Obligatory Avatar Post

So I saw Avatar. Before I go further, a little background – I don’t go to movies much anymore. In the past 4 years, I’ve seen 2 – those being the 2 most recent Harry Potter movies (my wife is a freak about them and I find them decent). My life is very busy and I learned a few years back to cut out the fluff – the fluff being things like movies and TV. This is how I find time to read (and blog) and it’s a choice that I don’t really regret.

So, a conversation with a friend basically ended with ‘well, if you only see one movie every two or three years, Avatar is the one’. This pretty well sums up what I’ve heard and read elsewhere. So, as I was away from home and bit lonely after dinner, I decided on a whim to see it as I walked by a near-by theatre.

Avatar ended up being pretty much everything I’ve heard and read about it. The story is terribly cliché, predictable, heavy-handed, and quite hypocritical coming from Hollywood. And it’s a great movie. The setting is wonderfully imaginative, capturing the heart and mind immediately. The presentation is spectacular – I didn’t see it in 3D (I saw it on impulse and 3D wasn’t available at the time), but it still looked great. The love story was actually done pretty well (even though any deep thought on it quickly leads to it being laughably implausible). The thing is, in spite of all its weaknesses, it still makes for great cinema. So yeah, it was worth it (even not seeing it in 3D).

Hunt for Gollum

So, I took the time this morning to watch The Hunt for Gollum. For those who haven't heard, it's a fan-produced 40-min internet film that follows the hunt for Gollum just prior to the start of The Lord of the Rings. It's a low-budget, non-profit film that flirts with copyright laws.

Basically, my reaction is that it wasn't bad - especially with the budget they were working with. I'm not one of those Tolkien fans who can quote the Silmarillion and speak elvish, so I can't really comment to how accurate it was, but it seemed pretty good. I think that they may have tried to piggy-back too closely to the movies, but I'm not sure they had a choice with that. In my opinion, the weakness was the fight scenes - they tried to get around a low-budget look, but didn't quite pull it off. Oh, and the sound through my computer was pretty weak.

But, it was 40-min of decent entertainment, and I can't argue with that.

EDIT: It looks like there is more to come - this fall is Born of Hope, another story of the Rangers.

Red Eagle Dances on Robert Jordan's Grave

Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time is one of my favorite series of all time – basically, when I started reading these books nearly 15 years ago I started on the path that brought me here. Or, I wouldn’t be blogging about this and that right now if it weren’t for The Wheel of Time. I’ve gone into more detail here.

So, I’m am quite upset about the way things are developing with the potential for these books to be made into a movie – see this announcement. Now, I’m not a big fan of books to movies (as I’ve said before), but in this case it goes much deeper. Below is an excerpt from one of Jordan’s final blog entries.

I hear things now and then floating out in the air. For instance, I hear that word was floating about ComicsCon in San Diego that I am displeased with Red Eagle. Too true. Too very true. In a few more months that last contract they have with anyone on God’s green earth that so much as mentions my name will come to an end and we can see what happens after that. You see, among other things they forgot an old dictum of LBJ back when he was just a Congressman from Texas, when he famously, or infamously, said “Don’t spit in the soup. boys. We all have to eat.” Worse, Red Eagle though they could tell me they spit in the soup, or pee in it, if they wanted to and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. You can’t apologize your way out of that with me, not that they tried. There isn’t enough money in the world to buy your way out of it with me. Not that they tried that either. So they get no further help from me. Once they are completely out of the picture, we’ll see what happens.

It’s easy to tell that Jordan felt that Red Eagle Entertainment had done him wrong and after they completely screwed up the New Spring comic effort, I have to admit that I have no love for them. The problem is that the development deal I linked above involves Red Eagle Entertainment – and as you can see from the above quote, this is not what Jordan wanted. In fact, I’ll go as far to say that this deal is in objection to a dying man’s wishes. It’s not surprising that the many dedicated fans of Jordan’s didn’t react too favorably to the announcement of Red Eagle’s involvement.

Earlier this week, Dragonmount did an interview with Red Eagle Entertainment about the project. Below is an excerpt.

DM: In one of his last blog posts, Jim made a negative comment about Red Eagle Entertainment that fueled a lot of speculation about Red Eagle Entertainment and your intentions with respect to THE WHEEL OF TIME. How will you convince Jim’s fans to trust you and give their full support to Red Eagle Entertainment’s WHEEL OF TIME projects?

REE: Let us first say that nothing Jim ever said did anything to diminish our great respect for him, his creative energy, and his vision for THE WHEEL OF TIME. He has set the bar very high, and we intend to honor his memory by carefully undertaking our film and other projects so as to meet the same standards of quality that he brought to his authorship of THE WHEEL OF TIME epic.

So, when confronted with the issue, Red Eagle basically turned around and said that Jordan (Jim refers to Jordan’s given name rather than the pen name he took) didn’t offend them – they got the question completely ass backward and managed to insult Jordan yet again. And they seem to miss the fact that their very involvement is a dishonor to Jordan’s memory as expressed by Jordan himself.

I’m not going to bother to quote the comments at that interview, but people associated with Red Eagle take things even farther, further insulting Jordan and questioning the state of his mind.

So, what’s the point of this rant? First, I want to inform people and fans alike of the situation. From the tone of the rest of this post, it should be no surprise that I’ll not be seeing any movie that Red Eagle has anything to do with. Furthermore, I’ll not be touching anything that Red Eagle touches – call it a boycott of Red Eagle. I won’t go as far to call for everyone to boycott Red Eagle, but I certainly think it should be considered. And let’s all pray that that this movie deal falls apart and dies the death it deserves.

A Review Like None Other

Hal Duncan has posted a great (let's call it a) review of the new movie version of Beowulf. It's as long as one would expect from a (all-too rare) Hal Duncan blog post and as fookin' funny.

Crossing Over to the Dark Side

Mixed emotions often follow ‘big’ announcements, and my emotion is in the minority (or seems to be) for one of the latest. As anyone who is familiar with the name George R.R. Martin has surely heard by now, it has been announced that HBO has picked up the rights to film Martin’s landmark A Song of Ice and Fire series – and it seems that things are progressing rather quickly in terms of production. Translation: this sounds like it’s for real. So, what’s the reaction from Martin fans – shouts of joy, unintelligible glee, proclamations that HBO is the only place that can do it ‘right’, etc.

My reaction – irritation, some anger, and now disappointment. While there are loads of good arguments for why it’s good when a work of one media crosses over to another, I’m ignoring them all and concentrating on how I feel about this. It saddens me that what people are treating as the greatest thing to happen to this series is its cross over to visual media – it will be watered down, loose its magic, and ruin my imagined interpretations and people scream in joy. What is it saying about books and the written word when such a reaction occurs? Is this indicative of people believing that a work is ‘incomplete’ if it’s only in the written form? Has imagination been monopolized by the huge, visual media conglomerates? Could these joyous revelers survive a week, or even a day without their TVs and video games?

As most of you know, I’m a regular poster at several message boards. One – Wotmania OF, where I’ve been a member for a long time now is the perfect example of how the written word seems to be fading in significance. Over the past 5+ years that I’ve been active in some form at that board I’ve seen it regress from a place of great discussion to one where a forum originally intended for book-talk has the majority of its activity talking about TV shows. What the fuck is up with that! TV shows? Come on, even the best TV show can’t stack up against a merely mediocre book. It seems that the visual media market has made the imagination an endangered species, and is working hard towards its extinction. I know there are others who think the same – speak up. Write, talk – be more intelligent and eloquent about it than I am (or less – whatever works).

I think I'm starting to get a handle on why the internet and such scares the publishing industry so much.

Saddened has grown to real anger, so I’ll stop here. /rant

PS – These related posts talk about books that just can’t be made into movies.

Related Rants: Can’t a Book Be Just a Book?

Can’t a Book Just Be a Book?

This should be a short rant that hopefully won’t piss too many people off…that being said…

Is anyone else just a bit tired of all the cross media ‘pollination’ going on? Can a successful SFF work remain only in book form? Does it have to become a comic, graphic novel, animated series, soundtrack, or movie? Am I the only one who’s a bit tired and insulted by apparent need ruin my imagination? Simply said, no graphic comic or movie will ever exceed the images I create in my head. If I enjoy it in book form, I don’t want to see it in any other form. Now, I will admit, Peter Jackson’s LotRversion was spectacular, and I enjoyed his creation. But, the little things he did ‘wrong’ still annoy me, and now my original mental images of the series are forever polluted by his production, however well done it was.

Yes, I know that it brings more popularity and notoriety to the genre, which insures its survival and helps to guarantee there is a large number of authors out there producing quality and entertaining stuff – victory through numbers. But I for one don’t cheer with the latest announcement of a ‘new’ movie or comic.

Related Rants: Crossing Over to the Dark Side