Category Archives: books

John Carter

John Carter isn’t nearly as terrible as everyone made it sound. I was pretty disappointed about that.

There might be spoilers in this review/coping mechanism to get me through the movie. You’ll only feel that they spoil the movie if a) you ever plan to see it and b) you’ve never seen a movie and c) you enjoy unexpected and fairly pointless scenes of alien baby-creatures covered in viscous mucous but prefer being pleasantly surprised by their inclusion in the movie.

If you were going to choose answer “c” I guess I already ruined it for you, so you might as well keep reading.

The movie just suffers from lack of a clear audience and characters you don’t care much about because of their flat affectation. But not that Wes Anderson-esque lack of affectation that’s minty-hipster-fresh, just…a dullness that suggests they’re all depressed to have to be in this movie but had no choice because their agents are doing a significant amount of gambling in riverboat casinos and can stop at any time, but so far, have chosen not to.

When I wrote the 1st draft, I had no idea that Wes Anderson is the great-grandson of John Carter’s creator. I read it on wikipedia so it must be true.

A Civil War vet named John Carter dies, leaving his nephew a journal that details the weekend he spent drinking slivovitz, a 100 proof damson plum brandy that he probably shouldn’t have been alternating with absinthe. In his defense, he just needed to take the edge off all that opium.

None of that is true, except the nephew and the journal, but it’s a slightly better movie if you believe that.

Carter kills an alien dude in a cave. The dude looks humanoid for whatever reason. Then we’re on Mars.

The lack of a clear intended audience leads to confusingly conflicting elements. John Carter has a gleeful and wacky leaping session in the weak gravity, and that scene really ought to be accompanied by a nose harp soundtrack and a couple of juvenile jokes, perhaps about nose-picking or how girls are icky or whatever else entertains 8 year olds. Then there’s a scene of a teenage girl being branded for misbehaving. A green, alien, teenage daughter, so it’s okay, I guess, but rationalizing the violence as being against a non-human Other doesn’t make it less incongruous when juxtaposed with the low-G frolicking.

When one of my ex-coworkers was a child, her family lived next door to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Storytime after tea was pretty cool. But not William S. Burroughs, because that would not be cool if you were a little girl.

I had some Gungan jokes about the aliens, but this movie wasn’t nerdtastic enough to deserve them. Even Michael Chabon as screenwriter wasn’t enough to salvage this thing from a vista of mediocrity so far and wide that, if you stare at it too hard, you’ll feel like you’re looking out a plane window while flying across west Texas. How did this happen?

The main problem with this movie is that it’s not bad enough to be funny, not good enough to be Bad. What it needs is Liam Neesen. We all know how well that turns out.

Grimmer than Grimm

Conference going (and organizing) and such haven’t slowed down my movie-watching much but they’ve slowed down my blogging. While I get caught up, and while my Grimm post is still hanging around on the front page, I thought I’d bring two related items to your attention.

First up, Neely Tucker has an intriguing review of The Annotated Brothers Grimm, which is edited by Harvard scholar Maria Tatar:

Once upon a time, fairy tales were not as nice as they are now.

Mother and Daddy dear — not an evil stepmom — take Hansel and Gretel out in the woods and leave them to starve. Little Red Riding Hood does a striptease for the Big Bad Wolf. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to force the mangled stumps into the glass slipper.

Ah, childhood. Ah, the Brothers Grimm.

It has been 200 years since the German siblings and folklorists published their landmark first volume of “Children’s Stories and Household Tales,” and it becomes clear in scholar Maria Tatar’s “The Annotated Brothers Grimm,” published this week for the bicentennial, that the modern tellings of fairy tales have gone soft.

[read the rest of the review at WashingtonPost.com]

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, the fantastic Mutter Museum has a new exhibit, “Grimms’ Anatomy: Magic and Medicine: 1812-2012”.

Which reminds me that I never got around to seeing Terry Gilliam’s The Brother’s Grimm. I put it in the Netflix queue. I think it has witches and wolves in it, so that should put things back on track here….

Like a Lovecraftian heroine, I find myself coated in slime


[embedded video: coughs & sneezes]

I can’t recall ever being sneezed on. Not by another human being, anyway. Horses, dogs and cats? Yes. Another person? No.

Not until Friday night. I was minding my own business, sitting in the front row of a packed concert hall, listening to Neil Gaiman speak at George Mason University’s Fall for the Book Festival, when the gentleman seated behind me suddenly blasted the back of my head with a great honking snootful of mucous.

These things happen. Sure. Yes. Absolutely. No malicious intent. Just a sneeze.

His wife made a half-hearted attempt to discretely wipe some of the snot from my hair. Or maybe she was just trying to rub it in, thinking I wouldn’t notice. I’m not entirely certain, as I was trying to ignore them and pay attention to the person speaking at the podium a few feet in front of me.

Here is a dramatic re-enactment of the aftermath of this event, as I now remember it.


[embedded video: ghostbusters]

Then it happened again on Sunday night while Michael Chabon was talking.

Then it happened again while I was listening to David Byrne and Dave Lowery speak at a Smithsonian event Monday night.

Oddly, this doesn’t outrages because of the yuck factor or the amount of time I’ve spent washing my hair this weekend. Accidents happen. This annoys me because I’m once again on a very high dose of a very unpleasant drug designed to cut my immune system off at the knees and at each of the 3 public events I chose as calculated risks there was a single solitary sneezing guy – and each time, that guy was seated right behind me? How is that possible? What are the odds?

I guess it would be weirder if it had been the same guy each time.

I’ve upended my life to minimize the amount of interaction I have with germyness for the next few weeks. I’ve stocked up on hand sanitizer. I’ve rearranged my life to avoid Metro and small children and teeming crowds as much as humanly possible. And yet? Old dudes with weaponized nasal passages seem to be homing in on me like Jack Ryan after the Red October.

To be fair, avoiding Metro and small children and teeming crowds is pretty much my avocation, but I’m too tired to work up a funny line of persecution and inconvenience and indignation, so let’s just pretend that in the day-to-day, my favorite activity is taking small children to big events via Metro, where we lick the handrails and seatbacks to pass the time along the way.

I’m lacking a punchline today. Here, have a sneezy baby panda, instead:


[embedded video: sneezing panda]

update: comments are being harshly moderated to eliminate any links to sneeze fetish sites because, although my moderation criteria is pretty liberal, some of the stuff that’s been left in the comments crosses some serious lines. Also: yuck.

Studies in Crap: Unicorn Vengeance

We’ve been spending way too much time here at my house reading Studies in Crap. The site first caught my attention when a link to “Does the Harlequin Romance Unicorn Vengeance boast the worst sentence ever published in English? Mayhap!” popped up on a list-serv.

So what is Studies in Crap? It’s a feature on the website of Kansas City magazine, Pitch.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Back to their expert dissection of Unicorn Vengeance:

That first sex scene ends abruptly in the middle of a handjob:

    “Nay! Not so soon! Wolfram felt his seed spill across his stomach in a warm, tingling rush, even as he heard himself moan.”

This is historically accurate, at least according to what a lady friend tells me about her summer working at Medieval Times. It also fulfills the narrative obligation of letting the maiden maintain her maidenhood until the book’s climax.

Studies in Crap dissects a variety of fine sources, from Texas history textbooks from the 1930s to Evangelical marital advice manuals.

Poor some coffee and say good-bye to the rest of your day.