For better or worse, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Sadly, much of the badness seemed to come from the fact that the writers couldn’t really figure out what Conan was all about.

I mean, was he a mercenary fueled by money? Or a hoity-toity do-gooder who just frees slaves because it’s “morally right”? You can probably guess my answer to this (and the answer of pretty much anybody familiar with the source material). But for some reason, these guys were really working hard to make him ruled by both instinct and… morality?  

Things seem to sort of happen randomly here, and I got the impression that there was some kind of internal war in the making of this film about who the hell Conan really was. It almost felt like they were going for the “noble savage” thing (popular concept in pulp like Howard’s, offensive as it may be), but you know… Conan is not noble. He is ruled by base instinct and the “Now.” This is, to me, what makes this character so appealing to modern day folks, even though the books are spilling over with sexism and racism and great gouts of poor writing and sneering heads. The appeal of Conan is that he drinks, fucks and fights with no care for tomorrow. Everything is about getting through right now – the pleasure of the moment. For people so caught up in the desperation of trying to ensure a roof over their heads and screaming every time they look at their 401(k) portfolio during shitty times, Conan’s utter disinterest in anything but the pleasurable moment (whether that’s the high of fucking or fighting) is really appealing.   

Yes, there are all sorts of other things Conan is – gratuitous sex and violence and magic and more violence – but at the core of it, I think, the true appeal of Conan for those of us stuck in societies where civil behavior consists largely of sucking up and controlling our natural wants and desires while endlessly plodding along at jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need so we can “enjoy” ourselves in our decreptitude for twenty years of failing health and hospital visits, the barbarian life, passionately lived, looks very pretty on paper (dying of gangrene or dysentery is less interesting, but that’s why we enjoy living it fictionally).

This Conan teetered very close to the edge of that, and very close to the edge of not sucking.  But, well. Yeah.

(SPOILERS AHEAD) It opens with Conan’s birth on the battlefield. His mother – heavily pregnant – has been mortally struck down on the battlefield, where she is fighting. Before she dies, she wants to see her son, so her husband eviserates her with a sword, and poof, Conan is born and his mother dies. Which was a better botched Cesarean scene than I was expecting, but ultimately ill-thought-out. See, later on, Conan notes to his “love” interest that Cimmerian women dress as warriors. Which is cool. But here’s the worldbuilding fail and one of the schizophrenic moments– during the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which we see Conan growing up into a warrior, we don’t actually SEE any women dressed as warriors. For that matter, during the pivotal scene when he’s running out with the group’s other warrior-hopefuls, every single one of the other “warrior” hopefuls is a guy.

So here we have this nice update (because really, if you thought women in small tribal groups didn’t know how to defend themselves, you’re stupid. Hence the recent hullaballoo over the discovery that, in fact, many of the Viking folks buried with their swords were not, in fact, men [as assumed by male archaelogists. If women didn’t know how to defend themselves while the guys were gone, Vikings would have died out pretty quickly), but that update is all hosed up because the rest of the worldbuilding just doesn’t jive with what’s *said.* You can *say* something is true all you want, but until you *show* that actually playing out in your world, it’s just so much talk (remember, your audience comes to a show with their own biases, just like those archeologists. It means working harder to remind people that hey, yeah, really, things are DIFFERENT here).

This schizophrenia continues with our first view of the adult Conan, who randomly decides to free some slaves because “no man shall live in chains” despite the protestations of his partner, who reminds him that freeing slaves doesn’t win them any money or serve any real purpose. But Conan does it anyway, because he is just a moral person (?). 

What?

Anyway, it gave them a chance to surround Conan with some bare-breasted slave girls, so maybe that’s what it was about anyway. If he’d done it to get gold and freeing the slaves was an afterthought, that’s one thing, but since when was Conan all about doing things just because they’re “right”? There is no “right” in Conan. There is only “right now.”

But anyway, the schizophrenia continues when we meet our heroine for this romp, who is in some kind of monastery, all dressed in white like she’s some kind of Vestal Virgin or nun or something. When the bad guys come to the monastery to kidnap her, we find out she’s actually some kind of fighting monk, who is passable with a knife and kicking people.  Trouble is… well, again. Is she a Vestal Virgin or fighting monk? She vacillates between maiden-in-distress and passable-with-a-knife the whole time. To add further confusion, we learn that she’s the last of some bloodline, and is going to be delivered “Home” by Conan (per some prophecy) but we never learn why she was there in the first place, if she even knew her parents or even remembered “home” or if it had any significance whatsoever to her. In fact, she had no real goal or ambitions at all except to go home as her master had decreed would happen via his prophecy. She was, in essence, a blank slate around which the rest of the plot (such as it was) moved. She was, basically, just a McGuffin, and a very badly fleshed out one. It probably doesn’t help that Hollywood is moving more and more toward casting female leads who all look alike. She could have been anybody.

Her non-desires-except-as-dictated-by-plot were also on display when she goes ashore at one point and just randomly has sex with Conan. OK, it’s Conan, I realize we need a sex scene, but there is no lead up to this and no real serious interest given on either person’s part (except Conan’s statement that she looks like a “harlot” I guess, which is apparently as close as he gets to foreplay). It’s just like, “Hey, ship isn’t sailing until morning, so we might as well have sex!” And here’s the deal with that. She’s, like, a Vestal Virgin/Monk, right? So wouldn’t sex be a big deal for her? Wouldn’t there be more angst/talking about it, like “Hey, now that I’m not a Vestal Virgin/Monk anymore I want to get it on” or some crazy lame crap like that? Can she have some kind of desire/motivation for anything at all besides, “Well, you’re here… and I’m here… and the plot dictates that Conan gets some action, sooooo….” One of my favorite scenes in the first Conan was between Conan and Valeria after they’ve had sex for the nth time, and she waxes on a bit about perhaps abandoning the life of thieving and excess and maybe, you know, hooking up for realsies, because she’s gotten envious of those couples would have somebody to come home to every night. And though this could have been a typical she wants to commit/he’s a barbarian thing, it ended up being a nice little moment – she was a hardened thief with a hankering to settle down, you know, maybe. It happens to the best of us.  It gave her a little more depth.

In this one, the female lead isn’t given anything to want or wish for at all, not even a for realsies relationship with Conan, which is never even broached (in fact, it would have been a great conversation where she was all like, “You know, dude, I just want to have some sex! I’m a Vestal Virgin! No strings attached!” and she really meant it). At the end of the movie, he just dumps her off in front of a city somewhere, and she looks wistfully after him.

Eh?

Anyway, there’s a plot in here about bringing this McGuffin love interest to some place and spilling her blood into a mask so she can be possessed by some demon Queen. Ho-hum. Rose McGowan is underused here as the daughter of the main bad guy who’s less than interested in her mother coming back because she feels she’s powerful enough to rule the world with her dad. But, just like our other female lead, she doesn’t really take actionable steps to get what SHE wants. She just says she wants something (which is nice – at least she HAS wants) and then backs off and once again backs dad’s plan. Which is not only lazy, but bad storytelling, because it reduces a lot of tension at the end.

Oh well?

At any rate, Conan cuts off some heads and hands and gets revenge for the death of his father and village (not his mother, this time, as she was already dead). Blah, blah, you know the rest.

In the end, I thought maybe they would do something with the sword stuff they were doing throughout, about Conan not being ready to pick up a Cimmerian sword, and then he gets back his dad’s sword at the end, and revisits his village, and I thought for SURE he was going to put the sword back, implying that he was not yet ready, and giving us something unfinished for another day. But instead he just picks it up and yells a lot, and The End.

And I was kinda left with this weird feeling like, “Um, what did I just watch?” Was this a story about a barbarian, or a do-gooder? A fighting Monk or a vestal virgin? An evil witch child or jealous daughter? It was like they were trying to merge these archetypes into actual fleshed out characters by simply smooshing them together – but it just didn’t work. You can’t take complete opposite archetypes and just slap them together and call it a character. They just don’t smoosh right.  You have to sit down and create real, fleshed out people with real wants, desires and motivations that spring from the world and situations they’re involved in. If you just throw a bunch of crap in willy-nilly to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one.

If I had to guess what happened, I’d guess it was this: trying to please too many people. Trying to make Conan progressive/yet traditional, without having any clue about what drove him or the people he associated with. Trying to make the female lead both a damsel in distress/fighter, without creating an actual person (they even randomly threw in this thief character who didn’t become a companion, just was there briefly, basically said, “Come find me for the climax of the movie!” and then appeared later to break him into a fortress… for the climax of the movie).

And the problem with trying to please too many people is that you end up with something mediocre. During the final epic battle scenes, I found myself kind of spacing out. I realized I wasn’t really attached to any of the characters – not Conan, not the Vestal Virgin, not the witch girl, and not the big bad guy. I just really couldn’t care less about what happened to them, because I wasn’t allowed to be truly invested in their stories because they really weren’t invested in them either. About the only interesting character was Conan’s initial fighting companion, who – again – just kinda showed up randomly throughout the movie instead of acting as a constant. I was more interested in the first 20 minutes of the movie where we’re actually learning about Conan and his world than the other 2 hours or so in which we’re just kind of running around after McGuffins without doing any kind of character work (in some ways, I think pairing Valeria and the thief with Conan helped in the first one, as both were allowed to emote – another good scene is when Valeria and his thief companion try to save him from the wind demons. They are allowed to feel things and be invested in them because he is not – but SOMEBODY has to feel things. Remember when the thief says, “I cry because he cannot?” Pure gold, there).

This is a classic pairing when you want to do a character as unemotional/distant as Conan. It’s like Holmes/Watson. SOMEBODY has to be there for the audience to relate to, or to help us sympathize with our rather unsympathetic lead.  But Conan in this movie just kind of wandered around randomly, sometimes alone, sometimes with other folks, but with no constant, nobody with any drive, and certainly nobody I could care about (again, the closest being his warrior-second, who was really underused throughout).

To sum up, no amount of schizophrenic storytelling will make us love a Conan who is not even fleshed out well enough to be truly loved by his cardboard companions.

Oh, sure, I enjoy reading now, to a point. Mostly, though, reading is drudgery for me, filled with lots of interesting but in-need-of-help first novels (including my own), and lazy writing, and plot holes, and all those other clunky things that jerk me straight out of a story (no matter how engaging) and fling me back to planet earth. I didn’t experience that much when I first started reading the genre, but after a while, you read and critique enough stories and you start to see all the crappy holes in them, and it sucks the enjoyment right out of the story.

I’d heard Martha Wells had some new fiction out, and being a fan of her book City of Bones, I decided to go ahead and check it out (also, we now have the same agent. Once again: my agent has such good taste!).

I had some trepidation, initially, because I knew this one was about a flying shapeshifter, and the last “weird” book I read with a flying hero was Steph Swainson’s Year of Our War, which – despite the interesting world building – I hated because the main character was a whiny, drug-addled and totally uninteresting person. So I had my biases going in about what was going to happen with some flying loner guy.

I should not have worried.

The Cloud Roads is the story of Moon, a shapeshifter (again! Not exactly one of my favorite things to read about in my fiction, due to how overdone it is) who is uncertain as to what kind of creature he truly is, as he has encountered no one of his kind before. He exists in hiding in his “groundling” or non-flying form, which more-or-less allows him to mix with other types of groundling races of – literally – all colors, types, stripes, and creeds. Because all the races are so different, and there are so many, he is not seen as too terribly out of place – unless he shifts. Because when he shifts to his flying form, he reminds others of a disturbingly violent race of baddies known as The Fell, who make it a habit of eating groundlings and destroying their cities.

One of the things this book does well is paint a picture of that classic odd-kid-out who’s used to being betrayed and bullied, and has grown up his whole life not only knowing he’s different, but knowing he will be actively hunted and possibly killed for it. I’ve heard some folks say that this would be a great YA book, and I can’t disagree with that. It’s a story about finding your place in the world, and the heartbreak of losing everything you love and trying to trust people again. This whole concept could have gone over syrupy-sticky, but instead, the way the protagonist, Moon, is presented was terribly sympathetic without being sticky. It reminded me a bit of how Robin Hobb’s bastard boy was introduced in the Assassin books – someone who simply ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and crapped on by everybody else because of how he was born.

Though Moon is pushing 30-something, his race is long-lived, so the fact that he is emotionally still a bit of a child is understandable – it doesn’t help that he’s never had to socialize with his own kind, and has a lot to learn.

Moon does eventually bump into his own people, and discovers what he is, but the road to get there isn’t exactly the one you were expecting. What made this book really work for me was that it challenged your expectations of family groups and social structures (oh, PLEASE, guys, give us more books beyond the hetero family pairing!). Moon’s people are socially complex, and the Big Bad that the plot hinges on actually has to do with selective/forced breeding for particular powers (not the nicest thing in the world, and especially not nice after you’ve gotten to like all the characters).  Moon himself is also incredibly well-drawn in a way with a bit of a uniquely unreliable narrative turn involving his refusal to trust others.  This makes him not just wary of betrayal, but expecting it at every turn. It means that when he tells you what he thinks just happened in a scene… well, you learn quickly not to believe a word of what he says to you about what someone’s motives are. That said, his caution is sometimes dead on, and saves some folks from disaster. It is this – his resourcefulness and survival instinct – that really made me respect him.  He is a little heartbreaking, and broken, but instead of that being a turnoff to him as a character, it makes your heart ache, because – for many of us – there’s that place inside where you will always feel like the outsider, unloved, like everyone’s going to betray you, and you start to cheer for Moon and hope for the best for him, even as he tries so very hard to just expect everything will fall apart.

This is a lovely book, with strong worldbuilding and sympathetic characters. The only real critique I have is that, for me, there were almost too many characters to keep track of toward the end (the folks involved in fighting the Big Bad are numerous, as in the end, his entire new adopted family comes under attack). Aside from that… well, really, I don’t finish a lot of books these days, and few of them are so seamless or engrossing. And none have tapped into that adolescent love I used to have for fantasy fiction so strongly as this book did.

Highly recommended.

But, whatever.

This movie was indeed exactly as it was advertised, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing. I mean, hey, cowboys and aliens! But… but… I don’t know what it is about Spielberg and trite storytelling (yes, I directly blame Spielberg for any  movie he executive produces, even if he didn’t write or direct it. I have a gooood feeling that it’s his preferences that often burble to the surface), but at some point he seems to have found The Formula, and now he is proceeding to beat us to death with it. This does not, luckily, detract from the visual/emotional experience of the story as your in it (I was engaged throughout the film), but it does start to bug you as you begin to notice and count the beats, and it’s especially aggrevating when you go to to postmortem posts like this and realize it didn’t all sit as well with you as you thought.

You figure out all the beats early on – all the characters who have spouses/loved ones taken by the aliens will, of course, join Our Hero in getting their loved ones back. The hero is haunted, of course, by the death of his wife, who was killed by aliens (before this, she is referred to as having been a whore – very explicit whore/martyr thing going on there, which annoyed me. Why did he like her to begin with? We never know). For a minute, I actually thought she’d been raped, to boot (which would have fit neatly with this lazy storytelling).

Yet for all that, Spielberg does this other thing that is mooshy-wooshy sentimental and yet, works. He makes you really care for the characters, despite  or because of the pat little plot and easy beats,  because that’s the other bit of the storytelling formula that works.

You wake up in a white room, or a desert, not knowing what’s happened to you, and slowly piecing together the narrative along with your protagonist. Classic and slightly tired SF trope, but it works. Your characters are achetypes, basically, from our Lone Wolf hero to the arrogant rich teen, the plucky young boy, the possible love interest/guide, a grizzled war vet with a heart of gold, and etc. etc. The acting here of Ford and Craig is terribly lovely, and Ford’s character in particular is given that perfect blend of character traits that makes you both hate him and sympathize with him (as with any good villain). Sadly, this often meant skimping on characterization of the supporting cast, which is why everybody else seems to have gotten only the vaguest handwave. The acting and cinematography and effects were so good, in fact, that it was often difficult for me to jive these sophisticated trappings with the rather unsophisticated story. They just did not go together. When are we going to allow our storytelling chops to match our mastery of the visual medium?

Yes, the movie gets points for the “we should all work together instead of fighting” angle, but even that felt terribly contrived. It’s like… it’s like watching a film made for 12 year old. Again. And again. And again. Which is fine. If you’re 12.

For my money, I did actually enjoy the alien tech, though the fact that they wanted gold was… weird. Another heavy-handed clunker of lazy writing, if you ask me. I wanted a whole lot more… non-laziness, I guess. We also get this avenging angel in the form of our only real female character, but  – even though she potentially has the most interesting story – she, too, is given short shrift so we can spend more time sympathizing with Harrison Ford.

Sometimes, I think, a movie is only big enough for so many big egos. Everybody wants their character to be the “star,” and what you often end up with is too much emphasis on the wrong people. I felt like that happened a lot here. I was learning a lot about the people who had the least invested in the story. Which was… weird. Or, would have been weird if one of them wasn’t Harrison Ford.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy this movie. There were plenty of clichéd things it avoided – the crazy “bad guy” Indians being a big one – but the story was stuffed with too many people painted with far too broad of strokes. They weren’t people in the end, just archetypes (Ford got the closest to being somewhat rounded). Which is fine, I guess, but not what I was looking for.

The trouble is, I suppose, that now when anybody says, “Cowboys in space,” I think of Firefly.

And this was most certainly not that.

 “What the hell is this?” I said.

My husband, J, grabbed the book out of my hands and said, “This is AWESOME!”

I winced. “That cover is terrible.”

“Kameron, this is an AWESOME cover! Look at the tentacles! And this woman with a sword. And her flannel shirt! And this woman doing something on a computer. TENTACLES! Also, this dude with glasses, doing magical nerdy stuff, and this guy, with this gun, and wow! DID I MENTION THE TENTACLES? This cover is PERFECT. I really want to read this book.”

I was speechless. “You want to… read this book?”

He handed it back. “Oh yeah. Plus, the way the cover is laid out is a total riff on the poster for Big Trouble in Little China, so you know it will be good.”

I peered at the cover again, dubious. It occurred to me that this was just going to be one of those books that wasn’t marketed to me, but as per J’s reaction, it was most certainly highly targeted to folks like him… folks with a much finer sense of geeky culture. 

But after throwing yet another promising-but-disappointing fantasy novel down, I went ahead and picked up NO HERO from my pile, just for kicks. Because, you know, the title is NO HERO. And I like that. People who aren’t heroes. So, hey. Worse case, I get a few pages in and chuck it off to Goodwill like I’ve been doing with so many books lately.

So I started reading this book. And, you know, it was exactly what it promised to be: Brain squid. Explosions. Socially awkward people. The end of the world.

The further I got into the book, the more I wondered why I kept reading, and the more I kept reading. For a book that’s also kind of a an anti-Urban Fantasy Noir a la Dresden Files but with a non-magical protagonist and underfunded government operation populated by a surprising number of women for this type of book, it was… awfully entertaining.

There is plenty to like here – the brain squid and explosions, the sort of broken and partially magical (but mostly not) characters, the big boss fights with animated Things and aforementioned brain squid and giant mutated monsters and, of course, my favorite – emotionally messed up women chopping off heads with swords.

The reason I couldn’t believe I kept reading this is because there’s also quite a few quibbles that will drive you nuts if you think about them too long. It’s a first novel, and it shows, with some dropped plot threads and lazy ways to avoid conflict (MINOR SPOILER: if there’s a guy with a girlfriend who wants to get it on with another woman on the team, there are more… well, not more interesting ways, but certainly more ways rife with conflict than to simply have him inhabit another body. You’re robbing us of some tension, there).

When it comes to the women in this book, I kept jumping at things that I was ready to gnash my teeth at. The protagonist is a police detective with a thing for his subordinate (of course), whose primary distinguishing and appealing characteristic appears to be that she is blond. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Her reward for being a possible love interest is, of course, getting killed by the bad guys to make the male protagonist suffer. When this happened, I threw up my hands and snarled because honestly, no wonder she wasn’t really fleshed out – she was just there to serve as a character motivation; she wasn’t a character in her own right. Just to prove how non-important she was, the protagonist starts moving in on HIS boss soon after.

But to dwell on that particular lazy outrage would be like saying that The Windup Girl was a horrible book because it had one female character who was, in essence, a sex slave. Yes, stereotypes suck, but here’s what makes them suck less – if you really, absolutely, HAVE TO HAVE your male protagonist’s love interest die horribly to serve the plot, then you had BETTER have more female characters that JUST THAT ONE. If she’s the only one, you FAIL.

And this is why I didn’t hate this book. Or throw it across the room. Because brain squid and chopping off heads or no, if you tell me my only role in your book is to serve as a character motivation, I’m done.

NO HERO doesn’t do that.

Instead, there’s a diverse hodgepodge of female characters. Yes, I have my own issues with each of them, but they were THERE. And that’s the first step. Baby steps, people.

The protagonist’s boss – the head of a… well, not elite, but let’s say “special” team of folks dedicated to going after these inter-dimensional brain squid – is a woman (also, a love interest. But let’s hand wave that for now. I guess that was to make up for the blond? Whatever. She, at least, has purpose. OK, well, she gave up a lot of her power to the protagonist, who she felt was supposed to save them, and was suddenly relying on his opinions a lot, though even he wasn’t so sure why he was supposedly qualified for this job. Urg. See, you can’t think about it too much). Then there’s the research guru, a smack-talking goth (really, that’s how I pictured her) named Tabitha, who, OK, also ends up a little smitten with another guy on the team. ::sigh:: OK, but then there is Kayla, the chick with the sword. She chops off heads to kill brain squid, and has superfast killing abilities. OK, yes, she is motivated to protect two children she saved from brain squid, but… OK, OK, there are some issues, I admit, which is why I felt so damn guilty reading this book. Don’t get me started on the succubus.  But there are, in fact, women in this book. With opinions and abilities. And nobody gets raped! It could have been much, much worse.

And yet, for all that – I kept reading this book. Why? Because I was engaged with the protagonist and his ragtag band of fellows and the mutant brain squid more than I was annoyed by the stereotypes (in fact, these female characters were just at the cusp of being awesome. It wasn’t until I sat down and started thinking about all of their motivations and relationships that things started to truly unravel). And at the end of the day, the book fulfills the title’s promise – the protagonist is not really a hero, and (MORE SPOILERS) he doesn’t even save the day the way he’s supposed to. A child still dies, but it’s her sister who saves the day, not the protagonist. And that, right there, may have been the big redemption for me in this book. There was, indeed, at least one female character who wasn’t primarily a love interest, or motivated my maternal instict, and gained instead of gave up power.

Now, when I write up mixed-bag rants like this one, I need folks to understand – if I really hate a book, I don’t finish it. And I certainly don’t write about it. But if something bugs me about a book, I’m going to talk about it. It’s not often that I finish a book without wanting to throw it across the room at some point (Mechanique and The Cloud Roads are the only ones I’ve read recently that are pretty near perfect, and I’ll be posting about The Cloud Roads later).  What I found the most fascinating about this one is that despite my annoyance (and the obvious fact that this was NOT a book targeted at somebody like me), this really was a fun little ride, and a big change of pace from what I’d been reading.

So if you like brain squid, and chicks with swords, and lots of shit blowing up, and you totally “get” this cover – and if you can forgive some cringe-worthy moments of annoyance – this is a crunchy little popcorn book.

It’s not much of a secret to folks who follow me on Twitter that I’ve had trouble finishing a lot of books these days. After a while, they all started to sound the same. I’ve had just as much trouble with steampunk books. Most of the ones I encountered took the Victorian theme all too seriously, so were set in largely unimaginative worlds with rather dull people in them who played second fiddle to work houses and industrial revolution grime and oh! look! airships! clockwork! zombies!

Whatever.

Now, there’s stuff that does this right – Tim Akers’s work and of course, China Mieville’s come to mind – and I’d wager that’s because, to my sensibilities, they lean harder on New Weird than traditional steampunk. Also, you know: they have characters in their books. You know, those things that use the technology and inhabit the world.

So I was delighted to read Mechanique, which is a sort of mash-up between, say, The Etched City, and some bizarro Angela Carter novel you’ve never read.

Mechanique is a wonderfully weird romp that follows the career of a peculiar group of circus folk across a perpetually war-torn world (yes, you can tell already that I must have loved it). They are guided by their ringmaster, “Boss,” a woman with a macabre talent that allows her to bring back the dead and reshape and preserve their bodies with copper. This circus and its core performers are infinitely old… and infinitely screwed up.

What’s often lost in the presentation of an “idea” in a novel (like, say, “What happens when a woman gains the power to extend lives and bring back the dead”) is that the people component is missing. Good speculative fiction isn’t about ray guns. It’s about what having ray guns does to us as people. How it changes us. For better or ill.

Mechanique pulls no punches in this regard, and the way each of the performers comes to the decision to die and be remade – and continue living this way (or not) – is equal part compelling, appalling, and inspiring. Many of these people were former regular-folk-turned-soldiers, thrown into a world of death and dismemberment during the long and continued crash of empires around them. They are shaped and appalled by war, by their own crimes, by their own methods of coping in this blighted world.

One of the things I like to do on this blog is critique the gender dynamics of novels, but Mechanique does this wonderful thing where the story was so very much about unique individuals that slap-in-the-face lazy writing when it came to gender roles was either not there or just completley invisible to me. Sure, the many of the guys are strongmen, and many of the women are aerialists, but not all. Their leader is a woman, and the two most heroic figures in the novel (both women) are so fully realized that  I simply found myself hurriedly paging through the last thirty pages of nail-biting suspense to find out what was going to happen – with not a grumble of a critique about lazy writing.

And perhaps that’s really why this book was so powerful, for me. Beyond the fully realized characters and awesome world, the writing itself was crisp, evocative, and compelling – not a lazy word or careless infodump in sight.  In fact, my greatest anger while reading this book was when I looked at the spine and realized it had come out from Prime, a smaller publisher, instead of one of the larger ones. If the big publishers are passing on amazing novels like this one, the rest of us are fucked.

So go out and support the full awesome that is this novel. Pick up a copy. Preferably two.

I didn’t hate this movie as much as most people, and I suspect this is because I didn’t go into it expecting some Grand Feministe Epic. You can generally tell how seriously a movie takes it female characters by what they’re wearing throughout. One glance at all the lingerie and little-girl fetish gear in the trailers should have been your first clue.

So my expectations were pretty low from the get-go.

The first 20 minutes of this film are lovely, with a great opening scene done without dialogue that reminded me a lot of the impact of the opening scene in Antichrist (another movie that went immediately downhill after the opener. I suppose with great openings like these, a film has no choice but to get worse).

As expected, the opener addresses the sexual exploitation and abuse of women, a theme which is pretty heavy-handed to the point of ridiculous throughout.

Yes, terrible things happen to women. Thanks. Can we start the story now? Because stories shouldn’t be about the terrible things that happen to women. Stories about the terrible things tend to be fetish movies. Instead, the sort of stories we should be making are the stories about what women do when terrible things are done to them. They are the stories about the women, not the Terrible Things.

And perhaps that was some of the problem with this film.

When our protagonist is tossed into a mental asylum with a bunch of other “crazy” women for attacking her abusive stepfather (and accidently killing her sister in the process), we leave the world that is so full of promise – the perfectly setup plot pieces for her escape – and we go… somewhere else.

We leave the terrible, oppressive world of the mental asylum where the women are sexually exploited and abused and go into the free, happy-happy land that all women dream of to escape such situations –

Yes, ladies and gentleman, our heroine decides to fantasize that she’s been sold off to a brothel instead of a mental institution.

Because really, that’s the first place I would wish I was if I was looking for an escape to fantasyland.

First thing!

This is probably the deepest problem with this movie (well, that and the one coming up). We put a second layer of “reality” on top of the first that is even more horrible and exploitative than the first, but it allows the director to dress and treat his heroines as whores throughout.

Now, if you’re paying attention, you’ll note that the movie Chicago does something similar with a woman in jail fantasizing about being on stage. She fantasizes about being a star. She may show a little flesh, sure, but she’s got her freedom, fame, and most of all – power. Power over her audience. Power over her fellow performers. Power over other women who want to be here. When you’re in a position of absolute powerlessness, it’s highly unlikely that the place you’re going to retreat to is one of even further powerlessness.

In fact, I felt really cheated by this movie, because this whole whore-land completely covers up the “reality” of how our protagonist actually accomplishes getting the plot-pieces she needs to allow another girl to escape the mental asylum. The truly excellent parts of this film were turned into whores seducing men to get what they want instead of sneaky/clever ways to achieve their goals – the things they would have to do with far less makeup and far less sexy clothes on if we stayed in the mental asylum.  Remember how dowdy everyone looked during the prison scenes in Chicago? The director apparently just couldn’t live with that idea.

Sadly, this does not address the biggest failure of imagination in this film. In fact, because the third level of fantasy scenes are so wickedly awesome, this failure stood out as shockingly hilarious.

Our third level of fantasy scenes – the ones you see the most in all the trailers – happen when the protagonists are completing each part of their quest. In order to escape the asylum, they need to acquire a knife, a key, a map, and some fire.

At this point, the lazy writer in me knows exactly what happened.

The writers sat down and went, “Man, these girls are so screwed. What’s the only way they could POSSIBLY distract all the men in the mental asylum/whorehouse in order to achieve their goals. Hrmmm… hrm… well… we really need to get a draft together to present to the producers. OK, well… let’s just write in that the main character does this really distracting sexy dance. You know, she just dances sexy and it intoxicates all the men and then… the women can get what they want.”

I KID YOU NOT.

In a film with helicopters vs. dragons, steampunk Nazis, massive Ancestor statues come to life, and all manner of beautiful, intense cinematography, the only way the writers could think up for the women to get the quest items was to have them… seduce the guys in the film.

Vomit on my shoooooooooooooooooes.

I laughed out loud the first time this happened. The heroines starts doing this “fade to the lamp dance” where all you see is her sorta lamely swaying back and force in a really not-sexy way, then you fade into her eyes and get transported into the fantasy-land scenes where she’s battling big monsters for her quest items. When you jump back out, the heroines have magically appropriated said items while she was dancing.

It is the lamest hand-wave I have ever seen. And, reader, I’ve seen a LOT of them (let’s face it: I’ve also WRITTEN a lot of them!).

Just like the lame whorehouse fantasyland, I went ahead and sighed and rolled my eyes and went with the sexy dance hand-wave, because, you know, again, when you’re dressing your female protagonists this way to start, how can you expect better?

I did enjoy the third-level fantasyland scenes with the women fighting dragons and zombies to awesome remixes of cool songs. Why? Why would I enjoy this crap where half-dressed women kick some ass? Because, you know, this is all I’ve got right now. There’s no Aliens. No Sarah Conner. When the women are working together as a squad in the trenches, shooting steampunk Nazis while wearing probably the most clothes they do in the whole movie, I couldn’t help but think this was the closest I’d come to seeing my short story Wonder Maul Doll in action – a female squad working together quickly and efficiently, with that incredible group cohesion that allows small squads to take out cities. I delighted in that, because that’s all I’ve got, and sadly, it’s going to be the closest I’ll get to anybody taking whole groups of fighting women seriously for a good long while.

In fact, I held out hope for this movie long, long after J. did (he admitted to tuning out after the first 20 minutes, like most reviewers).

One of the reasons for this is because it is such a good idea, such a good story. It was like watching that trainwreck that was the last couple Star Wars prequels, where your heart breaks because it’s such a good story but so, so poorly told.

The best relationship in the story is between two sisters – whose relationship adds a lot of interest to the third-level fantasy scenes – but the most interesting one dies. And dies stupidly.

To top that off, the protagonist sacrifices herself too. Which wouldn’t be all bad except that she sacrifices herself to save one of the least interesting characters, who is nearly caught but then subsequently saved by a male bus driver. Which just about blew my mind, there at the end. WTF, really?

Of course, because we’ve spent the entire movie except the beginning and last few minutes of the end inside the mental hospital, we’re not really sure if this chick is really deserving of freedom or not. I mean, was SHE really crazy? We don’t know, because we weren’t given a chance to know her outside the fantasyland brothel (once again, yeah, the first place I ALWAYS retreat to in my personal power fantasies is a brothel, people).

What possessed these writers to keep in their placeholder “hand-wave hand-wave sexy dance” and send all the women to a brothel is just absolutely beyond me. There was plenty of opportunity to sexy-fy the women in the third-level fantasy scenes. We could have lived with dowdy mental asylum scenes that had the real characters in them, you know, the actual people we could root for and be happy they got away in the end.

As it was, all the men in the movie were sexual predators and all the women were sexually exploited. It was a black and white victim and victimizer world that that just fell absolutely flat. And it was a tragic shame, because it did have so much potential.

Tra-la, tra-la.

Gee, Kameron, why do you write the types of books you write?

Because of this. Because of movies like THIS.

I am willing to forgive Kristen Stewart the whole Twilight thing because she had such a great Joan Jett look. The problem was she just wasn’t given much at all to work with. Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie was even worse, with only slightly more to work with. And if you think the other three band members got much more than a name and a snide remark or two to substitute for “characterization” you’d be dreaming.

In between images of trash-throwing, leather-wearing, and band members making out, I wasn’t really sure what the overall point of the movie was. It opens with Currie lip synching to David Bowie in a talent contest, and I thought, hey wow cool this could be like a trippy version of Velvet Goldmine only totally reimagined for The Runaways!

In fact, it was nothing of the sort as the protagonists stumbled through random disjointed scene after random disjointed scene.

At one point, J. walked in while Kristen Stewart was slunking around and said, “Is this movie even good?”

“No,” I said, “but I keep thinking of what it could be. It’s like watching those terrible Star Wars prequels where you keep going ‘oh, that’s such a good idea! They could have done something so cool with that!’ and then being endlessly disappointed with how they failed to tell you that story.”

In fact, the movie was one big messy stew of failed potential. It’s such a wonderful story – all-girl rock band in the glam 70’s made up of these incredibly young and talented girls. It has the potential to do and say and be all sorts of things. But in the end, I wasn’t sure if it was a love story between Joan and Cherrie or a heavy-handed cautionary tale about mostly off-screen drug abuse or how rock n’ roll can kill you or save you or…? Oh hell, it wasn’t even trying to be any of those things. It was just a poorly put together montage of moments from what could have been a great story. The only decent part of the movie was the soundtrack, which of course, was their actual decent music and, later on, lots of great just-Joan-Jett music.

At the end of the day, I knew nothing more about these characters. Joan is the only one with any kind of articulated goal, which is to be a rock star, and that was nice, but it was so muffled and stuffed and padded with so much other garbage that the actual people in the story and their motivations got lost.

The sexism was heavy-handed and sloppy – sexism is less about a guy shoving his hand in your crouch and more about the other Joan in the Mad Men getting replaced by a guy as script reader, and the epically sad and resigned look that fleetingly passes across her face.  But either the director didn’t feel these actresses could do subtle or she didn’t believe her audience would understand subtle, so it’s all random make-outs and orgasms without dealing with stuff like concern over contraception or pregnancy, which you’d think would figure in more with an all-girl band (granted, most of the making out was within the band, so…?).

Regardless, there was a big opportunity missed to create real, interesting people with a real, interesting story. How I could be bored five minutes into the movie and bored right up until the end with such a great subject just baffles me.

But why did I sit through it, then, if it was so boring?

I once asked an old friend of mine why she watched “The L Word” since it was such a formulaic, poorly written little soap opera. She thought about it for a minute and said, “You know, if you’re gay, and especially if you’re a lesbian, you don’t see yourself much in pop culture. So when you find stuff that features stories about you, even when it’s bad, it’s just very comforting to watch.”

And that, in essence, was why I kept watching this stupid show. Here was this story about an all-girl rock band, a movie mostly filled with women all talking to each other, where the two central relationships are between Cherie and Joan and Cherie and her sister, and they are making money and building careers and making out with each other, and it was just so nice to see a story about women that wasn’t, you know, about shopping or finding a guy who’ll marry you.

Which made it all the more disappointing that it sucked so damn much.

I know.

The cast is great in this one, and has a fun time. A bunch of retired CIA operatives find themselves being hunted down… by the CIA.

But the problems with this one start early. It feels like one of those movies where there were just too many hands stirring the pot, so you come out of it with these great big gems of meat, but then there are these odd banana peppers and apple slices in there, and then the stove explodes.

It opens with retired operative Bruce Willis on the phone with a woman at the pension department. Apparently, he’s called her 22 times about missing pension checks. In fact, he’s just been calling to chat her up. She’s had very bad luck with men and dating. They commisserate. Over the phone, he says he’ll be in town soon, and maybe they can finally meet?

She says sure, but call her first. She is a funny, quirky sort of person, and pretty likable, so at least we see some of the appeal for these two.

Well, you know, everything goes to hell the way it does in these kinds of movies, and Bruce Willis flees from assassins who shred up his house. There are some fun fight scenes here. Willis then breaks into the pension lady’s house and kidnaps her, explaining along the way that he’s doing this for her own safety because someone is trying to kill him and she will be a target.

Um. Ok. Back up.

This is a weirdly uncomfortable turn of events for a lot of reasons. First, because it shows an utter disrespect for the female “lead” (such as she is). He doesn’t find a neutral place to contact her and speak to her. Doesn’t even properly explain himself in her house (outside of her house would have made more sense). Can he not call her from a pay phone and set up a coffee date? Nope. No explanations at all. Just bound and gagged and thrown in the car.

Ick, right? Ick because you also know she’s going to be his love interest, which means she’d be falling for her captor.

Gah.

We get quite a lot of this ick before she frees herself and is then assaulted by a police officer, at which point she realizes that Everything Bruce Willis Says is True, and then she doesn’t have to spend the rest of the movie bound and gagged, thank god. But here’s the thing – couldn’t they have done this up front? Have assassins already in her house? Did we really have to go through the stranger-I-met-over-the-phone-kidnaps-me thing?

The answer is yes, we had to go through it. Because somebody thought it was funny.

That was, perhaps, the most insulting part. That this was supposed to be a really funny turn in the movie. It wasn’t.

You know, I was watching an SNL skit yesterday that was parodying Julian Assange. And he’s wonking on and the audience is laughing along at some mediocre jokes about Mark Zuckerberg and he says something to the effect of, “If somebody made a movie about me, the joke would be trying to keep it rated R!” or something along those lines. The audience goes totally silent. The comedian looks a little surprised, but recovers and moves on to the next joke.

See, that’s the thing. Rape, and accusations of rape, are, you know, not funny. Why are they not funny? Because they are real threats to women. It’s like joking about prison rape in a prison. Not so funny when it’s an actual threat to you, let me tell you.

At any rate, things got better after she got untied and the whole band of CIA retirees gets together. Morgan Freeman and some guy whose name I forget have some OK scenes, though once again, Freeman’s intro is of him coercing a female nurse to bend over in front of him because you know, ha ha, that’s so funny!

Who wrote this?

The good news is that Mirren’s assassin character may be one of the better developed in the whole movie, which let me forgive some things. She gets an old love affair, some battle stories, and some of the better lines in the movie.

Anyway, the band plots to break into the CIA to find out who’s killing them. Willis gets a great fight scene with one of the operatives trying to kill him (played really well by Karl Urban, who’s also given quite a bit to work with from a character perspective). This isn’t the climax of the film, though. It keeps going. There are some dirty arms dealers, and then a plot to kill/kidnap the Vice President (played by that creepy guy from Nip/Tuck).

The heist bit of the movie really comes together for the kidnapping of the VP (which, you know, is so much less creepy because nobody on the team is, you know, romantically interested in him. Writers take note!). Everybody in this movie was having a fun time (especially Willis and Mirren), I just wish the script hadn’t been butchered to pieces.

There’s some more la-la stuff in here. Fixing this movie would have required clipping that whole stupid kidnapping scene and just cutting to assassins in her house, which neatly avoids about 10 minutes of ridiculous movie time, and abbreviating the arms dealer weirdness, and possibly avoiding the CIA breakin, which is like a second movie climax. Weird pacing all around. Fun, on the whole, but poorly put together from a narrative perspective.

The Warrior’s Way is a beautifully shot, silly little film that’s apparently been stuck in post-production for years. This doesn’t surprise me, as anybody who starts mixing genres is going to have some trouble with marketing. In this case, it’s a mix of martial arts movie + western, with all the silliness that that implies. In fact, there’s even more silliness than that, as our martial arts hero exiles himself to America and takes up in a town largely populated by a defunct circus troop where he takes over an old friend’s laundry business and starts teaching the local tomboy how to throw knives and cut people up.

Yes, I’m serious.

And if that description didn’t pique your interest, this is not the movie for you.

In the Far East, a super assassin, the “best swordsman in the world – ever” kills every member of a rival clan save one. He saves this child and exiles himself to the American west to a small, decripit little town that has suffered under the tyrannic rule of some random group of Bad Guys. I’m not really sure why the Bad Guys are terrorizing this town. Or why they terrorized the town once, apparently, and then just came back a few years later for the sake of the plot to terrorize it again. You know they’re bad guys mainly because they try to rape the heroine (twice) and because they kill people indiscriminately. Why do they do this? No frickin’ clue. Because the plot says they do. Handwave, handwave.

As our hero begins to rebuild his life among the circus freaks and with our tomboy heroine, he is also hunted by the members of his assassin’s guild, who are pissed off that he didn’t kill the last member of their rival clan. They believe that the only way to truly “win” the war against the clan is to kill the last member. After all, when she grows up she will just start to hunt them down, and the whole cycle will start again.

Kate Bosworth of Blue Crush fame (she will always be “that chick from Blue Crush” to me) plays our heroine, a scrappy tomboy whose family was murdered by aforementioned Bad Guys. She scarred the one who tried to rape her by throwing hot oil in his face (a touch which reminded me of the scar that Red Sonja gives the Evil Queen, after the guards rape Red Sonja. Nothing new under the sun). This incident, of course, inspires her to take up arms to seek revenge (whenever he rolls back into town? Or has he been periodically visiting and she just hides? Who knows), and now she practices throwing knives. Before our hero entered the scene, his predecessor was also teaching her how to weild a blade. So, you can see how I’d appreciate this movie, despite the ridiculous and annoying and overdone near-rape scenes.

There’s a lot to like in this movie if you’re willing to sit back, relax, and giggle along. They’re pretty clear about what kind of movie it is right from the get-go, with supertitles that tell us the assassin on the screen is now the “Best swordsman in the world – ever.” It’s a silly little romp that spends a lot of time planting flowers in the desert only to blow them up (literally and metaphorically).

The fight scenes are pretty spectacular, the blood is over the top, and it has a couple of really great lines. My favorite is when the hero finds our heroine trying to throw knives, and she’s missing her target. He turns to her and says, “It’s not your arm that shakes. It’s your heart.” Somehow, blindfolding her and taking a few good lessons with the hero cures her of this (handwave, handwave), but it wouldn’t have been nearly as good a movie if she didn’t get her revenge, too.

I appreciated that she had her own story arc. I didn’t appreciate that (spoiler, duh) she gets stuck with the kid at the end, which was pretty much the stupidest thing in the whole world based on everything that came before. What, she had a kid sister once so she knows something about kids? I guess she did make the kid a diaper when they rolled into town, so she must be the perfect person to give a kid to?

Arg.

Of course, by then most folks are dead, so there’s not a lot of other options.

At any rate, the movie stuck to its mixed genres. Plenty of martial arts action, stoic hero, *and* it’s western sensibilities – random bad guys, big shootouts, plucky heroine. This movie was about fifty million times more fun than half the crap that’s out right now, but it’s going to have a much narrower audience because, yeah, weird little movie with ridiculous plot holes. Geoffrey Rush even shows up as a filthy, drunken marksman. Weird, I know.

Depending on your taste, this might be a fun film to see after a couple of beers. Don’t expect anything profound, but if you want to see some stuff get blown up, cut up, shot up, and giggle at movie tropes (and roll your eyes at ridiculous rape-means-we’re-bad bad guys) while a red-headed heroine throws knives, this could be fun.

Also, circus freaks. Blood feuds. Ninja assassins.

Sometimes I suspect I was just delighted that they’d gotten all of these ridiculous things into one movie.