Gobblin.net

1) The plot is threadbare.

By no means does a movie need a complex plot to succeed. Just last week I saw and enjoyed immensely the Japanese film Still Walking, the plot of which involved a family hanging out on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. 9’s plot is at once completely arbitrary and urgent, a lame combination in most circumstances, but especially here, given the high-concept setting.

2) The characters are brilliantly designed.

Shane Acker and team do an amazing job giving the numbered sack people designs that are both diverse and rich in character. There are wonderful details, such as first model 1’s lower-tech shutter eyes making him squinty, or 6’s dirty fingertips, or the little vestigial wings on 3 and 4. It’s a shame these visuals aren’t enough to make up for the fact that…
3) In all other ways characters are poorly-stitched.
Of the nine characters in 9, 4 have quirks, 4 are one-note and flat, and only one (1, appropriately enough), has any meaningful growth over the course of 80 minutes. There are a few great little moments, such as with 8 playing with his magnet, or the cute report of 3 and 4, but overall, these characters are woefully underdeveloped, which is a shame because the movie ultimately hinges on us caring about a world in which this is all that’s left of life.

4) The machines are wonderfully macabre.
The machine monsters, that combine mechanical parts with bits of bone and cloth and plaster, are super spooky as stills, and even scarier in motion. I especially liked the cobra-stitch creature.
5) The action scenes shine!
The action in 9 is as exciting as anything put forward in the summer blockbusters. The scenes are incredibly well choreographed, which is critical considering how bizarre the mechanical foes involved are.
6) The voices are unremarkable.
Christopher Plumber, who voices 1, is always a joy to listen to; he alone elevates his character through performance. The other voices are very perfunctory. Not that it’s the actors’ faults – they just don’t have any great material to work with. Elijah Wood’s 9 is the most problematic for me, as the performance is very generic and kiddy and doesn’t quite gel with the overall look and feel of the film.
7) The more serious sci-fi bits are confusing/frustrating.
Okay, this is spoiler territory, so skip this is you want to see the movie before discussing its themes. The nine sack-people of 9 are brought to life by bits of their creator’s soul. Early in the film, 2 comments on how sophisticated 9’s design is, suggesting that the sack people are getting more sophisticated with each iteration. The actual designs and personalities, however, don’t suggest any progression, but are rather manifestations of different parts of the personality (reason, ingenuity, curiousity x2, caution, intuition, bravery, brawn, compassion?). Perhaps 9 is supposed to be the culmination of a line in that he is a fully “human” soul, whereas the first eight are just fragments, which is why creating 9 kills the scientist. I’m sure there was some serious thought put into what these little guys represent, but how it’s conveyed is messy at best. Also, if the machine is evil because it is intellect without a soul, than why doesn’t it start to develop a conscience as it steals 5 pieces of soul? If I was writing this scenario, that’s something I’d want to explore. Finally, much of the film’s finale hinges on 9 discovering how to use the device that sucks out souls. He uses it to undo the damage he did by giving soul-sucking power to the machine, but it’s emphasized that the scientist wanted to impart the knowledge of how to remove souls to 9. What’s the implication here? Is it just really lazy writing so that 9 can undo the arbitrary disaster he sets in motion, or was he intended to release the souls of his comrades to unleash “green soul energy” back into the world to make it rain and bring back life? (Yeah, this makes no more sense in the movie…)
8 ) When will mankind learn that you should never make artificially-intelligent weapons of mass destruction?!
Seriously!
9) There are no talking animals!
With every animation studio out there churning out largely generic talking animal cartoons , it’s a nice change of pace to have studio support for an independent animated genre flick. 9’s not going to break any records, but the 16 million that it earned so far is pretty impressive for a movie that is ultimately very niche and nerdy. Even though I didn’t really like 9, I do admire it, and I’m glad I saw it.

In today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting article on e-reading consumers resistance to books priced above the $9.99 standard price point that Amazon has established. What surpised me is that in the case of new releases otherwise only in hardcover, Amazon is paying the same $13 price to publishers and is selling at a lost to encourage people to pick up readers. The idea of a $9.99 e-book, at least for new releaes, is NOT something publishers seem keen on:

“The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “What a consumer is buying is the content, not necessarily the format.”

As a Kindle 2 owner, I confess that I balk a little when I see books priced above $9.99. Even that price seems high at times, as when buying a 150 page YA book that retails for half the cost of a standard hardcover. As a writer, however, the arguments against cheap e-books are all too compelling. After all, only 12.5% of a book’s cost goes into manufacturing the physical goods and distributing it. The rest goes into paying the writer, editors, marketing staff and the general overhead for keeping the publishing engine running. 

Certainly much of that engine can run more efficiently in a digital age, whether its writers handling much of their own PR, or reforming the wasteful system of returns that sends countless books to landfills or shifts them between warehouses.

But putting aside the actual costs of producing a book, there is still the intangible concept of “value” that publishers can’t control. A book placed on a shelf is a form of self-expression; an e-book on a kindle is private. A book can be gifted, shared or sold; an e-book is a one-time license. Even if 99% of books are only read once (if that) by the original purchaser (I’m pulling that number out of my ass, but who knows, maybe i’ts close to accurate), that perception of value is hard to let go of.

This concept of persistant value isn’t just a monetary thing, either. A physical book will generally stay in print for as long as it is viable to keep up the costs of manufacturing and destributing to demand. When books lose their audience and fall out of print, they become scarce. Old books, even if demand is low, become “rare.” Each object has its own history. There’s no reason for rare e-books to exist. There’s no reason for e-books to go out of print! In this reality, every book has equal permanance. At the same time, the quality bar for what constitutes a thing worth of permanence is thrown out the window. This is a good thing! It is wonderful that forgotten authors can be rediscovered, reanalyzed and even remixed (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone?) 

A year or two from now, I’ll probably have enough blog posts to fill a book or two. That content is free now, and theoretically will remain free and accessible for perpetuity (yikes, that’s scary when you think about it). In recent years, blogs migrating to print has been a lucrative publishing niche, whether it be dooce doing a biograpy, stuffwhitepeoplelike, or any number of webcomics turning traffic into print advance. What happens in a reading reality where ebooks are the norm? Let’s say I’m an aspiring genre author and I want to get some advice from a veteran.I could pay $10 for Stephen King’s On Writing, or read old blog entries by John Scalzi.  Right now, King’s book is a self-contained unit of some 200 pages that isn’t likely to fall out of print physically or digitally anytime soon. Scalzi’s articles, however, have the benefit of a back-and-forth report with readers and the Z-axis of time to give them added value. I wonder, how would someone with no prior prejudice for print over digital equate the value of those works, and what will that mean for the future of publishing? It doesn’t seem that far-fetched to have blog archives (perhaps edited an annotated) start appearing alongside traditional “books.” 

The obvious answer to all these questions most likely involves a tiered system. Whether the value is placed on time (read it first!), depth (read it ALL, ie bonus features), merit (read the BEST), duration (read it once or read it forever), or more likely, a combination of the above, will probably shake out in the next few years. It will also be interesting to see how much pricing and tier flexibility there will be. 

In the meantime, I just have to believe that working as a writer, refining my craft and coming up with new stories that (hopefully) people will want to read, will continue to be a viable career… at least for the next 30 years. After that, it’s somebody else’s problem.

On the great new manga news/reviews blog, the Manga Critic, Kate Dacey brings up the old “OEL” (Original English Language) manga authenticity debate. Oftentimes this discussion turns into one of irritation, if not condemnation, towards anyone who applys the word “manga” towards a non-Japanese comic (not this article — Kate’s a classy lady). I don’t get the vitriol, but I do get the frustration in regards to classification and filing. Anyway, I really don’t want to get sucked into this debate again, but one of the quotes that Dacey includes perpetuates a misconception that I want to clear up:

“OEL Manga is a marketing term. Tokyopop made it up to sell their originally written comics just so they wouldn’t be put with the regular comics.”

As someone who was in the trenches at the start of this trend, as an editor, and later as a writer, I’d like to say once and for all that OEL was most certainly not coined by Tokyopop. Tokyopop just called all of its works “manga.” The company’s line was/is not to have a distinction in classification between books created in Japan, Korea, Europe or the Americas. “OEL” was first coined, if I remember correctly, by the folks on the Anime on DVD manga forums, as many folks didn’t like (and still don’t like) Tokyopop’s blanket usage of the term. The term caught steam online, not because any company wanted to perpetuate it, but because readers (at least those who take the time to discuss it online)want some distinction. In retrospect, Tokyopop sort of shot itself in the foot with the naming debates by building its “OEL” expansion on the success of its “100% Authentic” campaign, thereby implying its own product is “inauthentic.”

Also, Tokyopop was not the first company to apply the word “manga” to a non-Japanese product. What Tokyopop DID do was make manga synonymous with the serialized, 5 x 7.5, B&W, 192 page graphic novel. Ironically, this format and aspect ratio isn’t even used in Japan, but was rather based on Korean manwha trim sizes, which happens to be an ideal compromise between Japan’s two most common tankubon aspect ratios, making a 1-size-fits-all approach possible.

Oh dear… I’ve gone and worked myself up a bit! I know I said I didn’t want to get into this old debate, but there’s one final point I’d like to suggest that those who bring up this discussion be sure to include, and that’s the longform storytelling format. With RARE exception, OEL titles don’t last longer than a couple of volumes, where by and large, the manga titles we know are generally from a handful to several dozen volumes in length. I would argue that the longform, melodramatic stories afforded by serialized fiction are just as much a part of manga’s appeal as anything relating to the art, and thus far, that’s been very hard to reproduce outside of the Japanese system. (Superhero stories are serialized, yes, but they sprawl without the focus of a single authorial voice, like you have with manga). After all, you can’t very well afford to spend 50 pages on a secondary character’s flashback when you’re not even certain you’ll get a volume 2 or 3 to fully resolve your protagonist’s story. As it stands, there is almost zero trust by readers that an OEL series will extend beyond a volume or two (with rare exception, no one’s even trying to make series more than a couple volumes at this point); it’s a shame that we’re stuck with that reality now, as one thing that the Japanese system shows is that most manga take at least a couple of volumes for the creators to find their footing (which I can certainly attest to!). But now we’re not really talking manga at all, but rather the viability of serialized graphic novels as a business model…

All right, that’s enough of that.

From about the fourth grade when I graduated from mostly kids books to mostly mass-market paperbacks through high school, the Fantasy/Sci-Fi aisle was my bookstore haunt. I’ve always found it a little bit odd, if admittedly efficient, the way that Balrogs, Skrulls, Gethenians and D20 dice are all lumped together in a nerd ghetto. Would aliens (or elves) classifying all Earthly literature with fresh eyes (assuming these aliens have eyes) ever conceive of a classification system that would put Ben Bova and Terry Brooks side-by-side? In any case, it worked pretty well for a while. These days, nerds are pretty much taking over the bookstore, as evidenced by the boom of YA fantasy, Sookie Stackhouse and graphic novels.

It was shortly after graduating from high school that I turned my back on the old Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves. I still lined up for the latest genre movie, but with the exception of stopping by a few times for Neal Stephenson’s latest, I started giving my old haunt a wide berth. On the one hand, it was high time I broadened my horizons, but I was trying a bit too hard to “mature” my tastes. I probably went a full ten years without reading a book with spaceships!

Long story short, picking up where my reading habits left off, I just discovered Joe Haldeman’s seminal sci-fi novel The Forever War and it knocked my snooty spaceship-and-military-fiction-averse socks off. Quick summary for those who haven’t read it yet, the Forever War is about one soldier’s experience in a war between humans and an alien race that, due to time dilation from faster-than-lightspeed travel, lasts over a thousand years. While there are a few battle scenes, the novel isn’t about tactics or technology at all, but rather it’s a timeless soldier’s story about loss, alienation and hurrying-up-and-waiting, very much like recent films Stop-Loss and Jarhead , or the classic Full Metal Jacket. While Haldemam wrote the novel in response to Vietnam (himself a Vet), The Forever War feels even more relevant for today’s world, where war is paradoxically both more clinical and abstract than ever. It’s a fast read, but one that sticks with you. It would make a great film or miniseries, provided the filmmakers were more Terrance Malick than Michael Bay. Anyway, I know most people who come to this site are more into faeries than phasers, but if you’re at all hard SF tolerant, give The Forever War a read!

Next up on my genre reading list — Bones of Faerie. I’ll report back soon.

After a detour to the Half-Continent to battle monsters with D.M. Cornish, I returned last week to Crackpot Hall, home to Flora Segunda, her Butler and a pack of red dogs. Flora’s Dare, the second volume of Ysabeau Wilce’s Flora Segunda books, picks up right where the last volume left off, quickly recapping things with a “how I spent my summer vacation” style recap of volume 1 and moving on to new troubles right away. I enjoyed volume 1 a great deal, but volume 2 was even better. I admire the way that Wilce juggles multiple plotlines, turning what at first seems like a chaotic weave into one that’s perfectly tight, but not overly tidy. Flora is always jumping from frying pan to fire; she’s never quite in control of the situation, but she’s always learning so that next time she’s up against a 10th order stink demon, for example, she’ll definitely have things well in order.

The first volume which takes place on the eve of Flora’s 14th birthday, but now, a few months later, she is decidedly on the path to womanhood. Flora has a flirtation with the mysterious and dangerous Lord Axacaya, a figure in the Jareth mold – dangerous and seductive. She learns to see her family with the greater understanding and sympathy of a nearly-grown-up. Instead of just parroting the truisms of her mentor, Nini-Mo, Flora approaches trouble with caution culled from experience. It’s great character work.

Wilce continues to mingle fantasy and reality in new and unabashedly American ways, a nice change from the ubiquitous psuedo-European settings that dominate the category. (Again, it doesn’t hurt that as Flora dashes from place to place in fictional Califa, I can recognize the routes from their real-life San Francisco inspirations.) I also appreciate how vibrant the world is. In Califa, fashion is every bit as important as power, with men as well as women–especially with men, in the case of Flora’s best friend and dandy-supreme, Udo.

I can’t wait to see where Flora’s adventures take her next.

Lately, whenever I visit the bookstore (got to do it while this endangered species still exists!), I’m struck by how completely fantasy has taken over the Young Adult section. For years I dismissed the YA fantasy boom as at best, a fad, at worst, a shameless attempt to cash in while the holly and phoenix feather wand was hot! Okay, I admit it, I was wrong. Without a doubt, the YA shelves are now the destination for fantasy fans of all ages, leaving the “traditional” fantasy shelves as a sort of ghetto for pervy elf-fanciers and Robert Jordan fans (as if there were a difference). I figured it was time for me to get with the times and see what this new crew of scribes was up to. Read more…

This year I did not lead Niko Bellic through Liberty City, create a Death Knight or chop up dudes with a Lancer. I don’t think I shot a single zombie. Despite playing only a tiny fraction of the games that came out this year, I did manage to log in few hundred hours gaming. So where did all that time go? Here’s a year in hours lost to games: Read more…

It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means. A week ago I had every intention of doing my part for blogging tradition by posting a top 10 list or two, but try as I might, I couldn’t really think of any category of stuff that I had 10 things worth recommending or punditizing. I love video games, for example, but considering that I still haven’t played GTA4, Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid 4, Gears of War 2, Left for Dead or Wrath of the Lich King, would a top-10 list mean anything? So I guess I’ll buck the list trend and post my very personal highlights and trends of the past year. Nothing too formal — just a chance to reflect in public. Part 1 covers food, music and books. Part 2 will recap highlights in movies, games and life.  Even though there aren’t any rankings to dispute in the comments section, please do share your own highlights and hopes! Read more…

A few posts back I wrote about my frustration with the games industry for encouraging a monoculture where niche titles have a hard time finding an audience. I mentioned how music and movies have done a much better job with bringing niche content to the right audience, but even in those categories, things aren’t perfect.

Last week Apple released the latest version of iTunes with the new “Genius” feature. Basically, you select a song and click the Genius icon and iTunes will generate a playlist from your library around that song. It will also recommend songs that you don’t own that you might want to buy. As someone who has found the recommendations systems built into the iTunes store to be a valuable tool for discovering new music, I was excited to give Genius a whirl. With over 5000 songs in my library, there are doubtless plenty of songs I’ve overlooked.

First impressions boded well for the feature. Testing out a few songs from different genres, Genius generated playlists that meshed featuring songs that I uniformly liked. But the more time I spent with it, the more I realized that what seemed like its strength is Genius’ greatest flaw—namely, Genius generates the obvious.

Genius is powered by the same recommendation systems that can be so useful when browsing the store. By tracking the buying habits of millions of users, Apple does an amazing job at capturing the trends of the moment and can make very effective recommendations of obscure albums for those who take the time to follow the “Listeners also bought” trail. Because its consumer base is so large, Apple’s recommendation tools are strong, no matter how deep you go down the “long tail” of niche music. The iTunes recommendation system has two major flaws—1) it is heavily skewed towards new releases as that’s where the biggest sales and most active reviewers are; 2) it prefers strong quantitative associations over qualitative.

To illustrate these problems, let’s look at the album Neon Bible by the Arcade Fire (one of my favorite albums, BTW). It’s the latest album by a contemporary Canadian indy rock band, but by no means obscure. For fans of this album, iTunes recommends the latest albums by the Shins, LCD Soundystem, the National, Spoon and Wilco. On the song and Artist level, you’ll find Wolf Parade, Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs added to the list. Basically, you have a bunch of the standards of mainstream Alt/Indy rock for the past couple years. Are these good recommendations? Well, they’re certainly safe in that all of these bands are approximately equal in popularity. There’s nothing obscure, nothing from a jarringly different genre. A much better recommendation than any of those would be Bruce Springsteen, who is the most influential artist on the Arcade Fire, and whose music would actually mix better side-by-side with theirs. Similarly, older listeners who don’t follow up-and-coming indy bands but who like the Boss might be very fond of the Arcade Fire. Sadly, iTunes doesn’t help in that direction either, with Springsteen leading to recommendations of U2, John Mellencamp, the Who and other institutions.

There are plenty of other tools out there to find the music associations that iTunes can’t, from music blogs to services like Rhapsody and Pandora—I just had hopes that with Genius, Apple might have found a way to make their service, well, smarter. On the contrary, it only serves to make iTunes shortcomings even more frustrating by making playlists that seem culled from singles and greatest hits. New songs yield nothing but other new acts on the Genius playlist, and genres seldom intermingle. I like some hip hop and some girl bands, and I am probably someone unusual but hardly unique in that I like to mix the two in my custom playslists – Genius would never create a playlist like that.

The sidebar, which recommends items not on your playlist is probably the biggest missed opportunity here. Apple leaves them as passive recommendations with the option to play a 30 second preview. As implemented, this feature is only useful if I’m in active shopping mode, as playing the recommendations interrupts my regular listening, and I’m only getting a 30 second preview. Once again, Apple plays it far too safe here. A smarter way to handle this would be to automatically slip new songs into your playlist for 1 time use, then reminding you in the sidebar which songs played you don’t own.

As it stands, Genius is better than “shuffle” at creating a pleasing playlist, but it’s hardly revolutionary. With other places offering digital music cheaper and offering more sophisticated recommendation systems, Apple really needs to step up their game here if they hope to retain the appearance of mavericks.

On the movie front, one of the biggest success stories in separating the good from the bad is rottentomatoes.com. Films are rated “fresh” or “rotten” based on a meta-critic rating. The reasoning here is that the average score of 100 reviewers will lead to a more useful and objective score than that of any one critic. It’s a fun reference, and a handy starting point for reading more detailed reviews, but as a recommendation tool, it is hugely flawed. Certainly it does an effective job of recognizing the very best and very worst of movies, but stuff in the middle… the ratings are pretty much worthless. A movie that 70% of critics thought was just OK is ranked fresh, whereas a decisive film that 50% love and 50% hate is rotten. It disturbs me that the Tomato-ometer ratings get as much weight as they do, and that the idea of a critical bias is looked down on. You want biased critics! Understanding how your tastes measure up to an individual critics is a more useful tool for finding films you’ll like than following the averages of all critics.

Case in point, three new releases on DVD/Blu-Ray that were all rated rotten but that I would put on my top 10 list for the year: Youth Without Youth, Speed Racer and The Fall (23%, 31%, 44% respectively according to top critics. Going beyond the numbers, each of these films has one thing in common—they are highly decisive. These aren’t movies that fell off the radar – they were each subject to some very harsh critical lashings. Each, however, had a minority voice that praised the film in the most glowing of terms. Clearly they’re not for everybody, but they are far more likely to illicit a real reaction from the viewer than “fresh” movies like Kung-Fu Panda and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Originally this post was just going to be mini-reviews of those three films. Now I’ve got a dinner party to prepare for and some Force Unleashed to play, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out why I think those three rotton movies are worth your time.

Also, expect some new Labyrinth preview art this week–certified fresh, I assure you.

While browsing this week’s new DVD releases, I was quite surprised to see a 20th Anniversary release of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Guilliam’s take on the classic chronicle of tall tales. It doesn’t surprise me that the film is getting a much deserved rerelease (and Blue Ray Edition!), but that “20th Anniversary” bit made me do a double take. Yet another reminder that I’m getting old.

I distinctly remember when the movie came out as that weekend I was hanging out with my Uncle Wes and he offered to take us to the movies and I got to pick the film. The only two movies that were appropriate for 10 year old me on that April weekend were Munchausen and the Jim Belushi/dog love story K-9. As half my family is involved with breeding/training/supplying dogs, it seemed best to honor that tradition through moviegoing, so I ended up going to the later. And that was the film that changed my life and turned me towards a life of law enforcement and… Oh, wait, it’s the 80’s fantasy stuff that forever shaped my sensibilities. Maybe I should have gone with law inforcement…? I bet it pays better.

Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to see Munchausen in the theater, as it completely tanked and disappeared after 1 week, but I did not forget it. When the film finally came out on VHS (how quaint!) I absolutely loved it. In fact, this was the first time I remember actually wishing I’d seen a movie in the theater first. After one viewing, Munchausen became part of my video store standby movies — one of the short list of films that I’d rent a third, fourth or twentieth time, when the new releases didn’t excite me. It earned its place right next to Labyrinth, Excalibur (mom didn’t know about the sex), Great Muppet Caper, Star Wars, and a handful of others that I never tired of watching.

Munchausen is far from a perfect film — it drags at times, and a lot of jokes fall flat — but it has some absolutely inspired moments (like the execution scene), and some gorgeous fantasy images that will haunt me all my life. Things like the Baron’s ship sailing over the sands of the moon or the terrifying angel of death (it ranks somewhere between the depictions of death in Watership Down and Seventh Seal for causing childhood trauama). It’s been a few years since I’ve watched Munchausen, so maybe when I finally break down and get a PS3 with BlueRay, I’ll get this disc to break it in.

In the meantime, if you’ve never seen it, or need a refresher, here’s the trailer: