Pacific Rim: Written By Ten-Year-Olds, Made By Masters
There’s a lot of hand-wringing in nerd circles because Pacific Rim wasn’t a monster hit; it came in third at the box office this weekend, behind Adam Sandler’s Grown-Ups 2. And that’s because Pacific Rim is a deeply flawed movie that reminds me of, of all movies, Titanic.
Because Pacific Rim is immune to criticism in the same way Titanic is. Yes, it’s full of cheesy dialogue. Yes, some of the action sequences don’t quite make physical sense. Yes, the plot falls apart to the point where you’re actively questioning the plot points as they arise.
It’s also, like Titanic and Starship Troopers before it, tremendous fun if you hop on board.
The thing about Guillermo del Toro is that he swings for the rafters on this; he has a beautiful eye for scope, and so these huge robots feel terrifyingly, gloriously, large. He keeps finding the perfect shot to make them large, putting smaller things next to them so you never forget the scale; a seagull, a school of fish, a schoolgirl. When they’re stomping through downtown Hong Kong, goddamn if they don’t look like they’re titans battling among skyscrapers. You feel small, and strangely ennobled, getting a ringside seat next to such massive violence. And visually, it’s one of the most stylish movies to come along in a while, because everything has this worked-over feel that the original Star Wars had; these robots are banged up, scraped, they feel well-used. If you’re looking for eye candy, your eyes will be swimming in diabetes by the time it is all done.
As for the plot, well, it has one. This film gets by on sheer audacity, with people making such boldly bizarre statements in that Charlton Heston way of delivery that you either buckle under the strain of this bizarre reality and let it invade you, or you despise it. I mean, of course when two-hundred-foot high monsters start invading from the sea, the only answer is to build even larger robots to fight them. Of course, despite this apocalyptic scenario, there are only two scientists in the entire world devoted to analyzing the biology of these bizarre sea creatures. Of course each of the monsters arrives on a schedule, so we can better plan our robot-fighting techniques.
But all my attempts at snark wash off. I was grinning like a schoolboy the entire time, because if you pile absurdity onto absurdity, eventually it collapses into a sort of bizarre Axe Cop-like black hole where you realize Pacific Rim is not trying to emulate reality, it is trying to assemble a whole separately new reality that’s twice as entertaining. It is staring logic in and eye and saying, “…but what fun would that be?”
On one level Pacific Rim is a hot mess of filmmaking… but on the other, it surpasses all of its flaws to be strapped together much like the robots in the movie: functioning despite all disbelief.
Pacific Rim claps its hands together and dares you to mock it. What it loves, it loves hard, and unapologetically. If you’re looking for giant fucking robots to judo-toss Godzilla, well, Guillermo Del Toro said, “I want that to happen.” And he welded all that together with dialogue straight from frommage and special effects to make you gasp and a story that kind of sort of hangs together, and either you decide to hop on board or you hipster your way out of a hell of a lot of fun.
It’s up to you, man. But I’d ride the robot, if you can. It’s worth it. (And doubly so in 3-D, which I hardly ever say.)
I'm Teaching Master Classes In Story Writing: Care To Watch?
In woodworking, they say the difference between the amateur and the pro is that the pro knows how to fix his mistakes. And that’s true. You’re always going to have a door that doesn’t quite fit, or a frame that’s not quite square, or dovetail joint that doesn’t match up; that’s the nature of working with an organic material.
The trick is to know what to do when things go wrong.
And quite a bit has gone wrong for me as I’ve been live-writing my latest story. My first idea didn’t pan out, and I had to be smart enough to recognize when to bail on it after three separate attempts. The second idea wound up having a very tricky plot that was at odds with its emotional impact, and so I wrote literally three passes on the first 2,000 words before I was content to call it even a first draft. And this sucker is due in two weeks.
What I’m doing at the Clarion Echo this year is fixing a story in real time. This is as clear a view as I can give you into my head when I’m analyzing a nonfunctioning story, showing you how I’m diagnosing the problems, erasing the weak parts that aren’t working and uncovering the core so I can bring it back to life. Which, I think, is the kind of information I would have killed for ten years ago back when I was wandering in the woods, wondering why my stories weren’t selling. Stories involve getting tons of tiny details right, and I’m showing you what happens when you focus on the wrong details – and, more importantly, how to strip those inessential elements away to bring out the truth in it.
Plus, you get stories. This week I’ll be rewriting my tale “The Girl Dances, The White Curtain Flutters,” the tale of a girl on a mining asteroid who’s in love with Bollywood movies. That’s a good solid draft I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy, and then I’ll show you what I need to fix to take it from “good” to “salable, perhaps.”
If that sounds interesting, then I’ll remind you that I am blogging for the Clarion Write-A-Thon, and a mere $5 donation gets you access to six weeks’ worth of intensive analysis from me. ($25 gets you a short story critique, if you desire one.) And even if you’re not at all interested in the nuts and bolts of writing, if you could donate whatever you can, I’d take it as a personal favor – Clarion was the workshop that took me from “struggling nobody” to “Oh, wait, maybe I have heard of that guy” in the world of fiction, and I feel a deep responsibility to my alma mater.
So. $5 and an LJ account will get you in. I’ll do my damndest – have been doing my damndest – to make it worth your while. Please donate?
How My Mother's Generosity Ruined Our Sex Lives
My Mom is a very sweet woman, and so after listening to us discussing our backaches from our decade-old bed, last Christmas she went in 50/50 with us on a new bed.
We’ve barely had sex since.
The lack of sex isn’t my Mom’s fault. It’s the bed. The bed is a luxurious king-sized bed, which we’d never had to navigate before – it’s lovely to sleep in, as we can curl up in our own nests, never having to worry about bumping ankles. But getting to each other involves crossing a vast veldt of black blankets, a kind of humping crawl that takes ten, maybe fifteen minutes to be able to touch each other in the center.
It isn’t helped that the bed is a fluffy quagmire. It’s a foam latex bed, not quite as bad as memory foam (whose tight, form-fitting grasp makes me feel like I’m Han Solo trapped in carbonite), but it is very soft and swallowing, so watching someone traverse it is like watching a fly struggle to get out of a web. This bed is made for sleep, and slumber enforces it with a firmly mattressed hand; I’ve watched Gini struggle to cross the field of snooze to get to me, grow exhausted, and doze off in mid-stride.
So, with such a glutinous surface beneath us, trying to get, er, traction on any sort of amorous times becomes a huge issue. It’s like trying to have sex on a bag of Play-Doh; anywhere you put your knees, your hands, your face, sinks beneath you, making any attempt to connect with your lover a strenuous effort. The bed is actively trying to separate you, your weight sucking you away from each other, making certain conjoinings damn near impossible. We’ve actually taken to going for the big S in other rooms in the house when we want to experiment, because this bed? Is a vacuum traction of anti-intimacy.
Then, as it turns out, the bed actually reduces our overtures of sex. We were analyzing the reasons why we’d dropped so precipitously the other day, and it turns out that much of our sexytimes are jump-started by cuddling. Because you know, we’re not in the mood but hey, let’s snuggle up, and whoah, there’s a warm and cute body next to us, so, you know….
…except that this sweeping plain of a bed makes snuggling an effort. We have to fight our way past tides of blankets to get to each other – and it doesn’t help that we’ve taken to creating our own sleepy-holes, piled high with pillows and blankets and twigs and spare bits of lint and what have you.
So last night, Gini and I decided that to save our sensuality, we had to make room for snuggling. No more plopping into the Bed of Nap and dozing off; no, we must fling aside these impromptu Les Mis-style of barricades and cuddle for fifteen minutes before we drifted off.
It worked.
But the interesting thing in all of this is how much of our sex lives are formed by tiny details. Would we have thought that a new bed would make such a large change to our usual flurry of activity? No. But change two things, and the results were notable. And while on one level it’s just sex, on another level it’s a meditation on how our environment alters our behavior in ways we don’t even consider. We’d noticed the slowdown, but it took us a while to hunt for the cause, and it turned out it was things that should, in a sane world, have nothing to do with each other.
And I’m reminded of my daughter, heartbroken, because the boy she loved lived in Alaska, and she lived in Massachusetts, and she didn’t want to move to Alaska and he didn’t want to move to Massachusetts. She was aghast that something so stupid, so trivial as a choice of location, could stop love. “But things like that destroy love all the time,” I told her. “Bills don’t seem like they’d break a relationship, but hell yeah they do. Cleanliness. Pets. The way you like things arranged in the bathroom. All sorts of stupid mundane things affect a romance, and it seems like this effervescence of beauty shouldn’t be dragged down by chores and jobs… but they are. They totally are. And you just have to deal with it.”
For us, it’s a bed that shifted the underlying methods of our love life in ways we’d never realized. Two unrelated factors shifted our patterns of intimacy, a Skinner reflex no one could have anticipated. But hey, at least we’re aware of it.
Now? Time to fight back against the Bed of Asceticism.
The Arcade Cabinet: A Vital Update
I can’t just tell you how cool this is, so instead I’ll give it to you through the glory of video:
The weird thing is how much building a thing is like writing fiction. All I can see are a list of about fifteen things that I could have done better, or things I need to patch before it’s finished. (Anyone watching me live-blog the story I’m writing in The Clarion Echo will tell you how much I critique my fiction in-progress.) I’m constantly frowning as crap, that paint job’s a little shoddy, or that gap needs to be shimmed, or that shelf should be leveled.
But then, as happened last night, I catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye and see it as if it was the first time I’d seen it, and shit: that’s actually an arcade fucking cabinet. Maybe it would win no contests as-is, but it’s still way better than I could have done had I never tried at all.
It’s like writing stories. I’m in writer-mode and it’s all sentence-level stuff – a terrible word, a viewpoint shift, a missed emotional beat. And yes, those things all need to be fixed, because a story is the emotional accumulation of a hundred details, and the more of them you can get perfectly right, the better the story will be. And while you’re in that Felix Fix-It mode, the story appears to be a collection of missed opportunities, a heap of wrecked things.
And if you’re lucky, sometimes you read the story after forgetting about it for a while, and all of those beautiful things you mastered shimmered into view and you think, “That’s not bad.”
My cabinet. It’s flawed. But it’s not bad. And like all my drafts in progress, it’ll get better.
How Being A Webmaster Made Me Grateful During Power Outages
The power went out last night. Which was irritating, since the storm had passed. I have no problems if there’s a big kraka-BOOM and the lights short out, but there’s something vaguely irritating at looking up at blue sky and seeing the neighbors stumbling out of their homes to confirm our collective loss.
Turns out we were part of a 167-house blackout, which is usually not a good sign. Last time, the power took two days to come back on, and I had to work in a Panera Bread. I was not looking forward to getting up at ass o’clock to try to leech bandwidth off of a chain restaurant.
Yet we hopefully flipped the fan switch before we went to sleep, and at around four in the morning, we felt a cool breeze on our bodies. The gentlest, most perfect way of being alerted that the electricity had returned.
I’d be upset about the power outage in general, but I’m a webmaster. If my site crashes, I gotta go figure out why, which means I’ve kept some pretty damn odd hours. And it’s not always easy, with everybody bitching because they wanted to read the latest Magic articles and why don’t you just fix it and this site is shitty, you’re shitty, how dare you inconvenience me. Meanwhile, I’m working on tremendously complicated architectures, trying to figure out which layer collapsed and why, fleshing out plans so this doesn’t happen again, often with several layers of management huffing down my neck asking, so when do we make money again?
The power guys are doing all of that, but with lives on the line at hospitals, in the rain, in deadly danger if they touch the wrong cord. They’re working sixteen-hour shifts, pulled away from the things they wanted to do, out driving from downed wire to downed wire to provide the juice that society lives on. And there’s all the griping that dammit, I’ve got raw chicken in this fridge that’s gonna spoil… but really, I just feel grateful. I been there, guys. You’re working the suck right now, fixing things you may not have had optimal control over in the first place, and your reward for getting it working again is usually an exasperated “Finally!”
I didn’t have to work at Panera today because some schmuck in a hard hat was working at four in the morning. That was really nice of you. Thanks.