Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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A few months ago I read an article about filmmaking which talked about why the ending of a film is so important: it’s not just that the audiences want to see it come out a certain way, but the ending is the last impression the audience is left with. A film can be fantastic all the way through and then fall on its face at the end, and that’s the impression people will be left with.

Now I loved The Fellowship of the Ring, both the theatrical release and the special edition. I enjoyed most of The Two Towers. But the ending fell flat on its face. Helm’s deep simply stopped, and the Frodo/Sam story did nothing more than present a vague threat from Gollum.

Imagine if The Empire Strikes Back had ended not with Luke getting his replacement hand and Lando and Chewbacca heading off to rescue Han, but had instead ended with the escape from Cloud City. That’s what this felt like.

Visually, the film is amazing. The effects, the scenery, the sets, costumes and battle sequences are stunning. The acting, like last time, is excellent. And yet between the jumbled editing and the lack of an ending, the film is far less satisfying than the previous one.

I’m left with two conclusions: either New Line Cinema stepped in to “protect the franchise” instead of trusting the people who got the first one right, or they had a harder time cutting it down to three hours and made poorer choices.

At this point I’m going to bring up some specifics. Continue reading →

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I guess it’s just the “HP and the A of B” pattern, combined with the new movie coming out, but I’d like to see titles like:

But let’s stay away from titles like:

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The two of us and our friend Daniel were wandering through Borders last night, looking at the Harry Potter display. Oddly, it was right next to the sections on Astrology, Speculative (I guess New Age is too passé), two whole shelves on Magical Studies, Christianity, Metaphysics, and finally Self-Help. (How’s that for an interesting combination?)

Among them we found some frightening titles, like Dreams for Dummies (they don’t already have them?), or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Psychic, which made the claim that everyone is psychic, as opposed to the book we found down the shelf, which proclaimed merely that All Women are Psychic. Wiccan Feng Shui seemed like an interesting idea.

Daniel found the real kicker: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem. Just think about it.

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I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack for a while, but kept not finding it. A few weeks ago, we were listening to a copy of Holst’s The Planets we had just picked up. I’d heard the whole suite before, but had only heard “Mars” recently, so one section of “Jupiter” just leaped out at me. I was absolutely certain I had heard something very like it, but not exactly the same, in a movie, probably sword-and-sorcery. I tried several net searches, but had no luck – it’s not as if you can plug a few notes into Google and search for pieces containing a melody.

A while later it occurred to me that it might have been from Conan, so I tried to find it online, only to learn it was out of print. This looks like a job for eBay! It took a couple of auctions to get it (I really hate snipers), but I did, and the CD showed up in the mail a few days ago.

And sure enough, the piece I couldn’t help but think of while listening to “Jupiter” was there: track 12, “The Kitchen/The Orgy.” Interestingly the liner notes go into how Basil Poledouris constructed the piece, but don’t make a single mention of Holst, despite other tracks acknowledging influences such as Orff’s Carmina Burana, or the Gregorian chant “Dies Irae.” But the similarity is undeniable – even more similar than “Charging Fort Wagner” from James Horner’s Glory soundtrack or Joel McNeely’s battle music from the Verdun 1916 episode of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is to Orff’s “O Fortuna” (neither of which credits that influence either).

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Yay me. Looks like the writing-stuff-down-so-I-can-prove-I-said-it purpose of this board is coming into play sooner and more effectively than I’d thought. Not that I like the way the writers brought it about, but I’m beginning to think that to write on one of Joss’s shows, you have to take an Emotional (Manipulation) Intelligence Test. Saying any more in this vein would constitute spoilage, so I’ll just insert my little tag…. Continue reading →

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I seem to be having a great deal of trouble with my Buffy. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that my life from 8:15 to 5ish every day is nothing but a collection of deadlines, making them the last thing I want to face when I’ve just vegged out for an hour having my emotions…..manipulated. Perhaps it’s just that I feel obligated to come up with some deep insight rather than just saying “It was cool” (something that gets me finger-tied when reviewing fic as well). Whatever the reason, it’s getting quite annoying to me, and I hope those of you waiting for stuff aren’t too annoyed with me. What I think should work is combining this week and next week for each series, since neither one was particularly brain-grabby for me this week. Except that making the Home Improvement big brother evil was freaky, we think he’s going to become a demon now, and I want to see Gwen (the Gambit in Rogue’s clothing) again.

Feel free to ramble at me. I’ll be grateful.

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