something. If $100 has been donated by the 19th of this month, I will liveblog for you on Black Friday so you can exercise off some of your turkey with evil belly laughs.

Deal?

Money thus far: $209.40 (OH GOD NO NOT RAY COMFORT)

Challenge update since you blew away the first goal:
- Get to $250 and I'll liveblog Metal Tornado as well, because that sure looks like a thing.
- Get to $350 and I'll liveblog Dreams From My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception instead of Metal Tornado. If you haven't heard of it, it's a birther propaganda piece that will probably cause me to rupture a blood vessel in my eye.

Lasted edited at: 06.11.12 14:57

Bad Movie Science (2)

So on Friday, I risked getting my geek card taken away by saying that, for the most part, I don't care if the science in a movie is bad so long as it tells me a sufficiently good story. This was a point I tried to make at one of the Mile Hi Con panels I was on, actually. And at that panel, someone in the audience asked a very pertinent question - but don't you think it's the responsibility of a movie to present good science?

No, actually. I don't.

But people see things in movies and think they're true! What about all of the stupid shit about 2012? And so on!

The responsibility of a movie, as I said before, is to tell me a good story and make sure I don't leave the theater feeling like I just got fucked out of the $10 I paid for my ticket.

Movies are supposed to entertain, not educate. And I think most of us are damn glad for that. While I enjoy a good episode of Nova as much as the next person, you'll notice that's not where my primary consumption of media lies.

If someone goes into a movie and comes out with the misconception that the world is ending in 2012 or geologists wear white labcoats or exposing someone to a lot of gamma radiation is going to do anything but kill them, I frankly do not consider that the fault of the movie. I consider it a fault of the education that person received, and to a lesser extent the fault of media that actually has the responsibility of being truthful rather than entertaining.

Critical thinking skills have always gotten short shrift in education, and in the US that's only become worse with the advent of No Child Left Behind and the emphasis on gross skills such as reading speed uncoupled from the ability to process and critically assess what has been read. (Because those things are much harder to assess with a standardized test, I suppose.) Teaching kids science (something that low income schools particularly struggle to do), how to tell good data from bad, how to tell who is an expert who probably knows what they're talking about and who is just some jackass that the local TV station dug up in the pursuit of false balance would go a long, long way to closing that gap.

And that's not even touching on things like, say, the Texas GOP platform attacking the teaching of critical thinking skills.

The problem is not that a movie includes a ridiculous scene where the spaceships make noise and turn like airplanes instead of spaceships. The problem is that the audience lacks the necessary basis to question the truth of that statement.

And frankly, fixing this problem has nothing to do with requiring those who make their living in the arts to hew to scientific fact and never deviate. (We won't even touch on the question of how the hell you'd begin to enforce that, free speech issues, etc.) Ultimately, enforcing scientific fact through the arts still does nothing to fix the base problem. You are still presenting entertainment as a fact that should be accepted unquestioningly upon its consumption by a passive audience.

The real answer is simple to state and difficult to execute. We need to teach people to think critically and question and understand the difference in data quality depending upon the source. We need to stop pretending that education is only about reciting times tables and reading X number of words per minute.

We need to stop failing the education system and the kids who rely upon it.

Because yes, it is us failing the schools, not the other way around. It's us refusing to pass bond issues, and us obsessing about standardized testing, and us not paying attention to who the hell we're electing to the board of education for our county or state, and us allowing political affiliation to interfere with objective scientific truth, and even some wacky part of us actively fighting against teaching kids how to even think to begin with.

Us. We did this. Not the people who make movies.

The Man With the Iron Fists

This should come as no surprise, but The Man With the Iron Fists is a bad movie. A very, very bad movie. But it revels gleefully in its badness, a hodgepodge of one-liners glued together with endlessly spurting, ruby-red fake blood. This is not a movie that you see because you want martial arts or a decent action flick. This is a movie you see because you went to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and thought well yes, but what this movie needs is more obviously fake gore and bad Elvira wigs.

There's really nothing to this movie but fight scenes that are comedic in their brutality and groan-worthy one-liners that are held together by weirdly laconic exposition by RZA, who informs you periodically what the plot is doing. But let's be clear. There isn't really plot to this movie. It's a fabrication that exists so that characters can move from point A to point B and then throw around a lot of blood. While the movie itself has an impressive color palette (particularly the whore house, where everything is in a highly disturbing shade of pink) everything potentially emotional is flat and muted because feelings are really just there as a reason to punch someone's goddamn head off.

Near the beginning, Yen Zi (the X-blade) gets a note that reads: Your father is dead. The circumstances of this caused everyone in the theater to laugh. This is the kind of experience you have throughout the entire movie.

According to IMDB, the original cut of the movie was 4 hours long, and then it was reduced to 90 minutes. I'm forced to wonder, had it been left at the original, epic length would it:
a) have made sense
b) not been a comedy

The plot, such as it is, is fairly straightforward. I think. There are a bunch of clans, inexplicably named after animals. The Lion Clan (extra hilarious if you've ever played L5R) has a coup occur within it when The Artist Formerly Known a Prince Silver Lion kills daddy Gold Lion and then tries to have his son Yen Zi murdered too. Then kills a lot of other people because... reasons, including at least one other clan. He also seems very concerned about the Hyena Clan which, to my memory, never actually appears so perhaps it's some sort of hallucination on his part. He also steals a shipment of gold from the governor (a stern man with large eyebrows who has no actual lines and just poses on an enormous golden throne) and hides it under the whore house.

Yen Zi thinks all of this is a bad idea and tries to stop it, which means Brass Body (pro wrestler Dave Bautista) beats the snot out of him. The Blacksmith (RZA) who is incidentally the only black guy in the village, saves Yen Zi, nurses him back to health, and gets his arms chopped off for his trouble. Jack Knife (Russell Crowe), who has been hanging around chewing on the scenery and being weird, oversexed and not nearly as fabulous as Silver Lion, then saves the Blacksmith and helps him make some metal arms - and thus the movie gains its title. Together, Yen Zi, Jack, and the Blacksmith team up and kill... everyone. Basically. Well, Ultra Fabulous Lion kills Madam Blossom (Lucy Liu) as she tries to save a child for a reason none of us could figure out. Then Russell Crowe as Jack rides off into the sunset still reminding the audience that yes I am totally a British guy trust me and the Blacksmith swears off making weapons forever because violence is bad, that's why we just sat through 90 minutes of nothing but.

The martial arts scenes are fairly unimpressive. There's a lot of wire work  that's all right, if you're in to wire work. See it if you want a movie that feels like it's having fun with all the tropes of bad martial arts movies. See it if you want to witness Russell Crowe hilariously sneaking around the village in disguise as obviously the only white guy in the entire county (who also has a prominent and easily identified facial scar). See it so you can witness Byron Mann in a bad wig being a fabulous bastard and Daniel Wu with hilariously overdone eyebrows. See it so you can witness Dave Bautista, with apparent seriousness answer the line "I thought all the tiger were dead!" with "Yes, because I killed them!"

I laughed more in this movie than I had in the last comedy I went to. If you're the sort of person that likes MST3K and was willing to pay real money for a ticket to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, go for it, get some popcorn, and enjoy. If you demand that your movies do things like, I don't know, make sense, this is not for you.

If you do go, just wait until you get to the (gasp) Gemini Stance! And then imagine an entire row of students from a kung fu school laughing hysterically. Because that's exactly what happened.

Bad Movie Science (1)

This might get my geek card taken away, I realize. Oh wait, no, you can't take my geek card. John Scalzi says so.

But this is the thing. For the most part, I actually don't care about bad science in movies. Sure, there's the occasional face-clutching howler (red matter? a black hole that's going to destroy an entire galaxy? Wow, Star Trek, just wow.) but outside of that, 98% of the time, I seriously don't care. Spaceships that don't fly like spaceships should fly and make noise in space? Meh.

What I want a movie to do is tell me a good story. Or failing that tell me a really fun one. If the movie is doing its job at that, then I'm probably not even going to notice the shitty excuse for science. I'm going to be too busy watching villains get punched in the face or clutching the edge of my seat because oh god are these people going to make it or grow up or get back together I need to know.

I do think there are times (cough Total Recall cough) when the MacGuffin is too ridiculous to just accept, or when if the writers had actually spent five minutes on the internet and taken a look at the real science, it would have made the story stronger. But for the most part, the point is the story, not a technical lesson in how spaceships should really fly.

And frankly, I think if you or I can spend our entire time complaining bitterly about all the tortured science, that shows that the movie (or television show, etc) has failed at telling us that story and making us care. Because that means we're so bored or annoyed or overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity of the base concept that we'd rather pick apart the technical details than pay attention to what the characters are doing. I'd argue that the problem at the base of those movies isn't the bad science, it's the failure of the story itself to engage.

Prometheus is an excellent example of this, I think. If I'd actually given two shits about any of those characters and hadn't found their decisions inexplicable and stupid, I wouldn't have cared about how grossly ridiculous the more technical details of the story were. (eg: I just had major abdominal surgery and now I'm going to basically run a triathlon. I rolled my eyes until I strained something.) For goodness sake, I loved the hell out of Looper even though if I wanted to I probably could have just gone to town on the way the time travel was handled. But I didn't care at the time and still don't because any mistakes (intentional or not) that were made occurred in the service of a damn good, engaging story.

Remember, you can't take my geek card.

I've often heard Contact held up as a paragon to all nerddom because the science was done right. I know some people that really, really liked that movie. If you're one of them, good on you. I thought it was all right, but I've seen it a grand total of once and have never felt compelled to watch it again, which is a strange thing for me since I'm a compulsive movie re-watcher at my heart. (Don't ask how many times I've watched Avengers. Just. Don't.) I think that highlights that as far as I'm concerned, the correctness of the technical background really has no meaning unless the story grabs me and won't let me go.

I would further argue that, if it is in the service of a good story, rules should be bent and broken.

(Next: yes, but is it the responsibility of a movie to have good science?)

NaNo-advice

By which I mean advice for NaNoWriMo, not advice x 10^-9.

I've done NaNo five times, personally, and "won" it all five times, which is to say I've managed to produce 50k words in a month. Of those five times, twice I've gotten completed novels. Of those two novels, I've deemed one good enough that I've been willing to plunge into query letter Hell for it.

NaNo is a good experience if you want to practice writing, and writing at length. As was said at the How to Get Your Work Rejected Worldcon panel, a lot of people want to have written a novel. Most of them don't want to actually write one. Because writing one, particularly the first time you do it, can be kind of hard.

So from me to you, a little advice:

Find what works for you. Everyone ultimately has a different writing process, and what works for me is not necessarily going to work for you. I know some people who find NaNo meetups and write-ins are incredibly  useful. I've never had any luck with them because I can't concentrate when there are people around. But if they work for you? Great! This means you need to experiment and figure out how to set up conditions so that you can actually get writing done. Which may sound unhelpful at its face - what do you mean, I can't tell you how to do this? - but this is also permission to ignore advice from other people if it just doesn't work for you. Experiment!

There is nowhere this is highlighted more than the great Pantsers vs. Outliners debate. Some people can write a novel without an outline. I have no idea how they do this - my first NaNo was a seat of my pants affair, and it was a 50K train wreck by the time I limped to the finish. (I would not recommend padding your wordcount by overdescribing everything, by the way, unless you want to end up hating your story. Or unless you really like waxing poetic about tatami mats.) Of course, on the other end of the spectrum you have Kevin J. Anderson and his terrifying novella-length outlines. (Not making this up.) Personally, I like writing about a page of bullet points, which I then don't actually hold the story to. Which means that I will sometimes redraft an outline four or five times as things develop and then ending looks like it'll be somewhere else.

Figure out what works for you. If you get lost easily and can't figure out where you're going, outline. If knowing how the story will end means you're bored with it before you start, don't. And don't let anyone tell you that you're doing it wrong so long as it works for you.

That said, here are four more pieces of advice that I think are universally useful.

Don't look back. When you're doing this thing for the first time, you should feel like you're throwing yourself down a mountain, and the only way to keep from dying is to just keep running as fast as you can or risk losing your footing. Trust me. If you go back and let yourself edit particularly, you've lost the battle already. You're distracted from getting words on the page. Just keep writing. And if you realize that you need to change something you already wrote, just write yourself a big note in the middle of your page and keep going. Edit later. Write now.

By the way, you also don't have to write in chronological order.

Unplug the internet. The internet not-so-secretly wants to keep you from getting anything done. Trust me. When you are writing, you should be writing and that means not checking your e-mail. Turn off wifi on your laptop, put your droid or iPhone on silent, and let the world go for a couple of hours. It'll be fine without you.

Write the interesting parts. If you are struggling to write because you're bored by what you're writing, skip it and go write something interesting. Come back to it later, and maybe you won't find that part so boring. (Or, if it is boring, you should probably ask yourself if it's necessary, and if so, how can you make it not boring. Because if you're bored writing it, a reader is probably not going to find it more interesting than you did.)

Write every day. It's a point for debate if you should worry about word goals strictly. I met some people at the Mile Hi Con NaNo panel that had success with binge writing. Well, more power to them. But writing every day is still non-negotiable. Even if it's just ten minutes on your lunch break where you add two lines of dialog, that's good enough. The point is that you need to make this a habit. You need to feel like something is deeply wrong with the world if you haven't sat down and put some words on the page today. And once you skip one day, it's easier to skip another, and then next thing you know it's December and your characters are still sitting in a tavern and trying to decide if they actually want to bother saving the world or not.

Happy NaNo-ing, guys! I'm looking forward to rejoining the ranks next year, once the specter of grad school has released me from its icy clutches. Good writing, and remember - don't look back! There are zombies!

(Oh yeah, and happy Halloween, too!)

Moving to Houston

I've accepted a job offer in Houston, after a lot of discussion and back and forth with Mike about the pros and cons and oh shit he has to find a job too. While I'm really not feeling good about having to move, I'm super excited about the job itself. It's with a company I've been hoping to be hired by pretty much since I started doing this whole geology thing, and I'm going to be doing work that I find extremely interesting. (I get to look at actual rocks! And thin sections!)

My projected start time at the new job is beginning of February, since hopefully that will provide sufficient time to finish writing my thesis, get it defended and get all the edits in, as well as deal with more mundane tasks like finding an apartment, selling the house, all that. I'm actually a little excited about the house selling part, since this seems like a great opportunity to thin out our possessions. The company is paying for the move, using Atlas. Which means that someone else gets to pack up my house and move all the boxes. This is apparently how grownups do things, who would knew?

We're planning to come back to Colorado and visit very often, hopefully even as much as once a month. So you haven't gotten rid of us yet! And right now it's definitely my plan to be back for Mile Hi Con next year as well. (It'll be even easier to get to Worldcon, come to think of it.) 

It's exciting, and scary. Just like all adventures.

Scientists convicted of manslaughter for failing to be psychic

Words cannot begin to express how upset, angry, and filled with contempt I am by this:
Italian scientists resign over L'Aquila quake verdicts

Two scientists resigned their posts with the government's disaster preparedness agency Tuesday after a court in L'Aquila sentenced six scientists and a government official to six years in prison. The court ruled Monday that the scientists failed to accurately communicate the risk of the 2009 quake, which killed more than 300 people.

We wish we could predict earthquakes. We really, really do. So many lives could be saved. But there is as of yet no way to make those kind of predictions. A series of small earthquakes? Depending upon how you define it, those occur all the time. Hell, we can only sort of predict the imminent eruption of a volcano, and the mechanics of that, the pressures that dictate an eruption, are relatively simpler and there are far more "tells" - seismic activity, increased outgassing, etc.

Nature agrees: 

There will be time enough to ponder the wider implications of the verdict, but for now all efforts should be channelled into protest, both at the severity of the sentence and at scientists being criminalized for the way their opinions were communicated. Science has little political clout in Italy and the trial proceeded in an absence of informed public debate that would have been unthinkable in most European countries or in the United States

Hey Italy, while you're jailing people for failing to predict disasters, how about extraditing the horrendous human beings who played fast and loose with the financial markets and caused the global economy to shit itself? That had far more potential for being predicted and arguably has caused even more human suffering. What about jailing people who have refused to listen to repeated warnings about global climate change?

Or I suppose this pattern could continue and the next time a doctor fails to predict a heart attack, or a traffic cop fails to predict an accident, they'll end up in jail.

This is ridiculous. Contemptible.