The Death of Cinema?

Though it's still a couple of weeks from being released, I want to talk about Steven Soderbergh's Bubble. The plot involves puzzling out a murder, but the mystery element isn't really what interests me. It's Soderbergh's ballyhooed move to release it simultaneously to theaters, DVD, and high-definition cable TV.

I love this quote from Soderbergh: "The theater experience isn't always pleasant. Theater owners need to address that. There are often problems with projection; tickets and concessions are expensive; theaters aren't always clean; people talk during the movie. They're making it easy for people to stay home."

Because I love the huge screen so much, I've figured out a workaround to ticket prices and noisy audiences: matinees. By sneaking in a movie right after work I'm able to pay less and I usually get the theater to myself. That doesn't help with the concession prices and cleanliness issues though. Soderbergh didn't mention all the annoying ads, but those are out of control too. He's right; theater owners have some work to do and I'm glad to see him take up the cause of trying to get them to do it. They're the only game in town for new releases and they won't feel the need to make moviegoing a positive experience until they have some real competition.

Not that Bubble is going to change anything. It's a first step in the right direction, but as an independent film with an unknown cast, I don't imagine it'll have much impact. It won't be the big metroplexes that'll feel any sting on this one; it'll be the smaller arthouse theaters (whose audiences are generally more polite and who don't have all the obnoxious ads). A couple of metroplexes may have shown Bubble on one screen, but wouldn't it be interesting if they decided to push back and not show it at all, essentially turning it into a direct-to-DVD release? Not a big splash for Soderbergh's statement.

Now if it was Ocean's 13...

Frozen

I guess supernatural crime thrillers are more prevalent than I realized. It's probably Mulder and Scully's fault.

Shortly after learning about the Preston/Child novels, I heard about Jay Bonansinga's Frozen. It reportedly starts off as a serial killer story, but turns strange when the FBI profiler assigned to the case has to take some time off from it for health reasons and goes to Alaska for a quieter assignment. The assignment is to profile the body -- frozen in ice -- of a 6000 year old murder victim; what's odd is that the frozen corpse is posed in exactly the same position as the victims of the serial killer in the first case. Other than that there are some twists and surprises, I don't know more than that, but the imagination runs wild with that set-up.

Frankly

My favorite horror novel is Frankenstein. It all goes back to the Monster and his longing for acceptance in spite of his physical appearance. Growing up, I wasn't really that awkward-looking a kid, but I felt awkward for some reason and didn't have a lot of friends. So I sorta relate to the poor monster.

He has this one line that's haunted me since I read it. I might be paraphrasing, but it goes something like, "I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other." I remember feeling that way as a kid. It's a good thing I wasn't a hulking monster with supernatural strength.

Anyway, thanks to my long-standing affection for the guy, I usually check out whatever new material is being made about him. I bought Marvel's series about Elsa Bloodstone (even though it was an obvious Buffy rip-off) because it had Frank in it, and Frankenstein was the part of Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers project that had me most excited to read. I taped Dean Koontz's Frankenstein when it was on TV, but read enough horrible reviews of it that I never watched it, much less bought the tie-in novels.

Now though, I've learned that the novels came about because Koontz was dissatisfied with how the TV show turned out. I'm not sure why he's not writing them himself, but I've never read a Koontz book, so that's not a loss for me. Kevin J. Anderson (author of the first in the book trilogy) doesn't excite me much, but making the idea of the Monster being the good guy to Doc Frankenstein's villain into a police procedural/serial killer story does. More of that genre-crossing stuff that I like so much.

The Relic

The Relic was not a good horror movie. I only saw it because it was set in Chicago's Museum of Natural History and I've been there enough times to have found it a nifty setting for a film. The plot was too Alien-derivative for me though, so I've never given it a second thought.

Until recently, that is, when someone recommended to me the book series by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child that starts with The Relic. They're apparently mystery/thrillers with a supernatural bend to them and that's exactly the kind of thing I'd enjoy. Knowing how a great book like The Keep can become a crappy movie (even in the capable hands of Michael Mann), I'm inclined to give the Preston/Child series a try. (Then, while I'm thinking about it, I need to go back and read F. Paul Wilson's follow-up novels to The Keep.)

Nice and Cheesy, or "Let's Try This Again"

Last week, I toyed around with the idea of renaming this blog. Fact is, I like it a lot more now that I've started talking about general influences for my work in addition to making excuses for not actually doing any of it. I like it so much, in fact, that just calling it Michael May is boring and a disservice.

The first name I came up with tried to be clever and ended up being girly. It lasted less than a day. So, I've given up clever and gone for stupid, but fun. The Son of Michael May is born. See, it's sort of a sequel to the old Michael May -- an heir, if you will -- and it also hearkens back to cheesy horror movies of yore. Whatever. That's the name now and at least it has the benefit of being masculine.

Speaking of cheesy horror movies, I wasn't planning on buying the Bubba Ho-Tep DVD (even though it's a great film), but the news that the Limited Collectors' Edition contains a commentary track by Bruce Campbell in character as Elvis makes it too good to pass up.

The Genre Trap and J-Horror

You know by now that genre conventions is one of my favorite topics. I bring it up a lot because while my own writing tries to mix genres and ignore conventions, it's still too easy to fall into the trap of writing the same cliché story that everyone's read a zillion times already. In my pirate novel, I want to include certain settings that evoke "pirate" for me: uninhabited islands, lively and music-filled taverns down by the wharf, huge galleons, Spanish forts, etc. What I don't want to do is write another story about recovering buried treasure or taking revenge. There's a map, but hopefully I'm using it a little differently than most pirate stories.

In searching for a new path to take this story (or any story really), it's important to constantly remind myself where the traps are so that I learn to avoid them. I'm hoping it becomes second-nature eventually, but I'm still new at this, so whenever I see an article that brings it up, I'm likely to reference it here.

Like this article on J-Horror for example. Nicholas Rucka of Midnight Eye (a website about Japanese Cinema) does an excellent job of explaining how J-Horror has become a cannibal eating its own flesh:

"Ah, yes, 'J-Horror;' everyone knows its tropes by now: vengeful ghosts, long stringy black hair, impossible physical gymnastics, meowing little ghost boys, cursed videos (or cell phones or computers), old rotted buildings and corpses, moldy books and newspapers, elliptical storylines (or a total abandonment of logic), creepy sound design, and creepy cinematography. Then there're the bizarrely happy endings and, lest we forget, the saccharine pop songs.

"...this piece is me drawing a line in the sand and demanding that the producers allow - or FORCE - their filmmakers to work in a creative manner and put an end to the obsessive sequel-making and regurgitation of the shinrei-mono eiga ('ghost film') that is dragging down Japanese film (and Hollywood horror for that matter)."

In presenting his points, Rucka also goes into a detailed history of horror in Japanese media (literature, art, and manga as well as film). Even though he inexplicably ignores Godzilla and the other giant-monster movies, it's well worth a read if you're interested in such things.

Other than being completely freaked out by the American version of The Ring and frustrated by the American version of The Grudge, I'm unacquainted with Japanese horror. No, wait-- I saw The Eye. It was a good mystery, but unsatisfying horror (not sure if I'll check out the Renée Zellweger remake). I saw The Ring first, so maybe my lack of enthusiasm for the other two are indicative of what Rucka is talking about.

Don't Be In Such a Hurry

I've let my comics spending get out of control. I don't have the patience to adopt the "wait for the trade" mentality, so when I see a new comic series that looks interesting, I just pick it up and add it to my pull list. That's got to stop. I just can't afford it anymore. My DVD habit is suffering and I'd also like to be more daring with my CD purchases.

So... I went through my list of comics I was going to buy in January and pruned it down to the point where I figured I'd be spending an average of about $30 a week on new comics. That means that I'll have to wait for the trade on a lot of stuff I've been enjoying. And most of it is genre stuff.

I'm still a superhero kid when it comes to comics. I love the stuff in other genres, but if I had to only buy one comic a month, you can bet it would be by Marvel and DC and would feature someone in a costume beating up a bad guy in another costume. Which explains why this week's shopping list of genre comics I'll be buying is so meager.

Next week I might try to list all the genre comics that are coming out regardless of whether or not I'm planning on buying them. That would be a much more useful list anyway.

But for now, here's what I'm getting:

Horror
Interiorae #1
Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein #2

Science Fiction
Y: The Last Man #41

The solicitation for Interiorae (published by Fantagraphics as part of their "Ignatz" line) makes it sound part-horror, part-mystery, maybe part-slice-of-life. Whatever it is, it sounds interesting. "A high-rise apartment building in an unnamed European city. Its inhabitants come and go, meet each other, talk, dream, regret, hope…in short, live. A ghostly, shape-shifting anthropomorphic white rabbit roams from apartment to apartment, surveying and keeping track of all this humanity… and at the end of every night, he floats down to the basement where he delivers his report to the 'great dark one.'"

Gotcha where I wantcha. Now I'm gonna eatcha!

The Mexploitation horror blog is asking an interesting question: "What made you get into horror?" I don't remember a defining moment in my life; a couple of things combined to do the trick. One was an early exposure to classic horror films. I remember seeing the original King Kong on a big screen at my elementary school and Son of Frankenstein at our local children's museum. Occasionally a local TV station would run Creature from the Black Lagoon or another Universal monster film.

Even before those experiences though, was a love of scary stories. I loved collections of ghost stories and I loved those stories kids tell each other about babysitters in the house alone.

Alvin Schwartz has combined those two loves in a set of books called Scary Stories that collects spooky urban legends and folklore with disturbing illustrations by Stephen Gammell. I think it's cool that it's marketed under Children's Books. That and my Mexploitation-inspired recollections reminds me that a fascination with horror and being scared starts very young. As a parent and someone who's trying to write a kid-appropriate horror comic, that's good to remember.

Quit Stealin' Our Wimmins, Ya Bug-Eyed FREAKS!

The Website at the End of the Universe has a cool pulp sci-fi calendar you can download and print out for free. The theme is "women in peril" and features pulp covers as well as birthdays of important sci-fi peoples (today is Tolkien's, by the way).

Download it here.

Nano Lessons

Science fiction author Crawford Kilian has a pretty good writing blog. Recently he talked about genre conventions and what to do with them. He's specifically talking about a novel he's working on and comparing it to John Robert Marlow's Nano (which I haven't read and can't comment on), but he has some good things to say about genre conventions in general and what a writer's responsibility to them is:

"Anyone writing in... a genre must walk a fine line between plagiarism and parody. If you love your genre's conventions too much, you just imitate your favourite writers and wonder why you can't get published. If you see those conventions as preposterous, you can laugh at them, but then you spoil the fun for your readers (as Cervantes spoiled the fun for all the folks who loved reading chivalric romances).

"The trick is to recognize why these particular conventions appeal to readers, and then to push the conventions to reveal something implicit in them that other writers haven't understood."

That's great advice and reminds me of a quote I once read (can't remember where now, Stephen Grant maybe?) that said that most writers don't really want to write, they just want to stick their names on something that they think is cool. I'm guilty of that. It's the reason I want to write a jungle adventure story. I don't have anything particularly new or interesting to say about jungle adventures (yet), it's just that I like them and want my name on one. Fortunately, I want the one with my name on it to be really really good and that's where Kilian's advice comes in handy.

While criticizing Marlow, Kilian also sneaks in some very sound advice about the difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay:

"One of the problems in Marlow's book is that it's clearly written to be a movie full of big dumb special effects, so right there it runs into genre problems: as a genre, film SF is simply different from print SF. They have different priorities and appeal to different parts of our minds. That's why War of the Worlds is so good as a novel and so awful as a movie. Michael Crichton's laughable Prey is another example of a novel designed to be something else.

"And here is a fatal problem: Print SF tries to get us to think about scientific ideas that the author has dramatized for us so that we can grasp them better. An idea like nanotech is an important one, and deserves careful thought. If it's going to be used simply as a pretext for blowing up San Francisco, the message is that watching stuff blow up is far more important and interesting than understanding nanotech. All the mini-lectures on nanotech are just padding, and of course they'd end up cut from the screenplay."

This is something else I need to hear. I tend to think cinematically when I write. I think it's a strength that helps me keep my pace brisk and my descriptions succinct, but I don't want it to become a liability by forgetting that there are things that prose does that film can't. (I like to think though that I don't have a problem with sacrificing story for mindless action, so in that sense, Kilian's preaching to the choir.)

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