So Who Should Have Directed The New Star Wars?
When I expressed dread at the upcoming Star Wars movie yesterday, I got a lot of people floating their dream directors for the project. And I have to say: given the idiotic constraints Disney put on the film, JJ Abrams is probably the best director they could have gotten.
Which is to say that Disney treated Star Wars as “release date first, everything else second.” They’d locked down the date so all the other movie studios would get out of the way, and are now lurching towards that date come hell or highwater. As noted, it’s coming eighteen months from now, and they haven’t finished the script. (It took Lucas four years to write the script for the original Star Wars, and about eighteen months for everyone concerned to finish the script for Empire Strikes Back – and that was with Lucas’ overarching story notes.) Clearly, what the big D wants is “A huge profit center,” and the actual quality of the movie is secondary to dominating Christmas 2015 with the inevitable Star Wars juggernaut.
So given that a huge quality film often takes years to develop, and they needed to toss something together quick, JJ Abrams is a good choice. He’s flashy, he works quick, he’s clever.
But if we had infinite time, and Disney had treated the Star Wars films as though they were, you know, Star Wars and not some expensive direct-to-video sequel to the Lion King, who would have been best qualified to direct?
Not Kevin Smith. Disclaimer: I like Kevin Smith. He’s directed some funny movies. But I can’t recall a film of his where he’s had a memorable action sequence (and yes, I’m recalling both Dogma and Red State), and his characters are often all quips and no depth. The glory of Star Wars is that it has things both ways – Han is both snarky and a real character, as is Luke, as is Leia. Kevin Smith would certainly nail the quips, but would you really root for his heroes the way you did for Luke and Han? I doubt it. Plus, Kevin’s kind of a lazy writer.
In addition, Kevin’s a big Star Wars fanboy. That’s actually not a real bonus for me. When you have someone who treats the original material with such reverence, what you get is a sort of Christopher Columbus-does-Harry Potter movies thing where you have someone working so hard at emulation they forget to do anything actually interesting. I think Kevin, with no experience helming big-budget, high-SFX projects, would be a disaster. (Though script-doctoring? Oh, bring in Kevin!)
Not Joss Whedon.
I also like Joss, but when all this hooplah started he was committed to Marvel via an adamantium contract. I’ll hold out for quality, but I don’t really wanna wait until 2021 for my movie.
Plus, Joss needs to be restrained to work properly. When he has his own projects, he winds up making all his characters miserable. Do you really want Luke to die, Wash-style, at the end of this new Star Wars? I almost guarantee you something like that’d happen; Joss loves his heroic sacrifice, and who would be a bigger moment than watching Harrison Ford get the noble sacrifice he was pushing for all the way back in Return of the Jedi? You might see Luke and Han and Leia going out in a blaze of glory.
James Cameron.
Given that he’s obsessed with Avatar, you’d have to back a truckload of money up – maybe even buy him the sunken remains of the Titanic.
But seriously, gripe though you might, Cameron is the spiritual successor to Lucas. Corny dialogue that actually works for most people? Check. Ability to direct the best action sequences put to film, sequences that could only really be appreciated on the big screen in an age of video streaming? Check. Familiarity with SFX? Check. Overreliance on the Campbellian hero archetype? Checkity-check.
Yes, Cameron would probably bring his techno-fetish to the new Star Wars, and make it a little more military than I’d be comfortable with. And the new Star Wars wouldn’t appear until 2018 at the earliest, even if he started the day of the announcement. (The man takes his time.) But assuming you could get him to do the job, he’d be damned perfect for it.
But Cameron would probably have turned it down (who’s to say he didn’t?), so that leaves me with my next bet…
Brad Bird.
“Who?” You ask. The guy who directed The Incredibles, that’s who – perhaps the best superhero film of this century. The guy who directed Iron Giant, and don’t you dare tell me you don’t tear up when you hear the robot saying “Superman.”
“But those are cartoons!” you say, and I’ll counter that he directed the last Mission Impossible with its breathtaking “Tom Cruise leaps off the side of a Dubai skyscraper” sequence.
Brad Bird is the perfect choice, because he really cares about melding character with action, the old Star Wars way. He’s got good lines in him (especially if you get a Kevin Smith in to funny it up). And he really knows how to direct some amazing action sequences with ratcheting tension, which is what Star Wars is known for. It’s a shame he turned Disney down because they needed him to start directing ASAP, but I’m still looking forward to Tomorrowland (coming 2015 to a theater near you).
Gore Verbinski.
Okay, yeah, he just bombed and bombed hard with The Lone Ranger, so nobody would want him. And his work on Pirates of the Caribbean sequels were, shall we say, exactly the sort of crappy sequel that I fear (and that Disney rushed out in the same way that they are rushing Star Wars).
But my hope is that Gore has learned his lesson – and when he’s on his game, he makes the original Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring. He’s visually inventive, and I’ll put the original Depp-vs.-Bloom duel in Pirates, complete with witty banter, up against anything in Star Wars. If he understands that his job is to fight the studio’s onrushing deadlines and work to get only quality, I think he’d actually do a damned fine job.
Darren Aronofsky.
Okay, the guy who brought us Noah, The Black Swan, Pi, and The Fountain would be a terrible choice, transforming the visuals into hunched dark landscapes and Luke into a zealot seeking redemption at all costs… but damn, if anyone’s going to wreck the series, I want to see the way he wrecks it.
Someone I Hadn’t Considered.
Hey, Peter Jackson was not on my radar when Lord of the Rings was announced, but he turned out to be a fine choice. “The guy who directed Evil Dead” would not have been my go-to for revitalizing Spider-Man. The Spanish guy who did that film about two dudes taking a roadtrip would not have been my pick for directing the best movie in the Harry Potter franchise.
If I was going to go for Star Wars, I’d probably skip the guys who’d had multimillion dollar hits and choose someone who’d had success with limited budgets, someone who knew how to take $1,000 and make it look like a million, someone with the same hungry eye that Lucas had when he started out. After all, if you were going to direct the new Star Wars, would you choose the guy whose biggest hit ’til then was a film about teenagers in the 1950s?
But you know, that film was American Graffiti and that director was one Mr. George Lucas, so it just goes to show: you never know.
Cleveland's Cross-Town Cancer Culture
We love the Meyers, but they are inconveniently located. We live on the West Side of Cleveland; the Meyers live on the East. And thanks to Cleveland’s bizarre reluctance to build a freeway anywhere near population centers, there is no direct route.
So instead of a twenty-minute trip, getting there is a forty-minute ride across buckled streets and dodgy neighborhoods. This makes scheduling tricky; I have to work eight hours, I have to write two hours, and if I want to see the Meyers then to the East Side’s inconvenience we must go and that’s ninety minutes vanished right there in transit.
Yet we must. Not just because they are our friends, but because our goddaughter Rebecca has brain cancer.
We don’t know how long she has. And we need to stand by our dear friends in their hour of need.
And Kat, seeing our stress, has been encouraging us to go to a cancer counselor – someone specialized in dealing with the grief and stress that comes from watching a loved one go through this. And it is stressful. We call Rebecca our godchild, but Gini pointed out to me that we were literally the first ones to lay eyes on each of the Meyer children as they arrived at the home. We’ve changed their diapers, bandaged their wounds, played with them regularly.
In a very real sense, the definition is closer to “grandchildren.”
In a very real sense, as Rebecca diminishes, so do I.
But I’ve been holding off on going to the cancer counselor, because I don’t have time to squeeze in yet another ninety minutes of driving on top of everything else. I’m glad Kat and Eric have someone to go to, but me? I can’t haul my ass over to the East side again, not for therapy, I really can’t.
Until Gini pointed out that there was also a clinic here. On the West Side. Ten minutes away. She seemed aghast that I’d think there was only one clinic to deal with Cleveland’s cancer-related psychological issues.
But really, deep in my heart, I’d subconsciously hoped that what we were going through wasn’t that common. Watching Rebecca is tearing us to shreds. Watching the Meyers is breaking our hearts. Watching ourselves struggle to face this cold reality is slicing time off our lives, the stress weighing on our bodies. I can feel the anxiety shortening my time here, and though I knew it was possible to die of heartbreak, only now do I truly feel how such a thing could happen.
I’d hoped that it was just us. But it isn’t. It’s a hundred people, a thousand, maybe hundreds of thousands over the years, dealing with this goddamned disease and the helplessness you feel as some sickness ravages someone you love, and it was okay when it was just me but knowing this is replicating across the city, the state, the nation, the globe, feels like a door has swept open and all the evils in the world are walking in.
I wanted just one clinic. Inconveniently located. Infrequently used. And the goddamn thing all but has franchises, and today that seems so unfair it makes my fingers tremble.
The New Star Wars Will Be Like A Bad Beauty Queen: Pretty and Vapid
I saw Star Wars well over fifty times in the theater.
I met my wife in a Star Wars chat room on Compuserve, where we debated the dubious wisdom of the Death Star Trench approach.
When we got married, we put Luke and Leia on top of the cake. (I’m not a Han, and you can’t make me.)
And I am dreading the new Star Wars movie.
It’s not that I’m not excited about the idea of a new Star Wars movie, but it seems that “an idea” is all Disney had… well, that and a release date. Which they aren’t changing. So the new Star Wars is coming out next year – and they may not have finished the script, or finished casting, but by God they sure are shooting footage because when the date is looming, dammit, you start filling celluloid.
And what we’ll get, barring some miracle, will be something like Pirates of the Carribean 2 and 3 – also Disney productions that started shooting before the scripts were finalized, pretty things with plots and motivations that hold together only long enough to carry you to the next scene, stitched together with a lot of witty one-liners that you never quite remember because they’re witty like some Twitter status, not witty locked into characterization.
(“Witty locked into characterization” is like the first Pirates, where someone told Jack Sparrow “You’re the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of” and he riposted, “But you have heard of me,” which told us everything we needed to know about the Captain.)
And I like JJ Abrams, but he’s only done an okay job on Star Trek. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the movies… but I enjoy ’em largely because I’m a Star Trek fan, and I tend to forget about them when they’re not around. Yeah, people like the new Star Trek, but do you see half as much fangirl squee about it as you do, say, Sherlock, or Doctor Who? Hell, I’ve seen more happy posts and image memes devoted to Adventure Time than I have these two movies.
The new Star Treks are fire-and-forget summer blockbusters – a good place to be, don’t get me wrong, but it’s coming from a show that was the formative fandom, literally the first adult sci-fi frenzy in history. Those old Star Treks were so popular that the fans went seven years of isolation, not a film or a show or a bone, and still they threw conventions, warming themselves by the fire of old episodes. Those old Star Treks were so popular at the time that they made Doctor Who fandom look tiny.
And now we have two movies, and if there was never a third, I don’t think anyone would have a great uproar the way people still moan for a Firefly reunion. We like those movies. They made us happy. But there’s a difference between “That’s cool” and “ZOMG I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT THIS,” and I’d argue Doctor Who and Sherlock and even Downton Abbey fill that role more than JJ Abrams’ remakes.
And Star Wars? A high bar, man. And JJ Abrams has already shown us what he’s capable of with infinite time to work with: he’ll come up with something sleek, clever, and ultimately dispensable. I’m not bashing JJ Abrams – trying to recreate that magic is all but impossible – but JJ really does like ZOMG PLOT TWIST over character-building any day, and what people ultimately stay for is character. And what happens when the script – the thing that builds character – is being back-written to accommodate Big Splashy Action Sequences?
So I’m pretty sure what we’ll get. It will be pretty. It will be fun to watch. It will be entertaining. And it will slide out the back of our heads, getting dumped into the neglected back yard of Blockbusters We Enjoyed, and won’t take up residence in our souls. It’ll be something we’ll be happy to watch if it comes on late-night television and we’re bored.
But will it be like Princess Bride, or Galaxy Quest, or any number of other films where we don’t just consume it, but actively crave it time after time?
I hope. But I doubt.
I Don't Need To Protect My Favorite Shows
I think Emily Asher-Perrin is the best blogger on Tor.com right now, and she wrote an article called It’s Time To Get Over Firefly. Which basically states that Firefly is overrated because a) it ended before it had a chance to disappoint us, and b) some of the impending plotlines and themes were a little troubling (specifically, the overarching themes of Southern Restoration and the appropriation of Asian themes without actual Asian people).
This caused a hubbub in certain circles. “How dare she say Firefly is overrated!” people cried, rallying the flags, and I’m all like What, hey, why?
I don’t get that defensiveness over fandom. I never have.
I love old-school Doctor Who. But the episodes are padded, the special effects are laughable, and the acting is often wooden. So what? I can acknowledge those flaws and not have them bother me. If I waited for a show to be perfect on every level before I could enjoy it, then I’d never watch a damn thing.
And even if I thought the acting on old-school Who was wonderful, hey, it’s a big world. Some people think Daniel Day-Lewis, the most acclaimed thespian of our generation, is a terrible actor.
Am I such a neurotic that I cannot enjoy something until everyone loves it in the way I do?
And I see all these silly fandom scuffles where people get really bent out of shape because You Do Not Understand The True Batman or ZOMG How Can You Not Love Star Wars and You Dumbass Picard Is Way Better Than Kirk, and some people are getting seriously upset over these things – as though they cannot rest until everyone shares their opinions. As though somehow, a difference in taste is a wound to their very soul.
And I think what happens is that people are making the silly error that “I love it” means “It is perfect.” This is a thought process that inevitably leads to ruin, whether it’s in fandom or work or in romance. Something can sweep you up in whirls of dizzying rapture, but it’s not that it doesn’t have flaws – it’s that you don’t mind them. (Usually because the good stuff is so damned good that you may not even notice the fractures in the background.)
Look, I get that this TV show or movie or comic book has spoken to something deep within you. It expressed something important about your very nature in a way that you wished you’d been able to do it, becoming in a very real sense a part of you. And that’s great. That’s the power of fiction.
But then people make the leap of, “Well, if I like it, then everyone should!”, turning their love into a popularity contest, acting as if they can make this show as well-loved as possible then somehow they’ve vindicated something about themselves. And their fandom mutates away from expressing a love for the show and into a sort of baffled belligerence that anyone could ever not like this thing so crucial to them.
Then they do the usual thing zealots do – they get angry whenever anyone points out an error with the thing they love, they take it personally, and they try to stomp that opposition to the curb so no one brings up this troubling issue ever again. It ceases to be a fandom and more like a religion, where the One Truth Faith must prove itself over the bodies of others.
Look. Pointing out flaws shouldn’t destroy your enjoyment. Poke deeply at the greatest works of art in the world, and you’ll find so-called flaws. Those flaws bother some people, don’t bother others. They don’t bother you, apparently, and that’s all that should matter. Love shouldn’t consist of a battle to the death to justify its existence – there will always be people who don’t like what you do. There will always be people who don’t believe as you do. And as long as they’re not trying to cancel your show (hint: pretty much no fan is ever trying to cancel your show, and none successfully), then their difference of opinion shouldn’t matter.
Relax. Sit back. Let all of those other people roll on with their hatred. The glory of the Internet is that you can find people who like what you do, and fandom should be about accentuating and deepening that like instead of angrily justifying what you enjoy to people who wouldn’t like it anyway.
It’s a big world. Big enough you can sit back in your living room and read the words of people who agree with you. And on those occasions you find someone who disagrees violently, it’s okay to clear your browser cache and move the fuck on.
The Bees Are Back In Town
Who is the most popular character on my blog? If you think it’s me, you’re wrong.
Gini? Nope.
Basing popularity on “How often people ask about them,” the most popular person on this blog is… my bees.
And I have good news! Watch this video!
That’s right – the bees survived the winter. Which was a very uncertain thing for a while. We saw the bees doing cleansing flights a while back (bees do not poop all winter, instead waiting for spring to do their business outside the hive), but then we had several cold snaps again in March and didn’t see them for a month. It was entirely possible that the bees had died in that chilly final stretch, which included four inches of wet snow on the final weekend in March.
Ah, Cleveland. We love your weather.
Better yet, we know the queen survived, because these were new bees. How can you tell? Well, younger bees do an “orientation flight” around the front of the hive, zigzagging back and forth as they map what home looks like before venturing forth, and the hive was alight with lots of bees making sense of the place. So the queen is inside, laying eggs – precisely what we want our queen to do.
But which bees are these? Long-term readers will know that our original bees were the Good Bees – well-tempered bees that hardly ever stung, accepting of our constant novice intrusions. The queen in that hive died off and our attempt to re-queen didn’t take, so sadly, the Good Bees all died. We replaced them with the Bad Bees – very hostile suckers who stung every time we got near them, and chased anyone who got near the hive. We didn’t feed those fuckers and they died off last winter, much to our relief.
So who are these? These are the Mystery Bees. We intended to take care of them, but we went on a trip to Hawaii in July and then Rebecca was diagnosed with brain cancer when we got back in August, so we pretty much ignored them from July on. We don’t know their temperament. Alas, thanks to crazy life-issues, we have become bee-havers, not bee-keepers (as they say scornfully at the meetings), and so we must learn to take care of these guys once we get better gloves. (The mice ate the fingertips out of our gloves.)
We’ll be doing a hive inspection once the weather warms up a bit. But it looks like we’ve got a hive in somewhat working order. That’s a bit of nice news, something we’ve been short on lately.