A Few More Links of Note and Bad Movies

Fabu YA blogger The Story Siren explains why she reads YA and brings the lot of us to tears.

Scalzi argues that characters who are generally put together are not necessarily Mary Sues. I found this post very interesting because of a conversation I had on Fangs, Fur, Fey a while back (nope, can’t find it, I looked) where someone more versed in the SFF world than I told me that the accusation of “Mary Sue!” is so ubiquitous that it has almost lost all meaning.

***For those who are curious, “Mary Sue” is a term used to describe idealized, often-authorial-self-insertion wish fulfillment characters, usually in fanfiction, but occasionally in original stories. For instance, fan-fiction is rife with the perfect, young (often teenaged) new ensign on the Enterprise/Student at Hogwarts/vampire slayer who shows up, is beautiful and beloved by all thecharacters — but especially all the male characters–on the show, is especially talented and perfect in every way, is above the temptations/concerns/weaknesses/faults that plague the others, saves the day and then, often, dies in the arms of the cutest guy. There are even “Mary Sue Litmus Tests” available online, which are rife with the most hilarious questions (especially if you’ve read a lot of fanfic), such as “is the character’s name a name you really like? Extra points if it’s Raven” and “Are the character’s eyes a color which is found in nature?”***

Anyway, apparently it’s gotten to the point in SFF land to call “Mary Sue” on a character who has any kind of special power (dude, isn’t that why we’re writing stories about them in the first place?) or who isn’t phenomenally screwed up, or who is liked by anyone in the book at all. Which, unfortunate. Anyway, read the piece.

Watched two movies in the last two days. Both sucked. One was Code 46, which seemed right up my alley, but ended up making no sense whatsoever. It’s the near future, and everyone needs these very specific time-sensitive documents to travel anywhere and the cities all have massive border control and everyone else lives outside the city. Oh, also, cloning and in vitro fertilization had previously been such a problem that there was a widespread “inbreeding” panic and now there’s a law called “Code 46” which says that you can’t have sex anyone who may be genetically related to you. Which I suppose means you’re supposed to get screened before you get busy. Also, there are these viruses you can take which give you special powers or limit your behavior. Oh, and if that isn’t enough, they also have supercool new technology that regrows fingers and alters memory.

Anyhoo, Tom Robbins travels from Seattle to Shanghai to investigate someone who is smuggling out these time-sensitive documents that you seriously need for every single aspect of your existence. But that’s just a MacGuffin. Really, he’s there to meet and have a whirwind affair (depsite the fact that he’s married and has a kid) with Samantha Morton, improbably playing someone named “Maria Gonzalez”, who, although she never does her (practically shaved) hair or puts on makeup or wears anything other than shapeless factory-worker clothes, is apparently the type of girl who goes in for a full on Brazilian bikini wax (yes, I know this, becuase we get to see all of her lady bits). And there are all these ENDLESS shots of her walking in slow motion through subway stations and airports, and long lingering shots on some random dude singing karaoke in a bar. The movie was 90 minutes long. Felt like 200.

***SPOILER WARNING*** (mouse over to read)

Well, with a name like Code 46, I bet you know what happens. Turns out these two are related. As a Code 46 violator (not sure how the gov’t found this out), Morton is forced to have an abortion, has her memory altered to erase Robbins, and gets this handy dandy little “virus” that makes her dread the touch of anyone she shares genetic material with (see, because they now think she’s an incestophile) and, what’s more, makes her slip into a trance and report it if she does manage to commit another Code 46 violation. Which means there’s a really weird “rape” scene in which Robbins has to strap her downa nd hold her while she alternately screams in pain and insists she loves him. (Why she loves him, I don’t know, because she’s had her memory of him erased.)Then she reports it. How she manages to report it I don’t know, becuase it was previously established that after he came and rescued her from the government, they were kind of on the run and had to go live on the “Outside” in the shanty towns where the government couldn’t get them. Indeed, at the end of the movie, Morton chooses to stay on the outside, where she won’t be punished or have her memory erased, while Robbins chooses to have his memory erased and goes back to his wife. She even says “they don’t care what happens ‘outside.'” So why do they come after them once they leave? It’s a mystery.

***End Spoiler Warning***

So that was the first movie. The other one was Rumor Has It, which I probably should have just listened to my friend Anna, who swore I’d hate it. It started out pretty good — it’s about the family that were supposedly the inspiration for the book and movie, The Graduate. And I have to say that I really believed Shireley MacLaine as the grown-up Mrs. Robinson, and I actually like Kevin Costner quite a bit as the grown up Benjamin Braddock. I even liked Richard Jenkins as the much-maligned man that “Elaine” actually marries. It was especially cool because it sort of recast the story so that the characters all had slightly different motivations than seen through the lens of the Graduate fiction,a dn they got to give their own version of events, and you could see how some of it was “true” and some wasn’t.

But the movie was baffling. I guess to make the ages work, they had to set it in the early 90s (because they didn’t want “Elaine’s” daughter to be more than 30), though aside from a few references to Clinton and dot-coms, there was literally nothing in there that was remotely 90s. The fashions weren’t, the hair and makeup wasn’t, the cars and decor and wedding clothes really weren’t! Don’t even get me started on the cell phones! And then there’s this scene where Jennifer Aniston wakes up in Kevin Costner’s bedroom and on his bedside table, he has a picture of himself with Clinton, and a picture of himself with FIDEL CASTRO. On his bedside table.

And Jennifer Aniston’s character bugged the hell out of me. Is it a requirement now that the “job” they give romantic comedy characters is “writing obituaries for a newspaper?” How many romantic comedy characters is that now? I can count three off the top of my head. And then there was the romance. I guess there was supposed to set up this pattern — “Elaine” left her husband and ran off with Kevin Costner before returning and settling down, so they had this whole thing with Jennifer Aniston doing it too (this is not a spoiler, it’s the point of the movie), but I’m sorry, if I’m cutey-patootie Mark Ruffalo, and a rich lawyer in New York, and, to top it off, very sweet and loving and supportive and ready for commitment, and my so-called fiance refuses to tell her family that we’re engaged, treats me like crap, steals my anachronistically small cell phone to run off to San Francisco and have a very public affair with a man twice her age who also slept with her mom and grandma, and then she comes crawling home with the oh-so-romantic apology of “I can live without you,” (especially after he overheard her grovelling to her lover for a far lesser offense for like ten minutes about how handsome and fabulous and what a great lay he was) — yeah. Plenty more fish in the sea, Mark. PLENTY.

Gah.

Anyone see any good movies recently?