Movie Review: Captain Phillips (Mild Spoilers)
Every year, before the Oscars, Gini and I see every Best Picture nominee. This involves us seeing a lot of depressing movies that we don’t want to. Why do we do this?
Because occasionally, we get a winner like Captain Phillips.
Captain Phillips didn’t look good in the trailers – noble white guy fights off Somali pirates – and Tom Hanks in the role wasn’t a draw either, as Mr. Hanks is good but too Tom Hanks. He’s like his own moon, eclipsing himself, where you’re watching a movie and thinking, “Boy, that Tom Hanks is doing some damned fine acting pretending to be someone else.” (A reaction I had with him as Disney a few times during Saving Mr. Banks.) So I didn’t think it would be interesting.
Actually, Captain Phillips is two interesting films, and maybe as many as three.
The first film isn’t as engrossing, because sure enough you have Tom Hanks affecting a Bashtan accent, which is conspicuous because you know he doesn’t have one, as a captain getting up in the morning, headed down to the docks, getting his ship ready. Likewise, the Somali pirates get up in a much lesser house, go down to the shoreline, and pick out the guys who are gonna be pirating for the day. Pirates, inevitably, meet ship.
And what you get here is something I haven’t seen done well since The Wire. The Somali pirates aren’t smart, but they are goddamned bright – which is to say, like the gangsters in The Wire, they may not have a fine education, but they have raw brainpower to maximize their limited resources and cause significant trouble for anyone in their path. When they board the ship, the crew’s job is to hide the rest of the crew so they don’t get ransomed and/or killed, and the pirates’ job is to search the ship to find them. And there’s a surprisingly tense Die Hard-on-a-ship segment where Tom Hanks, lying his ass off, with the Somalis knowing he’s trying to lie his ass off, does his desperate best to mislead a bunch of clever guys who have the significant handicap of not knowing how a big boat works.
That’s fascinating, watching two smart segments facing each other down.
Then the second segment starts, and this isn’t a real spoiler because it’s based on a real-life event – but it is, to my mind, the more fascinating part of the film. The US government gets involved. The Somalis had no reason to think the US government would get involved. They’d ransomed a Greek ship for six million dollars a few months ago (and where’d all that money go? Straight to their bosses), and past US MO has been to just pay the cash, but the unspoken bit in all of this is that the US has finally decided that it’s too damn easy to pirate, and this is where we show people that there’s a cost to fucking with the US.
And when the Navy warships show up, it’s all over.
The movie goes on for an hour after that.
And it’s weirdly sad. Because these Somali pirates are vicious, and scared, and prideful. They do not want to acknowledge how little power they have left, because they barely had any to begin with, and now they’re facing down billions in equipment and training versus their stolen-lifeboat-and-automatic rifles. Tom Hanks stops talking in a Boston accent as he’s reduced largely to gibbering and weeping, and what we see here is how fucking impossible it is to fight the US if they know where you are and they decide to lay the hammer down.
You don’t hope the Somalis will escape – they’re vicious, unrepentant, they’ll do it again. But you wish there’d been a better way for these poor sonuvabitches, because what you’re seeing is the tail end of their lives where they’re making things as difficult as possible for the US Navy, but literally nothing they do can make it difficult enough. It’s an exercise in pure ultimate impotency, where the only thing you can do to display power is to kill an innocent or two on your way out – and they’re of mixed emotions on that.
…or maybe not. What I suspect a lot of red-staters saw was, “FUCK YEAH, EXTERMINATE THOSE PIRATES WITH OUR FABULOUS TECHNOLOGY,” and the movie is distant enough that this, too, is a valid interpretation. For me, there was a lot of “Christ, what do people get driven to?” and that twinge as you realize that it’s not wrong to shoot Old Yeller in the head, but there’s got to be something wrong with delighting in it.
And in the end, Tom Hanks brings the Oscar. He has a very brave scene at the end, and I’ll say no more than that. But I forgot the accent, forgot that it was Tom Hanks, forgot everything, because he lost himself in the role in a major way, and that scene alone might have been worth the film.
It wasn’t the best film, but it sure kicked up a lot more feelings than I thought it was. And that’s why we watch the Oscars.
Why Worldbuilding Is Increasingly Important To TV Shows
So Dan Wells wrote an essay on the terrible worldbuilding behind Almost Human, which really pulls apart all the lazy ways in which JJ Abrams set out to create a TV show.
It’s good. Go read it even if you don’t watch the show. It’s a very good explanation of how and why worldbuilding matters.
Now, it’s not that Almost Human is bad – well, actually, it kinda is. Basically, it’s a show with one element that’s so strong it almost makes up for the rest of the show’s terrible decisions. The chemistry between Karl Urban and Michael Ealy is delightful, that kind of practiced banter that makes you want to follow them around. They get all the best lines, and they’re great actors, and I like welcoming them into my living room once a week.
But in the end, it’s like Almost Human didn’t get the message about what television is these days.
Television is investment from fans.
Which is to say that back in the 1970s, there was no way to re-watch an episode of television. There were no DVRs, no VCRs, no DVDs, no Torrents – once that episode of Incredible Hulk aired, if the network chose not to re-run it, that was it. Your ass was either in the seat at the moment the show started, or you weren’t seeing it. TV was as transient as live music.
So every show had to be encapsulated. You couldn’t rely on anyone knowing what the hell had happened last week, as there was no Internet you could use to catch up. So each hour of show was designed to be a start-to-finish experience, like a little mini-movie, simple and formulaic, enjoyable if you’d never seen the show before. Complex storylines simply didn’t happen – except in soap operas and kids’ serials, and even then they had lots of redundant exposition to ensure that nobody was lost.
Then recording happened.
And the Internet made research easy. Enjoyable, even.
And suddenly you could rely on viewers to keep track of what happened, and shows started to become more complex.
None of this is new, obviously; many essays have been written on this topic before. But the point is that Almost Human is weirdly wrapped in this candy shell of “Oh, this is new and different!” but its core is very much that “Hi, we don’t expect you tuned in before, so let’s explain everything and not have any real continuity.”
Yet what you don’t see discussed was that the worldbuilding was often built on that premise, for the few sci-fi shows that existed. Basically, if a writer had a good pitch, it went in the show. Didn’t matter if this week’s super-premise was at odds with what we’d been told last week – it’s a cool idea, stuff it in, nobody cares whether it makes sense in context as long as it makes sense for this hour we’ve got to fill. The reason Star Trek was so crazily popular was because it actually had nods to past history and a semi-consistent framework – the Klingons, the Romulans, Harry Mudd – but it still had a lot of random one-time Things that should have changed the nature of the universe that were quietly forgotten because this episode wasn’t part of a contiguous whole, but rather every episode was a singularity.
(I mean, seriously, Scalosian Water has no usage elsewhere? I want to write the story of the super-secret Black Ops team that finds these universe-changing technologies and quietly removes them to prevent horrendous wars and imbalances of power.)
Which is how Almost Human treats the speculative elements. Hey, is there a burgeoning market in sexbots? Well, I mean, cops traditionally have marital issues, wouldn’t some cops be seriously addicted to the sexbot fulfillment? Wouldn’t we see people walking around with sexbots, taking them out for coffee to the disgust of their fellow Starbucks patrons? How would the semi-sentient robots deal with that evident facet of their slavery?
No, no, man, we have a story about sexbots. We don’t want to think about all that other stuff, or even reference it in another episode.
Sexbots are just a way to kill this next 43 minutes.
But while you can go with that “worldbuilding is episodic” that’s an error, in these days. I’m not saying every show needs to have the insane storylines of Sleepy Hollow (though ratings might suggest otherwise), but rather that if your universe introduces a technology, we should see how that universe is shaped by the technology. People get off on that.
And it gives your show a more unique feeling. I mean, the #1 complaint I hear about Almost Human is that it feels generic, and it is. It’s a buddy cop show with science fiction trappings. And while that might have worked back in the old days, these days viewers are searching for a world they can get hooked into – they don’t want just an hour, they want to fall in love with the whole season.
And when you skimp on worldbuilding, you skimp on an element that draws them in. It’s a fannish hook: if you show how sexbots are treated in society outside of this singular element of the procedural, then you get fans going, “Hey, how do sexbots work when you’re a single guy dating?” and they start trading theories on Tumblr and expanding parts of your universe in their head, and suddenly they are rooted more deeply in your universe – in your show – than they would have been otherwise.
For Almost Human, what happens is that you rapidly come to realize is that nothing matters except in the context of this episode. And that’s meh-see TV. You wind up tuning in if you’ve got the spare time – and Gini and I work at home, we’ve got spare time – but it’s not the kind of thing where you hunch in front of the television going, “Aww, man, how’s this going to start?”
And that’s tough. You’ve got to plan – not something TV shows are known for, mainly because it’s not necessarily rewarded. If you’ve got great worldbuilding and crap characters, you’re doomed. If you’ve got great worldbuilding and awful actors or poor plots or unfunny dialogue, you’re doomed. Great worldbuilding alone will not save you.
But I think right now, we’re seeing a real schism. You have the procedural TV shows wrapped in nerdy bits – both Almost Human and Agents of SHIELD have some stabs at ongoing plotlines, but really it’s all about this episode – and both are ratings disappointments. Meanwhile, you have the bull-goose looniness of Sleepy Hollow, which may turn out to make no sense but goddammit we’ve got all of American history tied up in this shiz, a great mystic conspiracy that’s evoking George Washington like he was some sort of Abdul Al-Hazrad, and people are all like, Whoa, I have to see what happens.
There’s a lesson here. Television is still evolving, rapidly so, from the concept that viewers might not just be able to follow a dense storyline, but might be eager to do so. That’s shifted television from the simplest visual medium to its most complex, and shit like Almost Human doesn’t get a pass any more. If you’re going to do something sci-fi or fantasy, you’ll have to put a bit of thought into it – or at least front like you do (*cough cough LOST cough*).
It’s not about this episode. It’s about how this affects everything. And if Almost Human had looked at the script pitches for all the planned episodes, and said, “All right, how do we put in a sexbot reference here, how’s this remote viewing thing for the jury work here, how do mechanical organ transplants work here?” and put in little nods in all the prior and future episodes, I almost guarantee you Almost Human would be doing better in the ratings. Because we’d still have that Urban-and-Ealy chemistry, but it’d be backed by a world that felt like it was more than just a stage to stand on.
And we’d be watching. Watching with intent.
New York City, February 20th, 4:30 p.m. – Wanna Meet Up?
So February 20th is going to be a hell of a day for us, thanks to our new plan of romance.
See, Gini and I spend so much time visiting with people that we don’t get any time for ourselves; our 14th anniversary passed last year with zero fanfare. And we’ve also felt a lament because we love fine dining – some of our fondest memories are at the Aureole in Las Vegas and Victoria & Albert’s in Disney.
So why not combine the two? We decided once a quarter, we would travel to a Michelin-starred restaurant and do what Michelin says a Michelin star is for – eat a meal so good, it was worth planning a trip there just for the experience.
And so, on February 20th, we’ll be in New York, eating at Joe Bastianich’s restaurant Babbo for lunch. (Why Babbo? Because we’re addicted to Master Chef, because his book Restaurant Man is the second-best book I’ve read on what it’s like to run a restaurant, and because of his New York restaurants it has a slight edge on the best food.) We’ve decided to go all-out and book tickets to The Book of Mormon in the evening, because why not do a Broadway show?
But that does leave a gap – and when our dear friend Nex0s asked, “When can I see you?”, rather than scheduling a million individual dates with all the people we want to see in NYC, we figured we’d do the Jay Lake thing and show up in a public place. Want to meet a Ferrett and a Gini? Then come to us, we’ll welcome you with open arms. No prior physical meeting necessary, as we live largely online.
The problem is, I no longer know New York well enough to know where that place should be. I need someplace flexible enough to allow an unknown number of people to hang out, close enough to Broadway that we can stay fairly late there and still get to our show on time, and warm. Some munchies for folks would probably be nice, but I assume I’ll still have the warm afterglow of Babbo.
So:
a) If you’re interested, lemme know.
b) If you’re local and can suggest a venue, that would be awesome.
(Future plans: Graham Elliot’s restaurant Graham Elliot, Chicago’s Alinea, and Philadelphia’s Morimoto. Other suggestions within a six-hour drive welcomed.)
The I-Shoulda-Seen-That-By-Now Movie Marathon: This Saturday
So periodically, Gini and I hold the I-Shoulda-Seen-That-By-Now Movie Marathon – a gathering where people get together at our house to watch movies. The next event: this Saturday.
The rules are:
1) EACH PERSON GETS TO CHOOSE ONE MOVIE, THE NAME OF WHICH THEY MUST PROVIDE IN ADVANCE. In keeping with the “I Shoulda Seen That By Now” theme, this can only be a movie which you yourself have not seen. There are to be no recommendations, no “I haven’t seen it in a decade,” no outs – only movies that you personally have never seen (and preferably feel guilty about not having seen).
2) I CHOOSE WHICH MOVIES ARE ACCEPTABLE. Left to their own devices, everyone chooses long depressing movies. A full day consisting of The Godfather, Schindler’s List and Gone With The Wind is not only going to be really long, but soul-blackening.
So if you’re attending, I’ll be asking what you plan to watch. You may be asked to provide another choice.
3) YOU MUST PROVIDE YOUR OWN DVD. Do not wait until the last minute to rent it, for these are the kinds of movies that RedBox tends not to have. Netflix it or purchase it for $9.99 or poll your neighbors to see who has it, but if you arrive empty-handed with your movie, you can watch the show from the front yard.
4) THERE WILL BE BREAKS IN BETWEEN MOVIES. These go so much better if we have time for breaks and pleasant chat.
This weekend’s ISSTBN looks tragically small, as many people had other plans, but we’re going through with it anyway. If you’re local and interested, check the Evite. I think my choice may be Weird Science.
In Which A Guy Is Held To A Standard Of Beauty, And Hates It
I was talking with a friend the other day, and she referred to Bradley Cooper as “someone I wouldn’t look at twice on OKCupid.”
I’m on OKCupid, and I don’t look anywhere half as good as Bradley Cooper. Bradley’s a really handsome guy as far as I’m concerned, with craggy looks that aren’t to my tastes – but he has beautiful eyes, a radiant grin, and is fit and young and healthy.
I really don’t want to know what my friend would think if she looked at me on OKCupid. If Bradley Cooper’s looks are a 5 out of 10 to her, then I can only assume that my pudgy ass is probably a 2 or 3 out of 10.
In that brief exchange, I got a clear idea of what she thinks of me physically, and it’s probably not good.
I despaired a little, because hell, if I can’t be Bradley Cooper, what can I be? Even if I worked out all the time and lost forty pounds and got The Hollywood Abs, I’d probably be a 3 on that scale at most… at least physically. I felt trapped at the base of a mountain that I literally could not climb – to my friend, I don’t think there’s a way I can be above-the-curve physically attractive to her.
As a result, I felt strangely like a failure all evening.
It wasn’t until this morning that I realized this is what women go through every day.
And I’m of two minds about that, because on the one hand I felt positively squidgey squeezing my muffintop into my pants that morning. My bald spot felt baldier. My puffy moon of a face, which isn’t actually that bad looking, was something I didn’t wanna look at in the mirror because Jesus, that’s a 3 at best on my friend’s scale of beauty. Maybe a 2. My spiffy hat felt like a sad attempt to distract from the disaster zone of my misaligned features.
On the other hand, who the hell am I to tell my friend what she should be attracted to?
There’s a double-edged sword here, because on the one hand I adore my female buddy’s strong sexuality, the way she owns who she wants to fuck, and the unapologetic way she partners with the people who are going to give her what she wants. That’s awesome. It’s a strength that women are often encouraged not to have, to instead passively accept whoever pays attention to them – so if she can say, “Fuck this guy, he’s not good looking enough for me,” then on one level that’s a total win for civilization.
Yet the other edge of the blade is that this off-handed idea that the Hollywood standard of beauty isn’t good enough is kinda hurtful. It’s what women feel when they get compared casually to airbrushed beauties in Sports Illustrated, as though here’s what you should aspire to be, and you just aren’t. The real you exists on the cover of this magazine, as an archetype, and the only things people like about you are all the ways you overlap with that perfection.
The rest of you is dross.
I stress that my friend did zero wrong. She compared me to no one – she’d never do that – and maybe Bradley Cooper is a little weird-lookin’ for a Hollywood star. (And I was in a peculiarly raw headspace at the time, thanks to bad news from Gini’s family. They’re better now.) And what we’re discussing here is not all of the non-physical ways one can be attracted to each other – just the raw battleground of physical beauty. Which is a pretty narrow space, as I’m pretty sure my friend (who is quite gorgeous herself) has vapid hunky guys hitting on her on a regular basis, and I’m just as sure she discards at least some of them because she needs a partner who can feed that big factory o’luscious brainpower locked inside her skull.
Yet there’s this weird conflict rubbing like sandpaper in my head – it’s good that people should have strong opinions sexually, knowing what they want, and are willing to discard people who don’t appeal to them. Yet it’s also a little bad when you’re held to those high standards and fall short, because you have this feeling like all the other bits of you – the interesting unique bits that make up you – can’t quite fill those gaps.
I’m not Bradley Cooper. I’m me. And I’ve done well, dating-wise. But to someone, if we’re honest, I’m probably a 2 on her personal scale when I’m reduced to a headshot.
The steepness of that scale makes me despair a little. Even as I think she has the absolute right to have it.
(EDIT: And if you’re going to tell me, “Oh, no, Ferrett, everyone finds different people attractive!” then you’ve missed the point I was trying to make. The point is that women are often held to a standard of Hollywood-style beauty and scorned by folks if they don’t match it – vitriolically so, in certain circles – and that’s hard to deal with when those judgments are coming from people you’re trying to impress. Maybe secretly they don’t think you’re that bad, but when a guy you like is saying, “God, Taylor Swift would be attractive if she lost a few pounds” or a woman who you think is gorgeous talks about all the ways her boobs look weird, it has a corrosive effect where you ask, “So what the hell am I?”
(And of course she likes something else aside from looks, a point I tried to make repeatedly in the text. But that “looks alone” experience is an effect that guys do not often experience. So I found it interesting to chronicle my reaction – which is not necessarily a rational one, or even a particularly well-thought-out one, but that’s my whole point. When you get these kinds of emotional reactions, they affect you before you can apply the Reality Shields. And as a guy who got startled by one, I thought it interesting to chronicle that.)
ConFusion: Just Like Starting Over
ConFusion is a weirdly stressful con for me, because my time is split.
See, when Steve Gutterman first invited me to Penguicon back in 2005, I showed up alone. I had a webcomic I’d just started six weeks ago, no stories published, and no real concept of what a con was. So I went not as a Big Writer Guest, but as a scared novice con attendee hoping to find friends.
I found them. Brilliant ones. I remember going on long solitary walks around the loop of the hotel, feeling ridiculously lonely and plucky, enduring my social anxiety bells of “No one wants to talk to you” until I stumbled across a conversation that seemed interesting that I could join in. I made twenty-minute friends – I’d join in a chat about some movie or website, the conversation would go wonderfully, and then people would wander off.
But by the end of the con, I’d go out on what I was already terming my Lonely Patrol – and people started to know me. I’d get hailed by Randy or Kat or Alexa, and we’d go find other people, and then we friended each other on LiveJournal, and by the next con I was still on Lonely Patrol but those patrols were shorter. And as I kept going to Michigan cons, I had tons of buddies to see.
And then I became a Writer person, with short stories and readings and whatnot, and found that the writers are all in the bar – and I want to see them! They’re also wonderful people, all these fellow scribes! They’re troves of Weird Shit, because you don’t become a sci-fi writer without acquiring weird anecdotes that you’ve turned into Story. And when I go to a place like World Fantasy or WorldCon, the only people I’ve ever met at those places are fellow writers, so when I hang at the bar meeting people, that’s the most exciting part of the con.
Except at ConFusion, the writer-buddies are in the bar, and my con-buddies are off at the room parties.
So I gotta split my time, and never quite feel like I get enough time with either. I had real issues with that in the last ConFusion, because I didn’t know which faction to choose, and felt like I was always choosing the wrong one. It stressed me out all weekend.
For this one, though, I decided to be calm; whoever I hang out with, I hang out with. Yes, I’d like to meet Sam Sykes to the point where he’d know who the hell I am, because he’s someone who’s pretty damn amusing on Twitter… but if I get a different dinner invitation, well, I’ll miss out on that.
And that was pleasantly serene, because by chance ConFusion was largely about catching up with all the old con-friends. I sat down for almost two hours with my dear friend Sheryl. I had a lovely evening meeting up with Alexa and her new wife. I caught up with Hope, and Nick and Vascha, and spent less time in the writers’ bar than I’d like to.
Which was fine. Robert Jackson Bennett said the other day that he’s basically given up on going to cons to promote his writing, he’s just going to hang with other writers. And I have other cons for that. WorldCon and World Fantasy are where I can both drink affably and make buddies with writers because hell, that’s pretty much what’s on the menu.
I dunno. Here’s where I maybe get uncomfortably honest, and I’m actually humiliated to admit this, but fuck, that’s pretty much my schtick on this blog, isn’t it?
I have this weird feeling like whenever I do a con, I must emerge with deep friendships with three different writers Or I Have Wasted My Career. Which is just some bullshit feeling placed there from years of How To Do Bizness tutorials… or, now that I reflect upon it, the fact that my highschool-damaged psyche views writers as The Cool Kids, and if enough of them like me then I will be magically healed of all my insecurities.
And that places a pressure on me that’s ludicrous. I’ve thankfully avoided the smarmy tendency to view people as though I were some sort of fucked-up Pokemon trainer and instead forged genuine connections – but there are times I’ve been having a beautiful conversation with friends and had that back-of-the-mind whisper of, you know these people already, you should be getting to know new people, isn’t that the point of coming here?
No. No, it isn’t.
The point is enjoying what I’ve got – which has never been a strength of mine.
Look, as a writer, I’ve never really gotten ahead thanks to connections. Mostly, it’s been, “Did you write a good story this week?” If the shit I write is good enough it’ll haul itself over the transom, and if not, then no amount of networking will save me.
And I have no idea whether this feeling of Go Make Connections is just me, or something that other writers feel. But whether it’s personal or universal, it’s toxic. Toxic personally. I mean, I’ve never friended a writer because he was on some checklist of mine, thank God, but I need to stop feeling like a failure whenever I don’t friend someone in the industry. I’m always at a tug-of-war between my big floppy dog instincts of “I love everyone” and these Borgian undertones of “join my collective,” and it’s time to unleash my inner Picard. I mean, the good Picard. Not that schmuck who got Borgified.
ConFusion was where I left those instincts behind, and just hung with whoever and strangled my inner Middle School Kid. (Which is always a positive experience, really. That kid is needy.) And I did hang with some awesome writers, and had some stellar conversations with them, too… and that’s the way it should be, prioritizing whoever is fun to talk to. But chatting with the people who literally inspired my love of cons reminded me of how awesome it was to let all of those expectations of what I should accomplish go, and just be.
As Myke Cole once put it, there is no amazing writer-party. There is merely an amazing party, with many guests, and you should dance with whoever’s got the best tunes.
Maybe I’d have a couple of new friends on Twitter this morning if I’d done the Networking Thing. Those friendships wouldn’t be half as good as the ones I rekindled this weekend. And the reason they wouldn’t is because the friendships I’ve got are organic creations of pure Love, created out of desire and not obligation, and thank God I’ve always lent my ear to those better instincts.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a party on Twitter I need to join.