Turn off your brain: Suspension of disbelief is fun

Tor.com (one of my favorite sf/f publishers) has a lovely ode to Red Matter (remember, from 2009's Star Trek?), that magical, science-ish thing that makes the suspension of disbelief possible, a soft lullaby to that annoying thinky part of your brain, the Jedi wave of the hand that tells your cortex, "Move along, nothing to see here." (Which is why midi-chlorians were such a fantastically awful addition to Star Wars lore. Don't explain that shit; we were already on board. Why did you have to screw it up with half-assed pseudo-science?)

Call it whatever you'd like. Phlebotinum. Kryptonite. The X-Gene. Nanotechnology. Unobtanium.

 But they left out my favorite! Wonderflonium. (Do not bounce.)

In my house, anytime we start a new show or movie with a particularly noticeable or silly phlebotinum, we shout "JUST BUY IT!" (Every episode of Fringe.) Then everything is awesome. Or, if it's a particularly believable/well-constructed phlebotinum, there's a chorus of, "Yeah, yeah! I'm buying it, I'm buying it... Oh, I just bought it." (First viewing of Inception.)

Cognitive estrangement is a wonderful thing. If you're into SF/F, it's pretty essential to be able to shut out the absurdity if you're going to enjoy yourself at all. (Plus, magic makes kids more creative.) But when things actually start making sense? -- that's when science fiction can be really satisfying. 

Which is why I was astounded by the review of the Avengers movie written by Orson Scott Card, one of my absolute favorite authors, best know for Ender's Game, coincidentally published by Tor. The Enderverse is very comfortably based in the science of our real world (until it gets to the really theoretical, "out there" (... get it?) stuff in Children of the Mind). It's just enough science to buy it, but usually just little enough to avoid bothering science-minded people. Even his fantasy tends to be based in familiar scientific theory; his newish teen fantasy Pathfinder series is about manipulating the space-time continuum. I guess that's why he's so snobby.

I've written about my love-hate relationship with Card (a Mormon narcissist, however freakin' brilliant he may be), but this review just killed me. Really? In this movie of gods, scientific accidents, superfreaks, and aliens all together in the same universe (which you also point out as ridiculous), you are seriously going to bitch about the physics of the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, a totally canon piece of the Avengers comic legacy? 

This is where movies are today. There is no earthly reason why an aerial aircraft carrier should exist. Buoyancy keeps ships afloat. But without balloons, keeping a huge heavy airship aloft takes energy. Lots of it. 

Which burns fuel at a frightening rate. And the fuel would weigh so much that the aircraft carrier in The Avengers could not possibly carry enough fuel to lift itself.

Oh, WHO CARES. We all know IT WAS AWESOME. Get over it, man.

Oh, um... also, man, I'm really excited for your book Earth Unaware, yet another Enderverse novel about the first Formic war, coming out next Tuesday, July 17th. And I'm SUPER STOKED for the Ender's Game movie, slated for release in November 2013. I think I might have actually squealed with I found out that Harrison Ford was cast as Hyrum Graff. And Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham? GUH.

Here is a periodic table of imaginary elements, available for purchase as a poster. 

Microreview [film]: I Walked with a Zombie

My favorite vintage horror movie poster

Val Lewton was in charge of the "horror unit" at RKO Studios in the early 1940s. He produced nearly a dozen genre-defining movies, saving the studio from financial collapse, launching the careers of several directors, and resurrecting (pun intended) the career of Boris Karloff in the process.

The Meat

The second low-budget horror movie Val Lewton produced for RKO, like Cat People directed by the masterful Jacques Tourneur, I Walked with a Zombie is generally regarded as the best of the Lewton horror movies. Probably this is because people like to make out that, in liking it, they display their refined, old-world tastes, since the movie is most famous these days as being a voodoo-infused adaptation of Jane Eyre. As far as who'd-a-thunk-it? movie adaptations go, it's probably less faithful than Forbidden Planet's take on The Tempest, but more faithful than The Man From Laramie is to King Lear. What I Walked with a Zombie owes in debt to Charlotte Bronte, though, is less about any famous literary romance than a pervading atmosphere of Victorian sensibilities that clashes in really engaging ways with the voodoo underpinning of the movie's Caribbean setting.

The movie itself follows Betsy, a nurse hired to care for Jessica Holland, the invalid wife of plantation owner Paul Holland. Betsy relocates to the Caribbean island of San Sebastian for the job, and soon begins questioning Jessica's medical diagnosis (spinal cord injury), fearing that the woman may actually be a "zombie," murdered and brought back to life as the meat puppet of a voodoo priest or priestess. Part of the film's appeal is that it never makes an explicit statement of "rightness" -- neither upholding the self-congratulatory scientific surety of Western medicine (because let's face it, how'd the whole practice of bloodletting work out?) and condemning voodoo as the mindless superstition of savages, nor the reverse, by pulling a "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" moment and subverting medicine in favor of magic. It suggests that things are more complicated than that, which, in reality, they surely are. The result is a lyrical and poetic meditation on the occult that remains evocative, if no longer as shocking as it probably was in 1943.

The Math

Objective Quality: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for being a spiritual forebear to later voodoo-themed horror movies like the Vincent Price English-colonial-guilt vehicle The Oblong Box and Wes Craven's still-way-creepy The Serpent and the Rainbow; +1 for beating Seth Grahame-Smith to the punch by 70 years.

Penalties: -1 because even at only 70 minutes, the pacing would have benefited from a bit of a jolt. The methodical forward momentum lessens the visceral impact you'd expect from a horror movie (and which Cat People delivers).

Cult Movie Coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention.

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

Microreview [comics]: War is Boring

The Meat

Like most Americans, I want the dream job. But there’s a problem for me: I fantasize about being a war reporter. Maybe it’s the enduring effect of watching The Killing Fields and Salvador at a very young age. Maybe it’s my lifelong fascination with war and violence. Whatever the cause, when I see Michael Ware’s jacked up nose on the TV screen I think to myself, “He’s the effing man.”

War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World’s Worst War Zones has considerably dashed my dreams. It’s not the violence, the disturbing imagery that a war reporter must bear witness to. It’s not the lies, the cynicism, and the amoral opportunism that thrives in war zones. It isn’t even the brushes with death. No, it’s exactly what the title warns: War is often boring. But, what’s worse is that returning from war, reinserting oneself in the normal world, into peacetime, is even more boring, according to David Axe, war reporter turned comic author.

First off, War is Boring isn’t reportage in comic form. Rather it’s a comic book about being a war reporter and the difficulties experienced coming back from war. 

The story is comprised of a series of vignettes tracing Axe’s experiences in East Timor, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Chad counterbalanced against his returns home to South Carolina and Detroit. Stateside, Axe experiences a deep ennui and impatience with normal life: parties, girlfriends, having a burger, going to weapons trade shows. A war junky, he’s drawn time and again back to war. It doesn’t matter which war, so long as people are shooting one another (or throwing spears in East Timor). The problem Axe finds is that war can be almost as boring as life back home. His time in the field is spent waiting for something to happen. He often  arrives too late: the war’s over, all that’s left is the scars and memories. Axe’s life seems to be one of chasing after something he only rarely finds -- and fending off the pleas of local fixers seeking a American visa.

The comparisons between War is Boring and Joe Sacco’s work is pretty much unavoidable. Axe is an accidental comic writer -- journalism is his main gig -- whereas Sacco is a comic artist doing journalism. But, both have an abiding fascination with war and conflict. War is Boring isn't as expertly crafted as Palestine or Safe Area Gorazde, but it’s a good read nonetheless. The similarities with Sacco’s oeuvre extend to Matt Bors artwork, at least at first glance. Upon closer inspection, Bors work is rather subdued in comparison to Sacco's. Bors favors clean lines and routine angles, excentuating the theme of the banality of war reporting, even of war itself.

If there’s a drawback to this book, it’s that Axe doesn’t seem to go deep enough into exploring his “war fix.” Indeed, Ted Rall’s introduction offers much more of an actual analysis of this condition. But Axe’s limited exploration of his war addiction is perhaps the point: there’s nothing much to it, it simply is the way things are for the author. The extremes of boredom in war and boredom in peace require no further explanation or elaboration. This is something that only a war correspondent would understand. 

Maybe the war fix is like jazz. I’ll probably never get it.

The Math

Objective score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for being an autobiographical comic about someone interesting

Penalties: -1 for looking a bit too much like a Joe Sacco comic

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

[Read about our non-inflated scoring system, where anything above a 5 is more good than bad, here]

Hammer History

ClarkesWorld, the Hugo Award-winning SF/F magazine, has a great essay on the history of Hammer Films summarizing how 1955's The Quartermass Experiment and Hammer's subsequent SF films influenced the genre. 

Hammer Horror is well-known for it many Frankenstein, Dracula, Mummy and "Cave Girl" films (see Nerd-Feather's microreview of The Satanic Rites of Dracula), as well as a number of other monster movies and psychological thrillers from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Hammer has had a pretty successful comeback in recent years: Let Me In (the American remake of Let the Right One In) and The Woman in Black (Daniel Radcliffe's first post-Harry Potter film) are both from Hammer. 

Microreview [film]: Black Water

Get it? Australia is down under! DERP.

The Meat

Not long ago I reviewed Andrew Traucki's minimalist Australian shark-horror flick THE REEF. I liked it, so it seemed natural to take a look at his debut movie, the minimalist Australian croc-horror flick BLACK WATER. Since it's basically the same movie, only set amongst mangrove swamp instead of the deep blue sea, with the human cast needing to swim 300m across a river rather than 8 km to land, it helped me come to some very important conclusions:

1. Sharks are scarier than crocs.
2. Sharks inspire better soundtracks than crocs do.
3. Crocs are, however, better actors.
4. Crocs make this hideous crunching sound as they eat your friends, whereas sharks spare you this indignity.
5. Your chances of survival in these two scenarios is about the same.

The Math

Objective quality: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 for using awesome croc actors instead of stupid CGI or animatronic crocs; +1 for the cap'n crunch moment

Penalties: -1 for it's like THE REEF only not as interesting

Cult film coefficient: 6/10

Guest Post: Why "Maus"?

Rob Kristoffersen is a writer for teamhellions.com and is a fellow nerdy connoisseur. He focuses on music, books, comics, and his guilty pleasure, professional wrestling. He hails from Northern New York where he lives with his wife, Beth and the cat from hell, Annabelle.

I began Maus on Father's Day in the laundry at my place of employment. I lost my father five years ago to a heart attack, and in the wake of that event I felt a great sense of guilt. I never got the chance to know my father on a personal level, and in retrospect, there are many things I can recall about him today. At the heart of Maus is the story of one man trying to understand his father, a story that as it progressed, became more important to me.

Along with Art's narrative concerning the writing of the book, is the tale of Vladek Spiegelman's time during the Nazi occupation of Poland and his struggles through history's most trying period. A narrative in this style is generally delivered by prose, for instance, such classics as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel are simple and visceral in their imagery. Maus crosses a number of boundaries, groundbreaking for its style and brutal in its spirit, introducing the imagery directly as opposed to coming straight from the reader's imagination. Since its publication, the comic has been translated into a number of languages, read the world over, and went on to win the famed Pulitzer Prize in 1992 under the Special Citations and Awards category. Its importance is unmatched, but why is it so successful? What makes Maus more widely known than Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness or Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist? And why does the comic medium work so well here?

Maus is a fusion of three unlikely influences forming two volumes of what could be considered the most groundbreaking "graphic novel" in history. The first was Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie. With Gray's work, Spiegelman emphasizes the strip's loquacious nature as opposed to its graphic prowess. Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary furnished the autobiographical subject of Maus; Green's work is about his struggle with what would later be named Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) while attending Catholic school. The third is culled from Frans Masereel's wordless, woodcut novels, like Mon Livre d'Heures. It's that graphic style that became mice, cats, pigs, fish, frogs and butterflies in Spiegelmean's world, updated to accommodate a modern style.

The presentation of the book is very economical; there is no color, there is no embellishment, it's bare bones and it's presented in a style fitting of Vladek's character. Vladek, in many ways is what you'd call a "hoarder" by today's standards, but an economical one in every sense of the word. He tries to obtain as much as he can for free, a true penny pincher created by the Hitler era. He takes paper towels from rest rooms and uses them as napkins or at the grocery store, he returns used product to get a discount on fresh produce. In circumstances like Vladek's, people are known to be as conservative as possible, for instance, with people who lived through the Great Depression. Vladek is even economical with his words, in every sense he's to the point, he doesn't elaborate, he doesn't try to feed you a deeper meaning, he just tells you how it was and in doing so creates a vessel for the reader can interpret. The success of holocaust literature is how it never tells the reader how to feel; it is human experience, stripped away, reduced to its base level before complete destruction.

Vladek's story, like every holocaust tale, is very unique; he was able to make deals to stay out of Auschwitz as long as he could. He bartered, traded items precious and valuable to him, doing so to support his wife. The Polish troops serving in the Nazi Army were very sensitive to fellow countrymen and he was able to use that sympathy to stay out of P.O.W. camps and avoid German raids. Even in the concentration camp he was able to use his skills to make his life a little better, obtaining food and privilege, taking jobs just to see his wife as well as making his time there more comfortable. Vladek redefines what it means to survive; it affects his life from there on out and the relationships he has with people, including his son.

Maus' finest achievement is how it takes an emotional subject, strips back that emotion, and presents it as a bare bones retelling of events. This again allows the reader to become as invested in the tale as they choose, as well as aiding in the style it's presented in. In a further turn, the emotional investment that is displayed in the novel comes mostly from Art; in the second chapter of the second book, he feels guilty for not having gone through the holocaust himself, feeling that his father holds that over his head as often as he can. Even from an early age (10), Vladek is doing this, referenced by the prologue at the beginning of book. It's only ten small panels, but it's one of the most powerful moments of the book.

This is a book that changed me, as it has millions of people. In a way, I feel drawn closer to my father, scrounging my memory to think of the times we shared and the events that mean so much to me. One great lesson Maus informs is the importance of visuals - to this generation and even past generations - to remember the past. Particularly its end segments, as Vladek hands Art the box of photographs. This is how we remember now and it's how I remember my father. As unusual as this story is, it has had an unusual play in my life. I'm closer to my father for it and through it I can forge a new relationship with him. More than a holocaust tale, this is a tribute to every dad that has and continues to walk the earth. Here is to them.

Best Westeros Map EVAH

The title of this post says it all.

Source: Popped Culture.