Out of the Blue

There’s something tremendously satisfying about going from having no idea for a story at all to having a completed story in the space of a few hours.

Since I won last month’s flash fiction contest at SFFWorld, it fell to me to pick the topic for this month’s contest. Flush with my own cleverness, I latched on to the month of May and came up with the theme of permission.  May, may I, permission, get it?  Oh the wit.

But for the longest while, it seemed I’d spent all my ingenuity on that dazzling bit of word play, because the creative well had run dry as far as any story ideas were concerned.  I pondered on it.  I set it aside hoping something would strike me out of the blue.  I read some of the other stories hoping for some motivation.  But nothing.  And I was rapidly running out of month in which to write.

Then, with only days to go before the deadline, inspiration struck.  And struck hard.  I went from zero words to over a thousand words in the course of an afternoon.  It was as if the whole thing just sprang from my brain fully formed.  I had the idea, and almost instantly knew the beginning, middle and end, the beats, how I wanted to reveal the ending, even little details.  It was a burst of creativity I was almost sorry to burn off on such a short project.

And while I’m not going to be so vain as to think it’s perfect, I did very little revising on it.  Apart from trimming it down to reach the word limit, the story I submitted was very nearly identical to the story I finished that afternoon.  I probably could have spent more time on it, but in my mind, flash fiction means not only the length, but the time spent on it. Done in a flash, so to speak.  Riding the wave of that initial idea, mainlining it in a mad dash to the finish.  Maybe that’s why I waited so long, to feed off the rush of an impending deadline.

So now it’s posted and waiting for the first comments, and eventually the voting.  Once the contest is done, I’ll post it here, so you can either nod in agreement that it’s pretty good or sadly shake your head at how badly I deluded myself.  In either case, it was a much-needed boost to the confidence.  Now to channel that so it’s there without the pressure of almost running out of time.

Look, Up in the Sky

Sometimes, I want to be the hero.

Never mind if anyone actually needs saving.  Or wants me to be the one to do it.  I want to swoop in and make things better.  To fix what’s broken.  As if, devoid of any awareness of the sheer hubris of it, I’m the one thing that’s needed to make everything all right.  All because I don’t want to see someone unhappy.  Because I don’t want to be the bad guy, who could have done something and didn’t.

But the cape doesn’t always fit.  Because my help would probably only make things more difficult.  Or because to help would mean too great a cost to my own happiness.  A cost I’d eventually resent paying.

And you can’t be that hero all the time.  You stop being a savior once the saving is done.  Then what?  You don’t just get to write “And they lived happily ever after” and end the story.  You have to live through that ever after.  One you already tried writing once.

Maybe the truly heroic thing to do is not feel like I have to be the hero.

And maybe the one I need to save is me.

Where the Series Has Gone Before: Star Trek Into Darkness

Look, Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness.  It’s been all but confirmed for ages now, and it’s such a non-surprise, the film itself even tosses out the reveal like it’s no big deal.  This isn’t a movie built around that revelation.  And with that character’s presence, certain story beats were a given.  I was prepared for that, ready to let the film be its own take on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  What I wasn’t prepared for was how much this new film aped not the 1982 classic, but J.J. Abrams reboot from all of four years ago.  He must think our memories are really short.

Because once again we’re presented with the story of a brash, hot-headed young Captain James T. Kirk who learns what it takes to become a leader.  Into Darkness even takes great pains to deprive him of the Enterprise only to have him get it back again what feels like almost immediately.  He goes through most of the same beats with Spock and Dr. McCoy as he did in the first film too.  There’s another time-lost villain posing a threat to the planet, and even another scientific deus ex machina waiting around to save the day.  We even get the Enterprise once again racing off where no man has gone before, actually beginning the famed five-year mission everyone had assumed they were off on at the end of the last film.  For a film that’s taking an awful risk in mirroring perhaps the best-loved iteration of Trek ever, it’s puzzling that it wouldn’t choose to offer a little more originality to compensate.

As for how it fares as a redo of Wrath of Khan, it can’t help but suffer from not having a decades-0ld TV episode already dispensing with the backstory.  The film has to spend time filling us in on who Khan is, which comes as no surprise to longtime Trek fans and has zero resonance for anyone unfamiliar with “Space Seed” and Wrath of Khan.  Not even a ham-handed cameo by Leonard Nimoy as Spock Prime gravely intoning the severity of the danger posed by Khan can provide enough heft.  And the truth is, Cumberbatch really didn’t need to be Khan for this story to work.  His initial campaign of terror against the Federation is big enough and ruthless enough to make him a credible threat without having to drape him in the spirit of Ricardo Montalban.  The film already introduces a secret division within Starfleet working on top-secret military projects; why not just have Khan be a genetic experiment who rebels against his creators?  It would still have echoes of the original Khan story without being a retread, you’d still be able to have Peter Weller’s corrupt Admiral Marcus behind it all, and you wouldn’t have to spend time explaining an old Star Trek episode in the middle of things.

Another reason the Wrath of Khan parallels fail is that the lesson learned here isn’t as deep or significant as Abrams and company seem to think it is.  In the original film, an aging Kirk is forced to deal not only with the mistakes of his past but with the uncertainty of his future.  He’s not just afraid of growing old, but of growing useless.  And despite the grave losses suffered at the hands of Khan, he emerges reborn, staring into the coalescing Genesis planet and saying, “I feel young.”  The big lesson of Into Darkness seems to be that yes, Spock can beat the crap out of somebody if pushed hard enough, and that Kirk is willing to sacrifice himself for his ship and crew.  The truth is that these iterations of Kirk and Spock — and of Trek itself — are too young and inexperienced for the ordeal of Khan have any of the resonance it had in Wrath of Khan.  There’s no weight of years on them, no strength of friendship.  So when Into Darkness has its go at Wrath of Khan‘s famous death scene — this time with Kirk on the wrong side of the glass — it’s diluted not only by the knowledge Chris Pine isn’t going anywhere, but by the Kirk/Spock friendship having barely begun.  We’re being asked to haul in our fondness for the older film to lend this one its emotion.

And it’s too bad, because when Into Darkness is just being a big, loud summer science fiction blockbuster, it’s tons of fun.  Abrams and the cast drop right back into the easy chemistry they established the first time around, the action is epic, and Cumberbatch absolutely knocks it out of the park with his performance.  If this could have just been its own Trek, echoing the past instead of mimicking it, it would have been a much more satisfying film.  Right before the credits roll, the Enterprise swoops gracefully across space as Kirk intones his obligatory monologue, promising strange new worlds, new life, and new civilization.  Let’s hope the next Trek film finds some new life of its own.

What I’d Watch 5/16/13: IDIC

Not content to mop up over the course of three days, Paramount moved up the release of Star Trek Into Darkness to today. It’s actually a pretty clever move; it gets an extra day of box office this week, then undoubtedly a bump from the holiday next weekend, ensuring there’s no big second week drop like most of these blockbusters suffer.  Assuming, of course, it does big business this weekend.  And there’s no reason to assume it won’t.  Because this version of Trek belongs to everybody now.

I think that’s the reason behind some of the resentment towards J.J. Abrams’ reboot. For the longest time, Trek was our thing.  It belonged to the geeks.  Even when names like Kirk and Spock and Picard were in the mainstream consciousness, the actual property, the movies and the TV show, were still pretty niche.  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, still arguably the franchise’s high water mark, grossed just $78 million in 1982.  Now granted, that’s 1982 money, and a time when breaking $100 million was still a big deal and not the stuff of opening weekends.  But Trek was never really a blockbuster franchise.  Before Abrams came along, the biggest hit of the bunch was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and that was only good enough to rank #5 for the year, behind such classics as Crocodile Dundee and The Karate Kid Part II.  It was popular, it was profitable, but it sure wasn’t Star Wars.

And I think most Trek fans liked it that way.  Theirs was the serious franchise, the one that was about ideas, not money.  I know fans who thought Voyage Home was a huge sellout, that it was Trek dumbed down for the masses. It wasn’t that they didn’t want Trek to be popular; they just wanted it to be popular for the right reasons.  And if success meant diluting the property, well, those fans were happy with modest box office if it meant Trek continuing on as it always had.  Some of those fans gritted their teeth when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, seeing it as a pale imitation of the original, even as interest in the new show led to more people rediscovering the old one. But even with Next Generation‘s popularity — which didn’t really translate to box office success — the Trek franchise still felt like it mostly belonged to the geeks.

Then along came Abrams’ Star Trek in 2009, and suddenly, Trek was cool.  Instead of aging TV actors and British thespians, the cast was full of good-looking young people.  Everything looked iPod sleek.  It was new and unfamiliar, and furthermore, Abrams was daring to undo some forty years of Trek history and start the whole thing over again.  Never mind that it was exactly what the franchise needed, a shaking off of the layer upon layer of burdensome continuity.  Even tossing in Leonard Nimoy as Spock felt to some more like insult than homage, forcing him to stand by as he was essentially written out of the Trek timeline.  And when the film went on to be the biggest Trek of all time — it made more than the highest grossing original series and Next Generation films combined — well, that was it.  That cool indie band you’d always wished everybody listened to more was now being listened to by everybody, and you couldn’t stand them anymore.

Not that there weren’t valid complaints to be made about Abrams’ Trek.  Nero’s entire plan doesn’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny.  The whole red matter thing borders on deus ex machina.  And yes, the lens flares can be a little annoying.   But the energy of the cast and of Abrams’ pacing of the film simply steamroll all those issues.  It’s a big, crowd-pleasing film that may not be Trek in the sense of exploring strange new worlds, but which is Trek through and through when it comes to the core relationships of the main characters.

Of course, Abrams didn’t do himself any favors by raising the specter of Trek‘s holy grail with Into Darkness.  ”The villain is Khan!” rumors started almost as soon as the credits rolled on the first film, and Abrams’ deliberate obtuseness about the matter only further fuel the speculation — and the ire of fans for whom Wrath of Khan is simply unassailable.  And I’ll admit, I think a Khan story without the weight of years behind it lacks the resonance that made Wrath of Khan so memorable.  Then again, I haven’t seen the new film, and I’ll withhold judgment on how well this story works until I do.  But there’s a lot of uneasiness out there among Trek fans over Abrams even making the attempt that will undoubtedly color their impressions of the film, no matter how good it may be otherwise.

We’re already seeing the same sort of reactions about Abrams and the new Star Wars movies.  That they’ll either be retreads of the original films, so why bother?  Or that they’ll be so removed from the original films, why bother? We have this fear of seeing something familiar get treated in an unfamiliar way.  We cling to our weathered paperbacks and our bagged comic books and our DVDs, always looking backward, insisting that our memories are the correct ones.  It’s an attitude not entirely unjustified in light of some of the dreadful remakes and reimaginings that we’ve been subjected to over the years.  But it’s also an attitude that would have cost us The Magnificent Seven.  Or the original Star Wars.  Debate and discuss the quality of a film all you want.  But the fact that the film exists at all shouldn’t be held against it.

And if the new Trek isn’t your cup of tea?  Guess what?  The original series still exists.  Wrath of Khan is on a gorgeous Blu-ray.  You can stream Next Generation on Netflix.  Nothing Abrams does can take those away from you.  If you’re a true Trekkie, you’ll know the Vulcan IDIC, which means “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” It’s the core of Vulcan philosophy, celebrating the innumerable variety existing in the universe.  Surely among those infinite combinations there’s room for more than one version of Star Trek.

CineMe 1988: Die Hard

1988: Die Hard

Directed by John McTiernan
Written by Steven de Souza and Jeb Stuart

“… I could talk about industrialization and men’s fashion all day, but I’m afraid work must intrude…”

It never should have worked.  I mean, look at that poster.  That wouldn’t have been out of place in an issue of TV Guide advertising the next episode of some detective show.  Especially considering the guy on it was best known for a decidedly non-action hero role on a romantic TV comedy.  And was eighteen months removed from this:

Yep, that’s the face of a tough New York City cop taking on forty stories of sheer adventure.  Seriously, this had disaster written all over.

And yet here we are twenty-five years later and Die Hard is one of the most beloved action films of all time.  Not only that, it became a blueprint, forever a part of the cinematic lexicon as “Die Hard on a ________.”  Bruce Willis proved to indeed be the face of a tough New York City cop, Alan Rickman gave us one of the greatest villains of all time, and John McTiernan brought it all together in a breathless package of constantly escalating stakes, perfectly timed humor, and spectacular yet clever action.  It’s become an unlikely Christmas tradition given its holiday setting, and a handy litmus test for anyone who wants to test a potential friend.  If you don’t like Die Hard, who knows what else might be wrong with you?

All of that ties into why Die Hard is here on this list.  But there’s a personal connection too.  And it has to do with how I didn’t see Die Hard.

I’ve mentioned plenty of times how my dad and I were a constant movie-going duo.  Good stuff, bad stuff, we sat through, innumerable weekends while I lived at home.  And as it happened, we ended up with passes to a sneak preview of Die Hard.  We weren’t sure it would be good, but for free, we’d give it a go.  But as the time to leave neared, my parents got into some inane argument.  There was some family drama at the time that had everyone on edge, the kind that helps escalate simple disagreements into a good old-fashioned shouting matches.  And to be honest, I was a little sick of it.

There I was minutes away from driving away with my dad to some silly action movie.  If I did that, I felt like I was taking his side.  If I stayed home, I felt like I’d be siding with my mom.  And to be honest, I felt like they both held a fair share of the blame.  I stood by listening, holding the passes in my hands.  And that’s when it occurred to me that I had a third option.  I interrupted their argument by tearing the passes in half, tossing them on the kitchen table, and informing my parents that I was going to a friend’s house until they both decided to grow up.  And then I got the hell out of there before they could say or do anything.

I stayed out long enough to make sure everyone was asleep by the time I got home.  I slept in long enough for my dad to have left for work before I emerged from my room.  Yeah, not the bravest of moves, but I’d never really asserted myself like that to my parents before, so I had no idea how they’d react.  When I finally talked to my mom that morning, she said my dad was fairly surprised, and that I’d pretty much defused the argument.

That was it, really.  Sure, there was a small bit of tension when my dad got home, but it was soon forgotten.  There were no delusions that I’d put an end to all the drama — that would take much more than ripping up some movie tickets — but I’d taken a stand.  It felt like one of those moments that Daniel Stern would earnestly narrate over on The Wonder Years.

My dad and I saw plenty of other movies together, but Die Hard never was one of them.  I ended up seeing it with some friends, and with no small amount of guilt.  But if the incident proved anything, it was that the bond between me and my parents was strong enough to withstand such things.  And whenever I see my dad these days, I try to take him to a movie.  I figure I owe him a few.

Organized Labors

Quite a few gamer geeks I know will argue that the best part of being into tabletop games isn’t the strategy, or the competition, or the companionship.  It’s not being exposed to a wide variety of genres and game mechanics and designs or being surprised by some hidden gem that comes out of nowhere.  No, the real thrill of gaming, what keeps them going, is the chance to organize and re-organize dozens of little cardboard counters and wooden blocks.

You’d think a product that comes in a fairly sturdy box wouldn’t need much in the way of storage.  But inside that box are usually player pieces, victory point tokens, coins, resource blocks, location chits, action markers, worker tiles, rules cards, and any number of other components that make chess look like Candy Land.  You could just toss everything back in the box when you’re done playing and keep it all reasonably secure, but you’re in for a nightmare when it comes time to actually play.  Nobody wants to spend half their gaming evening simply getting ready to game.  You need a way to keep all the coal in one place, all the corn in another, and everything of one color in a nice tidy package so you can just go, “Here, you’re blue.”

So any gamer who’s worth calling themselves that accessorizes with a proper variety of resealable bags and plastic containers for all their assorted pieces.  And I’m not talking about zip-lock bags off the grocery shelf or Tupperware. These are bags in a variety of sizes and containers with multiple customizable compartments.  We’ll commandeer tackle boxes and tool cases for our miniature games, or order custom-fit foam cases in which to gently nestle our figures.  We’ll sort by color, by type, by size, by shape, by theme, and then, after a while, we’ll do it all again, looking for that perfect combination of utility and aesthetics  that not only allows us to find what we need, but earns approving nods from our fellow gamers.  It’s just as much a game as the things we’re so obsessively trying to organize.

And for some, it doesn’t even go that far.  For them, it’s all downhill once they open the box.  They live for that moment when they tear the shrink-wrap away, slide off the lid, and view those pristine sheets of counters just waiting to be punched out.  They’re like kids on Christmas morning, filled with excited glee as they tear into their presents, only to sit in somewhat disappointed silence once the wrapping paper is strewn everywhere and all the secrets have been revealed.  If they had their way, they’d open everybody’s games, swooping in as soon as the box is open.

Just today, I bought three boxes in which to store a bunch of game cards that I had previously spent a few hours sorting into binder-sized pocket pages separated by divider tabs.  Yesterday’s solution is tomorrow’s inelegant mess.  And the kicker?  It’s a game I haven’t even played yet.  But I sure have organized the hell out of it.

CineMe 1987: The Princess Bride

1987: The Princess Bride

Directed by Rob Reiner
Written by William Goldman

“When I was your age, television was called books.”

There’s a certain feeling that creeps over you when you’re watching a film you know is going to become a classic.  It’s sort of like falling in love.  You’re meeting someone new, and you’re spending a little time getting to know them.  At first, they’re charming and say all the right things, but you’re waiting for that misstep, that flaw.  Then they surprise you by not making that mistake.  After a while, you’re smitten, but you’re not sure there’s more to it than that.  Amazingly, there is.  There’s a whole other level you didn’t expect, and that’s the moment you’re head over heels and want to see them again as soon as possible.  That was me seeing Star Wars.  And Raiders of the Lost Ark.  And The Fellowship of the Ring.  And that was nearly everybody who saw The Princess Bride.

Hollywood covets the four-quadrant film, the one that appeals to male and female, young and old.  And while The Princess Bride wasn’t anywhere close to being a blockbuster, even by 1987 standards, the sheer strength of its endurance is a testament to the fact that there’s something in it for everyone.  Like the posters said, “Heroes.  Giants.  Villains.  Wizards.  True Love.” What more could you possibly want?  I feel truly sorry for the grizzled, shriveled soul that can’t find room in their heart for at least one moment from this film.

What makes it so memorable is that it’s not content to simply throw together a bunch of old tropes and let us smile as we recognize them.  It’s in the way the film simultaneously pays homage to and affectionately sends up those tropes.  The brilliant conceit of framing the film as a book being read aloud not only allows it to work as a statement on the power of storytelling, but lets the film comment on itself in a natural way.  That doesn’t mean the characters themselves don’t realize they’re in a fairy tale, but the deconstruction is all so warm and affectionate, you walk out believing in magic as opposed to having had the curtain pulled away.

And just when we’d driven nearly every quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail into the ground, along came The Princess Bride to resupply us for the next decade.  We really needed it too.  I love me some Python, but man did we need some new material.  But instead of being the sole province of geekdom, The Princess Bride worked its way into the mainstream.  Say, “Have fun storming the castle,” and I bet 9 out of 10 people will know what you’re talking about.  And the tenth person is one of those grizzled, shriveled souls I talked about earlier.

I first saw The Princess Bride at a draft house, an incongruously adult place to see such a child-like film.  We bought a pitcher, but after a while, we were drunk on what was up on the screen, and the beer was forgotten.  It maybe a four-quadrant film, but it’s the child inside the film truly speaks to.