05/23/07: WisCon ho!
Tomorrow morning I'm catching a flight to Madison for the 31st WisCon. WisCon may no longer be the only convention focusing on feminist science fiction, but it's still the mother of them all, and it's going to be an impressive turnout of authors and fans. The Guests of Honor this year are Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks, and the convention will once again be hosting the awards ceremony for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Fun!
The only somewhat worrying element is that -- eep! -- I'm one of the hosts of a wiki workshop during the convention (along with the super cool and far more experienced Laura Quilter and Liz Henry). I've never participated in convention programming before, so I'm a little nervous. But -- I tell myself -- given the competition, it will probably be sparsely attended. And even if not... it'll be FINE!
More updates later, maybe even from the hotel itself (I'm taking a work laptop with me).
tags: WisCon, feminist science fiction
The only somewhat worrying element is that -- eep! -- I'm one of the hosts of a wiki workshop during the convention (along with the super cool and far more experienced Laura Quilter and Liz Henry). I've never participated in convention programming before, so I'm a little nervous. But -- I tell myself -- given the competition, it will probably be sparsely attended. And even if not... it'll be FINE!
More updates later, maybe even from the hotel itself (I'm taking a work laptop with me).
tags: WisCon, feminist science fiction
05/17/07: The sci-fi top 25
Entertainment Weekly made a splash lately by featuring a list of "The Sci-Fi 25: The Best Movies and TV from the Past 25 Years". I thought it was a decent list, despite its inclusion of several weird items like Total Recall and Quantum Leap. No one is ever going to agree on all the items in a list like this, particularly if they are ranked in order of preference. The fact that I agreed with a solid 9 of the selections seemed better than average to me.
So I was surprised when Jim Macdonald over at Making Light wrote a derogatory post about the list, which the commenters mostly agreed with. Most of the criticism was directed at individual works that either should or shouldn't have been on the list, with the occasional quibble about the ranking order. This seemed like easy pickings criticism to me. Where were the alternate lists?
When Bill over at Candleblog posted his challenge to readers to come up with their own lists, that tore it -- I had to make one. Unfortunately for my eyes and back, I wanted to make sure to do it RIGHT (or at least distract myself from work stress for several hours), so I looked through the entire IMDB database of "sci-fi" from 1980 to 2007 (over 6,000 titles!) to make sure I was remembering everything I had seen in the relevant time period. The following is the result of my labors. I figured choosing 25 out of thousands was hard enough, so the list is NOT ranked by preference.
To me, this proves the worth of my research method: don't assume you're going to remember everything that's worth remembering. Instead, go and check!
tags: science fiction, top 25
So I was surprised when Jim Macdonald over at Making Light wrote a derogatory post about the list, which the commenters mostly agreed with. Most of the criticism was directed at individual works that either should or shouldn't have been on the list, with the occasional quibble about the ranking order. This seemed like easy pickings criticism to me. Where were the alternate lists?
When Bill over at Candleblog posted his challenge to readers to come up with their own lists, that tore it -- I had to make one. Unfortunately for my eyes and back, I wanted to make sure to do it RIGHT (or at least distract myself from work stress for several hours), so I looked through the entire IMDB database of "sci-fi" from 1980 to 2007 (over 6,000 titles!) to make sure I was remembering everything I had seen in the relevant time period. The following is the result of my labors. I figured choosing 25 out of thousands was hard enough, so the list is NOT ranked by preference.
Aeon Flux (the cartoon)After compiling my list, and reading large chunks of the comments on EW's blog post and at Making Light, I was most amazed that hardly anyone else mentioned Tron! That movie was the shit back in '82, and had some amazing special effects given that it was all done with overlays, crayons and a lot of prayer. (Just kidding, but check out the special edition DVD for an account of the often low tech way they created the "computerized" look of things.)
Aliens (non-director's cut)
Babylon 5
Battlestar Galactica (Ronald Moore version)
Blade Runner (director's cut)
Castle in the Sky
Children of Men
Donnie Darko (non-director's cut)
Farscape
Firefly/Serenity
Futurama
GATTACA
Ghost in the Shell (1 & 2)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds
Red Dwarf
Repo Man
Roujin Z
The Abyss
The Brother from Another Planet
The Matrix
The Terminator
The X-Files
Tron
V for Vendetta
X-Men/X2
To me, this proves the worth of my research method: don't assume you're going to remember everything that's worth remembering. Instead, go and check!
tags: science fiction, top 25
05/16/07: I hate credit card companies
Today I received a Citi credit card bill with the second late fee in two months. The first late fee was definitely my fault, but I sent the second payment in 4 days before the due date. So I called customer service to complain.
The first guy I talked to said there was nothing he could do, because my account "didn't qualify" for a refund of a late fee. I asked what account DID qualify, and all he could say was that he didn't know -- he could only do what the computer system said he could do. Then he hurriedly signed off.
Five minutes later -- after applying for an REI Visa card -- I called back and got a different person. I started by saying that I was calling to cancel my credit card. When the guy asked why, I said, "Because I'm pissed that I was charged a late fee when I made an effort to send my payment on time."
The call was transferred to another person. The new guy said that he would put in a request for my late fee to be credited to my account. He couldn't guarantee anything, but he also asked my permission to sign my account up for a special offer of 1500 Member Reward points if I charged at least $300 to my card in the next month. In a skeptical tone, I asked, "And you're asking because...?" He reassured me that there were no fees involved, but he still had to ask my permission. "OK," I said, thinking, "I don't care about your fucking reward points, anyway. If you think this is softening me up, think again." He achieved his objective, though (at least in the short run): I didn't close the account after all.
After that call, I decided to look into the option of paying online (something the very first person mentioned) by creating an account on Citicards.com. The first step was creating a user ID. I chose "jdawley". It was taken. OK. I tried "janicedawley". It was also taken. Say what? There just aren't that many Janice Dawleys in the world -- did I create an account and forget? I tried to log in with one of my usual passwords. It worked, except the card that came up was a closed account with AT&T Universal.
Well... I have had a series of AT&T Universal cards, and I knew that they were acquired by Citi, so this sort of made sense. I tried to add my Citi card to the login account. A message popped up saying, "Sorry, but you must register this card at Citicards.com." Except of course, when I went there and logged in, it just brought me back to the AT&T Universal account page... The inescapable conclusion was that, even though Citi bought AT&T's account database and now prevent any user IDs from duplicating, they don't provide any actual FUNCTIONALITY for that inconvenience. In order to maintain my Citi card online, I would have to create an entirely separate login account.
So I tried to create an account. I got to page 4 of 5 and the layout broke. There was no "Next" button anywhere, even when I refreshed the page. So I called tech support for online accounts. I complained about the AT&T Universal account problem, then said that I'd gotten beyond it and was trying to set up a new account, only to run into a new problem. The guy asked, "Are you using Firefox?" I said I was. He said, "The site doesn't always work with Firefox, but if you got to page 4, the account has been set up. You should be able to log in now and sign up for the other options. Is there anything else I can help you with?" "No..."
And after all that, the online bill pay I was interested in requires that you give up your full bank account information. No fucking way!
I hate credit card companies!
The first guy I talked to said there was nothing he could do, because my account "didn't qualify" for a refund of a late fee. I asked what account DID qualify, and all he could say was that he didn't know -- he could only do what the computer system said he could do. Then he hurriedly signed off.
Five minutes later -- after applying for an REI Visa card -- I called back and got a different person. I started by saying that I was calling to cancel my credit card. When the guy asked why, I said, "Because I'm pissed that I was charged a late fee when I made an effort to send my payment on time."
The call was transferred to another person. The new guy said that he would put in a request for my late fee to be credited to my account. He couldn't guarantee anything, but he also asked my permission to sign my account up for a special offer of 1500 Member Reward points if I charged at least $300 to my card in the next month. In a skeptical tone, I asked, "And you're asking because...?" He reassured me that there were no fees involved, but he still had to ask my permission. "OK," I said, thinking, "I don't care about your fucking reward points, anyway. If you think this is softening me up, think again." He achieved his objective, though (at least in the short run): I didn't close the account after all.
After that call, I decided to look into the option of paying online (something the very first person mentioned) by creating an account on Citicards.com. The first step was creating a user ID. I chose "jdawley". It was taken. OK. I tried "janicedawley". It was also taken. Say what? There just aren't that many Janice Dawleys in the world -- did I create an account and forget? I tried to log in with one of my usual passwords. It worked, except the card that came up was a closed account with AT&T Universal.
Well... I have had a series of AT&T Universal cards, and I knew that they were acquired by Citi, so this sort of made sense. I tried to add my Citi card to the login account. A message popped up saying, "Sorry, but you must register this card at Citicards.com." Except of course, when I went there and logged in, it just brought me back to the AT&T Universal account page... The inescapable conclusion was that, even though Citi bought AT&T's account database and now prevent any user IDs from duplicating, they don't provide any actual FUNCTIONALITY for that inconvenience. In order to maintain my Citi card online, I would have to create an entirely separate login account.
So I tried to create an account. I got to page 4 of 5 and the layout broke. There was no "Next" button anywhere, even when I refreshed the page. So I called tech support for online accounts. I complained about the AT&T Universal account problem, then said that I'd gotten beyond it and was trying to set up a new account, only to run into a new problem. The guy asked, "Are you using Firefox?" I said I was. He said, "The site doesn't always work with Firefox, but if you got to page 4, the account has been set up. You should be able to log in now and sign up for the other options. Is there anything else I can help you with?" "No..."
And after all that, the online bill pay I was interested in requires that you give up your full bank account information. No fucking way!
I hate credit card companies!
05/09/07: Yet still more Pride & Prejudice
Were the movie and book enough? Hell, no! In the past couple of weeks I watched TWO more screen adaptations of Pride & Prejudice.
The first was the five hour BBC miniseries that came out in 1995. The rapturous testimony of various friends as well the general opinion floating around AustenBlog had made it clear to me that in any RottenTomatoes style smackdown, this version would defeat the 2005 movie I enjoyed so much. Also, that Colin Firth was da bomb. I was very curious to see what I would think of it.
In the end it was... OK. Given the build up, this made it a disappointment. The costumes and settings were much more accurate for the time period, and more of the characters made it into the production. Good. But it was still almost impossible to sort out who was who at certain times (Mrs. Hurst? Mariah?), and several made-up scenes of dubious quality were added (Darcy in his bath?!). Bad. Worse, the acting by the antagonists was outstandingly hammy; rather than being intrigued and/or disturbed by them, I kept wondering why the director thought Austen wasn't funny enough without an infusion of slapstick comedy.
But about Colin Firth (because it's really all about him)... HOW could the legions of swooning women have fallen for him when he was hardly in the thing?! Seriously, he has about 20 minutes of screen time in this 500 minute epic, and in most of that he's just mutely staring with eyes that declare, "I have heartburn." Maybe it's a testament to the Tall, Dark and Handsome principle. Or the Man of Few Words allure. Or the unexpected bathing -- not once, but twice. I don't know; I couldn't see the charm, myself. Anyone who loves him in this series, please write in and tell me why. (Just calling him "cold and haughty" doesn't count, Emily!)
The second adaptation was the 2004 Bollywood-style Bride & Prejudice, directed by Gurinder Chadha of Bend It Like Beckham fame. This was the first translation of the source material into a different time/milieu that I've seen, and I was surprised at how true to the original it ended up being. The Bennet family may be named "Bakshi", and Charles and Caroline might be "Balraj" and "Kiran", but the characterizations are right on in a lively, amped-up way.
Some plot elements obviously had to change. The system of inheritance that passes along the Bennet estate to Mr. Collins in the original is bizarre and untranslatable; in this version, Mr. Kholi has no particular leverage with the Bakshis, and his reason for visiting is simply to find a wife. Similarly, the Lydia equivalent, Lakhi, poses none of the dangers to her family's reputation that the original did. Instead, they worry that she will be knocked up by an irresponsible Wickham, and she is rescued at the last minute by BOTH Lalita and Will Darcy.
This is a kinder, gentler Pride & Prejudice in most ways. That robs it of some tension, but the sense of fun that pulses through it is a great counterbalance. And it has some truly amazing dance numbers! I've replayed the early scene at the friends' wedding several times now and love it more every time.
I want to take a moment now to acknowledge a difficulty that all adaptations of Pride & Prejudice must face: The Lydia Incident. I found the section of the book where Mr. Bennet, Mr. Gardiner, and Mr. Darcy are searching for Lydia and negotiating her marriage to Wickham to be eye-glazingly boring, because it is SO LONG and goes into such detail about something we, in the present day, have little concern about: the maintenance of at least the illusion of female virginity and propriety. I'm sure feckless men are still pressured into marrying women with whom they had no intention of tying the knot, but the lengths to which the characters in P&P are willing to go, and the number of words the author is willing to expend on the matter, are practically unheard of these days.
Modern-day adaptations have to decide what to do with this sequence. The 2005 movie compressed it into the space of 5 minutes, which I thought a handy solution. The 1995 mini dragged it on quite a bit longer, which made me lose interest just as I had with the book. Interestingly, the Bollywood version has some of the same problem, not strictly related to Lydia/Lakhi, but because the series of events gets somewhat mashed up at the end and the floppy, frustrating, ambiguous romance between Lizzy/Lalita and Darcy is confused even more by it all.
In the end, my favorite of all the Pride & Prejudice-related things I've experienced lately -- including the book -- is still the 2005 movie. Crazy, but... there it is.
tags: Pride and Prejudice, Bride and Prejudice, Colin Firth, Gurinder Chadha
The first was the five hour BBC miniseries that came out in 1995. The rapturous testimony of various friends as well the general opinion floating around AustenBlog had made it clear to me that in any RottenTomatoes style smackdown, this version would defeat the 2005 movie I enjoyed so much. Also, that Colin Firth was da bomb. I was very curious to see what I would think of it.
In the end it was... OK. Given the build up, this made it a disappointment. The costumes and settings were much more accurate for the time period, and more of the characters made it into the production. Good. But it was still almost impossible to sort out who was who at certain times (Mrs. Hurst? Mariah?), and several made-up scenes of dubious quality were added (Darcy in his bath?!). Bad. Worse, the acting by the antagonists was outstandingly hammy; rather than being intrigued and/or disturbed by them, I kept wondering why the director thought Austen wasn't funny enough without an infusion of slapstick comedy.
But about Colin Firth (because it's really all about him)... HOW could the legions of swooning women have fallen for him when he was hardly in the thing?! Seriously, he has about 20 minutes of screen time in this 500 minute epic, and in most of that he's just mutely staring with eyes that declare, "I have heartburn." Maybe it's a testament to the Tall, Dark and Handsome principle. Or the Man of Few Words allure. Or the unexpected bathing -- not once, but twice. I don't know; I couldn't see the charm, myself. Anyone who loves him in this series, please write in and tell me why. (Just calling him "cold and haughty" doesn't count, Emily!)
The second adaptation was the 2004 Bollywood-style Bride & Prejudice, directed by Gurinder Chadha of Bend It Like Beckham fame. This was the first translation of the source material into a different time/milieu that I've seen, and I was surprised at how true to the original it ended up being. The Bennet family may be named "Bakshi", and Charles and Caroline might be "Balraj" and "Kiran", but the characterizations are right on in a lively, amped-up way.
Some plot elements obviously had to change. The system of inheritance that passes along the Bennet estate to Mr. Collins in the original is bizarre and untranslatable; in this version, Mr. Kholi has no particular leverage with the Bakshis, and his reason for visiting is simply to find a wife. Similarly, the Lydia equivalent, Lakhi, poses none of the dangers to her family's reputation that the original did. Instead, they worry that she will be knocked up by an irresponsible Wickham, and she is rescued at the last minute by BOTH Lalita and Will Darcy.
This is a kinder, gentler Pride & Prejudice in most ways. That robs it of some tension, but the sense of fun that pulses through it is a great counterbalance. And it has some truly amazing dance numbers! I've replayed the early scene at the friends' wedding several times now and love it more every time.
I want to take a moment now to acknowledge a difficulty that all adaptations of Pride & Prejudice must face: The Lydia Incident. I found the section of the book where Mr. Bennet, Mr. Gardiner, and Mr. Darcy are searching for Lydia and negotiating her marriage to Wickham to be eye-glazingly boring, because it is SO LONG and goes into such detail about something we, in the present day, have little concern about: the maintenance of at least the illusion of female virginity and propriety. I'm sure feckless men are still pressured into marrying women with whom they had no intention of tying the knot, but the lengths to which the characters in P&P are willing to go, and the number of words the author is willing to expend on the matter, are practically unheard of these days.
Modern-day adaptations have to decide what to do with this sequence. The 2005 movie compressed it into the space of 5 minutes, which I thought a handy solution. The 1995 mini dragged it on quite a bit longer, which made me lose interest just as I had with the book. Interestingly, the Bollywood version has some of the same problem, not strictly related to Lydia/Lakhi, but because the series of events gets somewhat mashed up at the end and the floppy, frustrating, ambiguous romance between Lizzy/Lalita and Darcy is confused even more by it all.
In the end, my favorite of all the Pride & Prejudice-related things I've experienced lately -- including the book -- is still the 2005 movie. Crazy, but... there it is.
tags: Pride and Prejudice, Bride and Prejudice, Colin Firth, Gurinder Chadha
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