[Sæternes-dæg] Annotated Links #22: Different, but the Same

1. Ramstad, Evan. “Are Koreans the Irish of Asia? Here’s a Case.” Korea Realtime (Wall Street Journal) 16 October 2012. Web. 20 October 2012.

Ramstad recounts the recent visit to Seoul of Eammon McKee, Ireland’s ambassador to the Koreas, and a speech he made there wherein he fleshed out the Korea-is-Ireland cliché. He quotes McKee’s speech selectively, compiling a brief list of the ways in which the two nations are similar. This article is written in a pure journalistic style, this article reports on the idea of the two nations having shared traits.

An article about how two disparate nations actually have quite a bit in common is a great way to start of an Annotated Links about different things that, upon further analysis, can easily be considered similar. Thus, this article was an easy pick for this week’s batch.

2. Lorditch, Emilie. “Using Science Fiction to Educate.” Inside Science 17 October 2012. Web. 20 October 2012.

This one is a brief article that provides an overview of the basic argument for using science fiction in science education: to show the relevance of science to young people so that more of them will take an active interest in pursuing the sciences at college or university. It makes specific reference to science fiction and super hero films while leaving out anything about science fiction literature. Lorditch writes in a direct style of reportage, with an effective use of quotes.

Science fiction and science fact are definitely different, but the limits of human technology are always making gains on the limits of human imagination. This article doesn’t make a direct comparison between science fiction and science in the classroom, but mining science fiction for examples to show how science does and doesn’t work bridges the two nicely.

3. Houpt, Simon. “IBM hones Watson the supercomputer’s skills.” The Globe and Mail 19 October 2012. Web. 20 October 2012.

In this interview with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center’s Eric Brown, Houpt explores the different uses for IBM’s Question Answering supercomputer Watson. Specifically, Houpt asks about IBM’s work with the US healthcare insurance provider WellPoint and how Watson will figure in with that. It’s written as any interview is bound to be written – in a conversational tone.

Though comparisons between Watson and human personalities don’t come up until near the end of the interview, this piece is included in this week’s Annotated Links because it underscores how a stripped down version of human thinking (parsing sentences, taking certain elements and understanding the relationships between them) is being emulated by computers.

4. Taylor, Kate. “Picnicface: Why are we laughing? I don’t know, but it sure beats crying.” The Globe and Mail 20 October 2012. Web. 20 October 2012.

Taylor’s article offers some quick background information on the Picnicface story, along with a very quick rundown of where the three-person comedy trio is today. Her article also offers some thoughts on the matter of internet fame vs. old school fame, and how being popular on YouTube does not necessarily translate being popular on the boob tube. This one is written in a straightforward style, with quotes from players in the Picnicface story sprinkled throughout.

Including this one in the Links for this week was necessarily partly because it fit and partly because of personal prejudices. Picnicface is an hilarious troupe, and the ways in which culture on the internet is different from culture on TV or radio or in print is something that needs more mainstream attention.

5. Strickland, Eddie. “Red Potion (The Legend of Zelda cocktail).” The Drunken Moogle 14 October 2012. Web. 20 October 2012.

Simply a recipe for a cocktail inspired by the Legend of Zelda (clicking on that tag at the bottom of the recipe shows another 4 pages worth of Zelda-inspired booze bombs). This recipe is written in a direct style without any extra notes.

This one’s included for the obvious reason that video games (‘The Legend of Zelda,’ perhaps especially) are not the same as real life. However, it must definitely be noted that medieval medicine (and therefore medicine in a high fantasy setting such as the one in ‘Zelda’) would invariably involve alcohol in some way – so the two different worlds of the real and the virtual are bridged by the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems: alcohol.

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Closing

Next week, watch for a poem post for Monday, and Part Four of Shocktober, when I’ll make the call for the conversion of the campy horror flic The Convent.

Plus, over at Tongues in Jars, watch for the fifth stanza of “Dum Diane vitrea” in Tuesday’s Latin entry, and Wiglaf’s tongue lashing of the cowardly thanes in Thursday’s Beowulf entry.

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Annotated Links #10: Massaging Media

1. Chung-Un, Cho. “‘Focus on human nature, not unique cultural aspects’.” The Korea Herald 18 July 2012. Web. 24 July 2012.

Robert McKee explains why he finds Korean film so intriguing. He also highlights the importance of speaking to human nature rather than cultural elements in stories intended for an international audience. This article is part reportage, part interview between McKee and the Korea Herald. It is written in a straightforward style with only some minor typos.

2. Dvorsky, George. “How An Alien Invasion Inspired Kevin J. Anderson to Start Writing Science Fiction.” io9 16 July 2012. Web. 24 July 2012.

Kevin J. Anderson’s accomplishments are listed, and it’s noted that his novelization of Rush’s Clockwork Angels is due out in September. Included is a long quote about Anderson’s seeing the War of the Worlds movie lead him to writing science fiction. The article is written in a light, direct style.

3. MSumm. “Dear Nintendo, Please Give Me a Zelda Game Tougher Than Majora’s Mask.” Kotaku 17 July 2012. Web. 24 July 2012.

A rant/letter directed at the major players at Nintendo, asking for a new Zelda game that is as difficult as Majora’s Mask. MSumm considers Majora’s Mask difficult because of its utter lack of hand-holding and un-skippable tutorials. Difficulty is sought because beating such a game grants the player a great feeling of satisfaction. This article is posted from Kotaku’s “Speak Up” forum, so there are some typos and grammatical errors. The article’s style is quite casual.

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Closing

Tomorrow, watch this space for an editorial entry, and don’t miss Annotated Links #11 on Thursday! Then, come Friday, the final part of Nicolas Cage month, a quest to find the good in Seeking Justice, will be posted.

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[Freya-dæg] All About The Last Airbender

{The Last Airbender‘s movie poster, found on Wikipedia.}

Plot Summary
The Good
The Bad
Judgment
Closing

M. Night Shyamalan, a director best known for movies like The Sixth Sense and The Village should stick to what he knows, or at the least to doing what he does best: creating an engrossing plot that strings the audience along until they reach some crucial twist.

Not only is adaptation outside of his wheelhouse, so too are movies where his signature twist is missing. Put the two together, and, somehow, you get the live action adaptation of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Last Airbender

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Plot Summary

Based on the idea that each of the “books” referred to in the title cards of the animated series could be turned into a movie, The Last Airbender follows the plot of “Book One: Water.”

For those unfamiliar with the Nickelodeon show about a world where people can bend water, earth, fire, and air to their will, this section of the story introduces Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern water tribe shortly before they discover Aang (Noah Ringer) frozen in a glacier with his sky bison. He winds up freed from the ice, and after a brief encounter with the reviled Fire Nation, the three of them set out to help Aang realize his potential as the Avatar, the one who holds the four elemental forces of the world in check.

Ultimately, Aang, Katara, and Sokka end up at the city of the Northern Water Tribe, so that Aang can master water bending, and also so that they can help to defend it from an upcoming Fire Nation assault. As General Jao (Aasif Mandvi) of the Fire Nation plots to kill the spirits of the moon and ocean, thus robbing the water tribe of its bending power, defeat looms over the last truly free city in the world and only our three heroes can help to avert it.

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The Good

As you might expect from a movie about a world where people can bend the elements to their will with movements that Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan would be proud of, the choreography in this movie is decent. And the effects are fairly well done. Whatever else may be said about it, it has no shortage of spectacle. Especially when the fire and the water fly in the final battle.

Also, and this was more a surprise than anything else, but Dev Patel does a good job of playing the brooding, exiled Fire Nation prince Zuko. His character is softened, but it’s still really obvious that he’s absolutely brimming with conflicting hatreds and loyalties and desires.

Aasif Mandvi’s appearance was also a very pleasant surprise. He didn’t play anything up for laughs, and a movie based on an animated series (other than Avatar: The Last Airbender) might not be expected to offer up the chance to show your dramatic chops, but he definitely hits it out of the park as General Jao.

{The Daily Show’s Senior Hollywood Correspondent goes a little too deep undercover for his exposé on bad adaptations. Image from a screen capture}

Seychelle Gabriel also works well as Princess Yue of the Northern Water Tribe – she even puts some feeling into her lines.

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The Bad

Cool World is not a very good movie. However, having seen The Last Airbender, it seems as though the quotation used to introduce The Bad in it was used too soon.

The biggest problem with this movie is the absolutely bizarre pronunciations of names and things that are pronounced in entirely different ways in the animated show.

Where the series pronounces Aang as “(r)ANG,” and Sokka as “Sock-ah,” the director of the movie (Mr. M. Night himself) has them changed to “Ah-ng” and “So-ka.” At one point, a character even refers to the “Yang” in “Yin and Yang” as “Yah-ng.” So, first off, why not just follow the pronunciation that fans have become familiar with over the course of three television seasons?

The next biggest problem (a very close contender for the title) is that all of the character arcs that are presented throughout the show’s many episodes are almost entirely shaved away to make sure that this movie is feature length. This is an understandable change, but, if The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask teaches one thing about building character, it’s that it can be done in a limited space and a limited time.

Rather than trying to pack the movie with all of the side plots and diversions that the show presents so wonderfully, why not just have Aang, Katara, and Sokka interact with people in the Northern Water Tribe city as stand-ins for the characters they meet in the show? It’d even be possible to just move some of those characters into the city so that they could still be interacted with.

To be fair, the movie doesn’t try to pack everything in, but it skips over so many key moments for character development that the characters are left to develop through dialog that’s not only written so it conveys almost no subtlety but that’s often delivered as if it’s being read for the first time.

Dev Patel works well as Zuko, and Seychelle Gabriel does an alright job of playing Yue, but the actor that was cast as Sokka just doesn’t seem to get it. In the show, Sokka is a goofball of an older brother who’s always hatching plans and making schemes that have some hole or other in them. He isn’t solely a comic relief character, but he often is the one that audiences are meant to laugh at – at least early in the series.

As the three travel together and their characters develop, Sokka does become more serious, but that seriousness is always undercut with a bad pun or a silly gag. Instead of this nuance, Jackson Rathbone plays Sokka as some kind of straight man who hardly ever smiles. And when he does – especially when Yue is telling him about how she died when she was born and is alive because the Moon Spirit gave her its life – it’s really poorly timed.

{Maybe Rathbone’s Sokka is off because his timing, the heart of comedy, is off. Image from a screen capture.}

Aang and Katara are a little bit better, but again, because we see them in so few situations compared to the show, they aren’t as nuanced as they are in the original. Aang’s Monkey-King-like energy and playfulness are replaced by a more sullen, “I-don’t-wanna-be-the-Avatar-because-then-I-can’t-have-a-family” nature, and Katara is, well, just Katara. By the end of the first book in the series, it was already clear that there was some chemistry between these two characters, but in the movie there’s practically nothing to suggest this.

Mercifully, Zuko’s absolutely mad sister Azula, is only shown briefly in only two scenes. But, these two scenes set her up as more of a giggly little girl than as the scheming, psychologically twisted monster that she is in the series.

And, to end on a minor detail, a running joke in the series is that everywhere Aang, Katara, and Sokka go, they wind up upsetting a man’s cabbage cart. Even the new series Avatar: The Legend of Korra, includes a scene where a cabbage man is dispossessed of his cabbages.

It might be fan service, but it would at least show the fans that you care about something that they admire, Mr. M. Night. And, including the scene would also have assured people familiar with the series that you had actually watched it and not just written your script based on some sort of terribly truncated SparkNotes summary.

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Judgment

The Last Airbender is not the movie it could have been.

Now, it’s unrealistic to expect any filmmaker to be able to condense 20 episodes of a television show (about 6 hours and 40 minutes) down into something that’s less than two hours while retaining things like characters, a coherent story, and a fully realized world. But there are ways that such an adaptation could have been made to work.

The discovery of Aang could have happened during the opening credits. Then a voice over could give the background of the setting and what had happened up to x-point as the characters did something (maybe fly somewhere on Appa, or walk between villages with a group of people trailing them since Aang is, you know, the Avatar and all). From there, most of the movie could be based in the Northern Water Tribe city with flashbacks to fill any gaps, fully realized relationships with the city’s inhabitants to develop characters, and simply more dialog that revealed the story in an organic way, rather than lines that even the actors seem to balk at from time to time.

Unfortunately, M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation was not so bold as to make this many changes. Instead, he seems to have taken a more scissor-happy approach, trimming away everything excess until only the bare outline of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s plot remains.

Some of the actors were definitely well picked, and the spectacle that the movie offers is quite impressive. But the four elements of Patel, Gabriel, Mandvi, and spectacle alone aren’t enough to save the world of water, earth, fire, and air.

Freya, feel free to shed a tear as you fly over this one, but do no more save let it remain.

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Closing

Check back here next week for more creative writing, an editorial on the newest news, and a hunt for the good in, and hopeful redemption of, another generally despised movie.

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[Freya-dæg] "I can do much more. I have powers."

What I’m about to write flies in the face of the critics posted on Rotten Tomatoes (who awarded the movie 14%) and pinches annoyingly at the audience critiques on the site (averaging 39%). ‘The Seeker: The Dark is Rising’ is a fine, fun movie. As long as you can get caught up in details and excuse the overall picture’s generic writing and story.

Before getting to those redeeming qualities, however, let’s delve into what holds this movie down. These weaknesses are its poor effects, its lackluster story telling, and its lack of true enchantment.

The movie’s effects are too obviously effects. There’s a good use of crows, certainly, but other effects look too plush to be realistic (the icicles of the movie’s latter half in particular).

The movie also makes absurd usage of spinning cameras (to simulate ‘stepping through time,’ and, apparently, just for fun) and strangely fast cut-to’s. An example of the latter is most scenes featuring the Rider (Christopher Eccleston). In these scenes the camera switches from him and to his horse almost every 10 seconds, and at varying angles. This sort of camera work is disorienting and could be simulating some sort of nausea caused by looking at the force of darkness embodied, but it’s too distracting.

Not that there’s necessarily much to get distracted from.

The story itself is standard young adult fantasy fare. There’s a boy (Will Stanton, played by Alexander Ludwig) who supposedly has a hard time of it at school and at home (having five older brothers and a younger sister would do that to a guy). But no real struggle is shown beyond the sort of sibling interactions you could expect from any household even with three kids.

Nonetheless, Will turns out to be a mystic warrior in waiting. A group of beings from outside of time known as the Old Ones reveal this destiny to him shortly after his 14th birthday, telling him that he’s the seeker of the six signs of light. Apparently, together, these signs are fragments of the power of light itself – which were hidden away after the light beat the dark the last time the two forces battled (around the 13 century, the movie nebulously implies).

Will finds these signs, fights the dark and, (spoilers!) triumphs in a final battle that sees the dark sealed away and light securely restored.

Certainly this film’s plot is no match for another movie that came out in the same year about a boy and his school friends who band together to start a revolution and secret society against the rising power of an evil wizard in a modern, yet Gothic, setting.

Because of the emphasis on the six signs, unless you’ve played your share of fetch-quest-based video games and enjoyed doing so, you’re not likely to really get into the story of Dark is Rising. Further, perhaps because of the generally unusual size of the family and the premise of Will being the 7th son of a 7th son, it’s not so easy to relate to our boy protagonist or escape into his world.

Ultimately, what really made this movie flop (it remade $31,400,740 of its a $45,000,000 budget at the box office) was timing.

Coming out in the middle of the Harry Potter films’ run ensured that Dark is Rising would be completely overshadowed. And the fact that the movie is based on a series of books from the 60s and 70s is odd as well (though the Golden Compass also took some time to be made into a film).

The unfortunate thing about this timing slip-up is that, had the movie been released around the time of the books’ being published or when there wasn’t already a major fantasy series on silver screens everywhere, I think that it would have done quite well.

It’s true that the story on the whole is nothing special. But if you focus on the details of the story, there’s more at work here than the usual sort of coming-of-age/marginalized-kid-empowerment stuff.

The Celtic elements from the books are highlighted rather than the Norse ones, and this is a great move on the part of the writers and directors. Celtic mythology is rich and interesting, but is too often overlooked since Greek and Roman myth have a more prominent place. So it’s refreshing to see Celtic stuff get so much attention in a mainstream movie.

Even the film’s fetch quest element is interesting since (even though it’s something of a let down) one of the signs Will must collect represents the “essence of a human soul.” The Essence of A Human Soul. That is some (potentially) deep, really cool stuff. Potentially.

The time travel elements to the plot and the powers that Will has are also pretty neat. But, the most prominent time traveler of the film isn’t Will, or the Rider, but an adorable orange cat that Will and his sister Gwen (Emma Lockhart) rescue from a medieval battleground.

And though the movie’s effects do have their failings, what they try to convey is really cool. Icicles are not Rising Sun Pictures’ forte, but the plumes of shadow radiating from the Rider at various parts of the film are totally badass.

In fact, this movie makes it clear the Eccleston could be a contender for the role of Ganondorf if they ever make a Legend of Zelda Movie. Ian McShane (playing Merriman Lyon) could also fit the role nicely.

{Top Left: Christopher Eccleston; Top Right: Ian McShane; Bottom: Ganondorf (Twilight Princess Style).}

Also, The movie’s generous use of strobe lighting could definitely be dangerous, but it’s a clear and simple way to show the light and the dark battling. Plus, it suggests an interpretation of what David Lynch might have been doing with the strobe effects in the Black Lodge in the last episode of Twin Peaks.

Overall, despite what the critics say, this movie flourishes in its details. In fact, I can say that this movie forgoes the Green Lantern Effect since I would watch it again and I’m interested in the checking out the books.

So, Freya, swoop in and save this one from the heaps of unholy dead. For, just as the pick-up line from Will Stanton himself used for this article’s title suggests, this movie can do much more, and it does have powers – if it’s only given the chance to use them.

If you want to share your opinion(s) of ‘The Seeker: Dark is Rising,’ please do so in the comments.

And remember, after the weekend the analysis of going to teacher’s college based on my own feeling of “truthiness” will be posted – so keep reading!