Art & Criticism

It Came from Outer Space — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on February 16, 2020Leave a comment

The trailer for It Came from Outer Space really wanted to let you know how awesome its 3-D effects are:

Pity that the version I watched missed them. What remains is a plodding, dull, dragging story that takes far too long to get to the conclusion.

A meteor falls to Earth near Sandy Hook, Arizona and a local amateur astronomer and his school teacher fiancee get their neighbour to take his helicopter to take a look at it. He climbs into the crater and discovers it’s actually a crashed space ship, but before he can show it to the other two the crater collapses and the ship vanishes underground. Already tought of as a bit of a heads in the clouds egghead, nobody believes him, certainly not the local sherrif. But then people start disappearing, some coming back but not entirely themselves. When the astronomer’s fiancee disappears too, the sheriff organises a posse to capture or kill the aliens. Meanwhile our astronomer hero himself has managed to make contact with the aliens and realises they are not hostile, just ‘borrowed’ the towns people to help them make repairs to the ship. The climax is a race against time as the posse closes in and the astronomer tries to stop them long enough for the aliens to get away.

This could’ve just as well been told as an half hour Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episode, instead of an eighty minute movie. There’s too little plot for too much time and the suspense doesn’t hold up for me. I do like that the aliens here are mostly benign, if rather impolite to kidnap and then duplicate people without consent. You can’t argue the paranoid sheriff is entirely in the wrong to mistrust their motives. This being based on a Ray Bradbury idea I have the feeling that the moral is supposed to be that humanity has to grow up before being able to actually meet other civilisations, but the aliens didn’t cover themselves in glory either.

It Came from Outer Space: the astronomer hero as seen through the eye of the alien

Shot in black and white in 1953, based on an idea of Ray Bradbury, this is at least a good looking movie. Not sure how much difference the 3-D effects would’ve made, but in the 2-D version they are sparse. We get shots of the ship crashing and leaving, but the most ambitious scene is when the astronomer finally comes face to face with an actual alien, rather than an alien possessed human. We first get a shot of him through the alien’s eye, then slowly his body is revealed to the astronomer and us. While it looks a bit naff, it’s at least an attempt at a non-human looking alien.

It Came from Outer Space can be seen as part of that 1950ties wave of Cold War paranoia sci-fi movies, but doesn’t fit neatly in it. The aliens do not kill or hurt anybody, are ultimately benign and not here to take over. They just want to go home.

Sci-Fi Sundaze is an attempt to get me to watch more classic science fiction movies and blog about them. Sci-fi is a bit of a curse word in echt-fandom circles of course, something Forry Ackerman couldn’t have expected when he coined it to give science fiction a cool new name ala hi-fi. Sci-fi is shlock, all the bad stuff ‘we’ left behind in the pulps, proof that media sf could never catch up to the written stuff. That’s all bollocks of course.

What I’m interested in is taking a closer look at three long maligned waves of sci-fi schlock. First, like with this entry, that whole flood of quickly and cheaply made 1950ties science fiction thrillers, the purest expression of ‘sci-fi’. Second, there are the pre-Star Wars seventies dystopias like Rollerball or Logan’s Run. Sometimes these had little more going for them than awesome sets, but it’s still worth looking closer at them. Finally, there’s the eighties science fiction boom. Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien had made science fiction a blockbuster genre and boy were people ready to cash in. So let’s look at all the Star Wars ripoffs, the nuclear war armageddon Mad Max clones, all the sci-fi horror movies winking at Aliens. These are the movies I’d get from the videoshop once I saw all the good sf movies.

Aiura: the horny slice of moe anime

Published on November 23, 2019Leave a comment

After a hi-energy opening Aiura proper opens with a few lovely landscape shots, but it’s the first look at one of the protagonists that set the mood for the rest of the show:

Aiura: this anime really loves thighs

Horny.

Broadcast in 2013, Aiura is a short length (5:30 minutes) anime series, based on a four panel gag manga, about three high school friends hanging out and having meaningless conversations with each other. Just another slice of moe series, but for its running time. Short as it is, it’s even shorter than its runtime suggests. It has a minute long opening, a minute and a half long ending, another ending halfway through the episode which eats up another twenty seconds or so. In all, there’s only two and a half minutes for the actual show. The quality of those two and a half minutes though… For what’s largely a throwaway anime, this is really well done. The backgrounds are brilliant, the character designs are cute and the animation is very well done.

Aiura: this anime really loves thighs. And butts.

Four panel gag mangas are somewhat difficult to translate to anime, lacking an ongoing plot as they do. When done on autopilot, you just get a series of setup/setup/punch line/reaction jokes where you can almost see the panel borders. You need something to punch it up to make it work in anime. What Aiura brings is horniness. The original manga is significantly less horny than the anime. There’s little room in a four panel, top to bottom, usually cramped gag strip like this for the sort of shot as shown above after all, even had the mangaka been interesting in doing so.

The horny lens through which the anime has adapted Aiura helps keep it interesting. This could all have been static shots of high school girls talking to each other. Instead, we get shots like this, with one of the girls taking off her wet sock, lovely animated. You can see the animator likes their thighs, but the camera doesn’t leer nor do you have any of the bankrupt boob jokes you’d usually see in slice of moe series. All those slightly horny shots keep you interested while the jokes are being told.

Maybe grow a thicker skin?

Published on November 15, 2019Leave a comment

I’m sorry, but I just can’t see what’s so horrible about this statement that it got Sarah Dessen and a whole host of other big Name YA authors to flip their lid so hard:

During her junior year, Brooke Nelson said she fought hard against a Sarah Dessen book being selected.

“She’s fine for teen girls,” the 2017 Northern graduate said. “But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

Sarah Dessen, who apparantly has a google search alert for herself set up, reacted as follows (the tweet has of course been deleted since):

Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.

Which, you know, I understand. It is hard to see somebody dismiss your work as not college worthy so casually and if that makes you feel bad, you’re free to gripe about it to your friends. But she didn’t. She posted it on her twitter, taken out of context, for a quarter million or so followers. And then other YA authors with equally large followings did the same, some in the name of feminism. Because if something is feminist, it’s gangin up on a college student when you’re a bunch of succesful authors with a large, somewhat fanantical fanbase.

It was an old fashioned form of fisking that all those people , including N. K. Jemisin, which was …disappointing… engaged in. That first sentence “she’s fine for teen girls” was dissected as meaning that Brooke Nelson was dimsissive of teen girls, was unfairly biased to Dessen, a self hating woamn, etc. Insecurity and genuine concern about the place of YA fiction in wider literature led to take after take suggesting she was guilty of rampant misogeny and personally resposnible for all gender inequality everywhere. Earnest explainations of how teenage girls are always dismissed and not taken seriously were used as a cudgel to attack her with and nobody saw the irony of a group of mostly rich, mostly middle aged authors going after a college student for something she was involved with three years ago and had three sentences in a local paper talking about it?

Stop doing this. Stop overreacting to critics or readers disliking your work, stop ego surfing if you can’t handle negative reactions to your work. Stop pretending that somebody disliking you is an attack on all YA authors.

Grow up.

Chelsea Cain shows you how to not handle criticism

Published on June 10, 2019Leave a comment

Eagle Eyed viewers noticed something strange in the latest issue of Chelsea Cain’s Man-Eaters, a dystopian satire about how menstruation turns pubescent women into werepanthers:

First panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

In case you can’t read that, those are two mildly critical tweets about Man-Eaters hung on the walls of a rehabilitation centre for menstruators. Chelsea Cain breaking the fourth wall there to really own the person who wrote those tweets. (I won’t link to these tweets directly; they are googable if you really want to see them). Note that both of them are from the same person, a reader who didn’t tweet at Chelsea Cain directly, has fewer followers than even I have and only expressed mild disappointment that Man-Eaters wasn’t better than it was. Why feel the need to blow it all up by including them in the issue without approval and hence expose both them and your own inability to handle criticism to a much wider, much more hostile audience? Why do this to yourself?

Second panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

It’s not as if Cain herself doesn’t know what it feels like to be a target of harassment. On Metafilter last year I posted an interview in which she talked about her own experiences being harassed for being outspoken feminist in her work for Marvel. Sure, she left the poster’s identity off the tweets she put in the comic, but as said, a simple search on that first sentence in the first tweet will find the originals. Fortunately for the original poster, the comix community so far has responded with horror at Cain and they seem to have suffered little consequences so far other than the stress of knowing a big name comic creator tried to sick their fans at you.

Whether the criticism is warranted doesn’t enter into it. The problem is that Chelsea Cain took the same right wing harassment tactics used against her and attempted to silence a critic, one with a much smaller following than she has. Once the backlash against that started this weekend she was quick to apologise and throw a pity party for herself for being so dumb, but she never once contacted the person she actually wronged before she deleted her twitter account. It’s not a good look, but you also have to wonder why her editor, publisher, or even whoever had to cut and paste those tweets into the panels in the first place didn’t drew Cain aside to ask her if she really thought this through? American comics are a cesspit of unprofessionalism but this is low even by their standards.

UPDATE: for those wanting to read a good analysis of what’s wrong with Man-Eaters as a comic and story, including its gender essentialism, may I recommend Véronique Emma Houxbois’ review of the series, written before #9 came out.

Rammstein’s Deutschland looks very French to me

Published on April 12, 2019Leave a comment

I can’t help but look at the video for Deutschland and see Enki Bilal in it.

Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin/Jean-Claude Mézières’ Valerian series, or rather one particular album in that series, Sur les Terres Truquées. The latter because it’s a story set in a series of (faked) important historical moments that ultimately collide together into one big mess at the climax of the story. Not unlike the video with its mosaic of dark scenes from Germany’s shameful past, from Romans slaughtered in the woods of Germania to Rammstein themselves as Jewish prisoners being executed. In the end these too all blend together.

But I was mostly reminded of Enki Bilal. That mix of perverted science, mythology and religion, the fascination with fascism and totalitarianism, the sense of decay and degeneration, it’s all very Bilalesque. Ruby Commey too, as Germania could’ve walked out from one of his stories, beautiful and the focal point of each scene she appears in, but corrupted. There’s a layer of grime in most of Bilal’s settings that you see in the video too, the scene of the monks devouring offal frex. Whether or not the makers were actually inspired by him or not doesn’t really matter, but it sure looks like something Bilal could’ve made.