I can’t decide which of these genres needed the other more:

“Y’know what? Fuck all y’all’s tropes.”

We finally saw Jupiter Ascending a couple of weekends ago, in the lair, rented rather than in a theatre. I wish I’d got myself out to see it large, but, well, life and all that.

It’s better than it’s given credit for. And I thought I had a long post to write about this, but I keep not writing that post, so I’m going to write a shorter one and see what happens.

Jupiter Ascending is, in large-brush-strokes, David Lynch’s Dune, but with the “Chosen One” trope excised and replaced with “Hidden Princess.” It’s a bold decision to make, because audiences aren’t used to Hidden Princess in live-action anymore, and they’re not used to it in nominally-SF movies at all.

That’s what it is, though. You’ve got all the bits. You have ultra-rare critical-to-galatic-society unique-brutal-production-method High-Protein Liquid MacGuffin. You have old-school Dune-style space-opera politics-as-secret-warfare over the usual space-opera things, with betrayals! Everywhere! You have overflowing decadence, commentaries on exploitive economics, and massive disparities of wealth and power on an intergalactic scale, and set design Lynch would’ve killed to possess. And it’s a whole family of disturbing predilections and obsessions, as in, again, Dune.

You even have Eddie Redmayne channeling Sting’s shouty Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, only with a little more of a lid on it.

But not much of one

Meanwhile, instead of Chosen One tropes and fantasies, you get a huge bundle of Hidden Princess – the lost royal child, the family of commoners who know actual love vs. the royality who doesn’t, all of it.

Plus you get the bundle of heterosexual schoolgirl fantasy stuff that tends to go along with that trope. So… you’re found by a guy who is part wolf and has a tragic backstory you can’t be bothered to explain coherently because it doesn’t really matter because it’s different for you because it’s you (of course) and he has wings and he’s utterly devoted to you and has a great ass – did Tina Belcher write this part?

That’s just one example. And sure, it’s silly, just like a lot of the Chosen One tropes – Harry “Lightning Scar” Potter, I’m looking in your direction. But we take those tropes for granted, and run with them because they’re so common, they’re shorthand, and given meaning depending up on how well they’re done or not done. We don’t even call them “silly,” half the time; we call them “mythic” if we don’t just gloss over them entirely.

And when push comes to shove, that’s what I think did in Jupiter Ascending with critics; familiarity with “Chosen One” tropes, and the expectations thereof, but a lack of current familiarity with “Hidden Princess” in anything like this context.

Many, many people complained that the story made no sense, or was confusing. It’s not. It lacks narrative discipline, sure, but the primary flow is deeply linear – pedantically so at times. It only fails to make linear sense if you either try to force it into the Chosen One paradigm against all the actual storytelling on screen, or if you ignore everything women characters do as unimportant. (Every reviewer who referred to Black Widow as “eye candy not doing anything much” in the first Avengers film, I’m looking in your directions.)

But also explains why it did eventually find an audience. A subset of the viewing audience did pick up on the Hidden Princess tropes, and once you get that, it makes all kinds of sense.

Particularly once you realise it’s Hidden Princess Dune. Then, suddenly, it’s pretty neat.

I should schedule a critical-viewing double-feature at the Lair: Lynch’s Dune and the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending. Seeing them in that close a proximity sounds neat to me, as a cinematic exercise. Maybe in the fall, once summer touring season is done.

We’ve lost another giant. Christopher Lee is dead.

He played so very many characters. I’m not sure where I encountered him first, just chronologically, and recognised him as who he was – Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man? Zantor, on Space: 1999? Professor Stone on The Avengers? I’ve no idea. He’s just been such a fixture for so long – sometimes goofy, sometimes brilliant, but always a force.

Dammit.

What’s your favourite Christopher Lee role? I’m going to skip the easy answer and say Lord Haggard, The Last Unicorn. It’s a fantastic voice performance, and his use of voice was one of his best talents. What about you?

Also, after the movie, walking out, I was making “it’s FuriOsa, not FurioSAR” jokes and wondering why I hadn’t seen that yet on Tumblr. Minion Paul was like OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO DO IT. But:

It was already on Tumblr. I just hadn’t seen it yet. I had to search it out! Weird. Normally that kind of dumb joke flashes across my dash the very first day. XD

We went out to see Mad Max: Fury Road over the weekend. It’s really quite good, and spectacularly choreographed. But while I had a fun time, I wasn’t as over-the-moon about it as a lot of people have been, despite the whole ‘hey look, I’m not being treated with contempt!’ factor. Perhaps my expectations were set a little too high by the time I got there. I certainly agree that it is the most metal movie ever made – that’s not even really debatable. It’s just a fact. And that aspect of it, I loved.

Facts.

The single biggest thing I walked away with, though, was that the realisation that its philosophical assumption that women shouldn’t be sex slaves is what really caused the the misogynist/”manosphere”/return-of-kings crowd to explode. And I’m serious about that. I mean, if you read the most forwarded-around rant, they don’t even mention all the women being used as slaves. That’s apparently okay. They’re okay with the Mother’s Milk women, being harvested very much like cows. That’s fine too. That’s all suitably manly, it seems.

But the idea that a woman character should fall outside that category, and be a driving character? Unacceptable. That’s what constitutes “a feminist piece of propaganda posing as a guy flick.” That’s is what’s “ruining women for men” – being a woman while not being property and/or a sex-slave. Underneath that, the implicit declaration that you aren’t a man if you aren’t subjugating and raping women.

Pretty fuckin’ creepy, bro.

I mean, the degree of raw hatred for women that’s in all this sort of thing ought to be obvious. But a lot of people still gloss it over, and they shouldn’t, because it’s not just these jokers. They’re the Westboro Baptist Church we’re-not-like-them-we’re-okay misogyny, the version that’s easy to laugh at. They’re the sideshow clowns.

But versions of it show up other places, too, like in questions about why there are so many women are in a ‘man’s movie’ at places like Cannes. I mean, seriously, the reporter’s question boils down to, “Ick, women, why?” with the “Ick, women who aren’t sex toys for men, why?” kind of implied. (That specific codicil is somehow always okay – even when it’s Disney comedies with writers going around ranking underage actresses by “fuckability.” Ew.)

Thankfully, in this case, Tom Hardy treated the question with the kind of casual contempt it deserved. But that’s an anomaly. The idea was still sitting out there – “ick, women I don’t get to fuck, why?” Why should they even exist?

Which is the same hate – or at least, a contempt close enough to make no difference. It’s just socially modulated. Less explicit. Every so slightly less crude.

But still pretty fuckin’ creepy, bro. Even though you generally get to skate on it. Pretty. Fuckin’. Creepy.

Skellington – one of my fiddlers from Bone Walker – was performing with her band, Pinniped, at Folklife and saw someone watercolour-painting her band at the show.

That artist turned out to be Ellen Eades, who was hammer dulcimer on the same project. They never met in studio, recording their tracks at completely different times, and Skellington only figured it out later, when she went searching for more of Ellen’s art online.

#150 player characters #millions of NPCs

I’ve been thinking a little about Anna’s post about Black Widow in Avengers: Age of Ultron and about Black Widow as “love interest” and the “monster” comment and Disney/Marvel’s rather hideous sexism in merchandising and trying to separate out all those bits and pieces into a coherent thought.

And I’ve got various things to say about various parts, but I think want to talk about this one tweet. It gets spoilery below here, so consider yourself warned now.
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Wow, that’s unexpected: I’m in a movie trailer! The film – a documentary – is called GTFO, and it’s about sexism and misogyny in video game culture, something I’ve written about a lot.

I’m not in it for long; it’s only a couple of seconds of footage, shot at PAX in Seattle in… 2013, I think. But it’s specifically of me. I remember the game I was playing at the time, even if I’m not sure of the year; I don’t remember the camera crew.

Anyway, here’s an article in The New York Times about the documentary. Here’s a review. I wonder how it did at SXSW?

Hat tip to Randy Mac Kay for pointing it out to me. Funny thing is, at first mention, I thought it was from a different movie, one that I do know I’m in. This film? I had no idea. SURPRISE!

Roses and Ruin is a Leannan Sidhe album project. It’s akin to Cracksman Betty in that it’s single-day efforts, with only light production.

Unlike Cracksman Betty, it wasn’t ever wrapped up. And Leannan Sidhe is coming over today to record the first new track for the project since… I don’t even know. Quite a while!

It should be fun. It’s my first recording session in, like, five months. How the hell did that happen? Oh, right, releasing a major album, that’s right. It’s apparently time to get back on that pony.

Which… okay, long-time fans might just remember a song I’ve performed about four times ever called “Getting Away with It.” It’s this massive sprawling monster, probably a bit self-indulgent, crazily complex, all that. It was supposed to be on Dick Tracy Must Die, but I couldn’t get it to work like I knew it should.

Eventually I pretty much gave up on it, and it sat, half-forgotten, in the back of my lyrics books, my personal Don Quixote.

Then somebody asked me to play it after reading the lyrics at a Leannan Sidhe rehearsal. I had to struggle to remember how it even went, and I got the rhythm totally wrong in the verses, or did I, because in getting it so wrong, I think I see how I can get it to work.

I’m just glad I don’t have to work with Charlton Heston to find out.

Anyway, best get this posted. No rest for the wicked, after all. MINIONS! SET UP THE MICS!

Oh no, you fuckers do not get to make me care about Star Wars again. You have no right.

But I am going to say a thing nonetheless, about storytelling with cinematography.

J.J. Abrams was always the wrong choice for Star Trek. Always. He never got it, and really, said so, in that infamous Daily Show clip everyone’s seen, and that failure to get it reverberated throughout his choices.

But I hoped, just hoped, that he might be a good choice for Star Wars. And that opening trailer shot says a lot about him getting it. At least some of it.

See, the first, opening shot in the original Star Wars? The Star Destroyer sequence? That’s about scale. It’s about setting a very, very large scope, without ever saying HAY LOOK HOW HUGE THIS IS. It’s about dropping you in there and just letting it happen… in a way you don’t expect. There’s that little misdirection with the kind of a little ship that was in SF films before Star Wars… and then things change, and you know the scales have moved.

And that’s exactly what this trailer does. Right out the gate. A little landspeeder going across a desert; a little ship, crashed, like you’ve seen before…

…and then things change, and the scales are moved. It does so more successfully than either of the prequel films I saw managed at any point. The prequels mostly just looked busy and overly-concerned with minutia and, as a result, kind of… small.

There is more sense of largeness in this one shot opening the trailer than both of the prequel films I saw managed to achieve, combined.

And unlike with Star Trek‘s early promotional shots, this isn’t about just duplicating previous material effectively. Those looked good too – but they were duplications, re-creations. The same shots, staged with new actors.

This isn’t that. This isn’t just repeating but bigger. This is showing how to parallel, without duplicating.

You can’t take very much from a teaser-trailer. People have noted that Phantom Menace‘s teaser trailers looked pretty good too. But for J.J. Abrams to get this right, so very effectively… maybe there’s hope it won’t be the only thing he gets right.