It looks like I finally did it; I was...too smart?

You know, I kind of forgot that everything you go through in life involving women will be invariably picked apart, scrutinized and analyzed by several other women in your life. The amount of women who will perform this scourging, and the thoroughness of it, all depends on the event. If it is a first date, you can expect scrutiny from immediate family. Third date, women from more traditional families will be making wedding plans. Friends and members of less traditional families will wait until date #5 for that.
But a break-up of any kind is covered by every single woman you have ever known. Everything is copacetic, until the split, and then women to whom you have not spoken in years suddenly appear on the radar again, going "You should have known better than to take her to McDonald's for Valentine's Day."
Then follows the list of your faults, usually rattled off while you're trying to watch TV. But in my case, I recently got a little something different. I got the single most double-edged compliment in the history of double-edged compliments.
A friend of the family informed her conduit within the family that I was "intellectually intimidating".
Yes. I lost points for being TOO interesting.
If I were anyone else, that would be my cue to crawl under a rock with a decent book because how do you fix a "problem" like that? Take dull pills? Fortunately (unfortunately?) for me, I am a completely stubborn ass, and this crippling flaw in my genetic makeup didn't phase me. Other people, on being informed they were too damn smart, might sink into despair or the bottle, but not me. I AM A GOD DAMN ROCK.
Of course, I've been aware for a good long while of the schism between the way guys think and the way girls think. Girls do not want solutions to the problems and situations presented to guys, which is real bad because most guys badly want to solve everything. It's genetic: if there is something guys can't fix, then that means some other guy out there has a bigger...brain...than they do.
This is, of course, kind of pathetic.
So, of course, I always do it.
In all fairness, I must say that the person who informed me my relationships do not last because I'm too smart (it sounds like I must be exaggerating, but despite the fact that I do indeed possess a healthy ego, I am not) did so out of consideration. She beleives I should date women of equal or greater intelligence than myself, and she's probably right. Only someone smart enough to understand that I'm not the genius I think I am could possibly put up with that for long.
I want to add something to all this: I'm not trying to be an arrogant ass (I don't have to try, it sort of comes naturally). I beleive more or less everyone has an equal level of mental capability. I beleive the difference between "smart" and "not smart" isn't in capability, but in usage. Most people you meet tend to not use the majority of their intelligence. I think it's a warped attempt to fit in.
Me, I look around at what there generally is to fit in with, and think, "why would anyone do this horrible thing?" But that's me.
The laws of probabilities would tell me that somewhere out there is someone who fits the intellignce level my unrequested shrink beleives my relationships require. And the laws of irony would tell me that should I find her, I'll almost invariably find her annoying as hell. What the hell, right? I always did love a good ironic ending.

Cliches are good

Lately when I write I have been wondering why cliches are so rallied against, particularly from a visual sense. The whole idea of certain conventions in storytelling isn't to be realistic or original, it's to spice up a scene. trenchcoats, rain, fire, wind, cloaks, cigars, booze, paintings, windows, water, signs and more are all things I use to visually spice up a scene that would otherwise be boring. These things are often neither essential to the scene at hand, nor very inventive in the grand scheme of literature, but it just wouldn't be as interesting if I replaced a powerful, driving nighttime rainstorm with, say, a bagel.
This extends to the plots themselves. Allow me a list of some of the things I absolutely love to do in stories (and see in stories):
Last-minute cavalry style rescues
Big, dark offices where meetings take place entirely in ominous proclamations
Fights to the death, preferrably if one or both combatants fall off something significantly tall at the end
Ambushes
People standing atop windswept heights while their coats flap around them
Cheesy one-liners
Insane exposions the size of half of Texas
Dramatic deaths

I like all these things because fiction should not be entirely realistic. What's the point of that? If I want eighteen pages of two people talking, I can go do that. If, on the other hand, I want to see someone ride a galloping, fire-breathing monstrosity while having a showdown with a dastardly villain, I need fiction. It's a cliche, but if dropping cliches means making boring stories, bring on the tried and true.

As if that was not enough

I just realized that all my optimism about life comes full circle on a day when OUR FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT WAS INAUGURATED INTO OFFICE. I usually don't capitalize things unnecessarily, but did I mention that today OUR FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT WAS INAUGURATED INTO OFFICE? And that he is not just breaking a massive barrier, he is doing it with so much style, smile, smarts and grace as to be able to laugh it off when he flubs his lines on national television?
Amazing. Really, just fucking amazing.
You can tell me all you want about being aimlessly optimistic, but I think that, after centuries of division in the human race, a black man is the world's most powerful human being, that that is something worth shouting about. No, we're not over racism. Here's a cold slap in the face: we never will be. When our tribe was our life, discrimination, born of fear, was actually a useful trait. It is ingrained in all of us.
But what a huge step. What a huge day.

Time in Happytown

Well.

Well, well, well.

I've always said that if things started going really well with me, in the sense that I just felt I could do no wrong, that would be when the comet hit. My own personal meteorite, with my name etched into it by cosmic forces beyond the ken of man. It may even have my exact address on it, or it may just follow me until there was an opportune time for it to strike me, and only me.

I've been looking to the Heavens a lot lately.

I'm not even sure where to start. Hell, I was, five minutes ago, hitting the "next" button on my music randomizer like a monkey on speed, thinking I wasn't going to find a song that wasn't either sad, ironic or instrumental. Clearly my music collection is not prepared for this; it is in comet mode. I've managed to hit Interpol's All Fired Up and find it wholly appropriate, but I can't just keep hitting repeat.

Perhaps a little background is called for.

I have the worst relationship/dating history this side of the sort of pure tragedy you can only get away with on Lifetime Movie Network. I am that guy who never knows when a woman is interested, and often has other things on his mind if he does notice. Everyone has a friend like me; the kind that can do some intellectual thing amazingly well, but doesn't know a good thing unless it slaps him in the face.

Well, a good thing slapped me in the face.

I apologize if I remain, basically, an intensely private person who is going to keep juicy details out of his blog, but, well, I'm an intensely private person and am going to keep most juicy details out of my blog. I will say this: for a guy who once got beat up for playing video games and reading comics, to a guy whose comic-writing aspirations are mostly met with "Huh...that's...interesting" or better yet, "Biff bam and pow stuff?", what could possibly be looked for in a woman?

How about someone who thinks comic-writing is ambitious as hell? That is among a lot of other very nice traits, but like I said, I am an intensely private person and you'll have to make do with that for now.

And what about those comics? Well, Adam Witt, who can apparently pull miracles straight out of his ass, recently delivered me some very good news that portends very well for our projects. This news I want desperately to shout from the rooftops, but it isn't concrete yet and if you had my luck you would beleive in curses, too. I'll just say: the writing duo of Eft and Witt will have a very good 2009.

I can honestly say I have never known what it is like to have everything just click before. All the pieces, right into place. For those who were wondering, it's very nice indeed.

So that comet is just going to have to follow me around, at a distance, for a while longer.

Fallout 3 is a drug

I've now invested 36 hours into it, give or take. Usually I'll give a game an hour or two, and even if I recognize quality in it, something or other in it will not be compelling enough to tempt me further. F3 certainly has no shortage of little faults, but I find the overall experience wonderfully compelling. It's like one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, but well-written and featuring slow-motion heads seperating from mutant bodies. The narrative is wound into the gameplay, rather than beating itself over your head MGS style. I like that.
I'm still managing to be productive, and I've got something pretty cool coming up next week, that'll also mean a small change to this blog. I've just given up sleep, that's all. And eating. I'm not an addict, really.

Plague of Thieves

So Adam and I recently decided one of our works-in-progress actually has a very good chance at seeing the light of day. It's called Plague of Thieves, but I'm not going to describe it in any more detail because I beleive in curses. Hopefully the time will come soon when I won't have to discuss it, because you'll be able to read it.
We're taking advantage of a submissions process that seems much less restrictive than those I've wrestled with before, and I find the prospect of a success has the same effect on me it always has: anticipation. The prospect is still somewhat faint; there are still more odds against it than for (although it is too good a thing not to be made eventually).
I don't anticpate potential success because I want to see my name in lights or because I want a paycheck, even though any author who tells you they have no interest in those things is a liar or an idiot. Of course those things sound appealing, but I'm not sure I'd ever want to be too well known, even if I could be. I don't really know. I do know that the idea of seeing something I've worked on actually come into existence is what fuels my anticipatory feelings. With HOPE: New Orleans (in which I had a short story published among many other good ones; check it out if ever you can), I learned that I don't really care about money; it was just a thrill to see something I worked hard on there, on the page.

The Unmaking of the Anti-Hero

Any casual scholar of classical Mythology can tell you two things about it: 1. the God sure do like to fuck, and 2: they played pretty fast and loose with the idea of heroes. In fact, most of the figures they called heroes were what we would call anti-heroes. The selflessness and flawlessness of a John Wayne are purely modern inventions under the hero label. Hero, in the old days, seemed to have a very different definition. When the Greeks and Romans lived, the world was still a hostile, mean, largely uncharted place, and it was even more so for the spinners of tales that came before them. Accordingly, heroes weren't virtuous people who always fought the good fight. They were raiders and adventurers who braved the unknown, an act that naturally required them to commit a a little theft, a fair bit of fornication, and perhaps even cut a man or two down in cold blood. They were more Conan the Barbarian than John Wayne.

What I wonder is why such people have to be labeled anti-heroes now. Yes, a fair few writers have put the idea...and the label...to good use. But if someone tries to murder someone and, say, The Punisher breaks their neck, does that make him an anti-hero...or just a hero? This question, I think, is especially prevalent in a society that is increasingly aware that laws aren't always fair. Take the current economic crisis. If a CEO runs a company into the ground, costing the livelihoods of many dedicated workers, and then bails out with a few million dollars in severance, and the law allows this, does that make ir right? We've all either been directly affected by current events, or been close to someone directly affected. Who among us hasn't fantasized about a bloody-handed Robin Hood, cutting such people down and distributing their ill-earned cash to people who need it? Search yourself, and decide whether you would really be outraged if this did happen.

It is true: we've got most of the surface of the earth pretty well mapped now. The need for warriors to take sword in hand and venture out into untamed lands, with perhaps the survival of the tribe or city depending on them, has mostly evaporated. Even the Greeks, for the most part, idolized these mythological heroes while instituting, and abiding by, all sorts of laws that protected very corrupt people from soldier's swords. I just wonder what would happen if vigilantism were more present in our society. Would we label those people anti-heroes, or even villains? Or would we welcome it?

A story in the works by Adam Witt and myself reveals a lot about our position on valorous, clean-cut heroes, including some stuff I didn't know about my own preferences. Turns out the more vices a do-gooder has, the more I enjoy writing them. Our main character has super-powers...in fact, he is the only one in the world who does, and the world is falling slowly apart. He's the last hope, and all that. He also drinks, beds men and woman liberally, and shoots up. In our society, two of these things are frowned upon and one is illegal. But he also protects. The split fascinates me more than the John Wayne vision (outside of things like "The Searchers") ever could.

When I talk about anti-heroes that I think are just plain heroes, I'm not referring here to people who are 99% virtuous but may have a little secret in their past. I'm talking about characters whose vices ride shotgun with them while they are out heroing. Sometimes they are even quite public about it; they often don't see their faults as faults, even though they know others do. So you stole something or killed someone in the past but you're clean as a whistle now? Bo-ring. Bad people doing good things are infititely more fascinating than good people doing bad things.

Movie Review: Valkyrie

For the sake of this review, I can ignore the fact that Tom Cruise doesn’t sound the slightest bit German, and focus on the rooms. The politicians, generals and assorted ranking Germans who spent “Valkyrie” plotting the assassination of Adolf Hitler and the overthrow of the SS speak more than they act. They gather in nice places with nice rooms and discuss the details of their plans. The rooms are complete with nice curtains, chandeliers, mahogany tables, and other fine décor. In most movies about the Nazis, there are three planes of action. One is the fancy rooms in which the upper echelons of the Nazi order meet while planning murder, the second is the streets of German cities or the concentration camps where hopeless Jews are evicted, tortured and killed, and the third is sometimes the frontlines of World War II. “Valkyrie” jettisons the latter two planes entirely, and transforms the first. The rebels, the good guys, don’t mean in dusty, hidden tunnels or in remote locations. Their plans are formed in the same types of rooms where atrocities were also planned out, right in the middle of Nazi power bases.

I suspect “Valkyrie” will draw it’s share of criticism. At first glance, the film seems to sidestep the fact that, at the time, Nazis were killing Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, political dissenters and others in record numbers. The concentration camps are never even mentioned, and we see only one character-establishing battle scene. The film isn’t about those elements of the story. It is about important people within the German army who realized that Hitler was destroying Germany, and resolved to stop that for the sake of their country.

Their leader is Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise), who is severely wounded in Africa. He returns home lacking his right hand, fingers from his left, and one eye. In the opening minutes, Cruise does indeed seem an ill fit for the part; once he returns to Germany, his mutilation makes him more believable. His appearance is one we would normally find easily attributable to a villain, and this makes his role as a hero of the story that much more poignant.
Von Stauffenberg is far from alone: a lot of people would like to see Hitler dead. Major-General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh) makes a failed attempt to blow up his Furher’s plane, and is later transferred to the front, leaving von Stauffenberg in control of the conspiracy. General Freidrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy) believes in the cause, but is often hesitant to act on the plans; he always demands proof that things are going correctly, although you’d think a General would know that nothing ever goes the way you plan it. Also among the conspirators are Dr. Carl Goerdeler (Kevin McNally), a politician intended to govern in the new regime. Terence Stamp sees a turn as Ludwig Beck, a retired general whose loyalties were never to anything but Germany.

The plan, on its face, is simple: Stauffenberg gets Hitler (played by David Bamber) to sign off on changes to the contingency plan known as Valkyrie. The plan was created to protect Hitler in Berlin in case the allies got that far, but the rewritten plan will make it easier for the plotters to take over Berlin, in the guise of stopping the coup. Stauffenberg visits Hitler at his Bavarian residence, Berghof. Here, Hitler and his top advisorsare set off in a circle at one end of a huge room; sunlight streams through a large window, but the Nazis are largely in shadow. Hitler himself is a small presence, seeming more like a Grandfather in the early stages of arthritis than the powerful speaker seen in German newsreels of the time. After the changes are approved, Stauffenberg will plant a bomb at a strategy meeting, killing Hitler and ushering in the important part of the plan.

Those who know this story (I was one) not only already know the plotters fail, but know some of the details behind that failure. The plan is to get both Himmler and Hitler; when Himmler does not show up to the meeting that is initially targeted, approval isn’t given, and after some tense worrying Stauffenberg escapes with the explosive. At the second attempt, on July 20, 1944, things go wrong: the meeting is moved to an outdoor hut where the bomb will not have the same effect, and it is placed behind the leg of a table opposite Hitler. In real life, the cushioning of that leg saved Hitler’s life; Stauffenberg, however, believes he is dead, and proceeds with his coup in Berlin.

That we know how this all has to end doesn’t diminish the suspense in the slightest. Cruise never establishes himself as Stauffenberg perfectly, but this might be partially due to Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander’s script. His motivations for doing these things are never made entirely clear; the film doesn’t let us into Stauffenberg’s soul. Only one revealing moment is truly given him: he wants the world to know that not all Germans were like Hitler. He refuses to have his family name drug through blood for a party he does not support. Pride? Perhaps.

However, the conspiracy itself is gripping; the plotters actually begin their takeover of Berlin, complete with arrests, believing Hitler to be dead. Since much of the film is told with words and paperwork, the action is in the plans and heads of the people at the coup’s center; I suspect I could count the number of gunshots in the film in my head.
As a thriller, it fares well and actually owes much to our foreknowledge of the outcome. Bryan Singer, whose films I don’t always enjoy, directs the action in such a way that we find ourselves focused on details. Only here, the details we focused on could have changed history. What if they’d kept the meeting that day in the bunker at Wolf’s Lair? What if the bomb hadn’t been placed so far from Hitler? Or what if Stauffenberg has been allowed to go through with it all at the first meeting? What if General Friedrich Fromm (Tom Wilkinson) head of the Reserve Army, had been fully complicit in the scheme, instead of sitting on the sidelines (it didn’t do him much good; he was also executed)?
These what ifs are at the heart of the film. But another element in the film’s success is the rebels themselves. We have a certain preconceived notion of the rebel character; dirty clothes, bumps and bruises, hiding in the woods. The upcoming “Defiance” will present the resistance to the Nazis from that more archetypal viewpoint. The conspirators in “Valkyrie” wear suits, sign papers and still have homes. Does the fact that they also cared about escaping with their lives make them any less heroic? Perhaps if von Stauffenberg had been willing to sacrifice himself to kill Hitler, might things have then been different? Of course, putting what’s right before duty always takes a heroic effort; anyone who has done it can tell you that. But the movie’s narrow focus on the conspiracy and the effects of it allows us to ask our own questions about these things, rather than have them forced on us by the filmmakers. That may be it’s most important victory.

Movie Review: Doubt

John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” presents us with two people, one driven by to do what she does by what she is, and the other moved to be what he is by what he does. But then, perhaps their actions are simply driven by their basic natures, and their choice of profession is incidental. I don’t really know for sure, I guess; the movie’s title is appropriate.

The first, and arguably most compelling, figure is Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep). She certainly is not the most likeable figure; as Principle, she rules over her Catholic church and school like a dictator. She is universally hated by the students, and the other nuns regard her with silence. When we are introduced to the church itself, it seems to have taken on her shade. It lacks the sunlight and glimmering artifacts of most film churches. It is not a gloomy place, it simply lacks the extra light.

The other figure is her superior, Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), is much the opposite. Jovial and outgoing, Father Flynn claims as his only mission the desire to help people. It is 1964, and the school has its first black student (Joseph Foster). Father Flynn reaches out to him, and Sister Beauvier interprets the gesture as a very different kind of reaching. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. “Doubt” is less about plot points and more about behaviors.
Sister Beauvier is the sort of person who depends on her convictions as the fuel that keeps her going. That Father Flynn has done something wrong is corroborated by no evidence and no witnesses. The only proof that the Sister has is her own conviction, which is unlikely to be born of righteousness. Father Flynn wishes to modernize their Church; included in these proposals are such radical measures as singing secular Christmas songs. The Sister has only her traditional view of the Church to keep her going. Streep plays her so precisely that she does not come across as the villain precisely because she is not motivated by anything she seems to recognize in herself. Her nature drives her, spurred on perhaps by the gradual dissolution of the world she knows and fits in. Father Flynn’s willingness to move forward, to her, is not a sign of strength; it is an expression of attack upon her world.

Serving mostly as an observer to these events is Sister James (Amy Adams). Whose version she believes I will not say. What is important to know is the importance of her role. It was important enough for Adams to receive equal billing with Streep and Hoffman, which is a lot for even really good actors to live up to. She is not innocent or very naïve, which is refreshing for such a role. She is simply a great believer in the fundamental goodness of mankind. You might argue that this is a foolish belief to have, but Adams embodies it well in Sister James; it does not seem to be forced on the story. Consider that she is not meant to be delivering a high-powered performance, and you realize how well she actually pulls off that very thing, but in a quieter, more understated way. She is as much Oscar Bait as the others.
That many of the questions in the film do not come full circle is appropriate to the story. The film observes characters who are acting in ways they either must act, or feel they must act. What precisely is in their pasts is not the idea the film wants to convey. What it wants to convey is precisely stated in the title, and it does the job as masterfully as any film I’ve seen. That there are questions which remain questions is a credit to the soul of the film, and Shanley’s faithfulness in reproducing this for a larger audience than the original play is the sort of thing I applaud in a film.

I also applaud the cinematography by Roger Deakins. Nearly the entire film takes place within the church and school grounds, building such a persuasive world out of ordinary locations that we never notice. When Father Flynn and Sister Beauvier do come to open conflict (in a scene whose dialogue I will have to study on DVD), it feels less like individual actions and more like the weight of their confinement finally driving them to speak their minds. The conversations between Flynn and Beauvier are weighted by the place, while those between Flynn and Sister James are labored but not held down by it. Conversations acted out sometimes feel imposed, but not these. They feel natural and free of the writer’s voice, and among other things, a great film is made out of them.